Flying Jenny

by Theasa Tuohy

  Jenny suddenly realized she had to pay more attention to what she was doing. She’d gotten so engrossed in her thoughts that she’d almost failed to climb high enough for her next loop. Altitude was critical in this maneuver. One needed plenty of room going into a dive to make any necessary corrections. And, of course, you needed speed to get the loop going.

  She climbed a bit higher, and grinned. She hadn’t been so engrossed that she’d failed to notice that each time they came out of a hurtling dive headed straight for the ground, Laura had turned in her seat and given Jenny a thumbs-up as they began to climb again. Maybe I’m giving her the bug after all, Jenny thought. And maybe she’s given me one as well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  PONDERING JENNY

  The buzzing plane had attracted attention. Laura could look over its side and see activity on the field. Each time Jenny made a swooping pass, Laura strained to see if Roy had arrived. He promised last night he’d be here. But what would she do when he did? She ached to run and throw herself in his arms, even though he’d been stern in warning her against such a thing.

  “We want to keep this you-and-me thing quiet,” he’d said. “Jenny’s a prude. Thinks people shouldn’t be bedding down together before they’re married.”

  Laura had been too woozy with love and moonshine to argue about much of anything. Now she wondered what was the point. Nothing that she could see, except appeasing Jenny. But how silly was that? Although it would be nice to make friends with her; she was an interesting girl.

  Jenny had been unusually grumpy before they took off, which had made Laura nervous and giddy. She’d felt as though Jenny suspected something. But why care?

  She smiled thinking that for once she agreed with her mother. “That’s the way women should be, getting what they want and doing what they want to do,” Evelyn had said when e.e. cummings and other male poet friends griped of being overtaxed by the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven’s rapaciousness. Laura was happy that when she felt she’d found love, she had followed her feelings.

  She let her mind float in the same kind of weightless, circular pattern her body was moving in as the plane spun round and round in what she was now able to identify as a barrel roll. What was it about Jenny? What was her trouble? She appeared to be daring and adventuresome, risk-taking, but she couldn’t seem to free up her mind. Free was Evelyn’s favorite word.

  In a literature class in college, Laura had created havoc by declaring that she didn’t understand the central premise of The Scarlet Letter. When she had related the school incident later at home, her mother had said, “Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.”

  As they touched down on the small patch of grass and taxied up to the back of the courthouse, Laura could see Roy directing Jenny where to park. Jenny climbed down on her own, but Laura held out her arms for Roy to help her. As he did, he gave her a playful pat on the behind, saying out of the corner of his mouth, “Now behave yourself.”

  Jenny was too far away to have heard, but she nonetheless looked over and frowned. Laura couldn’t resist raising her right eyebrow in a what’s-it-to-you look.

  A small crowd had gathered, and spectators were staring out the windows of the back of the courthouse, as well as the nearby Indian Agency building. Laura had been told the locals called this Agency Hill.

  Roy pointed out the sign that Cheesy had helped him set up. It read, Rides 50c, Jumps $1, 4 p.m. Cheesy was now photographing it, along with a slim young man in overalls trying on a chute harness in anticipation of an afternoon jump. Roy squeezed Laura’s hand and walked over to his potential customer.

  Laura looked around and saw that there were several expensive cars parked haphazardly about the field—Packards, Pierce-Arrows, a Stutz Bearcat.

  “I told you,” she said, pointing them out to Jenny. “I bet they belong to Indians. They all have tons of money because they closed off the tribal rolls years ago, meaning there’s a huge pool of oil money to be split among a small group.”

  Jenny shook her head. “Always on the job, huh. Don’t you ever take a day off?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PAWHUSKA

  Laura walked back to the hotel, showered, and changed into a dress. She toyed with the idea of putting on her hat. She was in a happy mood and felt like celebrating the fact that she was in love. But she decided a hat would look silly here in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation, where the headgear seemed to veer toward headbands, deerskin caps, and cowboy hats. She met Cheesy in the hotel lobby and they set off to get a bit more information and take some pictures before going to Western Union to file.

