In the Company of Women

by Kate Christie

  He was a big bold man, he was a desperado

  From Cripple Creek way out in Colorado

  And he horsed around just like a big tornado

  And everywhere he went he gave his WAR HOOT!

  After that, they cycled through old favorites and more recent hits. CJ watched Nell, impressed. She didn’t seem to need sheet music at all. In fact, a couple of times at a request she stuck out her tongue a little and muddled her way through a first verse, picking up speed as she found her groove in the second.

  Then Reggie called out, “‘I Got a Gal from Kalamazoo!’ Or should I say Brady does.”

  Toby elbowed her.

  “What?” Reggie rubbed her ribs. “It’s hardly a secret.”

  It was CJ’s turn to redden as all eyes went to her. Then the opening notes of the requested tune sounded, bright and lively, and she smiled gratefully at Nell for the diversion.

  Soon their drafted pianist insisted on taking a break, and they passed bottles of beer and cigarettes around, settling back on the low orange couches arranged near the wireless. The WASPs had an ongoing competition, CJ knew from down time in the ready room, that centered on one-liners featuring the hapless French military. Once the alcohol started flowing, it didn’t take long for the jokes to roll.

  “How many Frenchmen does it take to guard Paris?” an older WASP named Betty asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Kaye said. “It’s never been tried.”

  “Why did the French plant trees along the Champs-Élysées?” Nell chimed in.

  “So the Germans could march in shade,” Holly replied.

  “What does ‘Maginot Line’ mean in German?” Kaye asked.

  CJ knew this one. “Speed bump ahead.”

  Reggie had been practicing too: “What’s the first thing the French Army teaches in basic?”

  “How to surrender in ten languages,” Toby said, and the two Wacs grinned at each other.

  “Going to war without the French on your side is like going hunting without your accordion,” Kate put in, smiling as everyone else laughed.

  The humor was a tad harsh, but American soldiers had a bone to pick with the French, whom they viewed as all but derelict in duty. The ease with which the French had surrendered to their German neighbors not once but twice irked the average GI because now, as in the last war, American soldiers were being asked to lay down their lives while the French waited to be rescued. Certainly the French Resistance was doing its part, but the French military? Not hardly, from the American standpoint.

  The beer kept flowing and the cigarettes burned brightly as the wireless set played big band tunes. After a brief foray into camp rumors and current events, the WASPs settled into what CJ recognized as another favorite pastime: telling and retelling flying stories.

  Josephine “Josie” Parker, a thin blonde with strong tanned forearms and a Georgian accent, started them off: “Kaye and I were flying a strafing mission in formation one day in Helldivers, and we had already finished our strafing and were on the way back to base when we saw a guy in a Jeep. We dove toward him, but instead of getting out and taking cover like the rules of engagement said, he had the gall to wave at us. So Kaye says over the radio we should go back for another pass. This time we come really, really close, and he jumps out of the Jeep and into a ditch. Meanwhile the Jeep keeps going right on out into the desert boondocks. We flew over one more time to find him—he’d taken off his white T-shirt and was waving at us in surrender.”

  “Nell has a similar story,” Holly said. Nell shook her head warningly, but Holly ignored her. “With strafing, you come down out of the sun and buzz the troops. They’re supposed to pretend it’s real and take cover. But with gas missions, it is real—when we’re over the boys, we hit a button on the Helldiver stick and let loose the gas from under the wings. This way the troops can practice getting their gas masks on under pressure.

  “This one morning back in September, Nellie here goes out on her mission, pushes the button to release the gas and heads back toward base, mission accomplished. On the way back, she caught some of the troops skinny-dipping in a stock tank. Like any good pilot, she decided to buzz them. But the men at the airfield that morning had loaded the gas incorrectly. When she pulled out of the dive, the gas released. Fortunately, the boys had enough sense to duck under the water and hold their breaths. But Nellie didn’t know that. She called up base and told them she had killed the whole group. There was an investigation and everything, but they didn’t find her at fault. The CO told us it happened once before, except the gas released over a parking lot and stripped all the paint off the officers’ cars.”

