by Janet Dailey
“Yes, sir.”
With considerable satisfaction, Rachel straightened up to tower over the shorter man, then walked out of his office, aware that he was following. An MP was standing guard by her AT-6 when she emerged from the operations building. He started to block her access to the plane, until he caught the signal from the captain to let her pass.
Rachel was in the cockpit with her belt fastened before she realized she had been given neither a map nor a heading back to Sweetwater. She was determined she’d fly the plane into the ground before she’d ask that captain for anything.
“Clear!” she shouted out the side of the opened canopy, then turned the switch that brought the propeller blades churning to life.
After taking off from the Oklahoma airfield, Rachel picked up the railroad tracks that had guided her to this strip and followed the reliable iron beams south. The encroaching darkness of night was about to obscure the landmarks on the edge of Sweetwater. Seconds later, she spied the runway at Avenger Field, outlined with flare pots.
Her instructor, Joe Gibbs, was waiting for her on the flight line when she landed. He chewed her out, but not too roughly, sensing that she’d suffered enough for her mistake. Rachel didn’t tell him all that had happened. It was enough that she’d gotten herself lost.
After he’d left her, Rachel’s friend Helen Shaw came out of the ready room to meet her. The ex-Hollywood actress eyed her curiously. “What happened?”
Before she was through, Rachel ended up telling her fellow Woofted about the entire incident, her treatment in the hands of the insolent captain, and the blind-luck flight back to Sweet-water.
“Men,” Helen said, commiserating with Rachel’s sentiments.
“To paraphrase an old quotation—’Men are bastards ever,’” she replied, and meant it.
At the barracks, Rachel and Helen parted company to go to their separate bays. There was the usual confusion, everyone trying to shower and change before evening mess, when Rachel entered. Her late arrival didn’t escape Cappy’s notice.
“Where’ve you been, Goldman?” she inquired with idle curiosity. “Did you have plane trouble or something?”
After a second’s hesitation, Rachel told them the whole story, chastened by the experience but still seething over the way she’d been treated.
Marty’s initial reaction had been to scoff, “Oklahoma?! How could you have made a mistake like that?” By the time Rachel had finished, she was saying, “Officer or not, I think I’d have punched him in the nose.”
Chapter XII
THERE WAS NO relief from the hundred-degree July heat. The rows of barracks were lined up in a north/south direction, the same as the prevailing summer wind, allowing for no cross-ventilation in the bays.
In the suffocating stillness of the night, Marty lay on her cot, hot and sweating. Her legs were spread apart to keep her thighs from sticking together with the prickly dampness of perspiration, and her arms were flung over her head to avoid touching her sides. Nothing seemed to offer any relief from the miserable, oppressive heat, not even the wet towel she had draped over herself.
From outside the barracks came the tantalizing whisper of a breeze. It danced by the opened windows and the screened door. Not once did it come inside. Marty listened to it, feeling so sweaty and irritable.
“Oh, hell.” She sat up. “How can anybody sleep in this hot hole?”
“Shut up, Rogers.” Eden’s voice was half muffled by the mattress on which she was lying face down, motionless with her arms away from her body as Marty’s had been.
“You can stay here if you want, but I’m moving.” Marty piled out of her bed and grabbed the end of her cot. The legs made an awful scraping sound as she started dragging it across the floor. “Somebody want to give me a hand with the door?”
“What the Sam Hill are you doing?” Cappy rose on an elbow to glare at her.
“I’m going to sleep outside where at least there’s a breeze,” she declared.
Within minutes, they were all dragging their cots outdoors and setting them up between the barracks. As other bays heard the commotion, they joined them until cots were strung out the full length of the buildings. It wasn’t much of a breeze, but it moved the air and revived them.
“Would you look at all those stars?” Marty lay on her back and gazed at the millions of rhinestone lights in the black velvet sky, each one so individually brilliant. She glanced at Mary Lynn with a wry look. “Now where’s that cowboy who wanted to show me the Big Dipper?” She chuckled in her throat at the memory of the amorous cowhand she’d met at the rodeo-barbecue given the girls by a local rancher on the Fourth of July.
