Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  There wasn’t time to hunt up a box, so I’d opened the stagecoach boot, spread a saddle blanket over the bottom, and eased a couple of her babies in. They’d be safe there for the time being. Taffy hadn’t pretended to be happy about this, but I’d put on a pair of the gloves we wore to stretch barbed wire before I started so her protests were for naught. When I came back for more kittens she’d abandoned the field of battle. This made it easier to help myself to her progeny, but it worried me a little. Sometimes when you move newborns the mama cat will abandon the litter, and no amount of reasoning will make her admit she has any connection to the kittens you insist on saying belong to her. Keeping the poor abandoned mites going with cow’s milk and eyedroppers was an iffy business. When they’re that young cow’s milk is too much for their digestion, and cats are so hard to milk.

  Luckily my fears were laid to rest when Taffy and I crossed paths halfway between the coach and automobile, me with a kitten in each hand and her headed back to the Pierce-Arrow toting one of her relocated infants by the scruff of its tiny neck. It was a Sisyphean struggle, but she had the one mouth to my two hands so the numbers were on my side.

  When I heard the ranch house station wagon’s engine in the distance I’d just slipped the last furry little packet of protoplasm in and had propped the boot’s lid open with another blanket, leaving a crack plenty big enough for Taffy to squeeze in and out of unless she tried to negotiate it with a mouthful of kitten. By the time I hotfooted it to the door of the shed, the station wagon was just a question mark of dust working its way up the ranch’s long driveway. I didn’t want to derail Nina and Emily’s escape by getting myself tangled up with the other ladies, so I closed the shed door and applied an eye to a crack in it to see what would happen next.

  I remembered then my mother taking me shopping in Memphis once when I was a kid, for what I have no idea anymore. Someplace in our travels we’d come upon a kinetoscope, even then an old-timey contraption that motion picture technology had rendered obsolete, but not so obsolete that a storekeeper who’d invested in one was ready to retire it. You put your money in a slot on the side of the machine, pressed your eyes to the viewfinder, cranked, and, miracle of miracles, a little movie played, just for you. I’ve heard tell some kinetoscopes showed a lady peeling her clothes off, but I never saw one of those, particularly not while out shopping with my mother. The one I saw that day showed two cats in a miniature prizefighting ring wearing harnesses to lift their forequarters high enough to allow them to go at each other with tiny boxing gloves.

  That day at the ranch the scene that unspooled for me when I pressed an eye to the crack in the shed door began with Nina at Coyote’s window, gesturing vigorously. Emily joined her; they registered dismay at the fast-approaching automobile and ducked low behind the windowsill. As we watched from our separate vantage points, Max parked and hopped out to hold the passenger door open first on one side, then the other for the ladies fresh from Reno. Once all were under the overhang of the porch, Nina and Emily stood up again. Emily started to say something, but Nina held a finger to her lips and tilted her head, listening.

  From my angle across the barnyard I could see what they couldn’t, Max hurrying ahead to hold the front door for the ladies and closing it once the last had filtered through. A story above, Nina nodded when the door banged shut, then held up a hand—wait. I counted ten, same as she must have before raising the window sash and stepping through in her aviatrix ensemble of jodhpurs, white blouse, and high boots. Emily followed. She’d changed into more or less the same thing, aside from the equestrian boots. The first thing Emily put over the windowsill was her life insurance policy, the red varmints.

  “I wish Portia were here to see,” Emily said, looking petrified.

  Nina had bounded off to find the keeper of the keys while we waited in the car. I’d parked alongside the hangar that housed her airplane to take advantage of a skimpy slice of shade. There hadn’t had been time to clean up after the kittens before we left, so all three of us had piled into the sedan’s front seat, Emily in the middle with her knees swept right so I could work the stick shift. Nina held her arms above the windshield like a kid on a roller coaster as we beat it out of there, hitting just the high parts of the bumpy gravel drive. “We’re leaving this hot old world behind at last,” she said, cupping her hands to catch the wind. “You’ll love flying, Emily. Since it’s your maiden voyage, we won’t go high or stay up for long. The first time’s free, chickadee, but every time after that I’m going to have to charge you the going rate, a dollar. And I won’t charge you for the loan of the accessories this time, either.”

