Jack finally pulled out of the surf onto the sand and put the jeep in neutral. “Maybe we ought to get you out of those wet clothes,” he boldly suggested to the girls.

Mollie slapped him and climbed out of his lap into the passenger seat. Bobby inwardly groaned. Maybe he should have warned Jack about rich girls, after all.

Mollie straightened her wet evening gown indignantly. “I think you should take us home.”

But Bobby had underestimated his new friend. This was all part of Jack’s plan.

“I only thought, you’d want to learn to fly,” Jack said with mock innocence.

Mollie looked at him, uncertain and wary. “What do you mean ‘fly’? I’ll have you know I’m not the kind of girl—”

“I mean really fly, in an airplane. Bobby and I could teach you.” He glanced over the seat at Ellen. “We could teach you both.”

Now it was Bobby’s turn to stare, mouth wide in wonder. How far was Jack planning on taking this farce?

Mollie looked intrigued, but still she was cautious. “Isn’t it hard?”

“No,” Jack assured her, “it’s not hard. I could teach you easy. Heck, I taught myself.”

“I thought the army taught you,” interjected a skeptical Ellen.

“Naw, the Army Air Forces didn’t teach me anything. I knew how to fly before I joined up. Isn’t that right, Bobby?”

“It’s true.” So it was true. Jack had never admitted it until now, and Bobby was fascinated. What was Jack up to?

“Oh yeah?” quizzed Mollie, arms crossing her chest for protection. “Then who taught you?”

“Like I said, I taught myself.”

What followed was a story that Bobby could never verify but Jack insisted was the gospel truth. Jack claimed that he learned to fly when he was fourteen. That was when his father died, leaving him with a biplane, a crop-dusting business, and two younger brothers to feed.

Jack’s mother decided to sell the plane and use the money to move to Chicago. She spent the last of their savings to put a “For Sale” ad in the paper and locked the biplane in the barn. Jack didn’t want to move to the city. He just wanted to fly. He’d loved the wind in his face and the goggles over his eyes and the stomach-wrenching acceleration when his father dived low to the earth before releasing the pesticide. Jack knew what that felt like because he’d always begged his father to take him, and his father seldom refused. Jack had been in the plane so often, and he’d watched his father so closely, that he was absolutely certain he could take the controls himself.

Which was why, on an evening he’d specially chosen for its full moon, Jack crept out of bed, snuck out of the house, and cut the barn’s padlock with a pair of his father’s shears. The World War I–surplus Curtiss Jenny inside weighed thirteen hundred pounds. If Jack taxied it out to the field, the sound of the engine might wake his mother. So he hitched the plane to Bess, the family dairy cow, and forced the unhappy creature to help him move the airplane out.

The improvisation worked until Jack started the engine. The racket of the eight cylinders spooked Bess, and she disappeared into the neighboring woods. Jack decided to ignore her for the moment, turned the biplane into the slight breeze, and gunned the throttle. As he took off, he cleared the woods on the edge of the fallow field and caught sight of black-and-white Bess trotting away from him in terror. Jack banked and rolled and dived, buzzing Bess and sending the cow into a panic. She leaped and turned like a prize bull at a rodeo before bolting back in the direction from which she’d come, back onto the family’s land. With his impromptu herding done, Jack decided to climb into the sky and enjoy the moonlit view.

He ran the plane almost to empty on that inaugural flight. He watched the Curtiss Jenny’s moon shadow race across the fields and forests far below. When he finally reached the last of his fuel, he turned back and prepared to land.

Landing was a lot trickier than it looked. His first couple of attempts almost resulted in disaster. He pointed the airplane down toward the fallow field and dived. But that only increased his speed, and as the earth rushed up to meet him, he realized that his propeller, not the landing gear, would be the first to hit ground. Both times he pulled out of the dive in the nick of time.

