Airfield Read online

  And in quiet moments Moss studies the radio manual he bought from Julie Elise's dad—a purchase I suspect he made instead of food, though he's too proud to say. Right off, he memorized the page showing the Morse code, and sometimes I see him tapping out a message on a tabletop.

  "What's that?" I ask when he practices over and over, DAH-DAH, di-di-dit.

  "M S, for Muddy Springs," he answers.

  "Why do you need to learn that? Morse code?"

  "'Cause it takes less radio power than talking does. Also, it reaches farther."

  Another day I find Moss frowning over the manual's tightly printed words regarding voice transmission. I suspect half of them are words Moss has never heard, much less read. "You need help with that?" I ask.

  But he says, "No. I'm figurin' it out. Ain't—isn't—it amazing how this all works? That radio can send whatever you say out through the air, all the way up to planes..." Moss pauses. "It's not like there's wires connecting you."

  "It is pretty wonderful," I say.

  "Like a miracle," Moss answers. "A sheer and outright miracle."

  About this time, I make a discovery of my own—just what it was that made Millie one of Colonel Bo Marshall's Stars of the Silver Screen. Or, rather, Mr. Granger and I make it together.

  It's another windy day, and Mr. Granger's come out to talk some more about those field-light repairs, as well as to check on other matters, like that we're not wasting supplies or using electricity unnecessarily.

  "Revenue," he says sternly, "got to conserve the revenue."

  But then he has me get a soup bone that he "just happened to notice" was in his car. "Come on," he tells me, "let's go see if Millie's earning her keep."

  She's not.

  Instead she's chasing things from a blown-over trash can, playing all by herself with scattering torn lunch boxes and papers. She snatches a piece of cardboard from midair, only to drop it and tear after a cup that's spinning across the ground.

  "Would you look at that dog go!" Mr. Granger says. The next thing I know he's making a paper airplane. He throws it high and calls, "Fetch, Millie," as the wind sails it aloft.

  Millie takes off, speeding twenty-five feet, fifty, racing to catch up. Then, just as the paper plane nose-dives, she leaps high and grabs it, flipping over in a twisting somersault. And she actually lands on her feet.

  "Wow!" I say, and Mr. Granger and I clap. "Good girl!"

  Millie prances to us and bows, her front legs flat on the ground and her rear up. She nods her head right and left.

  "That dog's as good as the trained ones I saw at an air show a while ago," Mr. Granger says. "Better, maybe."

  "I'd like to see an air show sometime," I tell him. "But how do dogs fit in?"

  "Just crowd pleasers to keep things going between events." He laughs at Millie, who can't decide whether to eat the bone or bury it. "But the dogs alone were worth my fifty-cent ticket."

  "I bet when Millie was in Hollywood she earned more than fifty cents," I tell him.

  "And there she didn't have an airfield to patrol," Mr. Granger agrees.

  The other thing that happens about this time is that I return from a Saturday afternoon with Julie Elise and Leila to find Clo sitting at her typewriter but reading a letter from Aunt Maud. It begins, "Fanny and I've got the Beatty Rotation reworked. See if it suits."

  The schedule they're planning calls for me to start school this fall in Waco, do spring semester in Dallas with Fanny, whose house ought to be fixed by then, and return to Clo, wherever she is, next summer.

  "Sound good to you, Beatty?" Clo asks, but her voice is strangely flat.

  "Not really," I answer. I pause, realizing this may be the first time I've ever objected to the aunts' arrangements for me. "I'd rather stay with you. And ... I guess ... stay here in Muddy Springs."

  "But you know that once the regular station manager comes back here we'll move on."

  "Mrs. Granger said maybe he won't return at all."

  "The airline still might put another, more senior man in his place. The most likely thing, Beatty, is that Grif will have to go back to shifting from station to station every week or two."

  "Kind of a Grif Rotation," I say.

  Joking's as good an answer as any, I guess, since there's no point in belaboring what Clo and I both understand: The plan Fanny and Maud have proposed makes sense, and there's no good alternative to offer.

