The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [109]
What was going through your head when A. Scott Crossfield broke Mach II?
What is your favorite aircraft?
What are your thoughts on the feasibility of flying at the speed of light?
Dad wrote up about twenty-five or thirty questions like that and then insisted we rehearse the interview. He pretended to be Chuck Yeager and gave me detailed answers to the questions he’d written out. His eyes got misty as he described what it was like to break the sound barrier. Then he decided I needed some solid grounding in aviation history, and he stayed up half the night briefing me, by the light of a kerosene lamp, on the test-flight program, basic aerodynamics, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach.
The next day Mr. Jack, the principal, introduced Chuck Yeager during assembly in the auditorium. He looked more like a cowboy than a West Virginian, with his horseman’s gait and his lean leathery face, but as soon as he started speaking, his voice was pure up-hollow. As he talked, the fidgety students settled into their folding chairs and became enraptured by the legendary, world-traveled man who told us how proud he was of his West Virginia roots, and how we, too, should be proud of those roots, roots we all shared; and how, regardless of where we came from, each and every one of us could and should follow our dreams, just as he had followed his. When he finished talking, the applause about shattered the glass in the windows.
I climbed up on the stage before the students filed out. “Mr. Yeager,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Jeannette Walls with The Maroon Wave.”
Chuck Yeager took my hand and grinned. “Jes’ spell my name right, ma’am,” he said. “so’s my kin’ll know who you’re writin’ about.”
We sat down on some folding chairs and talked for nearly an hour. Mr. Yeager took every question seriously and acted like he had all the time in the world for me. When I mentioned various aircraft he’d flown, the aircraft Dad had briefed me about, he grinned again and said. “Heck, I do believe we got an aviation expert on our hands.”
In the hallways afterward, the other kids kept coming up to tell me how lucky I was. “What was he really like?” they asked. “What did he say?” Everyone treated me with the deference accorded only to the school’s top athletes. Even the varsity quarterback caught my eye and nodded. I was the girl who had actually talked to Chuck Yeager.
Dad was so eager to hear how the interview went that he was not only home when I got back from school, he was even sober. He insisted on helping me with the article to ensure its technical accuracy.
I already had a lead figured out in my head. I sat down in front of Mom’s Remington and typed it out:
The pages of the history books came alive this month when Chuck Yeager, the man who first broke the sound barrier, visited Welch High.
Dad looked over my shoulder. “Great,” he said. “But let’s juice it up a little.”
L ORI HAD BEEN WRITING to us regularly from New York. She loved it there. She was living in a hotel for women in Greenwich Village, working as a waitress in a German restaurant, and taking art classes and even fencing lessons. She’d met the most fascinating group of people, every one of them a weird genius. People in New York loved art and music so much, she said, that artists sold paintings right on the sidewalk next to string quartets playing Mozart. Even Central Park wasn’t as dangerous as people in West Virginia thought. On the weekends, it was filled with roller skaters and Frisbee players and jugglers and mimes with their faces painted white. She knew I’d love it once I got there. I knew it, too.
Ever since I’d started eleventh grade, I’d been counting off the months—twenty-two of them—until I would join Lori. I had my plan worked out. Once I had graduated from high school, I’d move to New York, enroll at a city college, and then get a job with AP or UPI, the wire services whose stories unspooled from the Welch Daily News Teletype machines, or with one of the famous New York papers. I’d overhear the reporters at The Welch Daily News make