Velva Jean Learns to Fly (37 page)

FORTY

T
wo nights later Sally and Janie were scheduled for a routine check on the A-24. I remembered when I liked flying the A-24, but now it seemed dull and ordinary after the B-29, although I didn’t say this to Sally because she was excited to be flying again. Besides, ever since she’d found out about Helen and me and the B-29 mission, she said she was “jealous as a hen,” even though I knew she was proud of me.

Janie was scheduled to go up with Gus Mitchell just as the sun was setting, but she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and she was so hungry we could hear her stomach growling. Sally said, “I’ll go, Janie. You get yourself a good meal.” When Sally cleared it with Gus, he said he didn’t care who went first as long as they got back in time for him to buy her a drink at the service club.

Inside the mess hall, I sat with Janie and Helen and the other girls. I could see Vince Gillies and Bob Keene across the room. First Vince and then Bob turned in my direction, but they looked right through me, like I wasn’t even there. Then Bob said something to Vince, and they laughed loud and long.

I stared at my plate—fried chicken and rice. There was too much gravy on everything, and I tried to dig the rice out from underneath. I made myself think about the B-29: Hydraulic pressure gauge. Lamp controls. Throttle levers. Elevator tabs. Control wheel. Turn indicator. Flight indicator. Tachometer. Suction gauge. Radio compass. Blind landing indicator.

Suddenly the emergency siren blasted, cutting the night in two. I dropped my fork and pressed my hands over my ears. I hated the way the siren went through you. My first thought was that the German U-boats had torpedoed another one of our ships. The next thought I had was: Sally.

Everyone ran outside, tripping over each other, pushing each other, falling into each other. The smoke filled my lungs. Four hundred yards or so from the end of the runway I could see the flames. All of us, men and women, officers and enlisted, ran for the plane. It was surrounded by a deep ditch on one side and the swamp on the other.

Gus Mitchell lay on the ground, jacket and shirt burned off. His skin was raw and pink, and I thought of Harley after the train wreck. Gus wasn’t moving. The emergency crew rushed in to pick him up and take him to the hospital. I ran after them. “Gus! Did Sally get out? Where’s Sally?”

Gus didn’t blink or move. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. I started running for the plane. The flames were climbing into the trees, spreading up and out and over so that it looked like everything was on fire—the swamp, the ditch, the ground, the sky. I was choking on the ash and the smoke, which was black and thick and covering everything. My eyes were watering just like I was running through tear gas. I hollered, “Sally!”

I could hear something. I told myself: It’s the siren. Just the siren. The sound was high and loud and horrible. I stopped running and looked at the faces of everyone else standing there—Janie, Helen, Bob Keene, Major Blackburn, Harry Lawson, Vince Gillies, Colonel Wells, the cadets, and, off to themselves, the Indians. They were listening too. But it wasn’t the siren. The siren was quiet. There was the rush of water from the fire trucks and the shouts of men as they tried to fight the fire and the rumblings of everyone standing there watching. And there was the sound of screaming coming from the plane. I ran toward the wreck again and suddenly Butch was there, grabbing me out of the way. He said, “They’re trying to get to her, but the fire’s too strong. Stay back.” He had to shout to be heard over the flames.

“Sally!” I was crying now and coughing because the smoke was everywhere, filling every space inside me. “Sally!” My throat felt raw from the smoke and the shouting, but I kept at it until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and there was Jackie Cochran, tears running down her face. She said, “Hush, child.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to Sally.

Five minutes later the screaming stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the screams. The firemen could only get within three or four feet of the plane. The flames fought them off, keeping them away. Thirty minutes later the firemen weren’t any closer. An hour later the flames were still climbing into the sky.

I knew then that Sally was gone, really and truly, and even if the fire died down and the firemen could reach the plane, it would be too late.

Gus Mitchell woke up in the ambulance as they were driving him to the base hospital. He said that the takeoff and flight were normal until just before landing. Toward the end of the check flight, the control tower called Sally and told her to shoot a landing on runway two. She entered the pattern at eleven hundred feet and let the wheels down. Gus said he could feel the throttle moving back and forth and realized the engine was dead. At seven hundred feet and just over the runway, he took over flying from the backseat and hollered at Sally to jump. He finished the ninety-degree turn, flew a shortened downwind and base leg, and was trying to round out a turn into the final approach when the landing gear of the A-24 hit the tops of the tall sea pines that surrounded the field. The plane nosed down, hit the ground, and split in two. Gus felt the airplane shudder and then he blacked out.

