‘On your reading?’
‘Yes. I can’t take books out because I don’t have a library card. I can’t get one without a local address.’ He looked up again and smiled, and this time the smile was sly. ‘Though perhaps I could use your address.’
Flora saw that Xas had finally asked a question to which she could properly attach her ‘Yes’. She fished in her pocket and found a scrap of paper and the greasy pencil she used to mark film. She wrote out her address and gave it to him. She let him know where she lived, having completely forgotten how he’d frightened her by turning his face away from the people gathered at her trolley stop.
Before leaving the studio for the day, Flora went to visit her film star friend, Avril. The warning light was off at the soundstage door so she let herself in. Flora wasn’t used to soundstages, hadn’t visited any of the sets for the reshoots for Flights of Angels. It wasn’t her practice to sit in on the shooting of any film she was editing. She thought it better that she only dealt with the footage she got, so that she could discover for herself how best to find the story in what was filmed, unconstrained by any familiarity with the director’s dealing with the actors.
Flora was used to the sets of silent films, in which she and Avril had worked together. Sets lit by crackling carbon arc lamps, and filled with noise. The sounds of production people bustling about beyond the live area, carpenters sawing and hammering, sewing machines clattering, all kinds of talk, and the director yelling directions—‘You see him! Now fix your hair. Wave hello, honey! A big wave! You’re worried you won’t get his attention’—voice raised over the mood music.
The set of Avril’s latest film was baking under incandescent lights. It was bright and silent.
Someone closed the door behind Flora, stepped up to her and put their finger to their lips.
Avril was sitting straight-backed on an ottoman, her skin was velvety with powder and shone pinkish under a tower of piled platinum hair. The director was talking to the men in the mixing booth. He came out and found his seat. He was visible—but barely. Beyond the border of yellow key lights the crew appeared as shades of the living. They were signing to one another, and moving in a gliding ghostly way, or standing frozen and watchful like deer at the edge of an open glade.
The director murmured some instructions to Avril and the other actor, who was standing at a casement behind her. Then he asked for silence. Flora heard, ‘Rolling’—then the bang of the clapper. A second later Avril began to speak, clear and distinct, her bearing composed and head raised regally, all for the benefit of the microphone in the fruit bowl on the table before her.
They did ten takes, then waited for the verdict from the mixing booth. Finally the sound men seemed satisfied and Avril came to life and swept off the set and toward her dressing room. Flora intercepted her.
Avril took Flora’s hands and kissed her. Her rigid eyelashes scratched for a second at Flora’s cheek. Flora followed her friend to the dressing room and sat beside her while her hairpiece was carefully detached and her make-up removed. They talked into the mirror, Flora feeling moved as Avril’s face slowly emerged, brighter than all its bright artifice.
Avril complained mildly that the director really was a bit of a dope, expecting her and the other actors to have these conversations in cavernous sets hunched over things like the fruitbowl—which was all very well and good but he never thought to have them, say, hunched over a radio, or a bassinet with a baby in it, or any of the sorts of things people do actually gather around. ‘I just keep telling myself that I’m paying for my new swimming pool,’ Avril finished. She thanked her dresser and sent her away. Then she leaned into the mirror to make up her face for the street. ‘Anyway, darling, what’s up? Is Con still tinkering?’
‘Actually, he’s making some progress.’
‘And is it really all off with Kay North?’
‘No. Kay’s still on the back burner,’ Flora hesitated, then took a deep breath and said, ‘Avril, I want to ask you about something.’
Avril met her gaze in the mirror and nodded.
‘John Weber,’ Flora said. ‘Whatever became of him?’
‘Remember how Con tried to browbeat you into pressing charges and pursuing damages? I’m amazed he ever forgave you for not taking his advice.’
‘I remember very little of that. I was on morphine, and everything seemed to go on forever.’
‘Do you remember the lawyer Con presented you with in hospital?’
Flora shook her head.
‘I convinced the lawyer to let you be. Con was furious with me. I think he took what happened to you personally. The shock of it. He had the presence of mind to pull down that curtain and wrap it around you, but the whole thing was mortally shocking to him. He wasn’t eating, and he’d gone right off sex. I think he wanted his own revenge on Weber.’
‘But I wouldn’t press charges.’
‘That’s right. And Con gave up the whole idea of legal redress.’
‘So what happened to Weber?’
Avril shook her head. ‘He must have left town.’
The women peered into the mirror at each other’s faces, Avril apparently waiting for another question. Finally Flora asked it. ‘You don’t suppose Con did something to John?’
Avril nodded faintly, but said, ‘I don’t know.’
The Mojave Desert
September, 1929
Cole in the cockpit was an impediment between Xas and the sky. Xas’s boots and elbows were braced against the frame of the fuselage, and he had one hand resting on his notebook, pressing its pages flat. His parachute pack was a heavy lump in the small of his back. He peered over Cole’s shoulder at the constricted skyscape, the fresh, unfolding clouds, and felt resentful.
They had flown up to ten thousand feet, in order to discover the aircraft’s utmost viable angle of dive. They would try its limits, and somewhere in the shimmering space around them they would find the place in which the plane would pass, and its pilot would ease back, or in which it would break and fail.
