Trophy for Eagles by Walter J. Boyne Page A

pangs of envy that Lind bergh had a plane of his own, and gentlemen backers. As he watched, the jealousy turned, as modest as an early-morning bird song, into the first quiet signals of his driving need, a delicate early-warning message sent along the nerve endings of his extremi ties. For the thousandth time, Dusty told himself that he would not give in, that he would change the downward spiral of his life.
    Almost immediately he felt the hunger settling in, bird song turning to a claxon. The quiet quiver escalated, as if its thermostat had been turned up, turning into a burning at his fingertips and at the base of his skull, an implacable warning flush that said "Feed me!" even as it drenched his psyche in a repellent combination of need, greed, sin, and self-disgust.
    He fought it as he always did, trying to think of other things. Gentlemen backers, he thought. My backer is no gentlemen, but he is a source. Rhoades felt the fabric of his willpower shredding even as he tried to turn his attention away from the thought of the kit he kept in his car.
    "Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me." In the last four years he'd repeated those words a thousand times, and poor Mary had never been able to help, nor had anyone else.
    Lots of people had supplied answers to the wrong problems. He'd been told that he ought to get married, have a family, get out of flying into something steady. He knew he never would. The anony mous drifting from one job to another, the total freedom from responsibility except when actually working on a plane or flying it, and the easy comradeship were accessories to the addiction. The idea of going back to St. Louis to work in the Bemis Brother Bag factory, supervising young hillbilly girls fresh from the Ozarks, sickened him. He had seen what happened to his dad, working for Anheuser-Busch, drunk on his gallon of beer every day, until Prohibition drove him into amateur bootlegging. He was away from all that, and lucky to be flying at all.
    And yet he knew it wasn't luck at all, but Hafner's calculation. Hafner needed him to do things that were not ordinarily done for hire, and would have him only on the terms of a dependency.
    Hafner had introduced him to cocaine first, and later heroin, all the while supplying him with money, responsibility, and guilt. Now he was hooked—on all three.
    The whole sorry process had been fostered by his asocial existence. Until a few months ago, the free-and-easy women he bumped into in blind tigers around the country got about as close as he wanted women to come. He preferred purely physical relationships, just two bodies, two sets of organs working each other over, to climax not as lovers but as strangers. The thought of marrying someone, being responsible for her well-being and maybe even having children, had been frightening to him. Now that was changing, and he wasn't sure he could handle the new requirements.
    Rhoades upended a wooden Coca-Cola crate, trying to stave off the moment when he would give in, and rethinking Lindbergh's guarded answers. He felt guilty around Lindbergh, knowing how much he would disapprove of Rhoades's habit if he knew of it. And then too, Lindbergh was not easy to like, too reserved and somewhat pompous. Yet Rhoades admired him. For a young guy without any previous experience, he did a great job with the reporters and with the public, who'd gone absolutely crazy about him.
    That's what made the brush-off hurt. In the past Lindbergh had been equally courteous to everyone, generously sharing the information on prop settings that the Standard Propeller Company had sent him, or telling what he'd learned about flying the great-circle route over the ocean. Lindbergh had known that Hafner had hired an ex-Navy man to teach him navigation, but he had wanted to share the new information with Rhoades anyway.
    Then he felt his resolution bursting into desire like a match thrown into a fire. Dusty went to his Model A and drove to a rural lane not far from