Airfield Page 3

  "You've got this part looking almost like a room!" I exclaim. "I had a place I fixed up once, an old storm shelter no one was using, and I did just like you've done, set up a pallet and a place to eat, and..."

  My voice trails off as I realize the difference: That was play and this isn't.

  "Here," Moss says, getting his knife. His face and his voice both tell me he's embarrassed, and I look around for something easy to talk about.

  "Find any treasures yet? What's that stuff?" I point to dials and wire and coils heaped in a pile. "Is it from some kind of radio?"

  "Maybe," Moss answers. "Look, help if you're going to, and then you better leave. I got to see about a janitor's job at the picture show, anyways."

  I take a last look around. Does he really think he can live out here?

  Chapter 5

  I SEE CLO'S STRUNG a clothesline beside our cabin and is hanging out my dress, all scrubbed clean.

  "Hi there," she says. "I was wondering where you got to."

  "I went exploring."

  A black sedan pulls in the lot, and the woman driving it goes in the office and then pulls up to our place. "Yoohoo," she calls, getting out. "Mrs. Langston?"

  Extending a hand, my aunt says, "I'm Clo Langston."

  "Bee Granger. My husband, Ben—he's a director on the airport board—said I should come make sure you're settled in OK." She drops into a lawn chair, a bit breathless. "I would of come sooner, but this heat..."

  "This is my niece, Beatty," Clo tells her. "May I offer you some iced tea, Mrs. Granger? Beatty, will you please bring us some?"

  When I come out with the drinks, the woman is saying to Clo, "Now, I wouldn't want it to get back to Mr. Granger I told you, but I understand that the man your husband is filling in for may not be coming back until fall. If at all." She leans closer to my aunt. "Women trouble."

  "What kind of women trouble?" I ask.

  "Beatty!" Clo scolds me. Then the import of it hits her. "Mrs. Granger, do you think Grif might stay on for a while, then?"

  "That's what the airline told Mr. Granger."

  I slip into a chair and listen to the two of them go on, Clo trying to find out more about the Muddy Springs job and her visitor intent on the failings of the absent station manager. Then Clo asks me, "Beatty, isn't it that boy?"

  I follow her gaze to where Moss is walking along the highway toward town.

  "Who is he?" Mrs. Granger asks, her voice faintly disapproving. "Surely he's not from around here?"

  "No," I answer. "He's just arrived and is looking for work."

  "I see." Mrs. Granger shifts her gaze to the malt shop. "Have you investigated the Mirage yet, Beatty? I understand that's where the young people gather."

  "I figured so. I heard the voices last night."

  The conversation turns to various Muddy Springs women's groups, and eventually, when there's a chance, I say, "If I may be excused, maybe I will go across the street."

  The Mirage has a palm tree and blue lagoon painted on its stucco front, and music from a record player fairly throbs through lattice-shaded windows. It's the kind of place you don't enter so much as plunge into.

  Which is what I am trying to decide if I really want to do when two girls walk up behind me. "You going in or just looking, honey?" one asks, a redhead like Clo.

  "Going in, I suppose."

  The place is filled, kids talking at tables, a few couples dancing, a soda jerk working the long ice-cream counter.

  "You're new here, aren't you?" the redhead asks. I tell her I am, and my name, and she says she's Julie Elise Armstrong. "Come on," she says. "Meet the gang."

  First, though, we order sodas, Julie Elise talking nonstop both to me and to the young man who waits on us.

  "I didn't think I'd seen you before," she says to me. "And besides, I was sure you'd just come to town because your face was a giveaway, with that Do-I-open-the-door? look. I know the feeling. I get it every time I'm new in a place myself, which is about every year, because...

  "Rudy, are you going to make us those sodas or not?

  "So, Beatty, are you living in Muddy Springs or just visiting? We should get you down to—"

  "Julie Elise," the other girl breaks in, "stop babbling and come sit down."

  At pushed-together tables I meet another half dozen kids. Names come too fast for me to get them all straight, but I attach Leila to Julie Elise's friend and Henry and Milton to two of the boys.

  "When did you get here?" Henry asks, and I tell him just yesterday morning, on a bus from Dallas.

