Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  Six sixty-six was carrying a light load to San Francisco, it seemed. Miguel saw only a dozen or so people waiting sleepily to reboard the airplane.

  He watched the new crew go aboard—the two stewardesses, the flight engineer and the two pilots with their flight bags. Airlines were a little like the olive canners, he thought. The smallest olive you could buy was something called a Large De Luxe, and in the same frame of mind, the airlines called their pilot a captain and the co-pilot a first officer. Semantic snobbishness with a commercial twist. People felt better about flying with a captain than they did about flying with a mere pilot. The word pilot itself was a lower-case word, faintly redolent of hayfields and Jennies and helmet-and-goggled hell-raisers—while captain was an okay, four-stripe word with scrambled eggs on its cap.

  Miguel mused that he had flown in the left-hand seat for almost three years and had never been anything but a plain fly boy pilot with a fifty-mission crush to his Bancroft Flighter. He remembered that toward the end of the Middle War they had started calling pilots airplane commanders. But co-pilots had never been anything but co-pilots.

  It had remained for the United States Air Force to accomplish what the United States Army Air Corps had never been able to do: make aviation respectable, with blue uniforms and silver lightning bolts and clouds and grommets in garrison caps. Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps—He remembered learning that song while standing at attention in a wastebasket with an upperclassman bellowing commands in his face. He wondered how they had fit the new independent Air Force’s name into the song. It didn’t scan. Possibly they had just changed the song. It didn’t seem to go with B-52s and thermonuclear devices, somehow.

  The gate attendant unlatched his chain and the passengers filed aboard dispiritedly. Miguel glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. The wind blew in gusts, whirling newspapers and bits of refuse high into the air. It carried the far-off sound of thunder.

  When he was in his seat again, it occurred to Miguel that the next time he left this cabin, it would be in San Francisco. There was an almost fearful excitement in his chest, and a hunger to see once more the great inshore basin of the bay, the rolling foothills rising to the ridge of the Coast Range, and fog like a white blanket rolling in through the Golden Gate with the vermilion towers of the great bridge rising out of the mist.

  The Douglas taxied out to the end of the strip and the pilots began their run-up. Miguel followed them through mentally.

  Starboard inboard engine, right magneto, left magneto, both. Propeller to flat pitch, coarse pitch, and back to flat for take-off. Manifold pressure, oil pressure and temperature, fuel pressure, cylinder head temperature.

  Cowl flaps open. Checked and ready.

  Four times, the run-up—with the airplane vibrating and seemingly eager for flight. And then the undulating roll to square away with the runway and the feeling of acceleration, with the runway lights ticking by faster and faster until at last the wings develop enough lift to raise tons of steel and dural and bone and flesh into the murky darkness.

  There was beauty in flight, Miguel thought. He had tried to capture it on paper with The Canceled Skies. He felt that he had done it, too. It had been a good book, with the feeling of flight to it.

  He took the Bellamie from his pocket with some reluctance. He had no right to criticize Mrs. Bellamie for what she wrote or how, he knew. It was simply that he regretted with all his heart having to read it. In his present state of mind, though, it might be just the thing he needed. He opened the book to Chapter One.

  The stewardesses were checking tickets, one girl holding the manifest and the other taking the tickets and greeting the passengers with a professional smile.

  Miguel had started page 3 of The Green Hills of Home when they reached him.

  He had given his ticket to the stewardesses out of New York and this girl was simply checking him, presumably, he thought to make sure he hadn’t wandered out of the airplane while it was in flight. He remembered that the gatekeeper always came aboard an airliner just before take-off and said something like, “You got thirty-two of ‘em?” And the stewardess would count the names on the manifest and sometimes even count heads in the cabin and reply, “That’s right. Thirty-two.” Or forty or forty-one, however many persons she had on board. It always made Miguel feel a little like part of a shipment of livestock.

  Now, the girl, trim in a pale gray uniform with wings on the tilted cap and over her breast, said, “Happy to have you with us, Mr. Rinehart.”

  That was another gambit. If he replied that he was happy to be with her, he felt that he was overvaluing a purely professional greeting. If he said nothing, he felt sure he would be accounted surly and probably be served cold coffee.

  He nodded at the girls and returned to his book. They completed their trip through the rear compartment and returned to the buffet. The top lights in the cabin went out.

  Miguel reached page 10 of Kathryn Bellamie’s book and stopped. He couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had read. It was no use. He dropped the book on the empty seat beside him and took up the Hemingway again.

  They had been in the air over an hour. It was three o’clock and the darkness outside was stygian. They must be flying through a high stratus deck, he thought. Even the position light was invisible, and on the Douglas, the exhaust flames could not be seen from a level above the wing.

  He closed the book and sat looking outside at nothing, trying to think of nothing, too.

  Someone sat down beside him and he looked around. It was one of the stewardesses.

  “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Please do,” he said, noting that she already had.

  She was brunette, with short hair attractively arranged under the flight cap.

  “I know who you are,” she said, smiling at him. This was not, he noticed, the same smile with which she had greeted him earlier.

  “I read your book, The Canceled Skies,” she said.

