Velva Jean Learns to Fly (19 page)

TWENTY-THREE

O
n the morning of March 29, I sat on the flight line waiting my turn to fly. The weather had turned warm almost overnight, and I wore the legs of my zoot suit rolled up over my knees and the sleeves pushed all the way up to my shoulders so I could get some sun. I was reading a book on Morse code and trying to concentrate. Morse code was all dots and dashes, and so far I couldn’t remember a single word. I tucked Granny’s heartleaf into the page I was reading and closed my book. I said to the girls, “I’m going to fail ground school.”

The army way of flying wasn’t like what I’d learned with Duke Norris. The stalls and spins were different, and there were a hundred new maneuvers to learn. The planes at Avenger Field were tougher, harder to handle. The very first time I’d gone up with Arnold Puckett, he’d cut the throttle and pointed the nose of the primary trainer, or PT, at the sun above us and then brought the stick back, straight against my knee. The plane started spinning and the earth twirled around and around and I went jolting out of the seat, the safety belt catching me so tight around the stomach and chest that it knocked the wind out of me. Then he pointed the nose of the plane down and then up and then lifted a wing and we were flying upside down. My feet flew toward the ground and my bottom came up off the seat, and the safety belt cut off the blood in my stomach and legs. I held onto the plane, to my seat, to whatever I could, and prayed to Jesus that I wouldn’t die.

Here at Avenger Field, I felt like I was starting over, like I didn’t know anything. We went through spins and loops, upside down and sideways and right side up, because Jackie Cochran said learning all these moves was the only way to have total control over our planes.

Paula Hodges, the golf champion, was taking her turn in the air, so it was just me and Loma and Mudge in line. We were assigned to flight groups by height because we had to take turns with the same parachute, which meant little Sally was in a group with girls her own size.

Loma was already worrying. She said, “If anyone’s going to fail ground school, it’s me. I’ve had study hall every night this week. I’m going to wash out, I just know it, and then what will my husband say? What will my daughter think of me?”

Mudge sat next to me, eyes closed, leaning back against the building. Her goggles rested on her lap, and she’d pulled her turban off so that her dark hair hung around her shoulders. Because she was an actress, she believed in looking glamorous at all times. The wind was picking up her hair and blowing it every which-a-way. She said, “Hush up, both of you. No one’s going to wash out.”

A lot of the girls we knew had gone home already—at least 23 of them that we could count. I thought back to our first day and Jackie Cochran lining us up. “There are 112 of you in your class,” she said. We all looked around to see if this might be true. “The odds are good that half of you won’t make it to graduation day. Most of you will wash out. There are plenty of chances: ground school, link training, disobeying orders, too many demerits, dating instructors, civilian and army check rides.” Those were when they sent you up with an instructor to test you on various maneuvers, but you never knew when or where they were going to happen. “All that said,” she told us, “maybe you should just go home now.”

Then she said, “Look at the person on either side of you, because both of those girls will wash out.” And I thought, Oh poor things. It never occurred to me for one second that she was talking about me.

Now I wasn’t so sure. I’d been pulling study hall myself lately, and this week Puck had yelled at me in front of everyone after I made a bad landing. I opened the book again and the heartleaf was picked up by the wind and blown away. I jumped up after it, swearing “Great holy Moses!”

Loma said, “That’s a dime you owe the cuss pot.” The cuss pot was a jar we’d stolen from the mess hall. It was Loma’s idea that we had to drop a dime in for every
damn
or
hell
and a quarter for worse words, the ones I’d only ever heard Johnny Clay or Harley say but had almost never used myself. So far we had a dollar and twenty cents.

I caught the heartleaf just as it was flying up over my head, and that’s when I saw the horizon. There was a solid black cloud, like a thundercloud but darker, and it kind of sat in the distance, covering the earth for as far as I could see, starting at the ground and reaching upward. I thought maybe it was a tornado, only the sky overhead was blue and not green. The cloud was moving, wobbling from side to side.

