Sentimental Journey Page 26

  She took the pipe away from him that he’d just picked up and reached for the humidor herself. “Tell you what. I promise that if I see a German plane, I’ll land or fly out of sight. Okay?” She filled the pipe before she held it out to him rather like a peace offering.

  He glanced at it, then looked into her face with a distant and warm expression on his. It was one of those rare moments when things become apparently simple; they were just a father and daughter again, as if fifteen years hadn’t passed by at all. She struck a match, held it up for him, and sat there, waiting.

  He took the pipe from her and put it between his teeth.

  She shook out the first burning match and lit a fresh one.

  “Afraid you’ll get your fingers burned?”

  “No, Pop. You are.”

  It didn’t take him long to get her meaning. He took the match from her, lit his pipe with a few deep puffs, his forehead wrinkling as if it were difficult to light, but she knew that frown was because he had no good rebuttal argument. He shook out the match and tossed it in a copper ashtray with a beanbag base.

  When he looked up at her, his expression softened. He drew on the pipe and exhaled the smoke. “Okay, kiddo. You win.”

  “Nothing is going to happen.”

  “Well, I suppose I’ll have to think like you do. Besides, you’d do it anyway with or without my support.”

  “I knew if you looked at it from my perspective, logically, that you’d come around.”

  “You mean because I have no choice in the matter?”

  “No, because you know when I’m right.”

  “How did I raise such a persistent child?”

  “I’m just like you.” Laughing, she jumped up and gave him another hug.

  He patted her hands clasped across his chest. “I can’t help feeling protective.”

  “I understand, Pop.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do. You love me.”

  “Actually, I was thinking more about what you said.”

  She didn’t understand and peered over his shoulder to look at him. His face told her nothing. “And what was that exactly?”

  “Well, kiddo, based on your insight into universal male motive,” he said dryly, “I can’t help feeling protective. It’s part of my masculine psyche.”

  “PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT”

  WHITING FIELD, FLAT ROCK, TEXAS, 1942

  It was barely eleven o’clock in the morning, and the air in the flight-training room was already hot and thick and ebullient with the fumes of stale cigarette smoke and too much Tabu perfume. In the corner, an empty glass water jug in a wobbly metal stand crouched over a brown trash can spilling a trail of crushed paper cups and stubbed cigarette butts, both marked with different shades of red lipstick. Diagrams of Mustangs, Tiger Moths, Mosquitoes, and other aircraft covered the murky walls, and a huge dusty chalkboard marked with navigation data dominated one side of the room. An old, yellowed meteorology chart the size of a door hung at a cockeyed angle and was pinned with ads for everything from airplane parts and local jobs to a full-color Latin travel poster claiming the newly streamlined Douglas Aircraft Pan Am Clippers could get you from New York to Rio in only thirty hours. Some comedienne among the ATA candidates had taken an eyebrow pencil and drawn a dark mustache and thick eyebrows on Carmen Miranda’s face. At first glance she looked like Groucho Marx beckoning you to South America’s white-sand beaches. But no one was going to South America now, not since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Charley sat sprawled out on a hard wooden chair, her long legs propped on a metal electric heater that she was sure was about as useful in this part of Texas as wings on an ostrich. Right then, the thermometer was hovering around ninety-five degrees and the humidity felt to be about ninety percent. She was sweating—a permanent state since she’d arrived here—while she studied the tech manual for a P-51A.

  Called Mustangs by the British, the planes were single-seat fighters contracted by the British Purchasing Commission in a deal struck with North American Aviation. The plane was said to handle beautifully thanks to its semi-laminar-flow airfoil wing. The Allison V-1710 engine had 1150 horsepower and a maximum cruising speed at fifteen thousand feet of three hundred miles per hour. It was a plane she’d been wanting to fly from the first moment she’d heard of it, because once inside, she would have her first glimpse of a fighter pilot’s world.

  But before the American women could be approved to leave with Maggie Caldwell for the Air Transit Authority positions in Great Britain, they each had to be checked out in certain types of planes. Official testing and certification was required by the ATA. If the instructor failed her, the applicant would be tossed out the of the program. They had started with forty women, and now there were only twenty-seven left, assigned in small groups at three different airfields.

  Charlie focused again on the plane’s manual. She had a lot riding on this last training flight.

  Rosalie Allen came rushing through the door. “Scuttlebutt has it that we’re leaving for London before the week’s out.”

  “That soon?” Joan Harting groaned. “I almost failed the test flights yesterday. Rafferty was on his high horse again.”

  “When isn’t he on his high horse?” Dolores Salazar said with a wry laugh.

  “High horse has nothing to do with Bill Rafferty.”

  They all turned and looked at Connie Bellows as if she were nuts for defending him.

  “It’s the low end of the horse . . . ” she went on. “The horse’s ass.”

  They all got a good laugh out of that. Their flight instructor was unreasonably difficult, one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kinds of people.

  Joan set her books aside and poured another cup of black coffee, then leaned against a filing cabinet and took a long sip. She scowled into the cup. “Good God, that’s strong. Who made it, Caffeine Connie?”