  Miguel restrained an impulse to frown. Conversation beginning like this always made him uncomfortable. She was waiting for him to ask her if she liked it, and she would say yes whether she had or not, and then he would be left holding the ball and babbling about how happy he was that she had liked it.

  “You are the Miguel Rinehart, aren’t you?” she asked. “There couldn’t be two people with a name like that.”

  He smiled in spite of himself. “Yes, I’m the right one.”

  “Thank heaven,” she said and leaned her head back against the seat cushion. She took the cap off and ran a hand through her hair. He noticed that she kept watching the other passengers—most of whom were asleep. “I thought maybe I’d goofed,” she said. “I don’t very often, you know.”

  There was a vigor and youthfulness to the way she talked that was intriguing. She looked about twenty-six or seven.

  She stretched her legs out and settled more comfortably in the seat. “This is one of the advantages of being the A Girl,” she said. She reached under her and handed him the Bellamie book. He put it in the pocket in the back of the seat ahead of him with the airline folders and maps.

  “The A Girl?” he asked.

  Her brown eyes studied his face so that he had the impression that what she said and what she was thinking were completely unrelated.

  “That’s right,” she said. “The senior stewardess.”

  “It follows then,” Miguel said, half-smiling, “that there is also a B girl on this airplane.”

  She smiled back at him as though she were pleased with him for making a proper answer. “Marian Keane. She takes the front cabin.”

  “I see.”

  Her shoulder brushed his imperceptibly. “But you really aren’t interested.” She laughed and added, “You don’t have to answer that. It’s schlock.”

  “Schlock,” Miguel said. “I guess I’ve been away too long. And I’m said in certain circles to have an ear for language.”

  “Part of the patter. You know. The conversation people make
.”

  He nodded and took out a package of cigarettes. She refused when he offered her one, but she said, “I’ll take a drag on yours if you don’t mind germs.”

  Miguel had a momentary impression of sitting next to a dynamo. The girl was attractive and immensely assured. He found that assurance both stimulating and appealing.

  “Have you been out of the country?” the girl asked.

  “Yes. Does it show?”

  “You get so you can tell.”

  “My suit must be wrinkled.”

  “No, seriously. You learn a lot about people in this job. You can tell things.” She looked directly at him. “But you’re the first author I’ve met.” She paused. “I’m cheating a little,” she said. “I read about you in the paper.”

  Miguel frowned. “In what paper?”

  “One of the Chicago papers. The Tribune, I think.” She regarded him provocatively. “It said you were on your way to the coast to write a script for your fiancee’s new picture.” She tapped the bulge of Mrs. Bellamie’s book where it nested among the maps and throwaways. “The Green Hills of Home.”

  Miguel bit his lip and looked out the window. Tony Ayula hadn’t waited long to sink the harpoon into him. Nora must have convinced Ziegler that Alaine would cause no trouble and Tony had released the story to the papers. “That will teach me to go belting people,” he said in a low voice.

  “What?”

  “I said, my wife will be delighted to hear it.”

  “Oh, a wife?”

  “Yes, indeed. A wife.”

  “But you’re separated.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. That still doesn’t make that newspaper business any easier on me.”

  “You know? I often wondered what Nora Ames was like. I think I admire her.”

  Miguel said nothing. He was still thinking about Alaine. “When a woman sees something she wants, she should go after it.”

  “Many women do,” Miguel said. He wished suddenly that the girl would leave him alone. He reached up and turned out the light.

  “You don’t have to worry,” the girl said. “The story was on the back pages. In the theater section.”

  “That’s a blessing,” Miguel said. He pressed his fingers against his cheekbones.

  The girl said, “Headache?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Let me get you some dramamine.”

  “Don’t trouble.”

  She stood up, smoothing her skirt. “No trouble at all. Part of Continentals service.” Leaning over him, she said in a low, laughing voice, “Marian and I have the highest per capita dramamine consumption rate of any stew-team in the western division. Marian eats the stuff.”

  “Motion sickness? In a stewardess?”

  The girl shook her head deliberately. “In a way. She has an involuntary orgasm every time we miss a landing attempt.”

  In spite of himself, Miguel laughed.

  “There, you see? You’re feeling better already.”

  “I was thinking of your friend. Winter flying must be a joy to her.”

  “Three or four a trip,” she said gaily.

  “That’s par for the course.”

  She paused and looked at him, her head held to one side, her eyes mocking. “Yes,” she said. “For a junior stew.”

  She turned away and walked to the buffet, conscious that she was being watched. The uniform skirt was snug across her well-shaped buttocks and her legs were good. Her American feet, not small, were encased in soft leather Capezios.

  She returned with the dramamine and Miguel took it without protest, although it had no effect on him, washing the capsule down with a swallow of water.

  She did not sit down again, but she bent so that her hair very nearly brushed his cheek. “May I borrow your book?”

  “The Green Hills?”

  “Yes. I’ll return it.”

  Miguel found himself thinking how pleasant it would be if instead of doing all the things he had promised himself must be done, he could simply spend a few quiet hours with this assured and pretty, nameless girl.

  He took the book from the seat pocket and said, “If you’ll have dinner with me in San Francisco.”

