Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  Irene put her face in her hands.

  “Not to kill myself. Crash the ship, that was all, so I couldn’t go up again. I know how to crash, you know. Used to do it all the time for the movies. God knows the crowd loves it. That’s what they’re really there for, to watch somebody crack up. I did it right at the end, when I came in for the final landing.” He finished off the last ounce of whiskey and soda and made a motion with his hand. “Clipped the ground with my right wing, turned a nice cartwheel. Bang.”

  Irene dropped her hands and stared at him. There was nothing to say, even if she could remember how to talk. Sam raised the cigarette to his mouth, and the end flared orange in the darkness.

  “Irene,” he said, “it’s all right. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  From the darkened beach came a scream of drunken laughter. Neither of them moved. Irene remembered her soda water. She lifted it to her lips and drank it all, and when she was finished she could speak again.

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going away for a while.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe Europe. They could use me in Spain, I’m thinking.”

  “Spain? You mean the war? What do you care about Spain?”

  “You have to care about something. I don’t have anything left to care about anymore, nothing I love that’s not stolen away. I have to find something, or I swear I’ll die.”

  “What about flying? You care about flying.”

  He turned his head, and the light from the kitchen burned in his eyes. “You care about flying, Irene. I haven’t given a damn about it since I walked out of that sheep station eight years ago. Since then, I’ve just been making a living.”

  “But you’re the best pilot I know.”

  Sam finished the cigarette and stubbed it out. “You should go home.”

  “You can’t just give up! Fly with me. We’re a team, remember? We could fly around the world together, like we said.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Sam said gently, “is that it doesn’t matter to me anymore. Flying does not matter. Setting some record, it’s pointless. You get yourself killed for no reason at all.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “If I’m going to get killed, I want to die for a reason. I want my daughter, if she ever gives a damn, to say that her father died for something. For a reason, for something that was bigger than his own ego.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t say it like you’re already dying.”

  He lifted his empty glass and held it by the rim. “Irene, we’re all dying,” he said. “Some of us take longer than others, that’s all.”

  After the dishes were done, Irene put a record on the old-fashioned phonograph in the living room and made cocoa. She helped Sam into the armchair in the living room and sat on the rug, leaning against his good knee while they listened to music. The first record was some sentimental Kalmar and Ruby, “Who’s Sorry Now” followed by “Thinking of You.” When that finished, and the needle scratched softly on the disc, Irene got up and flipped through the records until she found something without words, a Schubert piano concerto. She put that on and returned to Sam’s knee. This time he idled his hand in her hair.

  “Remember when I cut it for you?” he said. “Little did I know we were creating a sensational new hairstyle. Copied by millions of women the world over.”

  “Hardly millions.”

  “But nobody wears it better than you.” He lifted a curl and ran it between his finger and thumb. “It’s getting late, Irene. You should be heading home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Someone’s got to look after you.”

  “Your husband might have something to say about that.”

  “My husband’s in New York.”

  “But he’ll be back. Sooner or later.”

  Irene wrapped an arm around his leg and closed her eyes. “I’m not leaving you alone like this.”

  The next morning, she drove back to Burbank to pick up some clothes and a toothbrush. Sandy greeted her at the door, making loud, accusing miaows. The housekeeper said that Mr. Morrow had been calling for her. He had reached New York last night and was staying at the Peninsula. Irene packed fresh clothes and a toothbrush into her kit bag and rang up the Peninsula. She asked for George Morrow’s room and they connected her right away.

  “Where in God’s name have you been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been at Sam’s house. He left the hospital and needs someone to look after him.”

  The silence at the other end lasted so long, Irene thought they had been disconnected, except that the static still crackled in the background. Finally she asked if he was still there.

  “I’m here,” George said. “Can’t he hire a nurse?”

  “I’ve got nothing else to do. The mechanics are working on the airplane.”

  The next silence didn’t last quite as long. Before Irene could break in a second time, he said, “All right. If that’s what you want. Just remember you’ve got the first lecture in Sacramento in ten days. And for God’s sake, don’t let some photographer catch you.”

  When she returned to the cottage, she told Sam that she’d spoken to George.

  “So what did he say?”

  “He said to make sure I didn’t forget about the lecture tour. And not to answer the door to any photographers.”

  “Jesus,” said Sam.

  “Anyway, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  Irene reached back into the car and drew out a fluffy, bemused calico cat from the passenger seat.

  Sam still had his old surfboard, and Irene liked to take it out in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise, while Sam watched anxiously from the terrace. He was worried because of her arm, but he didn’t say so. She would climb back up the path, carrying the heavy board on her shoulder, grinning and wet and shivering, and she would put the board away and straddle his lap and kiss him. He liked to taste the salt water on her skin, to nuzzle her dripping hair. He told her to be careful not to get his cast all wet, and she said she would be very careful.

  But they never were.

  After they made love and Irene showered off all the salt water and washed her hair clean, she would kiss Sam good-bye and put on a scarf and sunglasses so she could buy groceries without being recognized. She brought back lots of vegetables and fruit and meat, in order to build up his strength. “You’re too thin,” she told him. “You need someone to look after you, not these giddy starlets who only love their own reflections in the mirror.”

