Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Special order. Gent called Marx,” Stanley said.

  “I know everyone at the airfield, and no one’s called Marx.”

  “He’s been vouched for.”

  “By who?”

  “By someone who’s good enough for me and so’s good enough for you.”

  When she arrived, a couple of pilots were sitting on oil drums outside the general office, leaning against its corrugated side, drowsing in the sun. The afternoon sky was deep blue, undiluted by cloud. If she were them, she would be up flying. She called out the truck window, “I’m looking for Marx?”

  They stirred. “Yeah, the new guy,” one said. “Try the hangar down at the end.”

  The other one said, “Got any free samples today, Marian?”

  “I’ve got some day-old buns.”

  “What about something that comes in a bottle?”

  “Depends—you want to take me up?”

  “Depends.”

  She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ve got to go see this Marx first.”

  The pilot shrugged. “I might’ve gone home by then.”

  She drove down to the newest and largest hangar. Inside was airy coolness, grids of smoked-glass windows. At the far end, big sliding doors had been rolled open onto the field, and the bright rectangle of light was sliced across by the long orange wings of an aircraft, nose pointing out, black fuselage sloping down to an orange tail.

  “Hiya.” A man was sitting in a camp chair under the portside wing reading a newspaper, his feet propped up on the bottom rung of a stepladder. “You must be Stanley’s famous delivery girl.”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Letting the newspaper flop across his lap, still with his feet propped up, he regally held out a dirty hand, large for his skinny arm, with broad fingertips like a frog’s. “Tough guy, huh? I’m Trout Marx.”

  “Marian.” She balanced the basket on her left hip and leaned down to grasp his hand, gripping firmly, thinking wistfully of Felix Brayfogle. This man was remarkably ugly. No mystery about the derivation of his nickname. His mouth was downward-bent and almost impossibly wide, more like a grouper’s than a trout’s, really. When he spoke, he revealed a yellow saw of crooked teeth. The rest of his face offered little compensation. His eyelids were droopy, though one more than the other; his ears were short, scooped tabs stuck to the sides of his big, round head, and he was entirely bald. But he had a calm, cheerful way and a goblinish charm. Marian said, “Nice ship.”

  “You like planes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Been up in one?”

  “A few times.”

  “Ever been at the controls?”

  “No one’s ever given me the chance.”

  “No? Why not?”

  No need to explain the obvious. She set down the basket and walked under the wing, looking up at the smoothly varnished fabric. The plane was new enough to still smell faintly of bananas, a chemical joke played by one of the solvents in the doping. She closed her eyes, inhaled.

  “You look like you’re smelling a bunch of roses,” Trout said.

  “Better than roses.”

  She circled around to inspect the silver propeller and grease-blacked sunburst of engine cylinders. Her gut feeling was that if she played her cards right, he might take her up; she had to be careful not to say anything to make him brush her off as just a kid, just a girl. “What’s the make on this?”

  “That’s an upgrade. Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Four hundred fifty horsepower.”

  “Top speed?”

  “They say a hundred and forty, about, but I’ve done faster and it didn’t catch fire or nothing. Those lights were custom. Good for landing at night.”

  “Do you do a lot of night landings?”

  “Some. You seem to know a thing or two about planes, don’t you?”

  “I read a lot.”

  “That so? What do you read?”

  “All the flying magazines. What’s in the newspapers. Books.” She was particularly sharp-eyed for mentions of women pilots, studying their exploits as though reading tea leaves. She didn’t idolize them, the way she did male pilots, but envied them with a rawness that sometimes curdled into dislike. The obligatory photos of them powdering their noses in the cockpit disgusted her, and the fuss around Amelia Earhart, who was given credit for being the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air even though she’d merely been a passenger on the Friendship, baffled and annoyed her. You might as well celebrate a sack of ballast.

  She preferred Elinor Smith, who’d gotten her license at sixteen and, at seventeen, flew a Waco 10 under the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges on a dare. (There she was in all the newspapers afterward, powdering her goddamn nose.) Next, Elinor had set a record for solo endurance flying—nearly thirteen and a half hours—and after someone broke it, she set a new one. Twenty-six and a half hours in a big Bellanca Pacemaker. After that she set a women’s speed record: 190.8 miles per hour.

  “What kind of books?” Trout said.

  “You know. By pilots. About pilots.” Proudly: “I read one about the theory of flight.”

  “What’d that one say?”

  “It was about Isaac Newton and lift and Bernoulli’s principle, that sort of thing.”

  “Ber-who-lli’s principle?” Trout said. “Never heard of it. What’s it say?”

  Marian, who had intended only to make a breezily knowing allusion, climbed up on the landing-gear strut and peered through the side window into the cockpit. The long fuselage was empty except for two wicker seats bolted to the floor side by side at the controls. “It’s hard to explain, but it has to do with how the air pulls the plane upward.” She hoped he wouldn’t press.

  “Well, I’ve been flying a long time, and I never heard of it.” He set aside the newspaper and got to his feet as she hopped off the strut. He only came to her shoulders, but he looked strong. Sturdy. He said, “You want to go up or just stand around drooling? It’s a good day for it.”

