Page 24

With the nimbostratus layer beneath her, she felt like she was gliding over a wooly gray carpet. Beneath the clouds, steady rain fell. Above them, all was dry and clear. She wanted to stay up forever, sailing high above the troubles of the hidden earth below.

“All planes must land, Ector,” said Captain Patterson, “including this one.” She’d almost forgotten the instructor was there, the cockpit was so spacious and her attention so entirely on the controls.

If he hadn’t had a say in what and when she flew next, George would have circled once more over Sweetwater. She guided the plane into its descent and, at just the right moment, locked the tailwheel for landing.

Down at Avenger Field, it was pouring. The slog to the barracks would leave the hems of her zoot suit heavy with mud.

Her other suit was already in that condition, and she didn’t know how she’d find time to wash them before lights-out at ten, given that everyone else was in the same boat and all the sinks would be in use.

“Might as well climb down and take your medicine, Ector. Just like everybody else,” said Elliot, who had just disembarked from her own flight and was already up to her ankles in Sweetwater mud.

“Will it never stop?” George pulled off her goggles.

“Oh, sure. We’ll be back to complaining about the heat and choking on dust before you know it.”

“It’s sending all the scorpions inside,” said George. “Check your boots before you put them on.” Elliot was from San Jose, California, where there were no scorpions or roaches, and, according to Elliot, even mosquitoes were in short supply.

“Jesus, Ector. I don’t know how anyone can stand living in this sort of place.”

“We’ll be through in a month.” She mentally crossed her fingers, made a wish. Any one of them could still wash out. “Maybe you’ll get assigned somewhere in California.”

As she reached the barracks, she saw Vivian in the shelter of the eaves, laughing with a woman in full WASP uniform: khaki pants, white blouse, bomber jacket with a USAAF patch on the shoulder. Vivian spotted them and called out, “Ector! Elliot! Come meet Ethel Blankenship.”

George dragged her mud-heavy boots over to them and shook Blankenship’s hand.

“Ethel and I met on the barnstorming circuit,” said Vivian. Jealousy spiked in George. Blankenship had more in common with Vivian than George ever would. “She does the sweetest inverted flat spin you ever saw.”

“On purpose?” joked Elliot.

Blankenship bowed with a flourish. “Whatever brings in the crowds, right?”

“Ethel was two classes back from us. She’s ferrying a B-17 to Barksdale but doesn’t have to be there until tomorrow, so she stopped over.”

“And now that I’m here, I remember why I was so ready to leave. They could at least put some planks down over all this mud,” said Blankenship.

“Don’t hold your breath,” said George, liking Blankenship in spite of herself.

“Oh, I won’t. Hey, I’m heading over to Love Field tonight to look up an airman I used to fly with. Why don’t you girls come along? I’ve got plenty of friends in Dallas. I can get someone to fly you back before morning. If my guy’s not there, I’ll fly you back myself.”

“I’d love to get out of here for a night,” said Vivian. “Come on, George, what do you say?”

George wanted to go with Vivian and Blankenship so that she could assess the degree of friendship between them. But if she didn’t wash out her zoot suits, she’d be grounded for not maintaining a neat and feminine appearance. “I’ve got two filthy zoot suits. I have to get them clean tonight.”

“Me too,” said Elliot. But Vivian ignored Elliot, George noticed. Perhaps the jealousy cut both ways.

“Come on, George. Say yes. It’ll be fun!” urged Vivian.

“Seriously. Shearer will ground me.”

“Oh, go on, Ector,” said Elliot. “I’ll wash out one of your suits tonight if you wash out one of mine tomorrow.”

“Sure you don’t mind?”

“I’ll mind later when I’m dealing with a sink full of mud, but you should go, Ector. Really. You can owe me.”

It was a short hop to Love Field and a quick jeep ride to the bar where Blankenship expected to find her guy.

George felt giddy wearing real civilian clothing, walking alongside Blankenship in her crisp uniform.

In a month, if everything went well, she’d be wearing her own uniform, striding proudly down sidewalks between ferrying assignments.

