by Janet Dailey
“I know what you mean,” the chestnut haired lieutenant agreed. He was one of the many transient pilots temporarily stationed at Buckingham awaiting overseas assignments or more training in heavier bombers. Scott Daniels was a bomber pilot, but on today’s flight he’d come along to observe the patterns and procedures.
The constant coming and going of pilots suited Marty. She wasn’t interested in establishing any permanent relationships. Besides, it wasn’t wise with so many of the pilots bound for combat overseas. Airmen had a notoriously higher mortality rate than the regular soldier. She’d had fun with all the flyboys but she’d restricted intimacies to a very few.
From the corner of her eye, she studied Lieutenant Scott Daniels, strongly attracted to his fair skin and burnished brown hair. More than once he’d looked at her with a flirting, questing gaze, making his interest in her obvious. Marty wasn’t particularly bothered by the gold wedding band on his ring finger as long as he wasn’t. He turned, caught her eyeing him, and smiled with a slow, knowing warmth. A second later, his glance shifted past her, locking onto something in the blue sea below them.
“Look.” He leaned closer and pointed out a small white dot in the aquamarine waters. “Isn’t that a boat? What do you suppose it is? A fishing trawler, maybe?”
“Probably.” Marty watched the bobbing speck, so small from the bomber’s great height.
But her senses were picking up other messages—the slight pressure of his body making contact against her length, the warmth of his breath stirring the touseled, tawny curls of her short hair, and the spicy scent drifting from his smoothly shaven cheeks. He was very close. She turned her head slightly, feeling the little run of her pulse as her gaze darted to the full line of his mouth so near to hers.
“I wangled myself a weekend pass,” he murmured. “A buddy of mine is lending me his car. I thought I’d drive over to Miami. Would you like to ride along?”
“Sure,” Marty agreed in her whiskey-thick voice. “Why not?”
“Why not,” the lieutenant repeated, then he closed the space that separated their lips.
The kiss was both seeking and satisfying, a controlled exploration that invited and promised something more. Marty responded to the simple demand that didn’t press. Intense passion usually required some kind of commitment. She usually backed off from that, preferring something freer, less confining.
Slowly they drew apart. Her breathing was faintly uneven, warmly aroused. Marty held his gaze while she turned onto her side and shifted so she was slightly under him.
“Tell me, Lieutenant,” she murmured, gravelly mischief lacing her voice, “have you ever made love in an airplane before?”
A dark gleam entered his brown eyes. “Are you a member of that famed Mile-High Club I’ve heard about?” he taunted, referring to the supposedly select group of female fliers who had made love at an altitude over 5,000 feet.
“Not yet,” Marty replied, then chuckled in her throat as her hand curved itself to the back of his neck and urged him down.
Miami Beach with its palm trees and endless stretches of sand was a hive of tourists, workers whose pockets were stuffed with dollars from high-paying war jobs, uniformed servicemen, and wives, stubborn in their insistence to be close to their soldier husbands for as long as they could. The beaches were a strange blend of cadets drilling in columns, sun-worshipping factory employees wading in the surf in the civilian version of a furlough, and Coast Guardsmen patrolling the shores on horseback.
Nearly all the hotels were taken over by the Army as rest and recuperation centers for the war’s victims, prominent among them the Air Force pilots returning from overseas with their bodies intact and their nerves shattered. Vestiges of the war were everywhere, creeping into the idyllic world of sand, surf, and sun, like a widening shadow in paradise. The shadow lurked in the corners of people’s lives; their backs might be turned to it, but they were unable to banish it completely.
A bright sickle moon silvered the beach Marty strolled with Lieutenant Scott Daniels, the loose sand weighting her steps, making them slow and meandering. The salty breeze had a tangy taste, invigorating and clean. The small breakers rolled in slowly.
“I’ve heard ships have been torpedoed just a few miles off shore,” she remarked.
