Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  She scribbled, See anything?

  He replied, Box compass.

  Of course they had discussed what to do if navigation failed, if a certain mass of land did not turn up when and where it was supposed to. There was no need to panic, at least not right away. On an ocean so vast as the Pacific, using navigation methods that relied on natural variables and imperfect human observations, errors would occur. You simply tried to keep the margin of that error within reasonable—that is to say, survivable—bounds.

  So Baker Island had not turned up exactly where it was supposed to. It must still exist somewhere in the vicinity. According to the laws of geometry, from a point one thousand feet above the earth’s surface, the human eye could find the horizon across thirty-nine miles of open ocean in each direction; if you flew your airplane in four straight lines of forty miles each to form a square—boxing the compass, as they call it—you stood the best chance of detecting your objective before you ran out of fuel. At night, of course, your visibility wasn’t so exact. If the moon was bright and the weather was clear, as it was now, you might still have a hard time detecting some imperfection upon the ocean’s surface that might or might not represent an island. Still, you had to try. Sam and Irene had practiced this very maneuver atop the California desert over and over, by night and by day, and while Sam had always flown the airplane as Irene worked the navigation, still she’d passed him the necessary commands, she’d figured out which direction and for how long they should make their passes over the sand. Why, she’d had the tougher job! She knew what to do. She had just about expected this message from Sam, scribbled in block letters on a piece of square white notepaper.

  She banked the airplane and began the first side of the square.

  Before flying, Irene hadn’t given the moon much thought. She knew it guided the tides, of course, which were of some importance in surfing, but she didn’t pay attention to the how and why, to the actual progress of the rock in question. Her prior ignorance now stunned her. How could she not have noticed, for example, that a full moon rose exactly at sunset, and set exactly at sunrise? That a new moon—if she could actually see it—did exactly the opposite? The moon was her companion. It shed light on the black ocean. It occupied a predictable place in the sky, a landmark, a beacon. As she swept above the water, searching for some scrap of an island, the moon lit her way. If she found Baker, she would find it by the reflection of moonlight on a patch of sand.

  Or else Sam would. He had taken off the radio headset and lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The temperature was getting a little warmer, because they were so close to earth, or possibly because of the anxiety packed tight inside the airplane, and he had stripped off his thick, sheepskin-lined leather jacket and stood now in his flight suit, not moving, fixed on the landscape outside the window. A landscape on which no interruption appeared. Nothing. Water and more water, all the way to the horizon. The minutes ticked by. Ten, fifteen. The needle in the gauge of the main fuel tank hovered just above empty.

  Irene scrawled, Switch to aux tank soon.

  The note took ten or twelve seconds to write. While she was writing it, she was seized with certainty that when she looked back up, when she strained her gaze through the cockpit window, she would see Baker Island. She would see some silver ridge amid all those delicate white threads and curlicues that constituted the moonlit Pacific Ocean, and it would grow larger and more prominent and it would be Baker Island. She knew this like she knew the shape of her own hand, the rhythm of her own breath. She chucked the pencil stub in its can and clipped the note, one-handed, to the clothesline, and turned to the window in triumph.

  Nothing.

  The Centauri wobbled. Maybe it was the air, maybe it was her hand on the stick. She glanced at the fuel gauge and the clock. They had traveled nearly forty miles now in the first side of the square. Nearly time to bank and turn. Behind her, Sam was moving. Switching the fuel lines. The auxiliary tank held another sixty gallons. If Irene flew the Centauri with perfect efficiency, she could squeeze another hundred and twenty miles from those sixty gallons.

  She made the turn. Started down the next side of the imaginary square.

  Surely Baker Island would turn up any second.

  Two more sides.

  Eighty miles.

  No island.

  With six gallons of fuel remaining in the auxiliary tank, a note appeared on the clothesline. Descend to 200 ft. Prepare water landing.

  She scribbled on the same square of paper: YOU.

  He didn’t answer. The left engine droned on, oblivious to its imminent death.

  Irene started to descend. Her pulse punched against her throat, closing off her breath. Her hands shook on the stick. A hand came down on her shoulder. A finger appeared in her field of vision, jabbing at the window. Irene raised herself an inch or two and followed the line it drew across the water, right toward a tiny patch of white at the extreme southern end of the horizon.

  THERE IT IS, Sam yelled in her ear.

  Not a panicked yell, no fear at all, just loud and confident so that she could hear him above the noise of the engine.

  But the island, as it grew in size and came into focus, was not shaped like a potato chip. More like a dill pickle, or a banana.

  Irene couldn’t send any notes now. She had to fly, she had to look at this scrap of land by the light of the moon and figure out what it was made of, how to land on it, could she land on it. And all the while her heart was beating so hard and so fast, she thought her ribs would break. She couldn’t breathe. This white mist seemed to be filling her brain. All those times she had practiced landing in an emergency, landing on the sand in the desert, landing without an engine, but she hadn’t practiced this. Landing on some unknown piece of land in the middle of the ocean. The shape of it grew and grew. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t tell if those dark patches were grass or scrub or trees or what have you.

