Sentimental Journey (42 page)

They talked for a few more minutes, small-town gossip about who was seeing whom, who was getting married and having babies, who was in the doghouse for coming home with lipstick on his collar.

Charley finished the last of her drink. “Well, I’d better run.” She stood. “I’ll be around for a week or so.” She turned to Patti Marie. “If you change your mind about those lessons, let me know.
Waco
isn’t that far from
Dallas
.”

“Patti in a plane?” Dot laughed it off. “I don’t think so.”

But Charley caught something in Patti’s expression. She’d have been willing
to
bet that Patti Marie Ledbetter wanted to fly as badly as she wanted to marry a doctor, and even more than she wanted to matchmake all the Southwest.

“I’m in
Odessa
now,” Charley told her, paying the bill with a quarter. “But I’ll be moving to Whiting Field in a few months.” She looked Patti Marie in the eye. “Just in case you want to know.” She picked up her shopper, then smiled and left.

“SOUTH OF THE BORDER”

Less than an hour later Charley turned the wide steering wheel of her pop’s ‘36 Ford wood-paneled station wagon onto a private drive and under an arched iron sign that read:
“Casa del Cielo.”
Her mind was elsewhere, until she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the dry dust of the road billowing up behind the car in a pumpkin-colored cloud. Like desert smoke signals, the dust always told you when someone was coming up the road. She glanced at the speedometer; she was still traveling at about forty miles per hour, so she let off the pedal.

The private road to
Casa del Cielo
had been carved easily out of rolling waves of New Mexican land brindled with
piñon
and juniper, bushes of sagebrush and clumps of high desert grasses that after May turned the yellow color of a corn tortilla. In the distance, past the nearby foothills, stood the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains
, covered in ponderosa pine and looking incredibly green against the bleached, brittle colors of high desert that spread out for miles below. Midway between the two, like angels standing between life and death, were lacy aspen-covered foothills that shimmered silver in the afternoon sunshine and never ceased to remind Charley that this was home.

Another mile and she rounded a turn where the dirt road changed to gravel that crunched under the wagon’s tires. One more sharp turn and the road was suddenly flanked by two rows of tall juniper trees that led the way to a peach stucco, hacienda-style house that was built into the north side of a mountain. She parked and got out.

There were wrought-iron entrance gates that always squeaked when you opened them and a Mexican-tiled courtyard with a huge lion’s head fountain that you had to walk around to reach the heavily carved front doors.

She closed the doors behind her, turned, and tossed her bag onto a nearby Spanish oak bench, then paused and listened. There was music playing from the radio in the kitchen. Unmistakable music: the jazzy sounds of Tommy Dorsey. She hunched down to look into a low, dark-framed mirror on the creamy plaster wall, humming and jiving a bit as she unpinned her straw hat.

She put the hat on her shopping bag. She turned and sashayed her way into the kitchen, singing, “Let’s catch a tuna, way out in Laguna. Let’s get away from it all . . . ”

The room was empty, no sounds in the place but her humming and the voices of that new crooner Frankie Sinatra and the Pied Pipers singing from the wooden Zenith on the sink. She turned down the music. “Pop?”

“I’m in the den!”

She waited a second, expecting him to ask her for a beer. When he didn’t, she shrugged, flicked the volume back up, and crossed the tiled floor. She grabbed the handle on the white Frigidaire and danced the swing with it.

“Charley?”

She stopped. “Yeah?”

“Bring me a beer, will you?”

“Sure!” She smiled to herself, already bent over, her head half inside the open door of the fridge.

It was always amazing to her how good her voice sounded in hollow places like the refrigerator and the shower. Sometimes, when she was flying high in the clouds with the cool clean air in her hair, looking out at that blue, blue sky above her or down at the green mosaic pattern of the land below, she would sing as loud as she could, sing her heart out, sing up toward heaven just to let them know she was almost there.

“Let’s get away from it all . . . ” She shoved aside a bottle of thick buttermilk and a jar of even thicker golden honey, then took out two long-necked icy cold beers, spun around, and closed the door with a Carmen Miranda flick of her hip. She pried up the teeth of the metal beer caps with a bottle opener on the corner of the Fridge, then left through the arched hallway toward the back of the house.

She stood against the open doorway to the den. It smelled of the rum pipe tobacco her father smoked, a scent that she had always loved. When she was a little girl, they had a ritual. He would let her fill his pipe and taught her how to pack the tobacco tightly. She would sit and wait until he lit it before she ran off to play in some aircraft hangar or in the brittle grass of the land used as an airfield, which was usually next to a place they used as their temporary home. Her childhood could have been as colorless as the places they lived in, as vacuous as that of those poor, ragged children who followed their parents from town to town after the fall in 1929.