Janie and me sat on the steps of the barracks, right by Sally’s garden, and watched the fire burn itself out. Janie had smuggled two bottles of beer from somewhere—I didn’t ask where—and we drank them while the ash fell on us like rain. I didn’t want to go back to my room that night or ever. I couldn’t stand the thought of being in there by myself. Instead of two dead girls haunting that room, there would be three.

Janie said, “It should have been me.”

I said, “You didn’t know, Janie. No one could know.”

She looked at me and said, “How am I supposed to forgive myself?”

I put my arm around her. We sat there watching the flames, and then I started singing “I’ll Fly Away,” and Janie joined me. Halfway through, we started crying so hard that we couldn’t sing anymore. We didn’t stop crying until the fire finally went out.

Back in my bay, I sat on my cot and looked at Sally’s bed across from mine. Her things were everywhere—her shoes, her dresses, her books, her packs of gum, her banjo. I picked up the banjo and held it in my hands without playing it. I felt the cold of the metal against my skin and thought, I wonder where Ty’s bugle is. Did he have it with him when he crashed? Did it go back to his parents? Did they throw it away or is someone somewhere playing it?

I looked down at the banjo and started playing the song I’d written, the one Sally and I were learning together. I sang the words and played it through and then I lay the banjo on her bed, peghead and tuning keys resting on the pillow, just like it was a person.

March 18, 1944

Dear Mother,

I thought I’d sit down on my twenty-fourth birthday and write you a letter to thank you for each and every thing you and Dad have done for me. If it wasn’t for the two of you, I wouldn’t be a pilot or a WASP—I’d still be typing letters at old Doc Cady’s office.

Thanks for helping me get here and for understanding why I had to break it off with Joe. Maybe I’ll be a wife and mother one day. That’s what everyone expects and what I guess I expect too. I’ll probably be good at it. But so far I never met a boy I liked so much as flying.

You asked what I love most about it and here it is: I love watching the earth change below me from brown to green, from flat to hilly, depending on where and how far I go. Being high up is a good place to see what the world is made of.

I love my friends, maybe best of all, and I love red wine and dancing at the service club with handsome men who don’t expect me to settle down and knit them socks anytime soon.

I love the deep bone-weariness after six hours of flying and the soreness in my hands that means I’ve wrangled a plane that was built for a man and not a “little girl.”

I love my flight jacket and my helmet and I even love my coveralls because wearing them means I’m getting ready to do what I love most in this world.

Most of all, I love being happy. Know that if anything ever happens, I don’t want you and Daddy to be sad for too long because I went out flying.

All my love,

Sally

FORTY-ONE

A
s
WASP, we were still civilians and not military, which meant Sally’s funeral wasn’t paid for. The other girls and me pooled our money and paid for her casket to be sent back to Indiana, where it would be buried in the little church cemetery, next to Sally’s grandparents and a baby brother that died in 1928.

Janie and Helen and I flew to Indiana with Miss Cochran in her Beechcraft. Gus Mitchell wanted to go, but he was still in the hospital. Sally’s mama was smaller than Sally, but her daddy was a great big man, almost as big as the Wood Carver. Sally’s brothers were all too young to go to war—the oldest was just fourteen—and all her sisters were there: me, Janie, Helen, Paula, Mudge, and Loma.

At the sight of my old friends, the tears started spilling out. I hated crying. I thought of all the times in my life I’d had to cry over people I’d lost and I was sick of it. I decided that after I got through this, I wasn’t ever crying again, no matter what.

Paula looked tan and fit. She’d been transferred from her base in Texas to Dodge City, Kansas, to train on the B-26. Mudge was painted up and fancy, wearing a smart suit she said was made by one of the MGM studio designers. She brought her new boyfriend with her—Van Johnson, the movie star, who was tall and blond and looked just like a regular man, only nicer. He wore a dark suit and stood by Mudge’s elbow like he was waiting to see if she needed anything.

Loma hugged each of us so hard I thought she’d squeeze the life out of us. She was crying and crying as she said, “I’ve missed you fools more than you know.”

I’d never seen so many flowers. Mudge said, “There are too many here for the living.” Somehow I knew what she meant, and the thought made my heart ache. There were letters and telegrams that talked about Sally in the past tense, and I couldn’t make sense of this because to me Sally was still there. I kept waiting for her to show up, barreling in the door, cracking her gum, playing her banjo, chattering like a squirrel.