  She couldn’t do it.

  She flung out an arm behind her and grabbed hold of some part of Sam, his shoulder. She turned and looked at him, and the panic must have burst right into the open, because he took her hand off his shoulder and shouted in her ear, You can do it!

  I CAN’T! she yelled back, and this time she rose from the seat and let go of the stick.

  The Centauri pitched and dove.

  Sam slammed her down on the seat, grabbed her hand, and set it on the stick.

  LAND THE GODDAMN AIRPLANE, he said in her ear. I’M RIGHT HERE.

  She was shaking, she was dizzy. Sam’s hand covered hers on the stick. The airplane jerked and rattled as they brought it back under control. She thought, why? Why had he subjected her to this? He was the senior pilot, the better pilot, the stunt pilot who had performed a thousand improbable aeronautical feats, who had cheated death over and over. Why hadn’t he taken control the instant the engine stopped? Why make Irene do this impossible thing and kill them both?

  But his arms were right there. His face stood firm next to hers. STEADY, he shouted, so she could hear him, so she could smell his hair, his familiar skin. His confidence poured from his palm and into the back of her hand.

  THAT’S IT. His voice was firm, not worried at all. KEEP YOUR SPEED UP.

  Irene’s heart chattered away but her mind cleared. Her vision made a tunnel of the path before them. It was like the roller coaster when she was eleven, the whole world narrowing to a single corridor, to the patch at the end where you landed.

  The airplane fell softly. The silver ground rose and grew before her. There was no wind to rattle her, nothing to think about but the descent of the Centauri to earth. The island was flat and covered with sand and grass, as near to a landing strip as you could ask for on an uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean. YOU’VE GOT IT, Sam shouted in her ear. His hand lifted from hers. He stepped back and buckled himself into the navigator’s seat. It was like any other landing, like that time Sam shut one engine off and made her land in the Mojave Desert. The earth came up to me
et them. The still, dark grass and the brush and BANG! The wheels slammed into the ground, bumped and slammed again, tore through bushes, sand and leaves flying up around the windows, spinning and bumping and coming at last to rest in the long, quiet night, an hour before dawn.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  Because Olle’s away in Honolulu, trying to keep his brother-in-law Kaiko from climbing out of his hospital bed, Lindquist has to cover his flights for him. She doesn’t fly the airplanes often, she explains to me, as we drive to the airfield—first because of the risk of some cosmopolitan tourist recognizing her and second because most people would rather eat rabbit droppings than take off in an airplane piloted by a woman.

  “So you see,” she says, “it was all for nothing, everything I did. All those flights, all those speeches and books, the endless publicity. George used to say that we had entered the age of woman, that people were fascinated by women breaking free to do adventurous things, but look around you.”

  “I’d say it’s a hell of a lot easier for a woman to do what she wants today than fifty years ago.”

  “But she has to work twice as hard and be ten times as good at what she does.”

  “It’s better than not being allowed to try.”

  “And when she fails,” Lindquist continues, pulling into the long drive from the road, “God help her.”

  We bring the cat along in the back seat, because Lindquist doesn’t like to leave it alone all day, at that age. What age? I ask, and she answers, after a moment’s thought, Nineteen.

  Well, color me impressed. I didn’t even know cats could live that long. Lindquist says that’s because Sandy’s a survivor. Mallory found her on the beach one day, the day Lindquist met him, as a matter of fact. She stowed away on the flight to Australia.

  “No kidding?” I look to the feline with renewed admiration. “You mean she survived the crash and everything? The weeks stranded on the island?”

  “Lucky for her, the place was lousy with rats. They used to mine those islands for guano, back in the previous century, and naturally all the guano ships were overrun with rats. She must’ve gained five pounds.”

  We’ve reached the airfield cafeteria, where I’m to wait while she takes a planeload of tourists and locals back to Oahu. I observe how she’s in competition with her own stepson, and she says not really. Some people like to fly, some people like to sail.

  “Count me among the second clan,” I tell her, as I settle myself at the lunch counter with a cup of coffee.

  “You’ll be all right? I should be back in a couple of hours.”

  “I’ll be just fine.”

  She looks to the cat before she leaves. “Keep an eye on her for me, will you? Don’t let her get into any trouble.”

  Though I tried and tried that autumn of 1944, I could not get Velázquez to tell me anything more about Sam Mallory. He said he had promised Mallory never to reveal what he had done in Spain, and he—Velázquez—had already broken that vow for my sake, which was unconscionable and must not be repeated. You have a way of disarming me, he said to me, but now I am on my guard.

  As September passed into October, however, I went on meeting Velázquez. I told myself this was because I still had some hope of disarming him again, and because the strain of war on one’s nerves required some carnal release, which nobody understood better than Velázquez. Sometimes he would join me at the Scribe in Paris, when he could get a few hours’ leave from his duties at the airfield, which were largely administrative; sometimes I would travel out to Orly and meet him there. In the beginning, the terms of our association were clear and simple. Since we had the good fortune to share an electric physical attraction and libidos of roughly equal strength, we should screw each other silly, as often as we could arrange to meet.