  “I remember that,” Toby said. “It was right after our company arrived last spring. We told each other that at least we couldn’t get blamed for that screw-up.”

  “You girls take a lot of heat from the boys too?”

  “Of course. We’re women who have dared to invade their male domain, aren’t we?”

  “That we are,” Holly agreed.

  To get back at her friend, Nell shared a story about how Holly had crashed a radio-controlled aircraft. “There she was, hanging upside down in the safety pilot seat, unable to move. There’s a reason they call it the safety pilot, you know. You’re not supposed to let the plane crash.”

  “It wasn’t my fault the plane hit a mound of dirt on landing. As I recall, you and Betty were in the control ship.”

  “Wait, were you okay?” Reggie put in, frowning.

  “I was fine,” Holly reassured her. They shared a look, and everyone else in the room suddenly found somewhere else to focus their own gazes. Except Kaye.

  Almost gleefully she said, “You think that’s scary, wait until you hear about the time Pinkie came down from towing a target with a split cable.”

  “Kaye,” Nell said warningly.

  But Reggie had already bit. “What do you mean, a split cable?”

  “You know how the tow operator cranks out the target at the beginning of target practice and cranks it back in at the end of the run?”

  Reggie nodded. She knew very well, having served in this role a couple of days earlier.

  “Well,” Kaye said, pausing to take a gulp of beer, “lots of times the boys shoot the cable, which is understandable. They’re trying to hit the target and the cable is attached to it. But on this particular mission, the tow crank guy went back at the end of the run, and it only took two cranks for the end of the cable to come whipping in—the gunner had missed the target by a couple thousand feet.”

  CJ glanced at Reggie’s face. She was trying to look tough in a way CJ recognized, but her cheeks were pale. CJ didn’t blame her. If it were Brady up there getting shot at by prepubescent boys who thought women shouldn’t be allowed to fly… Except it wasn’t the gunner’s fault he’d almost shot down the plane instead of the target; it was squarely his instructor’s responsibility.

  “Hey, don’t worry.” Holly moved closer to Reggie on the couch. “It’s not that dangerous, what we do. Most of the accidents happen in training, and our squadron is pretty well-trained at this point.”

  Reggie nodded, but CJ could tell she was still troubled.

  “Tell you what,” Holly said, and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. Immediately Reggie perked up, and both women rose to their feet.

  “Um…” Reggie grinned at CJ and the others. “I’ll see you back at the barracks later, okay?”

  Without the guests of honor to keep it going, the party broke up shortly thereafter. Toby and Kate offered to walk CJ home, but she told them to go on ahead. It wasn’t quite nine thirty yet, and she felt like stretching her legs. Mostly, she wanted to give them time to themselves. Such opportunities were rare, as she well knew. For a moment she wondered where Brady was, but she knew—inside the marble and gypsum confines of Paso del Norte, where their friends had toasted them their first weekend together. The temptation to hop on a streetcar and crash the dinner party was almost overwhelming.

  “Feel like comp
any?” Nell asked.

  “Sure,” CJ said, grateful for the suggestion. The last thing she needed was to show up at the restaurant like a love junkie.

  As they headed for the exit, she glanced over at Nell. The smaller woman was dressed in a cotton sweater and her “general’s pants,” as the WASPs referred to their khaki uniform pants. Like many things WASP-related, CJ hadn’t gotten the story behind the nickname. The pilots seemed to have a penchant for shortcuts and inside jokes. In some ways, she envied them their civilian status. Frankly, she was tired of wearing skirts. For the past few years, she’d taken advantage of changing cultural mores to wear pants nearly all the time, but the WAC had strict rules about maintaining a feminine appearance—as if the appearance of women in Army uniforms could somehow be softened by a straight-line skirt.

  The temperature had dropped, and Nell grabbed a pair of bomber jackets from the downstairs closet on the way out. CJ’s lapel read, “Booker.”

