CJ forced a smile. “See you.”
Brady rejoined her Admin friends and set out toward central base. CJ longed to stare after her until she was a speck retreating into the dusty distance, but instead she turned and marched back to the barracks. It was better this way. With a little distance, they would both realize that they could only ever be friends. It wasn’t like there was any other choice.
Was there?
Chapter Ten
Over the next week, she worked diligently to avoid Brady, knowing that her willpower would crumble like the Maginot Line if they spent any time together. She tried to be subtle about her evasion, using her initial soreness as an excuse not to play basketball or softball, inventing duties to stick closer to the barracks than usual. In truth, the duty schedule had been revised, and she’d been assigned to KP for Thanksgiving—a serious piece of misfortune, the D-lites agreed.
The week dragged dully, the few points of color coming when she glimpsed Brady at PT, drill or mess. Fortunately, the nature of her work at Biggs kept her from dwelling too narrowly on her personal life. Flight lines and hangars were dangerous places; you could easily lose a finger if you weren’t careful. Or worse.
On Wednesday a dust storm, not uncommon in West Texas, kept the hangar doors closed, engineering crews inside and airplanes on the flight line chained and covered for most of the morning and into the afternoon. CJ’s crew played cards, messed about with heavy tools they weren’t rated on and read tech orders for ships they would probably never get their grubby little hands on, as a particularly cantankerous Griggs reminded them. The storm finally cleared mid-afternoon, but there wasn’t much they could do other than a basic check on aircraft with missing covers to make sure dust hadn’t worked its way into sensitive engine parts. The evening crew, already the busiest of the three shifts, would have even more to do now, thanks to Mother Nature.
CJ and her squad mates were about to go off duty when the airfield’s alert system screeched into action. In mid-November, the sun set by six each night, which meant it was already nearly dark outside when their shift ended. As multiple alarms began to howl across the airfield, CJ heard another sound: a massive explosion, like a thousand-pound bomb hitting the earth somewhere nearby. The ground shook, the brief metallic rattle of tools and hard stands joining in the broader alarm. Everyone in the hangar froze, exchanging worried glances. Then they rushed outside, looking for the source of the blast.
Residents of nearby hangars joined them as fire trucks and other emergency vehicles sped westward, and soon CJ saw it: midway up one of the mountains that bordered Fort Bliss raged a fire, its smoke plume barely visible against the twilit sky.
“B-17?” she heard Jill ask Griggs.
He nodded grimly. “Or a B-29.”
Both heavy bombers were known for problematic takeoffs. If dust had worked its way into any one of the plane’s engines, a successful takeoff over the Franklins would be next to impossible.
“What were they doing flying so soon after the storm?” Toby muttered to Reggie.
“And why would they head west?” Reggie shook her head, her face pale.
For a while, the crew still on duty watched the slow progression of emergency lights up the side of the mountain. Then Griggs ordered them all back to base. There was nothing they could do at the airfield. Nothing anyone could do.
They barely made supper. By the time they went through the mess line, most of the tables were empty. Brady and her Admin friends were nowhere to be seen, CJ noticed, simultaneously relieved and disappointed. It was better that way, she told herself as she sat down to eat with her friends.
No one was very hungry. They didn’t talk about it, but clearly they were all thinking about the crew on board the fallen bomber. A B-17 crew was ten people, a B-29 eleven. A bomber being ferried cross-country might have a skeleton crew, but the plane that crashed wasn’t one of theirs. That left Tow Target or one of the training outfits. Wasn’t the new WASP squad due to arrive any day? Pushing dry meat she couldn’t quite identify around her plate, CJ crossed her fingers that a woman pilot hadn’t been at the controls. Like WAC mechanics, WASP pilots had to perform perfectly. Otherwise the reputation of all of womankind would suffer.
