Airfield (12 page)

I meet her plane when she lands and help her out of a parachute that turns her walk into a waddle. "You were wonderful! All those acrobatics!"

She says, "A few stunts, maybe, but the routine was mostly just a fancy way to show skills any good pilot practices."

"Then what's the parachute for?"

"Another good practice—being prepared in case something goes wrong."

A pack of little kids gathers about Annie, a couple of them even holding out autograph books, and several adults want to shake her hand. Even a pilot I've heard make snide comments about women not belonging on ships, either sea or air, gives her a thumbs-up.

I start away but hear Annie call, "Beatty, let's find some cold soda." I feel myself blushing with the pleasure of being singled out. Is it because she's remembered her promise that we'll talk?

We buy the drinks but don't see a good spot to settle down with them, not with the crowds everywhere. Then I get an idea: "I know one unclaimed place with a great view."

When Annie realizes I mean for us to climb up on the terminal roof, she throws back her head in laughter. "Oh, Beatty," she says, helping me drag over the ladder, "in some ways you are
so
like your mother!"

She's still laughing when we perch on the huge's in the painted muddy springs, and I wait for her to stop before asking, "Now will you tell me about her?"

Annie turns to look at me. "That flying I just did—I was trying to
show
your mother to you. That's the way Lindsey would have flown, if she'd lived. Lindsey's flying would have been even better."

A tumble of questions occur to me, but my throat's suddenly too tight for asking them. Instead, I listen to Julie Elise announce the first of the afternoon's air circus acts, and Annie and I watch a biplane fly low before the crowd. A tiny figure climbs from the cockpit.

Hushed
ohhhhhs
drift among the spectators as the figure struggles for balance and then, reaching from one handhold to the next, paces out to the end of a wing. There the wing-walker stops, kneels, and straightens into a headstand.

"Can you imagine!" I say, as the crowd breaks into applause. "That does look dangerous."

"It is," Annie answers. "Just as dangerous as when your mother and I tried it. It was crazy, but we wanted money to buy Jennys from the war surplus the government was selling off."

"My mother was a
wing-walker
And you, too?"

"Not me," Annie says. "I tried it just once, tied to a safety line, Lindsey's instructions from her own first time ringing in my ears. 'There's nothing to it,' she said. 'Just step from rib to rib and don't put a foot through the canvas.' I went about half a yard before deciding I'd earn airplane money some other way."

"But my
mother! She
was a wing-walker!"

"Briefly, back when you were a baby," Annie says. "Until your father found out. It was one of the few times he ever said
no
to her, and he made it up by helping finance her Jenny himself. Against his better judgment, he said. They were already arguing..."

Annie looks at me curiously. "You really don't know anything about your mother?"

I shake my head. "Dad hardly talks about her. It was Kenzie who told me she was a pilot."

"Your mother," Annie says slowly, as though trying to pick just what's most important for me to know, "was like those gold stripes on my airplane, always seeming to flash more blinding the higher she climbed. She was my best friend from the day we met at the field where we were both taking flying lessons.

"Had to be friends, I guess, since we were the only females around, no folks of our own, both of us paying our way with the end of money our parents had left us. I liked your mother even though I couldn't keep up with her. Even then I knew when to be frightened."

Annie breaks off to watch two planes compete in flying laps above a barrel on the airfield. Then she picks up her thoughts at a different place. "Your father ... Beatty, I can still see how he used to look at Lindsey, as though he was dazzled by her brightness."

"He doesn't talk like he was dazzled by her," I say. "The few times he has mentioned my mother, it's been more like he was angry."

Annie, folding and unfolding the ends of her long silk scarf, is silent for several moments. Then she says, "The year after you were born your mother saw a chance to win an air race. It was one of those contests where flyers all start at one place and head for another, and the winner's whoever gets there first.

"Other contestants had bigger, faster planes than Lindsey did, but she had a risky northern route planned that she thought might even the odds. Your father—all of us—tried to talk her out of it, but this time she wouldn't listen."

