Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “Who’s that?” Irene whispered.

  “My husband.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back around any moment.”

  But the seconds ticked on, and still there was no sign of the returning airplane. One of the other men turned away and scuffed his feet in the grass. Another lit a cigarette. Irene knew better than to say anything. The silence held them together. Nobody needed to say a single word; everything known was obvious, everything unknown was better off unmentioned. Like among the surfers back in Santa Monica, you didn’t talk about the danger or the possibility of annihilation, the various scenarios when somebody went missing, sharks or rogue waves or cramp or miscalculation. What was the point?

  Over on Vanowen, an engine backfired. Everybody jumped, except Mr. Rofrano, who just flinched. Irene remembered what Sam had said, that Rofrano had flown in France during the war. She looked at his profile, at the nape of his neck, and tried to imagine him flying over France, dodging enemy fire, shooting down other airplanes. The most dangerous job in the war, she knew. If the Germans didn’t get you, the airplane would. On the other hand, it was better than dying on the ground, in a trench, like a rat. At least you died free, you died in honorable combat, like a knight or a bird of prey. Mr. Rofrano had a large, sharp nose, and it pointed to the sky, hunting for the Papillon. If anyone could pluck out an airplane from the sky, it was surely this man, a wartime flying ace.

  Mr. Rofrano lifted a pair of field binoculars to his eyes. A stir passed through the crowd. Mrs. Rofrano touched Irene’s elbow and nodded to the sky.

  At first Irene didn’t see anything, just that deep, flawless California blue and the green-golden hills underneath. She squinted and shaded her eyes. Somebody swore softly. She heard the purr of an engine, but it was just another automobile passing down the road. “Where?” she whispered to Mrs. Rofrano.

  Mrs. Rofrano pointed.

  Irene blinked and squinted.

  A tiny gray dot wobbled into the corner of her gaze. She gasped, and it was gone.

  She blinked again. There it was! Like somebody poked a hole in the sky with a needle, except it was moving, it grew larger and took shape.

  “She’s in trouble,” said Mrs. Rofrano.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Clear the field!” somebody called out, and the crowd turned and scattered, even Mr. Rofrano, who ran toward one of the sheds, followed by the other men. Irene tagged after them. She stopped in the doorway of the shed as the men pulled on the yoke of the fire engine inside.

  “Get the door!” yelled Mr. Rofrano.

  Irene grasped the door and pulled with all her strength, so it slid all the way open, and the men yanked and yelled at each other and pulled the engine into the sunshine. Now Irene could hear the airplane, humming and sputtering. The fire engine had an enormous tank, and all four men leaned desperately into the yoke as they hauled it down the field, parallel to the wide avenue of beaten grass that formed the landing strip. Irene lifted her skirt and ran to follow them. Her scarf fell free from her hair. She ripped it off and balled it in her hand, in case they needed a bandage or a tourniquet. The noise of the Papillon grew louder. Irene stopped and cast into the sky, where the airplane skimmed downward at a strange angle, sort of sideways, while the wings tilted back and forth.

  “It’s the rudder!” somebody shouted.

  The fire engine rolled to a stop, halfway down the field, and everybody just stood there watching, because there was nothing to be done, was there? This drama was about the pilot and the plane, the wind and the ground, and everybody else was just a spectator. Irene clenched her fists and her breath. She smelled the burning oil, the fear. In later years, she wished she could remember the way the airplane came in, the hundred tiny maneuvers made by the pilot to compensate for the rudder’s failings, but now, her flying career still before her, she didn’t know a thing about rudders and maneuvers, in her ignorance she didn’t notice any of it. She stood in awe, watching the hairy descent, the swoops and skids of battle, the crump of impact, the dust, the men running, Mr. Rofrano in front of them all.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  We’ve all got a thing that terrifies us. I saw a lot of airplanes crash during the war, and I encountered the aftermath countless times more, and still I never did get used to the sight or sound of some machine smashing into the ground.

