by George R. R.
Mary, sitting in her cockpit, out of control after whatever had hit her, calmly reaching over to turn off the ignition, knowing the whole time she maybe wasn’t going to make it—
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Em said.
“No. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just you’re right. She was a good pilot.”
“Then why won’t you—?”
A panicked shouting from the hangar caught their attention—”Whoa whoa, hold that thing, it’s gonna drop”—followed by the ominous sound of metal crashing to concrete. Jacobs dashed out of the office to check on his crew.
Em wasn’t proud; she went through the stack of papers while he was occupied.
The fact that Mary had crashed and died was becoming less significant to Em than the way everyone was acting about it. Twitchy. Defensive. Like a pilot towing targets for gunnery training, wondering if the wet-behind-the-ears gunners were going to hit you instead. These guys, everyone who knew what had happened, didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want her to ask about it, and were doing their damnedest to cover this up. What were all these people hiding? Or, what were they protecting?
It wasn’t a hard answer, when she put it like that: the other pilot. They were protecting the pilot who survived the collision.
She dug through repair orders. Mary’s plane had crashed—but the other plane hadn’t. It still would have been damaged, and there’d be paperwork for that. She looked at the dates, searching for that date. Found it, found the work order for a damaged BT-13. Quickly, she retrieved the list of names she’d taken from the flight plans. She’d copied only half of them before Burnett interrupted her. She had a fifty-fifty chance of matching the name on the work order. Heads or tails?
And there it was. When she compared ID numbers with the ones on the work order, she found the match she was looking for: Frank Milliken. The other pilot’s name was Frank Milliken.
She marched out of the office and into hangar. Jacobs was near the B-24 wing, yelling at the guys who had apparently unbolted and dropped a propeller. He might have followed her with a suspicious gaze as she left, but he couldn’t do anything about it now, could he?
She kept her eyes straight ahead and didn’t give him a chance to stop her.
* * * *
“You know Frank Milliken?” she asked Lillian when she got back to the barracks.
“By name. He’s one of the Third Ferry Group guys—he was part of Jim’s bunch of clowns last night,” she said.
Em tried to remember the names she’d heard, to match them up with the faces, the guys who talked to them. “I don’t remember a Frank,” she said.
“He’s the sulky guy who stayed at the table.”
Ah...“You know anything about him?”
“Not really. They kind of run together when they’re all flirting with you at once.” She grinned. “What about him?”
“I think he was in the plane that collided with Mary’s last week.”
“What?” she said with a wince and tilted head, like she hadn’t heard right.
“I’ve got a flight plan and a plane ID number on a repair order that says it was him.”
Clench-jawed anger and an anxious gaze vied with each other and ended up making Lillian look young and confused. “What do we do?”
“I just want to find out what happened,” Em said. She just wanted to sit down with the guy, make him walk her through it, explain who had flown too close to whom, whether it was accident, weather, a gust of wind, pilot error—anything. She just wanted to know.
“You sure?” Lillian said. “This is being hushed up for a reason. It can’t be anything good. Not thatanything is going to make this better, but—well, you know what I mean. Em, what if—what if it was Mary’s fault? Are you ready to hear that? Are you ready to hear that this was a stupid accident and Burnett’s covering it up to make his own record a little less dusty?”
Em understood what Lillian was saying—it didn’t matter how many stories you made up for yourself; the truth could always be worse. If something—God forbid—ever happened to Michael, would she really want to know what killed him? Did she really want to picture that?
Shouldn’t she just let Mary go?
Em’s smile felt thin and pained. “We have to look out for each other, Lillian. No one else is doing it for us, and no one else is going to tell our stories for us. I have to know.”
Lillian straightened, and the woman’s attitude won out over her confusion. “Right, then. Let’s go find ourselves a party.”
* * * *
Em and Lillian parked at the same table at the Runway, but didn’t order dinner tonight. Em’s stomach was churning; she couldn’t think of eating. She and Lillian drank sodas and waited.
“What if they don’t come?” Em said.
“They’ll be here,” Lillian said. “They’re here every night they’re on base. Don’t worry.”
As they waited, a few of the other girls came in and joined them, and they all had a somber look, frowning, quiet. Em didn’t know how, but the rumor must have traveled.
“Is it true?” Betsy asked, sliding in across from Em. “You found out what happened to Mary?”
“That’s what we need to see,” she said, watching the front door, waiting.
The men knew something was up as soon as they came in and found the women watching them. The mood was tense, uncomfortable. None of them were smiling. And there he was, with his slicked-back hair, hunched up in his jacket like he was trying to hide. He hesitated inside the doorway along with the rest of the guys—if he turned around to leave this time, Em didn’t think Jim or the others would try to stop him.
