“Until the carrier goes out next week,” Cunningham continued, “we’ll be working double time.”
As a murmur rippled through the crowd, Cunningham raised his hand. “That doesn’t just mean you’ll be here as long as I say every day. It means you’ll be working twice as fast while you’re here. Got it?”
Around the crowd, the men nodded in assent, their faces determined.
“All right,” Cunningham said with another clap of his hands. “Get to work. Except you new recruits,” he added as an afterthought. “To me.”
As most of the men strode away, heading toward the various planes scattered around the hangar, a handful of men, including Pickman, straggled up toward Cunningham, who was now consulting a clipboard he’d picked up from a workbench nearby. Lottie took her place among them.
“Hanson,” Cunningham said. “Looks like you’ve got years of experience with bodywork.”
A freckle-faced kid with a spike of straw-colored hair that looked like it might as well have been picked from whatever hayfield he came from nodded eagerly.
Cunningham looked at the plane with the damaged wing that had confronted Lottie when she first came in.
“See if you can’t help get that Helldiver back in action,” he said.
“Aye aye, sir!” the blond kid yelped, and jogged over to the plane.
Working down the list, Cunningham assigned each new recruit to a project that had at least something to do with their proven skills. After he’d sent half a dozen guys off to various planes, he said, “Palmer.”
“Yes, sir,” Lottie said.
The man next to her shuffled in surprise. Behind her, she thought she heard a muffled snicker. Was that Pickman, about to start up again? she wondered wearily. Well, if he wanted any more punishment, she already knew how to deal with him.
“Looks like you know your way around an engine,” Cunningham said. When he looked up, his eyebrows were raised in question, but Lottie thought she saw a hint of respect in his eyes, too.
Polite protests rose to Lottie’s lips. If this were a dinner party, she’d have been expected to put on a show of modesty and pretend that she didn’t have any skills at all. But something told her this wasn’t the time to pretend she didn’t have skills. She did, and she was ready to put them to good use.
“Yes, sir,” she said, raising her voice so there could be no chance he wouldn’t hear her.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve got a knotty problem on that Wildcat in the corner.”
Lottie smiled. The Wildcat was built by General Motors—another Detroit contribution to the war effort.
“All right,” Cunningham said, nodding at her. “Get to it.”
But as Lottie turned to go, she heard a voice behind her. “You only gonna make another problem,” someone said. “Putting a girl on that job.”
Lottie spun around, eyes blazing, and found herself looking directly into Pickman’s eyes.
But then she realized Pickman wasn’t talking.
And the voice still was.
“My wife tried to add oil to our car once,” whoever it was said. “Time she got done, I almost had to buy another one.”
Lottie scanned the small knot of new recruits and figured out who was speaking just as the voice dissolved into an ugly snicker. It was a pasty-faced guy with dirt-colored hair who had somehow managed to get through basic training with much of his figure still just as doughy as his face. The name on his overalls was Simons.
Sometimes, Lottie had had to bite back the words that came to her lips. But now her whole mind just went blank. She felt a sting inside her chest and heat rise in her cheeks.
Everyone, she realized, could see the flush spreading across her face. She felt the threat of tears in the back of her throat and prayed she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Especially not now, on the first day.
She’d gotten through so much before, without ever letting them see her crack. Why was she having so much trouble now? Maybe it was because, after everything she’d already been through and fought for, here she was again, feeling like she was right back where she had been when she first started. None of the respect she’d managed to wrest from the men back in California mattered here.
She was going to have to start over, from scratch, and earn it from all of these new men.
She took a deep breath and took another step, but as she did, she heard Pickman’s voice.
This time, fury flooded her heart. Pickman should have known better. After all the times she’d bested him back in the other shop, after their conversation on the beach once they’d arrived here together, he was really going to keep bullying her now?
The anger gave her the strength to narrow her eyes and raise her chin, ready to stride away.
But then she heard what he was actually saying.
“I don’t know you,” Pickman said. “But I know Palmer. And if you want to get this job done, you want her on it.”
Simons treated Pickman to the same sneer he’d been reserving for Lottie. “How you know Palmer?” he asked with an ugly suggestion in his tone. “Sounds like she’s got you whipped, for sure.”
Lottie winced internally at Simons’s insinuation that Pickman must be involved with her. But she managed to keep her features placid.
Pickman looked at Lottie. There wasn’t exactly sympathy in his glance, but something else: the kind of look men give to one another when they know they’re on the same team, and something important depends on it.
“Maybe,” Pickman said. “But you better watch yourself, or you will be, too.”
“Whooo-eee!” Simons said, leaning back in what was clearly a warm-up for another barrage of mockery and abuse.
At this point, old Cunningham broke in.
“Palmer,” he said. “Didn’t I just tell you to get at that Wildcat?”
“Yes, sir,” Lottie said promptly.
“Why are you still here, then?” Cunningham asked.
“Sorry, sir,” Lottie said.