  When you hear the telltale noise, you gird for horror. The things modern machinery can do to a human body, it’s enough to make you retch your guts out, enough to make you die of pity. I don’t know how the army surgeons survived it. I don’t understand how you could lock up the pity and the horror into a steel vault deep inside the bank of your soul, how you could set about repairing a mutilated limb or a split-open skull or some devastated viscera in the same way you might repair a flat tire, say.

  In England, before the Allied invasion, I was living in staff huts right near an air base, and just about every other day some poor chap would ram his ship into the earth nearby. The others in the press pool would dutifully trudge out to take notes and pictures, to point and stare and shake their heads at the gore, but I never would. I never went to see a crackup if I could help it, although there were plenty of times I couldn’t help it, and I faced the wreckage as bravely as I could. Also, I had a rule not to sleep with any pilots. You might get attached, after all, and then they would inevitably get killed, and you were left to imagine those last seconds over and over, the certain expectation of death, your helplessness in the face of it, your beloved body strapped into a hunk of metal that plummeted toward the earth, nothing you could do but wait for annihilation. I can’t think of a thing in the world more terrifying than that.

  And now this terror has followed me here, to a peaceful corner of a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? Still I follow Olle and the two pilots out of the cafeteria and into the soft Hawaiian morning. The three of them bolt toward the smoking pile of metal and drag out the body like any old piece of meat. Olle seems to know what he’s doing. He arranges limbs and listens for breath and barks some order at one of the pilots. In the distance, someone’s dragging out a water tank on some kind of caisson.

  And I say to myself, God forgive me.

  I’m going to tell you a story now, a story I’ve never told anybody. It does me little credit, but I was young and foolish, as the saying goes, and haven’t we all got some old folly that tortures us?

  The summer between my first and second years of college, when I had just turned eighteen years old, I worked as a secretary at a law firm in order to save money for the next year’s tuition, and there was this lawyer there who ran the place. He was handsome and authoritative, a brilliant jurist, and he was also forty-seven years old and married. He acted awfully stern with me, never stopping to banter and charm as he did with the other secretaries, as if he actively disliked me, but the sterner he was the more he occupied my thoughts. At work my fingers struck like lightning on the typewriter while my eyes wandered around the office, following him wherever he went, craving some crumb of approval, wondering what on earth I’d done to earn his displeasure.

  One Friday afternoon in early July, he had made all these notes on a brief and needed them typed up, and the other two secretaries—Patty and Laura—had already gone home. He said, I guess we shall have to wait for Monday then, and I said, Oh, I’d be happy to stay and type it for you. He said it was too much trouble, and I said it was no trouble at all. An hour later I was flat on my back on the Chesterfield sofa in his private office, blouse unbuttoned, virginal navy skirt up around my hips, married lawyer rocking away on top of me, and let me tell you it hurt like the dickens in more ways than one, but I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, even if I’d had the physical strength for it. I was miserable and ashamed, and at the same time I felt this surge of anguished joy when he shuddered and shook and shouted, begged God and his wife to forgive him, col
lapsed on my chest and called himself a lost man, because I thought that must mean I had won not just his approval, but his adoration. I was loved! Then he lifted himself off and said what a whore I was, I should have stopped him. He said this even as he wiped my blood from his skin with his handkerchief. He swore me to silence, swore this could never happen again.

  That night when I went home, I couldn’t even look at my mother or my stepfather. I felt this stain on me. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. In the middle of the night I went to the medicine cabinet and stared at the aspirin and wondered how much it would take to kill me, and if I hadn’t been scared of my mother finding me first, I might have done it.

