Flying Jenny Read online

  “Plug her to rewrite!” Laura heard Barnes shout at the switchboard. There was the familiar click of the copper-tipped cords, the operator said, “We miss ya, kid,” and Jimmy Murphy was on the line.

  Laura laid the purple prose on thick. She began: “Quote, I want my mommy, close quote, cried the cherubic-faced four-year-old, tears running down his pink cheeks. Open quote, Mommy’s with the angels . . .”

  “So there’s your headline,” said Murphy, “‘Mommy’s with the Angels.’”

  Of course, Laura thought, they love the color purple. When she finished, she put down the phone, thanked Mary, and asked, “Where can I buy riding boots and breeches?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LOOPING THE LOOP

  Jenny Flynn had been by herself in the Cleveland grandstand the day before, watching the first day of the National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition under a hot August sky.

  She was totally caught up along with the rest of the crowd in the excitement of a series of outside loops. The tail-skid dust of past landings hung in puffs over the field and smudged thousands of upturned faces. There was stone silence. Even the swish of hand-held palm fans had ceased. Then thunderous applause rolled through the stands as the pilot completed his third loop. The stunt had first been done two years earlier by the military ace Jimmy Doolittle. Until then, fliers had considered such a feat truly death defying because the G-forces acting on the plane could burst it apart, or yank the pilot from the cockpit, or cause him to black out. Now a number of people had become proficient at the loop that put the pilot on the outside of an imaginary circle instead of inside it. Roy, Jenny’s instructor, had been trying to get her to perfect the stunt, but it wasn’t easy.

  “For starters,” she’d told him, “it makes me dizzy as the dickens.”

  Jenny had an ambivalence about flying that seemed to confuse everyone but herself. She was fearless. She was an instinctive pilot, flying by the seat of her pants, as the saying went. But she backed away from perfecting her skills. She would tell the world and Roy, the mentor who kept pushing her to stretch herself, that flying was a lark, a once-in-a-while plaything. “I’m just doing it for fun,” was always her response. She loved the escape of being in the air—being on her own. It was a luxury that didn’t otherwise exist in her daily life. There were the constraints of family and friends, but most of all societal expectations so ingrained that it had never occurred to Jenny to question them. Besides, she was young—eighteen—and having fun was Number One.

  Had it been suggested to her to envy Laura’s independence, her lack of structure and inhibition in her home life, Jenny would have shuddered. She may have been young, but she was wise beyond her years in understanding the value of discretion and propriety in the world in which she lived.

  Again, Jenny watched the silver plane climb high in the blue sky then drop off, forming a circle as it fell headlong, with the pilot upside down at the bottom of the circle, then climb up to complete the loop, right side up, at the point where he had begun. He did one after another, until he had completed seven loops. The crowd went wild. Jenny was on her feet jumping up and down, screaming along with the rest of them.

  As she finally settled back in her seat to wait for the next performance, she pondered the discipline it would take to perfect such a difficult stunt. An inside loop is a breeze, she thought, you just throttle up, pull back on the stick, and around you go. True, you were upside down at the top of that circle, but forces pushed you back in your seat, not out of it. Easy peasy. So are rolls and dead-stick landings. No point in spending a lot of time trying to perfect something as difficult as an outside loop. If it’s not easy, why bother? Easy is the way things should be.

  This place is futuristic, she thought, looking around at Cleveland’s huge Municipal Airport. Recently built, it was the country’s first airport owned by a city. It was so large that the grandstands for the air show were at the west side of the field and didn’t affect traffic out of the passenger terminal at the other end. Several flights a day came in, including a daily from Detroit.

  Jenny ordered a hot dog and a Dr Pepper from a vendor selling in the aisle. As she was passing her dime down the row, she spoke to the stout woman in the big sunhat sitting next to her. “Someone told me that there were a hundred thousand people here today,” Jenny said. “That’s nearly as much as the entire population of Oklahoma City.”