She glanced at Pickman. She didn’t have time to thank him. And maybe he didn’t deserve a thank-you, yet. Maybe this was just what she had earned from him, after all the mockery he’d subjected her to back in California. But in any case, she’d have to talk with him later.
For now, her job was just to walk away, head held high.
But before she got more than a few steps, she heard another voice that stopped her in her tracks.
This time, she was sure she must be hallucinating.
“Palmer,” the familiar voice called. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Lottie shook her head, in hopes of knocking this hallucination clean out of it, and kept walking.
But then Cunningham started in. “Palmer,” he barked. “Captain Woodward asked you a question.”
By now, Lottie was a good fifteen feet from Cunningham and the other unassigned men.
She hoped blindly that at that distance, she’d misheard him, and that he’d said anything, anything else at all, other than “Captain Woodward.”
But when she turned back, there was Captain Woodward, grinning at her.
With irritation, she pushed down the part of her that could never help being surprised by how blue his eyes were.
“I’m assigned to that Wildcat over there,” Lottie said, gesturing behind her.
But it was clear by now that Captain Woodward’s question had never been anything more than rhetorical.
Cunningham was busy giving Captain Woodward a hearty handshake. “Welcome back to paradise,” Cunningham said. “I think I managed to keep the place running while you were on R & R.”
R & R? Lottie wondered. Was that what they thought of the demanding training Captain Woodward had just put her whole team through?
Captain Woodward was looking around the shop with an appreciative air. “I bet it’s running better than it ever did when I was in charge,” he said.
In charge? Lottie thought with a sinking feeling. Was there any plac
e in the US Navy where she wouldn’t be forced to work with Captain Woodward?
But old Cunningham already looked antsy to get back to work.
“We got a big carrier going out,” he said. “Gonna be working double time till it ships.”
Captain Woodward grinned. “In other words,” he said, “no more R & R?”
Cunningham’s lined face cracked a smile.
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” Captain Woodward said.
“Pick your team,” Cunningham said. “Get to it.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Captain Woodward joked, then looked at Lottie. “Palmer,” he said.
“Sir?” she said.
Captain Woodward gestured for her to join him. “Let that Wildcat be,” he said. “You’re on my team.”
“Your team?” Lottie repeated, still certain that she’d misunderstood something.
“Why do you think I had you stationed here in Pearl Harbor?” Captain Woodward said. “I wasn’t going to let them send my best mechanic off to some other shop.”
Lottie’s head began to spin, and the ground felt like it was shifting underneath her. Captain Woodward had been making her life miserable pretty much from the day they’d met. He’d made it perfectly clear that he didn’t want a woman in his shop, and she was no exception.
So what was he doing picking her for his team? And picking her first? And what had he just said about asking for her to be assigned to his shop? He was the reason she’d been stationed at Pearl Harbor?
As Lottie stood there in shock, Captain Woodward pointed at Pickman, then at three of the other new recruits who hadn’t been part of the shop in California. “Pickman,” he said. “You, you, and you.”
Beside him, Cunningham offered him the clipboard full of background facts on the new mechanics. “You wanna see their skills?” he asked.
“Naw,” Captain Woodward said. “If they’re any trouble, Palmer will whip them into shape.”
Lottie’s mouth fell open. With a gulp, she closed it.
“You got a plane for us?” Captain Woodward asked Cunningham.
“I got a Grumman Avenger no man in this place can get running,” Cunningham said, and pointed to the large shape of a torpedo bomber shrouded in tarps at the back of the shop.
“Maybe you need a woman,” Captain Woodward said. “Get over there,” he said to the men he’d just chosen, who scuttled off in the Avenger’s direction, then started to stride after them himself.
But when Lottie didn’t immediately follow, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder.
“Come on, Palmer,” he said.
Startled, Lottie jerked into action, hurrying to catch up with him and the other men.
At the wide-eyed expression on her face, Captain Woodward laughed.
“What’s the matter, Palmer?” he asked. “You already forget everything I taught you?”
A strange cocktail of determination and rage bubbled up inside of her. If Captain Woodward thought this was some kind of joke, then she was going to make darn sure that the joke was on him.
Seventeen
LOTTIE STARED OUT AT the dark water. Her bare feet were planted on the last little scrap of asphalt before the macadam gave out to the beach and ran down to the incredible sweep of the Pacific.
It felt good to be alone.
She could see glimmers of moonlight reflected again and again on the midnight-blue waves, but the horizon itself was lost in the darkness. On either side of her, the lights of the island curved away down the coast, then stopped abruptly when the dancing moonlight began at the shore.
Even in darkness, the wind still whipped the waves, and they still crashed on the beach in a constant roar. As she stared into the darkness, she knew that, miles and miles beyond, the war still raged, on land and on the sea.
Sound always carried over water in the spookiest of ways. When she’d been a girl, she’d learned that the hard way, when she’d confessed to her friend that she was sweet on Greg Roth while they were rowing out on a lake. When they’d gotten back to shore, everyone already seemed to know it.
