Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

“We’re just a star ourselves, after all. Who knows, maybe we’re guiding some other traveler on some other world.”

  “That’s blasphemy, Foster.”

  “God’s infinite, after all. Why should He content Himself with one little earth?”

  Sam didn’t reply. Irene listened to the rumble of Sandy’s purring from the patch of sand next to Sam’s ribs. After a while, she turned her head. The moon was a sliver of a thing now, setting already, but she could pick out just enough of Sam’s face to see that he was asleep.

  Meanwhile, as the days slid into weeks, they worked on the Centauri. They both wanted the ship to be ready to fly as soon as help arrived; they desperately wanted to finish the journey in triumph. Sam had figured out that the engine itself was undamaged, that all the trouble came down to nothing more than a broken fuel line, so all he needed to do was to repair it. Except he had no extra hose, nothing to splice the old ends together again. Irene shaded her eyes and frowned at him.

  “Don’t know why you’re bothering with that. They’ll have a fuel line for us.”

  “Who’ll have a fuel line?”

  “The navy. Once they find us. They’ll have a brand-new fuel line you can install in half an hour.”

  “It’s something to do, isn’t it? So I don’t go nuts.” Sam jumped down from the wing. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Cockles and mussels, alive alive oh.”

  “Sweet Molly Malone,” he sang, thick Irish baritone, and snatched her hand to whirl her around. “As she pushed her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow—”

  Irene broke away. “You’re in an awfully good mood, for a fellow keeping alive on shellfish and distilled seawater.”

  “And peanut butter.”

  “Peanut butter’s almost finished.”

  He squinted at the sky. “I keep telling you we should shoot down a bird or two.”

  “Like how? Make a slingshot? Anyway, we hardly have enough fuel to distill the water, let alone cook a full-sized booby.”

  “We’ll find a way,” he said. “We could live here forever, I’ll bet.”

  Certainly it was starting to seem like they’d lived on Howland forever. The dawn had marked their twentieth day since landing on the island, with no sign of any life upon the surrounding ocean except the occasional pod of bottlenose dolphins. A traitorous corner of Irene’s brain was starting to think the unthinkable, that nobody was searching for them, that Sam and Irene were presumed lost, or had simply been forgotten among a thousand more important world affairs.

  This was not the case, of course. An exhaustive search was still under way, no hint of giving up, no sir! Hundreds of men combed the Pacific for some sign of the missing pilots, and thousands more wrote and reported and speculated on their whereabouts, and hundreds of millions more gobbled up every crumb of news cooked up by the preceding. The only trouble was, they continued to look in the wrong place. After turning over every stone and blade of grass on Baker Island to the south, the navy had begun trawling the waters to the east, under the assumption—so George Morrow announced to the waiting press—that Sam and Irene had run out of fuel on their way to Baker and made an emergency landing on the water. Mr. Morrow reminded reporters that Mr. Mallory had stayed alive for eleven days on his floating airplane last year, so he was experienced in the techniques for survival. He and the U.S. Navy continued to harbor every expectation for a happy outcome.

  So the USS Farragut drew its solemn, methodical lines across the open ocean, while Sam and Irene fished for hermit crabs and gazed at the stars from their pile of coral sand some hundred miles to the northwest, and it seemed this state of affairs might continue indefinitely, or at least until some bright spark in the navy, or perhaps Mr. Morrow himself, should have the clever idea to expand the search to include the few additional islands in the larger vicinity.

  As of the twenty-second of August, however, Sam and Irene had received no hint of this unprecedented search under way to the south of them, to say nothing of the ballyhoo gripping the globe. Their horizon remained empty. Their radio remained inoperable. So far as they could hear and see, they were the only two people on the face of the earth.

  In the end, it wasn’t Mr. Morrow at all who got the clever idea to look for Sam and Irene on Howland Island. It was Hank Foster who checked out some maps from the library, some old navigational charts, and hovered over them with compass and ruler and magnifying glass. On that day, the twenty-second of August, he shot the usual breeze with the reporters gathered in the café at Rofrano’s Airfield, where he spent most of his waking hours nursing cups of coffee that might or might not have contained a little something extra. “Boys,” he said to them, “I’ll tell you what, I don’t know why they haven’t looked for my Irene on Howland Island.”

  Within hours, most of America and a good part of the rest of the world had learned not only the name of Howland Island but its exact longitude and latitude, its proximity to the other features of the Pacific Ocean, its history, its geologic composition, its native flora and fauna, its boobies and terns, its guano pits and Polynesian rats, its poverty of fresh water, and its general capability for supporting human life for various lengths of time.

  Within a day, the U.S. Navy had dispatched a ship north-northwest at full steam, along with a reporter and a photographer from United Press International, on the express orders of Mr. George Morrow.

  As evening fell on Howland Island, the twenty-third of August (Howland squatting there on the other side of the International Date Line, remember), the USS Farragut plowed through the ocean a hundred and fifty miles away, and Sam and Irene lay side by side on the sand of the island’s windward side, listening to the surf—there seemed to be some weather out there on the wide blue sea, somewhere—and watching the stars. They returned to the question of whether they would ever be rescued, whether they would live out their lives on these thousand acres.