Once they were above the clouds Cole banked away from the sun and bought the nose of the plane down in a very shallow dive. He turned his head to relay the readings on his instruments. Then he brought the plane back into level flight for a moment, before pushing it into a steeper dive.
This process went on for some time. The plane inscribed a wavering graph in the air. Cole called out the figures, and Xas wrote them in his notebook, while listening as the wind hammered the fuselage like a storm of wings.
Cole brought the plane up and level for the eleventh time, then pushed the stick forward. This time he turned his head quickly to report a vibration, a tremor in the stick and pedals. Beyond Cole’s head Xas caught sight of a little bit of the horizon, the solid floor to their world of air.
The engine missed, coughed, missed again.
‘It’s the fuel line,’ Xas shouted.
Then the engine fell silent.
‘Let’s hope it’s only an airlock,’ Cole called, his voice loud now. ‘Brace yourself—I’m going to roll her.’
The plane was using a gravity flow fuel system, and they both knew that sending it into a roll might shift any air bubble in the fuel line.
Xas saw that the propeller had spun to a stop. It hung before their faces, a dead thing. He scrambled forward till he was right at Cole’s shoulder. In the unnatural silence of the glide he heard his dropped pencil rolling forward.
Cole waited till they passed through a cloud layer, its buffeting gloom. They came out and saw a small town below them in the desert—buildings like a scattering of white ash. They sank toward it in a slow glide.
Cole turned to Xas again, so close that he was breathing into his face. ‘I said brace yourself.’
Xas jammed his feet, elbows and hands against the fuselage once more.
Cole pumped the throttle and pushed the stick over. The plane went into a roll. The desert turned above it, the solid world making an outline around the open sky bet
ween cloud and horizon, their corridor of air. The engine spluttered and started, the propeller becoming transparent once more.
The abrupt change in airspeed made the plane’s tail kick up, and the aircraft jerked into a dive at an angle Cole would normally have worked his way up to only gradually, after hours of tests.
The plane gave a lurch. Xas heard a wrenching noise and thump behind him, then the plane plunged into a steep dive, its engine roaring. It rammed downward, faster than falling. Xas saw Cole hauling back on the stick—to absolutely no effect. The plane wouldn’t flatten out. Its nose dropped further. It was driving downwards. The horizon rocked in Cole’s window, then swung above them, receding above their heads. For a moment the aircraft hung inverted, then it continued to roll, and went into a spin.
Cole let go of the controls and reached up to release the roof. He slid it back. He tried to climb out of the cockpit. Xas watched him struggle. The slipstream was creating a suction that held Cole in place.
Xas doubled up and began to punch at the fabric of the plane. He made a hole and the suction relented. He looked up again to see Cole clamber from the cockpit—then be snatched out of sight.
The plane was spinning so fast now that it was generating its own gravitational pull. Xas was pressed in place against the fuselage. With a great effort he dragged himself over the seat and into the cockpit—then out into the air. The slipstream grabbed hold of him and ripped him away from the aircraft.
Xas tumbled on down, faster than falling, still moving at the speed of the plane’s dive, the sky and desert alternately swooping over him. The plane was below him now, moving faster than he was. Xas saw that the tip of one of its wings was gone, and most of its tail. One wing had broken off and carried the tail away with it.
The angel could see Cole a little above him—for Xas been carried further down with the falling plane. Cole was lying spread-eagled on the air, trying to slow his fall to a speed at which he could risk opening his parachute without its splitting.
Xas too stretched out his arms and legs and lay on the air. Then he lifted one arm and dropped the other, banked, accelerated, and slid sideways for a time. He moved away from Cole, till he judged they were level. Then he made the practised adjustments of his body to steer himself through the air, back to Cole. He used his innate abilities, and those he’d learned wing-walking. He dropped down beside Cole, and wheeled to face the man.
Cole looked up at him. His eyes were slits and his cheeks rippling.
Xas seized Cole’s hands, and for six long seconds they dropped together, the sum of the surface area of their two spread-eagled bodies helping to slow their fall. Then Xas pushed away and signalled, ‘Pull your cord.’ He didn’t pull his own till he saw Cole’s parachute open and hold.
Someone spotted the smoke from the wreck and came to check.
It was a store owner, who gave them a ride in his truck to the nearest phone, which was at his place—a silvered timber ranch house with one gas pump and a barn converted to a repair shop, standing by themselves at the junction of two unsealed desert roads.
Cole and Xas sat on the porch of the repair shop and drank Coke. People kept coming by, ostensibly to fetch things from the store, really to look these downed pilots over, and to get their story.
The man’s wife came and joined them on the porch. She had a bowl of apples, a colander and peeler. She sat on a step and peeled her apples. Cole moved from the rocking chair to the step below her, where he sat fishing long strips of peel from her apron and eating them. She was startled, but charmed. She promised him a piece of the pie once it was done. ‘And you’d like coffee, I expect,’ she said, then went off again into the dark indoors.
