By the time Gladys Roy came to Fort Stockton, she had already done enough foolishness in the sky to make ordinary sin look lazy.
Folks in town did not know what to make of her at first, which is saying something, because Fort Stockton had already survived cattle booms, dust, dry years, wet lies, and men who claimed to know the future based on cloud shapes and the twitching behavior of goats. A woman could arrive from somewhere east in a touring coat and a cloche hat and still not cause much of a stir. But a woman who had played tennis on top of an airplane three thousand feet above the earth without so much as a parachute, that was another matter entirely.
You must understand the decade to appreciate the madness of it. In the twenties, airplanes were still only half machine and half rumor. They coughed, rattled, and stitched their way across the sky like something God had not entirely approved of yet. Everybody wanted to look at them, but not many wanted to trust them. That left a profitable opening for people like Gladys Roy, who had concluded, either wisely or fatally, that if the public feared flying, the public would pay good money to watch somebody treat it like a playground.
She had done more than treat it like one. She had made a whole circus of the thing. She had played tennis on the upper wing of a biplane while stuntman Ivan Unger returned volleys from the other side as if they were out at a country club and not three thousand feet above the cold face of common sense. She had danced the Charleston in flight. She had crossed the wings blindfolded. She had posed on the tail while a plane dropped nose-first toward the earth in a stunt that made newspapermen reach for adjectives like drunks reach for the bottle marked “medicinal.” By then she was not merely famous. She was the sort of famous that made people suspect death had mistaken her for a cousin and was too embarrassed to correct itself.
So when word spread that Gladys Roy was coming through West Texas for a publicity stop and exhibition, interest moved through Fort Stockton faster than a grassfire behind a feed wagon.
The Fort Stockton Regional Airport & Feed Lot was not, in those days, as formal a place as the title suggested. “Regional” was optimistic to the point of blasphemy. “Airport” implied more paving than was present. And “Feed Lot” was the only portion of the name that told the truth without putting on a necktie. It sat out beyond town where the land opened flat and hard under a sky so big it could make a man feel either religious or very small-minded, depending on the quality of his breakfast. There was a hangar that looked temporary even when freshly built, a windsock that generally gave up by noon, and enough nearby cattle activity that any landing came with the possibility of an audience that chewed cud.
On the morning of her arrival, men from town drove out in their work clothes and Sunday hats. Women came in low shoes and practical dresses, carrying hand fans against the dry heat. Children ran ahead until warned not to get underfoot of progress. A few old ranchers stood with their thumbs hooked in their suspenders, pretending they had only come to inspect the field, though they were as curious as anybody. One of the Weldon boys was there, an ancestor of the dealership crowd that would one day put chrome dreams in Pecos County driveways. There was a young Brewster too, not yet important, but already learning the family expression of cautious judgment, as if he expected every spectacle to ask for a loan before sundown.
And there, parked off to the side near the office shack with the warped porch, sat a motorcar grand enough to draw almost as much attention as the flyer herself.
It was a Buick Standard Six, a Model 27 sedan, only a season or two old and already wearing the kind of dignity some people never manage. Burgundy body, black roof, black fenders, and just enough gloss in the paint to hold the sun without arguing with it. The wheels were burgundy wood spokes, pinstriped white by a patient hand, fitted with skinny bias-ply tires that looked unequal to the roads of West Texas and yet somehow endured them anyway. There were running boards with step plates polished by actual boots, cowl lamps perched like attentive ears, a centrally mounted stop light, and a spare tire out back beneath a Buick-branded cover that gave the whole rear view the look of a traveling salesman with a respectable belly.
It belonged, at least for the afternoon, to a California promoter named Squires who had brought the car along partly because he enjoyed being seen in it and partly because every exhibition needed a little extra glamour on the ground to help excuse the danger overhead.
