Copernicus Avenue by Andrew J. Borkowski

Author:Andrew J. Borkowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

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MONEY THAT OTHER CADETS spent on chips, Cokes and pinball, Alex spent on a model kit, a Monogram 1/32 scale Hawker Hurricane. Alex liked the Hurricane, he liked its stubby workhorse design, its fluted fabric sides that reminded you of the biplanes that came before it. This was the plane that really won the Battle of Britain, the plane that the highest scoring squadrons of Poles and Canadians flew while the Brits took all the credit in their slender Spitfires. It’s the plane that he imagined himself flying alongside Skrebensky and Margate over the beaches of Normandy and the sands of Tobruk in the secret stories he made up for himself each night while he waited for sleep. He studied the instructions and gathered his tools: toothpicks to apply the glue, paintbrushes in three thicknesses, clothes pegs to use as clamps, and a table knife to heat and flatten bosses over landing gear hobs so that the wheels would actually turn. He broke the parts from away from their stanchions and scraped away excess plastic with a nail file.

“Hey Menkywitz. You ever actually gonna build that thing?”

McKnight set up on the table opposite him at the canteen, letting Horner and Margate do most of the work while he boasted about the virtues of his balsa wood P-40 Tomahawk, an expensive kit, one that would actually fly with its gas engine and radio control unit.

“Still shopping in the toy department, eh Menkywitz? You want to set your sights a little higher.”

Alex argued that his Hurricane would look much more like the real thing when he was finished, with tan and olive drab camouflage on the wings and fuselage, duck-egg blue undersurfaces, and flesh tone and chrome yellow for the pilot’s face and Mae West. To top it off, his kit had authentic decals for 303 Ko´sciuszko Squadron, the first Polish fighter squadron to go operational in Britain. Whereas McKnight’s P-40 was missing the Tomahawk’s distinctive “Flying Tiger” markings and had ugly, inauthentic, black pistons sticking out of its cowling for the gas engine. The argument was lost on McKnight and, on the night Alex finally cemented the Hurry’s wings into place, he was outside on the baseball diamond giving the Tomahawk its maiden flight. The model had just touched down when a cadet from an Oshawa squadron ran into the canteen shouting.

“You gotta see. Someone from the NCO course is streakin’ the camp!”

Alex followed the cadet out to the main avenue just as a naked figure appeared from the direction of the shower tent, rolls of fat jiggling like soft cheese over his hips, hands clenched to his groin. He was pursued by a pack of cadets (Alex thought he saw Horner among them) brandishing tins of shaving cream, razors, and tubes and bottles of sundry solutions.

McKnight watched from the side of the diamond, turning a matchstick in his mouth as Margate packed away the P-40.

“McKnight. What’s going on?”

McKnight didn’t speak until the fleeing cadet turned in among the tents, showing the fan of purple acne on his back before he disappeared.

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