The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

“Was it fun?” Beulah asked doubtfully, when Lizzy finished her story.

“It was so noisy and there was so much vibration that I thought the top of my head was going to fly off,” Lizzy said. She sat up and let Beulah wrap a dry towel around her head. “But it was incredibly gorgeous up there, the sky all around us, open and free, and the plane turning and wheeling just like a bird. The trees and fields were all spread out below like a rumpled-up green chenille bedspread. And there was Darling itself, with all the toy houses with their flower gardens and the town square and the courthouse with its bell tower and the neat streets and the trees.” She followed Beulah to one of the barber chairs and took her seat, while Beulah fastened a pink cape around her neck. “I looked right down on my roof, and my backyard, with my own garden like a tiny jewel, and it was all just perfect and perfectly beautiful.”

“I’d get perfectly dizzy,” Beulah said, getting out the tray of metal curlers she kept at her station. “I believe I’d keep my eyes closed the whole entire time I was in the air.” She poured some of her homemade setting lotion out of a bottle and into a jar. Dipping a comb into it, she began combing it through Lizzy’s hair.

“You and Verna are brave,” Bessie Bloodworth said, from her place under the permanent wave machine, where she was getting her graying hair electrically curled. Another Dahlia, she had been a big help in getting the garden vegetables picked and carted out to the festival grounds. She went on: “Honest to Pete, Liz, I’d chew my nails down to the wrists if I had to go up in one of those machines. It might fall right down out of the sky with me in it!”

“The only thing that fell out of the sky was that wingwalker,” Aunt Hetty said. Completely covered by a pink cape, she was settled in the other barber chair, where Bettina, wearing an embroidered pink smock, was combing out her white hair after a shampoo and set.

Bettina gasped and her eyes opened wide. “She really did fall?” Bettina had gone to her mother’s over the weekend and missed the air show. “She was killed?”

“It wasn’t a she,” Aunt Hetty replied crisply. “It was a he, and he didn’t really fall, at least not all the way, because he was wearing a parachute.”

“Oh, of course,” Bettina said, teasing out a fluff of white hair and patting it delicately into place. “This must be somebody who took Angel Flame’s place after she got arrested.” She picked up the scissors and snipped off a stray strand.

“That’s right,” Verna said, leafing through a magazine while she waited for her turn in Bettina’s barber chair. “The new wingwalker was a guy named Wiley Tuttle.”

Lizzy was watching in the mirror as Beulah deftly wound her hair around a fat metal roller and fastened the clip. “Wiley Tuttle is one of the members of the ground crew,” she said, handing Beulah another clip out of the bowl in her lap. “Neither Miss Dare nor Mr. Hart guessed that he had any experience as a wingwalker or a parachute jumper. But it turns out that he had been wingwalking with a flying circus that went broke a couple of months ago. He signed on with the Dare Devils, hoping to get a chance to strut his stuff.”

“He had plenty of stuff to strut,” Aunt Hetty said admiringly. “One minute that young fella is way up there in the sky, dancing around on the airplane wing like it’s a ballroom floor. And then the next minute he flies off that wing like a bird with his arms out.” She raised her arms to demonstrate and Bettina put a hasty hand on her shoulder.

“There now, Miz Little, you don’t want me to snip a bit off your ear, do you?”

Aunt Hetty dropped her arms. “And he’s falling like a rock, falling and falling and falling.” She took a deep breath. “And then just when I think he is going to crash into the ground right in front of my very eyes, he pulls a cord and whomp! like a lily blooming, that big white parachute opens up. And he lands—splat!—right in the middle of Archie Mann’s mattress!” She shook her head, disbelieving. “How that young fella could pick out that little tiny mattress to land on is completely beyond me.”

“Miss Dare says he’s a better wingwalker than Angel Flame,” Verna said. She looked up from her magazine. “Of course, his legs aren’t as pretty as hers, but he’s a lot stronger. He rode the wing through a loop and a spin. Imagine, hanging onto a wing while the plane is flying upside down! She said that Angel Flame could never have done that.”

Beulah wound a curler over Liz’s left ear. “Upside down,” she murmured. “I just can’t believe these modern marvels. Why, next thing you know, folks’ll be wanting to fly to the moon.”