“It is a beautiful night,” Mary Lynn sighed and pillowed her head in her hands.
On the other side of them Cappy mused, “It won’t be long until they start checking us out in the AT-17s.” Flying the twin-engined aircraft would be the last stage of their advanced training, giving them a multiengine rating before graduation the first week of August.
“The good ole ‘Bamboo Bomber,’” Eden joked dryly, referring to the plywood construction of the airplane, dubbed the “Bobcat” by its Cessna manufacturer.
Marty overheard their talk. “You mean the ‘Bunson Burner’?” she mocked. “The damned thing looks as if it would go up like a matchstick.”
Lying silently on her cot, Rachel listened to the low discussion about the twin-engined plane. She remembered hearing Woofteds in classes ahead of hers talking about the AT-17. The plane had a seat behind the pilot and copilot that was low and seemed to be sunken in a well. Even those who weren’t prone to airsickness had grabbed for paper bags when they’d sat in that seat.
Somewhere down the line of cots came a shriek. “A snake! A rattlesnake!” The cry went up. “Somebody kill it!!”
In a wild scramble of bodies, some girls sought the safety of the barracks while others perched atop their cots to peer over the edges, and more searched for a weapon. The rattler, which had so foolishly crawled onto the walkway, was subsequently clubbed to death.
“Poor snake,” Marty said in absent pity.
“It was a rattlesnake,” Eden protested.
“I’ve heard they always travel in pairs,” a trainee down the way offered.
A moment of silence followed. Then a clamor began anew as a search was started for the mate of the dead snake. Some of the trainees gave up and hauled their cots back into the bays, but Marty yawned and stretched out more fully on her cot. A second snake was never found, but most of the trainees spent a restless night, listening for the slightest rustle of grass that might betray the presence of a snake beneath their cots.
Before graduation, each trainee was required to make a long, solo cross-country flight to a destination prescribed by her instructor. It was sheer chance that Mary Lynn was assigned to fly to her own home town of Mobile on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Midway, she stopped to refuel her AT-6 and wire her estimated time of arrival so she could squeeze an hour or longer visit with her family.
On the last leg, favoring winds added another hour to her allotted ground time in Mobile. Upon landing, she called to say she was on her way and disregarded her mother’s veiled complaints over having her sleep interrupted. Working the graveyard shift meant that her mother slept during the day while her father had the coveted day shift at the shipyards. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t get to see him on this trip.
Outside the air base, she caught a bus into town. The giant cranes of the shipyards ranged across the skyline, by their presence transforming the sleepy Gulf seaport of Mobile, Alabama, into a boom town. Coal smoke drifted in layers, held aloft by the sea winds, its smell tainting the salty air. The city sidewalks were crowded to overflowing.
Mary Lynn got off the bus to connect with the line that went to her neighborhood and waited impatiently at its stop. At first, she didn’t notice the trio of young girls dawdling outside the corner drug store. Dressed somewhat alike in blouses and skirts, bobby socks and saddle shoes, they wor
e heavy makeup, garish paint on young faces, slashing lips an unkind scarlet red. They eyed Mary Lynn, in her tan gabardines, white short-sleeved shirt, and perky general’s cap on her midnight-dark hair, with the mistrust of the young toward the older, and of the female toward another of her own gender. Mary Lynn seriously doubted if any of the three had celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
Looking away, she glanced down the street to see if the bus was coming and debated whether it would be faster to find a cab. After nearly six months in Texas, she was unused to the hot, humid climate of the Deep South—a sticky heat that not even the breeze coming off the Mexican Gulf could alleviate. She felt its oppressive weight as she looked down the busy thoroughfare. No bus was in sight. Mary Lynn turned back to the trio of bobby-soxers.
“When’s the next bus due?”
Her inquiry was met with shrugs and one politely drawled, “I don’t know, ma’am. Soon, I expect.”
