by George R. R.
She went to him with the lieutenant’s story.
His office door was open and he saw her coming. As he was glancing up, a frown drew lines around his mouth. He was young for a colonel, maybe a little rounder than most guys in the Army, but high-spirited. His uniform jacket was slung over the back of his chair.
“I’m sorry, Anderson, I don’t have any news for you,” he told her before she’d said a word.
She ducked her gaze and blushed. She’d been in here every day looking for news about Mary’s death.
“Sorry, sir,” she said, standing at the best attention she knew, back straight and hands at her sides. “But I just talked to the pilots of that B-26 that came in from Romulus. Sir, they told me Mary crashed in a collision. They wouldn’t tell me anything else.”
Roper’s lips thinned, his brow creased. “A collision—Mary wouldn’t get herself in that kind of mess.”
“I know. Sir, something’s not right. If there’s anything you can do, anything you can find out—”
He scratched out a note on a pad of paper. “The crash report ought to be filed by now. I’ll get a copy sent over.”
That meant a few more days of waiting, but it was progress. They’d get the report, and that would be that. But she still wanted to talk to someone. Someone who’d seen it, someone who knew her. If there was a collision, another pilot was involved. If she could just find out who.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Anderson—try to get some sleep. You look beat.”
She hadn’t even been thinking about being tired. She’d been running on fumes. “Yes, sir.”
* * * *
Mary Keene came from the kind of family that did everything just so, with all the right etiquette. A car from the funeral home was waiting at the train station, along with Mary’s father. Em recognized him from the family picture Mary kept in their room.
Em, dressed in her blue uniform—skirt straight, collar pressed, lapels smooth, insignia pins and wings polished—jumped to the platform before the train slowed to a complete stop and made her way to the luggage car. She waited again. It should have been raining; instead, a crisp winter sun shone in a blue sky. Perfect flying weather. She was thankful for the wool uniform, because a cold wind blew in over a flat countryside.
Men from the funeral home retrieved the casket while Mr. Keene thanked her for coming, shaking her hand with both of his and frowning hard so he wouldn’t cry.
“I thought I’d be meeting one of my boys here like this. Not Mary.”
Em bowed her head. No one ever knew quite what to say about a woman coming home from war in a casket. If one of Mr. Keene’s sons had been killed, the family would put a gold star in the window to replace the blue one showing loved ones serving in combat. They’d be able to celebrate their war hero. Mary wouldn’t get any of that, not even a flag on her casket.
Mr. Keene left in his own car. Em would go with Mary to the funeral home, then call a cab and find a hotel to stay at until the funeral tomorrow. One of the men from the mortuary took Em aside before they left.
“I’m given to understand Miss Keene passed on in an airplane crash.”
“That’s right.”
He was nervous, not looking at her, clasping his hands. Em thought these guys knew how to deal with anything.
“I’m afraid I have to ask—I wasn’t given any information,” he said. “The family has traditionally held open-casket services—will this be possible?”
Or had she burned, had she been smashed beyond recognition, was there anything left?...Em’s lips tightened. Stay numb, stay focused, just like navigating a fogbank.
“No, I don’t think it will,” she said.
The man lowered his gaze, bowing a little, and returned to his car.
* * * *
Em logged thirty hours the next week in trainers, two AT-6s and a BT-13, flying from one end of the country to the other. One morning, she’d woken up in the barracks and had to look outside the window to remember where she was. She kept an eye on other logs and flight plans coming in and out of each base, and kept looking for people who’d been at Romulus last week. Everyone knew about the crash, but other than the fact that a WASP had been killed, nobody treated it like anything unusual. This was wartime, after all.
Arriving back at New Castle on the train after ferrying another round of BT-13s to Houston, she dropped her bag off at the barracks and went to see Colonel Roper. She still had her jumpsuit and flight jacket on, and she really needed a shower. And a meal. And sleep. But maybe this time he had news.
“Sir?” she said at his doorway.
He looked hard at her, didn’t say a word. Self-consciously, she pushed her hair back behind her ears. Maybe she should have washed up first. She tried again. “Sir?”
“You’re right, Anderson,” he said finally. “Something’s not right. The crash report’s been classified.”
She stared. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I have something for you.”
He handed her a folded paper that looked suspiciously like orders. She’d been in the air for three days. She hadn’t been back in her own room for a week. She didn’t want another mission; she didn’t want orders. But you never said no; you never complained.
Her despair must have shown, because Roper gave a thin smile. “I saved this one just for you. I have an AT-11 needs to go to Romulus and I thought you’re just the pilot to do it.”
Exhaustion vanished. She could fly a month straight if she had to.
He continued, “In fact, you look a little tired. Why don’t you spend a few days out there while you’re at it? Take a break, meet the locals.”