  For a moment, she stared fiercely at the plane. Then she said, “I have money. If you’d be willing to teach me a few things, I can pay you for a lesson.”

  Hands in his pockets, he grinned, showing all his frightful yellow teeth. “Good for you. Money’s a useful thing. But this’ll be free of charge. She’s already fueled up. I just need you to help me roll her out.”

  For such a large machine, the plane moved easily. They each took a side and pushed a wing strut as though leaning into a plow, emerging into the bright day. Marian’s body coursed with so much adrenaline she felt translucent. Here was her teacher. He had arrived, as she’d known he would.

  “You know how to do a walkaround?” he said, shading his eyes and looking up at her.

  “Only in theory.”

  “Like Ber-whatzit’s theory? This one’s pretty simple. You give the plane a good looking over and make sure there’s no holes in it and no oil’s leaking out nowhere. You check the tires. That’s about it.”

  The Travel Air proved to have no obvious holes or leaks, so Trout opened the cabin door, down near the tail, and told Marian to go sit in the seat on the right. “Starboard,” she said.

  “Oh-ho! We’ve got a regular Ber-whoozit on our hands!”

  She had to stoop as she walked up the cabin’s sloping floor. The inside smelled of gasoline. Bolt holes on the floor showed where more seats could go, but there were only canvas straps and metal hooks. “You fly a lot of cargo?”

  “Some,” he said, climbing in after her.

  Once they had settled in—an elbow-to-elbow squeeze, even for a small man and a skinny girl—he pointed out instruments set into the dash: “There’s your fuel gauge, your compass, your altimeter, your tachometer, your oil pressure, your clock—”

  “I know what a clock is.”
/>   “You’re a damn genius. There’s your air-speed indicator, your rate-of-climb indicator…” He showed her the levers, the pedals, the twin steering wheels yoked together, the crank up above their heads that adjusted the horizontal stabilizer, the brakes that could only be operated from his side. “You don’t have to remember everything right this minute,” he said.

  But she did remember.

  Never before had she ridden in a plane that didn’t require someone to swing the propeller. An electric motor got the flywheel spinning, the engine caught, a cloud of smoke billowed and dissolved. A few spluttering bursts became the uneven rattle of pebbles shaken in a can, then the impatient waltz beat of a galloping horse, then a steady metallic panting. The propeller blurred.

  “It would be better to learn in a biplane to get the basics,” Trout shouted over the noise, “but I don’t have one at the moment. Anyway, the idea’s the same.”

  He had her operate the rudder as they taxied, feel the awkward yaw of the plane on the ground.

  At the end of the field, Trout paused to check the gauges and stick a wad of tobacco in his lip before he pushed the throttle forward. They jolted and rolled, picked up speed. Marian sensed the buoyancy in the plane, the way the tires dug less and less deeply into the grass. The fuselage tipped level as the tail wheel lifted. Trout pulled back on the yoke, and the plane parted from the ground.

  “All right, now I’m easing off,” he said. He pushed his wheel slowly forward. “She can get off steeper than that, but there’s no need here. In the mountains you’ve got to be sharper, but here we’ve got nothing but room.” Below on the valley floor were the hangars, the cruciform shapes of a few biplanes moored on the grass, the fairgrounds’ long barns and oval racetrack.

  Trout adjusted the throttle, cranked the stabilizer.

  A new fear struck her: What if she had no aptitude for flying? Her vision of herself as a pilot had been so convincing, she’d forgotten she didn’t actually know how to fly, that she would have to learn. For the first time, the magnitude of her decision to leave school worried her.

  “Okay,” Trout said. “Take over.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Just try to stay straight and level.”

  This proved more difficult than it sounded, and she had to keep adjusting the controls according to Trout’s instructions. There was a pervasive strangeness to being in the air, worked upon by invisible forces, struggling always for levelness. The plane was alive, the air was alive. Below, her city was alive, too, but in the incomprehensible way an anthill is alive: full of minuscule, pointless activity.

  “Want to try a turn?” Trout said. “You take the wheel, and I’ll manage the rudder.”

  “I can do both.”

  “It’s tricky.”

  “I know what a coordinated turn is.”

  “Knowing and doing are two different things, but if you say so. Go right ahead.”

  Her fear was gone. There was no room for it. She pressed with her right foot, turned the wheel slowly to the right, felt for balance. The plane banked and turned. Of course it did—it was made to be flown; the controls controlled—but still the fact that she had told an airplane what to do and it had obeyed seemed momentous. Her side window filled with the dark coils of the Bitterroot, the tops of trees. From the ground, the pattern of it all was invisible: how the river fell along the valley in casual bends like a tossed fishing line, how the water always fused back together after being split and spliced by sandbars. Vantage brought obscurity, too, though. Detail was lost, the world reduced to patchwork. All trees were the same. Fields looked uniformly flat and green.

  “A little more rudder,” Trout said. “You feel it slipping?” He spat tobacco juice into a coffee can.

  As soon as she had the plane zipping along level, mountains would loom up, and she would have to turn again, flying around the valley like a marble riding the inner surface of a bowl.