Only his lack of fuel saved him. On his third landing attempt, he found himself once again in an unintentional dive. Once again he yanked up on the yoke, and again the Jenny jerked up to pull out of the dive. But at that moment it ran out of gas. The engine died, and Jack felt himself falling. The nose of the aircraft was pitching upward at over ten degrees, so Jack could no longer see the ground. All he could see were the twinkling stars on the horizon. But to his surprise and relief, the biplane began to slow as it fell. It fluttered like a kite without a string until Jack felt the force of the tail hitting the ground. He was thrown forward against his harness when, an instant later, the landing gear also slammed down. And then he was bouncing along uncomfortably as the Curtiss Jenny taxied uncontrollably across the plowed surface of the fallow field—and right into the communal watering pond.

The next day Jack and his mother hired a few transient laborers to help pull the Curtiss Jenny out of the mud and the muck. Remarkably, the plane hadn’t suffered serious damage. A few days later it was dried out and ready to fly again.

His mother wasn’t angry, just glad he’d survived. It also convinced his mother to let him try to take up his father’s business. She secured the contracts, bought the leading arsenate for crop dusting and superphosphate for top dressing, and even secured occasional postal-service subcontracts for mail hauling. They hired a Canadian Great War vet turned American hobo, Jimmy Hunt, as a maintenance mechanic. Jack did the actual flying. And together they managed to save the family business.

But the more Jack flew, the more he yearned for greater challenges. Jimmy Hunt often told Jack stories about the “Knights of the Sky” who fought in the Great War. Jimmy hadn’t been a pilot. But as a mechanic, he’d had a front-row seat for the acrobatic dogfights between aces like Kenneth Conn, Heinrich Kroll, Joseph Fall, and Paul Billik. Hearing those stories, Jack realized that air combat would be the ultimate flight test. He had to join the army. But he also knew he couldn’t make the mistake Jimmy Hunt had made. Only officers could be pilots. So Jack needed a college education. He set aside enough money for correspondence courses, and as soon as he received his diploma, he enlisted.

“And so here I am,” Jack concluded with a cockeyed smile. “Wearing my army wings and offering you girls a chance to fly.”

Mollie bit her lip and glanced nervously over the car seat at Ellen. “What do you think?”

Ellen looked up at Bobby’s face, his features soft in the warm moonlight. Whom did she see there? Bobby or a young Jimmy Stewart? She pulled his arms tighter around her waist. “I feel safe,” she said. And that settled it.

Fifteen minutes later, the girls waited in the jeep while Jack and Bobby snuck into the hangar and prepared the planes. They were P-39 Airacobras, the most powerful aircraft either Jack or Bobby had ever flown. And Bobby was nervous. Not because he feared flying the high-performance airplanes, but because he was afraid they’d be caught.

Jack tried to reassure him. “You know how many girls I took up in the Jenny?”

“These aren’t old biplanes.”

“So what?”

“So we’re stealing military property.”

“Borrowing it.”

“We could be arrested.”

“You asked about the full moon earlier. They call it a hunter’s moon because it’s bright enough to hunt by. It’s also bright enough to fly by, which means we won’t need lights, which means we won’t get caught. Trust me.”

“But the Airacobra’s a single-seater.”

“All the better. That just means Ellen’s gonna have to sit in your lap. She’ll love it. I told you, I’ve done this before.”

“These aren’t farm girls, they’re socialites.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s a world of difference.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. These girls, they’ve been sheltered their whole lives, chaperoned by crazy aunts everywhere they go, warned not to take risks. You take one of these girls up in a plane, you give her that thrill, and you bring her back down again safe and sound, you know what happens?”

“What happens?”

“She realizes Mommy and Daddy were wrong about taking risks. Risks can be fun. And they start to wonder what else Mommy and Daddy were wrong about.”

Bobby gave in.

Jack was right about taking off. The Army’s Third Air Force was still in an expansion phase, desperately trying to recruit and train as many pilots and ground personnel as possible, and quickly expanding beyond Morrison Army Air Field into the hotels and boardinghouses of West Palm Beach. The result was temporary chaos that wasn’t helped by the tropical surroundings and friendly local females. Jack taxied quietly through the airfield, leading Bobby, with Ellen in his lap, through a maze of tarmacs until they bounced onto a little-used emergency gravel runway. Then he gunned the engine and roared into the night sky.