  But as the weeks went on, we began to spend time together that was not entirely devoted to sex. We would go on walks or drive a Jeep into some village and look at the local cathedral, if it still stood; after making love, instead of getting dressed or falling asleep, we would have these conversations about art and politics and ethics. I was surprised to find that despite his cynicism Velázquez was an idealist, a believer in fate but also a devout Catholic, even though the Republicans in Spain had hated the church; he did not understand how I, a nonbeliever, could adhere to any moral code at all, and he was deeply worried for my immortal soul. Velázquez spoke in precise, beautiful language, and our discussions had this transparent quality, this clarity of expression, so that you could perceive each thought in the same way you could observe an object with your eyes. I remember I would watch his mouth as he spoke, or the bridge of his nose, or the wisp of smoke from his cigarette. He used to trail his other hand along my skin, to draw some diagram with his fingers to illustrate a point. Often he would turn on his side to fix me with a serious expression and ask me some question that stopped me in my tracks, that required me to walk back all the way along some path of logic and start again, in a new direction I hadn’t imagined, while he listened intently. Then we would make love again, and the texture of him was somehow different, and the texture of me.

  In October he took me to the opera. I wish I could remember which one. I didn’t understand a word, though the music stirred me. Sometime near the end, as the soprano lay dying yet miraculously sonorous, Velázquez snatched my fingers with one hand and wiped his eyes with the other. Afterward he apologized for this weakness and told me about his childhood in Spain, how his parents owned a great estate that was lost during the war, and how they used to take him to the opera in Madrid when he was a boy. He first saw this particular opera we had just witnessed when he was twelve, and it affected him deeply, so that he could not help but respond with emotion tonight because of all he had lost since then. He hoped this had not distressed me.

  All this he explained as we sprawled in bed in the tiny room in the Hotel Scribe to which I had been assigned. We had started to make love inside the elevator, because the mechanism was so slow and this was wartime, and finished hard against the headboard an hour later; Velázquez was a disciplined man and always made sure I came at least twice (sometimes more, if he had gone to confession recently) before he finished off. He used to say it was the man’s duty to give the woman satisfaction, because a woman who was not sexually satisfied was liable to cause trouble. I saw no reason to argue with him about this.

  A few days after the opera I was sent away on some assignment for a week or two, and it was only when we reunited that I realized that matters had gone too far. We devoured each other like a pair of desperate animals, driven by some lust out of all proportion to the length of our abstinence, and after Velázquez rose to dispose of the condom, he settled himself back on the bed and lit a cigarette, which we passed back and forth. An air of quiet despair settled between us. Finally he turned on his side to face me. “You will not like what I’m about to say, but I will say it regardless. I think I am in love with you.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, I’m afraid it’s true. Listen to me. I had word today that I am to be reassigned back to my old squadron, to conduct some reconnaissance over Germany.”

  “But I thought you were finished with combat missions. Haven’t you flown enough already?”

  “Well, it seems they have run short of experienced pilots. It is careless of them, of course, but that’s the English for you. I will not ask you to be faithful. That is like asking a cat not to catch mice. But I believe we are going to win this war, we are going to beat the Fascists at last, and when it’s over I would like to marry you.”

  I was so shocked, I nearly tumbled off the bed.

  “Me? You’re nuts. You should marry some girl from home. You know we won’t suit. You’d want me to give up my freedom, and I’d never obey you, which would make you miserable, because you love to be obeyed.”

  He picked up my hand and held it to his lips. “The girl I was going to marry is dead now. I have no home left to me. For many years I
said I would never marry at all, that the world was too terrible a place to bring children into it, and I was too poor in any case. But now there is hope. There is some possibility of a future. And though I am too gruff for you, and autocratic, and ugly—”

  “You aren’t ugly at all.”

  “But you are beautiful, and I have no right to you. Still, I promise I will make you a good husband. I will do my best to make you happy. All I ask is that you consider what I say. Then when the war’s over, the day Hitler surrenders, I will come back to you and ask again and again until you relent and become my wife. What do you think of this idea?”

  “I think it’s nuts. You’ll want a dozen kids, for one thing.”

  “That’s not true. Three or four would suffice.”

  “What about your mistress in London?”

  “I will keep her, of course,” he said gravely. “Every man needs a little variety.”

  That was the night I took that photograph of him, while he was trying to pin me down, as it were. I then put down the camera and performed an act on him that made him howl, made him curse all my ancestors, made him collapse at last on the sheets and swear the most exquisite vengeance on me, to which I replied that it was a woman’s duty to give her lover satisfaction, because he was otherwise liable to cause trouble. Then I laid my head on his thick, furry chest and listened to the thud of his heartbeat through his bone and skin until we both fell asleep.

  But I’m afraid I didn’t promise to marry him, or even to consider his proposal. We met only twice more before he transferred to his old squadron, flying reconnaissance out of some air base in The Netherlands, and I never saw him again after that, because he was shot down over Cologne in January. When I heard he was dead, I wept with rage, because I thought now I would never find out what had happened to Mallory. I wept and raged and wept until there was nothing left of me.