  “Is this Pinkie’s?” she asked, faintly alarmed by the prospect of wearing the squadron commander’s jacket.

  “Don’t worry. She and Em are on a date with a couple of captains from the other end of the field. I’ll have the jacket back long before they are.”

  Once outside, CJ was grateful for the coat’s warmth. Her wool uniform jacket was warm enough, but it actually felt like winter tonight. Or winter in Texas, anyway. Back home the farm was covered in snow, according to her mother’s latest letter, and her father was now dressing in his warmest clothes each morning to go out to the barn.

  “Hard to believe Christmas is two weeks away, isn’t it?” Nell asked, taking a drag on a cigarette as they walked together beneath a nearly full moon. “No snow, and most men acting like holidays are just another excuse to get drunk.”

  “They do seem to like their booze here.”

  “It’s because it’s so cheap in Juarez. Some of the girls call any excursion south of the border a ‘rum run’ now.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Army regulations being what they were, it wasn’t like Wacs could bring back so much as a bottle of beer to the barracks. In addition to pants, Wacs were expected to avoid drunkenness and other forms of lewd behavior. After an evening in the WASP BOQ, she was starting to think she had joined the wrong branch of the armed forces. Snug and warm in her bomber jacket, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be a WASP, flying missions out over White Sands, dining in the officers’ mess and socializing in the OC. Everyone loved a pilot, it seemed, or wanted to be one, even though the casualty rate was so high.

  “Did you have a good time tonight?” Nell asked, breaking the somehow comfortable silence.

  “Very. BOQ is a pretty nice setup.”

  “Don’t we know it. When we first arrived on base last summer, they didn’t seem to know what to do with us, so we were billeted in WAC officers’ quarters. But the WAC officers had long since taken over the smaller rooms, leaving one large room for the six of us to share.”

  “Was this in the WAC compound?”

  “No, it was before the cavalry brigade left for staging, when the Wacs were billeted on main post near the nurses. Those first ten days were awful. Two girls couldn’t have a conversation without the others jumping in with their opinions.”

  “Gee, I feel so sorry for you.”

  Nell scrunched up her nose, seeming to remember that CJ, an enlisted woman, slept every night in a room full of potentially opinionated women. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”

  “Sure you did. How did you end up in BOQ?”

  “Jackie Cochrane herself, head of the WASP, flew in to Biggs to set straight the powers that be. We moved the very next day.”

  “Bet you were glad to have a room of your own.”

  “Still am. But for a while, I sort of missed those Wacs. It was nice to be around women like us, even if they were Regular Army. That’s why when we heard about you girls, we pestered the major until he got you transferred to Tow Target. I hope that was okay,” she added. “We didn’t stop to think that maybe you would prefer to stay where you were.”

  “I can’t speak for everyone, but I like Tow Target. Our last sergeant was tough. Whimpy seems more even-keeled.”

  “And the work?”

  “Better too. It’s nice to get to know the ships we work on—and their quirks. In Transient, it was nearly all routine checks and quick fixes.”

  “It’s the opposite for us. The ferry line is what most WASPs aspire to.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, it’s the reason we were hired, in theory, to deliver aircraft from factories to airfields. In fact, it’s what the majority of active WASPs do. Besides, you get to fly the newest of the new. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it yet, but some of the girls are all about pursuit.”

  “Is that what you would rather be doing? Ferrying fighters around the country?”

  Nell smiled, her teeth flashing white in the base lights. “I thought it would be, but after a few months here, I realize I’m more of a homebody. We get letters from the ferry girls, and one night they’re in New York City, the next Chicago and a few days later, L.A. To be honest, it sounds like too much moving around for me. They also don’t get any variety in their missions like we do. One day I could be flying strafe, the next gas, the next searchlights.”

  “How did you become a pilot anyway?”

