Maggie just looked at her, stone-faced. Then she went over to her bunk and lay down on it, and tilted the brim of her uniform cap over her eyes for good measure.
Surprised, Lottie slipped on the one pair of brown Mary Jane heels she’d allowed herself when she left home. Some part of her was tugged toward the door and the adventure beyond, telling her to let sleeping dogs lie.
But something else drew her, step by step, over to Maggie’s bunk. Maggie had never been easy to get along with, but by herself in the barracks, surrounded by the empty bunks, she suddenly looked smaller than Lottie had remembered. And Lottie couldn’t think of any reason that any of the women would miss the fun tonight, unless something was really wrong.
“Are you feeling okay?” Lottie said, sinking down onto the mattress across from Maggie’s. “Do you want me to go fetch a medic?”
“No,” Maggie said in a voice that made it very clear she still had all the vigor Lottie remembered.
Irritated, Lottie thought about grabbing Maggie’s hat away from her face and demanding she sit up. But Lottie wasn’t sure she wanted to find out what Maggie’s reaction might be to that.
Stymied and mystified, Lottie just sat there, wondering what she should do.
A minute later, Maggie removed the hat from her face with a sigh and looked over. “You’re still here,” she said, deadpan.
“Yep,” Lottie said. Then, mildly encouraged by the fact that Maggie wasn’t outright ignoring her, she tried to give her what she hoped was a playful chuck on the shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “Get changed. I’ll wait for you.”
But when she said “get changed,” she noticed something flicker in Maggie’s face. Maggie rolled over. “I’m too tired to go out,” she said.
Suddenly, Lottie thought back to the day they’d both unpacked at basic training. She remembered Maggie’s pair of neat uniforms—and the fact that the rack where they had hung had been empty of anything else.
Lottie suddenly realized she might be treading into very dangerous territory, but she couldn’t leave Maggie there alone without giving it a try. “Listen,” Lottie said. If all else failed and Maggie got furious at her, she thought ruefully, they weren’t exactly friends to begin with, so no harm done. “I’ve got a dress I always thought would look nice on you. It’s just simple, but it’s a beautiful royal blue. Would you try it on for me tonight?”
Maggie turned and met Lottie’s eyes. Lottie saw the unmistakable brimming that came with the start of tears. Not wanting to embarrass Maggie, Lottie glanced away.
“Maybe it’s a silly idea,” Lottie said. “But I’d love to see it with your hair.”
To her surprise, when she looked back, Maggie was sitting up.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said.
Lottie thought about feigning ignorance, but the words died on her lips. Instead, she simply offered a small smile. “Well?”
“I’ll look at it,” she said finally.
“You will?” Lottie said. Then, before Maggie could change her mind, Lottie was on her feet, hurrying over to her own kit. In a flash, she had the blue dress in hand and was shaking out the wrinkles.
When she turned back, there was Maggie.
“If I’d known I was going to loan it out, I’d have tried to steam it just a little bit,” Lottie said.
“No need to apologize, princess,” Maggie said. But this time, the nickname didn’t have the edge Lottie was used to hearing when Maggie said it.
Without another word, Maggie accepted the dress from Lottie and returned to her bunk to change. When she stepped out into the aisle again, she looked like a new woman.
Lottie had just been making an excuse to get Maggie to try on the dress, but she was more right than she had known that the royal blue would look fantastic with Maggie’s red locks. And although Lottie hadn’t thought to worry about a pair of shoes for Maggie, the navy-blue pumps that the Navy had issued for their dress blues had just enough of a heel to create a nice effect with the royal-blue dress.
“Wow!” Lottie said as Maggie came down the row. “That looks great.”
Maggie gave her a smile, but when she got to Lottie’s bunk, she didn’t even stop, heading for the door.
“Come on, princess,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”
When they finally got to the civilian club where the other women had headed, with some help from a few of the officers from base, who were also headed that way, the club was already packed.
Under normal circumstances, Maggie might have made a beeline as soon as they got there for whatever part of the club was farthest away from Lottie. But there were so many people there that it was impossible.
They managed to get through the door together, and Maggie muscled their way up to the bar, where eventually they wound up with drinks in hand, courtesy of some seamen who waved to them from farther down the bar but couldn’t come over, because it was just too hard to move around.
So the two of them wound up talking all night to whoever happened to be around, which was mostly other WAVES. In their immediate vicinity were women from Boston, Albuquerque, North Dakota, and Louisiana—all with their own stories of how they’d gotten there.
When someone asked where Lottie was from, Lottie hesitated for a minute before she said Detroit, hoping that maybe the other women would have forgotten her name by now or wouldn’t connect it with the city she was from.
But sure enough, someone in the crowd yelped, “Detroit? The Detroit Palmers?”
Lottie smiled, hoping she could just keep it pasted on her face long enough for the conversation to move on to something else without having to answer any more questions about where she’d come from.
But the woman who’d made the connection, a blonde with a narrow face and a bottomless well of curiosity, just kept asking questions.