The Buick was a Fisher-bodied sedan, solid and proper, with rear-hinged back doors that opened like an invitation or a threat depending on who was climbing out. Up front, the hood stretched long enough to suggest serious mechanical intentions. Beneath it lived a 207 cubic inch inline six with a Stromberg carburetor and sixty honest horsepower, which in that day was more than enough to get a family to church, a salesman to ruin, or a stunt promoter to the next town with his lies mostly intact. The car rode on a 114.5-inch wheelbase and had semi-elliptical leaf springs all around, which meant it floated only in the sense that a buckboard might if you had recently hit your head. Four-wheel mechanical drums supplied the braking, and every man who had ever driven a fast car took one look at those drums and quietly revised his travel plans.
Inside, though, the Buick was unexpectedly civilized. Tan cloth seats front and rear, a matching headliner, brown carpets, door pockets, a robe cord, little flower vases mounted on the B-pillars like someone still believed passengers ought to be soothed while bumping across the known world. There was even a rear shade for the window. The dash was painted steel, the instruments simple and stern. Ammeter. Oil pressure gauge. Barrel speedometer. None of them promising anything they could not back up.
Gladys noticed it immediately.
That should not surprise anybody either. Daredevils know machinery the way gamblers know faces. She circled the Buick with a cigarette in one gloved hand and her chin tilted slightly up, taking it in with an approval that made Mr. Squires puff up like a quail in courting season.
“Well,” she said, “at least one thing around here looks prepared to survive the afternoon.”
That line spread through the crowd before noon and was repeated in town for years, though by then half the tellers had it aimed at marriages, rainfall, or county politics.
She was not especially tall, Gladys Roy, which somehow made the reputation fit her even tighter. There are some people who look built for danger and others who simply walk into it with a cheerful professionalism that troubles the rest of us more deeply. She wore practical shoes and moved with the balanced quickness of somebody who had taught her body not to waste motion. Her smile was real but sparing. She had learned, one suspected, that a grin could be sold too cheaply and ought to be reserved for the moment just before somebody lost their nerve.
The pilot with her was a broad-shouldered fellow named Carl, who had the leathery brow and calm speech of a man who had accepted mechanical betrayal as part of life’s menu. Their airplane, tied down against the wind, looked made from ambition, canvas, wire, and a deliberate misunderstanding of mortality.
There were speeches, of course. There always are, even when nobody wants them. Squires thanked the town. Somebody from the county welcomed “aviation progress.” A local feed merchant speculated that air freight might one day transform commerce if the cows would only cooperate. The crowd clapped in intervals, more from heat than conviction.
Gladys herself said little. She didn’t need to. Her work had already done the talking. Everybody there had heard some version of her exploits by then. The tennis match in the air was the favorite, because it was so idiotic it crossed back over into greatness. The blindfolded wing walk came second. The Charleston in the sky third. The tail posing during a nosedive belonged in a category all its own, under the heading NO MA’AM.
When she did speak, it was to a group of local boys who had edged close enough to ask whether she was scared up there.
“Certainly,” she said. “But fear is just excitement dressed for a funeral.”
That was another line people remembered.
She and Carl went up not long after noon.
The biplane roared across the hard field, bounced once as if reconsidering the arrangement, then lifted clean into the wide blue. Hats came off. Faces tilted upward. One woman crossed herself. Even the cattle seemed to pause and regard the business with professional disapproval.
At first the plane climbed in a plain enough fashion, but that was not why the crowd had come. Once it reached height and turned bright against the sun, Gladys rose from her place and stepped out into the wind like she was only moving from one room of the house to another. A murmur ran through the people below. Then came the full performance. A wave. A careful, impossible stance along the wing. A turn so graceful it looked rehearsed by angels with a bad sense of humor. She did not play tennis that afternoon, Fort Stockton not being the sort of place where extra rackets and proper stage management materialized by accident, but she mimed a few strokes to the delight of the crowd, and when she raised both arms as if saluting some invisible grandstand in the heavens, there were grown men below who yelled like schoolboys at a fair.
She stayed out there longer than anyone wanted and came back in only after she had wrung the sky dry of applause.
When the plane landed, the whole field surged toward it with that dangerous blend of admiration and poor judgment common to every public event before the invention of liability insurance. Gladys climbed down laughing, windblown and dusty, as alive as anybody had a right to be. Carl looked relieved in a way he tried unsuccessfully to disguise.
Then came the photographs.
