Gone to Soldiers (52 page)

She no longer felt oversized. They all looked enormous in their gear, the bulky fleece-lined leather jackets, the high-waisted, fleece-lined leather pants which zipped along the leg and needed suspenders to stay up, worn over woolly long johns. They were less ridiculous on Bernice than on smaller boned women. That was their winter gear.

The things that mattered here she was good at. They were actually paying her a hundred fifty dollars a month to learn the most exciting job she could imagine. She might have been living a fantasy, but her aching body told her otherwise. After she had stalled and spun her trainer, the bones of her neck felt wrenched out of place. Their physical program was designed to keep their sexuality in check, or so the women speculated; it certainly wore them out.

In March a directive had come down that the women were not to fly for one day before and two days after their periods. All the women had been quietly furious at the idea of being grounded for a week out of every month. Not only did none of them obey the directive, they soon realized that neither their instructors nor their officers were about to enforce it, the women because it infuriated them also, and the men, because they were too embarrassed to try to compel observance. It seemed to Bernice that since she had been enrolled in the program, her periods were shorter anyhow, but she did not ask anyone else if that were the case with them. Since the directive had come down, the women were engaged in a conspiracy of silence about menstruation. The only time anybody ever mentioned it was if she had to borrow a pad.

Winter in Houston passed, chillier and rawer than Bernice had expected. Many times the airport was fogged in. She had been caught up in the air when the airport closed, with no choice after a while but to land anyhow, with the tower yelling at her.

In the meantime, Jacqueline Cochran had opened the first all-female airfield at Sweetwater, Texas, Avenger Field, so that the class that had entered after Bernice had started there. Now Bernice's class was to fly to Avenger, cross-country, ferrying their own training planes from Houston just as if they were graduates already and delivering planes around the country, the way she would be doing in another three months, she hoped. She was enormously excited as April fifth approached. Bernice expected the Air Forces to think up some stupid reason why women couldn't be allowed to transport themselves and their planes, but the day dawned, the weather just fine—springlike and sunny—and no last-minute order from the male hierarchy on high had come to countermand their flight.

As they rode to the airport in the Army truck for the last time, Helen asked her if she would miss Houston.

“I like it here,” Bernice admitted. “But why shouldn't we like it even better where we have our own field?”

Not everybody was going. The class ahead of them, class of 43-3, would stay in Houston till graduation, then fly to Avenger for the ceremony. Flo said, “Besides, we got to try out different fields—different flying conditions. We'll be all over the country once we start ferrying.”

Flo was a year younger than Bernice and two inches shorter. She had strawberry blond hair and freckles, pale grey eyes that squinted against the sun, a big grin that showed bad teeth. The oldest girl of a family of ten, she had run off with a man in a barnstorming troop of stunt pilots who had played her hometown of Carbondale, Illinois, where all her male relatives had been coal miners. She had started out wing walking and then learned to fly. She was a good pilot, but the aeronautics courses were hard for her. Often she took a flashlight under the blanket and went on studying after Bernice and Helen had gone to sleep.

Helen, the daughter of a Nebraska newspaper publisher, had taken the civilian pilot training program in college and come in tops in her class, one of the only three women in the program at her university. Flying had seized her imagination, as it had Bernice's. After initially trying to dissuade her, her father had settled for being proud and buying her advanced lessons and her own plane, in which she had flown him around the state. At first Bernice had resented Helen, feeling that everything had been too easy for her; but no one thought of their civilian lives any longer.

Bernice, zipped into her baggy overalls they called zoot suits, climbed into the BT-13 assigned to her for the day. Two of their instructors were to act as flight leaders. They were divided into two flights. Helen took off in the first group, Bernice and Flo in the second.

