Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  Arriving back at New Castle on the train after ferrying another round of BT-13s to Houston, she dropped her bag off at the barracks and went to see Colonel Roper. She still had her jumpsuit and flight jacket on, and she really needed a shower. And a meal. And sleep. But maybe this time he had news.

  “Sir?” she said at his doorway.

  He looked hard at her, didn’t say a word. Self-consciously, she pushed her hair back behind her ears. Maybe she should have washed up first. She tried again. “Sir?”

  “You’re right, Anderson,” he said finally. “Something’s not right. The crash report’s been classified.”

  She stared. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I have something for you.”

  He handed her a folded paper that looked suspiciously like orders.

  She’d been in the air for three days. She hadn’t been back in her own room for a week. She didn’t want another mission; she didn’t want orders. But you never said no; you never complained.

  Her despair must have shown, because Roper gave a thin smile. “I saved this one just for you. I have an AT-11 needs to go to Romulus and I thought you’re just the pilot to do it.”

  Exhaustion vanished. She could fly a month straight if she had to.

  He continued, “In fact, you look a little tired. Why don’t you spend a few days out there while you’re at it? Take a break, meet the locals.”

  Do some digging, in other words.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  “Bring me back some facts, Anderson.”

  Last June, right after graduation and before transferring to New Castle, Em and Mary flew together on a cross-country training hop from Sweetwater to Dallas. It was the kind of easy trip where Em could sit back and actually enjoy flying. The kind of trip that reminded her why she was even doing this. She could lean back against the narrow seat, look up and all around through the narrow, boxy canopy at nothing but blue sky. Free as air.

  “Hey Em, take the stick for a minute,” Mary said, shouting over the rumble of the engine, when they’d almost reached Love Field at Dallas.

  From the back seat of their BT-13 Valiant, craning her neck to peer over Mary’s shoulder, Em saw her drop the stick and start digging in one of the pockets of her jacket. Em hadn’t yet taken over on the dual controls.

  The Valiant was a trainer and could be flown from either the front or back seat, and every trainee sitting in front had had the controls yanked away from them by the instructor in back at least once. The plane was flying trim so Em didn’t panic too much; she had a little time to put a steadying hand on the stick.

  “What are you doing up there?” Em asked. Mary turned just enough so Em could see her putting on lipstick, studying her work in a compact mirror.

  She’d had enough practice putting on lipstick in airplanes that the teeth-rattling vibrations of the engine didn’t affect her at all. Em laughed. “No one up here cares about your lipstick.”

  Mary looked a little ridiculous, leather cap mashing down her hair, goggles up on her forehead, painting her lips. So this was why she wanted to fly with the canopy closed on such a warm, beautiful day, making the cockpit hot and stuffy. She didn’t want to be all ruffled when they landed.

  “I have to be ready. There might be some handsome young officer just waiting for me to catch his eye. Oh, I hope we get there in time for dinner. This bucket’s so slow. You think they’ll ever give us anything faster to fly?”

  “A real plane, you mean?” Em said. It was an old joke.

  “I wouldn’t say that. This bird’s real enough. If you don’t mind going slow.”

  Em looked out the canopy stuck up top in the middle of the fuselage. “We have to get there and land before you can catch your handsome young officer’s eye. Do you know where we are?” They were flying low-level and cross-country; Em searched for landmarks, which was quite a trick in the middle of Texas.

  “Don’t fret, we’re right on course. Bank left—there’s the main road, see?” Em nudged the stick and the plane tipped, giving her a wide view past the wing and its Army star to the earth below, and the long straight line of paved road leading to Dallas. Mary seemed to have an instinct for these sorts of things.

  “You really do have this all planned out,” Em said. “You’ll be heading straight from the flight line to the Officer’s Club, won’t you?”

  Mary had a pout in her voice. “I might stop to brush my hair first.” Em laughed, and Mary looked over her shoulder. “Don’t give me a hard time just because I’m not already married off to a wonderful man like you are.”

