By Air Mail Ch.04

To hear her tell of it the one time that she told me, it was a pretty natural thing and when she sort of balked the first time, Rebecca told her not to be any more crazy than she already was. 'We are people and this is cold place, Marjorie. We are women and we know what men are good for.

But we don't have men.

Does that make white girls NOT have want in them? Tell me, then I will wish to be a white girl like you.'

My mother argued that women of any kind didn't necessarily want other women and Rebecca agreed. 'Yes,' she said, 'Paiute people are the same as white people like this. Women like men, men like women. But they live better than two crazy girls in a cave with no men in a long winter.

You don't like me, or you think I will give you another baby? You already have a baby.'

My mother turned away then, because she had to think about things. Rebecca had been good to her in a lot of ways and she couldn't help but like her, besides the fact that she's always been beautiful, so she decided to at least try. She wasn't too specific when she told me all of this, but my guess, knowing Rebecca in anything else, is that Rebecca didn't care and began to fool with herself, I'd have to guess, and my mother sort of realized that it was just the two of them there anyway, so at least she might try something a little different."

He shrugged, "I guess you'd have to know them. They've always loved me and they've never really stopped, not even after they were married. They know what they like, I suppose, and it's just how they are."

He fell silent for a moment and then he looked over again, "So I guess that if there's something really there and you care for the other person a lot, it might work. Nobody much knows about them, but the two crazy girls who met in the cold of winter still love each other. I can't say as I know it as fact, but I have a feeling that they've even switched husbands now and then. I just don't care to know much about it, that's all.

Getting back to what I was saying earlier, it's just my opinion, Emmy, but I think that the way that you left is working not too badly for you at the moment. You have to be the judge of it all at some point, but the facts are that you have left town, and in not too badly a way, if you think about it.

You're not all alone, either, not the way that you would have been even if you had gotten to buy a ticket and ride away on the train. It might take you a little while to decide about the shady cowboy character that you've fallen in with, but I meant what I said. Try to learn the job and it's yours. The only person that you know now is me. I don't know how you measure your friends, but I find that I'd like to be one of them.

Working with me gets you far too much time with me, very likely, but I don't have a lot of friends anymore, since I've been gone a long time from where I'm headed. I'm also finding someone in you who I'd want very much for a friend. You might think that you've just been rambling to me with your story, but I've been able to pick out that you've got a brain and you're a good person.

To me, it's very important that friends can laugh with each other. We can already do that. I don't know him, but to me, John Looking Cloud raised a very fine daughter in the short time that he had for it and she's someone that I really want to get to know."

Emmy looked at him and for all of how wet her eyes were and how sad she felt at the moment, she suddenly found herself feeling better. "Thanks, Quinton. I mean that."

He nodded and smiled at her softly, "I've been away from home for a long time, and I've made friends here and there along the way. But they were the kind of friends that you know can't or won't last because they came out of a common purpose. It was what we were all there for, and people like that - they tend to move around a lot, so you lose them, or they..."

He looked away for a moment and Emmy was both startled and confused. But then she looked at the upside -down lettering on the jacket and she thought that she understood a little.

They flew on for a time saying nothing and not needing to.

After a while, Emmy looked down at her shoes, remembering that she'd been in too much of a hurry to tie them up as she'd put them back on.

She lifted her legs and began to roll up the cuffs on the legs of her overalls one at a time and then tied her shoelaces. In doing that, she noticed the strange passageway again and Quinton saw her trying to see into it.

"What's down there is a small compartment for a single crewmember, " Emmy heard in her ears, "This is a Beechcraft Model 18, built right in Witchita, Kansas." Quinton said.

"That's just the name for the overall design. They were made to suit a few uses and this one was made for the U.S. Army Air Force as well as the Navy and a few others.

This one - this type is an AT-11 Kansan. It was made as a flying classroom, not so much to teach learning pilots to fly as it was to teach them how to manage two engines and other things like flying at night.

