Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “Had a nice time?” George asked.

  “The best.”

  “Good. I thought maybe you needed a little vacation. A little lighthearted fun, for a change. You weren’t yourself.”

  “Well, I’d have to say I feel like myself again.”

  “And how’s Mallory feeling? Bones all healed?”

  “Bones don’t heal in a week, George. But I firmly believe he’s a thousand times better than he was before I came.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Now listen to me, Miss Foster. While you’ve been resting up, I’ve been thinking. Kicking around a few ideas with the publicity fellows here. Tell me what you think.”

  Irene swirled her coffee around the cup. “Think of what, George?”

  “The circumnavigation. What if it’s not just you flying around the world?”

  “You mean a copilot? A navigator? I’ve already done that.”

  “No,” he said, and Irene could hear the excitement in his voice, a vibration she knew well. She imagined him sucking on his cigar, beaming into the telephone, while New York hustled and bustled outside his window.

  “What, then?”

  “A race,” he said. “A race around the world.”

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  November 1947

  Kaiko leans on his crutches near the airplane’s left wing, looking deeply pleased with himself. I duck under the tail section and gaze at the faded letters and numbers with reverent eyes.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  “If you think it’s Irene’s old airplane, the one that vanished from the face of the earth, then you would be one hundred percent correct, Sherlock.”

  I walk around the fuselage in slow, small, cautious steps. The metal is dull and dirty and curiously fragile, as if you might dent it by pressing a finger against the skin. It’s also smaller than I imagined. In photographs, scale is maybe the hardest thing to convey. That’s because a camera lens sees the world in only two dimensions, while our miraculous, stereoscopic human eyes have evolved over the eons to see the world in three dimensions. When you compress every object, near and far, into a single flat plane, your eye can’t necessarily tell the difference between something giant and something tiny. You know what I mean. You’ve gone to the Grand Canyon or someplace, you’ve oohed and you’ve aahed, you’ve taken out your Brownie and filled an entire roll of film with magnificent vistas of this monumental work of nature, and you’ve bounded off to fetch the developed prints at the drugstore a week later, and what a disappointment! That’s not how you remembered the Grand Canyon at all! This is just some pretty landscape. It doesn’t stir your heart, it doesn’t make your soul grow, the way your soul grows when you actually stand on the vast rim of nature’s greatness.

  Now, professional photographers have turned to various tricks and expensive equipment in order to create the illusion of what we call a depth of field, but by and large, you can’t understand how big or how small a thing might be unless you’re standing in its presence, measuring its size against your own, and I always imagined that this airplane, as legendary as it is, as capable of flying all the way around the world, was . . . well, bigger. But she is not big at all. Not an unnecessary ounce of metal encumbers her. She’s designed for utility, form following function as the modern designers insist, but what a form. The sleek lines of her, the way her nose tilts just so, the cocky angle of her tail. You can just about hear the soft whistle of the air as it whooshes along her sides. I gather my courage at last and run my fingertips along the curve of her cheek. There is not a flaw on her, not a dimple.

  “How did she get here?” I ask.

  “She flew in, what do you think?”

  “Just flew here to Hanalei? From where?”

  “Don’t you know all that already? You and Irene, you’ve been huddled up like sisters.”

  I examine my fingers for dust. “We haven’t gotten to the part about the race yet.”

  “No kidding?”

  “You know her. If she doesn’t want to talk about something, she just stops the conversation right there. Don’t worry. I’ll get it all out of her eventually.”

  I move around the nose to the wing, duck under the wing and lay my hand on the edge of the door, which is positioned near the tail.

  Kaiko shifts on his crutches. “Say . . .” he mutters.

  “How do you open this thing?” I ask.

  “Beats me. You know something? I think we oughta—”

  “Wait a second. She climbed in near the cockpit, didn’t she? There’s this photo . . .” I turn to the wing. If there’s one thing on this airplane that beats my idea of size, it’s the engine. There are two of them, large enough to hide a man inside, and the propeller blades stick from the front of this thing, long and curved and what’s the word? Deadly. I test the wing with my two hands and prepare to hoist myself up.

  “Now, wait just a second!” says Kaiko.

  “I won’t hurt anything, I promise. Just peek inside.”

  “Hold on! I never said anything about—aw, come on, Janey—stop that, she’s gonna kill me!”

  I pull the hatch open and drop myself inside. “Don’t worry! I’ll just be a minute. Take a few photos and . . . and . . .”

  For a minute or two, I stand without blinking, the way the Magdalen must have stood inside the tomb of Jesus. Is that blasphemous? But the feeling’s the same, I think. When you step inside a space that is sacred, the way the inside of that Rofrano Sirius feels to me. I can’t explain it. I can’t tell you what queer, otherworldly electricity hovers in the air. As I lift my camera and take the first photograph, I flinch, because I understand I’m transgressing some taboo, I am crossing the boundary between profane and holy. Still I snap the pictures. I must. Because I have no flash, because I wouldn’t use one if I had it, I’ve got to open the aperture wide and hold myself still. Click, click, click. Outside the metal skin, Kaiko groans and fidgets. I emerge some minutes later and close the hatch behind me. Climb down from the wing and aim the lens at the exterior. Click, click.

