Airfield

by Jeanette Ingold

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Copyright © 1999 by Jeanette Ingold

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be mailed to:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ingold, Jeanette.

  Airfield/by Jeanette Ingold.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In 1933, fifteen-year-old Beatty hangs around a small

  Texas airport waiting for visits from her pilot-father from whom

  she longs to learn about her deceased mother.

  [1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Sex roles—Fiction.

  3. Airports—Fiction. 4. Airplanes—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.I533Ai 1999

  [Fic]—dc21 99-6086

  ISBN 0-15-202053-5

  Text set in Ehrhardt

  Designed by Ivan Holmes

  First edition

  F E D C B A

  Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and

  organizations, all places and events are fictional. Any

  resemblance to any organization or to any actual person,

  living or dead, is unintended.

  For my parents, Jim and Carey Reilly

  Acknowledgments

  The Muddy Springs Airport and the airline it serves are fictional, but the idea for this book came from stories my parents told of the days when my dad first worked for American Airlines—American Airways, then—in a job very similar to Grif Langston's. Dad was part of the airline for forty years, but his best tales came from that time when commercial aviation was a brash adolescent trying hard to grow up.

  I'm indebted to many people for helping pin down the details of what flying was like in the early 1930s: Ben Kristy, curator of the American Airlines C. R. Smith Museum in Fort Worth, and the museum's director, Jay Miller; Colonel Knox Bishop (USAF/Ret.), curator of the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas; and, at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Larry D. Sail, associate library director for special collections, and the History of Aviation Collection volunteers who let me listen in on their hangar flying.

  I'm grateful, too, for assistance from fliers and aviation experts Otto Becker, Jack Callaway, Gregory Kennedy, Nancy Robinson Masters, Mary and John Stevenson, and John Talbot, and for the helpful staffs and wonderful resources of the Texas State Library and the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

  Chapter 1

  AIRFIELD?" THE OLD GUY sorting radiator caps in front of Joe's Texas Auto Parts sends a dented cap spinning to a junk heap. "You goin' flyin', young lady?"

  "I wish I were! But I'm just taking a late lunch to my uncle. He's filling in for the station manager."

  "I guessed you was new here. That turn's another mile on."

  "Oh..." I rub the back of my neck, lifting away hair wet with perspiration. Dark patches of sweat pock the front of my dress. "I'd hoped I was closer."

  Out on the otherwise empty highway, a worn automobile struggles our way. Its outside bristles with tied-on house goods, and the inside is packed with people. Depression migrants, I suppose, like half the world seems to be this June of 1933.

  "I reckon," Joe says, "you could take that old farm track past my billboard. It'd be a bit of a shortcut."

  There's the sudden craack of a tire blowing out, and the car we've been watching lurches to a lopsided halt.

  The first out is a boy who looks to be a couple of years older than me, perhaps nearer seventeen than my almost-fifteen. Dirt poor... It's a fleeting thought, gone as fast as I can feel bad for thinking it.

  But, truthfully, he does look about as ragtag as the vehicle itself.

  "They ain't gonna have no money," Joe says, as though he's already hearing the whole conversation, him trying to sell a replacement and the family wanting whatever threadbare tire he'll give for free.

  "Yeah. Well," I answer, feeling for him and them both, "I ought to be getting along. Will that shortcut take me straight to the airport?"

  "Close enough, anyway."

  I'm soon thinking that Joe and I have different ideas about just what a shortcut is. Going the extra mile on the highway would have been quicker than this. Twice I have to pull my dust-coated bicycle under barbed wire strung across the old roadbed.

  I keep remembering that migrant family, wondering if they left a place like this, land once farmed but now surrendered to mesquite and cactus. Or maybe they're from a place where pine trees close in, or where vines smother?

  Or maybe they didn't ever have a place?

  Of course, I remind myself, I don't have a place, either.

  That is, I do, only it rotates, aunt to aunt. Yesterday it was with Aunt Fanny in Dallas and would have stayed so all summer if that storm hadn't blown a tree down through the roof of her house.

  It was easy enough, though, to catch an early bus here, to Clo and Grif and their temporary home at the Muddy Springs Hi-Way Tourist Court. And if this doesn't work out, my barging in on what's still almost their honeymoon, I can always move on to Aunt Maud in Waco.

  Though I'm hoping it does work out. Clo's more like a sister than an aunt, fifteen years closer to my age than Fanny and Maud are. She's always made me feel that having me is pleasure rather than duty, and I hope her being married won't change that.

  It won't, I think, laughing again at how she met my bus this morning, bursting aboard, all red curls and wiry energy, to hug me before I could even get out of my seat.

  Abruptly, the old roadbed comes to an end, and I see in the distance a hangar. Next to it, a smaller building with a huge muddy springs painted on its roof must be the terminal where Grif is working.