  When they were back on the ground, engine off and propeller stopped, just shy of the hangar, Trout said, “You’re a natural.”

  Joy. Only joy. He could not have known he was saying the words she most wished to hear.

  “I am?” she said, hoping he would elaborate.

  “I’ve taught worse.” He motioned her out.

  Now that she had flown it, the Travel Air looked different. She knew the feel of the wheel and the pedals, the rhythmic kick of the engine as the sparks fired, the look of an orange wingtip pointing down at the river as she pivoted around it. She’d been concentrating too hard to fully absorb the miraculous fact that she—she, Marian Graves—was piloting a plane, but now, remembering, she got light-headed.

  “The thing about flying,” Trout said, “is that it’s unnatural. You’ve got to train yourself not to follow your instincts but to build up new instincts instead. For example—the simplest example—say the plane stalls and you’re losing altitude, what do you do?”

  “Push the stick forward, dive to get speed back.”

  He nodded. “You’ve read about it in a book, but it’s different up there. When it happens, the last place you want to go is down, but you’ve got to do it. You have to aim the nose just where you don’t want to go and go there. Getting a pilot’s mind takes a long time. You’ve got to be patient. And you’ve got to have nerve. When you’re up there, you can’t get flustered and stop flying.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. You can’t, not really.”

  Was he about to tell her she should give up? Even though he’d just called her a natural? Had he identified some fundamental inadequacy in her? The whole valley seemed silent. No wind. No birdsong.

  Finally he said, “So what do you say?”

  Her mouth was dry. “About what?”

  “You want to keep flying?”

  For a moment she wasn’t sure she could answer. “If you’d just tell me what you charge, I’ll find a way of paying it.”

  Trout beamed up at her, his droopy eyes scrunched almost closed by the upward curve of his long mouth. “I have good news for you. Great news. So good you won’t even believe it.” He paused dramatically.

  “Believe what?”

  “There’s someone who wants to pay for your lessons. You won’t have to pay a dime.”

  For a moment her disorientation was complete, but just as quickly it cleared, replaced by certainty. “No,” she said.

  The big fish mouth arced downward. “What do you mean no?”

  “No.”

  “Marian!” He reached for her shoulder, gave her a gentle shake. “This is good news. You’ve got a benefactor.”

  “Who is it?”

  “As a matter of fact, this person would rather stay anonymous.”

  “Barclay Macqueen.”

  Trout’s face locked up tight. “I don’t know that name.”

  “There’s no one else it could be. No. I have to pay my own way.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” Trout looked genuinely regretful.

  “Isn’t my money as good as Barclay’s?” Of course it wasn’t.

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “He can’t have thought I wouldn’t guess. There’s not a whole crowd of people fighting to pay for things for me. Only one’s been offering lately.”

  “Why not just enjoy the gift, then?”

  She turned away. “Nice meeting you. Thanks for the lesson.”

  Trout put up his hands. “All right. He said you might not accept his offer at first, but he also said you’d come around.”

  Marian thought for a minute. “He owns the plane, doesn’t he?”

  “Technically, Mr. Sadler does. So, I’m afraid I can’t let you pay for your own lessons. If it were my plane, I would. If I had a plane like this, I’d do a lot of things.” He seemed to be getting even smaller as he spoke, h
unching into himself. Abruptly he went striding off toward the hangar, short legs working furiously.

  Marian didn’t follow. She wanted to be alone with the plane. The engine was still giving off heat and the smell of oil. She bowed her head, rested one hand on the propeller as though it were the lid of a coffin. If Barclay had really wanted to be generous, he would have put his plane in her path and allowed her to pay Trout something reasonable for instruction and to become a pilot under a blissful illusion of self-sufficiency. But no, he wanted her to know she was beholden. Why, exactly, she didn’t know, but she knew enough to be wary.

  “They’re not cold,” Trout said from behind her. He was holding two beer bottles from the basket she’d delivered. “But after a first flight, you need something to celebrate.”

  She took one. “Thanks.”

  “Pull up some grass,” he said, sitting down. She sat cross-legged beside him. The beer was warm and malty. “I remember what it was like,” he said, “wanting to be a pilot.”

  The low sun glinted off the plane. “All along,” she said, “when no one would give me lessons, I was sure it was because my teacher hadn’t come yet. I thought he’d just show up one day, fly into town the way the first pilot I ever knew did. So when you said you’d take me up…” She took a morose swig.

  “Why not just let things happen the way he wants? I get paid. You get to learn. He gets to be your patron. Everybody’s happy.”

  “He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart.”

  The band of reflected sunlight on the plane narrowed and disappeared. The air began to cool.

  “Maybe this is like what I was saying about flying,” Trout said quietly, picking at the grass. “Maybe you have to go against your instincts. You want to pull away, but you’ll only get through if you do the opposite.”

  “I should do the opposite of pulling away from Barclay?” She looked at him hard.

  He couldn’t hold her gaze, lifted his hands again. “None of this is any of my business, but I think he means well.” He glanced back at her. “Don’t you?”

  “I really have no idea.”