  “Now can we split?” begs Kaiko.

  “Like a banana.”

  “You’re not going to send those photos to some newspaper, are you?”

  “My God, of course not! That would be a terrible waste.”

  “Waste of what?”

  “This is gold, Kaiko. Don’t you see that? Pure gold.”

  We emerge into the sunlight. I grasp the edge of the door and slide it shut. Both of us look this way and that, to see if we’ve been observed, but the surroundings are quiet and green and motionless.

  “Janey,” Kaiko says, in a serious voice, “I shouldna done that. You got to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  I tuck my camera and my notebook into my knapsack. My heart’s still thundering, my fingers shake. “Not a soul. You have my word.”

  But I don’t ask him why, after a decade tucked in a shed, Irene Foster’s custom Rofrano Sirius should have not a speck of dust upon her skin, inside or out.

  The cat enjoys riding in the basket of my bicycle as we trundle up and down the road from Kilauea to Coolibah, passing through Hanalei in between. Sometimes I check the post office again in the afternoon, before doubling back to Coolibah, but today I cycle straight back and calculate the hours until nightfall, when I can take out my developing equipment and turn that film into photographs. Already the whole episode has the texture of a dream, something my brain cooked up out of fantasy. Did I really just stand inside the cockpit of Irene Foster’s missing airplane? Did I really just climb down from its wing and snap a photograph of its snub nose?

  So enraptured am I, I hardly notice that the ferry should be coming in about now, has probably already docked, until I’m skidding past the little pier, wobbling my bicycle around the few departing passengers, and hear my name called over the racket.

  “Ahoy, matey,” I reply. “How was the sea today?”

  “Wet and salty, like always. If you can wait a minute or two, I’ll give you a l
ift back to Coolibah.”

  “What about my bicycle?”

  He shrugs. “You can leave it here, if you like. Dad’ll pick it up on his way home.”

  I wait for him to finish putting the boat to bed. The cat does not appreciate this interruption. I remove her from the basket and lean the bicycle against the railing. Leo climbs aboard his moped and I climb behind, one hand holding the cat and the other hooked around Leo’s waist.

  I soon realize this was a terrible decision. In my present state of agitation, I should be anywhere on earth but straddling an engine with Leo Lindquist, while the Hawaiian afternoon rushes through my hair. I haven’t slept with anybody in almost a month, a terrible drought, and here is a fresh, warm body under my fingertips, already proven, smelling and feeling exactly right. When we round the point and start toward the Coolibah drive, I burst out, “Just stop here! I think I’ll go surfing for a bit.”

  “Surfing? Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s an hour until dinner.”

  “I’ve been working all day. I need a little fresh air.”

  He pulls the moped to the side of the road, where the path runs down to the beach. Because hardly anybody else ventures so far, the Lindquists keep a few boards in a small wooden cabana. I set the cat in a pile of towels and shut the door so I can change into a swimsuit. It’s one of Lindquist’s, and it’s a bit long, but it will do. I grab a board and open the door, and there’s Leo, sans shirt.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I ask indignantly.

  “Surfing. ’Scuse me. Got to find a pair of trunks.”

  He tells me later that he had no designs on me whatsoever, that he was just worried about me surfing alone. I don’t know about that. One fascinating detail I learned about Leo in the past couple of weeks—he commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific during the war, and such men are always thinking several moves in advance, however straightforward they appear.

  We paddle out together. The surf is gentle, and we coast along without speaking, wave after wave, communicating in that wordless way of two people on the water. One wave rises up, bigger than the others, just as I’m about to head in. Maybe I’m tired, maybe I don’t have the chops yet, but I misjudge it completely and tumble into the drink. To his credit, Leo doesn’t try to rescue me. He catches up with me as I stagger onto the beach and asks if I’m all right.

  “All right? Are you kidding?” I throw myself on the dry sand and laugh at the sky. “That was just what I needed!”

  He laughs too and throws himself next to me. The sinking sun turns his skin to bronze. I lie there and find a curious pleasure in my own restraint, in the uncomplicated perception of his body next to mine, both of us still panting a little, dripping and salty, bound together by a half hour of shared adventure. And while I’m contemplating this innocent enjoyment, congratulating myself even, Leo turns on his side and kisses my lips.

  “What was that for?”

  “I’m sorry. Lost my head. It won’t—”

  I reach for his shoulders and kiss him back.

  Leo brings me a flower when he returns to Coolibah for dinner an hour later. His hair is dark and wet from a hasty shower, and the flower is a passionflower. I tuck it behind my ear. At dinner, Doris asks me why I’m wearing a flower in my hair, and I tell her it’s from a suitor. Leo grins from across the table. Olle’s busy carving the pork roast. Wesley’s got his head under the tablecloth for some reason. Lindquist leans forward on her elbows and frowns.

  Once dessert is cleared and the children sent to bed, Olle retires to the library and Lindquist sends Leo on an errand. As soon as he disappears around the corner, she turns to me.