  And between me and the buildings there's a long, hard-packed dirt clearing, which, after a moment, I realize is the landing field. Its only marking is a huge embedded circle, for identification, I suppose, though I bet from the air it looks more like a target. Instead of runways there are just sun-baked furrows showing all the ways planes have come in.

  I'm bouncing my way across the field, thinking Joe and I also have different ideas about "close enough," when I hear the faint sound of a motor.

  I stop to search the sky.... There it is...

  Shading my eyes, I watch a speck of rosy orange and yellow come closer and take the shape of a small, single-engine biplane. And then it dawns on me: The plane is getting ready to land on this field that I'm in the middle of.

  I quickly get back on my bike, hop a few steps to get started, stand on the pedals to pick up speed.

  The engine sound grows louder
incredibly fast, and when I look behind me the plane is at the back corner of the field, coming in on a low diagonal.

  Briefly I wonder if the pilot can even see me, if maybe the dust all over my clothes might make me seem to be part of the field. I wave and my front wheel catches in a rut and throws me onto a stubble of dry weeds and gritty earth. There's not even time to get to my feet....

  And then, just as the plane seems to be almost on top of me, it swoops up in a steep climb. The gold lines on its side flash by so fast they look like bolts of lightning, and I glimpse a pilot fighting to gain height.

  In no more than an instant the aircraft has cleared the nearest corner of the field and is climbing away.

  I brush off my dress, untangle a tumbleweed from my bike spokes, and try to calm down. I'll give Grif his lunch and then get away from the airport before that pilot circles around and comes looking for me.

  But even as I'm wheeling my bicycle along, avoiding what looks like the most worn landing path, my eyes follow the airplane. A shiver races along my skin, a feeling hard to place. Still fear, maybe, but also thrill.

  It's a feeling I get every time I watch a plane and imagine that I'm the one flying. What would it be like?

  The airplane briefly disappears into a blinding dazzle of sunlight, and when I catch sight of it again it's shrunk to a glittering speck. Already it has soared so far, so fast, so high.

  Chapter 2

  THERE'S NOBODY IN the main part of the small terminal building. Double doors on each end stand open to the breeze, and papers on a short counter flutter under the weight of a stapler and ticket punch. A chalkboard says the westbound flight is due in from Fort Worth at 1:59, to depart again sixteen minutes after that.

  I can see it in the sky now, its deep-bellied body and single wing on each side as different from that other plane as can be. Still, the small one probably isn't far behind. Where's Grif?

  Washing my face and hands quickly with water from a glass jug, I call, "Hello?"

  A snatch of static leads me to the doorway of a tiny operations room where Grif sits at a table of radio equipment. He's wearing earphones and taking notes but waves a greeting when he notices my reflection in a mirror that hangs from a nail.

  "Winds north at fifteen and gusting," I hear him repeat into a microphone. "Thanks, Sam."

  Leaning forward so he sees, I put down his lunch and mouth the words "From Clo."

  He nods, his eyes lighting up like she's done something a lot more wonderful than sending a ham sandwich that he forgot. He and my aunt have cared that way about each other since they were seniors in high school, half a dozen years ago, and I'm glad that he's finally got a job and they've been able to get married.

  It's just a relief job. Grif has been hired by an airline to move about Texas filling in for station managers away on vacation or training. But it's work, and in aviation and using radios. To Grif, it must seem like incredible good fortune.

  "I've got to go," I whisper, but he says, "Just give me a minute to relay this weather report." Flipping switches, he begins tapping teletypewriter keys. Then he adjusts more radio controls and identifies himself to the pilot of the westbound airliner. "You've got the skies to yourself," he says, "except for a small plane I heard fly over a bit ago—but it's apparently gone on. Come in whenever you're ready. And, Collin ... she's here."

  Collin!

  As soon as Grif pulls off his earphones, even before I hug him hello, I ask, "Is Dad flying that plane?"

  "He is. He traded routes with another pilot just to see you."

  "And you and Clo wanted me to be surprised?"

  Grif grins and nods, though he says, "Beatty, you realize your dad will be on the ground only long enough to refuel."

  That's OK. Sixteen minutes is better than nothing. After yesterday's storm, things happened so fast Aunt Fanny and I never even learned if the telegram we sent Dad reached him, but I guess it must have.

  I hope Grif's right about that pilot I want to avoid. Maybe he really has flown on somewhere else. I don't think he would have had a way to make a report about me. Until recently, even passenger planes didn't have two-way radios—I know that because I remember Dad talking about them being installed.

  Still, Grif is looking closely at me now, taking in my scratches and the dirt on my dress. "What happened to you?" he asks.

  "I fell off my bike—," I begin, but before I can decide how much to add, the telephone's ringing interrupts.

  Grif picks up the receiver—"Yes, this is Muddy Springs"—and after a moment jots a note, which he hands to me.

  "Beatty," he says, "will you run this over to the hangar while I bring your dad's plane in? Give it to Kenzie—he's the mechanic—and tell him it's about that part he's working on. El Paso needs it now."