  Em sighed. She hadn’t seen her husband in almost a year. The last letter she’d had from him was postmarked Honolulu, three weeks ago. He hadn’t said where he was sailing to—couldn’t, really. All she knew was that he was somewhere in the middle of a big wide ocean, flying Navy dive-bombers off a carrier. Sometimes she wished she weren’t a pilot, because she knew exactly what could go wrong for Michael. Then again, maybe he was flying right now—it was mid-morning in the Pacific—cruising along for practice on a beautiful day and thinking of her, the way she was thinking of him.

  “Em?” Mary said, still craned over to took at Em the best she could over the back of her seat.

  “Sorry. You just got me thinking about Michael.”

  Em could just see Mary’s wide red smile, her excitable eyes. “You really miss him, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Mary sighed. “That’s so romantic.”

  Em almost laughed again. “Would you listen to you? There’s nothing romantic about waking up every day wondering if he’s alive or dead.” She was only twenty-four, too young to be a widow, surely. She had to stop this or she’d start crying and have to let Mary land the plane. Shaking her head, she looked away, back to the blue sky outside the canopy, scattered clouds passing by.

  “It’s just that being in love like that? I’ve never been in love like that. Except maybe with Clark Gable.” She grinned.

  Em gratefully kept the joke going. “Don’t think for a minute Clark Gable’s going to be on the ground when we get there.”

  “You never know. These are strange times. He enlisted, did you know that? I read about it. Him and Jimmy Stewart both—and Jimmy Stewart’s a pilot!”

  “And maybe they’ll both be at Dallas, just for you.”

  “Hope springs eternal,” Mary said smugly. “I’ve got my lucky pennies, you know.”

  “All right, but if they’re there, you have to ask them to dance.”

  “It’s a deal,” Mary said brightly, knowing she’d never have to make good on it. Because Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart were not at Dallas. But if something like that was going to happen to anyone, it would happen to Mary.

  A few minutes later, Em leaned forward to listen. Sure enough, Mary was singing. “Don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me, anyone else but me . . . ”

  Em joined in, and they sang until they were circling over the field to land.

  After shutting down the engine, she sat in her cockpit and took a look down the flight line at Romulus, in freezing Michigan. The sight never failed to amaze her—a hundred silver birds perched on the tarmac, all that power, ready and waiting. The buzzing of engines was constant; she could feel the noise in her bones.

  This was the last runway Mary took off from.

  Sighing, she filled out the plane’s l-A, collected her bag and her logbook, and hoisted herself out of the cockpit and onto the tarmac. Asked the first guy she saw, a mechanic, where the WASP barracks were. The wary look on his face told her all she needed to know about what the men on this base thought of WASP. She’d heard the rumors—they traded stories about which bases welcomed them and which wanted nothing to do with women pilots. She wasn’t sure she believed the stories about someone putting sugar in the fuel tank of a WASP’s plane at Camp Davis, causing it to crash—mostly because she didn’t think anyone would do that to a plane.
But those were the sorts of stories people told.

  She made her way to the barracks. After a shower, she’d be able to face the day a little easier.

  After the shower, Em, dressed in shirt and trousers, was still drying her hair when a group of women came into the barracks—three of them, laughing and windblown, peeling off flight jackets and scrubbing fingers through mussed hair. They quieted when they saw her, and she set her towel aside.

  “Hi.”

  One of them, a slim blonde with mischief in her eyes, the kind of woman the brass liked to use in press photos, stepped forward, hand outstretched.

  “Hi. You must be the new kid they were talking about back in ops. I’m Lillian Greshing.”

  “Em Anderson,” she said, shaking her hand. “I’m just passing through. I hope you don’t mind, I used one of the towels on the shelf. There weren’t any names or labels—”

  “Of course not, that’s what they’re there for. Hey—we were going to grab supper in town after we get cleaned up. Want to come along? You can catch us up on all the gossip.”