Meeting her own guy in her own familiar watering holes.

Just outside the bar, a circle of male pilots doubled over, braying at a joke George was pretty sure she didn’t want to hear. They straightened as George and her friends approached, and leered at Blankenship.

“I love a woman in uniform!”

Blankenship stiffened. The women picked up their pace.

“Hey, baby, tell your friends to sign up too. A woman’s place is in the Army now.”

“A woman’s place is in my flight suit.”

“Come on, sweetheart, Uncle Sam wants you to keep this flyboy warm tonight.”

Blankenship hurried George and Vivian into the bar and deposited them at a table. She fanned at her red face and said, “Wait here. I’ll get us a round.”

“They’ve got nerve,” said George when Blankenship rejoined them. “Talking to us like that.”

“No kidding. I know they were drunk, but you’d think we weren’t all on the same side,” said Vivian.

Blankenship sighed. “You’ve been locked up in Cochran’s convent, so I guess you haven’t heard the tall tales going around.”

George and Vivian shook their heads. “Well, they’re really about the WAACs, but no one on the outside can tell a WAAC from a WASP from a WAVE. We’re all the same to them—women wearing uniforms.”

“They sell WAAC uniforms, or something close enough, at the JCPenney in Enid,” said George. “Anyone can buy them.”

“Yes,” said Vivian. “The victory girls that hung around Moody liked to dress up in them.”

“Which only feeds the fire,” said Blankenship.

“Because the rumor is that the WAACs and the WASPs were recruited to boost soldier morale. And that we were all issued ...” She dropped her voice: “Rubbers, just like the enlisted boys, so that we could do the job properly. And that the only sort of women who would sign up are women who, well, who lack a certain degree of self-control, let’s say. ”

Vivian paled, and George’s beer tasted suddenly sour.

Blankenship went on, revealing another rumor: that WAACs were being shipped home from northern Africa because they were pregnant.

She’d met one who’d been stationed over there, and it was all baloney.

“But the story’s just too good, I guess, so everyone’s decided it must be true. ”

George had hoped for an evening of dancing, of feeling a man’s arms around her, maybe even kissing a soldier in a dark corner of the bar. But now every man in the room seemed to be leering at them. She and Vivian hunched over the table and nursed their beers.

Blankenship found her guy and lost herself in dancing and beer, but not before she found a friend to fly them back to Sweetwater.

“You kidding?” he said. “Who wouldn’t kill for approval to land at Avenger Field.

Sign me up!” On the short hop back, she thought about the rumors going around, the assumptions people in Enid must be making about why she’d signed up for the WASP.

She thought about how Ethel, dancing with her guy, had indeed appeared to be up for it.

At least with that guy. She remembered the times she’d been up for it herself.

Once a girl was up for it, people assumed she always was.

Probably even their friendly pilot, deep down inside, thought she and Vivian were up for it.

Probably he’d tell the story about flying some WASPs back to Sweetwater, and his friends would laugh knowingly.

Just thinking about it made her queasy. The atmosphere in the plane became awkward, quiet except for Vivian clicking her lighter open and closed.

George scanned the moonlit ground below for landmarks, ticking off the miles until they returned to the safety of Cochran’s convent.

Fewer and fewer pilots washed out as the training progressed.

George and the remaining women had each completed ground school and logged thirty-eight hot, claustrophobic hours in the Link flight simulator.

They’d each logged one hundred and eighty flying hours in a combination of PT-19s, BT-13s, and the more advanced AT-6s and C-78s.

Soon they’d graduate and disperse, moving on to their official assignments.

“I hope we get posted together,” George said to Vivian.

“Me too. But if we don’t, we’ll manage to meet up.”

“Right.” George thought about how easy it had been for Blankenship to stop in at Avenger Field. Earning their wings would also earn them a level of independence—bounded by all sorts of regulations, naturally, but with far more latitude than they currently possessed.

But first they had to make it through their night flights.

Two or three planes went out each night, with two pilots and one instructor in each plane.

One pilot flew the long leg out, and the other flew back, each navigating by instrumentation only, with the instructor evaluating their performance.