Cole accepted his coffee in a cup with a chipped rim. He sipped and Xas watched him checking the chip with the tip of his tongue. This, for a man who was frightened of infection, was flirting with danger.
When Cole had finished his coffee, he joined the owner, who was bent over the engine of a car.
It got quiet. Gradually the folks who’d come looking for news all departed. The mechanic’s wife was indoors baking. The only sound was an intermittent murmuring talk between Cole and the mechanic, and the rattle of the man’s wrench on a bolt. After a time the smell of hot pastry and sugar, cinnamon and apples drifted out into the open air. The desert instantly blotted up the scented steam. The woman came out and called to her husband and Cole. ‘You should wash up now!’ She turned a nervous smile Xas’s way, where he was sitting, his back against the wall of the store and hugging his knees. She said, ‘I guess you have to collect yourself after falling out of the air like that.’ Then, ‘Hadn’t you better wash up too?’ She spoke gently as if, when she looked at him, she saw the queasy fright of someone who has had a brush with mortality.
Xas joined Cole at the outdoor tap. Cole was scrubbing engine oil out of the crosshatching of scratches on his fingertips with a bar of greyed soap. He passed Xas the soap and said, ‘Bill was just telling me he has too much work for one man.’
Xas glanced at the mechanic—Bill—then back at Cole.
Cole dried his hands and threw Xas the damp towel. He strolled back up on to the porch. The woman brought out three plates of pie, drizzled with condensed milk. Cole set to with appetite, and polished off the pie in less than a minute. He put his plate down, rested one foot on the rail and straightened his long leg to tilt his chair back. He said to the woman, ‘Bill tells me you could do with some help.’
She nodded. ‘My brother used to be with us. But he moved out to the coast, and got a job on a drilling crew.’
‘Is this your own business, Bill?’ Cole asked the mechanic.
‘It is. It’s not much, but at least I’m working for myself. Joan’s brother is working for a wage. His employer will make money if the well comes in, but my brother-in-law only takes his wages home.’
‘Well—there’s not much wrong with working for a wage,’ Cole said. ‘It has advantages, like not having to make all the decisions.’
The mechanic nodded. ‘True.’
Cole said, ‘Sometimes I think the ideal life would be simpler than the one I have. I think it might be better to follow someone else’s lead, to work with my hands, to live someplace quiet, where it’s possible to know everyone, and know them well. Those folks who came to take a look at us—you knew every one of them, didn’t you Bill?’
‘I guess I did. This isn’t the highway here, so we don’t get too many people just passing by.’
Cole nodded, a slow, sage gesture. ‘I kind of like that idea. No strangers. And waking up every day with a pretty clear idea of what that day will bring. And making do with plans that don’t need any hard push of will power. Maybe even dealing with things you could trust to come true exactly as you expect them to.’ He turned to the woman, who had been frowning at him with a sort of suspicious amazement, but blushed and smiled when he looked at her. He said, ‘Take this pie, for instance. It’s delicious, Joan, but I bet it’s made to a simple recipe.’
‘Flour, sugar, shortening, salt, cinnamon and apple,’ she said. ‘It’s about as plain as can be.’
‘And if you get all the measurements right it turns out just the way you expect it to?’
‘So long as you remember to take it out on time,’ said the woman, who wasn’t about to oversimplify her pie in order to illustrate Cole’s homily.
Cole flexed his knee and rocked his tilted chair back and forth. ‘There are many different things I could choose to do with my life,’ he said. ‘So I sometimes wonder: why don’t I choose something simple? Something clear of complications.’ He looked at Xas. ‘What do you think about the idea of getting a job, and being an ordinary guy?’
‘Of you getting a job and being ordinary? Or of me doing it?’
The mechanic and his wife exchanged a glance.
Xas went on. ‘For now I more or less get up every day and see what I can fix, who I can help. But that’s finding work, rather than having a job. Should I have a job?’
Cole dropped his chair back on all fours. He asked Joan where her brother had lived when he was working there.
‘Ed lived over the workshop.’
‘Could you show my friend where Ed lived?’ Cole asked.
‘Sure,’ she said, puzzled. Then to Xas, ‘If you’d like to follow me.’
Xas got up and followed her. She kept looking back over her shoulder at Cole as they crossed the yard and went through the door of the workshop. They skirted the edge of a grease pit. She stopped at the foot of a steep staircase, and said, ‘There. You can go on up if you like.’
Xas climbed the stairs. He found a room in the roof, a room with a pitched ceiling, one window, and an iron bedstead. The mattress was doubled up on the rusty bedsprings. Xas put a hand on the mattress and felt rustling lumps inside it. It was stuffed with corn husks. He listened to the dry stirring under his hand, and the faint hot shimmer of sound from the world beyond the small window in the gable.
It was the kind of room in which someone might wait for time to stop.
Xas went back down the stairs.
The mechanic’s wife said, ‘Why does your boss want my husband to offer you a job?’
‘Is that what he wants?’
She reflected a moment, then nodded. ‘As I see it.’
Xas looked at his feet and didn’t say anything.
‘Was it your fault that the plane went down?’
Xas shook his head.
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