At the funeral I looked at Jackie Cochran and thought, This is all your fault. I wondered what she was going to do about Sally’s death, if she was going to look into it or just pretend it was an accident like she’d done with Ruth and with the other girls, the ones that died before we got to Camp Davis. I stared at this woman, the greatest female pilot on earth, and I thought, Maybe you’re a great pilot, but you’re not a very good person. She looked at me, and I held her gaze for one long moment before I looked away.

Sally’s casket wasn’t draped in the United States flag and there wasn’t a twenty-one-gun hero’s salute. She was laid in a plain wood casket and put deep in the ground, in her small hometown, where, after a while, no one would remember how brave she was.

After the funeral I found Sally’s daddy and gave him her banjo. I told him about how we went to town on Christmas Day and how the music store was open even though it wasn’t supposed to be, and how Sally saw that banjo and decided right then and there that she was going to learn it. He held it for a moment, picking at the strings. He said, “Sally always did the things she set her mind to.” Then he handed me the banjo and said, “Why don’t you keep it to remember her? Sally wrote me about your music. She said you’re as good as Martha Tilton or Anita O’Day. That banjo needs to be played, and it’ll only sit here collecting dust.”

I hugged him and then he turned away, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. I walked out to the front porch, where the girls were sitting. I sat next to Mudge, in the porch swing, the banjo on my lap. Janie, Helen, Loma, and Paula sat on the steps and on the railing. Van Johnson stood in the yard, smoking a cigarette and talking to Sally’s brothers.

Paula said, “FUBAR.” I knew exactly what this meant, from Johnny Clay.

Loma said, “Twenty-five cents please.”

We laughed, but it didn’t last, winding down fast and fading away till there was nothing left. Mudge and I rocked back and forth slowly, pushing the swing together. She fished something out of her purse, and it was a silver flask, sleek and shiny. She took a drink and passed it to Paula. I watched as Paula drank and then Loma, and I thought I wouldn’t mind getting good and drunk for the very first time in my life. When it was my turn, I took a long gulp and nearly coughed it all back up.

Mudge slapped me on the back till I stopped coughing.

“Easy, Hartsie,” Paula said.

I held up the flask. “To Sally.” I took another drink and passed it to Janie.

“To Sally.”

One by one we toasted Sally Hallatassee and emptied that flask of whiskey till you could have held it upside down and not a single drop would have come out.

Sally’s mama had been cleaning all morning and buzzing around just like a hummingbird. I’d never seen anyone so busy. Sally’s daddy stood watching her and he had that helpless look that I’d seen men wear before—Danny Deal and Coyle, Linc, my own daddy. He said to us, “I don’t know what she’ll do when this funeral is over. It’s the only thing keeping her going right now.”

I thought, I don’t know what any of us will do. Sally was one of my best friends. That wasn’t anything you could replace, just like you couldn’t replace Ned Tyler or my mama. I would go back to base and expect Sally to be there, but instead there would be no one. I would fly the B-29 with Helen, if they still wanted me to, and I would go around to all the military bases and show the men how things were done.

I felt the place where Ty used to be, and where Sally used to be. The phantom limbs were multiplying.

When we landed at Camp Davis, Janie, Helen, and I climbed out of the plane and stood on the runway, waiting for Jackie Cochran. I held the banjo in my arms like a baby. Finally she came down from the cockpit, pulling off her helmet, running her hands through her hair, squinting in the sun. She said, “Ladies,” and started past us.

I said, “We need to know what’s being done about Sally.”

She stopped and looked at me. She said, “What do you mean?”

Janie said, “About the investigation into what happened.”

Miss Cochran said, “I promise you I’m doing everything I can to make sure we get to the bottom of this. We don’t know that it’s sabotage, but if it is, I plan to find out and something will be done about it.” Her face was hard to read—I thought she seemed tired and sad but that she was also on her guard with us.

I said, “Sally wanted to fly more than anything else in this world, just like we all do. She came to Texas to fly for you, to be a WASP. She came here to take part in your program. She did all she could to be a good pilot and make you proud.”

She didn’t say anything for a good long moment and then she said, “I’ll do my very best.”

Jackie Cochran left for Washington, D.C., the next day. She didn’t say a word to any of us about her investigation into the crash or what she might have found out. She didn’t even tell us good-bye.

I watched her plane take off and then I walked over to the Cemetery. I looked for Zeke Bodine and at first I didn’t see him. One of the other guards said, “What are you doing here?”

I started to tell him: I’m trying to find out the reason why one of the nicest girls you could ever meet, one of the best friends I ever had, is dead. But then I saw Zeke Bodine and waved at him, and he came over and said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “I need to see Sally’s plane.”

Zeke said, “Sorry, Velva Jean, we can’t let you in here.”