  He would pull her back on his lap and ask what she loved.

  “You,” she said. “Flying. That’s all.”

  They were never careful, not once. They made love recklessly, as often as they could because of so much lost time, and when they weren’t making love they lay on the rug together, arguing about the future, while Sandy curled in the armchair and watched them with sleepy, predatory eyes. Sam was still determined to go to Spain, as soon as the cast was off. Irene wanted him to fly with her instead. Fly around the world, the way they had talked about eight years ago.

  “I told you, I’m done with stunts,” he said.

  “It’s not a stunt. We’d be lengthening the horizon of human possibility. Pushing the boundaries of aviation.”

  “Save it for the speeches, Irene. You’re a decade out of date. Who cares about that kind of thing when the whole world’s in the middle of a depression, when villages are getting bombed?”

  “There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can still show people what airplanes can do, that air travel is the future.”

  “They already know that. I can’t show them anything they haven’t seen with their own two eyes.” He rolled on his side and wrapped his arm around her waist. “Don’t keep risking that sweet life of yours for this nonsense. Come with me instead.”

  “Oh, and that’s not risking my life?”

  “I’m not talking about fighting. I’
ve shot down enough airplanes, God knows. I’ll be training pilots, that’s all. Flying in food and medicine, maybe, flying out the injured. Now that’s some good an airplane can do.”

  “But won’t the other side try to shoot you down?”

  “They won’t catch me. They won’t catch you, either. You’re a terrific pilot. Come with me. Leave this show behind you.”

  “I can’t. What you’re talking about, that’s not what I do.”

  “We’ve got another chance, you and me. Let’s not waste it this time, all right? Let’s not leave each other again.”

  “You left,” she said.

  “You married Morrow.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “Enough arguing, all right? We have better things to do.”

  But the next morning, when Irene went out for groceries, she stopped at a newsstand and bought a newspaper. The man gave her change and peered at her. “Say,” he said, “ain’t you that lady pilot?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You are! Irene Foster. Son of a gun, my old lady’s never gonna believe this!”

  Irene put the change in her pocket and folded the newspaper under her arm. “People mistake me for her all the time, I’m afraid.”

  When she returned to the cottage, she put away the groceries and opened the newspaper and started reading about the war in Spain.

  From the perspective of history, it’s easy to see the outcome of the Spanish Civil War as inevitable, and maybe it was. But in the early fall of 1936 the Nationalist coup had only just started to gather steam, and the bombings of Madrid and Guernica still lay in the future as horrors yet undreamed of. You could say to yourself that while Hitler and Mussolini might be supplying Franco, Stalin had thrown the resources of the Soviet Union behind the leftist Republic, and how in the hell did you choose between thugs like those? Even in 1936, before history had revealed them for the monsters they were, had revealed the Holocaust and also the Ukraine famine, nobody could reasonably pretend that either fascism or communism was a nice benevolent system of government. Why did it have to be one or the other?

  Still, while the great nations of the world remained officially neutral, plenty of Westerners had decided which side they were on and took action, and most of them sided with the loyalist Republicans. They represented, after all, the lawfully elected government, however leftist, whereas the Nationalists stank of ruthlessness and repression. It’s not entirely clear what political views Sam Mallory held—he never expressed them publicly, and few private documents remain—or how he first came into contact with the various American brigades giving succor to the Spanish Republicans. What we do know is that this turning point in Spain’s history happened to coincide with a turning point in Sam Mallory’s life, and possibly the political question was irrelevant anyway. He was a man searching for purpose, and in the death and horror of a brutal war, he thought he had found it.

  Irene wasn’t so sure.

  “They’re bombing everywhere,” she said. “They’re assaulting Madrid right now. Hitler’s sending his own air force.”

  “I already told you all this. Civil wars are brutal. It’s personal, it’s not just some fellow you might be friends with if some archduke wasn’t assassinated. Everyone’s got a grudge. Against the Church, against the Reds, against the rich, you name it. They’re killing children over there.”

  “It’s terrible. But it’s not our fight. When did Spain ever send help to you, when you were fighting Germany?”

  “That’s not the point. It’s not about keeping score. It’s about relieving misery.”

  “You can’t just fly off to Spain to redeem yourself from some imagined sin. Spain is not purgatory.”

  “It is if you’re living there.”

  “Then don’t go,” Irene begged him. “Don’t get in the middle of somebody’s family fight. You know how it is in families. Everybody’s desperate for the high moral ground, and they’ll all fight dirty to get there. Try to get in the middle of that and you’ll end up dead.”

  “And I thought you were an idealist.”

  “And I thought you weren’t.”

  “If I’m going to die in an airplane,” Sam said, “I don’t want to go down in the middle of some ocean, chasing an empty record.”

