Airfield Read online

  At lunchtime I go hunting for Moss but hang back when I see him at the workbench with a couple of men I don't know. Moss is busy filing on a metal part, nodding along while the two men visit.

  Kenzie, coming by, says, "They're just crop dusters killing time with 'hangar flying.' Go on over."

  I shake my head, suddenly shy.

  "Suit yourself."

  I eat my sandwich sitting on the concrete ramp area, leaning back against the terminal building. All but the last bite, anyway. Millie snatches that away.

  "You know," I tell her, "a really well-trained dog wouldn't steal food. And where'd you appear from?"

  She offers a length of belly for me to rub.

  "Aren't you supposed to stay at the caboose when Moss is down here?"

  She jabs me with a foot.

  "OK, OK!"

  But something on the landing field diverts her attention, and she races away. After flushing a bird that flies off, she chases it until she's almost out of sight.

  Moss, joining me, laughs. "That crazy dog's gonna wear herself out. How come you ate without me? Kenzie said you come to the hangar and then left without saying nothing."

  "Anything."

  "'Anything.' Beatty, you should of listened to those pilots. They was telling a story—"

  " Were telling."

  "Yeah. They were telling a story about this flight they was on—were on—when their engine conked and—"

  "Moss, I'm sorry. I shouldn't keep correcting your grammar."

  "I'm grateful." He looks at me kind of sideways. "I admire people not too proud to learn."

  A man's voice behind us interrupts. "Are you Moss and Beatty?"

  He's a cheerful-faced man, perspiring, in a straw hat and a business shirt and a tie. He says, "Thought I'd meet all this new help I've been hearing about. I'm Mr. Granger, by the way, and—"

  He breaks off to exclaim, "Gol darn it! Look at those danged sheep. If I have told the ranchers around here once I have told them a thousand times, 'Keep your animals off the landing field. They are a hazard.'"

  Millie has also spotted the band of ewes and lambs wandering onto the weedy hard-pack, and now she's running at them, a low-streaking blur of black and white. The confused animals dart this way and that, but Millie barks orders and nips at hooves until she's herded them off the field. Then she drops into a watchful crouch, appearing ready to defend the whole airport if they return.

  "Well, gol darn it!" Mr. Granger repeats. "Ordinarily I don't want dogs on my airfield any more than I want sheep, but maybe I should hire that one."

  Which, of course, he doesn't mean, but he doesn't chase her away, either.

  "Well," I say to Moss after Mr. Granger's left, "it looks like you, Millie, and I all have jobs now."

  "And not a one of us gettin' paid regular," he says.

  I ask, "Do you mind?"

  "Nope. Not so long as Kenzie and me keep gettin' enough tips so I can buy food and not take so much from you all. You?"

  "I'm just glad to be here. And it's Kenzie and I."

  "That's what I said."

  "Beatty," Grif asks, "do you know how to work a typewriter?"

  "Just what Clo's shown me."

  What he needs typed up is an item for the company newsletter, a publication that the airline wants each station to contribute to.

  "Grif, do you really think anybody cares that the Muddy Springs Airport shipped a wedding cake and was visited by a senator's wife last month?"

  "Hey, you come up with something better."

  Clo's waiting when Grif and I drive up at suppertime, her eyes anxious. "Everything went all right? No problems?"

  "Best day since we got to Muddy Springs," Grif tells her. "Beatty was a real help."

  "Oh, good," Clo says, pleasure flooding her face. "I want to hear all about it."

  "Can I tell you later?" I ask. "Do I have time for a nap before we eat?"

  Chapter 13

  WHEN SATURDAY ROLLS around, Julie Elise and Leila and I go in town to the picture show. Afterward, while we're having sodas at the candy shop next door, the girls ask why I've been at the airfield so much.

  "I'm working there," I answer, expecting them to be surprised, but they're not particularly. More envious, is like, until I mention it's a volunteer position. I immediately wish I'd kept quiet about that part, because I don't want to explain about the dumb thing I did stowing away.

  "You're working for free?" Leila asks.