Her boat-shaped cap sat jauntily atop her short, honey-dark hair. In the moonlight, her silver wings gleamed on her semi-regulation shirt. She wore her uniform-tan pants and unbecoming but serviceable shoes. The night was warm, making a jacket unnecessary.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard, too,” Scott agreed and tipped the beer bottle to his mouth. No more than a swallow was left, and he frowned at the bottle. Hotels loomed in tall, irregular boxes close to the sand, darkened into black silhouettes. “Want another beer?” he asked. “There’s bound to be a bar in one of these places.”
Marty shrugged, not really caring. “Sure.” Altering their direction, they headed for the nearest blacked-out building. Where the hotel’s sundeck jutted into the beach sand, Marty checked her pace. “I’ll wait for you out here.” For once, she wasn’t in the mood for the noisy, smoky scene of a bar.
The pilot didn’t protest. “I’ll be right out.”
While he disappeared toward the hotel’s beach entrance, Marty wandered over to claim one of the lounge chairs, angular shapes in the shadows cast by the palm fronds. She stumbled over a pair of feet thrust into the walkway and nearly fell into a chair before she recovered her balance.
“Sorry,” she said to the unknown person, his outline barely discernible in the deep shadows. “I didn’t see you sitting there in the dark.”
“The hotels are under blackout orders again.” The figure shifted, catching some of the moonlight. An officer’s cap sat sideways on his head, the bill dipping over one eye and shadowing most of his features except for the smile that seemed to lurk permanently around his mouth, infected with a hard, cruel bitterness.
“I noticed the cars had the top half of their headlamps hooded”—Marty strained to see more of this stranger, wary and conscious of the hair rising on the back of her neck—“and the blackout curtains at the windows.”
“Only on the ocean side, though,” he pointed out with dry cynicism, in case she hadn’t noted how limited the precaution was.
There was something about this man Marty instinctively disliked. She couldn’t name it, but she felt on edge, ready to snap. Even though she couldn’t see him clearly, she could feel the slow rake of his eyes. She wished she hadn’t sat down next to him, but she wasn’t about to get up and leave now.
“What are those wings you’re wearing?” He lifted his hand to gesture in the direction of the specially designed wings on her shirt collar, ice cubes clinking against the glass he held. The potent smell of rum came to her. “Did your flyboy lover give them to you?”
“No. I earned them,” Marty stated in a flat, decisive voice.
He seemed to straighten with interest, and she caught the reflection of moonlight off the captain’s bars on his shoulders. “The hell you say.” Some kind of scornful amusement mocked her accomplishment. “And just what is it you fly? Cubs?”
“A B-17 Flying Fortress,” she retorted. A long silence followed, broken by the sound of ice cubes rattling as a drink was thrown back, then the glass lowered. “Surprised?” Marty couldn’t resist taunting him.
“I guess the Army doesn’t give a damn who they stick into their planes,” he mused, uncaring.
His head was lowered; moonlight splashed across more of his face, revealing rugged, once handsome features that were lined and pitted. Silver wings, too, were on his uniform. The Army had few pilots over thirty, but this captain looked to be every bit of that and more. Despite his lazy, slouched posture, he seemed a coil of restless, brittle energy.
“What do you fly?” Marty asked.
“Nothing. Not anymore.” Something akin to hatred was in his voice as it turned mocking and bitter. “You see, I fooled the Army. I survived my fifty
missions. When they extended it another ten, I survived that, too. They tried, but they couldn’t kill me off. Now they gotta figure out what to do with me.”
“Did you lose your nerve, Captain?” Marty said with disgust.
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He lapsed into silence and looked away, seaward.
“What did you fly?”
“Why, that great armada ship, the B-17 Flying Fortress.” The declaration was laced with a biting irony. “They sent waves of them over Axis targets just to see how many of them would come back. We went again and again.”
“Where were you stationed? England?” Mary Lynn’s husband was there … and Colin. Fate had thrown them together—fate and war. Wouldn’t it be something if—
“North Africa in the beginning, flying Liberators, then England.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know a B-17 pilot named Beau Palmer—” she began.