Em stood and approached them. “Frank Milliken?”
He glanced up, startled, though he had to have seen her coming. The other guys stepped away and left him alone in a space.
“Yeah?” he said warily.
Taking a breath, she closed her eyes a moment to steel herself. Didn’t matter how much she’d practiced this speech in her mind, it wasn’t going to come out right. She didn’t know what to say.
“Last week, you were flying with a group of BT-13s. There was a collision. A WASP named Mary Keene crashed. I’m trying to find out what happened. Can you tell me?”
He was looking around, glancing side to side as if searching for an escape route. He wasn’t saying anything, so Em kept on. “Your plane was damaged—I saw the work order. So I’m thinking your plane was involved and you know exactly what happened. Please, I just want to know how a good pilot like Mary crashed.”
He was shaking his head. “No. I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“What’s wrong?” Em pleaded. “What’s everyone trying to hide?”
“Let it go. Why can’t you just let it go?” he said, refusing to look at her, shaking his head like he could ward her away. Lillian was at Em’s shoulder now, and a couple of the other WASP had joined them, standing in a group, staring down Milliken.
If Em had been male, she could have gotten away with grabbing his collar and shoving him to the wall, roughing him up a little to get him to talk. She was on the verge of doing it anyway; then wouldn’t he be surprised?
“It was your fault, wasn’t it?” She had the sudden epiphany. It was why he couldn’t look at her, why he didn’t even want to be here with WASP sitting at the next table. “What happened? Did you just lose control? Was something wrong with your plane?”
“It was an accident,” he said softly
“But what happened?” Em said, getting tired of asking, not knowing what else to do. He had six women staring him down now, and a handful of men looking back and forth between them and him. Probably wondering who was going to start crying first.
“Why don’t you just tell her, Milliken,” Jim said, frowning.
“Please, no one will tell me—”
“It was an accident!” His face was flush; he ran a shaking hand over his hair. “It was just a game, you know? I only buzze
d her a couple of times. I thought it’d be funny—it was supposed to be funny. You know, get close, scare her a little. But—it was an accident.”
He probably repeated it to himself so often, he believed it. But when he spoke it out loud, he couldn’t gloss the crime of it: he’d broken regs, buzzed Mary in the air, got closer than the regulation five hundred feet, thought he could handle the stunt—and he couldn’t. He’d hit her instead, crunched her wing. She’d lost control, plowed into the earth. Em could suddenly picture it so clearly. The lurch as the other plane hit Mary, the dive as she went out of control. She’d have looked out the canopy to see the gash in her wing, looked the other way to see the ground coming up fast. She’d have hauled on the stick, trying to land nose up, knowing it wasn’t going to work because she was going too fast, so she turned off the engine, just in case, and hadn’t she always wanted to go faster—
You tried to be respectful, to be a good girl. You bought war bonds and listened to the latest news on the radio. You prayed for the boys overseas, and most of all you didn’t rock the boat, because there were so many other things to worry about, from getting a gallon of rationed gas for your car to whether your husband was going to come home in one piece.
They were a bunch of Americans doing their part. She tried to let it go. Let the anger drain away. Didn’t work. The war had receded in Em’s mind to a small noise in the background. She had this one battle to face.
With Burnett in charge, nothing would happen to Milliken. The colonel had hushed it up good and tight because he didn’t want a more involved investigation, he didn’t want the lack of discipline among his male flyers to come out. Milliken wouldn’t be court-martialed and grounded, because trained pilots were too valuable. Em couldn’t do anything more than stand here and stare him down. How could she make that be enough?
“Mary Keene was my friend,” she said softly.
Milliken said, his voice a breath, “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, all right?”
Silence cut like a blade. None of the guys would look at her.
Em turned and walked out, flanked by the other WASP.
Outside, the sun had set, but she could still hear airplane engines soaring over the airfield, taking off and landing, changing pitch as they roared overhead. The air smelled of fuel, and the field was lit up like stars fallen to earth. The sun would shine again tomorrow no matter what happened, and nothing had changed. She couldn’t tell if she’d won. She slumped against the wall, slid to the ground, put her face to her knees and her arms over her head, and cried. The others gathered around her, rested hands on her shoulders, her arms. Didn’t say a word, didn’t make a big production. Just waited until she’d cried herself out. Then Lillian and Betsy hooked their arms in hers and pulled her back to the barracks, where one of the girls had stashed a bottle of whiskey.
* * * *
The last time Em saw Mary was four days before she died.
Em reached the barracks after coming off the flight line to see Mary sitting on the front steps with her legs stretched out in front of her, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. Em approached slowly and sat beside her. “What’s gotten into you?”
