Sentimental Journey (44 page)

When he looked up at her, his expression softened. He drew on the pipe and exhaled the smoke. “Okay, kiddo. You win.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to think like you do. Besides, you’d do it anyway with or without my support.”

“I knew if you looked at it from my perspective, logically, that you’d come around.”

“You mean because I have no choice in the matter?”

“No, because you know when I’m right.”

“How did I raise such a persistent child?”

“I’m just like you.” Laughing, she jumped up and gave him another hug.

He patted her hands clasped across his chest. “I can’t help feeling protective.”

“I understand, Pop.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do. You love me.”

“Actually, I was thinking more about what you said.”

She didn’t understand and peered over his shoulder to look at him. His face told her nothing. “And what was that exactly?”

“Well, kiddo, based on your insight into universal male motive,” he said dryly, “I can’t help feeling protective. It’s part of my masculine psyche.”

“PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT”

WHITING FIELD, FLAT
ROCK
,
TEXAS
, 1942

It was barely eleven o’clock in the morning, and the air in the flight-training room was already hot and thick and ebullient with the fumes of stale cigarette smoke and too much Tabu perfume. In the corner, an empty glass water jug in a wobbly metal stand crouched over a brown trash can spilling a trail of crushed paper cups and stubbed cigarette butts, both marked with different shades of red lipstick. Diagrams of Mustangs, Tiger Moths, Mosquitoes, and other aircraft covered the murky walls, and a huge dusty chalkboard marked with navigation data dominated one side of the room. An old, yellowed meteorology chart the size of a door hung at a cockeyed angle and was pinned with ads for everything from airplane parts and local jobs to a full-color Latin travel poster claiming the newly streamlined Douglas Aircraft Pan Am Clippers could get you from
New York
to
Rio
in only thirty hours. Some comedienne among the ATA candidates had taken an eyebrow pencil and drawn a dark mustache and thick eyebrows on Carmen Miranda’s face. At first glance she looked like Groucho Marx beckoning you to
South America
’s white-sand beaches. But no one was going to South America now, not since the Japanese had bombed
Pearl Harbor
.

Charley sat sprawled out on a hard wooden chair, her long legs propped on a metal electric heater that she was sure was about as useful in this part of
Texas
as wings on an ostrich. Right then, the thermometer was hovering around ninety-five degrees and the humidity felt to be about ninety percent. She was sweating—a permanent state since she’d arrived here—while she studied the tech manual for a P-51A.

Called Mustangs by the British, the planes were single-seat fighters contracted by the British Purchasing Commission in a deal struck with North American Aviation. The plane was said to handle beautifully thanks to its semi-laminar-flow airfoil wing. The Allison V-1710 engine had 1150 horsepower and a maximum cruising speed at fifteen thousand feet of three hundred miles per hour. It was a plane she’d been wanting to fly from the first moment she’d heard of it, because once inside, she would have her first glimpse of a fighter pilot’s world.

But before the American women could be approved to leave with Maggie Caldwell for the Air Transit Authority positions in
Great Britain
, they each had to be checked out in certain types of planes. Official testing and certification was required by the ATA. If the instructor failed her, the applicant would be tossed out the of the program. They had started with forty women, and now there were only twenty-seven left, assigned in small groups at three different airfields.

Charlie focused again on the plane’s manual. She had a lot riding on this last training flight.

Rosalie Allen came rushing through the door. “Scuttlebutt has it that we’re leaving for
London
before the week’s out.”

“That soon?” Joan Harting groaned. “I almost failed the test flights yesterday. Rafferty was on his high horse again.”

“When isn’t he on his high horse?” Dolores Salazar said with a wry laugh.

“High horse has nothing to do with Bill Rafferty.”

They all turned and looked at Connie Bellows as if she were nuts for defending him.

“It’s the low end of the horse . . . ” she went on. “The horse’s ass.”

They all got a good laugh out of that. Their flight instructor was unreasonably difficult, one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kinds of people.

Joan set her books aside and poured another cup of black coffee, then leaned against a filing cabinet and took a long sip. She scowled into the cup. “Good God, that’s strong. Who made it, Caffeine Connie?”

Joan was a tea drinker, but since there was no tea available, she had to settle for coffee. Connie usually got up early to make coffee the way she liked it: thick as syrup and darker than engine sludge. But Connie could drink a whole pot of it and then settle in for a long nap. They had all learned early that caffeine didn’t affect her.

“I don’t understand it,” Joan said.

“The coffee?”