  Julie Elise saves me answering by interrupting with her own suggestion. "Beatty, does this have something to do with that boy who's working out there?" She turns to Leila. "I met him when he came in my dad's place to look at a book on radios. He's adorable."

  "That's not the reason," I protest, annoyed at her for thinking that, and also at myself for the blush I feel coloring my cheeks. "I'm working at the airport because I'm really needed. And Moss is just..."

  "What, Dallas?" teases Julie Elise. "Just a country boy? No big-city polish?"

  Leila says, "Country boys are the best kind."

  Monday morning I'm up before Grif and Clo, actually impatient to get back at my job.

  And I don't even mind too much when a whole family meeting someone on the eastbound flight seems bent on testing that "courteous and efficient service."

  "Yes, ma'am," I tell the lady. "I'll be glad to watch your children for a bit."

  "No, sir," I answer her husband, "finding you a newspaper won't be a bother at all."

  And I do not once say aloud what I'm thinking: Hey, kids! Use the door handle. I'm the one who cleans that glass panel you're pushing on!

  I'm glad, though, when they leave after watching the flight depart on schedule at 9:45 and Grif says, "Go on and take a break, Beatty."

  I wander out to the hangar, where I find Kenzie visiting with Annie Boudreau and a man I don't recognize. Swapping stories, I suppose, since nearby them Moss is sweeping the floor so slow he must be listening in.

  I start to leave, but then, instead, grab a dustpan and go to help.

  Annie sees me and nods as she continues with what she's telling the other person, who turns out to be a government weatherman.

  "Talk about missing calls!" she says. "You all were saying, 'Clear, visibility unlimited,' when anybody looking out a window could see fog so thick the birds were walking."

  "Now," the man says, "if we got it right all the time, you'd complain we were taking the sport out of flying."

  Annie waves a hand toward me. "Not so long as we have girls like this one to keep us on our toes. Did you hear about the scare she gave me, competing with my airplane for landing space?"

  Of course, she tells the whole story about almost running me down, but she doesn't sound angry and, in fact, kind of includes me in the audience. Her next tale is a drawn-out one that's not showing any signs of ending when I look at my watch and see I'm due back at the terminal.

  Moss hands me the broom. "I'll go," he says, "and you finish here."

  "You don't mind?"

  "Nah. I'd as soon help out one place as the other."

  Annie, taking in the exchange, says, "But come closer, Beatty, so I can stop shouting."

  And Kenzie adds, "Only don't stop sweeping. Moss ain't got under that workbench in a week."

  The switch-about, me to the hangar and Moss to the terminal, soon becomes a regular part of the day. Not that we don't stick mostly to our given jobs: There's no way I can take Moss's place as a grease monkey, and Grif likes me behind the desk at check-in times, when he's busiest.

  And I do enjoy being able to give a good answer when some passenger calls me "miss" and asks about a schedule or services in the air.

  There's one really scary day when the airline division manager shows up unannounced. "Not an official inspection," he tells Grif. "Just thought I'd see how things are going. Where's this niece of yours?"

  "This is Beatty," Grif tells him as I come over.

  I see the man appraising me, and I think a silent Thank y
ou I'm in a neat skirt and blouse, an outfit that might belong in an office. He nods, approvingly I hope, but all he says is, "Don't let your uncle down, young lady. He's gone to bat for you."

  Later on, when he's leaving, he seeks me out. "I told Grif it's a rare station where I find an operations manual completely caught up. He says this one is your doing."

  I nod.

  "You reading some of it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good."

  Good... That's how I'm feeling about myself, about Muddy Springs, too, more and more.

  Though I must admit that the things making me happy are the most unlikely assortment, like pieces of a dream and pieces of what's true, too overlapped for me to know which is which.

  Dad—again done being angry, I guess, or maybe just deciding to ignore the fact we ever disagreed—has taken to sending me postcards of the places where he flies to. They're mostly black-and-white but sometimes tinted photographs of a city's downtown or a boulevard of palm trees and large houses. On the back he writes, "Be good," or "Help your aunt," or, on a picture taken from an airplane, "For your collection."