  They were lying in bed. It was nearly midnight, and they had been arguing about this most of the day. Arguing and making love and arguing some more. The weather was turning chilly at night, so they fought curled around each other, sharing heat equally, skin on skin. Sandy slept on the bed with them, on a vacant pillow or else tucked into the bend of somebody’s knee. Sam was feeling much better; the bruises were already healing. Irene said it was because of the soups she made him, all the strong broth and wholesome food. Sam insisted it was the whiskey and the sex. He lay on his back, because that was more comfortable for his left leg in its plaster cast, and Irene lay on her side with her arm across his chest. Now she propped herself up and looked down at his face in the moonlight—the moon was waxing now, nearly full—and her heart ached because this was how he’d looked on the beach at Howland. So she did what she couldn’t do then, and straddled him. Sandy startled and leapt to the extreme end of the bed. Sam put his hands on her hips and grinned up at her, as if he hadn’t just spoken about getting shot down over Spain in his airplane.

  “Promise me something,” she said.

  “Name it.”

  “Promise me you won’t die in an airplane.”

  “I won’t die in an airplane.”

  “Promise me.”

  He drew her down for a long kiss. “Irene Foster. I swear to God I will die in your loving arms, and nowhere else.”

  Later, Irene would look back on those nine days with Sam and marvel at how she could have been so joyful, when she knew this arrangement was short and temporary, when the future beyond it was like a night fog. How, when they ventured out to the beach after sunset, she could have danced in mad swirls on the sand while Sam played records on the phonograph; how they could have made love for hours under the glittering night sky with no regard whatsoever for the possible consequences of uniting yourself sexually with another human being. She could only say that she was drunk at last, for the first time in her life, and didn’t realize that when you were drunk—and it didn’t matter what you were drunk on, dope or alcohol or danger or passion—you lost all inhibition. You forgot your drunkenness would end eventually in some kind of misery or that consequences even existed at all.

  What she couldn’t say was that they didn’t make the most of those nine days. They might have been nine years, Sam and Irene packed so much into them. They laughed and fought and ate and played and made love, and on the last night, after Sam hobbled up the cliff in his crutches, and Irene followed anxiously with the phonograph and the records, they fell into bed so exhausted, they did not make love at all, for once. They just slept in a tangle of skin and sweat, did not dream, did not stir until a premonition of dawn slid through the open window.

  Irene opened her eyes and peeled her skin from Sam’s skin. She slipped out of bed and wriggled on her bathing costume and surfed for an hour. When she climbed back to the terrace, Sam had a cup of coffee ready for her, and this morning he wasn’t smiling.

  “You’ve decided, then,” he said. “You’re going to Sacramento.”

  She didn’t ask how he knew. She took the coffee and drank, and when her mug was empty she washed it out and showered in Sam’s bathtub, under its rickety shower pipe. He was waiting, towel in hand, when she came out. He dried her off himself, sort of hopping about on one crutch, which made her laugh. Once he had her laughing, he set her on the edge of the chair and made love to her a final time on his knees, cushioned by the rug: an ingenious solution to the problem of the cast, which had bedeviled them all week. When they had both finished, panting like racehorses, wrung stone dry, ruined for life, she hung herself on his wet shoulders and cried a little.

  Sam hobbled out to the car with her. He said
he wanted to make sure she left safely, which made her eyes roll. “Sam, this is nothing. Didn’t we land that ship on Howland Island by moonlight, with one engine?”

  “It’s not the big things that kill you, Irene. It’s the little things.” He raised his hand and caressed Sandy, who nestled in Irene’s arms, rubbing beneath her ears as she liked. She stretched out her chin and purred graciously. “Sure going to miss this pussy of yours,” he said.

  Irene started to laugh in great whoops, so that she had to lean back against the car to keep herself steady. Sam just shook his head and kissed her, and for an instant, the great sky blue above them, the bad thing had never happened, eight years never happened, and they were just Sam and Irene who shared a single joy, a single passion, and that was enough.

  “Stay out of trouble, all right?” she said, knowing it was a stupid thing to say, because he was going to Spain, of all places, and she was going to fly solo around the world, and their separate paths were strewn with trouble.

  Sam didn’t even bother to answer. He grasped the door handle and opened it for her. Irene stepped inside and sat in the driver’s seat, dumped Sandy carefully into the passenger seat, and Sam leaned in to kiss her again.

  “When you’re done with all this, let me know,” he said.

  “Let you know? How?”

  “I’ll send a postcard or something. You’ll find me.”

  Irene pushed down the clutch and turned the ignition. The engine coughed once and woke. Sam stepped back and waved her off down the road. As she swept past, she heard him call something, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  George called her from New York the next morning, while she was eating breakfast in her hotel room in Sacramento. The speech had gone well. She was her old self, animated, bursting with passion for this thing called flying, for the grand possibilities of human endeavor. She did something she hadn’t done before, which was to talk about the famous Australia flight: what exactly had gone wrong with the engine, how they had found Howland by moonlight, how she’d learned from Sam Mallory to remain calm at the moment of crisis, the one absolutely necessary characteristic of a great pilot. The audience—a dinner crowd—had stood and applauded for six minutes and then turned to dessert, which was pineapple upside down cake.