  “Oh? What accessories?” Emily asked.

  “Goggles and a parachute.”

  “Why do I need a parachute?”

  “In the unlikely event that you do not love flying, the quickest way down again is over the side.”

  Emily drew in a sharp breath. “I will not jump out of your airplane, I promise you.”

  “You say that now.” Then Nina laughed and tickled Emily’s knees. “I’m kidding, silly. You need a parachute in case we crash. Remind me to show you how it works before we take off.”

  After Nina got out, Emily didn’t slide to the opposite end of the front seat like I’d expected. We were still close enough for me to feel her body trembling. “We got here so much faster this time,” she said. “There was hardly any time to think.”

  “A stagecoach is picturesque, but it isn’t speedy,” I said. “You know, you don’t have to go up in Nina’s plane if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to. I asked her to take me up. But now that we’re here I can’t stop thinking about Will Rogers.”

  Will Rogers, in case that name is unfamiliar to you, was a celebrity before the war. In vaudeville first, then the movies. Also he wrote newspaper columns everybody and their dog read during the early years of the Depression. One of his sayings that always stuck with me was, “Everything’s funny as long as it’s happening to somebody else.” He’d died a few years earlier in a plane crash with the most famous pilot of the day aside from Charles Lindbergh.

  “You know what’s interesting about that Wiley Post,” I said.

  “Wiley Post? Who’s he?”

  If Emily wasn’t thinking about the accident, the last thing I wanted to do was bring it up. “Wiley Post was Will Rogers’s friend.”

  “Oh, wait. Yes, yes, yes. I’d forgotten his name for a minute there. He was the pilot who—” She looked relieved to have remembered that, then distressed when she remembered the connection. “Well? What’s interesting about Wiley Post? Other than how he died and took Will Rogers down with him?”

  “Oh,” I said, “He was blind in one eye. But he could fly planes better with one eye than most people could with two.”

  “Until, you know,” Emily said.

  “I don’t think the plane crashed because he was one-eyed. I think it was equipment failure. That’s the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, anytime.”

  Emily started trembling again. “Do you think the man with the keys to the hangar has gone home for lunch? If Nina can’t find him, we might as well give up and go back.”

  “That’s possible,” I said. It was also possible that Nina, if she couldn’t find the man she was looking for, would heave a rock through the airport office window and go through his desk to find the key. Or that she’d pick the hangar lock with a hairpin. If she’d had on her gun belt I wouldn’t have put it past her to dig around in her pocket, find a bullet, and blow the hangar’s lock off. Not being able to find the man who had the key to something didn’t seem like enough reason for Nina to call it a day.

  Emily took a firm two-handed grip on the stick-shift knob, as if she believed she’d slip to the floorboard and slide under the seat if she didn’t hold on to something tight. “I’m afraid of heights,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. “Sometimes I get dizzy just looking down a flight of stairs.”

  “Then why on earth did you ask N
ina to take you up in her airplane?” I asked.

  “Because I’m every bit as dull as Portia says I am,” she said, opening her eyes and giving me an earnest look. “I thought turning myself into the sort of person who flies around in airplanes would impress her. That’s all I want in life.”

  “To impress a thirteen-year-old child?”

  “Who is my daughter, yes. If I had that, I could die happy. Just talk to me until Nina’s back, all right?”

  “It messes with your depth perception when you’re blind in one eye,” I said. “Have you ever looked at photographs through a stereoscope?”

  “A stereoscope?” she repeated faintly.

  “Those wooden photo viewers with the long stick that has a rack at the end to hold two photographs of the same thing.”

  “Of course. My mother had one.”

  “Do you know how it works?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s based on human anatomy. The photos are taken from slightly different angles, the way each of our eyes sees everything we look at. When you just have the one eye, you don’t get the other point of view, so it’s harder to judge distances. Your perceptions flatten out.”

