Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

by Janet Dailey

  “I’m giving you a satisfactory mark.” Although he made it sound as if he were doing her a favor, rather than giving her a mark she had earned, he couldn’t diminish the importance of it.

  With an unrestrained squeal of joy, Eden left him standing on the flight line and sprinted for the big fire bell that hung outside the administration building. She yanked on the rope, ringing out her triumph in the tradition of the successful trainee, laughing and crying in elation.

  Not long afterwards, Eden learned that Mary Lynn had rung the bell before her. One by one, over the next two days, her baymates went up for their check rides. On the second afternoon, Marty charged into the bay like a crazy woman and did a mock war dance in the center of the room, whooping and carrying on.

  “I flew that little baby the best that I knew how. Not even the big, bad Army can stop me now!” She sang while she danced around an imaginary point on the floor, then stopped, out of breath and elated, to share her victorious moment with them. “I made it!! It’s the old lucky thirteen for me.” She had advanced from the Fairchild PT-19 to the more powerful BT-13 aircraft.

  But when she finally looked around the room, she noticed that none of her baymates’ faces mirrored her jubilation. Instead, they looked uncomfortable and their glances skittered away in a grim and almost embarrassed fashion. Marty briefly had the feeling Eden would have enjoyed throttling her but her look didn’t last long either before it was directed to the side and downward.

  Bewildered by their reaction, Marty felt the silence weighing on the room. Chicago shifted her position, enabling Marty to see behind her. Aggie was sitting on her cot, dressed in a skirt and blouse. Her curly blonde head was bent over the handkerchief she was twisting in her lap. Marty opened her mouth to tease Aggie about wearing civilian clothes. Then the significance hit her and her shocked gaze flashed to Mary Lynn. A small nod confirmed that Aggie had failed her check ride.

  “Aggie—” Overwhelmed with guilt, Marty struggled to find the words that would make up for the salt she’d unknowingly rubbed on Aggie’s wound. “—I’m sorry.” It sounded so inadequate. “I didn’t know,” she finished lamely.

  “How does your foot taste, Rogers?” Eden asked angrily.

  Marty turned on her, lashing out in anger. “How the hell was I supposed to know she washed out?”

  “God, I don’t believe it.” Eden sent a heavenward glance at the ceiling.

  “Somebody could have warned me when I came in,” Marty protested, still guilt-faced while she searched for a way out of the awkward situation.

  “Why don’t you just shut your mouth?” Chicago suggested.

  It seemed the best advice. Marty’s lips came together in a straight line. Sniffling loudly through her nose, Aggie stood up slowly, her six-foot frame all hunch-shouldered.

  “It’s all right. Marty didn’t mean anything by it.” Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen from crying. “She has a right to be glad she made it. You all have. But …” Aggie blew her nose, and the sobs began to sound in her throat when she finally finished the sentence. “… I can’t help feeling sorry for myself. I wanted so much to—”

  The rest was choked off as Aggie abruptly turned away from them. For a minute, none of them moved, trapped by an awkward embarrassment. Finally, Mary Lynn went over to console her.

  Marty sank onto her cot, thinking how odd it was that Mary Lynn had gone to Aggie’s side rather than Chicago, who had been Aggie’s best friend. An unnatural silence hung over the room while Aggie removed her belongings from the footlocker and packed them in her suitcase. Like all of them, Agnes Richardson had paid her own fare to Sweetwater and she’d pay her own way back home.

  When the moment of leave-taking came, they all felt an odd reluctance to get too close to her, as if they were afraid her bad luck would rub off on them. They had trouble looking her squarely in the eye. Aggie understood and didn’t linger. She didn’t belong there anymore.

  The empty cot in the bay haunted them for days after Aggie had left. There were empty cots in other bays, too. Roughly twenty percent of their class had washed out in the first cut, beginning the weeding process. At the end of the week, Eden switched cots, occupying Aggie’s former bed and vacating the noisy location next to the shared lavatory. It helped.