Mostly, it was also made to teach navigators how to navigate, and bombardiers how to drop bombs and maybe even hit what they were supposed to be aiming at - at least some of the time.

So this one doesn't have a place for two pilots, though it does for some basic flying duties. The bombardier would sit right where you're sitting now until it was time to do his part. He could even steer in gentler turns and hold course..."

Quinton smiled, "whenever the pilot has to pee.

Then when it was time, he'd unstrap himself and head down to the root cellar, get comfortable and then do his learning. I just haven't figured out what to use the space for yet. Once we get up to where we'll be flying for most of the trip, you can crawl in there to see if you like. It's all windows down there, so it's just gotta have a fine view from up here."

"What does the pilot do when he has to go? Open the window? I can't see that it would help me any," she said.

"There are a couple of what - for lack of a better term - are known as piss tubes," he smirked as he held the one for the pilot up.

It was a funnel-like affair attached to a rubber hose which ran to a nipple on the side of the aircraft wall. "Ya gotta go a little slow, but at least you can go. The movement of the plane through the air provides a vacuum to help get rid of the pee. I guess that it could work for you as well if you took a little time to figure things out beforehand."

She shook her head, "Can't. While I try to figure it out, you'd probably crash us or something."

He rolled his eyes, "There's another one in the back, along the wall on your side about two-thirds of the way along and hidden by one of the seats. This wasn't ever designed for peacetime use, and most teaching flights aren't hours and hours long anyway. But at least it's got them. The civilian ones don't."

Emmy looked over, "What are you doing with this plane? Doesn't it belong to the army?"

"It used to," Quinton smiled over, "but the war's over and it was out of a job - just like me, pretty much. There are hundreds - no, thousands of planes sitting around now with no war to fight anymore. If you know who to ask and where to look, you can pick one up for a song, almost. I guess it depends on how much they value the ground that it's sitting on at the time.

This one cost me less than two thousand dollars, though I spent about half of that again once I'd flown it back to the factory for an overhaul and a re-fit. I was just on my way back from there when I uh... well I really had to go, you know?

Not a bad thing, since I knew that with a little asking around, I could probably get a few supplies for the trip back home without paying Witchita prices."

She'd been looking out of the window on her side when Emmy noticed that he'd stopped talking. "Well go on, Quinton. Tell me where you're going."

He sighed and it ended with a smile, "I'm going home, Emmy.

I've been away a long time and even when I got leave well, where I'm from it can take a good while to get home and then come back. There was never enough time for that, so I've never been back since I left just as soon as I got instructions telling me where I had to report for basic flight training. They don't do it all at one place. They had me slotted for a transport or a bomber pilot. I got my basic flight training done and then Pearl Harbor happened.

They changed me over to flying fighters after that and I had to move around pretty much to the four corners of the country before I was done. By the end, I was out in California and then I was assigned to report to the 6th Night Fighter Squadron, on the island of Oahu.

I'd trained in different kinds of fighters and at the time that I was shipped over, I'd been flying Curtiss P-40 Warhawks. But they're not even the best kind of day fighter that we had. They were pretty outdated by then anyway. We weren't a front line unit. We were just part of Hawaii's defenses so that there would at least be something better there if the Japanese tried to attack the place again anytime.

As a night fighter, they were awful."

"What's a night fighter?" Emmy asked.

Quinton shrugged, "Pretty much what the name says. You take off and patrol only at night, looking for bombers trying to sneak in. Even at night, you'd need a fair dose of wild luck to do much damage if you caught anybody. You're flying blind up there at night and you need the radar controllers on the ground to give you a heading to any contact that they might see on their scopes.

But then we transitioned to the P-70s, and that was a whole new ballgame. Was I ever glad that I'd gotten a lot of training in birds just like this one.

The P-70 is a converted A-20 Havoc bomber, just stripped of it's bombing gear and rigged up like a fighter at the factory. It's got 2 engines like this one, only they're lots bigger and you can go a lot faster, too. There were three of us in the crew; the pilot, the radar operator, since it carried it's own radar, and the gunner.