  “God forbid,” Irene said. “Think about your daughter.”

  “Except for Pixie, sure.”

  “And flying. Sure would be nice to go up in the air again.”

  “That too.”

  This evening there had been none of the usual banter between them, keeping up spirits. Irene busied herself with the distilling apparatus. Sam cooked the crabs in their shells. They ate and drank almost without speaking, because food and water were now precious things, in short supply, and required some concentration. As the sky darkened, Irene had thought Sam looked like a shaman, poking his stick into the glowing ashes, not saying a word. Eventually he settled back in the sand. When the last ember died, Sandy stalked between them, washed herself thoroughly, and curled up next to Sam’s ribs.

  Finally Irene spoke. “Did you see that pack of dolphins swimming to the north this afternoon?”

  “Pod. Pod of dolphins. Yep, I saw them.” He laid down the stick and looked at her. “They’ll catch up with us soon. The navy, I mean, not the dolphins.”

  “Oh, I know they will. It’s just funny they haven’t shown up yet, that’s all. It’s not like we’re hiding or anything.”

  “Yeah, it’s funny, all right. Won’t be too much longer, though. We’ll be on our way, back to civilization.”

  “A hot bath would be grand. Chicken dinner, mashed potatoes. About a pound of butter melting on top. Tall glass of cold lemonade, all you can drink.”

  “All of that,” he said, “but I’m sure going to miss these stars. Won’t you?”

  Irene looked up at the spangled sky. “Yes.”

  “It gets you thinking, a universe like that. You start to figure how small you are. How short your time underneath the sky.”

  “Sam—”

  “Irene, I’m going to do it. I’m going to divorce her. Soon as we get back stateside. Before you ask, it’s got nothing to do with anything but me and her. I just can’t go on the way things are.”

  “But how? Won’t she do the same thing she did before?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I figure I shou
ld clear some dough from this little adventure, once we get back. Write a book, make some speeches. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “She can’t keep me from Pixie, no matter how she tries,” he said, with determination. “I’ll hire the best lawyer around to see to that. If I have to, I’ll take Pixie myself. I don’t like to take a girl from her mother, but a mother like that . . . I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I think a girl’s going to love her mother, whatever happens.”

  He put his head in his hands. Irene reached out to cover his knee.

  “Sam. You know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Anything you can do?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “You know I’m in love with you, don’t you? You know if I could wave a wand and it would be the three of us, you and me and Pixie—”

  “No, don’t.”

  “—I’d do whatever I could to wave that wand. Because that would be heaven for me. To have you both. I’d give up anything for that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t give up flying.”

  “If I had to, though?”

  “I’d never ask you to,” Irene said, without thinking, and Sam turned and seized her hands.

  “What are you saying?” he said. “What are you telling me, Irene?”

  “Nothing! You’ve got a wife, Sam.”

  “Then just tell me you care. Say that I’m not the only one of us lying here at night, burning up with love for somebody who isn’t mine.”

  Well, what could Irene say to that? She wasn’t the kind of woman who could lie outright. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could move in on another woman’s husband, either. She was stuck. Stuck in more ways than one, remember, since it was just the two of them on an island in the middle of the Pacific, no one to know or care what went on in that particular moment, whether they kissed or did not, confessed their hearts or did not, made love in the darkness or did not. Just Sam and Irene and whatever God was paying attention at the time.

  Well, let’s be honest. In fact, there were plenty of people who cared what was going on, and moreover figured they knew, all right. Millions! As Irene sat in the sand with Sam, holding hands, thinking about how to reply, housewives and bus drivers and secretaries and farmers around the world were right then imagining that scene between the two of them, people just like you imagining what would happen if you too were marooned on a desert island with some man or woman with whom you were secretly enamored. The more cynical among you might call this an old story, a chestnut, but chestnuts have their purpose, don’t they? They allow us to imagine some all-too-human aspect of our condition on this earth, some thought or fantasy or conundrum we share in common, we flawed and yearning animals, we complicated and contradictory beings. That was why the world was transfixed with the story of the lost pilots. Sam and Irene, c’est nous.

  If you were Irene, what would you say?

  If you were Sam, what would you do?

  At 0431 local time the next morning, the Farragut dropped anchor about two hundred yards off the rim of Howland Island. Once dawn broke, the captain dispatched a boat containing himself, an oarsman, and the reporter and photographer from the UPI, to survey the atoll for any sign of the lost pilots.

  The news crossed the wire at 0603.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  Lindquist tells me to look out the window at that glorious sight below, and I tell her to stick her glorious sights in the world’s darkest cave. I ask her what was the real reason she made me come up here with her today. Is this some kind of murder plot? Are we going to crash on this island of hers and end our miseries?

  “Of course not,” she yells, over the noise of the engines. “What a waste of a good airplane.”

  “Maroon us on the island, then? Deliver me the full Foster and Mallory experience? The crabs, the peanut butter, the saltwater distillery? Listen up, dame. The desert island survival story, that’s a dime a dozen. All variations on a theme of building campfires and eating shellfish and getting sunburnt. Who cares anymore? You know there’s only one thing people really want to know.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  I lean forward. “Did you or didn’t you?”