Later that night, she lay in bed unable to sleep. She kept seeing the fire at the crash site, a beacon through the dusty twilight, flames that had almost certainly consumed the flesh and bones of boys no older than her brothers. Exactly like her brothers, in fact, and Brady’s brothers and Reggie’s brothers and so many other mothers’ and fathers’ sons. It could have been Alec. Could at this moment be him somewhere in Europe burning to death in a plane crash after a flak strike or an attack by German fighters, enemy pilots desperate to protect their own families far below.
If they all wanted to protect the ones they loved, and no one really wanted to kill any other mother’s son, how had they gotten to the place they were now, where an American B-17 crew in the Eighth had a life expectancy measured in weeks? Boys barely old enough to shave, some of them, and they were dying in droves over foreign soil, many of them crying out for their mothers as their lives ebbed away. She didn’t think she would ever understand.
All at once, she wanted to go to Brady, to embrace her and feel the warmth of her skin, the steadiness of her pulse pounding at the base of her throat. She wanted to touch warm, living flesh, to love and be loved, to feel as she had that night in Cloudcroft when Brady had held her: safe and thoroughly at peace. It seemed the only thing to do in the face of such fear and grief—to reach out and grab hold of the one who felt like home, the one you knew must love you because every time you were together you could feel an invisible wire tightening between you, drawing you ever closer.
But even as she longed to go to Brady, there were so many reasons why she couldn’t: Nate, their families, the Army, their government. So many reasons she had to stay in this lumpy bed, surrounded by the placid snores and faint breathing of her squad mates as tears slipped silently across her cheeks and dripped onto the soft cotton pillowcase her mother had sent from home.
* * *
In the wake of the B-29 crash, which they found out the following day had taken the lives of eleven men from the XX Bomber Command, the Transient Hangar was busy as ever with planes coming in from across the country. Some arrived dropping parts and coughing oil, and those were the ones that CJ treated with the utmost care. It was their crew’s job to diagnose problems and fix them quickly so that the grounded bird could be back in the air as soon as possible. However, rushing and engine repair did not go together. The ground crew held the flight crew’s lives literally in their hands, a fact of which Griggs was always quick to remind them.
Engineering crews, especially those working late at night, were not immune from casualties either. Sarah and Jill had told her about an incident on the flight line late one night the previous spring. An engineering crew in training had been performing a hundred-hour inspection on a P-39, including cleaning the cannon. The armorers had just reinstalled the gun with ammunition in the ammo can when they somehow accidentally fired off a round, narrowly missing a propeller technician. The practice round contained a tracer compound that made for a spectacular sight arcing over the flight line toward the distant mountains.
CJ lived with what she considered to be a healthy fear of making such a mistake. When Griggs called her and the other Wacs together at the end of the week, she assumed they were in for another lecture from the higher-ups on safety precautions, something the others had told her often followed an airfield crash. Instead, he removed his sergeant’s cap and informed them in a serious tone that they were being transferred away from the Transient Hangar.
CJ sensed her own dismay reflected in her crew mates. Had this latest accident convinced the Biggs CO that the airfield was no place for women?
Griggs said gruffly, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to give up your wings. You’ve been requested is all. I would have blocked it if I didn’t think you’d get all Amazon o
n me because it turns out y’all gripe the least out of any flock of penguins I’ve commanded.”
“Where are we going?” Toby asked, eyes bright with anticipation.
“The Balloon Hangar.”
“No kidding, Sarge?” Jill asked.
“Would I shit—I mean, would I kid you, Matthews?”
The Wacs began to talk among themselves. They’d heard the day before that the newly arrived WASPs had joined their sister pilots in the Balloon Hangar, home to the Sixth Tow Target Squadron. The Sixth’s pilots flew Beechcraft trainers and obsolete Navy fighters on simulated bombing, gas and strafing missions. They also towed targets for the antiaircraft boys at Bliss to practice firing on.