  Joan was a tea drinker, but since there was no tea available, she had to settle for coffee. Connie usually got up early to make coffee the way she liked it: thick as syrup and darker than engine sludge. But Connie could drink a whole pot of it and then settle in for a long nap. They had all learned early that caffeine didn’t affect her.

  “I don’t understand it,” Joan said.

  “The coffee?”

  “No. That’s easy to understand. Connie was born without taste buds. What I don’t understand is why someone would send Rafferty, the misogynist, to supervise the flight training for a handful of women. Maggie Caldwell had to fight pigheaded men like Bill Rafferty every step of the way to get these contracts accepted. Why on earth is someone like him in charge of our instruction?”

  “I don’t understand, either.” Rosalie sank into a chair in the corner. “I swear he was trying to get me to wash out all last week. You’d think Maggie would want someone who had some stake in seeing us succeed.”

  “Maggie had nothing to do with it,” Charley told them. “She had no choice about who would control the flight testing. He was sent down here from the Atlantic Ferry Office in Montreal as part of the contract agreements.”

  “He wants us to fail. I heard him talking. The pilots in Canada were grousing about sending women at all, especially Yanks. Most of them believe it’s only a stunt. I think Rafferty’s from that camp. He had already decided before he ever got here to make it as difficult as possible for us to succeed.”

  “So he came here with that chip already on his shoulder,” Dolores said.

  “Sure did.”

  “I’m not giving him the satisfaction of washing me out,” Charley said. “This is my last qualifier and then I’m home free.”

  But by three o’clock that afternoon, she was beginning to wonder if she would receive her assignment today at all. She was still waiting. They were behind schedule, and Rafferty was having a fit.

  When her call finally came, she ran out of the flight room and toward the P-51, feeling both anxious and nervous, but sense told her it was goo
d old American know-how that made the aircraft. The P-51 was designed, built, and made ready to fly in only a hundred-and-twenty-odd days. Now if she could just do her stuff in it for about a hundred-and-twenty-odd minutes, she’d be guaranteed a trip to London, something she wanted badly. She would be part of the first team of American women to fly for the war effort, a part of history doing something she lived and breathed for: flying.

  She climbed onto the wing and got a good look at the cockpit for the first time. It was so small that with all her flight gear on it was going to be a tight squeeze to get inside and get strapped into the flight seat.

  How the hell were men supposed to fly this thing?

  This wasn’t the first time she wished she was five foot four and a hundred and thirty pounds. “I wonder if Rafferty thought I would fit inside it at all,” she muttered as she placed her hand on the rim of the cockpit opening and climbed inside. She gripped the rim of the cockpit with one hand and leaned back so she could slide down into the seat without hitting her chin. She got about halfway down when she stopped sliding and felt her chute straps bite into her shoulders and groin.

  “Dammit.” Her chute was caught on the seat back.

  She twisted and pulled herself back up. It took a few moments to get untangled, which was like trying to dance the Lindy in a telephone booth. She closed the cockpit, then locked and checked the safety latch and pins. Even though she had spent the morning going over the technical manual, she still had to spend time familiarizing herself with the actual plane. She checked the boost and supercharger controls, fuel and oil switches . . . where was the fuel-booster pump?

  Rafferty’s gravelly voice came over the radio. “What the hell is taking so long, Morrison? Just because you’re trying to go to England doesn’t make this mother-frigging teatime. Get that machine in the air. Now!”

  She covered the mike on her radio headset with her hand and quietly suggested he put the machine in the same place his head was.

  “Did you say something, Morrison?”

  “Just a prayer, sir.” Charley flicked the switches. The engine coughed to a start. She checked her gauges, then talked to the tower on the radio. She powered up and took off.

  This was an amazing machine. She was upstairs a few minutes later, learning and loving what the plane could do. She wanted to take her up, way up, to dive, to loop and spin, to take her up to full speed, but if she did, she’d be washed out.

  Her job was to ferry planes, not dogfight over the Channel . . . if she ever got there. No, when she got there. She would show Rafferty she could control this plane. She was going to England.

  There were two main runways at Whiting. One which ran north and south and was used most often, but today that runway was closed, which was why they were behind, so she was told she had to use the east-west runaway for her touchdowns and takeoffs, which meant at this time of day she was going to be landing into the setting sun.

  She spent the next hour doing the required testing and learning the feel of the plane. But after a while, what she actually felt she was testing was her own skill as a pilot. The haze around the field was growing thicker by the minute. As the sun began to go down, landing was getting tricky, especially on a shorter runway. The P-51 could easily overshoot it.

  She had Rafferty to contend with. But she was going to Britain. Period.

  Whiting Field was not the best in normal weather, but in the sun haze, well, she was landing almost blind. To compensate, she memorized all the hazards over the end of the short field. There were power poles with crossbars at the end of the runway, not to mention the houses and businesses and telephone poles that were all clustered nearby.

  To help her land as the visibility grew worse and worse, she would count off the hazards, “one telephone pole, two telephone pole, three telephone pole, one power pole . . . Jackson Avenue . . . two power pole . . . ” until she knew she was right over the edge of the runway; then she would drop down for what was pretty much a blind landing.