“No. Everybody I knew is dead,” he interrupted flatly and coldly. “And I made it a point not to meet anybody else. It’s better if you don’t know the name of the pilot flying on your wing.”
His bitter self-pity irked Marty. “I guess no one knows your name. If you’d died, no one would have missed you.”
“How true,” he agreed, unscathed by her attempt to wound. “Here comes your friend. I’m sure he’s missed your cheerful company.”
“I’m sure you won’t mind if I leave you to yours. You seem to love it so much.” She swept out of the lounge chair to rejoin Lieutenant Daniels emerging from the hotel with a pair of beer bottles in his hand.
When she joined him, he noticed the man in the shadows and asked, “Who’s he?”
“Some pilot”—the scorn was in her voice—“who has lost his nerve.”
“I heard of a bomber pilot back from England who couldn’t stand the sound of a car riding over the joints in the highway.” The lieutenant passed her a bottle of beer. “The thumping reminded him of flak.”
Weary and nerve-torn, Cappy Hayward mounted the steps to the nurses’ barracks. She’d flown for hours over cloud hills, guided solely by her instruments, not seeing the ground until she’d broken through the solid murk upon entering the traffic pattern for Boiling Field. To make matters worse, she had a nervous passenger aboard who constantly questioned her ability to find the field.
The strain of gritting her teeth and smiling thinly at his implied insults had knotted the muscles in her shoulders and neck. Not once had she said anything that smacked of insubordination, although she had been tempted on countless occasions to inform the oft-decorated colonel what he could do with the airplane and precisely where.
As Cappy entered the barracks, she was hailed by one of the nurses. “Hayward.” She waited for Cappy to turn in acknowledgment. “There’s someone waiting for you in your room. She said she knew you. The two of you had trained together or something. I thought it would be all right if she waited for you there.”
“Thanks.” Puzzled and wondering if it could be Eden en route on some ferrying assignment, Cappy shook off some of her tiredness to walk quickly to her room.
As she opened the door, she spied the long-legged girl in the improvised WASP uniform with a mop of mussed, sandy curls in their typically shorn and carefree style. It was funny, but Marty Rogers was the last one of their group she had expected to see. Marty was sitting on her cot, her legs outstretched and her back propped on the pillows Cappy had stacked against the wall to give the room a homey touch. Smoke spiraled from the cigarette Marty held between her fingers.
“Surprised?” Marty mocked Cappy’s slightly wide-eyed expression.
No demonstration of affection was expected. After a small hesitation, Cappy walked the rest of the way into the room and shut the door to shrug out of her battle jacket.
“Yes,” she admitted as she gave the leather jacket a toss and reached for her own pack of cigarettes. “What brings you here? I thought you were basking in the Florida sunshine and flying all over those blue Gulf waters in a Fortress.”
“I was.”
The use of the past tense seemed significant. Cappy picked up the altering of pitch, the faint emphasis on the verb.
“Was?” she repeated in a prompting fashion.
“I’ve just been raked over the proverbial coals,” Marty replied on a scornful breath. “They’ve pulled me out of the heavy bombers. I was lucky, though.” She shrugged. “They damned near threw me out of the WASPs.”
“For what?”
“The Army pilot I was seeing happened to be married.” She swung her legs off the bed and turned to sit on the edge, her hands on the side of the cot.
“How’d they find out?”
“Scott was a fool. He wrote his wife a Dear Jane letter.” Her mouth curved wryly. “She, of course, fired off a nasty note to the commander about this bitch who’s stolen her husband.”
“That’s tough.” Cappy was distantly sympathetic. “So where to now?”
“I’ve been demoted to the ferrying division. Every cloud has a silver lining, though. I’m being sent to Long Beach, so I’ll probably hook up with Mary Lynn and Eden. It’ll be almost like old times.”
“Be sure to say hi for me, will you?” Cappy said, reaching for the ashtray that held the lipstick-stained butt of Marty’s cigarette.
