Velva Jean Learns to Fly (31 page)

~ 1944 ~

I’m flying high above the clouds.
I’m flying swift and free . . .

—“Beyond the Keep”

THIRTY-FOUR

O
n January 1, Ruth Needham picked up an A-24 in New York, stopped at Camp Davis to refuel and check in, and was flying the plane down to South Carolina when she lost all the controls except the throttle and had to jump. An antiaircraft lieutenant was flying with her and when he jumped out of the plane he hit the propeller.

The lieutenant died instantly, but Ruth was still alive. Sally, Janie, and I went to see her at the base hospital, and she looked small and bruised lying in her bed. She broke her leg in the fall and cracked three ribs, but otherwise she was okay.

I took Ruth’s hand when she held it out, and Janie said, “What happened up there?”

Ruth said, “I don’t know. One minute all systems were go, the next the fuel pressure warning light started flickering. Then the prop control went out, then the trim tabs, the wobble pump, the fuel selector, and the radio. The only thing that didn’t fritz out was the throttle.”

We asked her questions, and she answered them for as long as she could, and then her head started nodding and her eyes drooped closed and she drifted off to sleep. We slipped outside, and in the hallway Sally said, “I’m sorry—all the controls go fritzy at once? I don’t buy it.”

Janie shook her head. “Me neither.”

They looked at me and I said, “Me neither.” And as I said it a chill ran up my spine, uncoiling just like a snake. I thought of Laurine Thompson and Sandy Chapman and Dora Atwood, girls just like me, just like Ruth, who came to Camp Davis to fly and then died when something went wrong. I heard Colonel Wells’s words in my head: The planes are retired. The planes aren’t fit for combat anymore. And then I heard Helen Stillbert saying, “We think it was sabotage.”

The day after Ruth got out of the hospital, they sent her to base court to face charges for damaging government property and for putting her passenger in harm’s way.

Three days later, she was cleared. She kept to herself after that, sitting silent at mess while the rest of us talked around her, her nose in a book while waiting on the flight line, turning in early at night, long before bed check.

Through it all, I wondered just where Jackie Cochran was and if there was anyone on this base that we could trust. Some of the men were nice enough. They didn’t seem to mind that we were here as much as the other army air force pilots did. I wondered about the other 49,500 men on base—would they have been nicer if we were assigned to work with them? Or would they have been just as unhappy to see us as the pilots were?

The night Ruth was cleared, I was scheduled to fly my first searchlight mission. This was a kind of racetrack pattern at different altitudes, so I would be going up and down and up again while the artillery men tried to spot me and follow me with their searchlights. Before I took off, I told Harry Lawson that I wanted to look over the engine myself.

He said, “It already checked out. I have the paperwork here.”

I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over it again.”

While he watched me, I went over the gas tank, the carburetor, the oil, the engine, the landing gear, the propeller—every control and dial and lever. When I was done, I made sure to sign my name to the papers to say everything was okay.

I still felt nervous as I took off. What if the engine caught fire? What if I lost a wheel? What if the controls went out? I looked outside the windows and all I could see was the blinding yellow-white of the searchlights. I couldn’t read the instruments or see where I was headed, and so I tried to remember everything I’d learned at Avenger Field about flying blind. I remembered what Puck had taught me: “When you’re sitting in that cockpit, I want you to picture the flying you’re doing in that particular airplane. It’s just you and that one plane. You’ve got to know just what that plane can do for you.”

By now I knew the A-24 better than any other plane I’d ever flown. I closed my eyes and pictured the control panel. At first it was blurry, but little by little all the levers and dials and buttons filled themselves in until I could see them in my mind. I reached forward and adjusted the prop control, the trim tabs, the throttle. I saw the sky above Camp Davis just like I was looking at it. I pictured it like a road I was driving in my yellow truck.

An hour later, after I was sitting on the ground again, I thought that searchlight missions were a bit like life. Sometimes you could lose your way and not know where in the world you were going, but you just had to keep your head and remember your instruments. I thought maybe I was knowing my compass more and more.

Jackie Cochran arrived the next morning in her Beechcraft. She called all twenty-five WASP together in the office she sometimes used, which was a small room next to the dispatcher’s office. We crowded around the table, lining the walls, sitting in the chairs and on the floor. Ruth sat front and center, her leg in a cast, her face still bruised.

Miss Cochran looked like she’d been awake all night. There were little lines around her eyes underneath the makeup. She sat on the edge of the table, hands on either side of her, legs stretched out in front, ankles crossed.

A couple of the girls raised their hands. Miss Cochran nodded at them. “You’ll have a chance to talk. First, I want to address this latest accident.” She looked at Ruth, who was staring at her through her glasses, blank as a stone wall. “The plane’s log showed that there had been a complaint about the engine, Miss Needham, prior to your flying it. The complaint was written up but for some reason the plane was never repaired. I imagine this was just an oversight, but I assure you I’m going to look into it.”

Sally snapped her gum in Jackie Cochran’s direction in a way I knew meant “I just bet you will.” Miss Cochran glanced at her and frowned.

Ruth said, “Why even bother?” Her voice was flat and far away.

Miss Cochran looked at her long and hard and then she looked at the rest of us. “Anyone else? I want to hear what you have to say.”

Sally cracked her gum again, and then we all started talking at once, telling her just how scared we were, how angry we were. We told her about the crude comments, the teasing, the target shooting. We told her the A-24s were faulty and not fit for training, especially at night.