Working the engineering crew in Tow Target was a peach of an assignment. They would no longer be relegated to the drafty Transient Hangar looking after ferry and transport planes merely stopping over on the way to someplace else. Instead they would be working on a real flight line, like the rest of the post’s airfield mechanics. True, the Balloon Hangar didn’t possess much of a flight line. Worse, it was the farthest out of all the Biggs hangars, situated right at the edge of the desert. But they could worry about transportation to and from the WAC compound later.
“Quit yer jabbering,” Griggs finally said, but his tone was mild. “They’re still bringing the girls in and getting the flights organized, which means I’ve got you through Thanksgiving. Now get back to work, and make it snappy.”
For the rest of the day, CJ pondered the promise of the new assignment. Working with male crews was all right, but as female mechanics, she and her fellow Wacs were constantly asked to prove themselves. Did they know how to handle tools, were they capable of performing their duties during their time of the month, could they withstand the physical nature of airplane repair without complaint? Wacs were judged on separate standards from male crew members, even the civilian ones on loan from the airplane manufacturers. WASPs undoubtedly were familiar with the notion of double standards too. As pilots, even as auxiliaries, they were higher in the Army Air Corps pecking order than members of the ground crew. That meant the resistance they faced from male counterparts was probably that much more intense.
But even such a major airfield development couldn’t entirely divert her from her turmoil over Brady, who had stopped trying to catch her eye by now. Fortunately, her other friends were skilled at distraction. On Saturday evening, Reggie invited her to play pool in the enlisted men’s club. They had both grown up with the game, CJ on the table her father had built during one especially long winter, Reggie in the pool halls of her northern New Jersey home town. CJ had a decent time nursing a beer and making short work of the unsuspecting GIs who didn’t think they could be beaten by a couple of Wacs. Still, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as playing pool at the EW club with Brady or watching a movie with her, seated close together in the darkened post theater.
As they walked back from the club, pockets bulging with dollar bills they had scored off gullible GIs, the moon rose over the mountains in the distance. CJ looked for Orion, her favorite constellation, locating him above the horizon. Wasn’t there a story about Orion the Hunter falling in love with one of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters? Fantastic. Even the stars reminded her of Brady.
Who was she kidding? Their week apart hadn’t helped her get over Brady at all. If anything, it had made her miss Brady more.
“What’s going on with you and Brady, anyway?” Reggie asked. “It seemed like you were always together before last weekend.”
“You know how it is when you make a new friend. At first you spend every waking moment together, but then time passes and you don’t see each other as much.”
“That sounds more like love than friendship.”
CJ sighed. “It does, doesn’t it?”
Reggie slung her arm around CJ’s shoulders. “Don’t look so worried. There are other fish in the sea.”
“But I’m not interested in other fish.”
She couldn’t seem to stop herself from looking for Brady everywhere—at mess, on the training field, even tonight at the service club—hoping she might run into her even as she worried about what would happen if she did.
“Someday you will be,” Reggie said. “Trust me.”
“Sounds like experience talking.”
“Indeed. ’Twas a fair lass back in Jersey that made me become a Wac. ‘Let’s join together, Reg,’ she said. And so we did, and that was the last I saw of her. She went to Daytona, I went to Des Moines, and a month after basic I received a Dear Jane letter care of the United States Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Four months.”
“But you’re single. What about all the other fish?”
“I was talking about her, not me. I’m still trying to mend my poor, broken heart.”
And she wiggled her eyebrows at CJ, who laughed in spite of herself.
That night she lay in bed, sleep eluding her once again. The sounds of the barracks rose and fell around her, whispers between bunks, laughter, shushing, the inevitable snores. When she was home, she shared a bedroom with her little sister, but it was different to sleep among all these women. What would her squad mates think if they knew how she felt about Brady? Would they avoid her? Laugh at her? Turn her in? Then again, Toby and Kate weren’t overly cautious, and the women in their company appeared to like Toby, whose mischievous smile could get her out of any scrape, it seemed.