  The girl smiled. “Well see,” she said. She reached into the shelf overhead and brought down a pillow and blanket. She put the pillow behind Miguel’s head and spread the blanket over him. “You see? We know how to please, don’t we? We go to school to learn it.”

  “You didn’t answer me. About dinner.”

  “I said we’d see,” she said briskly.

  Miguel grimaced at the darkness outside, smarting unduly at the rebuff. “Thanks,” he said. “For the pillow.”

  “I’ll bring your book back,” the girl said, and walked away toward the front of the cabin.

  Have I offended her someway, Miguel wondered. He turned his face toward the night and pulled the blanket around him. After all, what did it matter?

  He closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. He lay half-reclining, drowsy with the darkness and the rumble of engines and thought of Allie Wylie and Sandy and Midge Kimball.

  What had become of Midge, he wondered, with her poor smashed face? She had never been a beauty, but what looks she had she lost in the accident. Only her face had been damaged, but she had had to stay in the hospital so long that her body, too, seemed to have wasted when she finally came home.

  And when she began to recover, no one knew her. To lose a year that way at sixteen or so was social destruction. Not that it mattered with that demolished face.

  Miguel could remember that Allie Wylie had made a point of visiting Midge at least twice a week all the time she was in the hospital. And sometimes Allie would cry when she came home from those visits, because it was obvious from the start that even the plastic surgeons would never be able to make Midge look quite right again.

  Poor Sandy, Miguel thought. To end in a nightmare like that. Where had it all gone, he wondered. The youth, the big dreams, the hopes for life? You crossed into middle age, Miguel thought, when you finally understood that you would never again have the courage to risk the losses that came with big dreams.

  That night in Paradise Cove, for example, lost him Raoul and the dream of family and family pride. Nothing changed externally, but there was a cancer born that night.

  And there was Allie to remember. Another loss.

  Someone, it might have been Midge or even Becky—he couldn’t remember now—had sent him a Christmas card in 1951 while he was living in Malibu with Nora. There had been a note on the card saying that Allie Wylie was back in Los Altos. He remembered how his hands shook as he read the offhand, casual lines. He had burned the card, not wanting Nora to read it and ask questions.

  He felt the old, familiar ache inside when he thought of her. Not love, it couldn’t be that. He had remembered and forgotten her a thousand times. Well, perhaps never quite forgotten. There was a song that went, “I saw you last night and got that old feeling—“ It was like that. There were always songs. Too many songs and all of them reminding you. That one called “Where Or When.” They had taken that one for their own and wasn’t it a crying shame to pick a tune that was destined to become a classic so that you would hear it for the rest of your life?

  On a Saturday in late September of 1938, Miguel and Allie went hotel dancing at the Palace to hear Glen Gray and the

  Casa Loma Orchestra. Allie wore her red formal, the one she wore to the New Years dance at the country club. It was old, but Miguel asked her to wear it. He remembered that first time he had kissed her breast and he counted it as the beginning. She wore the dress to please him.

  Gray played endless choruses of “No Name Jive” and Kenny Sargent, at Miguel’s proud request, sang “Where Or When” and “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” Miguel liked that one because it had a line in it, “—and that laugh that wrinkles your nose touches my foolish heart.” Which was corny, yes, but Allie did wrinkle her nose when she laughed and Miguel was so crazy
in love with her that he thought of nothing else.

  They had come up to the city alone in the Chevy. Tom was off somewhere with a Redwood City girl from Sequoia High. He had stopped seeing Florian O’Connor. Lawton Higby was with Floss and some fellow from Montezuma School and his date. But Miguel and Aldyth were keeping pretty much to themselves these days. It seemed to be the way Allie wanted it and Miguel didn’t mind.

  The couples moved slowly about the floor under the rose-colored lights. The music was terrific—slow enough to dance to, but with a solid beat from the rhythm section and accented with really fine work on the sizzle cymbal—the big Chinese job pierced with loose rivets to make a steady hissing note when tickled with the wire brushes.

  Miguel held Allie in his arms and danced with his eyes half-closed. There had been a change in Allie since that first night. She didn’t seem such a child any more. He was thinking of something, and he said, “Somebody told me they were going to subdivide Frenchman’s Tor.”

  “Oh, no, Mike.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Remember how we used to go up there all the time when we were kids?” Allie said softly.

  “You with dirty knees and stickers in your socks.”

  She moved her hand up on his back and held him as they danced. “Mike—”

  “Umm?”

  “Is it still the same way with you?”

  He pressed his lips against her forehead. “More,” he said. “Because—“ She hesitated and then went on. “Because I really belong to you now?”

  “If there has to be a reason, I guess that’s it.”

  Lawt Higby danced by with Florian and nudged Miguel. “Let’s watch that jowl-to-jowl stuff, guy. This a respectable joint.”

  Things like that didn’t seem so amusing when they came from Lawt instead of Tom. They hadn’t seen too much of Tom since he and Floss had broken up. Miguel still held it against her. “Big joke,” he said to Allie. “Joke over.”

  “I guess everybody talks about us,” Allie said quietly.