Airfield (3 page)

"Maybe he'll come get it," I suggest, hopeful I won't have to make that hot bike ride again and realizing I will.

 

I don't intend to stop at Joe's Texas Auto Parts, but Joe's out front when I ride up. He calls, "That airport still lost?"

"No, sir," I answer, veering over. "I found it and guess I will again, if it's not moved." Then I ask if Moss has been by.

"What for? I told him I hardly got work enough for me, and sure none extra." He looks at me sharply. "What's your interest?"

"None, really. I just saw how his folks took off yesterday. It was sad."

"He's a wandering boy now."

A wandering boy. There's thousands on the roads, and Moss is just one more.

"When you talked to him, did he say ... I mean, where was he even going to stay?"

"No telling," Joe says, "though I did mention an old boxcar up by the bluff, dry anyway and empty, far as I know. That ain't saying he's gone to it."

I'm about to leave when Joe tells me to wait while he fetches a few peaches. "Take these along. Just in case you find him."

"I'm not looking—"

"I said, 'in case.' Now get goin' 'fore your plane leaves without you."

"But I'm not—" Then I see Joe's teasing again. "One day," I tell him. "One day I
mil
get a plane ride."

 

Biking up Airfield Road—no more shortcuts for me—I study a low smudge of reddish brown in the not-too-far distance. That's got to be the bluff Joe meant, the only rise visible in all this flat land.

A vehicle overtakes me, a little open roadster trailing dust clouds and noise. It brakes to a halt, and the driver waits for me to catch up. It's Gold Lightning, I realize after a moment. Somehow she looked better in her flying suit than she does in the sprigged cotton dress she's now wearing, an outfit that seems way too dainty for her.

Though, to be fair, if I hadn't seen her yesterday I probably wouldn't think that.

"You," she says, "Donnough's daughter. What do people call you?"

"Beatty. For Beatrice."

"You going out to the airport again?"

"Yes."

"Well, do something for me. Give this to Kenzie and let him know I've got a pupil coming in at five o'clock, so I'll need my plane ready by then."

Hardly giving me a chance to take the leaflet she holds out, she makes a dirt-spitting three-point turn and starts off. Then, fifty feet away, she stops again. This time she backs up until she's even with me.

"Beatty..."

She seems uncertain about what she wants to say, and impatient, too. With herself for being indecisive, is my guess, considering how up to now about all I've heard from her are orders.

"Beatty," she repeats, "what I said yesterday—I hope you are learning good sense..."

It's such a strange thing to say, and so ill mannered that I'm tempted to snap off,
No.

But I can see from how her face flushes that she doesn't mean it rudely: She's just not as good asking a personal question, whatever her reason, as she was demanding to know what a fool was doing in her landing path.

So I nod, intending to ask why she wants to know and how yesterday she put Dad and me together.

Gold Lightning doesn't give me a chance. "Good," she says, driving off, leaving me to chew dust and think her interest really does seem odd.

It's strange enough I'll ask my dad to explain the next time he comes through Muddy Springs. Assuming that by then he's calmed down.

And I hope it won't just make him angry again.

 

Grif's got three people to check in for the afternoon flight, an unanticipated crowd for Muddy Springs.

I listen for a moment while Grif explains to a woman that, no, he is not being fresh by weighing her and her luggage. "Airline regulations require me to figure load allowances and balance. With full flights there's not a lot of leeway."

Another passenger interrupts. "Ma'am, I've flown many times, and there's always some weigh-in. If our plane's to get in the air, there's just so many pounds—us and fuel and cargo—it can carry."

"Young man," the woman says, "I understand that. But I assure you my suitcase is not more than the allowed thirty pounds, and as for my person..."

I put Grif's lunch where he'll see it, wave the leaflet, and point toward the hangar.

 

Kenzie has the
Gold Lightning
plane pulled in the shade just inside. He's working in the forward seat of its cockpit, and judging from the way he's talking to himself—just this side of outright swearing—I guess he's having a hard time with something. Suddenly his arm jerks back and a tangle of webbing sails my way. "Gol
durn
it!"

