by Theasa Tuohy
“Oh my.” Laura was blinking her eyes as though they stung. “Is that something akin to bathtub gin?”
Everyone laughed, including Laura.
“We Indians call it firewater,” Clem said.
“So what are the stories about St. Louis?” Laura asked. “I think my mother was from there.”
“You think?” Jenny said. “What in the world can you mean?”
Jim reached over her to set another full pitcher of beer on the table. “Anything else you folks needs?” he asked. “We got us some peach cobbler that’s powerful good. Wife made it jist this morning.”
“Anybody?” Roy asked, looking around the table to heads shaking no.
Jenny noticed that as Laura shook her head to the pie offer, she took another tentative sniff, then sip, of the corn liquor. Oh boy, Jenny thought, what next? She’s not sure where her mother is from; she’s never drunk corn liquor. We are indeed headed for a bumpy ride. I hope, at least, it means she’s working up her courage to fly. Perhaps I should find out more about her. What a bundle of contradictions she is. So curious and engaged about everything and at the same time she somehow seems like a lost waif.
“Okay, everybody,” Roy spoke up, “I haven’t had a chance to give you a report. I spoke to Roscoe Turner and he can’t join us tomorrow because he’s got an upcoming event in Cleveland. But he’ll definitely be with us the following day.”
“What’ll we do tomorrow?” Jenny asked. “Monday isn’t a very good day for a show, anyway. That silly lion would have helped draw a crowd.”
“Maybe you should go up in the morning and just buzz around. Might draw some attention, then we can plan to offer rides in the afternoon. Or take up anyone wanting to jump.”
“Count me out on that,” Jenny said. “Anyway, you’d have to be the one to take them up. You have a cabin to jump from. No way to do that from my plane.”
“Isn’t that how you got in trouble in the first place?” Laura asked. “Parachute jumping?”
“That was a freak accident,” Roy replied. “You’ll see, as soon as they autopsy that woman they’ll probably find she had a heart attack.”
“Who wouldn’t,” Laura shot back, “from jumping out of an airplane?”
“You should try it,” Roy said with a sly smile. “It’s very soothing to survey the landscape as you float down to earth like a swallow.”
Oh lordy, Jenny thought, he’s trying to seduce her every way from Sunday. I’m not sure she’s got the moral compass to handle this. But not my problem—she’s the one who’s chosen to run around on her own and break every convention known to polite society.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CAT AND MOUSE
Laura was in her hotel room later that night thinking about preparing for bed, but kept putting it off in an anticipation she didn’t quite understand. She was tipsy, she knew, maybe more than just a little. She wasn’t a drinker, wasn’t used to being with a group. At work, since she was the only woman other than the switchboard operators, she didn’t do much palling around.
At Barnard, she had gotten on the subway and gone straight home after classes. Except for the one boy she’d met at the college mixer, she had no friends there. She and the boy, Ben, would meet for coffee once in a while at a place on Broadway near the Barnard/Columbia campuses. He was a senior literature student and she would sometimes show him her class essays. But that was it—the extent of what one might call her intimate relationships with men.
She changed into a clean chemise from the white flying shirt she’d been wearing all day and was running a comb through her hair when she heard a faint rap at the door.
“Who is it?” she called, but she knew. No answer, then the faint rap again.
She opened the door to see Roy, his arm extended high, leaning on the frame, a big smile on his face. Still dressed in his flying togs, his tall shiny boots, but he had changed to a red checked scarf at his throat. “Just a quick hello,” he said. “Wanted to make sure you’re all right. Can I come in? Not discreet to disturb people out here in the hall.”
Laura quickly nodded, although discretion was not big in her vocabulary, not a concept with which she was very familiar. The few times she’d heard her mother mention the word, it was always with a hearty laugh. “Being discreet was coined by and only observed by the petty bourgeoisie.” Even though her mother was fairly fluent in French and spoke German like a native, she took great pride, and thus the big laugh, in pronouncing petite as petty.