Do some digging, in other words.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, a little breathlessly.
“Bring me back some facts, Anderson.”
* * * *
Last June, right after graduation and before transferring to New Castle, Em and Mary flew together on a cross-country training hop from Sweetwater to Dallas. It was the kind of easy trip where Em could sit back and actually enjoy flying. The kind of trip that reminded her why she was even doing this. She could lean back against the narrow seat, look up and all around through the narrow, boxy canopy at nothing but blue sky. Free as air.
“Hey Em, take the stick for a minute,” Mary said, shouting over the rumble of the engine, when they’d almost reached Love Field at Dallas.
From the back seat of their BT-13 Valiant, craning her neck to peer over Mary’s shoulder, Em saw her drop the stick and start digging in one of the pockets of her jacket. Em hadn’t yet taken over on the dual controls. The Valiant was a trainer and could be flown from either the front or back seat, and every trainee sitting in front had had the controls yanked away from them by the instructor in back at least once. The plane was flying trim so Em didn’t panic too much; she had a little time to put a steadying hand on the stick.
“What are you doing up there?” Em asked. Mary turned just enough so Em could see her putting on lipstick, studying her work in a compact mirror. She’d had enough practice putting on lipstick in airplanes that the teeth-rattling vibrations of the engine didn’t affect her at all. Em laughed. “No one up here cares about your lipstick.”
Mary looked a little ridiculous, leather cap mashing down her hair, goggles up on her forehead, painting her lips. So this was why she wanted to fly with the canopy closed on such a warm, beautiful day, making the cockpit hot and stuffy. She didn’t want to be all ruffled when they landed.
“I have to be ready. There might be some handsome young officer just waiting for me to catch his eye. Oh, I hope we get there in time for dinner. This bucket’s so slow. You think they’ll ever give us anything faster to fly?”
“A real plane, you mean?” Em said. It was an old joke.
“I wouldn’t say that. This bird’s real enough. If you don’t mind going slow.”
Em looked out the canopy stuck up top in the middle of the fuselage
. “We have to get there and land before you can catch your handsome young officer’s eye. Do you know where we are?” They were flying low-level and cross-country; Em searched for landmarks, which was quite a trick in the middle of Texas.
“Don’t fret, we’re right on course. Bank left—there’s the main road, see?”
Em nudged the stick and the plane tipped, giving her a wide view past the wing and its Army star to the earth below, and the long straight line of paved road leading to Dallas. Mary seemed to have an instinct for these sorts of things.
“You really do have this all planned out,” Em said. “You’ll be heading straight from the flight line to the Officer’s Club, won’t you?”
Mary had a pout in her voice. “I might stop to brush my hair first.” Em laughed, and Mary looked over her shoulder. “Don’t give me a hard time just because I’m not already married off to a wonderful man like you are.”
Em sighed. She hadn’t seen her husband in almost a year. The last letter she’d had from him was postmarked Honolulu, three weeks ago. He hadn’t said where he was sailing to-—couldn’t, really. All she knew was that he was somewhere in the middle of a big wide ocean, flying Navy dive-bombers off a carrier. Sometimes she wished she weren’t a pilot, because she knew exactly what could go wrong for Michael. Then again, maybe he was flying right now—it was mid-morning in the Pacific—cruising along for practice on a beautiful day and thinking of her, the way she was thinking of him.
“Em?” Mary said, still craned over to look at Em the best she could over the back of her seat.
“Sorry. You just got me thinking about Michael.”
Em could just see Mary’s wide red smile, her excitable eyes. “You really miss him, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
Mary sighed. “That’s so romantic.”
Em almost laughed again. “Would you listen to you? There’s nothing romantic about waking up every day wondering if he’s alive or dead.” She was only twenty-four, too young to be a widow, surely. She had to stop this or she’d start crying and have to let Mary land the plane. Shaking her head, she looked away, back to the blue sky outside the canopy, scattered clouds passing by.
“It’s just that being in love like that? I’ve never been in love like that. Except maybe with Clark Gable.” She grinned.
Em gratefully kept the joke going. “Don’t think for a minute Clark Gable’s going to be on the ground when we get there.”
“You never know. These are strange times. He enlisted, did you know that? I read about it. Him and Jimmy Stewart both—and Jimmy Stewart’s a pilot!”
“And maybe they’ll both be at Dallas, just for you.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Mary said smugly. “I’ve got my lucky pennies, you know.”
“All right, but if they’re there, you have to ask them to dance.”
“It’s a deal,” Mary said brightly, knowing she’d never have to make good on it. Because Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart were not at Dallas. But if something like that was going to happen to anyone, it would happen to Mary.