  Only one letter came for Mary Lynn. Mail from England was spotty at best. Sometimes two weeks would go by without her getting a single letter from Beau, then a half dozen would come in one day with pieces snipped out of them. For a long time it had bothered her that their mail was being read and censored. But there was a war on, even if it did seem far, far away from Sweetwater, Texas.

  She read her letter for the third time while she sat at a table in the recreation hall. The trainees often gathered there in the evenings to study, write letters, hangar-fly, socialize, and escape the small, stark bays, so militarily uniform and devoid of personality. It was strictly informal, chairs pulled around in casually formed clusters, girls wandering around with their hair wrapped in curlers, dog-eared magazines scattered around. The March issue of the Sweetwater Reporter was opened to the latest list of sinkings of Allied ships in the Battle for the Atlantic. The much-frequented Coca-Cola machine stood in the corner, wooden cases for the empty bottles stacked beside it. On the wall, a bulletin board posted announcements of church events and other activities, pertinent newspaper cartoons, and pinned messages.

  A hot Ping-Pong match was in progress at one end of the rec room, Marty and Chicago against a pair of trainees from another bay. The slap-pop of the paddles and ball punctuated the chatter in the room as the game grew intense in a battle for match point. Marty’s low-driven slam-shot won it.

  Flushed and exhilarated, the pair of them returned to the table where Mary Lynn sat with Cappy and Eden. The five of them were rarely apart. Since Aggie’s departure, they had taken to calling themselves “The Inseparables,” hoping in some superstitious way it would mean they’d stay together through the completion of their training. Aggie’s failure had sobered all of them. Their training was taken more seriously than before and their resolve to succeed deepened.

  Marty pulled out a chair and plopped onto it, kicking back to rock the chair on its rear legs. “Hey, kid, what are you reading?” she said to Mary Lynn.

  Although Mary Lynn was the oldest, she was treated as the baby of the group, partly because of her size and cherub-cheeked face, but mostly because of her inexperience. She had married so young she’d never been on her own before.

  “A letter from Beau.”

  “I should have guessed,” Marty declared.

  Cappy looked up from her meteorology textbook and glanced at the tablet in front of Mary Lynn. All this time she’d been hearing Mary Lynn’s pen scratching across the paper, she thought Mary Lynn was taking notes from her own book, but she could see it was a letter. “Hey, you’re supposed to be studying,” Cappy reminded her. She was the unappointed captain of the bunch, naturally taking charge and handling everything from making sure their bay was ready for inspection to getting all of them up and ready for class on time.

  “I will—as soon as I finish this letter to Beau. I’m telling him about the new planes we’re flying now.” She needed to tell him all the small details of her life, to share with him the things that were happening to her so she could feel their lives were still linked no matter how many miles separated them.

  So she told him all about the basic training aircraft, the BT-13. Like the PT-19 they’d been flying, it was a low-winged, tail-wheeled airplane. But at that point the similarities ended. Called the “Valiant” by its manufacturer, the Vultee Company, the BT appeared enormous with its powerful 450-horse engine. It had a front and rear seat, but unlike the open-cockpitted Fairchild, it had an enclosed canopy top. Another major difference, Mary Lynn wrote, was that the BT-13 had a radio. For the first time, the trainees were in communication with the control tower.

  The operators in the tower gave the pilots their taxiing instructions and takeoff and landi
ng positions. Mary Lynn told Beau that although some of the trainees had to learn a new language in communication, none of them minded being told what to do and when. They finally had a microphone attached to their headsets, and they could talk back.

  “Leave her alone, Cap.” Marty could be counted on to defend Mary Lynn, invariably sticking up for the loyal, trusting girl she idealized. She seriously doubted that there was a mean, unkind bone in Mary Lynn’s small body. No one dared say a thing against her in Marty’s presence. “A wife is supposed to write her husband every day when they’re apart.”

  “I’m not stopping her.” Cappy shrugged, but it made her think about how the Army separated couples, and not just during a war. When she married, her husband was going to come home to her every night. Under no circumstances were they ever going to live apart.

  “Are you going to see Colin this weekend, Marty?” Chicago wondered.