  Much later on, Emily had me recap that explanation for Nina’s edification. Once I’d wrapped up my lecture, Nina said, “Given how far apart your eyes are, Em, you ought to be able to see clear through to the other side of things. Like those characters in comic books, the ones with X-ray vision. What color underwear do I have on today?”

  Without missing a beat, Emily said, “You aren’t wearing any underwear.”

  Nina applauded delightedly. “We should work up a vaudeville act,” she said. “Take it on the road. Ward can drive our carnival wagon.”

  That day at the airport while Emily and I waited and wondered what had become of Nina, Emily closed both eyes, then cracked open the one closest to me. After studying me for a moment, she said, “This isn’t making you look flat, but it is making my head hurt.” She straightened up and closed one eye, then the other, staccato. “I see what you mean about the different angles, though. I’ll have to find my mother’s viewer. She had a box of photos of the San Francisco earthquake. You’d think she’d want to forget all about that, since we lived through it.”

  “You were alive then?”

  “I was. Barely. I was three, so I don’t really remember it. I looked at those photos so much growing up, though, that I’ve almost convinced myself I do. My mother always said the earthquake was really a blessing in disguise because it cleared out some awful slums.”

  “What happened to the people who had been living there?” I asked.

  “They found someplace else to live, I suppose.” Emily closed both eyes and collapsed against the seat. “Tell me another story, Ward. Quick.”

  It didn’t seem like the time or my place to take on the right or wrong of her mother’s assessment of those poor displaced unfortunates, particularly not when my own sainted mother might have said something pretty similar prior to becoming displaced herself. I was about to launch into the story about the kinetoscope and the two cats boxing when Nina rounded the corner of the hangar waving a ring of keys, the caretaker and the gangly kid trailing in her wake.

  “But how can that thing fly?” Emily asked. “It doesn’t have any wings.”

  The three of us stood in front of the hangar while the custodian and the gangly kid wheeled Nina’s plane out by straps they’d threaded through its undercarriage. Where the wings should have been the plane was squared away into something resembling shoulders. Aside from that it looked a little like one of those plywood cars kids build to race in soapbox derbies.

  “Watch,” Nina said. “You’ll love this.” She climbed onto a wheel alongside the cockpit—the way I got to the driver’s box of the stagecoach, I couldn’t help thinking—and lifted an L-shaped metal pin on the fuselage’s upper shoulder. Stepped off and stooped to free its twin down below. Trotted to the airplane’s tail, grabbed what I realized was the tip of a folded-away wing, and swung it forward until its inner edge was flush with the cockpit. Then Nina slid the pins into fittings inside the wings, twisted the upright of the pins flat, and battened them down with little leather straps that snapped into place. Very small leather straps, narrower than my belt, joined with the sort of snaps you sometimes found on a pair of trousers. I glanced at Emily. She was very pale.

  “Ta da!” Nina said. “Isn’t it brilliant? When it isn’t flying, its wings tuck against its body, the way a bird’s do. For storage. One day everybody is going to have one of these babies in their garage. Now I’ll just take care of the other wing and we’ll get started.”

  “I am never setting foot in that death trap,” Emily said.

  On the way back to the ranch, nobody spoke for a long time. Finally Nina said, “My plane is not a death trap.”

  “I can’t afford to risk my life, Nina. I have a child to think about.”

  “That’s no excuse. Shackleton had children. Admiral Perry had ten.”

  “They’re men.”

  “So? Why shouldn’t we live lives just as full of risk and thrilling adventure, too? You’re looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope, Emily. What we choose to do or not do should make our lives bigger, not smaller. Kids included.”

  Emily scowled. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have any children. You couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I know what having children is like. I am a child, after all. Was.”

  “And you’ll stay one until you have a child of your own,” Emily said.

  “Look at me, Emily.”

  Emily looked. So did I. Nina was eyeing her roommate the way a cobra looks at a mouse that’s about to become its lunch. I heard the scritch of gravel being kicked up from the highway shoulder, remembered I was driving, and looked back at the road again.

