The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [159]
They drove on in silence, in the white iron winter over the northern half of the world.
The snow glare on the buttes against the clear morning sky lent Great Falls a rim of dazzling ivory. Wouldn't you just damn know. Perfect flying weather and we're grounded for eternity.
Signing her way through last-minute paperwork, Cass every so often sent a pining look out the ready-room window. Around her, her pilots restlessly filled the wait as best they could, some jokes, some bitten lips to clamp emotion away. Taking extreme care not to show it, she herself was having to fight a case of trembles. So enormously much that was ending today. Everything else that was not. She had survived the war, the P-39, the P-63. Now to survive the situation with Dan. He was a bear some days—a lot of days—in the recuperation that sometimes he did not even seem to want. Other times, his old carnie self came through, he was full of plans, the old notion of barnstorming, flying, wing-walking. She was not sure wingwalking had survived the war.
And when I'm not sure, I start dreaming about Ben, don't I. If wishes were fishes, I'd be Jonah.
One more time, Cass strung herself together. She glanced at the clock next to the flight board, coming onto the hour. "All right, officers, let's get outside and form up."
The eleven women lined up in three ranks at the edge of the long runway. They were in Sunday uniform, white shirt, tan slacks—except for the leather flight jackets worn against the Montana cold, the same dress uniform each of them had worn at graduation from pilot school in Texas, hundreds of flying hours ago. Deep-creased crush hats crowned manes of hair; Cass could have picked every member of her squadron out of a thousand by the way the hat sat. She inspected them one last time as they stood at attention.
"Della, half step right. M.C., half step left. That's Beryl's spot between you."
With a deep breath she gave the command, and the squadron marched along the flight line to the hangar where the inactivation ceremony would be held.
Work on the unpainted bombers and P-63s stilled for a moment as the women mechanics in hairnets and overalls looked around from the wings and platform ladders they stood on, to the WASPs crisply saluting the waiting general. The gathering was not large. A perfunctory honor guard, rifles at rest and flag drooping in the still air of the hangar. The fresh-faced Canadian liaison officer, down from Edmonton for the occasion. Jones with a Speed Graphic camera, blazing away with flashbulb after flashbulb; he had worshipfully let Cass know there would be a set of photographs for each pilot.
The general at the portable podium his aide had set up shuffled his papers as if this were one more chore, glanced up at Cass as if she were personally responsible for his being saddled with Grady's Ladies all this while, and gruffly began.
Standing at attention determined to show him not so much as a quiver, she wondered if there would have been a ceremony at all if the general hadn't had to read out the special letter of commendation—the renowned flying women of East Base ... service above and beyond the call of duty—from the Senator.
Rising from his chair like a gallant of old, the Senator came around the table and delivered a forehead kiss to his wife as she settled in her seat. "Good morning, Sadie, light of my life." He stayed standing, looking out the lead-paned windows of the breakfast nook at most of a week's worth of lazy flakes still descending on Washington like tired confetti. "Isn't this town the damnedest place? It doesn't even know how to have a proper blizzard."
His wife helped herself to what