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Okay, Mary
Hugh B. Cave
HUGH B. CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, and emigrated with his family to America when he was five. From the late 1920s onward his stories began appearing in such legendary pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales.
After leaving the horror field in the early 1940s for almost three decades, a volume of the author’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, was published by Karl Edward Wagner in 1977. Cave subsequently returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels: Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead. His short stories were also collected in a number of volumes, including The Corpse Maker, Death Stalks the Night, The Dagger of Tsiang, Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask, Come Into My Parlor, The Door Below and Bottled in Blonde. Milt Thomas’ biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House a week after the author’s death.
During his lifetime, Cave received Life Achievement awards from The Horror Writers Association in 1991, The International Horror Guild in 1998 and The World Fantasy Convention in 1999. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy gathering in London, where he was a Special Guest of Honour.
The following story comes from that period when the author had left the pulps and was working for more mainstream and lucrative magazine markets: “In the old days,” Cave later recalled, “you could try, say, a Saturday Evening Post reject on Country Gent, American, Collier’s, Liberty and on down the line to, say, Toronto Star, where you would still get around $400 for it. But all those slick-paper markets are gone now.
“Those years with the ‘slicks’ meant writing to editorial formula much of the time. Even the mystery novelettes I did for Good Housekeeping—for very fancy money—had to be tailor-made to formula and usually revised at least once to fit the editor’s idea of the formula.”
HAD YOU ASKED Bill Reavey on Monday morning what he thought of Alaska, he would have grinned and said, “Marvelous!” Quite likely he would have told you that flying freight from rail’s end to a wilderness mining camp was the best deal he’d had since the war.
But had you put the same question Monday afternoon, he would have looked at you blankly and said nothing. The mail had arrived and with it a letter from his folks in Indiana. In the letter was a clipping.
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar L. Furbish, the clipping said, announced yesterday the marriage of their only daughter, Mary, to Mr. Robert Trainer, vice-president of the First Commercial Bank.
You see, Bill, what happens when a guy stays away too long?
Reavey returned the scrap of newspaper to his pocket just as Matt Murdock, his boss, came into the operations office.
“Your plane ready, Bill?” Murdock asked.
“All ready. We’ve half an hour yet.”
Murdock shook his head. “Not if you’re smart. The weather’s turning rotten.”
Reavey shrugged as he stepped outside. He had been flying supplies to the mine for weeks, and the weather over that wild mass of mountains was almost always bad.
So she married that fellow from the bank, he thought as he trudged on leaden legs across the windswept field. She wouldn’t wait . . .
His plane was being warmed up and he approached it, around piles of crated goods and fuel drums, from the rear. His scowl lengthened. One of the boys had given the ship’s name a coat of fresh red paint. Quickly he looked away, but in that bleak air the crimson letters danced as though suspended on strings before his face: M-A-R-Y.
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar L. Furbish announced yesterday the marriage of their only daughter, Mary, to…
He scanned the sky anxiously as the DC-3 climbed from the barren airstrip. Even in good weather some of the towering peaks along his route were all too ready to trap an unwary pilot. Today not even the glittering crown of McKinley, better than twenty thousand feet high, could be seen through the thickening soup. Head winds buffeted the ship savagely.
Ed Fraser, his co-pilot, glanced at him and grinned crookedly. “Take it easy, boy. Mary never let us down yet.”
Bill had no answering smile. He wondered what Ed and the other two would say if they knew about the newspaper clipping in his pocket. Because he knew about the clipping, his vigilance was razor sharp. The plane that he had named for Mary Furbish might not be so lucky now. It, too, might break the faith.
Did you think of that, Mary, when you decided not to wait? Did you give a thought to what it might mean to MacAndrews, Dexter and Fraser, who worship your name on a beat-up old DC-3 and think of you as their guardian angel? That’s right, Mary—their guardian angel! Those boys were in the war, too. They believe in that kind of thing . . .
He could not climb high enough to clear the worst of the hidden peaks ahead—not with the plane groaning under such a load. That made it tough.
Joe Dexter came forward to report on the cargo—a nice kid, young but ambitious. “Everything okay,” he announced with his small-boy grin. “Bring on your weather!”
