Wings Page 4

  All three of the girls were staying for dinner with them, their husbands had other plans that night and the girls came home to their parents often. Oona loved seeing the kids, although having them all home at once made the dinner hour unusually chaotic and noisy.

  Pat went to change and Chris went to his room, while Cassie tried entertaining the kids and everyone else cooked, and two of her nephews thought the dirt on her face was hysterically funny. One of her nieces did too, and she chased all of them around the living room pretending to be a monster. Chris didn't appear again until dinner was called, and he glared at Cassie when he did. He was still annoyed at her about the loop she had done, but on the other hand she had won his father's praise for him, so he didn't dare complain too much or too loudly. They were both getting what they wanted out of the arrangement. She wanted to fly, and he wanted the money. His father's praise was an added bonus.

  Half an hour later, they all sat down to an enormous meal, of com and pork, com bread and mashed potatoes. Glynnis had brought the pork, and Megan the com, and Oona had grown the potatoes. They all grew their own food, and when they needed more they bought it at Strong's. It was the only grocery store for miles, and the best one in the region. The Strongs were doing well, even in tough times, and theirs was a solid business. Oona said as much again as they finished the meal, and Cassie heard a familiar sound of wheels outside the house, almost as though on cue. It was easy to guess who it was, he dropped by almost every night after dinner, particularly now that they were both out of school for the summer.

  Cassie had known Bobby Strong, the only son of the local grocer, since they were children. He was a good boy, and they had been good friends for years, but for the past two years they'd been more than that, though Cassie insisted she didn't quite know what. But her mother and Megan always reminded her that they had gotten married at seventeen, so she better know what she was doing with Bobby. He was serious and responsible, and her parents liked him too. But Cassie wasn't ready to admit to herself, or to him, that she loved him.

  She liked being with him. She liked him, and his friends. She liked his good manners and gentle ways. His thoughtfulness, his patience. He had a kind heart, and she loved the way he was around her nieces and nephews. She enjoyed a lot of things about him, but he still wasn't as exciting as airplanes. She had never met a boy who was. Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe that was something you just had to accept. But she would have loved to know a boy who was as exciting as a “Gee Bee Super Sportster” or a “Beech Staggerwing” or a Wedell-Williams racing plane. Bobby was a nice kid, but he didn't even compare to an airplane.

  “Hi, Mrs. O'Malley… Glynn… Meg… Colleen… wow! Looks like it'll be pretty soon!” Colleen looked huge as she tried to gather up her kids to leave, and Oona helped her.

  “Maybe tonight if I don't stop eating my mother's apple pie,” Colleen grinned. She was only five years older than they were, but Cassie felt as though they were light-years apart sometimes. Her sisters were all married and so settled and so different. She knew instinctively that somehow she couldn't be like them. She wondered sometimes if there was a curse on her, if her father had wanted a boy so badly that it had somehow damaged her before birth. Maybe she was a freak. She liked boys. She liked Bobby particularly. But she liked airplanes and her own independence a whole lot better.

  Bobby shook hands with her father, and said hi to Chris, and all the little kids climbed all over him. Then a little while later her mother and the oldest sisters went out to the kitchen to clean up, and her mother told her not to bother, and just to go sit with Bobby. At least Cassie had washed her face by then, but you could still see traces of the grease that had been there before dinner.

  “How was your day?” he asked with a shy smile. He was awkward, but likable, and he tried to be tolerant of her unusual ideas and her fascination with her father's airplanes. He pretended to be interested, and listened to her rattle on about a new plane that had come through, or her father's cherished Vega. But the truth was, she could have said anything, he just wanted to be near her. He came by faithfully almost every night, and Cassie still acted surprised when he did, much to her parents' amusement.

  She was just not ready to face the seriousness of his commitment, or what it might mean if he persisted in visiting her. Only a year from now she would graduate, and if he kept dropping by like this, he might ask her to marry him, and expect to marry her as soon as they finished high school. The very thought of that terrified her and she just couldn't face it. She wanted so much more than that. Time, and space, and college. And the feeling she got when she did a loop, or a spin. Being with Bobby was like driving to Ohio. Safe, and solid and uneventful. He wasn't like flying anywhere. And yet she knew that if he had stopped coming to see her, she would miss him.

  “I went up in my dad's Jenny with Chris today.” She filled him in, trying to sound casual. Getting too serious with Bobby always scared her. “It was fun. We did some lazy eights, and a loop.”

  “Sounds like Chris is getting good,” Bobby said politely, but like Chris, airplanes didn't do much to excite him. “What else did you do?” He was always interested in her, and secretly he thought her beautiful, not like the other boys who thought she was too tall, or her hair was too red, or liked her because her figure was great, or thought she was weird because she knew a lot about airplanes. Bobby liked her because of who she was, even if at times he recognized the possibility that he might not understand her. But that was endearing about him too. A lot of things were, which was why her feelings about him confused her. Her mother told her that she had felt that way about Pat at first too. Commitment was always hard, Oona said. And that made it even harder for Cassie. She didn't know what to think of what she felt for Bobby.

