by Tom Miller
I had a brief vision of Dar and me with a brood of daughters, all of them with dark, wavy hair and perpetual frowns, scolding me on some point of politics and then flying rings around me. I rather liked it. But not just yet.
“I came to fly,” I said.
Gertrude nodded, as if it would have been impossible for me to answer differently. “Then fly it again, unladen, at best speed, and show me your hottest landing.”
I did a one-step launch and might have touched two hundred miles per hour on my return leg. I blistered in for a direct approach and landed with a smart angle and tuck.
“No!” Gertrude screamed. “What was that?”
“It was an angle and—”
“A hot landing! Hot! Do you know what that means?”
“Like a flashy—”
“Hot! Hot landing field. Like I’m drawing a bead on you with a rifle. Quick to the ground! If I can hit you six times with a flintlock musket, that’s not hot. Do you know a flare and settle landing?”
“Of course.”
“Then show it to me! I have a machine gun. I’m trying to kill you. So fast, fast, fast to the ground!”
The flare and settle, which involved flipping upside down to speed up the approach, was my least favorite landing—too much potential for hitting the ground face-first if you didn’t flip back upright quickly enough. But I climbed to four hundred feet, pitched head-down, and dove. I could see Gertrude leveling her cane at me like it was a gun. At one hundred feet, I began frantically back-drawing my sigil for counterthrust. A few feet above the ground, I kicked upright, leveled out, and hit the ground hard enough to jostle my teeth.
“No!” Gertrude screamed. “That was an upside-down angle and tuck with a terrible touch. Who taught you that horror?”
I flushed with anger and humiliation. “My sister.”
The old woman softened, as if she understood me for the first time. “And she was twelve years old.”
“Umm—sixteen, I think.”
“Babies teaching babies to fly. It’s the worst kind of sin and one we’ll never stop repeating. But you’ve got to learn it right. You own a copy of Tintinalli’s Hovering Emergencies and Recovery?”
“Yes.”
“They shot a beautiful series of photographs with a high-speed camera. The body in each position of the flare and settle. Learn it. Know it cold for tomorrow. It’s a landing that can kill you or save your— oh, for heaven’s sake!”
Essie was running up to us. In her hand she had a piece of paper, rolled and tied with a hair ribbon, which she pressed into Gertrude’s hand.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Essie said.
“Sweet Jesus in his bedroom slippers, what did you . . .” Gertrude unrolled the paper to find a charming little hand-drawn map of Harvard Square, the buildings crosshatched with contrasting blue and black ink, the approaches labeled with Essie’s immaculate copperplate script.
“You made it pretty! What’d you do that for? You won’t have two fountain pens on the front lines. You won’t have time to blot it and wait for the ink to dry. Redo it in pencil. Make it ugly. Then land all three approaches.”
“Ma’am,” said Essie, “it’s the middle of rush hour. It’s going to be—”
“They’ll get out of the way for you. Go!”
Essie launched without further objection.
Gertrude returned her attention to me. “Tomorrow, nine o’clock, flare and settle. Until you learn it, you’re rated a Two. You don’t fly without my personal supervision.”
“That’s not how—”
“It’s how it works starting today. Now go stow your gear in your locker.”
“I don’t have a locker,” I said. “Most of the women felt—”
“I don’t care how they feel. I count eight souls evacuated in your life. That makes you the ranking member of the aerodrome. So, you’re assigned locker number one.”
“There’s going to be an uproar.”
“It won’t be any better in France.”
We walked into the aerodrome and paused outside the locker room.
“Man on deck!” Gertrude roared in her Sigilwoman First Class’s voice. “Two minutes! Make yourselves decent.”
There were a few shrieks and incredulous shouts, much laughter. A stream of women hurried out, but quite a few seemed willing to stand and protect their territory.
“Each morning, sing out and then two minutes later claim your locker,” said Gertrude. “I don’t care what you use it for—keep your chewing gum there—but use it every day.”
She glanced at her wrist chronometer. “They give you problems, take it to your senior instructor.”
Which was no solution at all.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I said. “But that’s Miss Rodgers and she’s likely to be the one instigating the problem.”
Gertrude scoffed. “Her aunt was a sniveling little pissant, so I can’t imagine the niece is much different. Learn to manage it.”
She reached into her workbag and handed me a key.
“First locker on the left. If some ladies have chosen to remain in a state of undress, don’t tell tales.”
She put her hand between my shoulder blades and pushed.
• • •
Dnt think I evr met yr Gertie, Mother wrote after a series of messages in which I detailed the morning’s events. She snds like crap if sh liks flar and settl for landng. Bad cmmndr who sends y to hot field in frst place.
My fellow ex-Threes agreed with the “crap” part. We convened in the dining hall and one tale of woe was worse than the next—all of us had been demoted and set different challenges to earn back our ranks.
“A lot of disrespectful old biddies,” Francine sniffed. “Treating us like children. Robert’s told him he’s fat and to learn a flare and settle out of a book. What kind of shit is that?”
“I thought Gertrude was great,” I said. “She told me—”
“You’re just excited because you get to see a lot of young ladies in their underwear,” Astrid said, laughing.