I hear the grandstand erupt with cheers, but nothing could make me take my eyes from Annie's face.

"So what happened?"

"A slow-moving weather front rolled in a few hours into the race. It grounded most of the pilots, but your mother put down just long enough to refuel and then took off again into a thick overcast. She told a mechanic she couldn't be worried by a little autumn sleet, that she'd climb above it and get ahead of the front. 'There's sun up there someplace,' she said.

"Three days later searchers found your mother where she'd made a forced landing on an ice field in Canada. She was barely alive."

About to die of pneumonia. That must be when Dad took her and me to San Antonio.

Annie unties the long scarf from her neck and holds it out. "Your mother and I bought matching scarves the day we soloed. I don't know what happened to hers, but perhaps you'd like this one."

"Thank you," I tell her, "but I don't think so. What I don't understand is how my mother could do something everybody knew was dangerous. I guess this sounds selfish, but ... didn't she care about me?"

That gets a chuckle from Annie. "Oh, she did, Beatty. Lindsey talked about you and carried your picture with her everywhere. She'd swing into one of those creaking old wood hangars where a woman was about as welcome as fog, and make every man in it admire you!"

The idea of my mother showing baby photos to a hangar full of Kenzies makes me laugh, though I ask, "But where would I be? Who'd be taking care of me?"

"Your father, if he was home. Sometimes I'd have you, or some other friend your mother trusted. She'd leave pages of instructions about your care."

Groping through ideas new to me, I say, "Maybe that helps explain why Dad's the way he is. Maybe he's still mad because part of what he loved was the daring that killed her."

Annie looks startled. Then she says, "Beatty, you just may be a very wise young woman."

But then, thinking about
all
Annie's told me, I burst out, "How can I be so proud of my mother and at the same time feel so
angry?
"

And now it's Annie who's laughing. "What you've done, Beatty, is bump into the puzzle of Lindsey Donnough—the same one anybody who loved her came up against: how she could have been both so wonderful and—forgive me, Beatty—so foolish at the same time."

This time, when applause sweeps through the crowd, we both look to see what's causing it. There's a skit beginning in front of a sign that says new york. A pilot slings a bag with a big air mail sign into the cockpit of a small plane, climbs in, and takes off.

Meanwhile, another man with a bag, labeled ground mail, steps into the cardboard cutout of a train. He moves it just a little way before reaching the end of wood tracks. The mail plane takes off, and the man on the ground transfers his bag to a truck.

"Did you dream that up, Beatty?" Annie asks.

"I painted the signs," I tell her.

Overhead the mail plane swoops by, while on the ground the mail gets moved from truck to wagon to horse to mule and, finally, to a sled behind Millie. Millie wriggles out of her harness and trots off just as the air-mail plane taxis to a stop in front of a sign saying
LOS ANGELES
.

"Pretty good," Annie says. "And not too far from the truth."

She again holds out her silk scarf. "Want to change your mind?"

"Maybe I'll at least borrow it," I say, "while I do some thinking."

Now the army planes that began the show soar into a finale, and Julie Elise's voice over the loudspeaker says, "Beatty Donnough, Mr. Granger wants you down in front of the grandstand."

Milton's voice in the background can be heard urging, "Go on, Moss. He wants you down there, too."

Mr. Granger tells the crowd that if they've liked the air show, they should give Moss and me a round of applause, and they do.

Though, of course, Millie thinks the clapping is for her. She prances and bows and, to tell the truth, judging from how the audience is laughing, she's probably got it right.

T
HAT EVENING CLO
and Grif and I lean back in the lawn chairs outside our cabin, and I wonder if the two of them are feeling the way I do, hardly able to believe this day is over.

It has been so full, and such a
finish.

I finally understand what happened to my mother all those years ago, and in a way I'm not so much surprised as relieved. It makes her a real person, with parts I can love and parts I don't. The way Moss feels about his mother, I guess.

The understanding gives me a new view of my dad, one that suggests why he wasn't more honest with his family before I was born. And it helps lessen my disappointment that he didn't come to today's show even though I asked him specially.