  Try as I might, I don’t remember how I knew my father was running around on my mother. It seems to me it was just a fact of life. She never tried to hide it from me. As far back as I could recall, she would talk about your father’s little girlfriend, in this scornful tone of voice, or that hussy of your father’s, in the same way as you might refer to his beloved automobile or his stamp collection. Sure, I would hear her cry at night when he was away, presumably with some paramour, which was another word my mother favored. But I was just a kid, and I sometimes cried at night, so I didn’t think this was especially strange. I adored my father. I thought my father was the most wonderful man alive, handsome and brave and smart, and I knew he loved me more than anything else in the world. He would come home and lift me in the air and call me his best girl, and he would take me out for milkshakes at the drugstore, just me and him, and tell me stories about his day. Of course I loved my mother, but I worshiped Dad; I gave him all my secret loyalty. I looked at my mother and felt an awful, guilty, childlike sense of superiority, because Dad certainly wasn’t running around on me. I was the apple of his eye. Nobody more dear to him than his Janey.

  Not until I was older did I realize the truth. Not until later did I understand how much grief my father’s sins caused my mother, how it felt when you were betrayed by somebody you loved that much. Because eventually my father left my mother. She came to me one day, when I was about thirteen or so, and said that Dad had left us for good this time, and soon after that Mama met my stepfather and we moved away and that was that. Mama said we were dead to Dad and he was dead to us, and I should just forget all about him and look upon my stepfather as my new father, my real father, a man I could trust.

  But all that is history. My point is this. As you might have deduced already, I’m fascinated by the subject of sex in general, and infidelity in particular, and have been ever since my father deserted my mother for another woman. In my one year of college, I studied some anthropology and some psychology in an attempt to understand this concept of monogamy and why most human beings will stake their all on one mate, will find themselves cruelly disappointed when that mate proves untrue, when most animals will happily mate with whomever they want. When a stallion, for example, will impregnate every mare in the herd because he has won the right to deposit his superior seed wherever he sees fit, and nobody blames him for it. He’s a stallion, for God’s sake.

  Then I parted ways with college, as you know, and pursued my studies elsewhere, but when the fate of Samuel Mallory began to intrigue me, when I decided I wanted to learn more about this fascinating public figure, I couldn’t help searching for clues about his relationship with Irene Foster. If you plunder the newspaper archives for all the articles and interviews covering the Flying Lovebirds’ rescue from Howland Island—and there are many, believe me—you’ll find that neither Foster nor Mallory lets drop a single hint about the nature of their personal relationship, and yet it stands to reason that a healthy, attractive, red-blooded male would naturally want to fuck a healthy, attractive, red-blooded female, if they were given a chance like Howland, a chance in a million. Stands to reason Mallory would forsake the forsaking of all others and betray his wife; stands to reason Foster would be unable to resist a strapping young demigod like that.

  But I want to hear it from her mouth. I want to hear from Lindquist what they did, and when, and how often, and whether they gave a damn about poor Mrs. Mallory, left at home with that innocent towheaded tot. I want a real answer. Because nobody’s going to read a book about Sam Mallory unless that answer lies inside, right?

  Only Lindquist won’t answer the question.

  She points to her ears. “Can’t hear you so well with this racket.
We’ll talk after we land.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Not long. It’s only about thirty miles away. I’ll have us there in a jiffy.”

  I sit back in my seat and stare at the metal wall. She’s got a point, after all. Call me stupid, but I never considered that an airplane would be so damned noisy inside. I guess I just imagined the silence of death. But believe me, those propellers don’t just whirl around quietly. The pistons of those engines don’t thrust without friction. The noise goes on and on, and for the first time I wonder how she and Mallory didn’t go crazy, listening to that racket for twelve or eighteen hours without pause.

  Twenty minutes later, the engines change pitch, and gravity pulls us downward. I still haven’t looked out the window, and I don’t intend to. What’s there to see, anyhow? Down we plummet, down down down while my stomach drops in pursuit, my head gets all dizzy, the black spots appear before my eyes. Lindquist, perhaps sensing my decline, glances back over her shoulder and points at my seat. I look underneath and find a paper bag. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to breathe into it or vomit, but my stomach decides for me. Luckily there’s not much, just coffee and Scotch. What a waste.

  Because I’m not looking out the window, the landing surprises me. We’re rattling along, and then bump, and then another bump, and then the continual bumping of wheels on turf.

  “Here we are!” Lindquist says cheerfully. She brings the airplane to a stop and I sit there awkwardly with my bag in my hands. The bottle fell out of my lap some time ago and rolled down the aisle to the tail. I unbuckle my straps and stagger after it. Bottle in one hand, bag in the other, I ask Lindquist where I can dispose of my little problem.

  “You’ll just have to hold on to it until we get back,” she says. “There’s nothing else here except us.”

  Naturally I think she’s kidding, but when she opens the door and the fresh air rushes inside, I see nothing but green grass and jungle, and the ocean off to the right.