  On Monday it happened again. He told me to bring him his morning coffee, and when I stepped into his office with the cup he closed the door and kissed me. The coffee spilled. He told me he had spent all weekend in torment, thinking about nothing but me and what we had done, drunk with love for me, how I had bewitched and seduced him, this was all my doing, all my fault. He kissed me again, and I kissed him back, because I thought I should feed this thing, this love he said he had for me, this power I thought I had over him. He unbuttoned my blouse and kissed my neck, my breasts, then turned me around and laid me over the top of his desk, so that the leather blotter pressed against my cheek. When he was finished he gave me a handkerchief and told me this was our secret, that if I said a word about this to my mother, to anybody, he would cut all ties with me and I would be disgraced as a whore in front of everybody. So I didn’t say a word. I hated what we did, hated myself for doing it, hated these physical stirrings that sometimes came with what we did, and yet I never refused him, God forgive me, never once said no to him, because despite all the shame and the revulsion I craved his love, or rather I wanted him not to stop loving me, because I thought his lust for me was a symptom of love, and if I stopped feeding that lust he would no longer love me. Nobody would love me!

  Long story short, we carried on through July and August, and though I still sometimes went to the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night to stare at the aspirin bottle, I never worked up the nerve to swallow the pills. I figured if I killed myself, people might find out why, and his wife’s heart would be broken and his life ruined, and all of this would be my fault.

  At last I returned to college for the autumn term. By late September I realized I was going to have a baby. Well, of course I was! We must have fucked fifty times at least; I doubt there was a moment all that summer when my fresh young womb was not teeming with that man’s sperm. I wrote a letter to my lover and asked humbly what I should do, but he never replied. I thought it would be bad form to confront him face-to-face, so I went to Mother, who promptly took me to some doctor she knew of, who solved the problem. After the thing was done, she told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson, because she and my stepfather wanted no more to do with me, and that was when I started on the road with my camera, older but wiser, armed with a few new guiding principles.

  First, no matter how much you’re tempted, do not have to do with married men.

  Second, never allow a male member indoors unless it’s properly dressed.

  Third, you may lease your body to whomever you fancy, and insist on your pleasure as a condition of same, but whatever you do, in whatever bed or sofa or sunlit meadow, for God’s sake keep your heart to yourself.

  In time, I was to break all three of those rules, although not at the same time. We are only human, and our miseries take on infinite form.

  Now, why have I told you this sordid, unhappy story, this stale tale already told a million times by a million other women, when I have not told another living soul? Because I think you should know that I am not so invincible, not so hard and so careless as I sometimes seem. I have been naïve. I have behaved stupidly, even culpably. I have sinned and repented, I have deceived others and been cruelly deceived myself. I have been wounded so deeply I wanted to die.

  But I did not die. I am Perseverance, remember. I am Survival.

  And I am not so callous that I don’t feel a bone-crushing remorse at the sight of that airplane wreckage and a shudder of fate repeating itself and finally a sense of loss that almost brings me to my knees, because in my grief and my outrage I’ve destroyed something important. I have caused this nightmare that is my own worst nightmare.

  All these thoughts bear down on me in a series of instants, and in the next instant I leap forward to help with the water tank, because I don’t do so well with the blood, and anyway Olle seems to be performing every necessary thing.

  The slender man at the caisson must possess some superhuman strength, because he’s almost reached the wreckage. In seconds, I hurtle to his side and grab the yoke and together we haul that tank the last fifty yards. The fellow drops the yoke and thanks me, reaches for the hose and tells me to man the pump, and by God I nearly lose my mind.

  “You! I thought—I thought—”

  “You’re an idiot, Miss Everett,” yells Mrs. Lindquist as she drags the hose from its spool. “Now pump!”

  As it turns out, the pilot’s not dead at all. He has a broken ankle and a great many cuts and bruises, and Olle suspects a collapsed lung caused by a possibly broken rib. His name is Kaiko, and he’s apparently Olle’s brother-in-law. Olle was married before, it turns out, to a Hawaiian woman who died some time ago, and Kaiko is her brother. Everybody’s related to each other in Hanalei, Olle explains.