  Em’s smile went from polite to warm, as she felt herself among friends again. “That sounds perfect.”

  The four women found a table in the corner of a little bar just off base. The Runway wasn’t fancy; it had a Christmas tree decorated with spots of tinsel and glass bulbs in a corner, a pretty good bar, and a jukebox playing swing.

  The dinner special was roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and a bottle of beer to wash it down.

  “What’re they transferring WASP to Camp Davis for?” Betsy, a tall woman with a narrow face and a nervous smile, asked when Em passed on the rumor.

  “Don’t know,” Em said. “Nobody’ll say. But Davis is a gunnery school.” More speculative murmurs ran around the table.

  “Target towing. Wanna bet?” Lillian said.

  “I’ll stick to the job I have, thank you very much,” Betsy said, shivering.

  Em felt her smile grow thin and sly. “Not me. Nursing along slowpoke trainers? We can do better than that.”

  “You want to fly planes while some cross-eyed greenhorn shoots at you?”

  “Nope,” Em said. “I want to transition to pursuits.”

  “It’ll never happen,” Lillian said, shaking her head, like she needed the emphasis. “The old cronies like Burnett will never let it happen.”

  “Burnett?”

  “Colonel. Runs this lovely little operation.” She gestured in the direction of the airfield. Smoke trailed behind her hand to join the rest of the haze in the air.

  “What’s he like?” Em asked.

  That no one answered with anything more than sidelong glances and rolled eyes told her enough. Romulus was a cold-shoulder base.

  Em pressed on. “We’ll get there. Nancy Love has five girls in transition out at Palm Springs already. The factories are all working overtime building bombers and fighters, and ATC doesn’t have enough pilots to ferry them to port. They’re going to have to let us fly ’em, whether they like it or not.”

  Betsy was still shaking her head. “Those birds are too dangerous.”

  Mary got killed in a trainer, Em wanted to say. “We can do it. We’re capable of it.”

  Lillian said with a sarcastic lilt, “Burnett would say we’re not strong enough. That we wouldn’t be able to even get something like a Mustang off the ground.”

  “He’s full of it,” Em said. “I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those.”

  Betsy, smiling vaguely, looked into her beer. “I don’t know how I’d explain flying fighters to my husband. He’s barely all right with my flying at all.”

  “So don’t tell him,” Lillian said. Shocked giggles met the proclamation.

  Round-eyed Molly, blond hair in a ponytail, leaned in. “Don’t listen to her, she’s got three boyfriends at three different fields. She doesn’t understand about husbands.” More giggling.

  Em smiled. “Betsy, is he overseas?”

  “England,” she said. “He’s a doctor.” Her pride was plain.

  “You’ve got a ring there, Em,” Molly said to the band on Em’s finger. “You married or is that to keep the flyboys off you?”

  “He’s Navy,” Em said. “He’s on a carrier in the Pacific.”

  After a sympathetic hesitation, Lillian continued. “What does he think about you flying?”

  Em donned a grin. “I met him when we were both taking flying lessons before the war. He can’t argue about me flying. Besides, I have to do something to keep my mind off things.”

  Lillian raised her bottle. “Here’s to the end of the war.”

  They raised their glasses and the toasts were heartfelt.

  The quiet moment gave Em her opening—time to start in on the difficult gossip, what she’d come here to learn. “What do you all know about Mary Keene’s crash last week?”

  No one would look at her. Betsy bit a trembling lip and teared up, and Molly fidgeted with her glass. Lillian’s jaw went taut with a scowl. She ground her cigarette into the ashtray with enough force to destroy what was left of it.

  “It happened fifty miles out,” Lillian said, her voice quiet. “Nobody saw anything, we just heard it when the fire truck left. All we know is a group of seven planes went out—BT-13s, all of ’em—and an hour later six came back and nobody would tell us a thing. Just that Mary’d been killed. You knew her, I take it?”

  “We were in the same class at Avenger,” Em said. “We were friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “She was only here a couple of days but we all liked her a lot.”