It was funny. There were all sorts of laws against how she felt about Brady, laws CJ had always believed were as bigoted and unfair as the ones in the South that dictated where black people could sit on buses and in restaurants. Apparently it was easier to be objective about bigotry when it was directed against a group you didn’t belong to.
But did she really belong to the same group as Kate and Toby? What about Sean? She had cared about him and mostly enjoyed what they did in bed, though they had never “consummated” their relationship, as he’d insisted on referring to sex. She’d known plenty of girls at Michigan who hadn’t gone all the way yet. More who had, but without any reliable protection other than condoms, which were both user-dependent and difficult to find, abstinence had always seemed like the best option.
The fact that she hadn’t ever been swept away by passion for Sean seemed to be a tipoff now. She’d never fallen madly in love with any of the boys in her classes at Kalamazoo Central, either. Looking back through this altered lens, she suddenly saw something she’d missed—her fixation on Laura Miller, a girl from nearby Plainwell who she’d played summer basketball with in ninth grade. Laura was a point guard, small and blonde and pretty, and CJ remembered now how she had agonized over whether to ask her out to the farm after summer league ended. Her mother had encouraged her to extend the invitation, but in the end she’d been too scared to branch out beyond the kids at school, most of whom she’d known since kindergarten.
At least, that was what she told herself. Now she realized she’d been frightened not of making a new friend but of her colossal crush on Laura, the cutest girl she was sure she’d ever seen. In fact, if she were honest with herself, Laura and Brady weren’t the only girls she’d known who had made her feel all warm and fluttery inside. Brady was simply the first such girl she’d let herself get this close to.
In bed in the darkened barracks, window shades pulled against the outdoor lamps, CJ stopped herself. This line of thinking wasn’t helping. If anything, it felt suspiciously like revising history, which in the academic world was rarely a good idea. But in this case, it might be more like discovering an important, previously hidden viewpoint than purposely altering known facts.
Briefly she allowed herself to dream of a not-so-distant point when she and Brady were an actual couple, living together and socializing with other women like them—Toby and Kate, perhaps, or one of the older couples she’d known at Michigan. But that version of the future was even more difficult to picture than the post-war world where she and
Brady somehow managed to remain friends.
* * *
At mess the next morning, she was at the coffee urn when she sensed Brady’s presence. She glanced over her shoulder, and sure enough, Brady was walking directly toward her. Their nearly telepathic connection was not helping matters in the least.
“Hey,” Brady said.
“Um, hi.”
Brady poured a cup of coffee, her gaze trained on the sideboard. “I feel like I never see you anymore.”
CJ couldn’t say the same. Brady had returned to her dreams the previous night in a repeat performance involving the four-poster bed from their room in Cloudcroft. She felt her cheeks color. “Sorry, work’s been busy.”
Brady turned to stare at her. “That’s your excuse for avoiding me? Because work has been busy?”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
Where CJ came from, women didn’t curse. What was more, the Army frowned on swearing among Wacs. But Brady was right. It was bullshit. She missed her. Missed smoking on the steps, debating social theories over coffee, playing one-on-one basketball under the lights in the early evening hours after mess. These last days, she had been lonely even in the company of friends.
“It’s not you,” she said. “I, well, I felt like an idiot after the trip.”
Brady frowned. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t tell you I was sick,” she lied, “and then I tried to catapult myself off the trail.”
“That’s why you’ve been avoiding me?”
CJ shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “Well, yeah.”
“Oh. I thought it might be—I mean, I thought…” Brady ran her hand over her hair, touching the same onyx barrette she’d worn Sunday evening when she’d kissed CJ’s cheek, her lips soft and lingering. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
Easier said…CJ stared down at her coffee mug.
“For the record, I didn’t think you were an idiot. I was just glad you were okay.” Brady squinted out across the crowded mess. “But then, you already know that.”
In the Company of Women Page 13