“We had a good little talk here this afternoon about flying, parachuting, etcetera,” Roy said, once he was in her room with the door closed. “Just thought we could follow up on that. Now that I’ve completely dispelled your fears, I’d like to see you take a jump.”
“I remember,” she replied. She also remembered her cheeks getting warm, the kisses he’d given her at the end of that little talk, as he called it. While the others were waiting in the downstairs dining room, he had stopped by “just to check,” he’d said, “that you’ve settled in all right.” Laura had finally disentangled herself. “The others must be wondering where we are,” she’d said, pulling away from him. She knew Jenny would disapprove, and she’d been right. Jenny had glared at them when they’d walked into the dining room. Try as she might, Laura couldn’t understand what she’d begun to call in her mind Jenny’s Rules. She had roughly pulled Laura aside yesterday to tell her that Roy was married. The boy from Columbia, Ben, had kissed her, once or twice, as he was waiting to see her off on the subway from one of their rare meetings, but that was nothing like Roy’s kisses.
Roy took a flask from his hip and a package of Camel cigarettes from his shirt pocket and put them down on the writing desk in her small standard-issue room. “If you’ve got a couple of water glasses,” he said, “we’re in business.”
As Laura indicated two glasses on the top of the bureau, she fingered the gold key to her childhood diary on the chain around her neck. She had copied some of Aunt Edna’s poems into the journal when she was quite young, attempting to understand the structure of poetry and the nature of love. But by the time she’d grown to her teen years, she had given up pondering where love could be or what it might mean.
Looking at Roy in his shiny boots and his rakish mustache, Laura smiled. She felt as though she’d found a home. Lines of Aunt Edna’s danced from the pages of her journal: What lips my lips have kissed / Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave / Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave.
Laura was way out of her depth here, and perhaps normally she would have been tough-minded and self-protective enough to realize it. But moonshine and moonlight had taken their toll.
CHAPTER THIRTY
FLYING INTO THE WIND
When Jenny arrived the next morning at the grassy area behind the courthouse where she and Roy had left their planes, she found Cheesy and Laura already there. And, thank heavens, Laura seemed totally prepared to fly. She looks a bit green around the gills, though, Jenny decided. I’d better put her in the front cockpit today so I can keep a better eye on her. If she starts to throw up or do something silly, I want to know about it.
Jenny went about checking over her plane—looking for rips, kicking the tires—not much in a mood to make conversation. But Laura seemed strangely different—giddy and talkative. She’s truly weird. Not knowing where her mother is from. What in the devil could that mean? I should find out. It’s too intriguing to pass up. She supressed a grin—now I’ll be the nosy one.
“I’ve heard some strange things about this town,” Laura launched in without seeming to notice Jenny’s pensive mood. The reporter’s manner was hyper, almost frenetic. “Some interesting stories for such a small, dusty place. So much oil money. The Indians here have the highest income per capita of any place in the world, leading to all sorts of murders.”
“Oh really?” was Jenny’s non-reply, as she bent under the fuselage.
“Yes. Clem explained yesterday about the headrights thing for the Osage
, and the people killed for them. To get control of the money, say from a wife or her mother who would inherit.”
“I think that’s an old story, Laura. It was in the papers several years ago when they had a grand jury investigation.”
“Old or not, it’s awful,” Laura snapped. “In one family alone, first one sister was shot, then another sister and her husband were blown up in their home, then their mother was poisoned at her own dinner table by a son-in-law.” Getting to the end of that litany nearly ran Laura out of breath. She took a gulp, and went on. “All so he could get control of the headrights of his wife’s dead relatives. The feds sent in undercover agents as salesmen, cattle buyers, because town officials were so corrupt. The Indians couldn’t even control their own money, they had to have minders.” Laura was totally out of breath, but looked at Jenny with a mystifying grin of expectation. Jenny had no way of knowing this was the grin she usually reserved for Barnes when she thought she was on to something big.
“Yeah, fine,” Jenny cut in. “We have a show to do today. You think you’re up to it? You seem a little peaked.”
Laura looked at Cheesy with a slight headshake and a familiar shrug passed between them: Not the first time we’ve had a story idea shot down because the editor hasn’t the brains to recognize a good yarn when it’s dropped in his lap.
