“Ladies, I’d like you to meet Sergeant Middleton. He’s the head engineer who works on all of our planes.”
Middleton gives us a dubious once-over. He’s youngish, probably not even thirty, but the way he squints at us, and with his short-cropped strawberry blond hair making him look almost bald, from a distance I’d have probably guessed he was a lot older. He reminds me of that cartoon fellow, Pop-eye, but in an army uniform instead of a sailor suit.
“Forty-four double-U three?” he says with as much doubt as his hard squint implies. He shakes his head, and I half expect him to spit, he looks so disappointed.
“Well, just keep them off my airfield until they’re properly suited and trained. I don’t want to see none of you out heres without an instructor,” he says, pointing a thick finger. “This ain’t no beauty parlor. And it ain’t the movies, neither, so quit gawking. You’ll get your turns soon enough.”
He shakes his head again and runs a hand over his crew cut. “Ma’am.” He nods toward Audrey and shuffles off toward the hangars.
Audrey smiles and shrugs. “Damn fine engineer, but not much for the niceties. It’s best to stay on his good side, though, ladies. He keeps us up in the air. Our lives depend on Sergeant Middleton.”
“Aye aye,” Lily says with a sharp salute.
“Aye aye is the navy,” I whisper from behind.
“Oh, cripes.” She lowers her hand quickly. Audrey Hill just smiles and continues the tour.
“Just a few more things. When you fly, or anytime you’re near the planes, you’ll have to wear those turbans they gave you with your flight suits. You know, the thing that looks like a towel? Despite Sergeant Middleton’s insistence that this ‘ain’t no beauty parlor,’ we have to keep our hair from getting caught in any machinery. We have our commanding officer, Major Urban, to thank for that, so we call them ‘Urban’s turbans.’ Kinda catchy, huh?”
Most of the girls laugh, but a few sigh and primp their perfectly coiffed tresses. I for one would much rather slap my hair into braids and stick it in a towel than have to worry that it’s getting too kinky. Thank you, Major Urban, I think.
“So, that’s about it. You’ll figure out the rest as you go along. Once again, as your squadron leader, if you have any questions, just come to me. I’m over in Barrack Seven.”
Audrey leads us back to our barracks. “At thirteen hundred hours, you should all report to the medical unit. Doc Monserud needs to perform a complete physical workup for each of you and get your dental records in order in case they’re needed for identification later.”
“Identification?” one of the girls asks.
“Yes, identification.”
There’s a moment of confused silence. Patsy scowls at the girl. “In case we get burned up in a crash. They’ll know you by your overbite.”
The girl’s eyes go round as moons. “Oh.”
Audrey frowns at Patsy, who smiles back pleasantly.
“Patsy,” I whisper, more than a little shocked myself.
Patsy just shrugs. Audrey smiles at the poor girl. “Don’t worry, honey, we hardly ever need them. Hardly ever.”
With that, she salutes and walks away.
“That didn’t sound enough like ‘never’ to me,” Patsy says, and winks.
It’s my turn to shrug. “We’ll worry about it when we have to. But now, I’m going to get five more minutes of shut-eye before we have to go see the doctor.”
“Hear, hear.” Patsy yawns. “Getting up at dawn wouldn’t be so bad if it meant we were flying. But today’s a bust.”
Fact is, I need the time to try to relax. In the South, folks think skin color shows up in the blood. If that’s true, Doctor Monserud will have me on the next bus out of town. My big brother, Thomas, swore to me after his first year of medical school that it just wasn’t true. Skin color is only in the skin, he said. I believe him, but today’s physical had better prove him right. I don’t know if they can tell the difference between Spanish and Negro when it comes to blood tests, so Grandy’s advice might not work.
The day goes from bust to worse, but not in any way I feared. By the time Doctor Monserud is done with us, we’ve been poked and prodded with so many different needles and vaccines, I feel like a sick porcupine. But I passed the test, in more ways than one. Good old Thomas really is learning something in medical school.
At last, it’s suppertime. I don’t think I can keep anything down, but I know I won’t get another chance until morning.