She knew it was impossible that any sound should carry over the water from the war to her across so much distance. But she couldn’t help thinking of it. And in the darkness, her mind played tricks on her and made her wonder if the roar of the water on the sand was actually the roar of far-distant engines and explosions. Sounds that hadn’t been distant at all not long ago, on this very land.
She took a deep breath, then stepped barefoot onto the sand. She always felt a feeling of freedom at the touch of sand on her bare feet. And that was true, she discovered now, even in the darkness, when the sand was cooler than she ever remembered it feeling, even during the last days of summer in Michigan, up on Mackinac Island. It wasn’t the way the girls’ athletics coach, Miss Spriggins, had trained her to run—Spriggins was always breathing threats about the dangers of girls training barefoot.
But Lottie wasn’t training now. This was the real test. She just wanted to get away from everything: the base, the guys at the shop, the women in the dorms, Cunningham, the whole war itself, even if just for an hour.
And Captain Woodward. Captain Woodward, most of all.
For the rest of the day, he’d been unusually complimentary of her. At first, she’d thought it was a joke, another way he could privately mock her. But he was so insistent, so specific, that Lottie began to suspect that it was sincere. Ever since, she’d felt uncomfortable, vulnerable even. And all the feelings of hatred that she’d been harboring toward him had been replaced with another feeling. The kind of feeling that seemed forbidden. That made it hard to do her work. That made her head spin with questions that she didn’t have answers to.
So she’d slipped away during the women’s few free hours that night and taken a jeep down to the nearest beach.
It hadn’t taken her long to jog across the virtually empty lot and kick off her shoes.
And now, once she had the feel of the sand on her feet, she ran: First down to the shore itself, so that she was only a few steps from the surf that hissed and fizzed as it sank into the sand with each wave. Then along the line of the coast, with the lights of the island flickering to her left, and the giant naval base up ahead, and the slivers of moonlight dancing in endless patterns on the water.
As she pounded down the beach, feeling the sand slip and grate under her, her mind became a merciful blank, filled only with her own breathing and heartbeat. The sights and sounds around her were different with every step, but also comfortingly steady—the waves new, but the sounds the same. As she ran, she could feel the stress slide from her shoulders, as if an actual weight had been lifted. She drank in the night air, and the cool darkness, as if they were a kind of medicine for her spirit.
The curve of the swimming area began to run out, and big outcroppings of black rock rose up from the sand, crowding the beach. But there was still a strip of navigable sand, even though some of it was so close to the shoreline that it was still clumped and damp.
So Lottie simply darted around the big formations, splashing through the surf until the rock receded again, revealing a little cove, sheltered on both sides by big chunks of stone. Beyond that, Lottie could see that the rocks got even larger, and the sound of the waves against them was far louder than the dull roar the water made on the sand.
If she went any farther, she might wind up dashed on those rocks herself.
So she came to a stop, squinting into the darkness, then turning her back to the ocean to get a better look at the cove.
And as she did, one of the rocks on the sand, sheltered by the curve of the larger stones, seemed to stir.
Startled, Lottie let out a shriek and stumbled backward, not stopping until the chill of the dark water closed around her ankles and drew her up short.
By this time, the rock was talking as well. In fact, it seemed to have gained the power to move and took a few steps toward her, almost as if it were a man.
“Palmer?”
/> There was only one person it could be.
“Captain Woodward?” she yelped into the darkness just as the captain stepped out of the shadows of the rocks into a patch of moonlight that illuminated his face enough for her to realize it really was him.
“Palmer?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“What are you doing here?” Lottie demanded, indignation rushing in as the fear began to seep away.
Captain Woodward laughed. “I guess I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
“I’m going for a run!” Lottie said, the irritation in her voice still clear.
“In the middle of the night?” Captain Woodward asked. “How do you see where you’re going?”
“Probably the same way you do,” Lottie snapped back. “I know the boys in the shop love to point out all the differences between men and women, but even I haven’t heard anyone say that a woman can’t see just as well as a man.”
As soon as the words flew out of her mouth, she regretted them. If she’d said it in the shop, it would have been rank insubordination. She wasn’t sure what military etiquette required when you ran into your commanding officer in the dark on a beach, but she suspected that insolence was never looked on kindly at any time. And she hated the idea that he might think she was complaining about her treatment by the men in the shop. Because she could stand up for herself. And she had every intention of proving that here at Pearl Harbor, just like she had in California.
“Captain Woodward,” she began, “I—”
“Please,” Captain Woodward said. “It’s Luke.”
Lottie stopped, openmouthed.
After a moment, she gathered the presence of mind to close it, hoping somehow he hadn’t been able to see how caught off guard she was in the darkness.
“Luke,” she repeated. She wasn’t sure if she had ever heard his first name before, and when she said it aloud, she was surprised by how quiet her voice sounded.
Through the darkness, her eyes met his, which picked up the glint of moonlight just like the crests of the waves in the ocean. She reminded herself that it was forbidden for WAVES to fraternize with the Navy men—and everyone knew what they meant by that. It wasn’t friendly conversations the Navy was trying to discourage. It was this… whatever this was.
For Love and Country Page 13