  Molly handed Betsy a handkerchief; she dabbed her eyes with it.

  “I was told the accident report was classified, and that doesn’t make any sense. Some guys who were here last week told me there was a collision.”

  Lillian leaned close and spoke softly; like this was some kind of conspiracy. “That’s what we heard, and one of the planes came back with a wheel all busted up, but Burnett clamped down on talk so fast, our heads spun. Filed away all the paperwork and wouldn’t answer any questions. We don’t even know who else was flying that day.”

  “He can’t do that,” Em said. “Couldn’t you go after him? Just keep pushing—”

  “It’s Burnett,” Lillian said. “Guy’s a brick wall.”

  “Then go over his head.”

  “And get grounded? Get kicked out? That’s what he’s threatened us with, for going over his head,” Lillian said, and Em couldn’t argue. But technically, she wasn’t part of his squadron, and he couldn’t do anything to her. She could ask her questions.

  Another group from the field came in then, flyboys by their leather jackets with silver wings pinned to the chest. Ferry Division, by the insignia. Not so different from the girls, who were wearing trousers and blouses, their jackets hanging off their chairs—a group gathered around a table, calling for beers and talking about the gossip, flying, and the war.

  Pretty soon after their arrival, a couple of them went over to the jukebox and put in a few coins. A dance tune came up, something just fast enough to make you want to get out of your seat—Glenn Miller, “Little Brown Jug.” Lillian rolled her eyes and Molly hid a smile with her hand; they all knew what was coming next.

  Sure enough, the guys sauntered over to their table. Em made sure the hand with her wedding band was out and visible. Not that that stopped some men. Just a dance, they’d say. But she didn’t want to, because it would make her think about Michael.

  Lillian leaned back in her chair, chin up and shoulders squared, and met their gazes straight on. The others looked on like they were watching a show.

  They weren’t bad looking, early thirties maybe. Slightly rumpled uniforms and nice smiles. “Would any of you ladies like a dance?”

  The women glanced at each other—would any of them say yes?

  Lillian, brow raised, blond curls falling over her ears so artfully she might have pinned them there, said, “What makes you boys think you could keep up with
any of us?”

  The guys glanced at each other, then smiled back at Lillian. Gauntlet accepted. “We’d sure like to give it a try.”

  Nobody was making a move to stand, and Lillian again took the lead—breaking the boys’ hearts for fun. “Sorry to disappoint you, but the girls and I spent all day putting repaired AT-6s through their paces and we’re beat. We were looking forward to a nice, quiet evening.”

  The guy standing at the first one’s shoulder huffed a little. “Lady pilots,” he might have muttered.

  The first guy seemed a little daunted. “Well, maybe you’ll let us pull over a couple of chairs and buy you a round?”

  Magic words, right there. Lillian sat up and made a space at the table.

  “That’ll be all right.”

  Another round of beers arrived a moment later.

  The men were nice enough, Ferry Division boys flying pursuits and bombers from the factories. Em asked questions—how many, what kind, where were they going, what was it like?—and ate up the answers. They seemed happy enough to humor her, even if they did come off on the condescending side—isn’t that cute, a girl who wants to fly fast planes.

  The attitude was easy enough to ignore. Every WASP had a story about being chatted up by some flyboy at a bar, him bragging about piloting hotshot planes and ending with the “I ship out to Europe tomorrow, honey,” line; then seeing the look of shock on the guy’s face the next day when he spotted her on the flight line climbing into her own cockpit. That was funny every damn time.

  Lillian leaned over to Jim, the guy who’d talked to them first, and said, “Do your friends want to come on over and join us? We could make a real party of it.”

  A couple of the guys already had, but a few remained at the other table, talking quietly and nursing beers. They didn’t pay much attention to the other group, except for one guy, with a round face and slicked-back hair, who kept his jacket on even though the room had grown warm.

  Grinning, Jim leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I think you all make some of the boys nervous.”