“I didn’t come just to chat,” Marty stated, and met Cappy’s questioning glance. “I need a favor. You were always the one who knew everything. I figured you could help me.”
“With what?”
“You know a lot of people in town. Maybe you can give me the name of someone to contact to arrange an abortion. On top of everything else, I’m pregnant.”
After the first shock had receded, Cappy breathed out a troubled sigh and frowned. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“I want to fly. I’ve always wanted to fly,” Marty retorted grimly. “What would I do with a kid? Hell, the father is already married. And even if he was free, I wouldn’t want to marry him. So what’s the alternative? If they find out I’m pregnant, I’m washed out.”
The olive-gray eyes remained steady, not a glimmer of doubt on their calm surface. Still, Cappy hesitated, not liking any of this, yet feeling a loyalty to her former baymate.
“How soon? How much time before you have to report to California?” she asked finally.
“Counting travel time, I’ve got three days.”
Cappy pulled in a breath and held it before letting it out slowly. “That isn’t much.” She cast another look at Marty. “You are sure this is what you want?”
“I’m sure.”
Cappy nodded. “Okay. There’s an empty room down the hall. I’ll arrange for you to stay here while I see what I can do.” She paused. “Just about anything is available in Washington, legal or not—moral or not.”
Being brought up in the Army included lessons in rumor. Cappy had learned well how to piece them together. Someone hinted this; another whispered that; this one suspected another thing; and that one heard something else. Things that weren’t discussed and things that were—they were part of knowing what went on and pretending otherwise.
Between the confidences of a few discreet Army nurses and contacts in the ocean of Washington typists, Cappy got the name and address of a reputable abortionist—in her opinion, almost a contradiction in terms. Marty made her own contact.
When the time came to keep the appointment, Cappy couldn’t let her go alone. Whether she liked it or not, she had become involved in this and she had to see it through to its conclusion. Marty didn’t argue; with or without Cappy, she was going through with it.
Expecting the worst, Cappy was surprised when the address didn’t take them into the slums which covered nearly half of the city, occupied mainly by Negroes. There, it was said, among the dreadful “alley houses” where several families sometimes lived in a single room, gangs of seven- and eight-year-old boys roamed the streets armed with knives, and girls barely into their puberty were prostitutes on the corners.
&
nbsp; The address was in an old neighborhood of the city, the back office atop a two-story building housing a pharmacy at the street level. Paint and plaster were peeling off the walls of the narrow, steep stairwell. Marty paused at the bottom of the steps and looked up.
“This is melodramatic as hell,” she muttered dryly and resolutely started up the stairs. Cappy followed, her lips pressed firmly together.
The frosted glass door on the right of the second-floor hallway was identified only by a number. Marty tried the knob and it turned under her hand. The air had a musty, closed-in smell, faintly tainted by an antiseptic odor. The small anteroom was devoid of furniture except for a standing ashtray by the inner door, but it was clean.
A soft scuffle of sound came from the adjoining room. The door was opened by a chocolate-dark Negro in a white starched jacket. There was a scrubbed look about him. His neatly trimmed hair was gray, and wire glasses sat smartly on his nose. Almost absently, Cappy noticed his shoes squeaked when he walked, a disconcerting sound.
“May I help you?” he said.
“I’m Miss Smith.” Marty calmly stepped forward.
“Of course.” The name mattered not—to either of them. He moved out of the doorway. “Would you like to come in?”
“I’d like to go with her,” Cappy asserted, stepping to Marty’s side.
The black gentleman hesitated, then politely inclined his head, granting permission. “It isn’t necessary, but you may observe if you wish.” His inflection betrayed an education, although a trace of southern accent remained.
The inner room was larger. At first, it appeared to be a storeroom for pharmaceutical supplies. However, behind the shelves and bins was a long table, standing beneath a bright ceiling light. The strong medicinal smells in the air were almost overpowering. A lighter-skinned Negro woman in a long white smock was standing by the table, of an age to be the man’s wife or sister, her face unlined but her hair salty gray.