But it wasn’t. Looking back on her childhood with older, wiser eyes, she realized she could easily have disappeared. Among local children who had bonded together in a classroom for year after year, the ones who’d played together and grew up together, she could have gone unnoticed, like faded white paint on the walls of a place you see day after day. It’s there, but who cares?

Instead, she was the girl who flew in airplanes, the one with the father everyone liked and accepted and who would fly right over the schoolhouse at lunchtime and wave his wings. On Fridays, without fail, he would give three of her classmates an airplane ride. So for a time, the kids would try to get to know her, until she flew off to a new place, a new classroom filled with new faces.

Eventually they had settled down in
Santa Fe
, and her father swiftly built an aircraft business and eventually this home, where the den also served as his office. Here, there were photographs of aircraft and air races, of celebrities and famous clients, displayed everywhere, on the walls, the tables, and the huge double-sided mahogany desk.

In a display case on the west wall were brightly painted models of her father’s modified Lilienthal aircraft, nicknamed Ottos. At Charley’s suggestion, he had named his company after Otto Lilienthal, a German scientist who made thousands of glider flights and whose experiments in flight gave both inspiration and airfoil data to the Wright brothers.

The room was thoroughly masculine, with plastered walls, thick dark wood moldings and beams, and the same tiles that covered all the floors of the house. The expensive handmade rug that dominated the center of the room was a hundred years old and the rich red color of
Bordeaux
wine. Dark velvet draperies framed the wide wood-and-glass doors that opened out to a patio, and the leather furniture was a similar oxblood color with deep tufts and nailhead trim.

The room was like her dad. Large and bold, yet comfortably warm.

“Hey, Pop.” She crossed the room.

Her father looked up and smiled at her from his leather chair behind the desk.

She handed him the beer.

“Thanks, kiddo.” He took a long swig. “How was town?”

“The same.”

“The same?”

“Durable.”

He laughed. “You must have been in the Five-and-Dime.”

“You know me too well.” She slid her arms over his shoulders from behind and gave him a quick hug.

“Not really. You’re wearing blue.”

“Sure am. Saved you a nickel, too.”

He laughed, then turned his head slightly so he could look at her. “So town disappointed you, did it?”

“It’s the same. Not just similar, but exactly the same.”

“Yes, it is. They work hard to keep things the way they like them here.”

“I didn’t mean anything derogatory. You know that. But I do wonder how a town, in this day and age, can feel so completely unchanged?”

“What happened to, ‘Oh, Pop, are we
ever
going to have a
real
hometown? Someplace cozy and warm, like
real
people?’’

“I was twelve.”

“You were Joan Crawford.”

She laughed and walked around the desk. “You are awful, you know that? Besides, we were barely staying in one place for more than a couple of months. I was a sensitive child,” she said airily, waving a hand in the air. “One who needed stability.”

“Stability? I guess that’s why now you’re flying all over the country.”

“I inherited your wanderlust.”

“You’ve lived in eight places in the last three years.”

“Little girls
do
grow up.” She paused, then grinned. “Unlike
Santa Fe
, people change.”

“I think I know one little girl who has gotten too big for her britches.”

“I’m six foot one. I’ve always been too big for my britches.”

He gave a shake of his silvery head and relented. In those years when her life had been so migratory, there hadn’t been time to form close friendships with other children. But she had Pop.

Now they were like twin legs on a compass. He could go off in one direction, she on to another, but they always came back together again. They were joined by something stronger than their mutual love of flying, something different than the love between father and daughter, different than blood ties or family or all of those naturally accepted bonds.

They genuinely liked and respected each other. He was her best friend.

She hitched her hip on the corner of the desk and glanced down at the papers scattered all over the tooled-leather blotter she’d bought him last Christmas. “Whatchadoing?”

“Reading this letter from Maggie.”

“Maggie Caldwell?” Margaret Caldwell was an infamous flyer, an attractive blonde with sharp eyes to the future, a woman who felt strongly that she should be Amelia Earhart’s successor.

Maggie was one of those people whom you knew, the moment you met them, would someday make their mark in the world. Charley had met Maggie through her dad, on a trip to
Florida
. At the time, Maggie had just broken Howard Hughes’s
New York
to
Miami
speed record and had already twice won the Bendix Trophy, the penultimate in American air races. She also had several Harmon International Trophies to her credit, distinguishing Maggie Caldwell as the outstanding woman aviator in the world. The amazing thing was, she had only been flying for five years. “So. How is Maggie?”

“Fine. Busy. She has her usual five irons in the fire. But she’s now Mrs. Cooper Crosby.”

“She and Coop got married? Good.”

“You sound relieved. Afraid she might have been your stepmother?”

“Let’s just say Maggie is a woman who knows her mind, and expects you to know it, too.” Charley took a drink of her beer.