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat,” I say the minute we walk into the mess hall. Most of the other classes are already there, women sitting on one side of the room, male officers and instructors on the other side. But it’s not the people that stop me in my tracks.
It’s the food on the first plate in front of me. A man is sitting there, eating a steak, casual as day, and a baked potato heaped with pure, sweet, pale creamery butter.
“Pinch me, Patsy. I haven’t seen butter in eight months.”
Patsy slaps me on the arm lightly. “What, don’t you have cows on that farm of yours?”
“It’s a berry farm. No. We’ve got all the jams and jellies you can eat, but not a single stick of real butter.”
Lily remains conspicuously silent for a whole half a minute. “Okay, okay. We had butter at my parents’ place in the Adirondacks. The caretakers brought in a cow specially for us to have butter, milk, and cheese.”
“Well, for those of us born without a silver butter knife in our mouths, make way,” Patsy says, and shoves herself through to the food line.
It’s like some kind of Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in here. Nothing at breakfast prepared me for this sort of spread. Steak, real sugar, even ice cream, and not a ration stamp in sight. If Mama and Jolene had known what the food was like, they might have signed up, too. I find my appetite quickly enough when it comes to dessert. I go to bed that night happier than I’ve been in a long time, with a stomach full of food and my head full of tomorrow’s first flight.
Chapter 10
I am not the first one in line today at the showers. All twelve of us are up early. Today is the day we fly. Lily times us, five-minute showers each. Even so, the last girl out has no time to worry about makeup or hair; she just yanks her zoot suit on and races outside with the rest of us. Fortunately, Uncle Sam doesn’t care about lipstick or perfectly curled hair. Only the first few girls out of the shower can afford to primp. Dolled up or not, our whole bay makes it through the showers and outside in time for formation and roll call. Patsy and I make sure our classmates line up outside the barracks into our separate flights. I stand next to Patsy and watch Lily call out the roll in a high, nervous voice. She catches my eye and I give her a thumbs-up. She smiles and leads us to the mess hall for breakfast.
An hour later, we are back in the barracks, trying to finish what we started in the bathrooms before breakfast. At eight forty-five, Lily leads our flight, zoot suited and Urban turbaned, out to the cattle trucks that will take us to our first day of flying.
The trucks are what they call stake beds, large, flatbed trucks with wooden slats, almost like a fence, to keep the animals in. We stand in back and get towed three miles to one of the auxiliary fields where new classes begin their training. The ready room at this field is nothing more than a Quonset hut, a low-slung arch of a building with a tin roof that touches the ground on both sides. It looks more like a tunnel than a building. Inside, benches are lined up against a blackboard, scribbled with the flight calculations of other pilots. Lily, Patsy, and I stick together. We take seats and wait, like a bunch of first graders on the first day of school. I almost wish I had an apple for the teacher.
At oh-nine-hundred precisely, our instructor arrives. He’s a civilian, and his name is Happy Martin. “You may call me ‘sir,’ ‘Instructor Martin,’ or ‘Mr. Martin.’ Neither I nor the majority of your flight instructors are enlisted. That, however, does not mean we do not deserve your respect.
“You’ve left husbands and childre
n at home to be here, and while I can’t approve of that choice, I can make sure that you still know your place in this man’s army.”
A murmur of disapproval sweeps across the room, not so much sounds of protest as a shifting of bodies in seats. I am reminded of the flight instructor back in Tuskegee. There are no steel blue eyes here, no strong, disapproving jawline. On the contrary, Instructor Martin is a very prim-looking fellow, black hair carefully combed back, not a strand out of place. He is wearing a khaki shirt and matching slacks, despite his insistence that he is not military. His black-rimmed glasses are the only square thing on his round face. He looks like an insurance salesman. It takes me a full minute to believe this man has ever flown in his life. Anybody whose feet have ever left this green earth should have something wild about them, something free. One look at Instructor Martin and I’m pretty sure that military or no, he spit-shines his shoes and his wife presses the crease into his pants precisely the same way every single day.