  When they found the center of the little burg of a few thousand people, they discovered it was dominated by a sheer cliff that rose straight up off the main street. Atop that cliff sat the imposing Greek-columned white granite courthouse behind which Roy’s and Jenny’s airplanes were parked. Laura gasped.

  “Doesn’t look like such a steep drop when you approach it from the other direction,” Cheesy said with a dry laugh.

  To further emphasize the dominating aspect of the building, there were two flights of stairs leading straight up to it from the town. As the two stood gaping, a passing local informed Laura that there were 147 steps.

  “It’s a known fact,” she said, nodding her sunbonneted head toward Laura’s pad and pencil. “Folks have counted ’em.” The reporter made a note of the number and thanked the woman, thinking she would count them herself later. But she was more intrigued that even in this heat, a number of people on the streets wore colorful blankets, some around the waist, others draped over one shoulder or wrapped like a shawl.

  “Blankets?” she said with a puzzled look.

  “So?” Cheesy responded. “They’re Indians.”

  “Some of the patterns somehow look familiar. Maybe from a schoolbook or something. ”

  As they moved down the main street, both got a good laugh over the five-story redbrick Triangle Building. Several people on the street explained quite seriously that it was patterned after the Flatiron Building at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in New York.

  “You must be joking,” Laura blurted out to the first person who made the comparison, a short, rumpled-looking, middle-aged man wearing a large carpenter’s apron. “I’m from New York City and the Flatiron is an architectural beauty. It’s probably twenty or more stories high. But this one is a squat brick.”

  Laura was sorry as soon as she made the smart remark. The man, who introduced himself as Charles Maxwell, the owner of Classic Hardware, was clearly embarrassed. “See, it is a triangular piece of land here at Main and Kihekah Avenue just like in New York,” he said. Pawhuska’s version was frequently referred to in the local paper as a unique architectural masterpiece. The Osages knew it as the building of a hundred lawyers, all of who seemed to be wheeling and dealing with tribal oil leases.

  By way of apology, Cheesy had Maxwell pose for a photograph in front of the building with another passerby, an extremely tall Indian dressed in a buckskin jacket and beaded headband. He identified himself as Running Fast in Tall Grass. “But,” he said with a solemn smile, “several people call me Paul.”

  Before Cheesy could slam the first plate into his camera, a cluster of people gathered, obviously hoping to be included in the picture.

  This is how it happened that the photographer, who was well known for his gritty pictures of the underbelly of Gotham, including gangsters hiding behind their fedoras, transvestites in ball gowns, and bloody corpses not yet covered by the cursory sheet, had a field day taking pictures on the sidewalks of Pawhuska for the readers of New York.

  Laura trailed along as Cheesy spent an hour roaming the dusty downtown with its two-story buildings lined up along a broad, flat, treeless Main Street, and then, puffing under the weight of his camera equipment, climbed the many stairs to the town’s looming attraction on the high hill. All the while a crowd followed, as though Cheesy were the Pied Piper.
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br />   He took shots of cowboys in ten-gallon hats, ladies in the very latest fashions, and Indians in an awesome assortment of just about everything, a stunning variety of dress. Indeed there were feathers, but also little pillbox caps, all manner of shirts and leather pants, and what seemed to be the running standard, soft moccasins. There was lots of spiked hair and, as always, blankets of many hues.

  Suddenly, one in particular worn by an elderly woman caught Laura’s eye. It had several borders of different colors around a series of children’s handprints on a solid field of beige.

  “Take a picture of that blanket,” she said in a flash of memory. “It looks almost like one my mother has on the floor at home.”

  Just as quickly, her attention was distracted by a tall, beautiful young woman in a white dress that appeared to be deerskin. “Look at that elaborate beadwork!”

  “Yep,” replied Cheesy, never one to waste words. “Let’s call the boss.”

  “Yeah,” Laura said with a worried frown. “He’s got to like this stuff. I can’t go home right now.”

