Velva Jean Learns to Fly (33 page)

THIRTY-SIX

O
n February 1, Ruth resigned from the WASP and went home to Illinois. I wondered what would happen if we all dropped out, and I liked thinking of Jackie Cochran coming to Camp Davis on her next visit and finding us all gone. But where would we go? What would we do? I couldn’t go back to Fair Mountain now for anything. Just like how, once I taught myself to drive, I couldn’t very well teach myself
not
to drive, now that I knew how to fly, I couldn’t very well stop flying.

Two days later three female reporters came to Camp Davis to interview the WASP. The day before they came, Colonel Wells gave orders to clear out a storeroom in the administration building and brought in a table and chairs. A sign was hung on the door—gold and shiny just like the one outside his office. It said “WASP Nest.”

In groups of five or six, we were rounded up and brought to the WASP Nest to talk to the reporters. They were nice but businesslike. They said, “Oh what a nice office the Army Air Forces has given you.” We didn’t tell them that up until yesterday our office was a storeroom.

The reporters said they’d been hearing rumors about men sabotaging the WASP, about women being harassed and even shot at. One of the reporters said, “Before we came here, we were up at Camp Lejeune, talking to the women marines. Some of them say they fear for their lives.”

We answered politely and carefully, not saying a word about ferrying Norden bombsights or being shot at by male pilots, all except Sally, who said, “There’s truth to everything those girls told you. We’ve been going through it since we got here.”

The reporters started asking a hundred questions then, and Sally answered all of them.

On our walk back to the bay, I said, “You shouldn’t have said those things.”

Sally said, “Aren’t you tired, Hartsie? This isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t why I learned to fly. I’m sure I’ll tick some people off when the articles come out, but how’s that any different than the way they’re feeling about me now? At least this way I know I’m being honest.”

She was right, and I knew she was right. I wished then that I hadn’t just sat there like a stump. I wished I’d been as brave as Sally. “Or as reckless,” I heard a voice say.

The next morning Sally and I walked over to the WASP Nest to get our assignments, but the sign was gone. We went up and down the hallway, searching for the office, trying to see if we’d remembered it wrong. Then we walked back to the first door we’d stopped at and opened it. Instead of the table and chairs, the room was filled with boxes and brooms and equipment. Our WASP Nest was back to being a storeroom.

I didn’t see Butch again till Thursday. I came out of the mess hall just after supper, with Sally and Janie and Gus Mitchell and Vince Gillies, and he was standing outside smoking a cigarette. He shook the hair out of his eyes and said, “Hey.” His eyes flicked over at Gus and Vince. “Hey,” he said again, but they just stood there.

I said, “Hey.” I thought: Where have you been? Where did you go? What are you doing here? How can I find you?

Sally started talking to Gus and Vince, pulling them away.

Butch said to me, “It ain’t going to do you any good to be seen with me. They hate us more than they hate you.”

I said, “I don’t care.” And I didn’t.

He said, “I been working on a song.”

He didn’t ask what I’d been doing or how I was. He didn’t ask me if I’d been shot at lately. He didn’t know anything about Ruth’s accident or Jackie Cochran or the Norden bombsight.

I said, “I been working on one too, but it’s stuck. I can’t get it out no matter how I try. When I moved to Nashville, I just wrote and wrote, but ever since the war, ever since learning to fly, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to write again. All I can think about is airplanes.”

He said, “Maybe you’re still learning to fly.”

I thought this was about the craziest thing I ever heard. I was a WASP. The most famous female pilot in the world had pinned my silver wings on my uniform. I was ferrying planes for the military.

He said, “What time’s bed check?”

“Ten o’clock.”

He nodded. He took my hand. He said, “Come on.” I turned back to wave at Sally and the others, and Gus and Vince were still staring at Butch, only now they were staring at our hands.

The Indians lived on the far side of the base, nearest the swamp, over by Highway 18, which ran right past Camp Davis on the other side of the marsh, and an old runway that was now covered in moss. They slept in large brown wood-frame tents, and the ground around them was muddy from the rain that seemed to come in off the ocean every day till you were surprised you didn’t find moss and mildew growing all over yourself.

I said, “Why do they keep you over here?”

He led me past the tents to a small square building with lights in the windows. He pushed the door open and said, “Go on in.”

Inside there was just one room and it was warm and bright. Half a dozen men sat in front of a fireplace, playing cards, smoking cigarettes. One of them was playing the guitar and another was singing. They didn’t look like Cherokee, and I guessed these were the Lumbee—light skin, brown-black hair, dark eyes—and maybe some of the Navajo and Comanche too. The Lumbee were supposed to come from the Croatan Indians and the white men of the Lost Colony, which was a group of the first English settlers that came to America and vanished one winter. No one ever knew what happened to them.

The Indians hollered to Butch as we came in, and nodded at me. The air was friendly and easy. I wanted to sit down and talk to these men. They reminded me of home, of Granny, who was part Cherokee, and Beachard, who looked the most Cherokee of any of Mama’s children.