  The idea of seeing an air show stays on my mind, partly, I suppose, because I'm glad for any thought that keeps me from remembering that I'll be leaving Muddy Springs in another month. Going without ever having had a real ride in an airplane.

  What else, though, keeps me thinking about air shows is some of the hangar stories I hear about my mother.

  Kenzie has taken to occasionally introducing me to visiting pilots—the older ones—by saying, "You recall Lindsey Donnough? This here's her daughter."

  And then I might hear a tale about some adventure my pilot-mother had: how she taught some flying instructors a thing or two; how she once rescued an injured miner by taking her Jenny into a mountain meadow so narrow no other pilot would consider it; how she liked to test the limits of canvas and wire and wood.

  Or I might hear of air exhibitions she took part in, in her own plane or in whatever more powerful one she could borrow. One man tells about seeing my mother fly a complete loop and come out of it so low down she flew under an electric line.

  All that afternoon I turn over in my mind a picture of her thrilling crowds as she performed in the sky.

  "She was a stunt flyer!" I tell Moss. "Can you imagine?"

  "Hardly," he says. "Leastways, I can't imagine my ma doing that stuff."

  There's a sad, resigned note in his voice, enough to make me ask, "Did you hear from your mother again?"

  Moss nods. "She says Pa wrote that he's hoping to sign on for government relief work out West. She says meantime I should send home a bit more."

  I put down a flash of anger at this woman who just wants to take from Moss. That's how it seems to me, anyway.

  Maybe, though, she doesn't know he's still working just for tips and that what money he does send home is more than most would spare. I've seen him at the grocery story buying cornmeal, dried beans, wilted greens from the day-old bin. Other than for that radio manual he probably hasn't spent one unnecessary penny on himself.

  It's easier to be angry at his mother than to think about him going elsewhere to find work.

  "What you need, Moss," I tell him, "is to get the airport to pay you a regular salary."

  "Kenzie says so, too," Moss answers. "But Mr. Granger says that much as he'd like to, himself, he'd never get the airport board to agree. Not enough revenue."

  Later on that afternoon, I take a Dr. Pepper out back of the terminal building. Millie sees me and comes running in from the airfield.

  "This isn't for you, girl," I tell her. "But you can sit down and listen while I tell you all that's wrong with the world. Money, for one thing. Or needing more than you have."

  Millie licks the wet outside of the soda bottle.

  "Yuck, Mill," I say, wiping if off with my skirt. "Didn't Colonel Bo Marshall teach you any manners? Or did you make so much money for him that he let you get away with whatever you wanted?"

  And then, an instant later, I'm hurrying inside, calling, "Grif, when's Mr. Granger coming out here again?"

  Chapter 15

  I'M HERE NOW," Mr. Granger answers from the wall phone behind the counter. He's holding the telephone receiver. "What—" Then he breaks off to listen. "I see. Well, whenever you can, anyway."

  Hanging up, he grumbles, "Bother those lights. We can't do without them, but they sure eat up money we need for things like fencing and runways. But, Beatty, what can I do for you?"

  "I have an idea," I begin. "I was wondering if maybe Muddy Springs shouldn't put on an air show?"

  To my own ears it sounds suddenly ridiculous, but Mr. Granger doesn't laugh. Instead he asks, "What mak
es you think so?"

  "Well, it would be good publicity for the airport and might get more town people to think about air travel. And maybe some pilots who've never flown in here would find us. And it would be fun. Millie could be our crowd pleaser."

  "Chasing sheep and running after trash!" Now Mr. Granger does laugh.

  "We get people coming out on Sundays anyway, just to watch the regular planes. I bet hundreds would come for a real show. Mr. Granger, at fifty cents a person ... think of the revenue!"

  Its official name will be the First Annual Muddy Springs Airport Air Show. I'd like to take full credit for thinking it up, but to be honest, I learn the airport board was already considering holding one. My bringing it up just kind of spurred things on.

