Sentimental Journey Read online

“You don’t have to worry about Rafferty anymore.”

  “I can’t believe he qualified me.”

  Red popped a handful of nuts into his mouth and chewed on them for a bit. “When do you leave for England?”

  “They haven’t told us. Rumor is within the week. How long’s your leave?”

  “Four more days. I need to be back to the base by Sunday at oh-nine-hundred.”

  She smiled and pointed to his Army Air Corps jacket with flying cadet insignia, silver wings, and sergeant stripes. “I like the uniform.”

  She reached out and touched his insignia. “I don’t understand your ranking. Sergeant Pilot? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

  “Neither do some of the MPs. I’ve been stopped a few times and told to take off my pilot’s wings. When I refused, they hog-tied me good and took me in. A few phones later they let me go, wings intact. One of us was clubbed in Houston when he refused to take his wings off. Now they call us Flight Officers, but there’s still no official insignia. It’s kind of a hinterland between enlisted men and commissioned officers.”

  She took another drink. “So, when did you join up?”

  “Not too long after you left. I signed up first for airplane mechanics training; then after that I could apply for pilot training.” He grinned and popped some more nuts into his mouth. “They were desperate for pilots, so they let me in.”

  “They must have been.” She laughed when he threw a nut at her. It hit the back of the chair and bounced off her shoulder. “What a lousy shot. Good thing you weren’t going to gunnery school.” She brushed the chili powder off her shoulder.

  “I was aiming for the back of the chair.”

  “Sure you were.” She moved the nut dish closer to her and took another sip of her drink. She set the glass down and looked up at him again. “Seriously, what made you decide to leave the gas station?”

  “You. And my sister. Nettie pointed out that even as a kid I was always dreaming of someplace else—anyplace but where I was. She says wanderlust is in my blood and that I couldn’t stop it any more than I could stop breathing.”

  “You listen to your sister.”

  “Listen to Nettie?” He laughed. “She doesn’t give you any other choice. My sister, the riveter. She gets something into her head and she won’t let it go. She just kept at me. ‘You don’t belong in that gas station, Red. Go follow your dreams and stop trying to be something you’re not.’ “

  She laughed at his high, mimicking voice, complete with Southern drawl. “I think I would like Nettie.”

  “Most likely you would. She’s even more stubborn and pigheaded than I am, maybe even more than you.” He took a swig of his beer, then grinned when she punched him in the arm. “She was right and I should have left earlier.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He looked into his beer as if the answer were written in there. “I kept trying to be like my daddy, I guess, probably because I didn’t want to be like Mama. Until one day I realized I didn’t want to spend my life like he spent his: living inside his gas station, afraid—ashamed because he was afraid—his only world inside an engine and his dreams wrapped up in a woman who couldn’t have stayed with him even if she wanted to.”

  “Your mother left.”

  He nodded. “When I was twelve.”

  “I’m sorry, Red.”

  He shrugged, not looking her in the eye. “It was a long time ago. And it doesn’t matter. What does matter is a few months after you left, I woke up one morning and it was all so clear. I knew I wanted more. I have you to thank for that.” He looked at her then, a look she’d seen before—like she hung the moon.

  “You didn’t look all too thankful when I landed that day.” She reached out and squeezed his arm, laughing, because she needed to make a joke to keep things from being too serious.

  He just said, “You were living my dream. I watched you fly away and this bell went off in my head, like some kind of alarm or something. There was another whole world outside of that Texaco station in Acme, Texas. But I was just too afraid to walk out into it.”

  “Red,” she laughed. “Anyone who is compelled to sit on a rickety old water tower during a storm so he can watch tornadoes go by already has the courage and heart to do anything he sets his mind to.”

  “I wanted to fly.” He rolled the beer bottle between his palms. “Since the day I set eyes on my first airplane, I’ve always wanted to fly.”

  For a moment neither of them said anything, lost in feelings only people who’ve flown a plane can understand. She knew what it was like to hold that control stick in her hand. The speed and power of the engine in front of you, feeling it all the way into your hands and feet. That moment when you lift and leave your belly and the world below behind you. You’re in the air—suddenly a human cloud—flying a machine that gives you wings, and you are in a sudden and reverent awe of the sheer wonder of aerodynamics.

  The band stopped playing and took a break. The clinking sound of glasses came from behind them where the bartender was dishwashing. Overhead smoke drifted in long foglike fingers up in the beamed ceiling, and a few people were talking in low tones from the cocktail tables huddled in dark corners. Charley fiddled with the napkin under her drink, tearing the corners and folding it into the shape of an airplane. “What were you doing down in Santa Fe last Thanksgiving?”

  He laughed and looked down as if he were embarrassed. “You heard about that.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. And Pop was at an air race in Arizona.”

  “I was coming through and thought I’d see if I could track you down through your daddy. I had just finished flight school. I was riding pretty high that week. It had been tough getting there.”

  “Through flight school?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “There was a lot of hazing. I don’t think I’d slept much more than ten hours a week. I was afraid I’d wash out. They worked us hard and tore us down, testing our tolerance points. The military does that.”