“No jitters?” Bill asked.
“No, sir!”
“The front office has priority on jitters,” Ed Fraser chuckled. “We’ve none to spare for you.”
“Look, skipper,” Dexter said. “Do we stay over at the mine tonight? The reason I ask—MacAndrews and I have a date with two of those nurses we flew in last week for the hospital.”
“You’ll be able to keep it.”
“Oh, boy! Now, if only you’d join us, skipper—that cute little blonde thinks you’re really special. But I suppose—” Joe let it drop, knowing that Reavey never went out on dates. The sweetest girl in the world was waiting for the skipper back in Indiana.
At that moment Reavey saw what he’d been looking for and dreading, and the perspiration on his face turned cold. Dead ahead, a torrent of wind-driven snow roared through the haze, swirling, stabbing, weaving like the head of a great white serpent.
On the whole of the run the enemy wind could not have picked a better ambush. The plane was rumbling through a tortuous defile between mountains. Reavey strained to see the ragged peak at its end in time to lift the laden ship over it. There was scant room for maneuvering in that narrow pass. Now the rushing mass of snow was on them, reducing visibility to zero.
Reavey slid the ship on her side, weaving away from the nearer mountain wall. She could be plucked in flight like a butterfly by that howling wind, tunneled in upon them by the gap toward which they struggled. He put her down, saw the tops of the scrub pines below just in time, and flattened out again—so close to the valley floor that the treetops must have been seared.
It was like dodging Jap fighter planes on the trip across the Hump in CBI, he thought wryly. A veteran Hump pilot, he used every maneuver in the book. But that screaming wind, straight from the Arctic icebox, was still engaging him in a dogfight when the valley ended. With a towering wall of rock and ice dead ahead, a ghostly road block in the blizzard, there was but one way to go.
“Angel, baby, stay with us!” Reavey whispered, forgetting for a moment they no longer had a guardian angel.
He hauled the plane’s nose up and she thundered skyward. Like a river in full flood the wind crashed against her belly. For one terrible instant she faltered, seemed to lose her nerve, hung fluttering in space. Reavey’s face turned dead white.
Beside him Ed Fraser said softly, “Come on, Mary. Do it, baby.”
The battered plane stopped shaking. Like a fly buzzing up out of a bottle, she continued her climb.
Ed Fraser let out a stored lung full of breath. “Another two feet,” he gasped, “and I could have written my name on that ice wall!”
Reavey was silent. Even when MacAndrews and Joe Dexter came forward to thump his shoulders, he had nothing to say. He knew what the boys were thinking, though. He guessed what they would say.
He was right. When the plane landed at the mine an hour later, they said it: Their adopted angel, the skipper’s girlfriend, had brought them through again.
Reavey listened with a scowl on his face. Then, because he had always leveled with these boys, he took the clipping from his pocket and said, “Read this,” and walked to the supply shack and found a can of paint and a brush, then sat on the stoop, waiting for the boys to depart. While waiting, he struggled to put his muddled thoughts in order.
Maybe it was his pride that was hurt most. He and Mary Furbish had never seen eye-to-eye on some things, such as the need for flying a beat-up plane in Alaska.
“Skipper.” Joe Dexter was standing awkwardly before him. “The boys and I know how you feel and we’re sorry as hell. But we think we ought to tell you something. I was elected to come over and put you straight.”
Reavey waited, frowning.
“A lot of girls are named Mary, skipper,” Joe said. “MacAndrews’ mother is. My sister, too.” Clumsily Joe stuffed his hands into his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. “Ed Fraser calls his wife Mike, but her real name’s Mary and their little girl is named after her. We never pushed the point before, skipper—we didn’t want to take anything away from you—but we always kind of felt we had more than one guardian angel. The old bus belonged to all of us.”
As the skipper stared at him, wordless, Dexter turned to scowl at the paint can. “You—you see what I mean, skipper?”
Reavey stood up. Strangely, he was smiling. Holding the paint can at arm’s length, he solemnly poured its contents onto the frozen earth and said, “God love you, Joe—the bunch of you.” Then he squared his shoulders. “That nurse, Joe. The little blonde. What’s her name?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“All right,” Reavey said. “I will.”