  I’m in Lindquist’s yellow truck with Olle, driving back into town, because Lindquist is flying Kaiko to the hospital in Honolulu in her own private airplane. Olle doesn’t trust the tiny hospital here on Kauai. Some fellow from the junkyard on the other side of the island is coming later to pick up the remains of the machine itself, which seems precipitate to me. I ask, Don’t they want to find out what caused the accident? and Olle looks at me like I’m crazy.

  “What caused the accident is that Kaiko is a terrible pilot,” he says. “He came in to land too slowly and stalled. Now he’s learned his lesson. Thank God he had no passengers.”

  “Does he usually? Have passengers?”

  “Sometimes. When we’re short of pilots.”

  “Oh, that’s just terrific. And people wonder why I won’t get on an airplane.”

  “You don’t fly?”

  The wind billows in drafts through the open windows, smelling of brine, whipping my hair around my head. I make some attempt to tuck it behind my ears. “Never ever,” I tell him. “By land or by sea, that’s my motto. It takes longer, but you see more, and you generally stay in one piece.”

  Olle starts to laugh. I have the feeling he’s just relieved Kaiko isn’t dead, and sometimes relief finds expression in hysterical laughter. I saw a lot of that kind of thing in Europe, believe me.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  “You. Fixated on my wife, and you don’t even fly.”

  “I’m not fixated on your wife. I’m fixated on Samuel Mallory. He was the better pilot, after all.”

  That sobers up Olle. “He was better at some things, maybe. But which pilot is still alive?”

  We reach the inn a few minutes later. Olle seems to have forgotten that he doesn’t like me, or maybe my heroic efforts at the water pump have atoned for my sins. He stops the truck and frowns at me.

  “I still want you on the next boat to Oahu,” he says. “You upset Irene.”

  “If I’m on the next boat to Oahu, the next boat back will be carrying several members of the press. It’s your choice.”

  He bangs a hand on the steering wheel. “Why? Why did you have to find us?”

  “Because I want to know, that’s all. I want to know everything. I can’t rest until I do.” I sling my pocketbook over my shoulder. “And I think your Irene wants to know too.”

  “Irene knows everything she needs to know.”

  “Are you sure of that?” I open the door, slide out, and slam it shut again. The window’s open. I lean my head inside. “Good-bye, Olle. Tell your wife she knows where
to find me.”

  The desk clerk can’t suppress a smirk when I walk inside. “Miss Everett! Here you are at last. Have you enjoyed your stay with us?”

  “Positively delightful, thanks.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Although, now that you mention it, my upstairs neighbors were making a terrible racket last night. You know how it is. I had to sleep elsewhere, or I wouldn’t have caught a wink. Perhaps you might consider taking it off my bill?”

  The smirk fades. The fellow starts to stammer.

  “In the meantime, I’d like my room key, please.”

  He turns and takes the key from the hook and a small envelope from the pigeonhole beneath. “You have a message too,” he says grudgingly.

  Upstairs, my room is neatly made—no surprise there—and really quite attractive, for a rustic beachside sort of hostelry. It’s decorated in blue and white and if you strain your neck out the window at just the right angle, you can glimpse a sliver of ocean. You’ll have to take my word for that, however. I’m frankly too exhausted to do anything except collapse on the bed and pull the envelope from the pocket of my slacks. Inside, there’s a folded note and a five dollar bill. I spread the note between my two hands and hold it up against the ceiling.

  Dear Janey,

  I enclose your five bucks. The drinks were on the house.

  Yours always,

  Leo

  PS you left something behind

  The next thing I know, I’m thrown awake in a panicked sweat. My heart’s chattering, my lungs panting. In my ears, over and over, plays the scream of a doomed engine followed by the metallic smash that jolts every pore. In my fist, Leo’s note is crumpled to a tight, damp ball.

  But this experience is not unknown to me. I know what to do when I wake in a thundering panic, when the unexpected crash of an airplane starts the process all over again. You just lie where you are and listen to your breath, you count the beats of your pulse and your respiration until they return to normal, and then, if you haven’t got a body lying conveniently next to you on the bed, you rise and hunt for one.