No, Lottie said, she didn’t get to design the company cars. No, her father didn’t either. Yes, it was fun to go to all those big parties, sometimes.
No, her father hadn’t made a phone call to get her the best assignment. With every question, her smile faded just a little more.
And apparently, Maggie noticed. Because just as the blonde opened her mouth to ask another one of her interminable questions, Maggie jumped in.
“None of this has anything to do with whether Palmer here can do her job or not,” she said. “And let me tell you, she can. I never saw anyone so determined to make it through at that whole basic training camp.”
Lottie shook her head. “That’s only because you couldn’t see yourself,” she said. “I was the one who had to stand behind you the whole time.”
The blonde looked from one of them to the other, obviously calculating that Maggie didn’t seem to be an obvious choice of companion for someone of Lottie’s pedigree. “Oh?” she said. “And how long have you two been friends?”
Maggie looked at Lottie, her eyebrows raised in surprise and amusement. And when Lottie’s eyes met hers, the two of them started to laugh and laugh.
Thirteen
FOR ONE MOMENT, AS Lottie gazed out of the huge door of the hangar at the flashes of blue bay and the few fronds of palms that waved between the grim gray buildings of the aviation repair complex, she wished passionately to be down on the beach, any beach, relaxing in the beautiful, brand-new red swimsuit she had left behind, along with so many other things, in Detroit.
What she wouldn’t have given for even ten uninterrupted minutes of sun. Not to mention a glass of something cool, served by a handsome and attentive stranger.
Then, with a sigh of determination, she looked back at the half-built engine in front of her. This was the part she liked the least. Tearing an engine open to figure out what had gone wrong with it was like a treasure hunt. Even the tiniest action, like unscrewing a bolt, setting a part aside, was charged with excitement, because it could be the piece that revealed the mystery or solved it all.
And taking steps to fix the problem once she’d solved it had a kind of drama of
its own. Had she made the right diagnosis? Had she chosen the right patch? Had she executed the fix correctly? All that was more than enough to keep her mind engaged and alert.
But sometimes the problem was buried in the engine, under piston after piston or the entire carburetor. In which case she didn’t just have to go in and make a fix. She had to put the whole thing back together again.
Quite often, she couldn’t really know for sure whether she’d fixed the thing or not until she got it put back together. Which meant that she could be doing all the boring scut work only to discover it all had to be taken apart all over again.
And Lottie wasn’t the only one who hated this part of the process. The master mechanics who were moving through the trainees, pointing out their errors, helping them when they were stuck, and giving them tips along the way, would often tear an engine apart, get to the heart of a problem, and then call over one of the mechanics in training to reassemble it for them.
But Lottie wasn’t a master mechanic yet.
So it came as a relief when a shadow fell over the engine as she was bolting in a fuel-filler gasket, because it meant that someone was there to help.
Until she looked up and saw whose shadow it was.
Captain Woodward was looking down at her. Or at least looking down at the engine she was working on. He hadn’t actually met her eyes since the day she’d come in early to get a jump on the old Merlin block. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten she existed.
In fact, to her, it sure seemed like he always had time to go out of his way to find something wrong with whatever she was doing, whatever it happened to be.
He’d picked on her for heading straight to a plane’s engine block when the propeller wasn’t working, instead of first doing a manual check of the propeller itself. He’d called her on the carpet for not trying to fire an engine up before she started to troubleshoot, even though the guy who’d assigned her to the case had told her it was completely dead—and when she checked it, it was. He’d hassled her about fuel intakes and cylinder cases, valves and pistons and gaskets, rpm, horsepower, and miles per hour.
So it was no surprise that he found something to frown about when he looked at the engine she had just torn apart now.
Lottie just stared up at him, waiting for his verdict.
As usual, he looked at everything but her.
For a minute, when he couldn’t seem to come up with anything she’d done wrong, Lottie thought maybe she’d finally stumped him. She felt a tiny kernel of pride in her chest.
But then Captain Woodward crossed his arms. “You call that a clean engine, Palmer?” he asked.
Lottie looked back at the engine, surprised. This engine wasn’t particularly clean, but it wasn’t particularly dirty, either. She’d seen engines that looked a lot worse. And she’d seen Captain Woodward give praise or blame for them, without ever mentioning the cleanliness of the engine, or lack of it.
“Sir?” she said.
“I don’t just want to see this engine working,” Captain Woodward said. “I want it showroom clean.”
Lottie looked back at the engine, which was covered with grease.
Gamely, she picked up the next piece that needed to be fit in and wiped it down with a rag.
“No,” Captain Woodward barked. “The whole thing.”
“You want me to take it apart again?” Lottie said, trying to control the irritation in her voice. “Just to get it clean?”
Was he doing this because she was a woman? she wondered. Was this some backward way of letting her know he thought she was only good for cleaning?
“That’s right,” Captain Woodward said, and stalked away.
As he did, she heard a giggle behind her.