  Once Laura got Barnes on the telephone, she was breathless. “Such an ordinary redbrick town, with wide streets. But the array of people and dress is unbelievable. The Indians don’t look like Indians, in loincloth or anything. And there are small dress shops selling expensive jewelry and frocks at outrageous prices. They say the Indians will pay anything, they have so much oil money. Except they have to buy on credit because the government thinks the Indians are incompetent and doles out cash a little at a time, or just pays the merchants when the bills come in. Doesn’t seem like a very sensible system.”

  “You think that’s your job now, writing editorials?” Barnes was yelling, as usual.

  “I was just commenting,” Laura replied stiffly. “You said you wanted only a little color from me that you’d fill in with the old clips from a year or so ago. You have all that about the feds investigating and sending in undercover agents and the grand jury and everything when so many Indians got killed by relatives and guardians. Somebody told me there were thirty-four suspected homicides in one year.”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers?” The phone vibrated with Barnes’s voice. “The ringleader finally got sent to Leavenworth a few months ago after a bunch of hung juries and mistrials.”

  “It’s still interesting . . .” Laura’s voice trailed off. No way to win with this lug.

  “Yeah? So, I’ll turn you over to rewrite. You can dictate what it felt like to fly upside down. And give ’em another piece to top off a resurrection of these old murders. But you better darn well make sure that tomorrow we have something more exciting than those barrel rolls. They’re not new anymore.”

  “Hey, Maxine,” Laura could hear Barnes shout at the switchboard, “transfer the kid to Mac!”

  When Laura and Cheesy got back to the hotel, they found the others having a light lunch in the dining room.

  Jenny and Roy were already sparring about whether she should make an appearance for the afternoon rides. Laura tried to catch Roy’s eye but he seemed focused on the spat with Jenny. Laura knew, anyway, that he was serious about not letting on that they were in love. She couldn’t envision how this was going to play out, but she trusted him to manage somehow. Besides, she would soon be back in New York, so theirs would need to be a long-distance, from-time-to-time affair. She had pangs that such an arrangement might be painful, but her mother and Aunt Edna had balanced many such loves. Edna and that major—what was his name?—who lived in Washington. Her mother had always said, “A lot of delightful poetry sprang from that liaison.”

  Laura decided not to fret about something she couldn’t control, so she ordered a barbeque sandwich. She’d gotten addicted to them at Jim’s. No such thing in New York that she knew of. Cheesy ordered grits and gravy, saying he had no idea what grits were.

  “I’m glad to come along, Roy,” Jenny was saying, “but you know I’m not planning to do any jumping or wing walking. That stuff is for someone else, not me. How about Laura?” She laughed and pointed at the reporter with her chin as she dug into her salad. “She took to the air this morning like an old pro, despite what seemed like a bit of a hangover.”

  Laura looked to Roy for his reaction.

  “Could be. I’ve mentioned it to her. You’re going to do it, aren’t you, kiddo?” He smiled at Laura, but then turned back to Jenny. “You have to at least be there. It’s good to have as many people around as possible. We want it to look like a crowd. Roscoe Turner said he’ll be in this evening to fly with us tomorrow.”

  Laura opened her mouth to reply, but Jenny’s response was quicker. “Oh boy,” she said, “if you talked to Roscoe, he must have told you how the women finished up in the derby today. They were due into Cleveland an hour or so ago, weren’t they?”

  The waiter arrived with Laura’s sandwich and Cheesy’s grits. He took one look and blurted, “Why don’t they just say it’s breakfast mush?”

  Roy grinned at Jenny, and Laura bit down hard on a french fry. Darn her. Yet he was the one who seemed obsessed with Jenny, not the other way around. It was painful to Laura. Why couldn’t he pay more attention to her?

  “You were right all along,” Roy said to Jenny. “Your pal Louise Thaden won the derby. Landed first—and with the winning time—in front of thousands of screaming, adoring fans.”