  They were required to take off and land a certain number of times to be officially checked out. Some instructors would give you some slack on that, but not Rafferty.

  She checked her logs. She had one takeoff and landing left to qualify. The sun was getting lower, but she felt there was still enough time.

  She taxied around again and prepared for her last takeoff.

  “You’re not going to make it, Morrison.” Rafferty was talking to her from the tower.

  The bastard was smiling. She could hear it in his voice through the earphones in her headset.

  “You have one landing left to qualify. Too bad, Morrison. I can’t qualify you. They’re closing the airport because of the haze. Bring that plane to the west hangar.”

  She tapped the mike with her finger to make some static noise, then blew into it a few times as she turned the plane for another takeoff. “Sorry, sir, but I can barely understand you.”

  “I said bring the plane in!”

  “You’re cutting out,” she lied.

  “Turn that goddamn plane around!”

  “Cannot copy. Can you repeat, sir?”

  “I said . . . do not take off!”

  “Roger, I’m taking off as ordered. Over.” And up she went.

  “OH LOOK AT ME NOW”

  Red pulled his truck into the lot across the street from the airfield and parked. He opened the door and stood alongside his dusty black truck, one foot on the running board and his arm resting on the truck cab.

  In front of him was a big, old brown-brick building with a flat roof and four floors—each one cut with white, wooden-framed windows that ran across the side like dominoes spread out on a parlor table. Two skimpy trees stood in the front, and there was a gravel walkway that led to the door. Off to the south in a vacant side yard, the lawn was brown and burnt, with round, scabby patches of dirt showing through the grass that made it look as if it had skinned its knees. Above that was a good hundred feet or more of clothesline strung in Zs. He’d never seen so much female underwear in his life, bras, panties, and slips, all of it bleached to a crisp, blinding white, except one lacy brassiere that was red enough to fire up a bull.

  He’d been told that the women were assigned to quarters near the field, in an old Sears and Roebuck building. One look at that clothesline was enough. He’d found it.

  He crossed to the front door and rapped on it.

  Nothing.

  From an open window on the third floor, he could hear the thin, scratchy sound of radio music and the distant chattering of women talking and laughing. He knocked again, louder, then searched for a bell to ring.

  There was none.

  He stepped back and looked up at the closest open window; it was up on the third floor and had a flimsy-looking flowered curtain drifting out of it. Since the air was still as a rock, the only thing that could make that curtain drift would be a fan in the room.

  “Hel-lo!” He waited.

  Nothing.

  “Hello!” Still nothing.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Is anybody in there?”

  A pert looking brunette with full lips and a head full of pin curls swiped aside the curtains and stuck her head outside the window, scowling.

  “Hello, ma’am.” He slipped off his service cap and nodded to her.

  Her expression changed on a dime. She hitched her hip on the window frame and grinned down at him. “Well, well . . . hello to you, soldier.”

  “I’m looking for Charley Morrison.”

  “Lucky Charley.”

  That was why he liked Charley. She didn’t embarrass him the way this girl did. He looked down for a moment, away from her come-on look, and stared at the field cap in his hands.

  “Who are you talking to, Rosalie?” Another girl wedged her head out between Rosalie and the window frame.

  “Charley’s beau.”

  “Charley has a beau?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m just a friend.”

&
nbsp; “Uh-huh, sure,” the new girl said. She gave a sharp nod toward the airfield. “She’s at the field. Ask over there and someone can tell you where she is.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I—” He stopped.

  She hadn’t waited for him to finish. She was gone as quickly as she had appeared. But not Rosalie, who was still sitting in that window, languid as a cat full of buttermilk on a warm summer day. “Oh, don’t you mind her, sugar. She’s always like that. But I’m not. No, siree. Not me. I like men.”

  He just wanted to leave, but he didn’t want to be rude to her.

  She laughed and waved a hand at him. “Go on. Find Charley. But if she’s busy, you come on back here and I’ll be happy to keep you company.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Red put his hat back on and turned, then flatfooted it across the dirt lot, heading off toward the airfield.

  For the next twenty minutes he wandered around, asking for Charley. Everyone had seen her, but no one knew where she was. He had two places left to look, one was the tower and he doubted she was there, and the other was a big Lockheed Aircraft hangar out on the west end.

  Red rounded the corner of the hangar, out of the relentless heat and sun into a sanctum of shade. Across the hangar, past a small trainer and the maintenance area, where a mechanic was working on a Lodestar transport, he spotted a man with a crop of white hair and sporting grease-stained coveralls.

  Red moved closer, close enough to see the man was sitting at a workbench, talking excitedly into a radio mike.

  “Five-niner-three. Can you hear me, now? Come in?”

  Static crackled back from the ham radio.

  Red stood just behind him and the old-timer glanced up at him, then held up a hand, frowning as he repeated, “This is Whiting Airfield. Hangar B. Come in again if you can hear me. Over.”

  More static.

  “Damn and hell . . . I can’t get it.” Scratching his jaw, he turned to Red. “Caught a distress call from a plane out there somewhere. Sounded like big trouble.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. I was repairing this here radio when out of the clear blue this panicked voice comes through.”