Turning, he exclaims, "You! Beatty, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, Beatty, pick that piece of junk up and toss it away. I don't want to see the thing again."

"OK, but I've brought you something from the pilot."

Ignoring the leaflet I reach up to him, Kenzie climbs down from the plane and gets the webbing himself. "Blockhead who designed this ought to be shot," he says. "No proper connections, doesn't fit, probably won't be no use, nohow."

"Do you want this?" I ask, offering the paper again.

"What? Put it on the workbench."

Certainly, Mr. Kenzie. You're welcome, Mr. Kenzie.

Reading as I carry it over, I see the leaflet is instructions for installing what sounds like that webbing he was swearing about. I briefly enjoy thinking,
Well, Mr. Kenzie, you can just find that out for yourself.

But I can't be quite that mean spirited. Almost despite myself, I say, "Kenzie, this paper might help with what you're fixing."

 

An hour later I leave the airport, still uncertain just how Kenzie roped me into reading those instructions to him step by step. Or how I ended up wrist-deep in kerosene and grease again, sorting what he calls valves from valve springs and connecting rods and pistons.

"What's this all for?" I asked,

"Spare parts for overhauling engines, of course," he told me, with a look that dared me to ask what an engine is.

And so instead I asked about Gold Lightning.

"I don't know much but her name, Annie Boudreau," Kenzie answered. "Been giving flying lessons over in Fort Worth, and now she's decided to expand her business to Muddy Springs a couple of days a week. Even brought a car over."

"She didn't sound like Fort Worth."

"Yankee, I'd say. You keeping those parts straight?"

"Yes, Kenzie," I answered, and kept at the work until it was done.

And now I have to decide which way to go.

I know I should return to town. Clo's expecting me.

But there's the peaches in my bicycle basket....Just how far away is that bluff, anyway?

 

Past the airport, the road runs straight north. I'm not good at judging distances, but I suppose I've gone a mile or so when the bluff suddenly ceases to be a distant smudge and becomes, instead, a reachable line of gullied rock. A ribbon of brush and scrub oak meandering along its base shows where there's a creek.

As I get closer I see it's almost dried up.

So now where do I go?

A sound like a door banging comes from somewhere fairly close. I search, at first not seeing anything in the heavy brush, then making out a line too straight to be natural.

It turns out to be not a boxcar like Joe said but an old caboose, half falling apart, glass missing from its windows.
How,
I wonder,
did it ever get out here?

I'm about to call a greeting when noise in the undergrowth startles me. Whirling about, I spot an armadillo digging through dead leaves.

"He won't hurt," Moss, suddenly next to me, says. And then his voice gets an edge. "What'd you come after?"

"Moss, you gave me a worse start than that animal did."

"I asked, what do you want?"

"To give you these peaches. There's no call to be rude."

"I ain't hungry."

"Then feed them to the blasted armadillo." Annoyed at him for making me feel foolish, I toss the peaches on the ground. One hits something sharp and splits open.

"Hey," Moss says, lunging after it, "you shouldn' throwed 'em." Then he yells, "Ouch!" and cradles his hand.

"Cactus spine?" I ask.

"I guess." He probes a thumb joint, grimacing. "It's splintered off."

"Let me see."

I turn his hand to get the light. It's all calluses layered over ground-in grease. "You got tweezers? Or anything sharp?"

"My pocketknife's inside," he says.

I start toward the caboose, but he tells me, "Never mind. I'll fix it later."

"Not without gouging yourself, unless you're left-handed as well as right."

I pull open the door. Opposite, light shines in a rectangle where another door used to be.

The inside's a mess, all but one end, and I realize that Moss has started cleaning up from that side. It's been swept—the trash, anyway—and a makeshift seat's pulled up to a counter. One bunk along the wall looks straighter than the rest, too, so I guess that's where Moss slept.

"You've got this part looking almost like a room!" I exclaim. "I had a place I fixed up once, an old storm shelter no one was using, and I did just like you've done, set up a pallet and a place to eat, and..."

My voice trails off as I realize the difference: That was play and this isn't.

"Here," Moss says, getting his knife. His face and his voice both tell me he's embarrassed, and I look around for something easy to talk about.