  “Rafferty gave us a pretty hard time. Does the Air Corps do it because they want you to fail in the same way he wanted us to fail?”

  “I don’t think so. It isn’t prejudice. It’s the Army’s way. They figure it’s better to fail here than on the battlefield, when other lives are at stake.”

  She nodded. “I wish that had been Rafferty’s reasoning.”

  “Some things were pretty harmless. For the first three weeks we could only sit on the first three inches of our chairs. They had us marching so much on the parade grounds that we were up all night studying; then we’d go up the next day with a flight instructor who would crack our knees with the stick if we did something that wasn’t done the way he liked it. I can remember being so tired I had trouble remembering where I was, in the air or on the ground. I’d wake up thinking I was landing a BT-13. They came in on inspections at all hours. You’d just fall asleep and the lights would come on and they’d rip apart your locker.

  “You needed every ounce of stubbornness you could grab onto. Pretty soon, it’s just you against them. You’re damn well not going to fail just to spite them.” He paused and took a swig of his beer. “You never knew what was going to happen, so you stayed on your guard. One time, some joker removed the bolts in my flight seat, so when I took off, I suddenly found myself lying on my back and staring up through the canopy at the wild blue yonder.”

  She started giggling, and couldn’t stop, then held her hand out. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny, I know.”

  “It’s funny, Charley. I know it is. After I was able to sit up and get control again, I cursed the air bluer than that sky, but I had to laugh. It was pretty inventive. I can imagine what my face must of looked like. One minute I’m staring out ahead of me and the next, I’m flat on my back. Stop your giggling, girl.”

  “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t stop and bit her lip, then decided sipping on her drink would help. She took a giant gulp.

  “Are you
through?” Even he was having trouble keeping a straight face.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Good. I expect you would have been right there with those guys standing along the runway and laughing like jackasses when I landed.

  “None of that matters now. I’m a pilot. And every lost minute of sleep, every sore foot and bloody blister, every humiliating joke and embarrassing moment, was all worth it the day I graduated.”

  She reached out and clasped his hand. “I’m glad, Red. Really. I’m happy for you. You’ll make a wonderful pilot.”

  His neck flushed the color of his hair, and he looked down at her hand, so she let go and wrapped her hands around her drink. “Where are you stationed?”

  “San Antone. I’ve a got a four-day pass before I start bombardment courses at Randolph Field.”

  “Bombers? You’re going to train to fly bombers?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m so envious. I’d give anything to fly a bomber.”

  “After what I saw tonight, I expect you could fly a tin can.”

  “Thanks.” She took another drink, then ate some of the ice from a glass of ice water at her elbow.

  The music started again, the soft sweet notes of “And the Angels Sing.”

  Charley listened for a moment, then said, “I swear. Look. It’s ten o’clock at night and still a hundred degrees.” She pressed the glass to her forehead and sighed. “This feels so good. I’d like to take a bath in a huge vat of ice.”

  He looked at her for a second. “Let’s get out of here.” He stood up and paid the bill. “Come on.” He put his hat on and pulled her off the stool, then threaded her arm through his. “I know someplace much cooler.”

  “THE MOON GOT IN MY EYES”

  Charley looked out the windshield of Red’s truck and saw nothing but a black night sky and below it, in the dark relief, the features of the landscape. “Why are we stopping here?”

  “You’ll see.” Red stepped out of the truck, came around, and helped her out.

  “But I don’t see anything.”

  “You will.” He slammed the door. “Follow me.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her along with him over a clump of land and down toward a gully, where a dark cluster of sprawling trees were filled with the assonant purr of locusts and the grass was so softly moist it didn’t crunch like hay under her feet.

  She could smell the red Texas dirt; it had a smell like no other place she’d ever been. Texas dirt smelled like what was grown in it: wheat and cotton. You breathed in Texas dirt once or twice and it became a part of your memory, so when you put your hands in a bowl of flour or ironed a clean shirt, you found yourself drifting back to a place so flat and broad the horizons looked like the very edges of the world.

  Red pulled her along through a few rustling bushes that had soft waxy leaves but no thorns or burrs. She could taste the moistness of water in the air before they came out of the bushes. There, before her, lay a large pond that turned silver as the moon crawled out from behind a drift of gauzy clouds. Squat dandelions and limp bluebonnets grew in a tangled cluster near some rocks where a frog croaked, then plopped into the water.

  At the pond’s edge, he released her hand and sat down on the ground, untied his shoes, then peeled off his socks. He glanced up at her over a shoulder. “Well?”

  “Red, this is wonderful!” Charley laughed. After those tense weeks at Whiting, the sound of her laughter seemed light and distant in that sudden cradle of silence. It carried up above her, floating up there as if it had come from someone she didn’t know. She sat down in the soft grass and took off her flight boots and socks, then rolled the legs of her jumpsuit up to her knees and slid her pale feet and calves into the cool water.

  A second later she flopped back, her arms over her eyes as she kicked her feet in the water and groaned, “It feels just like heaven.”

  Something dropped on the ground next to her. The wind from it brushed her face. She lifted her arm and looked up at Red.