The moment of tension passes, ignored by the teacher but well noted by the students. I look at Patsy, fully expecting her to stand up to Martin the way she did Nancy Howard. Instead, she’s examining her fingernails as if it’s a casual day at the beach. To my right, Lily clenches her jaw in defiance. We’ll show him, she seems to say. I raise my own chin a little higher.
“Now, because you’ll be sharing parachutes, I’ll need you to split up into groups according to height. Anyone below five-foot five over here, five-foot sixes and sevens to this side, eights to nines, and so forth. Although I doubt we’ll be getting anyone taller than that.” He laughs at his own humor. A few of the girls feel obliged to join in.
“See you on the ground,” I say to Patsy. She’s definitely in the five-eight, five-nine range, while Lily and I are firmly in the five-two to five-foot five.
“Good luck, flygirl,” she tells me.
“Good luck.”
The parachutes they give us attach to our torsos with thick olive drab harnesses that go over the shoulders and around the legs. Our zoot suits bag out over them unmercifully, but you could have told me I had to wear iron shoes and I’d still be smiling. I’m about to fly.
Instructor Martin walks us through the use of the chutes—how to pull the rip cord, how to fold up the silks afterward. Feeling the smooth cloth under my fingers makes me think of Jolene’s prized silk stockings, reluctantly turned over to the army back home. I guess she did help the war effort after all.
Parachutes in place, Instructor Martin leads the first group of girls, those of us in the five-foot-five-and-under crowd, out to the tarmac. The rest of the girls are supposed to wait in the ready room for their turn, but they rush to the door to watch us.
The plane waiting for us on the tarmac is an absolute beauty. To my farm-raised eyes, those silver wings and open cockpit are like a dream, but some of the girls groan slightly.
“Ladies, this is the PT-19A, a primary trainer. By the time this course is done, you will have completed fifty-five hours in this plane. You will be able to fuel her, repair her, and land her in the event of an accident. I know this all sounds routine to such an accomplished lot of pilots”—he makes no attempt to hide his sarcasm—“but Sunday flying with your beau and actually flying the military way are two different things. These planes are heavier than the Jennys and Pipers you flew at home, and there will be no one here to hold your hand. Having said that, do we have a volunteer?”
Every hand in the group goes up, mine included. Instructor Martin smirks, as if he knew this would happen. “Not a cautious one of you in the lot,” he notes. “Very well, we’ll make this easy. You, what is your name?”
Lily, the first in line to his left, steps forward, face pale, with two red spots on her cheeks. I can’t tell if she’s excited or terrified, but I’m guessing it’s both.
“Lily Lowenstein, sir.” Martin raises an eyebrow at the name. And I thought I’d have it hard.
“Well, Lily Lowenstein.” He makes the name sound long and round. “You have your flight suit, your parachute, and your goggles?”
“Yes, sir,” she says nervously.
“Well, then, put the goggles on and get in.”
Lily hesitates. I want to whisper to her, tell her it’s a trap, but I don’t need to.
“We haven’t run a flight check yet, sir. We should go over the plane first.”
Happy Martin doesn’t look happy. She’s just robbed him of a chance to make her look like a fool. I try not to smile too broadly. Lily knows her stuff. After watching her try to make a bed, I hadn’t been so sure.
“Ah, so someone actually did pay attention in flight school,” he says. “Miss Lowenstein, lead the way.”
Only after giving the plane a thorough once-over does Lily climb in, with Instructor Martin behind her. The PT-19A has an open cockpit with two controls, one in the front, the other in back. Instructor Martin takes the rear seat. He radios the tower for clearance and, without warning, starts down the runway. Lily gives me a quick thumbs-up, and they take off, Martin at the controls. We won’t be allowed to take off or land until he’s confident we can handle the plane through all the basic maneuvers every pilot here should know.
All of the girls, even the ones in the ready room, line up on the tarmac to watch Lily’s first flight. The plane banks and turns. It’s a beautiful sight to see in the clear blue Texas sky. Then, suddenly, the plane does a loop in the air, and something awful happens. Lily falls out of the plane! A tiny figure, still visible in her oversized zoot suit, slips from the backseat and plummets toward the earth.