She didn’t have to turn around to recognize it. She’d heard it too many times before in the last few weeks. It was Pickman, who also seemed to have made it his personal mission to make her life in the repair bay miserable.
But at least when Captain Woodward picked on her, she usually learned something.
Pickman, on the other hand, just got in the way of whatever it was she was doing.
“You better do it, too,” Pickman said. “He made me do that last week. And he spent ten minutes taking it apart himself to make sure I actually cleaned under the carburetor.”
That actually came as a comfort to Lottie. At least it meant the assignment wasn’t a personal slight to her.
“Yeah,” Pickman went on. “I had trouble getting some of that burnt grease off so I just used my face cream. You know. That real nice stuff, from Paris. Works like magic on an engine.”
“How do you know where the best face cream comes from, Pickman?” Lottie asked.
This strangled Pickman’s laughter at his own joke, midgiggle.
To her satisfaction, as she continued steadily working on the engine, dismantling the pieces she had just reinstalled, part by part, he eventually ambled away.
But before Pickman got very far, she heard his footsteps stop. And then she heard a general murmur spread throughout the crowd of mechanics in the hangar.
When she turned around to see what the fuss was about, a black shadow filled the door of the hangar bay. A twin-engine bomber plane sat just outside.
“That’s a PBJ Mitchell,” Lottie heard one guy tell another.
Captain Woodward began to clap his hands for attention.
“All right, all right!” he said. “Gather ’round.”
As the trainees crowded near, Captain Woodward turned back to give the Mitchell an admiring glance.
“What we have here,” he said, “is a PBJ Mitchell bomber. One of the great standbys of this war. And our very own Navy plane.”
He walked around the front of the plane and gave one of the propellers a swat that seemed almost affectionate.
“This one,” he said, “is distinguished by the fact that neither of the engines work. Our pilot brought it in with only one in service. By the time we tried to fire it up in the repair bay, the other one had gone out, too. You boys like a good race, don’t you?”
A series of whoops and cheers went up from the crowd.
“All right,” Captain Woodward said with a grin.
Lottie had seen a smile on his face so rarely that she hardly recognized him. But suddenly her memory was thrown back to the dark movie theater where she had seen him for the first time. What had happened to that charismatic man who had so much to say about the importance of women in the war effort?
“So I need two volunteers,” Captain Woodward said.
All around Lottie, hands went up.
Lottie’s memory of the last time she’d volunteered was still strong in her mind. And it didn’t give her a lot of incentive to try again. But at the same time, she didn’t want to back down from anything all the other men were gunning for. And so many hands were raised, she reasoned, there was no way Captain Woodward was going to pick her again.
“Palmer,” Captain Woodward barked the instant her hand rose above her head.
A grumble rippled through the crowd as Captain Woodward scanned the other faces for his next victim.
But when Captain Woodward said, “Pickman,” cheers broke out again. There were lots of other men in the bay who had given Lottie the cold shoulder or made comments that made it clear she wasn’t exactly welcome there. But nobody in the hangar could have missed the fact that Pickman was her chief antagonist. He was the loudest voice cutting her down, and he did it multiple times a day.
Carrying her tools, Lottie made her way to the plane in a daze, not sure if the cheers were because the men thought Pickman could take her down or they thought this was her chance to give Pickman his comeuppance.
Probably, she thought as she came to a stop in front of the Mitchell, a bit of both.
But right now, she didn’t have time to think about who was on whose side.
She looked over at Pickman, who was standing under the other wing of the plane, beside the opposite engine.
He gave her
a wink with a threatening grin.
“Ready?” Captain Woodward was saying. “Set… go!”
Pickman was already twisting screws off the nacelle that surrounded the Mitchell’s engine before Lottie even had her screwdriver out.
When Lottie broke into the engine itself, she found a Double Wasp, known for its reliability. So she wasn’t dealing with a famously temperamental engine, she reasoned. And the solution, whatever it was, should be a simple one. That had always been Gus’s advice when he was teaching her about engines. She smiled as she thought of him.
All around her, she could feel the eyes of the gathered crowd.
“You want us back to stations, Captain?” someone called.
Captain Woodward shook his head. “What fun is a race if no one’s watching?” he asked.
So everyone stood there watching as she checked her fuel lines and seals—all good. She double-checked the valves and the gasket between the engine head and the engine case.
From Pickman’s side of the plane, she could hear him swear as something dropped to the ground: a tool or a part. She didn’t have time to bother looking.
She started to check the spark plugs. And there, she found it: an unseated plug, just waiting to be knocked back into place.
Her heart beating hard, she yanked the plug and cleaned it with hands that tremored with excitement, until it looked, as Captain Woodward had said so recently, factory clean. Then she pushed it snugly back into place.
For a moment, she hesitated, the sound of her own blood echoing in her ears. How sure was she that this was the fix? Did she want to take the risk of claiming her victory in front of everyone, when she wasn’t absolutely sure the engine would work if she fired it up?
It only took a moment for her fear of losing the race to win out over her fear of getting it wrong.
For Love and Country Page 10