  “Kaiko made a little confession to me this afternoon,” she says.

  “It’s not his fault. I might have goaded him a little.”

  “You’re doing your job. I understand that. But the airplane is off limits, is that clear? I want that film you took.”

  I hesitate. “It’s in the cottage.”

  “Then bring it to me at breakfast.” She jiggles her wedding ring. “Please.”

  “But why? I mean, you’ve kept it, all these years. It must mean something to you.”

  “Because even if I destroyed that airplane, the parts would make their way into public notice. Someone would find some scrap of wing, some section, match the rivets. It’s safer where it is. At least until I’m dead.”

  “You don’t believe that. Not really. You’re worried about some scrap making its way into the wrong hands? You can’t destroy that airplane, any more than you could cut off your own arm.”

  She stands.

  “You keep it clean, don’t you? Not a speck of dust. You keep it in working order.”

  “Her,” Irene says. “An airplane is a she.”

  “She, he, it. There must be a reason, right? So tell me.”

  Lindquist reaches down for her glass of soda water and finishes it. But she doesn’t sit. She’s just stalling for time, she’s trying to think. A week ago, she would have walked away, but today—I don’t know, maybe it’s the passionflower in my hair, a symbol of some kind, marked friend—she considers what she should say to me and not say to me.

  “Bring me the roll of film in the morning,” she says, “and I’ll tell you about that airplane.”

  For the record, Leo and I did nothing but kiss on the beach that afternoon. On my honor! You never know when a pair of pint-sized ruffians might tumble down the path, for one thing, and for another this was a different kind of kissing from the kissing I was used to. When Leo drew back and stroked my hair with both hands, the way you stroke a cat, I thought about telling him I had never done this before, just kissed a boy and nothing else, but I realized how that made me sound, what kind of person that made me. So I said instead that we should probably head back to the house, before we did something we might regret.

  “I don’t regret this,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned his forehead against mine and said he was sorry. I asked for what. He said he had got me all wrong, he’d sized me up and figured I was just using them all, Irene and the entire family, that I was some hard, cold villain who would break his heart.

  I told him he was probably right, that maybe I was that villain.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I’m starting to figure I could take that chance.”

  The touch of his forehead was warm, the muscle of him, the sanded skin, the breath. I sat on my knees, in the V of his legs, his gentle arms on either side of me, his hands resting at the back of my head. I was surrounded. I thought that I had come to like Leo a great deal, over the course of the past weeks. I had maybe come to like him too much.

  I had come to like them all too much.

  I kissed him one more time and clambered to my feet.

  “Believe me,” I said, “you shouldn’t take that chance.”

  Five hours later, when the black night presses against the windows, I’m regretting this moment of high-mindedness with all my might. My God, what I wouldn’t give to have a Leo lying next to me, equipped and willing to give me oblivion.

  Instead I climb out of bed and prepare my makeshift darkroom. I move as silently as possible, the way I learned to do when I was small. I remove the film and clip the ends and load the reel; I sink the reel into the tank and fill it with water from the sink and swish it from side to side. Then the developer, the stop bath, the fixer, the rinse. Hang the negatives on their clothespins and clean the trays.

  But despite these comforting rituals, I’m still restless. Something nags me. I’m thinking about that airplane I saw today, and about that last flight from Alexandria, and the search for Irene Foster that dragged on for weeks.

  I find my way to the little table that serves as my desk, and I pull out the stacks of articles sent to me in batches by my old friend Bill at the Associated Press, in response to my saucy telegrams. He’s been a good sport, Bill Cushing, and I owe him a drink or two. I’ve organized th
em in neat manila folders, according to subject, and I take out my penlight so I can read the labels. Alexandria, reads one.

  It’s now three o’clock in the morning. I climb back into my cold bed with a stack of decade-old newsprint and read without comprehension until my eyelids droop, until I can’t go on. I set aside the clippings on the nightstand and that’s all I remember, until some erotic dream takes shape in my sleep, as it often does.

  But this time it is not Velázquez who fucks me furiously in the grass of some airfield, while a series of propeller engines scream over our heads, one after the other, each louder than the last.

  It’s Leo.

  In the morning, I bring the prints and the negatives to Lindquist and set them down on the tablecloth next to her breakfast plate.

  “There you are. Now talk.”

  IV

  The first lesson is that you can’t lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can’t win a war if you haven’t.

  —Jimmy Doolittle

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  April 1937: Egypt

  Having reached Alexandria just before midnight, Irene was now a full two days ahead of the next competitor. She’d been lucky, of course, but she had also flown with the kind of cool, single-minded confidence she hadn’t felt in years. The monsoon in Delhi, for example. When everyone else had remained on the ground, Irene had taken off in her gleaming, rebuilt Rofrano Sirius, tore right through the rain and clouds to the calm above, and built a lead that was essentially insurmountable, barring accident. You might even call it a classic Foster maneuver: the gutsy, calculated risk, relying on a thorough knowledge of geography and meteorology, allied with her characteristically precise piloting and sound instinct. The old Irene was back.