  “There were three hundred thousand at the parade,” the woman replied. “That’s a third of the size of Cleveland. People came from all over the world for this show. They even painted directional arrows for the planes on the roofs of buildings.”

  “Signs? I saw people perched on roofs when I flew in this morning,” Jenny said. “Sometimes it looked like whole families, or even neighborhoods.” She had flown here on her own and planned to stay until Monday to see the finish of the women’s competition. Races for men would be culminating here all week from various cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Miami, but since this was the first year for the women, it was especially exciting.

  She wondered who would win. Her guess was Louise Thaden, or perhaps Ruth Nichols. She was sure that poor Amelia didn’t have a chance. She’d already busted up a propeller overshooting a runway in Arizona on an early leg of the race, and of course her press release had, as always, blamed it on plane malfunction or a rock or a ditch in her path. Amelia could be a good pilot, if she just applied herself. But instead of flying, she seemed to spend most of her time on the lecture circuit, which was hard for Jenny to comprehend. Why spend all your time either courting or dodging the press, and showing off for old ladies at rubber chicken lunches? Didn’t make sense. Amelia was a nice woman, but seemed to be ensnared by her publicist and the idea of making money on endorsements. As a result, she was not at all qualified to be flying a fast, difficult plane like her Lockheed Vega. Many of the other contestants had sponsors, had been lent planes. Amelia bought hers because it was touted to be the fastest thing going. But fast wasn’t going to do her any good if she was too inexperienced to handle the big bird. Everyone else in the race had logged countless hours in the air, while Amelia was off talking about flying. Jenny had heard rumors, too, that the hours Amelia had written in her logbook couldn’t all be accounted for.

  The woman in the big hat grabbed Jenny’s arm. “Oh my,” she said, “those Navy High Hats are next. It’s said to be really something.”

  Jenny gasped as nine Navy fighter planes flew in formation, doing loops, rolls, and dives, with their wings tied together, strut to strut, with manila rope.

  What would it feel like to be able to fly like that? she wondered. But she just as quickly pushed the thought away. Too much boring work.

  The Navy planes had just swooped by close overhead—all nine of them—when the stout woman poked Jenny again. “Someone over there is waving at you.”

  It was a friend from the Curtiss hangar who, once he had gotten Jenny’s attention, handed a paper to the first person on the aisle. The note was passed from hand to hand of the annoyed spectators who didn’t want to take their eyes off the field even for a second.

  What could it be? Jenny’s fingers trembled as she unfolded the paper. She never liked to be away from home for very long. It was a message from her instructor saying to call immediately, it was an emergency.

  After Jenny had struggled through the packed stands and finally found a phone, she was grumpy with Roy for frightening her over a problem that was nothing more than his plane. She gave him a bunch of reasons why his plan sounded like a bad idea. Even though she had flown his closed-cockpit, five-seater Bellanca a few times before, she wasn’t really that familiar with the big plane. She’d never been to Atchison, didn’t know the field. What low-lying power lines were around? Besides, she didn’t want to leave the air show—the end of the women’s race was Monday, three days away. She really got worried when he explained just how low she would be on fuel. What if she couldn’t make it to Kansas City and had
to touch down in some farmer’s cornfield, and then try to sweet talk him out of tractor fuel? But Roy was a friend, as well as her instructor, and he needed his plane to move on to a scheduled stunt show in Ponca City.

  * * *

  So here she was, after flying until dark yesterday and with an early start this morning, circling the Atchison airfield. Roy was going to hide in some bushes near the hangar then pop out and climb into her plane, while she ran and jumped into his. They had closely choreographed this ahead of time. Her Curtiss Jen4 was not a self-starter. If Jenny killed the motor, someone on the ground would have to crank up the plane’s wooden propeller to get it going again. As she landed and taxied down the field, she could already see someone in overalls sprinting out of the hangar, wanting to be helpful, coming with chocks to put behind her wheels for parking. Jenny moved the little ship away from his path and idled her engine, looking frantically around for Roy, seeing very few close trees or bushes, wondering where he could be hiding. She was also looking at the wind sock to see whether she or Roy was going to have to take off into the wind. Seemingly out of nowhere, Roy was suddenly climbing into the rear cockpit.