  “When I was a kid, the barnstormers came through our town. My father paid five dollars to take me and my brother, the two eldest, up for rides. That was it. I was hooked. After college, my brother and I bought a single-engine Taylorcraft with another friend. I managed to log five hundred hours before the ferry service was formed.”

  CJ remembered the barnstormers who had passed through West Michigan, former military pilots from the First World War who flew around the country selling rides in surplus Curtiss Jennys purchased from the government after the war. Almost every summer when she was little, CJ had longed to go up for a ride, but even a few dollars had seemed like too much, even during good times. Now she wondered if her parents might have willingly donated the funds to the cause if she had asked. And if they had, would the bomber jacket she currently wore bear her name instead of another woman’s?

  They walked on, chatting about the shared experience of having older brothers overseas on bomber crews. Nell was easy to talk to, CJ realized, which shouldn’t be a surprise. They had so much in common—they had both been raised in Midwestern farm communities; their parents were Roosevelt liberals who believed strongly in a compassionate God and in education as the path to betterment; and they had both attended state universities where students like them were given a window onto lives that didn’t involve marrying a boy from back home and settling on a hundred acres not far from the family farm. They had each left those lives to seek a different path and ended up here at an Army Air Corps base in West Texas, serving their country to the limits that country would allow.

  In the midst of another comfortable silence, Nell asked, “Who’s Brady?”

  The sudden change of subject jolted CJ, and she nearly stopped walking. “Oh. Um, she’s my friend from Admin.”

  “Your friend,” Nell repeated, stressing the term. “And where is she tonight?”

  “At an engagement party for one of the girls in her squad.”

  “I see.”

  Did she? While CJ was fairly certain Nell preferred the company of women too, the pilot had yet to confirm this supposition. Without verification, there was no way CJ could risk revealing herself, not even to someone who was becoming a friend.

  At the gate to the WAC compound, CJ took off Pinkie’s jacket and handed it to Nell, who accepted it with a slightly chivalrous bow.

  “Thanks for the company,” CJ said, folding her arms across her midsection. Geez, it was cold for Texas. “You sure you’ll be okay walking back alone?”

  “I guarantee it. By the way, I have to say, your friend Brady is a lucky woman. I hope she knows it
.” And she waved jauntily as she turned and strode away.

  CJ nodded at the MPs and hurried toward home, rubbing her jacket sleeves as she went. Usually she considered herself the lucky one, but it was nice to know someone else thought Brady was. Even if Nell was a flirt, she was a cute flirt who might someday be persuaded to teach her how to fly.

  As she neared the barracks, she pictured the barnstormers in their Jennys performing spins, dives, loop-the-loops and barrel rolls while aerialists walked on the wings, hopped from one plane to another and even, once, played tennis in midair above her parents’ fields. Where were those pilots and wing walkers now?

  And then she wondered if the same performers had ever made stops near Kalamazoo and Lincoln, if the same Jenny that had carried Nell up on that first important airplane ride might not have made loop-the-loops over CJ’s farm too, way back in the day when flying seemed like nothing more than an exhilarating game and global war belonged, they were certain, firmly in the past.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At breakfast the next morning, Reggie was floating so high that she seemed to soar above the teasing jabs her friends leveled at her. CJ participated with half her brain, the other half intent on watching for Brady. But Brady didn’t show.

  Sparse attendance wasn’t unusual for Sunday morning mess. Sunday was the one day of the week they were allowed to sleep in, and plenty of women stayed out late on Saturday night, since bed check was an hour later than the rest of the week. But CJ had fully expected to see Brady after spending their second Saturday evening apart since they’d met. The last one had been during the Week of Denial, as CJ mentally termed the unhappy period she’d spent avoiding Brady.

  “Did you see her this morning?” she finally asked Kate. They were in different squad rooms, but it was possible.

  “No. Sorry,” Kate said, squeezing her shoulder.

  CJ waited until the Wacs on KP began cleaning up before she finally gave in and walked over to Brady’s barracks. At the door, the Wac on day duty was none other than Marjory from Albany, the post librarian.