  I suppose it's as close to flying as I'm likely to get any year soon. If anything, the more I become part of all that goes on at the airport, the more I realize how unlikely it is I'll get up in a plane myself.

  Clo and I pick out a scrapbook to keep the postcards in, and I fall asleep over it one evening while I'm trying to decide on the arrangement and where to put in a couple of cards from school friends.

  Dreaming, I get myself somehow mixed up with the tree that blew down on Aunt Fanny's house, only instead of falling I get picked up by the wind and whirled off. I see, twirling under me, the Alamo and the new zoo in San Antonio's Brackenridge Park, the Baylor campus in Waco, a Dallas streetcar, and the city's downtown.

  Faster and faster I circle, until suddenly I'm flung straight out, swept over miles of mostly empty land, and dropped smack down on the Muddy Springs airfield's regulation embedded identifying circle.

  "Beatty," Clo says, shaking my arm. "You better put this work away and go to bed."

  The next day Moss seems quieter than usual when we eat our lunch, and finally I ask, "Is anything wrong?"

  "No," he answers. "I'm just thinkin'."

  "About what?" I keep at the question until he pulls a postal card from his shirt pocket.

  It's addressed to Moss Trawnley, General Delivery, Muddy Springs, Texas. The elaborate script is uneven, as though its flourishes and curlicues were formed painfully, one by one.

  "From Ma," Moss tells me.

  The back reads, "Dear Son, I hope you are well and get this. We are alright. We miss you but its best you stay on if you are working as there's still none extra here. Your brother walked for the first last week."

  "You miss home?" I ask.

  He nods. "Some. Beatty, I hate it I wasn't there to see the littlest take a step."

  Now it's my own words that are painful, a question catching in my chest as I try to get it out as lightly as I can. "Are you thinking you'll go back?"

  "I reckon not," Moss answers. "You see what Ma says."

  I am sorry for him, though I'm also glad in a way.

  I'm still hearing the wistfulness in his voice when a woman waiting for the westbound plane to be refueled takes a small corsage of rosebuds from her suit jacket and hands it to me. "Would you like these?" she asks. "They won't last the trip."

  I put them in a jar of water, and when I get a chance I take it over to the hangar. Kenzie, out on the ramp working under the hood of his truck, sees them and calls, "Beatty, don't you be turning my hangar into any ladies' parlor."

  "I'm not."

  Moss is at the workbench, and I set the flowers down in front of him. He asks, "What's this?"

  "Just something pretty for you to look at. You seemed kind of sad before, and I thought..." My voice trails off as I realize how silly it is for me to be giving flowers to a fellow, especially here, especially to this boy who needs just about everything in the world more than he needs roses.

  But he thanks me. And then, like we're both remembering that moment when it was me thanking him for wildflowers, Moss bends his head to kiss me, a peck on my cheek that turns into a light touch on my lips.

  "Dad blast it!" Kenzie's voice carries from the hangar doorway. "Will somebody tell this animal to untwine herself from my ankles?"

  Moss quickly steps back, and I look around, seeing Kenzie and Millie silhouetted against bright light. Hoping Kenzie didn't see us clearly—hoping he spoke before his eyes could adjust to the dim shadows in here—I call, "Mill, why are you bothering people?"

  Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the dog streaks from Kenzie's legs to mine.

  "Are you afraid, girl?" I ask. "Don't worry. I promise I won't let any old storm come near you."

  Kenzie asks, "And just how, Beatty Donnough, are you going to keep storms away? Face 'em off?"

  "Maybe," I answer, "if I have to."

  The thunder rumbles again, and Millie jumps from my ankles to Moss's arms, her tail knocking the jar of roses into Kenzie's pipe tobacco.

  "Dad blast it," Kenzie says again. "Dogs and flowers ... in my hangar..."

  Chapter 14

  THE STORM NEVER does get any closer, but it sets up a whole string of windy days. Deplaning passengers look a kind of greenish pale, the wind sock stands straight out, and one of the field floodlights is blown down. Put back in place, the light works but burns out bulbs about as fast as they're put in.