Once they were up, they formed into two big squares, flying close as they had been taught and keeping in formation. They were heading north. It was a clear day, a tinge of dust in the air, a bit of a headwind but not enough to slow them down. Bernice felt like singing at the top of her lungs. She had had the same dream last night that had recurred since her second week in Houston. She was crawling down a long tunnel. Sometimes it was a drainpipe or a sewage pipe; other times it appeared to be a culvert for runoff. Sometimes it was one of the steam tunnels that connected the older buildings at St. Thomas. Suddenly she reached an exit and struggled out. The dream always ended with her standing at her full height in a field and feeling as if she were soaring, free.

Their flight leaders had them set down for lunch in San Angelo, at the regular Air Force base. Then they all marched double time into the base cafeteria, where they took over half a dozen tables. Flo was grinning. Shaking her strawberry blond hair out of her hairnet, she began whistling at every passing cadet. About half the other women began doing the same thing: wolf whistles, catcalls, everything they'd always had passed out at them. Bernice did not join in, although she was surprised to notice that Helen did, with a big amazed smile. Nobody had ever pestered Bernice with those animal noises, and she had little hostility built up toward men in general.

Her best friend had been her brother. She had never had a really close girlfriend. Often she had been the only girl, sitting in on classes at St. Thomas, where the ticket to survival was remaining inconspicuous. Until Jacqueline Cochran had picked her to try out for the Women's Flying Training Detachment, the only help in flying had come from men, starting with Zach.

Feeling happy, feeling a part of a group for the first time in her adult life, Bernice ate her chicken potpie and drank her coffee and thought about herself with a cool detached acceptance. She did not feel female; she did not feel male either, certainly not. What was she?

Flo had a streak of sexual pain through her like a raw welt. She had loved and been dumped; she felt used and abused. Helen had a side of frank sexual curiosity. She hinted in their gossip sessions after dark that she had had a lover, a man she had been engaged to but had decided not to marry. When finally forced by the curiosity of her female friends to dredge up some male in her past, Bernice produced Zach. He sat well for the part of one loved and lost. It was almost ladies' magazine stuff: the playboy from the rich family who had taken enough of an interest in her to teach her to fly.

Bernice admitted openly to being a virgin. She felt she could not fake knowledge not only unpossessed but not imagined. She talked about Jeff to her friends. They studied his photograph and both pronounced him handsome. He had written about his English girl and then her death; that too she shared with them.

Once every two weeks she wrote home, a brief letter, factual, full of her training and the weather. The Professor did not answer. She also wrote occasionally to Mrs. Augustine, who did. Mrs. Augustine informed her The Professor was just fine, eating at her house, driving his new housekeeper crazy, and that she soon might have to find him another. He had gained weight. Her husband Emil and Bernice's father were both overworked, for campus was crowded with military personnel in V-5 and V-12 programs to train officers for the services.

They took off again and flew the last sixty miles to Avenger Field in their two tight squares. The earth was red under them and flat, obscured at times by rolling dust. The roads ran straight for miles, then took an occasional dogleg and continued as straight as before. The grey green of mesquite dotted the brown land. The place called Cochran's Convent was on the horizon. Soon she picked out the tiny X of gravel runways. From the air, it looked just like the field they'd lunched at earlier. When she landed, the heat closed around her like a fist.

As she found out immediately, here they lived in barracks. She enjoyed even less privacy than in the tourist court in Houston, and they had to make their beds Army style so that a dime would bounce. Every barracks was divided into two bays, each with six bunks, with a bathroom between the bays. In addition to Flo and Helen, three others who had shared a cabin in Houston moved into Bernice's bay.

There were already more than a hundred women at the base, for the class that had started after theirs, 43-5, had come directly here. Sometimes fifty planes at a time were trying to take off and land on the two small gravel runways, with the wind blowing the red soil in gusts or dust devils or lifting it as a solid wall of bricklike swirling mess, the loose bales of tumbleweed threatening to tangle in the propellers.

A great deal of Bernice's time was spent learning to fly blind, first in the hot-box Link Trainer on the ground, with the sweat running down her in rivulets and plastering her hair to her skull under the regulation hairnet, then under the hood in the air. She flew for hours under a black curtain while her instructor bellowed instructions through the headset. She was supposed to judge everything by watching the altimeter, the ball with the needle and the air-speed indicator to judge position and correct herself.

