Sentimental Journey (47 page)

She closed her eyes and looked down, like she was going to cry.

“Especially for a woman.”

Funny thing, then. Her head shot up.

He gave her a wink.

She gave him a weak smile, but it looked like her tears were gone. “Help me down, will you?”

He didn’t let go of her shoulders. “You’re sure you’re okay? I’ll wait if you need me to hold you up a bit longer.”

“I’m okay. Right now all I want is to feel the ground under my feet.”

He jumped down, then turned and half-caught her when she slid down from the wing. A group of women pilots, all of them talking at once, closed in around them, hugging her, two of them were crying. Over her head he watched as Rafferty came forward and put his hand on her shoulder.

Charley turned around and saw who it was. Her smile melted like that propeller, and she stiffened, almost as if she were waiting for a blow. The other women grew suddenly quiet, all of them looking at Rafferty, then at her, then back to Rafferty.

“Good job, Morrison.”

Her jaw dropped open when he took and shook her hand.

Rafferty said nothing else, but didn’t move.

She recovered quickly. “Thank you, sir.” Then the women took her hands and swept her along with them, chattering and heading for the outbuildings.

Red turned when he saw Rafferty walk away and join the group of men who were looking over the plane.

“Can’t believe she landed it.”

“Amazing. For a dame.”

“Yeah. That was some flying.” One of them whistled.

“Did you see her almost clip that radio tower? Jeez . . . ”

“You’ll have to pass her, Rafferty. She’s a damn good pilot.”

“Yeah, anyone else would have probably bailed or ended up dead.”

“Hell,” Rafferty said. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if the bitch goes and kills herself. I just don’t want her doing it when I’m in charge.”

Rafferty spun around.

And Red knocked him out cold.

“I WAS LUCKY”

Three hours later, when the last of the ATA gals and a few of the airfield employees finally left, Charley and Red were alone at a table in a nearby bar. A local band called Joe Corn and His Five Cobs was performing on a makeshift pinewood stage in a dimly lit corner. The bandleader, a great trumpet player named Guy Jay, had just announced they were ending the set with a special arrangement of “Deep Purple.”

Charley set down her whiskey sour and began to pick out the chili-coated pecans from a snack dish shaped like a longhorn steer.

“Those women are something.” Red shook his head. “They all talk at once.”

She laughed. “We’ve become good friends. It’s been hard. So many have been washing out because of Rafferty.” She swallowed, then looked Red in the eye. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for what you did.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. I didn’t do anything. You did it, not me.”

“I was so scared I just reacted by instinct.” She paused, looking into her drink and remembering how scared she had really been. She looked up and admitted, “It was easier to think more clearly once I heard your voice. I guess what I’m trying to say is that thanks to you, I didn’t feel as if I was alone anymore.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to try to land that plane for all the oil in Texas. Most pilots would have bailed.”

“Rafferty would have killed me if I’d ditched that plane.”

“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.”