  He was shirtless and busy unbuckling his belt.

  She sat up. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going swimming. That’s why I brought you here.” He stepped out of his pants and dropped them on the ground. He climbed onto a nearby rock and dove in with hardly a splash, just a concentric ring of ripples. He surfaced and slicked the hair and water back from his grinning face. “What are you waiting for?”

  “A bathing suit.”

  Laughing, he swam a few feet closer and faced her again. “I thought you were hot.”

  “I am.” She didn’t move, but glanced up at the sky. The moon was slipping across that broad Texas sky. The air was like the inside of an oven, the pond secluded; the water was simply there, waiting. For a minute she didn’t do a single thing; then she grabbed the lapels of her flight suit and in one motion pulled open all the front snaps. She fought with the heavy metal zipper that always stuck, then managed to slip it down. She let the jumpsuit drop, stepped out of it quickly, and headed straight into the water until she was in knee-deep.

  It was so incredibly freeing, doing something like this, leaving her clothes and maybe her sense behind, wading out in that island of water. But then today had been one of those kinds of days that almost squeezed all the life out of you. There were rare events in your life that time could never make stale, moments that ached just as much years later as they did when you lived through them. She had the feeling this was going to be one of those kinds of “real memory” days.

  She took a deep breath of warm summer air, then arched with her arms high and dove down, swimming along the murky bottom of the pond. There, she didn’t have to qualify to live her dreams. There, she didn’t have to prove herself. There, she could just move in the water and feel as if she had become a part of it.

  She kicked out and flipped over, then pushed through the cool silk of the water, looking up above her. Everything was black, an opaque cocoon, except for the circle of silver-green, a glowing rime of the moon and its light that made the softly fluent water almost transparent and lit a path to the surface. She swam upward. When she burst through and gasped for air, she felt as if there was fresh blood inside of her, in her heart, her limbs and her mind.

  She treaded water for a moment, looking around the pond.

  Red swam over to her.

  “This is too wonderful for words.”

  “I figured a cool swim was just what you needed.”

  “How did you know about this place?” She floated onto her back.

  He turned over and floated beside her out into the middle of the pond. “My granddaddy had a small farm about ten miles from here. My mama used to bring Nettie and me there.” He paused. “Whenever she needed to get away from Daddy, she’d leave us with Granddaddy Ross.”

  For too many years Charley had missed having her mother there for her. It was one of those things that girls without mothers thought about. . . the moments when you missed your mother so badly that you felt as if you were only half a person. But she understood something then, from what Red had just said. She knew that it was better to lose your mother to death than to apathy.

  That he was a kind man said something about his strength of character. The truth was, she liked him, as much for his quick smile and openness as she did for his honest words.

  “I learned to swim in this pond,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “Yep. On my sixth birthday.”

  “Whoever taught you to swim did a darn fine job, Red Walker. You’re a good swimmer.”

  “Taught me?” He laughed. “No one taught me. My granddaddy just threw me in, then sat down on that patch of grass right over there and said, ‘Move your arms and feet, boy. Else you’re gonna sink like a rock.’ “

  “That’s horrible!”

  “No. It was his way. He did things the only way he knew how. His daddy and his Uncle Buddy taught him to swim by throwing him in the Red River, and when he’d struggle and cry and then crawl out, they’d throw him in a
gain, and again, and again, until he finally figured out how to swim his way out. He told me they threw him in a good ten times before he caught on. It was his fourth birthday. He told me I was fifty percent older than he had been.” Red laughed quietly. “He figured he was giving me a real kindness because he told me to move my arms and legs, which was more than he got told.”

  What kind of person does that to a child?

  He looked at her. “You stopped swimming.”

  She couldn’t hide the horror she felt from her expression.

  “It’s okay, Charley. Granddaddy was a good man. He taught me all the things young boys need to know: how to tell the weather by the moon and the sky; how to find your way home by a star; how to shoot a dove off a fence with a single shot and to bait a fishhook. He taught me to understand the land and the soil and when the time was right to plant wheat, maize, or cotton. We spent a lot of days chopping cotton side by side.

  “And those times, when I had a hoe in my hand and sweat and dirt covering every part of me, well, that was when that old man taught me the truly important things: to take a man for who he was, not how he looked or spoke. That it was okay to be alone in the world.

  “Sometimes I wonder if he saw my future like some gypsy. He understood his daughter, my mama, the way simple men can see into the real heart of things—clear as looking through glass in a window. He didn’t judge her. I don’t think he judged anyone. He figured each one of us is on this earth for his own reason, with his own unique view of his world, and what he thinks he wants from it.”

  “You loved him a lot, didn’t you?”

  “Yep. Respected him, too. Granddaddy used to say that you can’t understand a man and his decisions until you’ve walked in his shoes. He was the only man I ever knew who really lived by the words he preached. Every single day for fifty years.” He stopped speaking for a moment. “Fifty years,” he repeated as he shook his head. “Then one hot, summer day, he just up and dropped dead behind his plow horse.”

  “Oh, Red. I’m sorry.”

  He looked over at her, searched her face for something, then said, “He’d have loved you.”