“No. That’s easy to understand. Connie was born without taste buds. What I don’t understand is why someone would send Rafferty, the misogynist, to supervise the flight training for a handful of women. Maggie Caldwell had to fight pigheaded men like Bill Rafferty every step of the way to get these contracts accepted. Why on earth is someone like him in charge of our instruction?”

“I don’t understand, either.” Rosalie sank into a chair in the corner. “I swear he was trying to get me to wash out all last week. You’d think Maggie would want someone who had some stake in seeing us succeed.”

“Maggie had nothing to do with it,” Charley told them. “She had no choice about who would control the flight testing. He was sent down here from the Atlantic Ferry Office in
Montreal
as part of the contract agreements.”

“He wants us to fail. I heard him talking. The pilots in
Canada
were grousing about sending women at all, especially Yanks. Most of them believe it’s only a stunt. I think Rafferty’s from that camp. He had already decided before he ever got here to make it as difficult as possible for us to succeed.”

“So he came here with that chip already on his shoulder,” Dolores said.

“Sure did.”

“I’m not giving him the satisfaction of washing me out,” Charley said. “This is my last qualifier and then I’m home free.”

But by three o’clock that afternoon, she was beginning to wonder if she would receive her assignment today at all. She was still waiting. They were behind schedule, and Rafferty was having a fit.

When her call finally came, she ran out of the flight room and toward the P-51, feeling both anxious and nervous, but sense told her it was good old American know-how that made the aircraft. The P-51 was designed, built, and made ready to fly in only a hundred-and-twenty-odd days. Now if she could just do her stuff in it for about a hundred-and-twenty-odd minutes, she’d be guaranteed a trip to
London
, something she wanted badly. She would be part of the first team of American women to fly for the war effort, a part of history doing something she lived and breathed for: flying.

She climbed onto the wing and got a good look at the cockpit for the first time. It was so small that with all her flight gear on it was going to be a tight squeeze to get inside and get strapped into the flight seat.

How the hell were men supposed to fly this thing?

This wasn’t the first time she wished she was five foot four and a hundred and thirty pounds. “I wonder if Rafferty thought I would fit inside it at all,” she muttered as she placed her hand on the rim of the cockpit opening and climbed inside. She gripped the rim of the cockpit with one hand and leaned back so she could slide down into the seat without hitting her chin. She got about halfway down when she stopped sliding and felt her chute straps bite into her shoulders and groin.

“Dammit.” Her chute was caught on the seat back.

She twisted and pulled herself back up. It took a few moments to get untangled, which was like trying to dance the Lindy in a telephone booth. She closed the cockpit, then locked and checked the safety latch and pins. Even though she had spent the morning going over the technical manual, she still had to spend time familiarizing herself with the actual plane. She checked the boost and supercharger controls, fuel and oil switches . . . where was the fuel-booster pump?

Rafferty’s gravelly voice came over the radio. “What the hell is taking so long, Morrison? Just because you’re trying to go to
England
doesn’t make this mother-frigging teatime. Get that machine in the air.
Now!”

She covered the mike on her radio headset with her hand and quietly suggested he put the machine in the same place his head was.

“Did you say something, Morrison?”

“Just a prayer, sir.” Charley flicked the switches. The engine coughed to a start. She checked her gauges, then talked to the tower on the radio. She powered up and took off.

This was an amazing machine. She was upstairs a few minutes later, learning and loving what the plane could do. She wanted to take her up, way up, to dive, to loop and spin, to take her up to full speed, but if she did, she’d be washed out.

Her job was to ferry planes, not dogfight over the Channel . . . if she ever got there. No, when she got there. She would show Rafferty she could control this plane. She was going to
England
.

There were two main runways at Whiting. One which ran north and south and was used most often, but today that runway was closed, which was why they were behind, so she was told she had to use the east-west runaway for her touchdowns and takeoffs, which meant at this time of day she was going to be landing into the setting sun.

She spent the next hour doing the required testing and learning the feel of the plane. But after a while, what she actually felt she was testing was her own skill as a pilot. The haze around the field was growing thicker by the minute. As the sun began to go down, landing was getting tricky, especially on a shorter runway. The P-51 could easily overshoot it.

She had Rafferty to contend with. But she was going to
Britain
. Period.

Whiting Field was not the best in normal weather, but in the sun haze, well, she was landing almost blind. To compensate, she memorized all the hazards over the end of the short field. There were power poles with crossbars at the end of the runway, not to mention the houses and businesses and telephone poles that were all clustered nearby.

To help her land as the visibility grew worse and worse, she would count off the hazards, “one telephone pole, two telephone pole, three telephone pole, one power pole . . . Jackson Avenue . . . two power pole . . . ” until she knew she was right over the edge of the runway; then she would drop down for what was pretty much a blind landing.