George wanted to fly with Vivian. She wanted Vivian to see her handle the controls, show her what she could do.

But Vivian drew Elliot, and George drew Dubarry.

Vivian and Elliot went up on the first night.

George watched their C-78 head north and then bank northwest. The bay felt empty without her friends.

She wondered where she’d be sleeping in a month, assuming she passed her night flight.

There was talk of WASPs testing drones at Liberty Field in Georgia.

There was ferrying to be done from bases in California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Delaware to pretty much everywhere else.

There was artillery target towing in North Carolina.

She fell asleep hoping she wouldn’t get the drone assignment.

She wanted to fly the plane she was in, not ride in one plane while flying another one by remote control.

At morning mess the day after their night flight, Vivian and Elliot clinked their coffee cups together, then dipped into extravagant curtsies as George and the other pilots from their bay cheered.

“It’s strange to fly without any landmarks,” said Vivian.

“All those little towns we’ve learned are just scattered lights on the ground.

Trust your instruments and you’ll do great. ”

“Patterson tried to get us to land at Midland,” said Elliot. “Watch out for that trick.”

George felt nervous and out of sorts about her upcoming flight.

Vivian’s completed test had opened a gulf between them.

Now Vivian and Elliot were virtually guaranteed to pass.

If something went wrong, if George and Dubarry botched the navigation or, God forbid, even the routine preflight check, then she’d wash out.

The gulf between herself and Vivian would be permanent, uncrossable.

She found Dubarry studying nav charts in the common room. “They flew north, then northwest last night,” said Dubarry. “But we should expect them to mix it up.”

“Did Patterson tell you that?” Everyone knew Dubarry was seeing Patterson on the sly. They were discreet, and Patterson made sure he was never Dubarry’s evaluator, but George wondered if he might have dropped a few hints about what to expect.

Dubarry’s dimples disappeared. “Nobody told me anything. I’m thinking for myself, Ector. You should too.”

But she couldn’t stop herself. “Shaw and Elliot went up with Patterson last night. They said he tried to trick them into landing at Midland.”

“If he did, I’m glad they didn’t fall for it.”

The flint in Dubarry’s stare brought George up short. “Sorry, Dubarry, I just ...”

Dubarry softened. “We’re all scared of washing out.” She rotated the chart so they could both read it. “All we can do is study up, so come on.”

George and Dubarry’s weather briefing noted clouds well above their planned flight altitude. “Might get choppy here and there,” the briefer said, “but nothing you girls can’t handle.” George loved him for that.

Dubarry took the controls on the way out. The clouds above them blocked the moonlight. The scattered patches of lights on the ground told George nothing. Her internal gyroscope sensed the plane tilting. “Dube!” she hissed.

“Just straightening it out,” whispered Dubarry.

George peered ahead and saw what Dubarry meant: an enormous cloud bank sloped up in the distance.

Dubarry read it as the horizon and had adjusted the plane accordingly.

George sensed the sudden alertness of the instructor seated behind them.

She checked the altimeter. Dubarry was taking them too high, up into the territory the briefer had told them to avoid.

“It’s not the horizon,” George whispered, hoping the instructor wouldn’t hear but that Dubarry would.

“It’s clouds.” Dubarry checked the altimeter and returned the plane to a safe altitude, and everyone in the cockpit breathed easier.

When it came time for George to bring them back to Avenger Field, the clouds had dropped to their planned flight altitude.

She tried taking the plane higher, but the cumulonimbus column was endless.

At last she flew out of it, saw a scattering of stars.

Before she could pick out any particular constellation, they flew into the next cumulonimbus column.

This one threw them around like a toddler tossing a beanbag.

Her palms were sweaty on the controls. She stared out into the dark, searching for some patch of light, some star or planet, something to fly by while she tried to handle the bucking plane.

“ Trust your instruments, ” she heard Vivian say.

Right. There was no point in looking out the windshield. There’d be nothing to see. All the information she needed was on the dash in front of her. She trained her eyes to her instruments, gripped the controls, and prayed.