We found that we worked best if I handled the guns as well sometimes and we used the gunner to watch our own tail a lot of the time. So they gave us those things and sent us to the south Pacific.

We went up and patrolled to intercept high-flying Japanese raiders. Up in the sky at night, you could get into the worst kind of knife fights up there sometimes, because the radar couldn't see everywhere around you in the darkness all at once. I pulled out of a turn to get behind somebody one time and almost crashed right into his wingman. Nobody had seen him out there on their scopes. I pulled back on the power and just drifted back and then down into the slot behind him. I couldn't believe that he hadn't seen me.

I tagged him and then I went after the first one I'd been following. But he had a clue by then and all that I could claim was one down and one damaged.

They gave us better planes all of a sudden. We got these Northrop P-61 Black Widows. Same thing, two engines, but a really wild shape to them and juice - man, they were something to write home about. They could fly day or night in any weather.

See, the P-70s were converted bombers made into fighters. The widows were night fighters right from the word go and they had really good radar - even one to warn us of somebody trying to sneak up behind us. Same crew of three and I could still take over the guns if I wanted or if the others decided that I had the best shot. We had two gun turrets, one up top and one underneath and if I wanted to, I could put four machine guns and four cannons to work at the same time.

I had one that I liked to use a lot. We'd get switched around a lot of the time, from plane to plane and often I'd fly with other crewmembers. But if we all had our druthers, the guys that I liked to work with most often, we loved this one plane. We got to know the crew chief pretty well and he was proud whenever we took his baby out for a night. He did a painting by himself on both sides of the front, a girl that looked like a horse - if you can picture that, Emmy.

Anyway, he was a pretty good artist."

"I've seen pictures in the paper of some of those painted-up planes," Emmy said with a bit of a roll to her eyes. "Kind of hopeful schoolboy stuff if you ask me. So what kind of uh,... art was there about that one?"

Quinton smiled, "Not that far off the usual. But there she was, this horse-girl, dark and shiny as hell on a flat-black airplane. She was painted standing with a mean look in her eye and one uh - hoof on her hip and the other one up in a fist. Underneath it all, it said "Night Mare".

Emmy began to smile and then she laughed, "I gotta admit, that's not bad! Didja ever get to take a picture of it, like to send back home or anything?"

"We couldn't, well we weren't supposed to." Quinton said a little sadly, "The radar and other stuff on those planes was top-secret or something. We weren't allowed, mostly. But I did get a picture or three of her. They're in that knapsack by your seat with the coffee."

Emmy reached to pull it up and she rummaged around for a little while. The photos were in a kind of wallet with some other ones. It didn't take her long to find the ones and she looked at them for a few minutes in silence. Two were from the ground and one was from above, taken from another plane.

"I'm not that big on war a lot of the time," she said, "I understood the whole thing, but I always had trouble figuring out how the people we were fighting could come over here to threaten us. But I got the point of it."

She smiled, indicating the photos, "But this thing... it looks like a nightmare, it really does, and I even like the painting of the girl though I can't but wonder at how her uh..."

"Bosoms?" he suggested.

"Yeah," Emmy nodded, "Horses don't have them there. They carry their tits a lot farther back."

Quinton laughed quietly, "I know. Well I guess that's where he wanted them to be, to make her look a little more human."

"Do you miss that kind of flying much?" Emmy asked.

He shrugged, "Some, I liked the flying. I just never forgot that if I pressed the buttons on my control yoke at the right time, somebody stood a good chance of dying. If I'd lined us up just right and I just touched those buttons, pieces would start to fly off whatever was in front of me like crazy.

I was there to fight, Emmy. All the same, I knew that the guy in my sights hadn't done anything to me personally.

It's a pretty dumb thing when you think about it. I'd guess that he'd have had the same thoughts if things were the other way around. But all the same, I'm sure that he'd have pressed his buttons just like I would.

But the flying? Yeah, I miss that."

"Could you have bought one like that - the way that you bought this one?" she asked.