We all cry out. My legs start moving before I can think. Patsy, the entire class starts to run, our eyes on the sky. A second later, the parachute balloons out behind her, and we all heave a sigh of relief.
“Thank you, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Patsy mutters.
“Amen,” I add. Silently, I say thank you to Jolene, too. We jog the rest of the way across the fields to the spot where Lily has drifted gently to earth. When we get there, she is crying.
“Honey, are you hurt?” Patsy kneels beside her.
“No,” she sobs.
“Are you sure? Can you stand?” I give her a hand and we help pull her to her feet.
“Is she all right?” the other girls ask, running toward us, breathless.
Lily’s face, already red from crying, turns an even deeper red. “Oh, no, I’m fine. I’m okay.” She gives them a weak thumbs-up. A cheer goes up. But Lily turns away.
“I’m so embarrassed, I could die.” She begins to pace in little circles.
I put my arm around her shoulders. Patsy begins to gather her parachute. “Well, what happened?”
Lily stops her pacing and gives me an anguished look. “Oh, Ida, I swear I fastened my seat belt, but this darn suit is so big, it got in the way and I guess the belt didn’t lock properly. I should’ve double-checked it, but it felt right, and we took off so fast, and he was saying, ‘Look at this,’ and, ‘Don’t forget that,’ and then he says, “Do a loop,” like he doesn’t think I can, and next thing I know, I’m pulling my rip cord. And I’d been so careful, too!”
“It’s all right, Lily. It’s just the first day. And that’s one mistake you’ll never make again.”
“Aw, honey, it’s a rite of passage,” Patsy says. “You’ve joined the Caterpillar Club!”
“Caterpillar Club?” Lily asks.
“That’s what they call it when you use your parachute. It opens like a silk cocoon. You’ve just spread your wings, little butterfly.”
We sent the warning to all the girls in Flight One. Don’t forget to double-check your seat belt. No one else wants to be a member of the club today.
By the time we get back to the flight line, Instructor Martin has landed. “Any broken limbs?” he calls out to Lily.
“No, sir.” Lily blushes three shades of pink and I feel just awful for her, but at least he’s not giving her a demerit.
“Fortunately, Miss Lowenstein remembered her parachute, if
not her seat belt,” he says to the class. Lily starts to protest, but I put a hand on her arm to stop her. Falling out of your plane doesn’t earn you a demerit today, but arguing with the instructor just might.
Martin clasps his little hands together with a smug look and says, “The kitchen is safer than the sky, ladies. Let that be a lesson to you. Next?”
Lily bristles, but I have no time to commiserate. I’m up.
My hands start to sweat. This is the first time I’ve done more than sit in a plane since Tuskegee, three years ago, and it looks like Instructor Martin is determined to make it hard. Then again, this is what I’ve come here for.
I give the plane a once-over and climb on board. This plane is not too different from my daddy’s plane. The same sort of open cockpit, tandem seats for pilot and co-pilot. It’s just like going up on a dusting run with Grandy sitting ahead of me. With that thought, all of the butterflies fade away. It’s like a cool wind is blowing through my mind. I smile. Settling into the frontseat, I make doubly sure I fasten my seat belt before I look over the instruments and put my hand on the throttle.
“Hands off until we’re in the air,” Martin shouts at me. His voice comes through the gosport, a speaking tube that runs from his dashboard to my helmet like a one-way telephone. I nod. “I’ll tell you what to do and when.” I nod again and sit back. Martin can do what he will; I aim to enjoy myself.
“This is Flight One PT-19A signaling for takeoff,” Martin says into the radio.
After a brief moment, the radio crackles to life. “This is the tower,” a man’s voice says. “PT-19A, you are cleared for takeoff.”
“Miss Jones, note the clearance light on the tower and the pattern of the flight and to your left, the wind sock on the hangar. Note the direction of the wind.” And the sun and the moon and the cows in the fields, I think. I will not be distracted. I checked the wind and the clouds the minute we got into the plane. Nothing to get in our way. With a hum of engine and tires, we roll up the runway and leap into flight.
Flygirl Page 8