“I didn’t see anybody’s—”
“Knock it off,” said Jake.
She’d come back changed, too. After her preceptor had thrown her flight plan back in her face and called her “honey,” she’d taken Jake up to thirty-five thousand feet, where the old lady had demonstrated the Ostebee Loop, named for the famous aerialist who’d died during her third attempt at completing the maneuver.
“Your old lady didn’t really do it, though, right?” Tillie asked her. “At that altitude, it’s thirty, maybe forty seconds before you black out?”
“She says if I want my Three back, it’s my turn to do it next week,” Jake answered. And then said nothing else during the remainder of her lunch.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Astrid said to Jake. “Just because you don’t get to be queen bee and lord it over—”
“Shut up,” Jake said, and stood. “Weekes, walk me home.”
I’d never seen her so quiet. There was no companionable hand on my arm, no gossipy banter.
“You’ve been running your mouth about the Corps,” Jake said. “You and Essie.”
“Sure, but we’ve talked about that plenty of times since—”
“The girls are going to start believing that you can. They saw you this morning. And they’re not wrong—you’re better than some of the women R&E took last year. It’s just politics whether they commission a man.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“All sorts of girls who have no business in R&E are going to decide if you can do it, then they can, too. The ones who see it at the movies or those posters of Winged Victory at the library. ‘Why not a little adventure before Daddy and Mum marry me off?’ A story to tell at cocktail parties. Then they’ll get slaughtered.”
“No they wouldn’t.”
Jake looked down at her boots. “How many of your pals from back home have died in the war?” she asked.
“A
lot of my friends volunteered in April,” I offered. “They’re still in the States, finishing training or waiting for their boat over.”
“So, none of them, right?” Jake said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Even the Americans who are in France aren’t seeing much fighting. Gen. Pershing doesn’t want them in combat until he has enough men to launch a real offensive. Next summer, probably.”
“How nice for them. Let’s not risk American soldiers, but if we run a few hundred R&E fliers into the ground pulling out the French wounded, no harm done.”
She looked up at me. “Most of my friends volunteered in April, too. Congress declared war and Ruby, the queen bee of the aerodrome before me, said, ‘This is it, ladies!’ Nine of them joined R&E with her. They came back from Fort Putnam with their commissions, and I had the Harvard marching band waiting to strike up ‘Yankee Doodle.’ But even then, I realized that R&E must be getting desperate. Three of ours barely rated a Two. They had no business in a war zone. I should have spoken up. But they were my friends and they desperately wanted to go. Then last summer, in the course of a month, they ended up dead, dead, and missing. And then Ruby crashed.”
“That’s awful.”
“That’s what happens in a war! It happens to people you love. Do you know how Ruby got it? Somebody told you the story?”
“No.”
“She was my best friend. She was very successful when she went over, promoted twice, squadron leader. Then she took a group out to pick up casualties at night with bad coordinates—set down right in front of a German machine gun. All the women were hit, Ruby, too, but she picked up two wingmates and flew out as fast as she could. No time for stasis, she just scooped and ran.”
Jake coughed and steadied her voice.
“Halfway back, so much blood had soaked into her powder bag that it failed. She tried to set down in a British trench, got shot by a panicky sentry, and crashed. Both her passengers died on impact. The Tommies thought she must be dead, too, lying out there for hours, tangled up with the bodies. They didn’t go out to check until just before dawn. She’d shattered both legs and broken her back.”
“Jesus.”
Jake trudged on toward the ladies’ dorm. “Now imagine you’re the one who gets word first and you have to tell the rest of the girls. I know it’s petty of me—my burden is nothing compared to the ones who are actually over there—but I had to do it four times last summer. Weekes, I don’t believe in God and I was on my knees every night praying there wouldn’t be a fifth. So, don’t act so shocked that I don’t want you to go. Or Essie. Or whichever little Zeds those veterans sweet-talk into signing up.”
“They may not win too many hearts,” I said.
Jake shook her head. “Your heart’s easy to win. A girl just has to be mean to you. You and Danielle Hardin?”
“No, you can’t go around saying—”
“Everybody knows. I said you needed serious, Robert, but damn. You’d be safer in France than you are here. You so much as look at another woman, she’ll castrate you.”
• • •
“Man on deck!” I announced the next morning. “Two minutes, please!”
“Don’t you dare!” someone yelled back.
“Two minutes, please!” I repeated.
There was no recurrence of the previous day’s mass exodus, which seemed ominous. But there were fewer women in the locker room at this hour and they likely understood I wasn’t trying to cause mischief. After all, no one had been turned into a pillar of salt.
I debated giving them an extra minute, but decided that was a dangerous precedent.
“Coming in!” I called.
I walked in to a chorus of enraged shouts. I kept my head down and didn’t look at anything but my locker. Only ten feet to cover.
“Get out!”
“Pervert!”
“We’re calling the police!”
Several towels came flying my way. A rock clunked off a locker next to my head hard enough to leave a dent. I grabbed my regulator and harness and got out before anyone with a more accurate throwing arm had time to take aim.