A few minutes later, Em leaned forward to listen. Sure enough, Mary was singing. “Don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me, anyone else but me . . .”
Em joined in, and they sang until they were circling over the field to land.
* * * *
After shutting down the engine, she sat in her cockpit and took a look down the flight line at Romulus, in freezing Michigan. The sight never failed to amaze her—a hundred silver birds perched on the tarmac, all that power, ready and waiting. The buzzing of engines was constant; she could feel the noise in her bones.
This was the last runway Mary took off from.
Sighing, she filled out the plane’s 1-A, collected her bag and her logbook, and hoisted herself out of the cockpit and onto the tarmac. Asked the first guy she saw, a mechanic, where the WASP barracks were. The wary look on his face told her all she needed to know about what the men on this base thought of WASP. She’d heard the rumors—they traded stories about which bases welcomed them and which wanted nothing to do with women pilots. She wasn’t sure she believed the stories about someone putting sugar in the fuel tank of a WASP’s plane at Camp Davis, causing it to crash—mostly because she didn’t think anyone would do that to a plane. But those were the sorts of stories people told.
She made her way to the barracks. After a shower, she’d be able to face the day a little easier.
After the shower, Em, dressed in shirt and trousers, was still drying her hair when a group of women came into the barracks—three of them, laughing and windblown, peeling off flight jackets and scrubbing fingers through mussed hair. They quieted when they saw her, and she set her towel aside. “Hi.”
One of them, a slim blonde with mischief in her eyes, the kind of woman the brass liked to use in press photos, stepped forward, hand outstretched.
“Hi. You must be the new kid they were talking about back in ops. I’m Lillian Greshing.”
“Em Anderson,” she said, shaking her hand. “I’m just passing through. I hope you don’t mind, I used one of the towels on the shelf. There weren’t any names or labels—”
“Of course not, that’s what they’re there for. Hey—we were going to grab supper in town after we get cleaned up. Want to come along? You can catch us up on all the gossip.”
Em’s smile went from polite to warm, as she felt herself among friends again. “That sounds perfect.”
* * * *
The four women found a table in the corner of a little bar just off base. The Runway wasn’t fancy; it had a Christmas tree decorated with spots of tinsel and glass bulbs in a corner, a pretty good bar, and a jukebox playing swing. The dinner special was roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and a bottle of beer to wash it down.
“What’re they transferring WASP to Camp Davis for?” Betsy, a tall woman with a narrow face and a nervous smile, asked when Em passed on the rumor.
“Don’t know,” Em said. “Nobody’ll say. But Davis is a gunnery school.” More speculative murmurs ran around the table.
“Target towing. Wanna bet?” Lillian said.
“I’ll stick to the job I have, thank you very much,” Betsy said, shivering.
Em felt her smile grow thin and sly. “Not me. Nursing along slowpoke trainers? We can do better than that.”
“You want to fly planes while some cross-eyed greenhorn shoots at you?”
“Nope,” Em said. “I want to transition to pursuits.”
“It’ll never happen,” Lillian said, shaking her head, like she needed the emphasis. “The old cronies like Burnett will never let it happen.”
“Burnett?”
“Colonel. Runs this lovely little operation.” She gestured in the direction of the airfield. Smoke trailed behind her hand to join the rest of the haze in the air.
“What’s he like?” Em asked.
That no one answered with anything more than sidelong glances and rolled eyes told her enough. Romulus was a cold-shoulder base.
Em pressed on. “We’ll get there. Nancy Love has five girls in transition out at Palm Springs already. The factories are all working overtime building bombers and fighters, and ATC doesn’t have enough pilots to ferry them to port. They’re going to have to let us fly ‘em, whether they like it or not.”
Betsy was still shaking her head. “Those birds are too dangerous.”
Mary got killed in a trainer, Em wanted to say. “We can do it. We’re capable of it.”
Lillian said with a sarcastic lilt, “Burnett would say we’re not strong enough. That we wouldn’t be able to even get something like a Mustang off the ground.”
“He’s full of it,” Em said. “I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those.”
Betsy, smiling vaguely, looked into her beer. “I don’t know how I’d explain flying fighters to my husband. He’s barely all right with my flying at all.”
“So don’t tell him,” Lillian said. Shocked giggles met
the proclamation.
Round-eyed Molly, blond hair in a ponytail, leaned in. “Don’t listen to her, she’s got three boyfriends at three different fields. She doesn’t understand about husbands.” More giggling.
Em smiled. “Betsy, is he overseas?”
“England,” she said. “He’s a doctor.” Her pride was plain.
“You’ve got a ring there, Em,” Molly said to the band on Em’s finger. “You married or is that to keep the flyboys off you?”
“He’s Navy,” Em said. “He’s on a carrier in the Pacific.”