  Mr. Granger comes out to the airport to consult with Grif about it, and I tag along when they walk out to see what needs doing. Millie stays close to Mr. Granger's heels, eager for the bit of meat or cheese he's taken to bringing her.

  "I think there's damage up the whole line, which already wasn't working too well," Grif says. "I've jury-rigged a fix as best I can, but probably we should get someone in to look at it."

  "I hate to spend the money," Mr. Granger answers. "Revenue's low enough anyway, and we need to be putting it to new things like runways."

  "It would be nice to pave at least that carved-out path that most planes take," Grif agrees. "One thing pilots and passengers do hate is having to push a plane that's stuck in mud." He pulls a screwdriver from his pocket and unfastens the light cover. "But nobody likes to fly into an airport without reliable field lights, either."

  "I guess you're right," Mr. Granger says, shaking his head. "When I get a chance, I'll put a call in to the company we bought them from."

  One day the wind gets so strong that the afternoon flight by-passes Muddy Springs altogether. With no work to do in the terminal, I help out in the hangar, where Mr. Granger's got Kenzie and Moss counting inventory.

  "Quarter-inch rivets?" I ask, reading down a list, and Kenzie answers, "Forty-seven."

  "Fifteen here," Mr. Granger says.

  "Three-eighths inch?"

  "I got 'em," Moss says. "Eighteen, nineteen ... twenty-two in all."

  Grif comes searching for something to eat. "Are there any of Clo's oatmeal cookies left?" he asks me.

  "Sorry. Are you really hungry?"

  "Not enough to worry about. Air over a plane's wings."

  After he leaves I ask the others, "What does he mean by that?"

  Kenzie chuckles. "I'd guess he means it's nothing, or not enough to worry about, anyway."

  I'm still puzzled.

  "Because," Kenzie says, "in one way, nothing is what air being rushed over the curved front of a plane's wing results in. It makes a space of almost nothing—a low-pressure area—over the slanted-down back side of the wing."

  "Seems a roundabout way of talking," Moss says.

  I look at a Travel Air biplane in for maintenance and see that, sure enough, the leading edges of its wings are rounded and the trailing edges tapered and narrow.

  "So what's the point?" I ask. "I mean about low pressure over an airplane's wings?"

  "So?!!" Kenzie practically sputters. "Why, it's that low pres
sure that gives a plane its lift, girl—that lets it leave the ground. Higher-pressure air underneath pushes up on the wing and lifts the whole airplane with it."

  It's a difficult thing to grasp, but Kenzie tells me, "See for yourself. Blow your breath atop that piece of paper you're working on."

  Holding one short edge curved over my fingers, I breathe across it.

  "Harder!"

  I blow my breath out evenly and with all the force I can, and watch the paper rise almost horizontal.

  "See?" Kenzie says. "They're the same thing, what you just did breathing and the lift a plane gets when air rushes over its wings."

  "A wonder," Moss says, getting paper to try it himself.

  "More like a miracle," I say, looking from the tissue-thin inventory form in my hands to an airplane that must weigh close to a ton.

  But I also wonder, Is a plane leaving the ground more or less of a miracle when I understand how it works?

  Kenzie says, "Knowing the why of a thing makes it part yours."

  Mr. Granger watches Moss for a moment before saying, "Oh, what the heck." Then he reaches for his own piece of paper.

  There's one place, though, where I'll probably never understand the why of things, and that's in the operations room.

  The equipment there baffles me, and even if it didn't I'd probably stay out. The place isn't big enough for three people, and more and more often Moss and Grif are in there talking radios.

  They began the day Moss brought Grif those tubes and parts from the caboose.

  Grif told him, "I don't think you can make much of all this. You're missing some main items." But then he added, "Come on. We'll take the case off the station receiver so you can see what I mean."

  Since that day, Moss has taken to finding excuses to be in the terminal when he knows Grif's likely to be talking to an incoming plane or collecting weather information from a couple of ham operators who radio rather than call it in. He watches intently when Grif struggles with dials and knobs to make broken transmissions come in clearer.