  “Sure.” She took it for granted. On weekends there was a casual mixing of the enlisted cadets and the women trainees in town, but mainly it was a friendly group thing. Few routinely paired off the way Marty and Colin did. A wicked light danced in her silver-green eyes as Marty looked sideways at Chicago. “Are you going to see Mr. Lentz this weekend?” Always the agitator, she couldn’t resist stirring up a little trouble by mentioning Chicago’s former instructor in primary training. She knew her baymate had a crush on the man.

  “No.” Chicago turned red.

  Restless with this inactivity, Marty set her chair down hard on all four legs. “Let’s do something besides study,” she urged.

  “You’re right. This place needs some livening up.” Eden unexpectedly agreed with her.

  “Her highness has spoken,” Marty said mockingly. “Someone fetch the court jester.” She gibed at Eden, her favorite target when she wanted to pick a fight, because Eden was the only one who fought back.

  “You do such a good job of it, Marty, we don’t need another one,” she retorted coolly and closed up her study papers. Standing, Eden paused to motion them to follow her. “Come on.”

  After a second’s hesitation, Cappy shrugged and put away her papers, too. The rest followed suit and trailed after Eden as she crossed the room to the upright piano. Used to commanding attention and occupying center stage, Eden sat down at the keys and began rumbling out a boogie-woogie beat that gathered a crowd.

  By the time the weekend rolled around, the girls had discovered the basic training phase had a few twists besides new ground school courses, more powerful aircraft, and radios. But the most grueling and mentally strenuous was the concentration required to fly the plane by instruments alone. A black curtain enclosed their cockpit, shutting out any visual reference point. It was brutal on the nerves and on the senses.

  “I could have sworn I was in the steepest right turn you’ve ever seen.” Marty was slumped in the chair, fatigue etched in her features. Colin listened sympathetically, his chair across from hers at the table in the hotel’s restaurant, where they usually met on weekends. “Those damned instruments showed straight-and-level flight, but it felt so real that I was sure they were wrong. Then that flaming Frye started yelling in my ears.” A tired sigh broke from her, heavy with self-disgust.

  “Vertigo is something you just have to learn to ignore. You’ll overcome it,” Colin insisted calmly.

  “Yeah.”

  “I agree.” Cappy was at the big table, too, along with Mary Lynn, Eden, and Chicago. “Flying blind is no picnic. After two hours of it, my eyes feel like they’re connected to my head with little springs, and they’re going to pop out.”

  “You girls better get used to it,” Colin advised. “One of our guys got a look at your curriculum. You’re going to be flying more instrument time than the cadet training calls for.”

  “That isn’t fair,” Marty protested.

  “As ferry pilots, you’ll potentially be flying in worse weather conditions than we will as combat pilots,” he reasoned. “We have more emphasis on aerial acrobatics. It’s natural.”

  There were skeptical murmurings around the table. Instrument flying was definitely not a favorite among them, the five who had once believed anything connected with flying was a joy. Over the course of the last months, they had changed, too, but the determination remained, growing stronger as flying got tougher.

  Seeing their expressions, Colin added, “Wait until you do some night flying. Then you’ll really find out what disorientation is like.”

  “We start this coming week,” Cappy said.

  “I haven’t figured out when we’re supposed to sleep yet,” Eden complained.

  “And without her beauty sleep, Eden reverts to a witch,” Marty taunted, never able to resist a gibe at her rich baymate.

  “Have any of you had your trainer into a spin yet?” Chicago asked, uninterested in the ongoing but minor feud.

  “It scared the hell out of me.” Marty confirmed her experience with it, while the others nodded a mutual agreement. “I thought the plane was going to shake apart. I mean, it shuddered so violently I thought this was it.”

  “I used up more than two thousand feet of altitude before I could level her out,” Cappy admitted.

  “Instead of the Valiant, they ought to call her the Vultee Vibrator,” Eden suggested dryly, tapping her cigarette on the ashtray in the middle of the table. A black-haired woman in a tight-fitting dress walked by their table. The exaggerated sway of her hips caught Eden’s eye. An eyebrow arched in dry, cynical humor. “Speaking of vibrators,” she murmured.