Mary donned a slow, sly smile. “It didn’t happen the way I thought it would, the way I planned it.”
“What didn’t?”
She tipped her head back so her honey brown curls fell behind her and her tanned face looked into the sky. “I was supposed to step out of my airplane, chin up and beautiful, shaking my hair out after I took off my cap, and my handsome young officer would be standing there, stunned out of his wits. That didn’t happen.”
Em was grinning. This ought to be good. “So what did happen?”
“I’d just climbed out of my Valiant and I wanted to check the landing gear because it was feeling kind of wobbly when I landed. So there I was, bent over when I heard some guy say, ‘Hey, buddy, can you tell me where to find ops?’ I just about shot out of my boots. I stood up and look at him, and his eyes popped. And I swear to you he looked like Clark Gable. Not just like, but close. And I blushed red because the first thing he saw of me was my...my fanny stuck up in the air! We must have stood there staring at each other in shock for five minutes. Then we laughed.”
Now Em was laughing, and Mary joined in, until they were leaning together, shoulder to shoulder.
“So, what,” Em said. “It’s true love?”
“I don’t know. He’s nice. He’s a captain in from Long Beach. He’s taking me out for drinks later.”
“You are going to have the best stories when this is all over,” Em said.
Mary turned quiet, thoughtful. “Can I tell you a secret? Part of me doesn’t want the war to end. I don’t wantthis to end. I just want to keep flying and carrying on like this forever. They won’t let us keep flying when the boys come home. Then I’ll have to go back home, put on white gloves and a string of pearls and start acting respectable.” She shook her head. “I don’t really mean that, about the war. It’s got to end sometime, right?”
“I hope so,” Em said softly. Pearl Harbor had been almost exactly two years ago, and it was hard to see an end to it all.
“Sometimes I wish my crazy barnstormer uncle hadn’t ever taken me flying, then I wouldn’t feel like this. Oh, my dad was so mad, you should have seen it. But once I’d flown I wasn’t ever going to go back. I’m not ever going to quit, Em.”
“I know.” They sat on the stoop, watching and listening to planes come in over the field, until Mary went to get cleaned up for her date.
* * * *
Em sat across from Colonel Roper’s desk and waited while he read her carefully typed report. He read it twice, straightened the pages, and set it aside. He folded his hands together and studied her.
“How are you doing?”
She paused a moment, thinking about it rather than giving the pat “just fine” response. Because it wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t believe her.
“Is it worth it, sir?” He tilted his head, questioning, and she tried to explain. “Are we really doing anything for the war? Are we going to look back and think she died for nothing?”
His gaze dropped to the desk while he gathered words. She waited for the expected platitudes, the gushing reassurances. They didn’t come.
“You want me to tell you Mary’s death meant something, that what she was doing was essential for the war, that her dying is going to help us win. I can’t do that.” He shook his head. Em almost wished he would sugarcoat it. She didn’t want to hear this. But she was also relieved that he was telling the truth. Maybe the bad-attitude flyboys were right, and the WASP were just a gimmick.
He continued. “You don’t build a war machine so that taking out one cog makes the whole thing fall apart. Maybe we’ll look back on this and decide we could have done it all without you. But, Emily—it would be a hell of a lot harder. We wouldn’t have the pilots we need, and we wouldn’t have the planes where we need them. And there’s a hell of a lot of war left to fight.”
She didn’t want to think about it. You could take all the numbers, all the people who’d died over the last few years and everything they’d died for, and the numbers on paper might add up, but you start putting names and stories to the list and it would never add up, never be worth it. She just wanted it to be over; she wanted Michael home.
Roper sorted through a stack of papers on the corner of his desk and found a page he was looking for. He made a show of studying it for a long moment, giving her time to draw her attention from the wall where she’d been staring blankly. Finally, she met his gaze across the desk.
“I have transfer orders here for you. If you want them.”
She shook her head, confused, wondering what she’d done wrong. Wondering if Burnett was having his revenge on her anyway, after all that had happened.
“Sir,” she said, confused. “But...where? Why?”
“Palm Springs,” he said, and her eyes grew wide, a spark in he
r heart lit, knowing what was at Palm Springs. “Pursuit School. If you’re interested.”
* * * *
march 1944
Em settled in her seat and reached up to close the canopy overhead. This was a one-seater, compact, nestled into a narrow, streamlined fuselage. The old trainers were roomy by comparison. She felt cocooned in the seat, all her controls and instruments at hand.
She started the engine; it roared. She could barely hear herself call the tower. “This is P-51 21054 requesting clearance for takeoff.”
Her hands on the stick could feel this thing’s power running into her bones. She wasn’t going to have to push this plane off the ground. All she’d have to do was give it its head and let it go.