  “Also, for the record, it’s all right to be afraid for your own sake,” Nina said. “You don’t stop mattering once you give birth, you know. At least that’s what my mother always tells me.”

  “There’s no way to make you understand. We’ll have to agree to disagree.” Emily angled toward me, edging away from Nina and her messianic stare.

  “Come on, Em,” Nina said. She laid her left hand on Emily’s right shoulder, grasped Emily’s left hand in her right, and ratcheted her around to face her again. “Don’t be angry with me. I was scared when I first started flying, too.”

  In a small voice, Emily said, “I don’t believe you were ever scared.”

  “I was! Half to death. I used to be such an unbelievable chicken, just like you.”

  “I’m not a chicken. I’m—”

  “You are a chicken. Don’t try to deny it. But you won’t be once I’m done with you. If you come out the other side alive.”

  Emily said, “That’s not funny, Nina. What is wrong with you?”

  “So many things,” Nina said. “Every now and then I decide to make a list, but inevitably I get bored and tear it up. Why bother, honestly, when there are so many more mistakes out there, just itching to be made? You don’t learn as much from success as you do from failure, chickadee. That’s why I’m wise beyond my years. In case you’ve been wondering what my secret is.”

  Chapter Five

  We made it back to the ranch in time for dinner.

  “What are we having tonight?” Emily asked brightly when Sam appeared at her left elbow with a platter of food. “It smells wonderful.”

  “Chicken,” Sam said. “Ollie King.”

  “Chicken à la king,” Margaret said, “is just a fancy way of saying chicken in gravy.”

  “Speaking of kings, I’ve met a prince. On my husband’s yacht,” said Mary Louise, a tall, well-put-together guest with the oversized blue eyes, corn-silk hair, and broad shoulders of a Viking daughter of the Midwest. She could have spawned a football team, that one, and for all I know she may have after she left the ranch. She was doing time with u
s after walking down the Ziegfeld Follies staircase into the heart of an industrialist who manufactured leather goods. She’d been married to him long enough to see some of the world, but not quite long enough to learn tactful ways of slipping what she’d seen into a conversation.

  “Oh?” Margaret asked. “What was he prince of?”

  “Some country. He was trying to do business with my husband and he wasn’t interested in talking to me. He was older, frowned a lot, and wore this uniform to dinner that he’d stuck a lot of medals on because he would have looked look like a chauffeur otherwise. I guess he’d done something in the Great War.”

  Years later, when I was stationed in Europe during the next big one, I met a prince in an aid station. He was older, too, and frowning, though he was also bleeding like a stuck pig, so it hadn’t seemed appropriate to ask if he’d ever been on an American industrialist’s yacht.

  Sam asked Emily, “Want some of this Ollie King chicken?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I was coming along behind Sam with a basket of rolls, so I heard Nina lean close to Emily and whisper, “You’re eating chicken? Cannibal.” They exchanged a look, then stifled giggles. And just like that they were friends again.

  The evening meal at the ranch was a ladies-only affair, the cowboys playing waiter, Max in the kitchen dishing out what Margaret cooked, and Margaret seated at the table to make sure the meal and conversation progressed smoothly. Back in those days people were wild for themed parties. Most nights we could have gotten away, easy, with calling our dinners “Cowgirls and Contessas.” Guests who ambled around whistling “Home on the Range” with their thumbs hooked in their pockets showed up with their hands and faces clean but their boots and trousers militantly dusty, while the ones who could hardly wait to shed their dungarees at the end of the day dressed formally for dinner.

  “I’d rather find my own, thank you.” One of the contessa types, an effervescent older guest whose real name I can’t recall now, took Sam’s serving fork and started shuffling through the pieces of chicken on his platter. She was stoutish but still light on her feet, something I knew from dancing with her many, many times over the course of her stay. The sort of dowager Margaret Dumont would have played in a Marx Brothers movie, not always entirely on the ball but generally a good sport, pleasant enough to be around when she wasn’t trying to convince herself and everybody else in Washoe County that she was a femme fatale.