Quinton shook his head, "Those ones aren't for sale. They never made all that many and they're keeping them for now. Besides, I wouldn't be able to buy one. I'd bet that they'd want over twenty thousand dollars for one of those and that would be at fire sale prices. I read that they cost about two hundred thousand dollars each!"

He smiled a little then, "But in one of those birds, you can go over three hundred and sixty miles an hour, straight and level, and a whole lot faster in a dive."

He asked her to pour them both cups of coffee then and though it took her a little while, she got it done and they flew along, still climbing slowly as they sipped and even smiled a little. The heater had driven out the chill of the wet fall day by then and when she asked, Quinton said that he hadn't exactly been in any hurry to get upstairs, as he'd put it, but that they only had a little while before they'd level out.

"How in the world did you ever get enough money to buy this thing?" she asked.

"I'm really cheap," he smiled, "but my mother got word to her in-laws about the death of their son, not that they wanted anything to do with either of us. But about the time that I was fifteen, my grandfather on that side died and he'd left me some money in his will. You might imagine how surprised we were, my mother and me. She took it all over to a bank and I gave her half. The rest, I just saved a little and I put some with my mother's help into government bonds.

When I needed money for my business, my mother went to the bank with Deke and she had some put over into an account that I could wire to. It took a few days, like it always does if I do that, but then I had the money to pay for this thing and again to pay for the overhaul at the Beechcraft factory.

She asked him to go on, but he said that there wasn't all that much more to that part of his story.

"After it was all over with, I managed to hang on through the first few big cuts. But without a war, what do you need a night fighter pilot for? I knew what was coming - sooner or later. We were moved back to Hawaii and pretty much demobilized for a few months. I got through all of that, since I was a good pilot and I had a good record as far as shooting down the enemy goes.

But then we got the word that we were being sent back over - to Japan, of all places to be part of the defenses of occupied Japan - against the Chinese or somebody. All that I knew was that by then, it wasn't what I'd signed on for anymore. That feeling grew inside of me once we were in Japan. I liked the people that I met there and it sure was a different culture to see and live in, but I wanted to go home by that time, so I chose not to extend when my time ran out and they weren't offering anyway. I left and began my long, lonely trip home.

By June, this year, the 6th was inactivated and it's planes made part of another unit. It doesn't exist anymore, except on paper.

My uncle Harry has a contract to provide airmail service and he helped me to get one too. That's what the job is, Emmy. I'm going to fly the US Mail."

He grinned at her a little, "And you're going to help me do it - once you see what it's about and if you think that you can handle it."

The stories between them stopped for a time and they just sipped the coffee and when he mentioned it, Emmy pulled out the sandwiches and they shared. For some reason, to her, she'd never tasted finer coffee. It felt really good to her and in that flying aluminum tube droning through the western afternoon, it felt like a place where she could belong.

She did learn about the rest; that the quilting was there to keep out the cold and to protect the tubing and cables and wires. There was an overhead dome that she'd noticed and hadn't thought to ask about and she learned that that it was for taking sun and star shots to calculate one's position by the navigator.

They decided to save the second of the thermos bottles of coffee for later and Emmy got unstrapped from her seat to explore the root cellar and she found that Quinton had been right. The view from there was spectacular. He told her that in a little time - if she wanted the work, she'd learn to fly from either place, since the bombardier had control over the aircraft during his bombing run. The bombsight and release controls had been removed, but the simple flight controls and the instruments were still there and they worked, as far as Quinton knew. She put on the headset that was hanging up down there and she read them to him and he said that what he had on his instruments matched what she said.

They got to know each other a lot better and to Emmy, it suddenly felt a little less like her going into the unknown all alone and though it was a strange feeling, she liked the thought that if she could do the work, she'd have a place in the world.

She didn't know any more than that and she thought about Quinton a little, but if he came from people like what he'd told her about, she didn't think that there could be more than friendship between them and at the time, she also didn't know if she really wanted that, anyway.