I said, “What in the hell?”

Loma said, “Ten more cents, Hartsie.”

I looked at her over my shoulder and said, “Look.”

Loma got to her feet and Mudge opened her eyes, and then she jumped up too. The three of us stood there, and soon there were other girls wandering up from the barracks, from their flight groups, from the control tower.

I said, “What is it?”

Shirley Bingham was two trainee classes ahead of us. She was a suntanned girl with freckles and bright-blue eyes and hair the color of North Carolina clay. She walked up and stood over my left shoulder and whistled long and low. She said, “Locusts.”

By afternoon the black cloud covered the sun. We spent all day—trainees, cadets, instructors, officers—covering the planes with tarps, especially the open-cockpit Stearmans. In the barracks we closed the windows and locked all our belongings away in the footlockers and shut the doors to the bathroom and the hallway, stuffing paper underneath so there wasn’t a single crack showing.

Then we waited.

By nightfall we could hear them—a buzzing, humming plague of locusts, hitting the base like a great, spinning meteor. Everything stopped—classes, flying, mess. The girls and I took cover in the bay, stuffing more paper under the doors. We could hear the locusts beating against the roof, the windows, the walls. The sound they made was like the beating of a million wings—like the very highest note on a fiddle being played over and over.

It was just like in the Bible: “Behold, tomorrow will I bring the locusts . . . And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth . . . and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field.”

Even though we were sealed up tighter than a drum, there was no way to keep the locusts out of the bays, the lockers, the beds, the food, our hair. They hopped and buzzed around the room while we chased them with our shoes or hid under the covers. Sally said the average swarm was made up of about fifty billion bugs and that it could be days before a swarm moved on.

The first night I didn’t sleep at all because there were locusts in the bed. I pulled both the sheet and the blanket over my head, even though it was hot as blazes in the bay. Through the blanket I felt them land on me, thudding against my legs, my stomach, my arms, my face. I slapped at myself here, there, everywhere because I thought I felt them crawling on my skin, that maybe they’d got under the sheet.

I lay there fidgeting and itching and kicking the locusts off me and thinking how much I hated Texas and how much I missed the sounds and seasons of home. Why had I ever come to Texas, with its flat, ugly earth and locusts and sandstorms and tarantulas and scorpions? The locusts were hitting the windows from inside and outside and buzzing against the floor, the footlocker, the bed. I could hear one in my ear and I screamed.

“Did they get you, Hartsie?” Paula shouted from her bed. Each of us was lying just like the others, all bundled up head to toe like mummies.

“One got in my goddamned hair!” Mudge hollered.

“One tried to get in my goddamned mouth!” shouted Sally.

I slapped at my arms and legs and thought about how much money we were all going to owe the cuss pot when this was over and done.

When I finally started to drift off, after lying there for hours, I thought about Cornelia Fort. She’d grown up in Nashville but left to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. On March 21 she was killed over a place called Merkel, Texas, when the plane she was ferrying was clipped by another plane in midair. She was the first woman to die on active duty for the United States. When Jackie Cochran told us the news, she said to remember that Cornelia Fort died doing what she loved most. Ever since, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Cornelia Fort left Nashville only to wind up flying planes in Texas, and how strange that was because I left Nashville—where I always wanted to go my whole life—to go fly planes in Texas too.

Even though she was a stranger and I’d never known her, I couldn’t get her off my mind. These were the things I knew about her: she was twenty-four years old. She was the daughter of one of Nashville’s richest families. Her family gave her a debutante ball when she was nineteen and she had to be bribed before she agreed to go. She was the first female flight instructor in Nashville. She graduated from college. The week she earned her pilot’s license, she flew two thousand miles to celebrate.

All of this had been in the papers along with a letter she’d written to her mother one year before she was killed. In it she talked about why she loved flying and what it meant to her: “I loved it best perhaps because it taught me utter self-sufficiency, the ability to remove myself beyond the keep of anyone at all—and in doing it taught me what was of value and what was not . . . If I die violently, who can say it was ‘before my time’? . . . I was happiest in the sky—at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down, and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light. Think of me there and remember me . . .”