  “Good luck!” Jenny yelled as she scrambled out and slid off the wing. “Take care of my baby!” The little plane was surplus from the Great War. She’d learned to fly in it, learned her first stunts, feeling dizzy and afraid she’d fall out when she first flew upside down. Even so, she’d refused to wear a parachute. Stunts were fine, she trusted the plane but never wanted to be on her own floating in the sky without it. She loved her baby, named after her, she always felt—everyone called the Jen4 a Jenny. It had seen her through many a scrape.

  She peeked around the tail of her own plane, then scampered through an open side door of the hangar and headed for Roy’s. She was happy to be helping him out of a jam. He was an ace, yet had taken her on as a student when other instructors dismissed the idea as a waste of time—she was a dilettante, a little rich girl incapable of being serious about much of anything. Her father had thought she should finally start developing some domestic skills, learn how to run a house properly. Her mother, who always had household help and wasn’t too interested in cooking or needlework herself, thought Jenny should find a nice charity or civic project. She’d strongly recommended the garden club or the library board. Instead, Jenny was in a bustling hangar in Atchison, Kansas, hoisting herself up on the wing of the Bellanca, stealthily opening its cabin door, preparing to defy a sheriff’s order that had impounded the plane because of an accident.

  She smiled. “Twenty-three skidoo,” she said.

  Roy cleared the hangar just as she roared out of it in his Bellanca. The people on the ground were so startled to see a plane that had just landed take off that they had their backs turned to what Jenny was up to. She was glad she hadn’t actually seen Roy’s plane lift off. Jenny loved taking off herself, it always felt like a start, a new beginning. But watching friends or loved ones disappear into the clouds or beyond the horizon made her sad. It felt like an ending, as though, like Bubba, she might never see them again.

  Jenny sped down the runway, pushing the throttle more than was really safe, wanting to lift as fast as possible to clear the trees at the end of the field. Under normal circumstances she would have taxied then turned back and taken off downwind to have a full runway as Roy had. But she just wanted to get in the air and say goodbye to Atchison. As the trees approached, coming at her way faster in this powerful plane than she was used to, she waited until the last possible second to pull back on the stick, and hope. She felt the lift she needed and relaxed as she watched the treetops recede beneath her.

  She had saved the scariest for last. She finally peeked at her fuel gauge. Even worse than she had feared.

  When she’d climbed to three thousand feet, she held the stick between her knees to keep her on course and pulled out the charts and map she’d stuck under her left leg. She realized with a start that her old habit of anchoring was unnecessary with no incoming wind in this closed-cockpit Bellanca. She could easily lay out a map on her lap to see the route she’d already marked to follow the Missouri River.

  Atchison was in the northeastern corner of the state, so the quickest way out was to cross the river, then follow it south to Kansas City, Missouri. It was sixty or so miles away, and with good luck she had just enough fuel to get there. She looked down at a little frame house with a gabled roof, and wondered about its funny wooden walkway that ran from the front porch all the way around the side to its back door. Perhaps the river overflows its banks, she guessed, and that was Atchison’s version of stilts. She flew over several three- and four-story buildings that no doubt were on the main street. Then she spotted the trestlework of a steel bridge and tipped her wings in a relieved sigh as she flew over the narrow span of the river that marked her exit from Kansas.

  But taking even this much of a detour east would mean another refueling stop before she could reach her rendezvous with Roy in Oklahoma. She would certainly be happy when she could dump this big lumbering plane on him and retrieve her own Jenny. Shut up inside this covered bubble, she missed the feeling of being one with the sky. She decided to keep as low to the lush terrain along the river as she dared, both to save fuel and to more easily spot the next landmark on her map. She giggled—for once she didn’t really need to worry about charting a course. The Missouri River was hard to lose, and that was her guide straight to her destination. It’s not often you have landmarks as good as this, she thought. Rivers and railroad tracks, the pilot’s navigational saviors.