  Julie Elise has introduced me as Beatty, but when Milton asks, "Hey, Dallas, do you dance?" I know what I'm going to be called as long as I'm in Muddy Springs.

  "Sure," I answer.

  We make space for ourselves between other dancing couples just as the music ends, and while we wait for the record to change, Milton tells me he plays football for Muddy Springs High. "It keeps me busy in the fall," he says. "And of course I'm a workingman, got to clerk Saturdays at the hardware store to support the old jalopy."

  Close my eyes and he could be any boy I know in Dallas or Waco or San Antonio.

  "That's nice," I say.

  I stay at the Mirage a good while, though, grateful for the friendly welcome.

  The only awkward moment comes when Julie Elise suddenly spots the grease I haven't quite got out from under my fingernails. "What have you been doing, Dallas?" she asks.

  "Helping the airfield mechanic." I give some details to explain, but I stop when I see I'm telling more than anybody wants to know.

  Soon after, I find an excuse to leave.

  Crossing the highway to the tourist court, I'm surprised to see that Grif's automobile is parked in front of the cabin. Then I spot Clo and him roasting hot dogs on sticks over a small charcoal fire. They're holding hands, but they quit that when I call, "Hi, I'm home."

  "I was just coming to get you," Clo says.

  "It didn't look that way to me," I answer. Then, because they both seem so embarrassed, I feel bad about teasing.

  Clo says that supper's early because Grif has to get back to the airport to check in some air express.

  "Kenzie says you gave him a hand today," Grif tells me.

  "Just read to him, mainly. He sure can be grumpy."

  "He'd rather be flying planes than fixing them, I'd guess," Grif says. "But that bad leg's got him permanently grounded."

  By this time the traffic out on the highway is increasing. A lot of it is kids leaving the malt shop. Milton sees us and taps out a shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm on his car horn, which makes Clo raise her eyebrows. "Promising?"

  "Nope," I answer, just as I glimpse Moss walking along the edge of the road from the direction of town. His shoulders are hunched, his head down.

  "I guess he didn't get the theater job," I say.

  Grif asks, "Who? That boy? No wonder, if he went asking for it looking like that."

  "You'd look shabby, too," I say, "if you were living all alone in an abandoned railroad car and you didn't have a thing to your name, not even soap." I stop, realizing Clo and Grif are staring at me in surprise, and Clo asks, "Beatty, how do you know...?"

  But then she flings herself out of the lawn chair and snaps a dead branch from a scrawny tree. "Oh, for heaven's sake. Beatty, I told you ... Here," she says, handing me the branch. "Put on another frankfurter."

  Then she walks down to the road. "Moss?" she calls. "I'm Beatty's aunt. Come join us?"

  Moss isn't like any other boy I know. Not that any of the ones I do know are rich. It's just he's the first I've ever known who's truly poor.

  He has good manners, though. He's got bad grammar and says not no like a country boy, but he also says sir and ma'am. And when Grif mentions an automobile problem, Moss talks about exhaust manifolds and differentials and never misses a syllable.

  The two of them end up under the car, their legs sticking out and their voices and experimental knocks on various metal parts carrying Clo's and m
y way.

  Moss doesn't leave until Grif does, Grif offering him a ride as far as the airport.

  "He seems a nice boy," Clo says afterward. Then she adds, "But don't get involved with him, Beatty. He's got no family, apparently—not given what you saw—and who knows where he's from."

  "Good heavens, Clo! Moss is just a friend. Hardly that, even. Though I am glad you gave him supper."

  Chapter 6

  THE NEXT MORNING, as soon as Clo leaves for a meeting and luncheon Mrs. Granger's invited her to, I put together a few things for Moss: a wedge of cornbread, two deviled eggs, and a slice of watermelon. Also a bar of soap.

  The girls I met yesterday are going in the Mirage as I pull my bike onto the highway, and Julie Elise calls, "Hey, Dallas!"

  "Hey!" I call back, but I don't stop. "I'll try to catch you this afternoon."

  It's so late I'm afraid Moss might have already left to go job hunting, but he's out front of the old caboose when I get there.