  “Wow.” Jenny’s face lit up, awe in her voice. “I knew she would. Gutsy.”

  With nearly $25,000 in prize money at stake, nineteen pioneering women had flown out of Santa Monica’s Clover Field nine days earlier. After having endured local banquets and toast masters every evening at every stop, the endurance was not quite over for Louise Thaden. Before she could park her plane after landing, she was mobbed by hundreds pouring out of the stands and had to shut off her engine for fear of harming someone. Then an official greeter encircled her neck with a wreath of red roses, thorns and all. A soft-spoken, unassuming young woman of twenty-three, who initially took a job selling airplanes to get flying lessons, Louise had diplomatically suggested her open-cockpit Travel Air was the real winner and asked that the wreath be placed around its propeller.

  Louise had dedicated her win to Marvel Crosson, who was killed when her own Travel Air crashed between Yuma and Phoenix, Arizona, on day two of the race. It was suspected that Marvel was overcome by carbon monoxide exhaust from the plane’s engine. Louise luckily had made the same discovery about her own plane on a test run and flew with a jerry-rigged system of hosing to dispel the fumes. The rest of the Travel Airs in the race were modified in the same way after Crosson’s crash.

  “What else did Roscoe say?” Jenny demanded.

  “Gladys O’Donnell was second and Amelia finished a distant third. Roscoe called her landing amateurish. She bounced all the way across the airport. Had to brake out of a ground loop before she was able to stop. Everyone was laughing, making snide remarks.”

  “Not surprising,” Jenny said. “That Vega is way too big and fast for her to handle. Poor Amelia. She’s too nice for all the stupid hoopla that surrounds her.”

  “Yeah,” Roy said. “She wouldn’t even have made third if Ruth Nichols hadn’t cracked up on the last leg this morning at the Columbus airport.”

  “Is Ruth all right?” Jenny nearly jumped up from her chair.

  “She’s fine, she’s fine. Roscoe said she crawled out unhurt. But a real shame. She was third place into the last day.” Roy lifted his eyebrows for emphasis before imparting the next bit of information. “All the ladies with transport licenses were way out in front. Phoebe Omlie was first in the lighter craft division.”

  “I get your drift.” Jenny could have pointed out to him that the first- and second-place winners were also flying in the open-cockpit planes that Jenny loved. Neither cooped up in an enclosed cabin that Earhart, or for that matter Roy, seemed to prefer. When Louise Thaden landed, she had jokingly referred to what she had just won as the Sunburn Derby. In an accumulated twenty hours and nineteen minutes
over nine days, she had logged some 2,700 miles of sun, wind, and rain in her face.

  “And Bobbi Trout had to make a dead-stick landing someplace in Indiana and busted a hole in an aileron.” Roy started laughing.

  “Hey, wait a min—” Laura tried to inject herself into the conversation without any luck. She wanted to tell them about the story she had written—before she’d left Cleveland to chase after Jenny—about Pancho Barnes landing on a car.

  “What’s so funny about Bobbi having an accident?” Jenny countered. “You have the strangest sense of humor.”

  “Just laughing at what Bobbi did next. You know how I admire these resourceful women. Those with spunk.”

  “So without the lecture, please. What did she do?”

  “Patched up the aileron’s hole with a tin can and some bailing wire and got back in the air.”

  “You know very well I plugged a hole in a gas tank once with a manicure orange stick,” Jenny retorted. “You thought that was pretty clever at the time.”

  “Aileron?” said Laura. “How do you spell it?” She put down her dripping sandwich and reached for a napkin and her notebook.

  “Trailing edge of a wing that you can flap up or down,” Jenny replied, pushing her salad away. “Gives you lift.” She turned and gave Laura a hard look. “You really never stop working.”

  “So, Bobbi didn’t come in the money this time,” Roy continued. “But she’s already talking about doing a refueling endurance flight within the next month or so.”

  “Swell,” Jenny said with a disdainful tone. “Sit in the air for a day and try to connect by hose with another plane to give you fuel? Ridiculous.”