Butch’s steel guitar was propped in a corner. He picked it up, and then we sat down away from the fireplace and the card players and the man playing guitar. There were three chairs, and Butch set his steel guitar on one of them. He pulled off his jacket and rolled his shirtsleeves up over his elbows. I thought about the tattoo on his arm—a guitar with writing on the neck and flames shooting out of the pegbox and the words “The Bluesman,” written across it.

I said, “Are those the other code talkers?” I liked the way “code talkers” sounded. It made me think of the Indian message trees on Fair Mountain, of how the Cherokee used to bend the trees to mark their way and leave messages to each other in the ones that were hollowed out.

He said, “How did you hear about code talkers?”

I said, “Some of the girls here. They said you all might be rounded up to do code talking.”

“I guess
classified
don’t always mean ‘classified.’ ”

I said, “Oh, is it top secret? Like spies?”

He smiled, “Something like that.”

“What kind of code do you talk in?”

“Navajo. Comanche. Choctaw.” He ran his hands through his hair and pushed a piece of it behind his ear so it wouldn’t fall in his face. He looked at me. It was the kind of look that was hard to read. He looked like he was thinking things over.

I started getting nervous a little, the way I sometimes got around him. I felt the need to fill all the spaces when I was with him.

I said, “Code talking sounds important.”

He said, “It is.”

I said, “I heard each code talker’s assigned an officer and that officer has to protect them.” Sally told me that the officer had orders to shoot his code talker if the enemy tried to capture them.

Butch said, “You know a lot.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. He leaned forward in his chair, arms resting on his legs. “The important thing’s protecting the code, not the man talking it.”

I looked around at the other Indians. “They look young.”

“Most of them never been off their reservation till now.” He picked up his guitar again and started tuning it. I thought he always wanted to be doing something with his hands—rolling a cigarette, playing guitar. “Navajo’s the rarest language on earth. It’s never been written down. All these years, they have to memorize it and then pass it down and around. Like a song. Like the way you know it first, before you write it. And the way it’s hard to write down sometimes because it’s just in you.”

“I thought you were Choctaw.”

“Half-Choctaw. Half-Creole. But I learned the Indian languages a long time ago. I speak Cajun, Creole, French, Patois, Gullah, Geechee. I figure the more words you know the better.” He strummed the guitar. “At the start of the world there were words. The first word was
light
. The second word was
earth
. Then
water
. Then
air
.” He said the word for each one in Navajo, and it sounded strange to me, like he was making it up. “The Navajo believe the universe was created by words.”

I believed this because, when it got down to it, words were just about my favorite thing and you didn’t have much if you didn’t have words. I thought that maybe they were the most powerful thing on earth. Sometimes they could lift you up like you’d just been saved, and sometimes they cut through you till you couldn’t breathe. I loved the feeling when you found just the right one after you’d been looking for it for a while. I hated the feeling when you couldn’t catch them like you wanted to or when someone used them against you.

Butch said, “Navajo’s one of the hidden languages of the world. In Navajo there’s no such thing as choosing the wrong word. You have to say it right or you end up saying something else.”

Then he started to sing, low and growling. It was a bluesy song, but not deep-down-in-the-gutter bluesy like the ones I’d heard him play back up in Alluvial. This one was yearning and lonely and raw right down to the bone. His voice was deeper, scratchier, more whiskey-and-cigarettes than the last time I’d heard him sing. It seemed older and had more shades of something in it—a kind of aching, a kind of heartbreak.

I thought, Something’s happened to you, Butch Dawkins, since I seen you last.

I wanted to know what it was—if it was a person or maybe some sort of misfortune or tragedy—that had changed him. I wanted to climb inside that song right now and try to heal the heartbreak.

After he was done singing, I tried to think of something to say. He might wonder why he was sharing this song with me when all I did was sit there and stare at him and not have anything smart to mention about it.

I thought about talking to him about burdens and scars and the things we carry around with us in this life. The more things that happened to me, the more I thought it was like carrying a suitcase—you kept adding things to it, like your mama dying and your daddy going away, heartbreak over your husband, heartbreak over a boy that died. You just started adding these things to your suitcase until the case got heavier. You still had to carry it around wherever you went, and even if you set it down for a while you still had to pick it up again because it belonged to you and so did everything inside it.

I thought of saying all this, and then I just said, “What’s that song called?”

He smiled, a slow and lazy grin. I liked what it did to his face, shifting the angles, making them softer. Butch said, “It don’t have a name yet. I’m thinking of calling it ‘The Bluesman.’”

“Like your tattoo?”

He laughed and then nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I know I want to write a song called ‘The Bluesman’ someday, but I’m still waiting for the right one. Nothing I ever wrote’s been good enough.”

I said, “You never told me how you got your tattoo.”

He sat back in his chair, strumming the guitar a little more so that I knew he was about to start another song. He said, “I know.”

I went to bed that night hearing his song in my head. Just the memory of it made me sink a little deeper into the bed, my heart weighing down my body till I thought I might break through the mattress and fall onto the floor. I thought about a language that couldn’t be written. I thought about all the words on this earth that I didn’t know. I wondered if learning them would mean being able to write more songs, better songs.

Then I tried to remember the words that began the world. I said “light,” “earth,” “water,” “air” to myself one by one, first in English, then in Navajo, until I fell asleep.