Mary Lynn smiled briefly in response and suppressed a deep sigh, resigned to waiting for the bus to make its appearance. A sailor came strolling up the street, setting the young girls to tittering and giggling behind their hands while they eyed him with flirtatious interest. Mary Lynn was absently amused by their adolescent silliness over a young serviceman, until she saw the brazen way they approached him.
“Where are you from, sailor?”
“Gee, you’re cute. I’d be proud to keep you company if you’re lonely.”
“Wanta buy me a soda?”
The three girls practically threw themselves at the sailor, pressing close with the straining urgency of their young bodies. Such behavior from seemingly well-brought-up young ladies was scandalous to Mary Lynn. The sailor was being virtually offered his pick of them. Each seemed to melt when he looked her over to make his choice.
“What’s your name, honey?” He familiarly slid a hand around the waist of the chosen one and let it ride down low, resting suggestively near the curve of her bottom.
“Donna May.” Adoration dominated her expression, not even a hint of objection showing at the near-intimate contact.
The sailor bent down and whispered something in Donna May’s ear, then straightened to say, “I’ll take you to a movie. How’s that?”
“I’d love it just fine.” She was atremble with some kind of wild excitement, triumphant while the other two girls started to drift away, disappointed yet already looking down the street in anticipation of another chance.
When the young girl started to move off in the company of the sailor, it was more than Mary Lynn could tolerate. “Does your mother know you’re doing this?” she demanded. “How old are you?”
The girl turned, angry and defensive, clutching the sailor’s arm as if she was afraid she might lose him. “It’s none of your business, lady.”
Mary Lynn glared at the sailor, finding him equally to blame. “She’s hardly more than a child.” The sailor was unmoved by her protest.
“I’m old enough,” the girl, Donna May, insisted, and jerked her head in the direction of the oncoming bus. “Why don’t you get on your bus and leave us alone. No one asked you to butt in.”
Brake shoes screeched against the drums as the bus rattled to a halt at the curb stop. Mary Lynn hesitated a second longer, staring at the sailor and the child-woman, then swung aboard. The crowded bus reeked of sweaty, unwashed bodies and stale tobacco smoke, odors made all the more objectionable by the hot and humid July air. A small space was available on a front seat and Mary Lynn wedged her hips into the narrow section between two seated passengers as the bus lurched forward.
Through a dust-filmed window, Mary Lynn watched the sailor and the girl stroll along the sidewalk, acting more like lovers than the strangers they were. Mary Lynn’s apple-cheeked features wore an unusual expression of stern disapproval. The woman passenger on her right, dressed in the garb of a factory worker, noticed it and the object of its censure.
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” she agreed.
“She’s too young to know what she’s doing.” It was a frustrated protest.
“Khaki-wacky, they call it,” came the dryly cynical response. “Some of these young kids go crazy over anyone in uniform. I’ve seen them in drug stores trying to buy … you know … protection. This war, it’s doing things to all of us.” She lit a cigarette, something manly about the way she exhaled the smoke and pinched out the match. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re right and we should grab everything we can today.”
Mary Lynn fell silent rather than continue the depressing conversation. As long as the bus moved, a wind swept through the opened windows and offered the passengers some relief. But it was short-lived, dying down at every block corner while the bus let passengers out and took more in, letting the stifling close air fill the interior. Old, mansard-roofed homes with vine-choked iron grillwork and tall colonnades lent a shabby elegance to the city gone wild with the war boom, which crowded its streets with people and littered its gutters with fly-attracting trash.
Outside a movie house, jammed around the ticket booth, were children of all ages, from a sleeping toddler held in the aching arms of a seven-year-old to a cigarette-smoking nine-year-old dictator keeping his brood of siblings close by. Few adults were in sight.
“Lock-outs, most of them,” the woman said.
“What?”
“They’re locked out of their houses. Their mothers are working somewhere and don’t want their kids alone in the house so they lock them out and send them to the movies—a cheap babysitter,” the woman announced. “Doorkey children are the other kind. They wear the key to the front door around their necks so they don’t lose it. It’s sad. It’s really sad.”