"Find any treasures yet? What's that stuff?" I point to dials and wire and coils heaped in a pile. "Is it from some kind of radio?"

"Maybe," Moss answers. "Look, help if you're going to, and then you better leave. I got to see about a janitor's job at the picture show, anyways."

I take a last look around.
Does he really think he can live out here?

I
SEE CLO'S STRUNG
a clothesline beside our cabin and is hanging out my dress, all scrubbed clean.

"Hi there," she says. "I was wondering where you got to."

"I went exploring."

A black sedan pulls in the lot, and the woman driving it goes in the office and then pulls up to our place. "Yoohoo," she calls, getting out. "Mrs. Langston?"

Extending a hand, my aunt says, "I'm Clo Langston."

"Bee Granger. My husband, Ben—he's a director on the airport board—said I should come make sure you're settled in OK." She drops into a lawn chair, a bit breathless. "I would of come sooner, but this heat..."

"This is my niece, Beatty," Clo tells her. "May I offer you some iced tea, Mrs. Granger? Beatty, will you please bring us some?"

When I come out with the drinks, the woman is saying to Clo, "Now, I wouldn't want it to get back to Mr. Granger I told you, but I understand that the man your husband is filling in for may not be coming back until fall. If at all." She leans closer to my aunt. "Women trouble."

"What kind of women trouble?" I ask.

"Beatty!" Clo scolds me. Then the import of it hits her. "Mrs. Granger, do you think Grif might stay on for a while, then?"

"That's what the airline told Mr. Granger."

I slip into a chair and listen to the two of them go on, Clo trying to find out more about the Muddy Springs job and her visitor intent on the failings of the absent station manager. Then Clo asks me, "Beatty, isn't it that boy?"

I follow her gaze to where Moss is walking along the highway toward town.

"Who is he?" Mrs. Granger asks, her voice faintly disapproving. "Surely he's not from around here?"

"No," I answer. "He's just arrived and is looking for work."

"I see." Mrs. Granger shifts her gaze to the malt shop. "Have you investigated the Mirage yet, Beatty? I understand that's where the young people gather."

"I figured so. I heard the voices last night."

The conversation turns to various Muddy Springs women's groups, and eventually, when there's a chance, I say, "If I may be excused, maybe I will go across the street."

 

The Mirage has a palm tree and blue lagoon painted on its stucco front, and music from a record player fairly throbs through lattice-shaded windows. It's the kind of place you don't enter so much as plunge into.

Which is what I am trying to decide if I really want to do when two girls walk up behind me. "You going in or just looking, honey?" one asks, a redhead like Clo.

"Going in, I suppose."

The place is filled, kids talking at tables, a few couples dancing, a soda jerk working the long ice-cream counter.

"You're new here, aren't you?" the redhead asks. I tell her I am, and my name, and she says she's Julie Elise Armstrong. "Come on," she says. "Meet the gang."

First, though, we order sodas, Julie Elise talking nonstop both to me and to the young man who waits on us.

"I didn't think I'd seen you before," she says to me. "And besides, I was sure you'd just come to town because your face was a giveaway, with that Do-I-open-the-door? look. I know the feeling. I get it every time I'm new in a place myself, which is about every year, because...

"Rudy, are you going to make us those sodas or not?

"So, Beatty, are you living in Muddy Springs or just visiting? We should get you down to—"

"Julie Elise," the other girl breaks in, "stop babbling and come sit down."

At pushed-together tables I meet another half dozen kids. Names come too fast for me to get them all straight, but I attach Leila to Julie Elise's friend and Henry and Milton to two of the boys.

"When did you get here?" Henry asks, and I tell him just yesterday morning, on a bus from Dallas.

Julie Elise has introduced me as Beatty, but when Milton asks, "Hey, Dallas, do you dance?" I know what I'm going to be called as long as I'm in Muddy Springs.

"Sure," I answer.

We make space for ourselves between other dancing couples just as the music ends, and while we wait for the record to change, Milton tells me he plays football for Muddy Springs High. "It keeps me busy in the fall," he says. "And of course I'm a workingman, got to clerk Saturdays at the hardware store to support the old jalopy."