But settling my parents' story, important as it is, seems just a gentle ripple in all my contentment.

"Could any day have been more perfect?" I ask.

"It would be hard to imagine one," Clo answers. She reaches across to take Grif's hand. "Grif, did you tell Beatty your news?"

"What news?" I ask.

"That it's definite the station manager I've been filling in for won't be returning," Grif says, "and that Mr. Granger was so pleased with how things went today he offered to call the airline and urge them to give the job to me permanently."

"Grif, that's wonderful!"

"I reminded him the show was your doing, and Moss's—"

Clo interrupts to say, "And it means we'll be able to stop this tourist-court living and move into a house. Maybe get one with an extra bedroom, so that if you really do want..."

I catch my breath. "Clo ... Do you mean ... Are you inviting me ... Really?"

Clo and Grif both nod, looking pleased and shyly private. And then, as though keeping the rest of their news a secret is more than Clo can do, she says, "Beatty, I'd like your new cousin to grow up with you around every single day."

"My new—CLO!"

I fling my arms around my aunt to hug her and her baby-to-be, both.

"Careful!" she says as we all laugh.

But after a moment Grif cautions, "About your staying with us for good—we'll have to clear it with your father."

 

"I don't know," Dad says the next morning. His voice is hard to hear over the crackle of long-distance phone lines. "You write what it is you want to do."

"To live with Clo and Grif."

"There's Fanny and Maud. They'd miss you."

"And I'd miss them, but I can visit. Dad, please."

"I don't know why you want to go changing what's worked all these years, Beatty. I think you just better..."

Static covers his next words, and I wait for the noise to lessen before asking, "Dad, won't you please come here so we can at least talk about it?"

"I don't—"

"School starts next week, so I need to know. And there's something else I want to talk to you about ... just to straighten out..."

"Beatty, I can't..."

"Please, Dad. It's important."

"What is? This connection's no good. Look, maybe I can try to catch a ride in on tomorrow night's mail plane if there's an extra seat. I'll see."

 

The rest of Monday is mostly taken up with getting the airport back to rights. In the morning I lug a sack from one end of the lawn to the other and all up and down the road, collecting trash, while Moss works with Kenzie to knock down the grandstand.

And then, when I go looking for Moss at lunchtime, he's gone. "He went to town," Kenzie says.

I see Moss return a while later, but by then I'm helping with a million passenger chores, and I never do get free to talk to Moss the rest of the afternoon. Which about kills me, when I've got so many things to tell him.

 

At dinner Clo says she's been making arrangements to see her sisters. "Fanny and I are going to catch early buses to Maud's tomorrow. We'll be there in time for lunch."

"You're going all the way to Waco to eat?" Grif asks.

"No. To talk about the baby," Clo answers. "And I can explain better about wanting Beatty to stay with us. I don't want their feelings hurt."

Grif shakes his head as though Clo and her sisters are still sometimes too much for him. "And you can't just write?"

 

Tuesday morning I wave to Clo as we wait for her bus to pull away from Muddy Springs Drug.

She leans out a window to ask, "Are you sure you won't come? You'll be by yourself here all day and evening, what with Grif planning to work through dinner. I won't be back before midnight."

"I'm sure, Clo," I tell her. "You all can talk about me better if I'm not around. Just please see the talk comes out the way I want it to!"

 

After she leaves, I find Julie Elise and Leila and poke around town with them awhile.

Grif has given me the day off—a thank-you, he said, for the air show and for helping clean up after. He meant so well by it that I couldn't tell him I'd rather work.

Or, at least, that I'd rather be out at the airfield, where I can see Moss. It's funny, but for all my insisting he's just a casual friend, he's become more than that.

Anyway, I have a hard time getting interested in Julie Elise's and Leila's chatter, and after lunch at the malt shop I head back to the tourist court.

In the cabin I check the icebox, thinking I'll take Grif's supper out to him if he's forgotten it, but he hasn't.