  “Oh, I don't know…” Cassie went on to answer his question, trying to remember all she'd done. All of it had to do with airplanes. “I gassed a bunch of planes, tinkered with the engine on the Jenny before Chris took it out. I think I might even have fixed it.” She touched her face self-consciously then with a grin. “I got a lot of grease on my face doing it. My dad had a fit when he saw me. I couldn't get it all off. You should have seen me before dinner!”

  “I thought maybe you were getting liver spots,” he teased and she laughed. He was a good sport, and he knew how much her dreams meant to her, like college. He had no plans to go himself. He was going to stay home and help his father with their business, just as he did every day after school, and all through the summer.

  “You know, Fred Astaire's new movie Follow the Fleet is coming to the movie theater this Saturday night. Want to go? They say it's a great movie.” Bobby looked at her hopefully, she nodded slowly, and smiled up at him.

  “I'd like that.”

  A few minutes later, the last of her sisters and their children left, and Cassie and Bobby were alone on the porch again. Her parents were in the living room. She knew they could see them from where they sat, but her parents were always discreet about Bobby's visits. They liked him, and Pat wouldn't have been unhappy if they'd decided to get married when she finished school next June. As long as they didn't get themselves into trouble first, they could spend all the time they wanted cooing on the front porch. It was fine with him. Better than having her hang around the airport.

  Inside the house, Pat was telling Oona about Chris's loop that afternoon. He was so proud of him. “The boy's a natural, Oonie.” He grinned and she smiled at him, grateful that he had finally gotten the son he had so desperately wanted.

  On the porch, Bobby was telling her about his day at the grocery store, and how the Depression was affecting food prices all over the country, not just in Illinois. He had a dream of opening a series of stores one day, in several towns, maybe as far reaching as Chicago. But they all had dreams. Cassie's were a lot wilder than his, and harder to talk about. His just sounded young and ambitious.

  “Do you ever think of doing something totally different, and not what your father does at all?” she
asked him, intrigued by the idea, even though all she wanted was to follow in her own father's footsteps. But those footsteps were totally forbidden to her, which made them all the more appealing.

  “Not really,” Bobby answered quietly. “I like his business actually. People need food, and they need good food. We do something important for people, even if it doesn't seem very exciting. But maybe it could be.”

  “Maybe it could,” she smiled at him, as she heard a sudden droning sound above, and looked up toward the familiar noise of the engines. “That's Nick… he's on his way to San Diego with some cargo. Then he's stopping in San Francisco on the way back, to bring back some mail on one of our contracts.” She knew he was flying the Handley Page, she could tell just from the sound of the engines.

  “He probably gets tired of that too,” Bobby said wisely. “It sounds exciting to us, but to him it's probably only a job, just like my father's.”

  “Maybe.” But Cassie knew different. Flying wasn't like that. “Pilots are a different breed. They love what they do. It's almost as though they can't bear the thought of doing anything else. It's in their bones. They live and breathe it. They love it more than anything.” Her eyes shone as she said it.

  “I guess,” Bobby looked baffled by what she was saying, “I can't say I understand it.”

  “I don't think most people can… it's like a mysterious fascination. A wonderful gift. To people who love flying, it means more than anything.”

  He laughed softly in the warm night air. “I think you just see it as very romantic. I'm not so sure they do. Believe me, to them, it's probably just a job.”

  “Maybe,” she said, not wanting to argue with him, but knowing far more than she let on to. Flying was like a secret brotherhood, one she desperately wanted to join, and so far no one would let her. But for those few moments in the air today, when Chris had let her fly the plane, that was all that mattered.

  She sat thinking of it for a long time, staring into the darkness off the porch, forgetting that Bobby was even there, and then suddenly, when she heard him stir, she remembered.

  “I guess I should go. You're probably tired from gassing all those planes,” he teased her. But actually, she wanted to be alone, to think of what it had been like to fly the plane. It had been so exquisite for those few minutes. “I'll see you tomorrow, Cass.”

  “Good night.” He held her hand briefly and then brushed her cheek with his lips before he walked back to his father's old Model A truck with “Strong's Groceries” written across the side. In the daytime, they used it for deliveries. At night, they let Bobby drive it. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

  She smiled and waved at him as he drove away, and then she walked slowly back into the house, thinking of how lucky Nick was to be flying through the night, on his way to San Diego.

  3

  Nick returned to Good Hope from the West Coast late Sunday night, after dropping off cargo and mail in Detroit and Chicago. He was back at his desk at six o'clock Monday morning, looking rested and energetic. It was a busy day, some new contracts had come in, and there was always more mail and cargo to be moved around. They had plenty of pilots working for them, and enough planes, but Nick still volunteered for the longer-range trips himself, and the more difficult flying. It gave him enormous satisfaction to get in a plane, and fly off into the night, especially in rotten weather. And Pat was the perfect balance for him. He was a genius at running the administrative side of their business. He still loved to fly too, but he had less time for it now, and in some ways less patience. It annoyed the hell out of him when something went wrong with a plane, or they were delayed, or their schedules got loused up. He had no patience at all for pilots' quirks and little tricks, and he made them toe the line and be 100 percent reliable, or they never flew again for O'Malley.