“Roy said I can go up with him at some point,” Cheesy chimed in, “to get some shots of you gals with your stunts.”
“We’ll see when the fellas get here,” Jenny said. “Since John and Clem decided to stay another day, they had to call their offices.”
Jenny pulled her cloth helmet from the front pocket of her jodhpurs, gave a lift of her chin to indicate that Laura do the same, and hoisted herself onto the wing. As she lifted her leg over into the back cockpit, she suppressed a grin, knowing that it was harder to get into the forward hole. Then she watched Laura struggle to follow her lead. Cheesy finally had to put down his camera equipment and help the reporter. Jenny continued to grin as she pulled down her goggles and turned over the motor. I’m being simply malicious, she chided herself. What about that woman brings out the worst in me? Am I somehow jealous, as Roy suggested? But of what?
Cheesy finally got Laura settled in, then ran around to the front of the plane to crank the propeller. Jenny had to yell out to remind him to remove the chocks. As she gave him a salute of thanks, she thought that at least these New Yorkers were good for something.
Once they got in the air, Jenny relaxed. Flying was the easy part. Whether she was rolling the plane over and over in the air, or doing inside loops, it felt as though that was the way things were meant to be—natural—she didn’t have to think about it.
Louise Thaden had spoken to her a few months ago about what a thrill it was to skim along very close to the ground. “If you’re at a high altitude,” she’d said, “you have no feeling of how fast you’re going.” But Jenny had countered that ground-hugging was for racecar drivers. For her, just floating along, rolling in the sky, watching the creampuff clouds going by was wonderful. She didn’t understand why many of her flying friends were so hell-bent on records. Shortly after that conversation, Louise had set a women’s record of 156 miles an hour, skimming only a hundred feet off the ground. Talk about feeling like you’re in a racecar! That was Louise’s third record: solo endurance, altitude, and speed.
Jenny came out of a series of barrel rolls and noticed that Laura was still upright and seemed to be okay. Jenny had completely forgotten for a moment about her passenger as they swirled around. Roy was trying to use the reporter as some kind of goad. But Laura was the one who was going to get burned, Jenny was sure of it. She’d tried to warn the girl, telling her he was married, yet it didn’t seem to have worked. Roy was a womanizer, always had been. How could Laura not see that? She must be terribly naïve despite all her pushiness. And heaven knows, Jenny’s real loyalty was to Roy. He had taken her on as a student as a favor to John. No one else wanted to fool with trying to teach a young girl how to fly. Now Roy seemed to feel she wasn’t repaying his faith in her. But what was it he wanted? She had no stomach for those endurance things. As for the derby race from San Diego, she wasn’t about to stay out there for months, tuning up and trying out some new plane in preparation. She wanted to be home with her husband. Her parents were already beside themselves with what they saw as the danger and uncouthness of it all. Besides, Roy was some kind of glory hound—not a good idea to pin one’s hopes on any of his grandiose schemes.
Jenny gunned her engine, pulled back on the stick, and started a steep climb, preparing for a series of inside loops. She might let the number she would do depend on how Laura was faring. It was possible that loops, with their steep climbs and sharp falls, could make her passenger dizzy or even pass out, especially since she seemed to be suffering from a hangover.
These maneuvers, of course, carried nothing of the danger of the outside loops that Roy mastered, but still . . . If she kept perfecting them, would that satisfy him? Was there something really wrong with her that she didn’t want to, as Roy kept saying, take your natural God-given gift and get out there and show the world what you can do?
Jenny got to the top of the arc that was going to be the starting place for her first loop, checked her altimeter, cut back on her throttle, swung the little ship slightly side to side as she did a quick check of each rudder, and dropped the plane into a deep dive. “Hang on!” she screamed into the wind, her white silk scarf flying out behind. Watching her altimeter closely, Jenny began pulling back slightly on the throttle as they neared one thousand feet. She wanted to get close enough to the ground to give any spectators a thrill, but didn’t want to give her passenger a heart attack. The landscape below stood out in sharp relief. It was hilly country compared to the flat, orderly plains of the Oklahoma she was used to, with its farms and fields laid out in precise rows. At five hundred feet she could see that Clem had arrived, could glimpse the color of his suspenders, so she pulled out of the dive and started the climb back up. As they rose into the cloudless blue, Laura turned toward Jenny, a big smile on her face. Jenny couldn’t hear the words, but could read Laura’s lips. Coney Island.