  "I told you I don't need handouts," he says.

  "And I don't need ingratitude. I'll wait while you wash up."

  Moss looks like he's trying to decide whether to challenge me. Then he smiles a bit. "You wait inside, then. The only water I got's out here."

  He's done a lot of straightening since yesterday. A holey blanket, tied back to let in light and fresh air, has replaced the missing door. Almost all the mess has been hauled to a pile out back.

  Only that tangle of parts is left. They're spread across the counter.

  "Tell me...," I say, as I hear him step inside. His hair's wet and his face scrubbed—Why, he's not bad looking—"What are you doing with all this stuff?"

  "Trying to figure out what it is."

  "You think you can make something of it?"

  Moss shrugs. "I don't know. I wish I could get it clean enough to see what all's here, anyways."

  "Moss," I tell him, "one thing I do know is where there's stuff for cleaning metal."

  We walk together as far as the airport, sharing the lunch, Moss wheeling my bike along. He flat-out refuses to go in with me, though, saying he won't ask for things he can't pay for.

  "The mechanic owes me," I say. "I did some work for him."

  That brings Moss's head snapping around, and for the first time he looks at me as if he's trying to see just who I am. "I never knowed a girl to do shop work."

  I'm tempted to let him stay impressed, but something makes me be honest. "Actually," I admit, "what I did was clean and sort parts."

  "Still ... Anyways, have him give you something for yourself."

  "Moss," I tell him, "what I ask for is my business. You go on to town if you want."

  I find Kenzie cleaning the windshield of a small private plane. His one hand's polishing glass, the other gently resting on the gleaming body.

  "Kenzie," I say before really thinking, "you must miss flying."

  And he says, "I do, Beatty. There is nothing in this world like it." Then he catches himself. "Nothing that's more work, either. You come to make yourself useful?"

  "No. I came to ask for a little kerosene. Though if you need me...

  It takes Kenzie about two seconds to fetch some ammonia water and get me up in the cockpit washing dials.

  "What's this one?" I ask, and he calls it an altimeter. He says it's to tell how high up a plane is flying.

  "And this?"

  "Don't you know a compass? And there's the fuel gauge, and that one nearest your hand, it's the airspeed indicator."

  I'm repeating the words to myself, altimeter, compass, fuel gauge, air..., when I realize Kenzie, down on the floor now and draining gasoline into a steel drum, is asking a question. "How about you? You like flyin'?"

  "I've never been, but I know I'm going to like it," I tell him.

  "Never?" he asks. Peering my way, he kind of starts. "Beatty, you look so much like your mother up there I almost called you Lindsey."

  "You knew my mother?"

  "And you without any notion what flying's like! It'd be funny if it weren't so sorry. Lindsey Donnough's daughter earth-bound!"

  "You knew my mother?" I repeat, incredulous.

  Nobody ever tells me they knew my mother. She was from someplace up north, New York or near there, without people of her own, and Dad didn't bring her to Texas until just before she died. Even my aunts didn't know her except as a person dying.

  That's how, all my life, I've thought of her, just a woman too weak to talk, much less care for her year-old daughter.

  But now Kenzie's telling me, "We worked together a bit back in the old days. I remember once we was delivering a couple of planes to an exhibition—a new idea, flying planes to where they was needed instead of sending them on a train. Anyway, we was supposed to be flying tandem, but with Lindsey that meant chasing after her—"

  "My mother was a pilot?"

  "Huh! After the war was over and she got that little Jenny biplane of hers—part of the surplus the government sold off—she flew like she had her own wings."

  "A pilot?"

  Kenzie jerks around to face me, and now his voice is the one disbelieving. "You mean you didn't know?"

  I shake my head.

  "Well, ask your dad. And ask him to get you a seat pass from the company, too. Lindsey Donnough's daughter never been up in a plane. Sinful."

  As I go searching for Grif, I think how I have asked my dad to take me flying. He's just never been any more willing to discuss his reasons for saying no than he's been willing to answer questions about my mother.