She held up her hands and said, “All right, all right. This is what I can do. I’ll talk to the mechanics. I’ll test-fly some of the planes tomorrow. I’ll see if we can’t get to the bottom of this, but you have to be quiet. If I hear or read so much as a cough in the press about things not running well here, about anything less than perfect harmony between the WASP and the male pilots at Camp Davis, I’m going to make some personnel changes.”

The next day Jackie Cochran test-flew several of the planes, including the A-24s. Afterward she met with Harry Lawson and went over the squawk sheet, which was where pilots reported all aircraft technical problems and the mechanics responded with how they’d taken care of them and when.

The twenty-five of us waited on the edge of the flight line, and when Miss Cochran was finished she walked over, hair blowing in the wind, smiling. She said, “Yes, the planes have some problems. They’re old. They’ve been through it. But I don’t see anything life threatening.”

When some of the girls started to talk, she held up her hand. “Look. They have problems, but what plane being flown these days doesn’t?”

Sally said, “I’d like to be relieved of my target-towing duties.”

Helen Stillbert said, “Me too.”

Janie said, “And me.”

I said, “And me.”

A half dozen other girls spoke up, but by now Miss Cochran was frowning and shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No one’s resigning and no one’s being relieved of any duty. You’re here to perform a mission. The future of this program is at stake.”

Sally said, “We could go to the FERD.” FERD was the Ferry Division of the Army Air Forces, and even though we were nonmilitary, we could go there to complain or even resign.

Jackie Cochran said, “If you do, I can still override them.” She was smiling but her tone was cold. It was a look I’d seen before on Sweet Fern, on Harley.

By nightfall she was gone, and the next day we were back on the line, taking our turns towing targets in the A-24s. When I came down, I counted eleven bullet holes in the tail of my plane, five in the wing, five in the cockpit, and one in the nose. I thought to myself, If you can fly here at Camp Davis, you can fly anywhere.

On January 14, I got two letters at mail call, one from Janette Lowe, Hink’s sister, who wrote me all the way from England to tell me how she was a nurse for the Red Cross and to thank me for all I did to help her, back on Fair Mountain, when she was attacked by the German from the CCC camp. The other letter was from Butch Dawkins. All it said was, “Girl—you free tomorrow night around seven? I got someplace for us to go. Butch.”

I sat down on the flight line and waited my turn, and while I waited I thought about Butch and then I thought about Ty. I reached into my pocket for his compass and ran my fingers over each letter: N-E-T.

The thing I’d never said to anyone, much less to myself, was that Ty would be alive if it wasn’t for me asking him to meet me in Blythe. I should have just been happy to write him letters and let him write me songs and see him the next time he came to Avenger Field. This was something I went over in my mind again and again—my telegram telling him I would be there, his telegram saying he would come—like going over it would change it somehow. Like maybe if I thought enough about it and pictured it different in my mind he would never have been in Blythe in the first place, which meant he would never have crashed into that mountain.

Sometimes I made myself think about what our lives would be like if he was still here. I went beyond the good and the happy and wondered if I ever would have stopped loving him like I stopped loving Harley. Would we have fought about little things or big ones? Would he have got tired of me? Would I have stopped talking to him about my songs? Would he have stayed away from home more and more? Would I have woken up one day and find out I didn’t love him anymore?

When I got back to my bay, I opened my hatbox and set Ty’s compass inside it, on top of all my other treasures. “I’m sorry,” I said, and it was silly to say it to something so small that was only made out of metal, but as I closed the lid to the hatbox and locked it up in my footlocker I felt like I was leaving a part of me behind.

At seven o’clock the next evening, I met Butch Dawkins outside my barracks. I was wearing my blue dress and my Comet Red lipstick and some of Sally’s best perfume. Outside it was already night, the last traces of the sun fading right into the ocean. Butch was dressed in his uniform. His skin was dark against the green. Some of the army air force pilots walked past and stared at us. They called out to Butch—“You lost, Injun? You need some help finding your way back to your teepee?” They all laughed at this like it was the funniest thing and then they walked off, blowing kisses at me.

He said to me, “I guess I should’ve met you someplace.”

I said, “It’s just as bad for you to be seen with me.”

He said, “Well, then. We’re going to have us an adventure.”

He didn’t say a word about how I looked, didn’t tell me I was pretty or that he liked my dress. He didn’t tell me I had the prettiest face on Fair Mountain—Fair Mountain or anywhere.

He said, “Ready?”

I wondered why it should matter to me if Butch thought I was pretty. Maybe because there were other girls in this world he probably did think were pretty and I at least wanted to be one of them. But maybe he didn’t like girls with hair that waved too much in the heat or had eyes that weren’t one color but a lot of them. He might not like girls with heart-shaped faces who weren’t tiny like Sally or bigbosomed like Sweet Fern. He probably liked Indian girls or Cajun girls, exotic-looking ones with dark hair and almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of caramel.

There was a juke joint out in the country, just past Holly Ridge, called Leona’s. I talked and talked on the drive there, thinking how silly I sounded going on about everything from
Life
magazine to Dan Presley’s airplane spotting to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Yet I kept on talking. Butch stared straight ahead, one hand on the wheel, the other arm crooked out the window. The cold air blew in through the window flaps, but I was warm from the heater. I liked the feeling of hot and cold, hot and cold. Just when I got too hot, there would be a rush of cool air. Just when I got a chill, I could feel the heat.

I kept thinking: I am here with Butch Dawkins. The world sure is a small place. I couldn’t get over it.

Every now and then Butch said, “You up to somethin’, girl. Sho’nough.”

I chattered on and on and then I made myself stop talking so that he could talk. I said, “Where did you go after you left Alluvial?”

He said, “Here and there.”

“Did you make it to Chicago, home of the blues?”

“Not even close.”