Jenny grinned back. She’s got what it takes after all! I wonder what Roy could have said on their short flight here yesterday to get her over her fear. But he’s right, she is a spunky girl. That’s what all the newspaper stories had been saying about the women in the derby: they had guts. Actually, they weren’t all saying that. After Marvel Crosson’s crash and death on the second day, a lot of editorials screamed that women had no place in the air. That was annoying nonsense. But as Roy and Mark Snyder kept pointing out to her, the public didn’t really trust airplanes. If God had meant men to fly, he would have given them wings. How many times had she gritted her teeth when hearing that! Perhaps it is up to those of us who believe in flying to get out and do our darndest to advance it. I guess that’s Roy’s problem with me—he thinks I’m shirking my responsibility.
John doesn’t seem to care one way or the other. Care is the wrong word, she decided. He’s just easy, that’s it. Whatever I want to do seems fine with him. But Laura thinks it’s strange that I’m married. She seems to do whatever she wants without asking anyone. Hard to understand. How can a woman just go off on her own? Being a reporter and traveling around all over is a man’s job. She really does have spunk. Does that mean she was improperly brought up, or is it just doing what she wants to do? Though I wouldn’t be flying, Jenny reminded herself, if it weren’t for John. He rescued me from a pretty ordinary life. In fact, all the women fliers I know are married, or have rich fathers—like Ruth Nichols and Pancho Barnes. Hmm, she thought—Amelia has a rich publicist.
As she throttled back preparing for her second dive from the top of the loop, Jenny smiled. She always smiled thinking of John. After her parents had objected to her marriage—heck, they had objected to her even dating him—John had met with her father for a heart-to-heart talk. John then took the des
ign job with Cord auto and soon switched his enthusiasm from airplanes to cars. And the wedding was planned. That’s funny, Jenny thought, she’d never quite put that together with John’s growing up. But that’s exactly what he’d been saying to Roy yesterday: that all his barnstorming around was no longer an adult thing to be doing. Even Wiley Post, the oil-field roustabout with only one eye and a sixth-grade education, was making serious plans to advance flying; talking about a trip around the world. But what had Roy meant by his cryptic reference to jobs for rich oilmen and what they entailed? Sounded as though he’d somehow been burned. She would have to ask John. As the plane dropped off into its steep dive, she wondered about when she might want to have children. Damnation, it’s complicated.
What about the women in the derby? How did they manage? Louise, she knew, was married and planning children. Her husband had sold his innovative idea to make planes out of metal, so they were well fixed to support her flying. Amelia was a publicity hound, or at least her publicist, George Putnam, was. Pancho Barnes seemed like some kind of eccentric, always wearing pants wherever she went and smoking a black cigar. Newspapers had dubbed Ruth Nichols, a Wellesley graduate, as New York’s Flying Debutante. Jenny knew Ruth and she was a lovely, modest woman, even if she had designed and often wore an eye-catching purple jumpsuit for flying. She was the first woman ever to qualify to fly seaplanes and she held a transport license. There was a thought! Even though a lot of women held a pilot’s license—Jenny knew there were over one hundred just in the US alone—only three had transport licenses that allowed them to carry passengers or freight. Maybe she should think about that. She would be in heady company: Louise, Ruth, and Phoebe Omlie, whom Jenny had never met. All three of them in the derby. Again, guilt raised its head. Or was it envy? They were participating, taking part, Jenny wasn’t. She was just floating, drifting around in the sky. Even that pesky reporter threw herself into her job, ran out and grabbed life. Getting a transport license would be a challenge, hard work. But it would be nice to have people look up to you, and to hold something in your hands that proved you were the best.