I said, “Just so you know, Zeke, I plan to get in there one way or the other.”

The other guard started to say something, but Zeke said, “I’ve got this.” He waited till the guard walked away, looking over his shoulder, watching us, before he said, “I’m awful sorry about Sally.”

“I need to see her plane. I know they’ve already picked through it.” Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe no one was even paying attention. “But I’ll feel better if I see it. I need to know what happened.” And when I do find out, someone will be sorry. I don’t care if I have to become Bonnie Parker again, just like when Johnny Clay and me were on a wayward path and following Harley Bright around Alluvial with his bad Barrow gang. I don’t care if I get locked away in Butcher Gap Prison just like Junior Loveday, who killed all those men just because there was a meanness in him that he couldn’t help. Maybe his meanness comes from being a Loveday—my mama said they were all of them mean as dirt for as far back as anyone could remember—but my meanness comes from one terrible thing happening after another, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with much more of it.

Zeke stared at me, and I stared right back, not blinking, not flinching. I knew I looked mad as a wild boar. Finally he said, “Go on.” He glanced around him to see if anyone was watching. “But if you get caught, you’re on your own.”

I thought: I already am.

I didn’t know where to look, but I figured her plane—what was left of it—might be near the front since the accident had only just happened. I made my way through the maze of olive drab and silver and looked for the black of fire damage. Walking through the crushed metal and parts of airplanes made me think about the fact that every day I was going up in these ships that were made out of bolts and steel and glass, and that it didn’t matter if the cockpit was armor plated because all these things could be broken, which meant you could be broken too.

Five minutes later, toward the middle and not the front, I found an A-24 cracked in two. The engine and cockpit were thick with black. I pushed through parts from other planes, sending some rolling to the ground. I laid my hands on the cockpit and the metal felt thin and cold. The glass of the windshield and canopy was cracked and foggy. The glass over the backseat was shattered. That must have been how Gus was thrown out. I wondered if Sally had kicked the glass from inside or if the cracks were made by the fire. They said she was still strapped in when they got to her.

I climbed up on the wing and then stepped on top of the cockpit. I wanted to get a good look at the safety latch, to see why it was she couldn’t get out of there in time. I ran my hands over the hatch, the place where it should open. I thought about where this plane had been before it came here. Maybe it flew in the Pacific. Maybe over Guadalcanal. Maybe Beachard had flown in it while he was there or it might have flown over Italy. Linc and Coyle Deal might have looked up from the beach somewhere near Naples and seen it. I wished I could find the little black box. What would it tell me?

Rumors were spreading around the base that Sally’s plane was brought down by friendly fire. Some of the pilots said they were there when Lieutenant Bruce Arnold, son of General Hap Arnold, snatched a gunner’s hand from the trigger after he saw a .50 millimeter round fired at Sally’s A-24.

The inside of the cockpit was charred as black as the outside. I could suddenly hear her screams and I tried quick to think of something else—anything else: marching songs, Ty’s songs, Butch’s songs, Sally’s banjo, the cracking sound of her gum.

I crawled through the hole in the side of the plane—the one the firemen made when they were trying to get Sally out—and sat down in the pilot’s seat. I reached up for the canopy safety latch, wrenching it back and forth, up and down, but it wouldn’t move. I stood on the seat and ran my fingers over the hinges, over the joint of it. The latch was bent like a pretzel, right at the tip. There were marks on the side that shouldn’t have been there, like someone had tried to twist the latch out of shape, and I couldn’t tell if this was from fire or something else.

Someone wanted this to happen.

I tried to push the thought out of my head, but it kept coming back. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up, which meant that it was probably true. But who would do something like that?

“You there.” I turned at the voice. Harry Lawson was walking up. He said, “Get down from there. What are you doing? Do you have permission to be in here?” His accent was shorter, more clipped than usual.

I said, “My friend was in that plane. She died in there.” I thought maybe if I told the sad truth of it he’d feel sorry for me and let me keep looking. I said, “I need to know what happened.”

He said, “You can’t be in here. It’s regulations.” I took a last look at the cockpit—at the safety latch—before climbing down. He reached out a hand to help me make the jump from the wing.

I said, “What about the black box?”

“The black box?”

“Was there a flight recorder on her plane? One that could tell us something?”

I thought about all the people I knew who had little black boxes—my daddy, the Wood Carver, Harley Bright. Butch had a little black box all locked up tight, full of secrets that I would never get to open no matter how much I wanted to see inside it.

He said, “No.”

I said, “Are you going to report me for being here?”

He took his time answering and finally he said, “No.”