  I've heard Dad say, "There's no use talking, Beatty. Your mother's gone," so many times that I have about stopped asking. Especially now that I'm old enough to realize some of the possible reasons for his silence, other than him just missing her: that maybe they'd fallen out of love or something had gone wrong between them.

  But that doesn't excuse Dad for not telling me the facts of her.

  I catch up to my uncle as he's rolling a drum of heavy cable out to one of the landing-field lights. He's sweaty faced and provoked, muttering about the lights needing more attention than he knows how to give.

  "Grif, Kenzie just told me my mother was a pilot. Did you know that?"

  "Your mother? No. Here, hold this clip."

  "It's what Kenzie said. He wouldn't make up a thing like that."

  "I don't know anything about your mother, Beatty. Ask Clo."

  "I'm on my way to."

  But Grif tells me there's no point hurrying, since Clo telephoned from the luncheon to say she was staying on to play cards.

  I don't remember Moss and his radio parts until Kenzie waves me down as I'm getting my bike. "Thought you wanted these," he says, handing me a pint of kerosene and a bag of rags. "Fair pay for fair work. Next time, put away what you use."

  At least pedaling back to the bluff gives me something to put my muscles to while my mind puzzles over what I've learned. My mom flew.

  My mother! Nobody's mother is a pilot.

  The question I can't imagine an answer to, though, is Why didn't anyone—why didn't Dad—tell me?

  ***

  I leave the cleaning stuff on the caboose step, where Moss can't miss seeing it, and I start back. The early-afternoon sun is all pulsing heat, and my stomach is grumbling because I haven't had lunch, except for the little bit I ate to keep Moss company.

  Nearing the airport, I see Grif up on the terminal roof doing something to a floodlight, and of course, from up there he sees me.

  "Beatty!" he calls. "Hey, Beatty!"

  There's no way I can go by without stopping, but I'm saved from questions about where I've been by the arrival of a car.

  Grif looks at his watch. "That can't be a passenger for the westbound plane already!" he exclaims, hurrying down a ladder. "I should have had the rest rooms cleaned and the weather report in by now..."

  "You clean bathrooms?"

  "Beatty, do you see anyone else out here to do it?"

  I trail him inside, where he's just get
ting a mop and pail from a janitor's closet when the radio's loudspeaker calls Muddy Springs.

  "Now what?" Grif asks, heading to the operations room.

  I listen as he talks to a pilot flying a feeder route, a guy who got off course and then made a forced landing in a farm field way to the north.

  Grif asks, "Anyone hurt?...Thank goodness ... Yeah, I'll get fuel out to you once our afternoon plane's off the ground."

  Then he adds, "You've got what} Well, don't let 'em cook."

  As Grif signs off, a passenger comes in the terminal juggling belongings and looking for someone to help him.

  Grif says, "Beatty, I've got to let that pilot's outfit know about the downed plane. Please tell that passenger I'll be with him in just a minute, and then go ask Kenzie to get the service truck ready."

  "Can I go with you?" I ask, watching Kenzie run gasoline into the tank on his truck. "Out to the plane, I mean?"

  "If your uncle says. Here, hang up this nozzle."

  Grif, coiling a length of rope, says he doesn't see why not. "Just stay out of the way of any passengers. They tend to get agitated over unplanned stops."

  "Why did the plane land out in the country?"

  "Coming out the Panhandle, the pilot got surprised by a thunderstorm and had to fly around both his scheduled stop and an emergency field. Then his fuel wouldn't stretch quite enough to get him here."

  "What's the rope for?"

  Grif glances at Kenzie. "In case the cargo needs walking."

  "Dogs again?" Kenzie asks.

  "That's what it sounded like."

  Driving north, Kenzie and I come on Moss trudging up the washboard road toward the bluff.

  "Can we take him along?" I ask Kenzie. "He's the friend I got the solvent for."

  "This ain't a tour bus."

  "Maybe he can help with whatever needs walking."

  Slowing to a stop, Kenzie grumbles, "In the old days, an airplane passenger didn't get coddled, and he sure didn't cart his pets along. A mail bag on his lap maybe, and another likely under his feet ... and that's if he could get a spare seat in an open-cockpit plane..."