  "But—"

  "It'll just take a minute."

  The hangar's wide doors have been rolled back to open up the whole front. "Mr. Kenzie," I call, peering into a huge space where unlighted floodlights lamps hang from a grid of roof trusses. The building smells of the grease and motor oil soaked into the concrete floor. There're tools and equipment but no people.

  A small truck rushes up behind me, MUDDY SPRINGS AIRPORT MOBILE SERVICE on its side. It brakes to a stop, and the driver jumps out.

  "Mr. Kenzie?"

  "Just Kenzie. I can't talk now." He hurries in a kind of limping run for several items that he throws in the back. "Catch me after I get that Ford Tri-Motor serviced."

  "Tri-Motor ... you mean the airplane? I think this note is about something that's supposed to go on it."

  Kenzie reads the message and spits. "Somebody always wanting yesterday what I ain't ready to send. Come here."

  He moves, his limp deeper now he's not running, to a workbench where a piece of machinery soaks in a pan of kerosene. "Here," he says, sticking a brush in my hands, "clean that part and bring it out."

  And then, just like that, he's gone, driving his service truck over to the plane that has now rolled to a stop near the terminal. I see Grif and him run a hose from the truck up onto a wing.

  About a dozen thoughts tumble through my mind all at once, the main one being that I don't have time for this now.

  And cleaning an airplane part! It's not a girl's job!

  But I reach in and pick the piece up, surprised at how heavy it is. A splash of filthy liquid spreads an oily ring on my skirt.

  Quickly I scrub the part and then hurry it out to the service truck. Kenzie scowls and tells me, "I said, 'Clean it good'"

  But Dad is running my way, swooping me up in a bear hug, standing me back so he can look at me. He searches my face like he's got to see for himself I'm not hurt, and I rush to explain that the scratches aren't anything, a bike fall.

  "I'm fine, Dad. Truly. And Aunt Fanny is, too."

  "Then you ride more carefully! And while you're at it, stay out of windstorms!"

  That sets us both laughing, a relief that prompts Dad to tease, "Or did you wish up that storm yesterday just to throw off the Beatty Rotation?"

  That's what the aunts call it, my annual calendar of living four months with each of them.

  "And rotate myself to the middle of nowhere on purpose? You must be kidding!" Then I add, "But now that I'm here, maybe I'll get to see you a little more often? When you're here at the airport, I mean?"

  "You know I rarely fly the transcontinental route," Dad answers, his attention already moved on. He's watching what's being done to his plane, glancing at his watch, observing the sky, and checking to see which way the wind sock is blowing.

  It's how Dad always is, worried to make certain I'm safe and well but believing that's all that's important.

  I can understand. He lost my mom, who died from pneumonia, when I was a year old. What I figure is that having someone he loved die was such an overwhelmingly big thing, it made him just shut down his feelings. And I guess it might explain why he won't talk about her.

  Anyway, that was when the Beatty Rotation got started, wh
en Dad first deposited me with his family and they began taking turns keeping me as they had time and could.

  "Collin, is this that daughter you brag about?" The question comes from Dad's copilot. He's young and nice enough to grin at me and suggest, "So, does she get to do the next leg with us? There's extra seats."

  The suggestion, coming so suddenly when for years I've been trying to talk Dad into taking me for a plane ride, about takes my breath away.

  "Oh, Dad ... Please? Can I?"

  The copilot winks at me before adding, "My wife's in El Paso, Collin. She can put your daughter up for the night and see she gets on the flight back tomorrow morning."

  Always before, Dad has had some reason to say no to me— full loads, or I'm too young to manage the return trip by myself, or just, "Beatty, I don't want you flying, and that's that." But this time, maybe because the idea's come from someone else, Dad actually seems to be considering it.

  Just then, though, a motor cuts the air, and the small biplane—the one I was wishing would just go away—lands and rushes toward us. As it slows to a stop the painted gold lightning on its side becomes just jagged stripes.

  The pilot climbs down from the back of an open cockpit, pulling off a leather helmet and shaking out short, permed hair. A woman! She unsnaps the front of a leather flying suit as she strides toward us, showing a plain white shirt underneath. I hear her call to a staring passenger, "Yes, women can fly!"

  And then she spots me. "You! I've got something to say to you."

  She says it to everyone who's in earshot. "This fool...right in my landing path and about as visible as a scared jackrabbit ... only good luck and a wind gust kept me from killing her."

  She's still carrying on when she reaches us. "Any child should know not to wander about an airfield ... Who's in charge here?"

  "I am," Grif says, "but I don't understand. Did you try to land before?"

  "Yes," she answers, "and I'd like to know why—"

  "I'm sorry," I break in, embarrassed and wishing I'd told Grif right away about what happened. I don't want him blamed for something I did. "I was taking a shortcut, and nobody knew I was out there."