Cornelia Fort’s body had exploded on hitting the ground. Her plane came down in a pasture near Merkel, and Betty Joe Seymore, who was fourteen years old and living on a farm close by, found what was left of her—a scalp and hair. A farmer named H. H. Cargill found her insignia pin and a piece of her watch, which was smashed flat.

Merkel was just thirty miles east of Avenger Field, on the road to Abilene. I couldn’t get over the closeness of it and the fact that I’d just finished my first month as a WFTD trainee when Cornelia Fort crashed and died in a field.

How horrible to die in Texas. I remembered the tarantula we’d seen outside the mess hall the other day and the scorpion that had tried to sting Sally in the shower. I thought, when it came down to it, Texas was the most god-awful place I’d ever seen. I thought about Nashville and Harley and my family up on Fair Mountain and all I’d left behind to come here. I tried to take myself home, fast away in my mind, to its streams and hillsides and trees and green and gold dust and flowers and birds. I pictured the sun—the way it fell through the leaves, making patterns of light on the ground—and remembered the way it warmed your skin without burning it right off.

And all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.

I wondered if I’d brought this plague of locusts on, just like in the Bible, if maybe my leaving Harley had something to do with it. The thought of this was suddenly the saddest thing in the world, and the part of me that was like my daddy’s people, that sometimes liked to dwell on sad things, stepped up and said, “You stopped loving Harley even though you promised him you always would, and now here you are being attacked by locusts. What did you think would happen?”

From her bed, Loma shouted, “Goddamned locusts!” And we all laughed over the buzzing and the humming and the high scratching of violins because it was the first time we’d ever heard her swear.

Mudge hollered, “That’s twenty-five cents you owe the cuss pot!”

And Loma said, “I’ll pay my month’s salary! Just get these goddamn things off me!”

I was hot. I was suffocating. The locusts thumped against me like stones. Then I thought: Texas brought these locusts on itself.

The longer we stayed cooped up together, the more I got to know my bay mates in a way I hadn’t on the flight line or at mess or at ground school or during the in-between times. Paula was the best listener and she was also a problem solver. She liked figuring things out, just like a puzzle. She and Mudge each kept a stash of gin outside the bay in a narrow alley between the barracks. There were hundreds of sticks in the ground, just like a little graveyard, and this was where the girls from all the classes hid their liquor.

Mudge was smart and she could be sweet. She always meant well, but she said whatever was on her mind, which could be good but was sometimes bad, like when she made Loma cry. This was easy to do because Loma was the most sensitive person I’d ever met, and she was funny without knowing she was funny or trying to be. She was always saying words wrong and getting mixed up. And Sally was smarter than she seemed for being such a chatterbox. She also talked with her gum—snapping or popping it at instructors and at us when she had something to say. Most of the time it worked better than words.

I wondered if any of us would have been friends in real life. The one thing we had in common was that we all loved flying. Whenever we heard a plane buzz the barracks, we ran outside to see what kind it was. The male pilots at nearby bases knew we were off-limits, but somehow they kept having engine trouble right over Avenger Field. They would land and holler to us while we stood there in our zoot suits or pajamas, till we were rounded up by Lieutenant Patrick Whitley or our one female instructor, Evelyn Beatty, or even Jackie Cochran and sent back inside.

Loma talked a lot about her husband, and sometimes I wished for someone—not Harley but someone who would be back home loving me, someone I couldn’t wait to go back to. I was only lonely sometimes though. Mostly it felt good to be on my own and to feel like I was getting better at being on my own. It was like when you were growing, back when you were little, and suddenly you’d wake up one morning and your legs would look longer or your arms would look longer or your hands would look bigger. And before you knew it, you were growing right before your own eyes. That was the way it felt being there in Texas.