  That, I guess, and my promise that Moss and I will do as much of the work as we can. For free, of course, though I hope that if the show does bring in some extra money, a little of it will get shared with Moss.

  Word about the show spreads fast.

  "I heard you was stirring things up out at that airfield," Joe calls when I bike by Joe's Texas Auto Parts. "Good for you."

  Clo just shakes her head. "Beatty, I cannot believe the things you think to get into."

  Grif's eyes sparkle. "An air show is what first got me realizing how I might turn knowing radios into a job."

  And the kids in the malt shop offer every reaction from disbelief to applause.

  Leila asks, "Dallas, why do you want to take on so much extra work?"

  Julie Elise is enthusiastic. "Can I do something?" she asks. "I mean, be part of it?" while Milton chimes in with off-key fanfare.

  "And," he says, "introducing the world-famous, Texas-famous, Muddy Springs—famous Julie Elise..."

  "Sorry, you two," I tell them. "But the program doesn't call for vaudeville."

  Even Kenzie gets caught up in the plans, suggesting that this pilot or that might be a good one to invite. And every plane that comes in for even an oil change, he wants buffed to sparkling just in case it winds up in the show.

  One afternoon I clean the cockpit of a small private aircraft while Kenzie works on the motor. Its owner and a company pilot—old-timers, both of them—are killing time by grumbling about desk men who don't understand conditions aloft.

  The company pilot is saying, "It was last February, dead of winter, and I told the Detroit dispatcher nobody could make Chicago that day. But he insisted the forecast called for clearing, and nothing would do but we load up the passengers and wait for a break in the clouds. Said he knew it was my call, but..."

  "Kenzie," I ask, "you got something I can use as a scraper?"

  "For what?"

  "It looks like dried peanut butter."

  "...The left engine wouldn't start," the pilot's saying. "Then a tire went flat ... Mind, it was snowing, big, fluffy flakes."

  Kenzie hands me up a screwdriver. "Where'd you find peanut butter?"

  "Under where the long piece goes into the floor."

  "'Long piece'?" Kenzie says. "Beatty, don't you know the names of things yet?"

  "...So," the pilot's saying, "we finally took off about two in the afternoon, five hours late. The weather was getting worse by the minute. And choppy ... It was soon reeking in that cabin, and the heater was stuck on high ... Must have been eighty degrees near it, and ice inside the windows not ten feet away."

  Kenzie leans over the edge of the cockpit where I'm working. "Now show me what you're talking about."

  "This thingamabob."

  "'Thingamabob'! Girl, that's the stick. The control column."

  "What's it for?"

  "For?!! To make your plane climb or descend, or to move the ailerons so your wings bank right or left. And those rudder pedals down there are for coordinating your turn."

  We both pause to listen to the pilot.

  "...getting so goopy I radioed down for an alternate course. And what did I get but an order to circle around back of Detroit to some emergency landing strip lined with smudge pots. We slipped in with conditions deteriorating so fast even the desk boys realized we were going to be socked in the rest of the day..."

  "Served him right for trusting a durn forecast," Kenzie tells me.

  "The funniest thing was," the pilot continues, "one of my passengers was a big shot from the home office. 'But I have business in Chicago,' he kept saying. I told him he was going to spend the night fifty miles farther away from Chicago than he'd started that morning."

  "What's a smudge pot?" I whisper to Kenzie.

  "Just a container with some fuel and a wick large enough to give off a big old tongue of flame. Not a bad way to mark a runway on a foggy night, if you don't mind the upkeep or the oily smoke. We had 'em here afore those field lights went in."

  "You think that story was all true?" I whisper to Kenzie.

  "With embellishments. Now, Beatty...," and Kenzie begins pointing to other things in the cockpit, naming them and telling me what they do. "See that throttle? It governs the engine's speed and power—gives you the thrust you need. Airplanes are complicated things, Beatty, and any maneuver takes working the controls together. Say you want to make a right turn, you've got to..."