  “Ya better watch out, Ace,” Nick teased him now and again, “you're beginning to sound like Rickenbacker,” their old commander.

  “I could do a lot worse, Stick. And so could you,” Pat would growl back at him, using Nick's old wartime nickname. His wartime history was every bit as colorful as Pat's. Nick had once fought the famed German flying ace Ernst Udet to a standoff, and brought his plane back safely even though he'd been wounded. But that was all behind them now. The only time Nick thought of the war was when he was fighting weather, or bringing in a limping plane. He had had a few close calls in the seventeen years he'd flown for Pat, but none as dramatic as his wartime adventures.

  Nick was reminded of one of them late that afternoon, as they watched a storm brewing in the east, and mentioned it to Pat. There had been a terrible storm he'd gotten caught in during the war, and flew so low to the ground to get under the clouds, he had almost scraped the plane's belly. Pat laughed, remembering it; he'd given Nick hell for flying that low, but he'd managed to save himself and the plane. Two other men had gotten lost in the same storm and never made it.

  “Scared the hell out of me,” Nick admitted, two decades later.

  “You looked a little green when you got in, as I recall.” Pat needled him a little bit, and they watched the ominous black clouds gather in the distance. Nick was still tired from the long flight from the West Coast the day before, but he wanted to finish his paperwork before he went home to sleep. And when he walked back into the office with Pat, after checking the condition of some planes, he noticed Chris in the distance, chatting with Cassie. They seemed intent in conversation and neither of them noticed him. He couldn't imagine what they were saying. Nor did it worry him. He knew that the weather was looking too ominous for Chris to want to go up with him or practice solo.

  Cassie and Chris were still talking after Nick disappeared back into the office, and Cassie was shouting at him over the roar of some nearby engines.

  “Don't be stupid! We only have to go up and down for a few minutes. The storm is still hours away. I listened to all the weather reports this morning. Don't be such a damn chicken, Chris.”

  “I don't want to go up when the weather looks like this, Cass. We can go tomorrow.”

  “I want to go now.” The dark clouds rushing past them overhead only seemed to excite her further, “it would be fun.”

  “No, it wouldn't. And if I risk the Jenny, Dad'll really be mad at me.” He knew his father well and so did Cassie.

  “Don't be dumb. We're not risking anything. The clouds are still way up there. If we go now, we can be back in half an hour, and be perfectly safe. Trust me.” He watched her eyes unhappily, hating her for being so persuasive. She had always done this to him. After all, she was his big sister. He had always listened to her, and more often than not it had resulted in disaster, mostly when she urged him to trust her. She was the daredevil in the family, and he was always the hesitant, cautious one. But Cassie never listened to reason. Sometimes it was easier just to give in to her than to go on arguing forever. Her blue eyes were pleading with him, and it was obvious she wasn't going to take no for an answer.

  “Fifteen minutes and that's it,” he finally conceded unhappily. “And I decide when we come back in. I don't give a damn what you think, if it's too soon, or you haven't had enough. Fifteen minutes and we're back. And that's it, Cass. Or forget it. Deal?”

  “Deal. I just want to get the feel of the weather.” She looked like a girl with a new romance as she beamed at him, her eyes dancing.

  “I think you're nuts,” he said grumpily. But it seemed easier to get it over with than to stand there yelling at each other till the storm broke.

  They went out to where the Jenny was kept, rolled it out, and did the necessary checks on the plane itself, and then they hopped into their respective seats. Cassie sat in front again, and Chris took the instructor's seat behind her. In theory, just as before, she was only a passenger, and since they both had controls, no one could see who handled them, if it was Chris or Cassie.

  A few minutes later, Nick heard the hum of the plane overhead, but he didn't pay much attention to it. He figured it was some fool, trying to ge
t home ahead of the weather front right before the storm broke. For once, it wasn't his problem. All his pilots were on the ground, where he had told them to stay, after listening to a news bulletin half an hour before. But as he listened to the sound now, he could have sworn he could hear the Jenny. It seemed impossible, but he wandered over to the window anyway, and then he saw them. He saw Cassie's distinct red hair in the front seat, and Chris right behind her. He was flying the plane, or so Nick thought, and the wind buffeted them terribly and seemed to almost toss them away right after takeoff. They were moving with surprising speed, and then Nick saw them rise dramatically, probably caught in a sudden updraft. He watched them, amazed, unable to believe that Chris had been both brave and foolish enough to take off in a windstorm like this one. And almost as soon as they disappeared into the cloud hanging over him, Nick saw the rain splash down on the ground as though someone in the sky had turned on a faucet.