by Jill Barnett
Stiles opened the car door for his mama, then leaned in as he closed it and said something to her that made her laugh. He walked around the car without a look at Red. He got in and started it up.
His mama turned and waved at him as they drove off down a long, lonely strip of blacktop. The highway was a good five miles to the west.
As he watched them shrink smaller and smaller, his mama’s bright red hair whipping in the wind from the speed of the V-8, he thought for just one second that she looked as if she belonged in that car.
His mama must have thought so, too, because they never saw her again.
“TOOT, TOOT, TOOTSIE, GOO’BYE”
His daddy sat them down a few nights later, when he knew for sure she’d run off. He said it was his fault. That he couldn’t live in a city like she wanted. He couldn’t breathe in a place where there were so many people stealing the air from your lungs.
He had been a towering, black-haired man with light blue eyes and ears that were too big for his head. He was so tall that he had to duck when he came into a room or he would bump his head on the doorjamb.
In Texas, men walked tall, but for as long as Red could remember his daddy walked with a slight stoop to his shoulders as if he were carrying the weight of all the wrong choices he’d made.
Dina Rae sent Red and Nettie a postcard from Dallas with a picture of an oil well on it. She signed it Love, Mama.
Their daddy got a fat yellow envelope from some fancy divorce attorney in Jackson.
His daddy wasn’t the same after that. He stayed in the old gas station with its chipped sign that swung back and forth, back and forth, waving good-bye to everything that might have been. He stayed there between the wood walls that seemed to turn suddenly gray like his hair had. And it was there, with that unending Texas sky above him, that he spent his days and his nights with his head hidden under the hoods of countless cars the way an ostrich hides its head in the sand.
Red and his sister came to accept the myth that their daddy never came to Red’s basketball games or to see Nettie in the school play because he had to work late on Jimmy Jessup’s delivery truck or Homer Wilbarger’s John Deere tractor.
Some nights Red would look at him, bent over their kitchen table and working on some engine part. Every once in a while his daddy’s eyes would go blank, as if he had gone someplace else, someplace hopeless. Later, he would stand at the sink in the kitchen for the longest time and scrub his hands so hard that by morning they would crack and bleed. He never could get that grease out from under his fingernails.
Two years to the day that she’d left, Red woke up and found his daddy slumped over a carburetor he’d taken apart the night before.
The doctor said his heart just gave out.
“No. It broke,” Red told him. “It just, plain broke.”
He quit school at fourteen and took over the station. Nettie married a nice boy named Louie Lee and they set up house in Vernon.
Red worked hard enough to pay the bank without much left over. He didn’t need much. But every once in a while, as he was walking inside the station door, wiping the grease off his hands with a rag he still kept in his back pocket, he would stop and look up at the Firestone Tire sign and wonder if his mama got where she wanted to go.
“DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS”
MAY, 1938
Charley Morrison looked down from the cockpit of the bright yellow Piper Cub for the hundredth time in the last two hours and searched for some kind of distinguishing mark on the land below.
A futile effort.
There was no mountain, not even a hill beneath the broad Texas sky. Just flat land with an occasional clump of green or a gray strip of road that didn’t look like any kind of highway, and came and went as often as a sailor. There was nothing below, and there had been nothing below for most of the afternoon, nothing but brick-red faceless land and mesquite the color of a biscuit.
Over the last half hour, a few scattered farms and a small town had appeared, but not a single building among any of them had a roof that looked sturdy enough to paint an airmark on it.
A group of five experienced pilots with a minimum of over two hundred flight hours had been hired by the federal government to airmap the U.S. It was their job to fly over the nation—sixteen thousand or so towns and cities—looking for rooftops where a mark would be visible from the air as a navigational aid for pilots.
Charley was one of the five.
At six foot one, Charley was tall enough to see easily from the cockpit of the small plane, although that height didn’t help much now, when there was nothing to airmark but tumbleweeds.
There was no choice but to turn back and head for the last marking spot between here—wherever here was—and Lubbock. Plainly speaking, nothing left to do but start all over again after wasting almost a full day flying around for nothing.
But airmarking was a job, and a good one, at a time when jobs were hard to find. A person was lucky to have a regular paycheck, even luckier to have a government check. Both were rare for a pilot in these pinched times when the economy had gone bad so fast and no one but the very wealthy had money for flying lessons and joyrides.
It had been a long and dismal nine years since the Stock Market had crashed and sent the country into a tailspin, one that left little prosperity and a lot of people who were hungry, homeless, and out of work.
Charley was one of those lucky five pilots who, for the last four months, had flown from state to state, city to city, town to town, mapping America from thousands of feet above the land.
Almost nine years ago to the week, another lucky pilot called Lindy had set down in Paris in the dead of night after flying alone for thirty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes across the unpredictable Atlantic. Who’d have thought then that man would have discovered a whole new wilderness, that he would have a new perspective of his place in the world—from the air high above it.