  I try hard to follow all he's saying, even while I ask myself, What's the use of trying to understand things I'm probably never going to see used, anyway? Grif will never let me take off in a plane again, and even if he does, Dad won't.

  "Hey, Kenzie," says the pilot we've been listening to. He lights a pipe as he strolls over. "Are you trying to pack a whole course of aeronautics into that kid's head?"

  "I ain't telling her anything Lindsey and Collin Donnough's daughter shouldn't know," Kenzie answers. "And you mind that NO SMOKING sign and get yourself outside where there's nothing flammable."

  "I'm nowhere near—"

  "Out! And don't hurry back. Your yarn swapping's making it hard for Beatty to concentrate."

  Kenzie turns to the other guy, the one who owns the plane I've been cleaning. "You go on, too. Peanut butter!"

  Chapter 16

  THE AIR SHOW seems to be rushing toward us faster than we can do all we need to.

  Mr. Granger has all the business details to arrange. He books pilots and their planes, figuring and refiguring how many tickets we'll have to sell before we start making more money than we'll have to pay for the acts. He arranges for insurance. Concessions. Where spectators will sit.

  Since Grif is employed by an airline rather than by the airport, the show is not part of his job. Still he does a lot, including setting up a rented loudspeaker system.

  Moss helps with that, saying, "I'll run it, long as no one expects me to do the announcing."

  "You know," I suggest, "there are a couple of kids in town who just might be perfect."

  And to give the others time to work on all they've taken on, I pitch in doing more and more of the airfield's regular chores.

  I even sometimes help with the passenger planes, giving a hand to copilots who have cargo to load or unload. One asks, "Since when does the company hire girls for this work?"

  "I'm not doing it fast enough?" I ask. I grab a bundle of magazines and toss it through the door so quickly he jumps back to avoid being hit.

  Kenzie, passing by, says, "Better watch out for Beatty. If the airline ever takes on female pilots, she might just be after your job!"

  And Grif calls, "Kenzie, don't give her ideas."

  But he winks at me.

  Waiting to drop off to sleep that night, I think about that conversation.

  Kenzie and Grif are proud of me.

  While I've been too busy with all the things that need doing to think of myself, they've been thinking about me.

  Of course, I know their talk is just plain silly. I can't imagine an airline ever hiring a female pilot.

  But if my uncle and Kenzie can change their minds about what kind of girl I am, then maybe Dad might, too.

  I hear the night mail flight coming in and mentally check off what Grif must be doing: getting rea
dy to exchange mail bags and to top off the plane's gas tank, jobs Kenzie does for the milk run.

  I wonder, Would knowing how I've become somebody needed at the airfield be enough to convince Dad I deserve a plane ride?

  The engine sound gets louder as the mail plane nears town and then veers west.

  I suppose there's a chance.

  But perhaps ... that's no longer all I want. Perhaps there's more that I can do, and just what that is will be up to me.

  As though to show me what might be possible, the days before the air show bring three women to the airport. They're all connected to flying, though in different ways.

  The first is Miss Betty Blanston, one of the company's brand-new stewardesses and the first ever to be on a plane landing in Muddy Springs.

  She's gorgeous. Also really stylish, in a dark blue suit with a matching close-fitted cap. Because the flight's delayed on the ground an hour, I get to visit with her.

  "How did you become a stewardess?" I ask. "Did you just think you'd like to do it and go apply?"

  She laughs. "No. I was working in a hospital when an airline recruiter came offering all us nurses better wages than we were making there. Seven of us signed on before the hospital shut its doors to anyone who even looked like he was connected with aviation."

  "Would you rather be a pilot?"

  "Why, no," she answers. "Why ever would I?"

  The next to come through is Amanda Winters, on her way to New York to take part in an aviation competition.

  She's not the most famous woman flier in the world, but she's got a name in Texas.

  Amanda Winters does not leave her plane to Kenzie and Moss's care alone. She supervises every drop of oil going in it, inspects the propeller blades herself, spends half an hour adjusting a rudder pedal just the way she wants it.