She was also learning to fly at night. Avenger Field lacked lights, but burning pots of oil were set out to mark the runways. The first time Bernice flew in the dark, she landed so hard she knocked the wind out of herself. After hundreds of smooth landings, she almost pancaked. After that, she trusted the instruments over her eyes in the dark.

One hot day in May—when every day was hot and the temperature never seemed to sink below one hundred between dawn and dusk—the class of 43-2 roared in with their advanced trainers for graduation. Jacqueline Cochran arrived for the ceremony. She had just removed the previous command at Avenger and put in her own, men that the women were already finding more sympathetic, less interested in washing them out and proving women incompetent, more interested in developing good ferry pilots. From the distance of the ready room, where women waited for planes, Bernice looked at the glamorous figure with respect and gratitude. She did not think she would ever understand the woman who strutted like an actress across the field from her own plane, followed by her personal maid, but she would have done anything required for Cochran. Had she been religious, she would have prayed each night for the welfare and happiness of Jacqueline Cochran.

As the summer deepened, the heat thickened. The only time she was ever comfortable was aloft, where the wind and altitude provided natural air-conditioning. All the women were varying shades of mahogany. Bernice had not been as tanned since she was little, when Viola had taken them to the lake every day, where she sat under an umbrella reading Sophocles in Greek.

She had a letter from Jeff. They had ways of informing each other the censor would remove if he understood. Jeff had only to refer to incidents in their past to identify his location. He was telling her that he had returned from Tunis to London, but that he had hopes of getting into France.

One day during instrument training, Bernice was confronted with a dilemma. All the women had to choose a buddy to go up with alone—no instructor. Instead the buddy was to act as the instructor while the pilot flew on instruments, under the hood. Bernice realized that both Flo and Helen were expecting her to go up with them, but that she could only choose one. She waited, hoping they would pick each other. She would rather go up with somebody she knew less well, than hurt either's feelings. Still they waited, both expectant. Bernice wanted to hide. She could not bear to give pain. Finally she thought to ask herself which she would rather depend on up there, to be her eyes and ears in an emergency. Flo. Flo was the more desperately serious flier. Flo was also essentially orphaned, as she was. Her family was hostile. She could never go home.

As she walked out to the flight line with Flo, she felt Helen's reproachful gaze on her like a burden, which made her walk slowly and clumsily. In the air, she forgot everything except what they must do. They were utterly dependent on each other.

How serious the results of inattention could be, or how final the results of engine or other failure, was brought home to them when a student and an instructor were killed in a night crash in the class coming along behind them. I could die at this, Bernice realized. The thought kept occurring to her for the next four days after the crash, at odd times, when receiving the food in runny piles on her plate with its metal dividers; sitting Saturday night in the canteen in Sweet-water drinking local moonshine from a bottle in a bag under the table and soft drinks on top. As the moonshine burned the back of her throat but warmed her stomach, again she thought about the charred bodies in the crumpled wreckage. Finally she said to herself, Not a bad way to go, after all. What was I doing before this? Could you call it living?

The next day when she was up alone in the AT-6 Texan working on cross-country navigation, the image came back for the last time. This time Bernice, sighting along a railroad track that was to guide her, simply smiled. The AT-6 was that plane she had watched the previous graduating class landing that day they had flown into Avenger for their ceremony. It was sleek, wicked-looking, powerful. It went faster than anything she had flown—145 miles per hour—with a 600-horsepower engine and a rakish line to it-she loved. She thought that now she could feel what Zach had about his racing cars. Such pleasures were keen enough to be worth the risk.

In two weeks she would be graduating, a working pilot. That was living; her twenties had previously been a slow death. Better to take her chances and be, fully, what she had dreamed. Bernice had never been one for looking in the mirror. Now sometimes when she was wearing her outsized flying gear, she would catch a glimpse of herself, and she would almost blush with pleasure. She looked powerful. She looked bigger than life. She looked like a pilot.