The five airmarking pilots covered different regions of the country. There was one in the North, three in the middle and one in the deep South. Charley was one of the three in the middle. Although today, it looked like this particular section of the middle was not the place to be. At least not in a plane.
It hadn’t been clear weather this morning, but high clouds seldom stopped a plane from taking off. By early afternoon, those clouds had changed into a heavy, gray sky, the kind that happens just before the weather turns real ugly.
Now the wind had picked up, too.
A savvy pilot understood that the air could change quicker than the weather; it happened that way often in the Midwest, especially in Oklahoma and Texas, where the weather was as wild and woolly as the region’s history.
The Cub dropped suddenly, slapped down from the sky by the mighty hand of the elements. Charley took the plane lower, downstairs, then scanned the skies all around. Off toward the south was a front of dark clouds, rolling in fast and looking like God on Judgment Day.
The temperature changed quickly. The air grew thicker, then cold. The sudden, dark storm looked massive, bearing down in a huge hurry. Flying got rougher and controlling the plane was more difficult. The weather tossed it up and down, up and down, until the Cub was flying so low you could almost see the whites of the cows’ eyes.
The plane bounced around like a rubber ball.
This way.
That way.
Then, a long straight strip of road appeared off to the left. A blacktop lifeline, wide enough for a landing. Charley gripped the stick in two hands and banked the plane, heading for that thread of blacktop.
A pilot learned quickly to sit evenly, so you could tell if you were banking at the right speed. You could literally feel the turn in your butt. Flying by the seat of your pants wasn’t just a quippy saying.
A crosscurrent hit hard. Feet on the rudder pedals, Charley fought to keep the stick steady, fought the air and the drafts that wanted to knock the plane around.
The road grew larger. The ground rose up as if i
t were swelling.
Closer . . .
Closer . . .
The Cub’s wheels hit it hard: a sharp thud and a rubbery screech. The plane bounced and wobbled, then rolled duck like down the road, heading straight for a small, clobbered-looking Texaco station.
The red star in the middle of the Texaco sign grew bigger and bigger. On the side of the building, painted in stark white and red letters was a huge advertisement for drinking Dr. Pepper at 10, 2, and 4.
Charley hit the brakes, which didn’t stop the plane, just made it roll slower.
A gust whipped the plane starboard.
Now it was headed straight for the gasoline pumps.
Whoa, baby, whoa . . . Come on . . .
A tall, lanky young fellow with a crop of bright red-orange hair stepped out from the shadow of the station building. He stood there as if his feet were frozen to the spot, but he was waving his arms like crazy.
The plane rolled to a stop about ten feet shy of those pumps. Charley revved the engine up a bit, turned the plane, and taxied into the lee of a ramshackle building that sat beneath a crippled-looking water tower with the thick line of trees growing behind it.
The tree line would give the plane some protection from the buffeting wind. The storm was moving in quickly, and the clouds were getting blacker and higher, looking as if they filled the whole sky.
A flick of the switches and the engine was off. The propeller slowed its spinning rotation until you could see the blades, then their outline, then the looped shape of each one.
Charley took a deep breath of sticky, storm-heavy air that tasted like wet hay and smelled like country.
The young man was all legs and reminded Charley of a greyhound, moving with that seemingly never-ending, limber-legged gait. He was stuffing a faded red rag in the back pocket of his old, grease-stained work coveralls. “I thought for sure you were going to hit those pumps and send us both to Kingdom Come.”
The two gas pumps were ten foot tall cylinders with round glass globes on top of them that looked as if they’d been cracked by BBs.
He had a smile as wide as the Texas horizon.
Charley jumped down to the ground with a thud.
Close up, he was just a kid, really. Maybe seventeen, give or take a year or so. His red hair and freckled face made him look young, despite his height.
But then it could have been his expression that made him look younger, the way he was looking at the plane with such awe.
He took a step closer and stuck out a big, freckled hand. “I’m Red Walker.”
Charley took his hand, and shook it, then slipped off the goggles and the leather helmet. “Charley Morrison.”
“Christ on a crutch!” He frowned. “You’re a woman!” His hand went slack in hers. After a second he glanced down at their hands and pulled his back, then quickly shoved both deep in his pockets.
It amazed her that even with newspapers and air races, with cinema newsreels and the swiftly changing times, even with the fast-rising fame of women flyers, there were still a lot of people who never imagined a woman could fly an airplane.
Most of those people were men.
“Yes, I’m a woman and you’re a man. So now that we’ve settled that, how about you help me get this plane secured?”
A gust of wind hit the Cub and rocked it in a wild way that worried her. She scanned the area. Next to the station was a work garage that leaned eastward and had a wide wooden door held open with three-foot stacks of old black rubber tires. Inside was a rusted Ford pickup truck that had once been black. The building was high enough and the doors wide enough to take the Cub, if she angled it in right and could fit the wing around that truck bed.
She gave a nod in the direction of the clouds. “That storm’s coming right at us, and I don’t want it taking this plane and my income along with it.”