They moved past the theater and the wind was once again blowing through the windows. The bus turned onto a tree-shaded street and Mary Lynn strained to see the white frame house with its long front porch.
Her mother’s welcome was less than warm when Mary Lynn reached the house. A more pinched and worn-out look marked her mother’s features, but her eyes remained dark, burning coals of light—angry and hungry for something, Mary Lynn knew not what. She was taking in boarders now, renting out the spare rooms.
“You’re working too hard, Mama.” Pity rose at the driven weariness she sensed in her mother. There were four boarders, she’d learned, occupying the spare beds in shifts. “Holding down a night job plus keeping up this house and renting out rooms …”
“Sleeping space is at a premium in this town,” her mother declared. “If this war will just last a few more years, your papa and I will be able to pay off the mortgage on this house and have some money set aside for our old age as well.”
The greed she heard in her mother’s voice twisted her in-sides. To wish for the war to continue because of the money that could be made from it struck Mary Lynn as selfish and callous. Beau was fighting in this war. If it was prolonged, his exposure to danger would be that much longer.
But while she bitterly resented her mother’s greed, Mary Lynn could understand it. Her parents had lost a lot during the Depression, barely managing to keep the family home. Her mother had hated being poor and doing without. It had soured her and made money an obsession.
Without thinking, Mary Lynn took a cigarette from the pack in her small purse. She tapped it on the table to pack the loose tobacco. With a jaundiced eye, her mother observed the action.
“What other dreadful habits have you picked up in Texas besides smoking and wearing men’s pants?” she asked reproachfully.
“Mama, it’s difficult to climb in and out of planes in a skirt.” Mary Lynn defended the practicality of her attire, but made no attempt to justify the cigarette in her hand.
“It’s certainly not ladylike.”
She lit the cigarette and took a drag from it. Trails of smoke were released as she responded to the remark. “Maybe it’s time you looked at yourself in the mirror, Mama.”
The visit with her mother wasn’t a pleasant one. It was almost a relief when it was time to return
to the airfield and make the long flight back to Sweetwater. The next time she came home, her stay would be longer and a pair of silver wings would be pinned to her uniform.
The incessant hot wind flung dust at Rachel’s face, making her eyes smart with the fine particles, but it provided some relief from the blistering temperatures on that early afternoon in late July. She stood outside the ready room with Helen Shaw and two other Woofteds, waiting for their instructors to arrive. The twin-engined Cessna Bobcats were parked on the flight line, all serviced for an afternoon of radio navigation practice. Graduation was so close all of them could taste it.
“My parents are catching the train from Oklahoma to be here when I get those silver wings pinned on me,” Helen said, adding wryly, “presuming, of course, that I pass the check rides.”
“You will,” Rachel replied confidently.
A shirt-sleeved instructor stepped out of the building behind them. “All right, let’s cut the gabbing and get the plane checked out.” The order was directed at Helen and her flightmate that day, Carla Ellers.
“It looks like we’ll be the first off the ground. You can follow us in your Bunson Burner. That way you won’t get lost on your way to Big Spring,” Helen gibed at Rachel, and winked as she headed for the planes with the boxy fuselage, constructed of plywood.
Despite the five-minute head start Helen had, Rachel had her AT-17 in sight shortly after taking off from Avenger Field. Both had successfully bracketed the radio beam to Big Spring and had the unbroken hum of its signal droning in their ears. Helen’s twin-engined aircraft kept the lead. It was always within Rachel’s range of vision as she flew the beam with her instructor in the copilot’s seat and Barbara Frye, a fellow trainee, sitting in the unenviable position of the rear seat.
That low, irregularly shaped hill, the landmark she always associated with Big Spring, jutted onto the horizon. Their destination was just ahead. Rachel reached to turn down the volume of the radio signal so her hearing would be attuned for that brief cone of silence when they passed over the beacon.