  Marty turned in her chair and looked over her shoulder. “She really thinks she’s a hot number, doesn’t she?” It wasn’t the first time she had noticed a member of that woman’s profession in the vicinity, especially at the Bluebonnet Hotel.

  “It’s a pretty dress,” Mary Lynn said admiringly. “It’s a pity it’s so tight.”

  There was a slight break as everyone looked at Mary Lynn to see if that softly drawled remark was meant seriously. Her dark eyes blinked innocently back at them.

  A staccato laugh came from Marty. “For a married lady, Mary Lynn, you have certainly led a sheltered life. Can we blame it on your magnolia-white upbringing?”

  Mary Lynn looked around the table, feeling ignorant but unsure why. “What did I say wrong?”

  In exaggerated mimicry, Marty copied her southern accent. “Honey, I believe you would refer to that woman as a ‘lady of the evening,’ or perhaps a ‘soiled dove.’”

  Mary Lynn’s dark eyes rounded as she craned her head to stare after the woman, then she paused to look at the group long enough to ask, “Is that what they look like?”

  Amid the laughter that followed, Marty declared, “We’ll corrupt you yet.”

  Avenger Field wasn’t equipped with runway lights. As the long shadows of twilight stretched over the field, it became customary to see the truck loaded with flare pots drive down the runway, depositing the burning oil pots at regular intervals.

  What with “flying blind” beneath a black curtain, hours spent on the ground boxed in the Link trainer to simulate instrument flight, and night flying, the girls were convinced the basic training courses were designed to test their sanity and their endurance. Cold showers and pots of Mom’s black coffee kept them going—the showers taken before reporting for night flights and the coffee consumed in the ready room while they waited for their turn to fly—usually until two in the morning.

  On takeoffs, Mary Lynn had still not gotten used to the sensation of charging down the midnight-dark runway, the yellow flames from the burning pots flashing in her side vision while she watched her airspeed indicator to know when to pull back on the stick. After liftoff, all was instantly swallowed into the blackness. It unnerved her every time.

  Landing was equally tricky, the darkness lousing up her depth perception. She had to depend on her altimeter, virtually to the point of touchdown, and watch her airspeed to keep the plane above stalling speed. She couldn’t remember making a smooth landing. Invariabl
y, she hit with a thud and a bounce before skittering onto the runway like a wounded duck.

  Endless time was spent in the traffic pattern around Avenger Field, making touch-and-gos—landing, applying full power, and taking off again. Other planes were mere pinpoints of light—the red and green navigational lights on their wings and the white beams of their headlights shining like sightless eyes on final approach to landing.

  Once they left the traffic pattern to practice navigation by radio beam, Mary Lynn’s infatuation with night flying surfaced. There was a magical quality in the utter blackness of a Texas sky sparkling with stars. Beneath the moonlight the airplane’s wings appeared dusted with silver. The glass canopy over her cockpit sometimes seemed to reflect the moonbeams, bathing her in the silvery glow.

  The odd ranch light shining in the bottomless black below her plane became an eye-catching sight. Mary Lynn filed away its location, so she could find the friendly source in the daylight. Passenger trains, with their many windows of lights crawling through the dark void, reminded Mary Lynn of caterpillars. In her ear the steady hum of the signal, beamed from the navigational radio beacon, confirmed that she was on course. If she strayed off the transmission quadrant, the sound changed to Morse Code beeps. Da-dit, which was the letter A, was repeated if she was to the left of her course; and dit-da, which was N, if she strayed to the right.

  Each radio beacon had its own assigned frequency on which it transmitted. Its location was marked on maps so a pilot could fly from one beacon to another, changing from one frequency to the next. When a pilot flew directly over the transmitter, there was a cone of silence, allowing her to pinpoint her exact location on the map. The cessation of sound lasted for only a short interlude. An ear always had to be attuned to it or it would be missed.

  The droning stopped for those ticks of seconds. Mary Lynn changed the frequency and made the turn toward the second beacon, following orders previously given by her instructor. Above the da-dit, da-dit that was beeping in her ears the instructor barked, “What do you think you’re doing, Palmer? I told you not to fly to the second beacon until you’d flown over the first. Haven’t you got ears?”