This was the true commerce of the age. Not merely doing the thing, but proving you had done it, and if possible proving it while leaning against something expensive. Squires wanted pictures beside the Buick. He wanted Gladys with one foot on the running board and one hand on the door. He wanted her seated in the back with the shade half drawn, smiling out like a queen headed somewhere fatal in style. He wanted a shot with the pilot at the front fender and another with Gladys beside the spare at the rear. He wanted one with the cowl lamps showing. One with the chrome radiator surround catching the sun. One with the hood open so the public could gaze upon the inline six and imagine power. He was drunk, as many promoters are, on the possibility that one good image might sell six bad events.
To her credit, Gladys gave him every pose he asked for and improved half of them.
She sat in the rear seat and tucked one gloved hand near the flower vase as if she had always traveled with blossoms. She stood with one foot on the step plate and looked across the hood in a way that made the sedan seem almost fast. She leaned through the open rear-hinged door and made the whole contraption look less like transportation than a co-conspirator. The tan cloth upholstery, the robe cord, the tidy order of the cabin, all of it played well against her sharp little spark of danger. The photographer, who had until then been sweating like a guilty preacher, suddenly found religion in his work.
At one point she asked to see under the hood.
Squires obliged, and she studied the engine with real interest. She asked questions about the carburetor. She tapped the radiator hose with a knuckle. She said the six looked dependable, which is about the most intimate compliment a machine can receive from a woman who spends her time riding on top of flying ones.
“Dependable is underrated,” she said.
“Not in Fort Stockton,” answered a local man, who had lost two mules, three fence lines, and most of his confidence to the weather already that year.
By late afternoon the light turned a dusty gold, and the field took on that temporary softness West Texas sometimes grants before the evening wind remembers its duties. The plane had been rolled aside for more photographs. Somebody wanted Gladys standing near the propeller with the aircraft in profile and the Buick off behind her, a grand meeting of old roads and new skies. Somebody else wanted a shot of her walking toward the plane, chin up, as if headed into destiny and not just another publicity still for newspapers hungry for tomorrow.
If there was a flaw in the whole day, it was that the crowd had grown too comfortable. Spectacle does that. It turns wonder into routine. A woman can spend an afternoon standing on a wing three thousand feet up without a parachute, and by supper folks are more interested in whether the pictures came out flattering.
The light was going fast. Carl had the engine alive for one final sequence, the propeller chopping the air to a blur. The sound filled the feed lot, rattled the office windows, and made conversation pointless. Dust moved in little circles near the wheels. Gladys stepped away from the photographer to reset herself for another shot, brushing hair from her face, half-turned toward a voice nobody later could agree upon. Some said Squires called to her. Some said the photographer shifted position and she followed instruction. One old rancher swore she was looking toward the Buick, admiring again the burgundy paint under the lowering sun.
Whatever the cause, it happened in the kind of instant that leaves no room for symbolism until afterward.
She took a few quick steps on the ground, safe at last, after all the sky had failed to kill her. Then she walked straight into the spinning propeller.
The sound changed first in the memory of those who heard it. That is what they always said. Not what they saw, but how the world itself seemed to lurch wrong all at once.
There was no theatrical struggle, no time for heroics, no last smile borrowed from a newspaper legend. One blink she was Gladys Roy, conqueror of altitude, tennis player of the clouds, wing walker, dancer, blindfolded fool in the service of glory. The next blink she was gone, killed instantly on the hard ground at Fort Stockton Regional Airport & Feed Lot, not by the open sky that had invited her all her life, but by the spinning machinery of an ordinary photograph.
For years afterward, old-timers told the story in a lowered voice and with the same baffled shake of the head. A woman could play tennis on top of a plane three thousand feet in the air. She could dance the Charleston mid-flight. She could stand on the tail while the world tipped downward and death came climbing up to meet her.
But on the ground, in Fort Stockton, at the very end of an ordinary day, she met her maker because she missed seeing one damned propeller.
And that, as the town would have put it, was just plane crazy.
One response to “JUST PLANE CRAZY”
Wow, Captain ! What a story. Have Lucinda pour you a cup on me.