  Almost immediately, she spotted on her right the bend in the river that wound around the protruding thumb of land that held the sprawling military installation of Fort Leavenworth. She glanced over at the trees and green lawns and frame homes on the Army base, as well as the two-story dark blocks of the federal prison. She would love to dip the short distance across the Missouri to take a closer look at this world unto itself. That was one of the many things she loved about being in the air. You could just nip in and get a bird’s-eye view of whatever struck you as interesting and then zoom on to the next thing. Jenny winced and tipped her left wing as she caught sight of the rows of white crosses in the base’s cemetery. She thought of the president’s son who had gone down behind enemy lines and been given a military burial with honors by the Germans. Her brother’s body was never found. Several of the pursuit pilots of the 95th Aero had taken the trouble to make the trip to Oklahoma City to tell Jenny’s parents they had seen Charles’s plane disappear in a fiery ball near the Marne River. There was no hope that he could have survived. No hope that he could one day have a white cross like those below.

  She so wanted to fly over, but didn’t dare. Leavenworth was Kansas again. Where the sheriff was waiting. No sense in taking the chance of spurting out of fuel and landing back in the soup. Upcoming next on the Missouri side, she knew, would be the mouth of the Platte River with its muddy deltas. And sure enough, there it was.

  She peered at the fuel gauge. Close. It was going to be a shaver, but she would probably make it. Running out of gas was usually no big problem. She was plenty used to that in Oklahoma, with its many flat spaces and cornfields. But she made a face as she looked down—an awful lot of trees along the river here. She could no doubt find plenty of open spaces if she moved a little to her east away from the water, but she would use up fuel doing that. Ah phooey, she decided, I’ll just wing it. She could always glide along for a few miles with a dead stick. Then again, glancing at the map in her lap, she saw that the Kansas City airport looked like it was smack dab in the middle of town—not a good idea to count on gliding too much when you’re on top of a lot of people.

  Amelia had overshot the runway in her big red Vega, but Jenny knew that wouldn’t happen to her. At least it wouldn’t if she were in her own little plane. Heck, she thought, maybe I should start worrying a little. But that was usually a waste of time.

  Jenny stared at the fuel gauge just as she flew through a puf
f of cloud. Red. Empty. But the engine was still putting along. What to do? She must veer left as soon as she could see where she was going. Then she was out of the cloud and back in the bright sunshine, and there, straight ahead, was what had to be Kansas City! Actually, two of them, right across the river from each other. She thought of cutting her motor now, but was afraid whatever fuel was left wouldn’t be enough to crank her up again. So she began her slow descent on the Missouri side, banking to circle the town as she searched for a spot big enough to land, hoping that it would turn out to be the airport.

  The engine sputtered. Jenny gripped the stick tighter between her legs to hold the ship steady as she prepared for her gliding descent.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GET A HORSE

  The engine sucked up its last dram of fuel, gave a little cough, and quit. Jenny frowned at the silence, so muted inside the closed cabin. Her face felt slightly hot, her heart began beating a little faster; she shifted in her seat and went into command mode. Automatically she tightened her seat belt and did her checks: altimeter, rudders, gas gauge. No point in that, it was definitely way beyond red. Still in automatic mode, she bumped her head on the cabin cover trying to look over the side for a sight check of the terrain. She laughed at her foolishness—there was no reason not to slide the top open, so she did. How much more fun flying is when you feel the wind in your face and hear the sound of the engine against the quietness of the sky, not the artificial lack of sound in this dumb little bubble. The wind rushed in, and with it her heart soared.

  She and the plane were on their own. They were one. And she knew how to do this. Forced landings in farmers’ cornfields were a dime a dozen, but the trick here was landing on a dime. Not a lot of leeway with all those cars and houses around. It was like threading a needle, but so much more fun. Her grandmother had long ago given up trying to teach Jenny to embroider. What kind of waste of time was that?