“Your income? You mean someone pays you to fly a plane?”
She turned away before she said something that she’d regret. Something about boys too wet behind the ears to understand that women had the same intelligence and drive that men did.
She took a second to stick her headgear inside the zipper of the flight suit, then felt she could face him and not say something ugly. “Ever heard of Amelia Earhart?”
He gave a snort of laughter. “You’re not Amelia Earhart. She disappeared last year.”
“I didn’t say I was. But she flew planes.”
“I know who she was and what she did. I’ve seen her picture in the newspaper.”
“I bet you have. I bet you look at all the pictures in the newspaper.”
He gave her the once over. “You from California?”
“No. Why?”
“You know what they say.”
“No, I’m not certain I do.”
“Well, that women from California do all kinds of stupid things.”
“What does that mean? That men from California never do anything stupid?”
He didn’t say anything, but looked away for a moment, his hands deep in his pockets, and he rocked on his heels.
“Maybe you meant that only people from California do stupid things?”
“Well. . .” He paused, then nodded. “I suppose so. They make movies there. It’s a made-up world in California. You know what I mean. This isn’t California. This is Texas.”
She crossed her arms and nodded slowly. “You know, I think I do understand what you’re saying. Because they make movies in California and movies aren’t real, people there do stupid things, yet people in Texas never do stupid things.”
He said nothing, just looked at her.
“So that would mean . . . logically speaking . . . that people everywhere outside of California never do stupid things, unless of course they make a movie. Then suddenly the cameras and actors arrive and the whole state goes off half-cocked doing all kinds of stupid things. Like letting women out of the kitchen.”
She had him now. “It’s really funny, the way we can be so small-minded. Like it comes to us naturally.” She tapped a finger on her temple. “From somewhere inside our heads. We don’t want to take risks. And it’s our willingness to accept the ordinary that keeps us from reaching for our dreams.”
Let him think about that. She turned away. She couldn’t stand people who were too afraid to be different. They tried to make the world more difficult for those who weren’t. It was a fact that if you chose the harder road, people threw boulders in your way instead of waving you on.
He still wasn’t talking, this kid who was throwing his own rocks.
The wind was blowing hard. She needed to push the plane into that garage. She was annoyed enough to push a whole train clear to Dallas. She placed one hand on the fuselage, then the other on the wing, near where they joined.
Luckily for Redneck Walker, she cast a quick glance over her shoulder before she gave it the old heave-ho.
He was standing in front of the left wing, staring at the Cub, lost in thought and oblivious to the fact that he was in the way.
“Look, that wind is whipping up like crazy. If you’re not going to help me, then get out of my way.”
“IT’S AN OLD SOUTHERN CUSTOM”
They barely made it inside the house before the hail fell. Balls of ice the size of your fist hammered the roof and hit the ground so hard they bounced up as if they were made by Firestone Rubber.
Red had his back to her. He stood at the kitchen sink washing his hands.
“My God . . .” she said. “Would you look at that hail?”
He didn’t need to look at the hail. He was born here, right under that water tower with the word Acme painted on it. He knew the Texas weather by the sound and the feel of it. If you lived here, you could even taste a storm before it hit. It tasted like the crops the local farmers were growing: wheat, alfalfa, hay, or maize. And the air always got thicker than potato soup.
He turned back around, leaning back on the counter and drying his hands on a dish towel.
She s
tood at the front window, her back to him, her hands braced palm-down on the sill. He took a gander at her figure, which from the way she was standing, you’d have to be blind to miss.
From this angle he could tell she was lush and curvy and all woman even in the zippered jumpsuit and clunky boots she wore. Too bad she hadn’t bent over the plane that way. He’d never have thought she was a man.
He tossed the towel aside, then cast a quick glance over his shoulder and out the back window. The storm clouds were getting so black that it grew darker inside and made the place look even more dreary than it was.
Red flipped on the black wall switch for the overhead light, hoping it might brighten the place up a bit. It was like hoping for the sun to rise in the kitchen sink. The single fixture hung off-center from the middle of the ceiling and the light from its cracked and dusty bowl of frosted glass dimmed and flickered when the power generator surged.
He stared up at it, hope gone.
There were black specks in the basin, dead bugs and flies he hadn’t noticed before. It spread bright light down on the kitchen table, where a dismantled carburetor, a set of pistons and barrels, a manifold, and a distributor were spread out like Sunday chicken dinner.
His pride made him suddenly want to make the whole place just disappear.
“No one could possibly fly in that mess of weather out there.” She still didn’t look at him, so he didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself.
Most people hereabouts believed that only the very old or the very crazy talked to themselves. He was nineteen, yet he’d been talking to himself for years.
The wind whistled down the walls, through the old window frames, and rattled the glass, then over the roof and through the eaves, making them shudder slightly. It was a loud, howling wind.
She straightened suddenly and turned around, leaned back against the windowsill and stared up at the ceiling as if she expected it to fall in.