Gertrude was on the landing field, sitting in a camp chair with a flannel jacket buttoned to her chin. She was eating a croissant.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I think the locker idea—”
“Sit,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
I took a knee beside her.
“You’ve studied the flare and settle,” Gertrude said. “What do you think?”
“I liked the pictures,” I said, trying to be diplomatic.
“The pictures?” She frowned. “Well, spit it out. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”
“My ma called it a crap landing and said it’s a bad commander who sends you to a hot landing field.”
Gertrude threw her head back and howled. “His mama! A corpswoman, I’ll wager—I probably trained her. You tell your mama that your war is going to be different from hers. She flew in Cuba? Or the Philippines?”
“Both,” I said.
“They didn’t use trench warfare there. Your mama had nice big landing fields well back from the fighting. Under those circumstances, a flare and settle is reckless. But for you, it’s essential.”
Gertrude ate the last bit of croissant and brushed the crumbs from her jacket.
“Imagine how a busy morning plays out in France,” she said. “They ring the bell for a hundred wounded at the forward aid station and your squadron of twelve women goes to evacuate it. You have a ten-foot-by-ten-foot landing field and the Germans are shooting at incoming fliers. How many women will you land at a time?”
“One,” I said. “She’s got to approach fast and hard so she doesn’t get hit.”
“Exactly. And how long does it take to get to the ground doing a tuck and angle, like you favor? We’ll say the gunfire has driven you up to a thousand feet.”
“A minute or two.”
“Twelve of you. The last woman in line is circling twenty minutes before she ever sets down. The women coming back from the hospital run right into the caboose and now they’re circling, too, before they can make a second run. That’s unforgivable. With a flare and settle, you can bring a flier in at full speed at one hundred feet and have her on the ground in fifteen seconds. Space your fliers properly and the whole squadron runs continuously—a hundred and ninety souls evacuated each hour instead of forty. If you fail to learn it, wounded who were supposed to live will die.”
“Okay,” I said.
Gertrude picked up a rag doll outfitted with a harness and used it to demonstrate each step.
“From level flight, you perform a half somersault.”
She flipped the doll upside down, so that it was flying upside down and backward.
“You draw sigils for full thrust until you’ve killed your forward momentum.”
She stopped the doll, still facing head-down.
“Now, you never want to be hanging motionless in the air, so at the same time you’re braking, you’re also accelerating toward the ground. At the last moment, you flare back upright, get your legs up, draw for maximum upward thrust, and settle to a stop right above the earth.”
She flipped the doll right-side up, lifted its legs into an L shape, and halted it an inch above the ground. “It’s a very simple maneuver.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But if you take a half second too long to stop, you dig your own grave.”
“It saves me digging it for you. We’ll practice your timing tomorrow. Bring a towel, a change of clothing, your warmest coat, and your lightest skysuit.”
• • •
“Man on deck!” I shouted the following morning. “Two minutes.”
I didn’t hear a sound from inside the locker room. Had the novices been so offended they were simply changing at home?
When the time was up, I found the door blocked by six women standing with their arms linked.
“Absolutely not,” one of them said. “This is a gross invas
ion. If you touch any of us, that’s battery.”
“I’ll be thirty seconds,” I said. “I’m not undressing, I just want my equipment.”
“We’ll get it for you. Give us your key.”
Lord knew what kind of mischief they might cause if they got hold of my regulator.
“It wasn’t my decision, I—”
“Let him in,” said Essie, who’d come up behind me.
“They taught you how to strip for men at that fancy finishing school of yours?” one of the young ladies jeered.
Essie appeared unflustered. “He has a right to be here, too.”
“He has no right. It’s disgusting.”
“Then let me fetch his gear,” Essie suggested.
They were willing to yield for that.
Essie collected my regulator and we walked down to the field. She was wearing a black pea coat over her winter-weight skysuit and had a lifting harness slung over her shoulder.
“They’re terrible,” Essie said. “Doing that to you. And I hate . . .” She swallowed. “I hate that last year I would have agreed with them.”
Gertrude was waiting for us on the riverbank. The morning’s exercise was straightforward enough: I would put on a pair of ankle shackles connected to a long line and Essie would haul me up to one hundred feet, with me dangling upside down. Then she would cut me loose and I would drop headfirst toward the river, just like in a flare and settle. All I had to do was flip upright, get my legs up into an L position, and brake as hard as I could.
“Time it right and you’ll just get your toes wet,” Gertrude said. “Time it wrong and the water temperature this morning is a balmy sixty-seven degrees. Professor Brock has a life preserver and will be spotting.”
I sat and removed my boots. Brock fitted the shackles around my ankles.
“Robert, tuck your chin and put your arms across your chest on the launch,” Brock reminded me. “Engage your glyph before Essie drops you—just minimal force—so that you have directional control when you start to fall. Both of you, be very, very careful.”
Essie launched gently, pulling me behind her upside down. The blood rushed to my head. At a hundred feet, Essie came to a stop. I drew my hover sigil to initiate thrust. Essie counted down from three and pulled the release strap. The shackles popped open and I fell away.