George stopped short, looked this way and that, stumbled back outside the airplane and was sick in the sand.
“Thank God you’re here,” croaked Sam.
“Mother of God,” whispered Raoul. “What has happened here?”
“Irene was hurt in the bombing at the Bilbao airfield. I was evacuating her to Valencia but the fuel tank’d been strafed, we didn’t see the bullet hole because it was dark, and we ran out of fuel.”
George climbed back inside, pressed a handkerchief to his mouth and nose, and knelt next to Irene. “Can you talk, sweetheart?”
“She needs water, for God’s sake!”
Raoul had already unstrapped his canteen and held it to Irene’s lips. “She has had the baby?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” said Sam. “Back in Bilbao. He lived for thirty-two minutes. I buried him with my own hands.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said George, “but it’s probably for the best.”
Sam stood up on his knees, hauled up George by his collar, and drew back his fist. But he did not punch. His left leg crumpled underneath him, and he collapsed on the metal deck next to Irene.
George straightened his collar and knelt back down. “Darling, we’ll get you out of here, I promise. I’ve got a doctor waiting in Valencia—”
“What about Sam?”
George glanced at Sam. “I’m afraid someone will have to come back for Mallory. The airplane won’t take a fourth passenger.”
“But Sam’s hurt. He needs a doctor too.”
“We’ll leave water for him. I’m sure this fellow will be back in a jiffy. Won’t you, Velázquez?”
Raoul was checking Irene’s bandage and didn’t answer.
“George, you should stay. You’re not hurt. Sam—”
“Damn Mallory! That—that bastard there, he’s the reason you’re dying in this godforsaken desert in the first place! The reason you’re not safe on an ocean liner heading back to America. He’s going to kill you one of these days, don’t you realize?”
Sam spoke up. “Irene flew to Spain on her own, Morrow. She flew here to escape you, as a matter of fact. You and that prison you’ve built around her—”
“Prison? You’ve got a nerve, you son of a bitch. I’ve set her free! Free to fly on her own, instead of second best to the goddamn magnificent flying ego of Sam Mallory! Do you know how frantic I’ve been? Held back the damned press, chartered a flight to Alicante, bribed a dozen officials to track her down on the crazy chance that—”
“Gentlemen,” said Raoul, “I’m afraid Miss Foster has fainted.”
Raoul carried Irene aboard the airplane they had flown from Valencia. Mallory watched them go, watched Morrow jump down from the broken Potez and into the sunlight. He dusted off his hands and stuck his head back inside.
“I imagine you already know this, Mallory,” he said, in a kind voice, “but there will be no airplane sent back to rescue you. You’re on your own. And if you do survive, by some miracle, you stay the hell away from my wife from now on. Is that clear?”
Mallory spoke through cracked lips. “Go to hell, Morrow.”
Morrow shook his head and turned away. As he walked across the sand, he called back, over his shoulder, “Just remember, this was your doing, Mallory.”
Hanalei, Hawai’i
November 1947
In the summer of 1946, I was in Nuremberg, that half-ruined city of ghosts and lawyers. My hotel was lousy; the food was worse. The daily evidence of man’s perfidy accumulated in what I had begun to imagine as sedimentary layers, grotesque upon grotesque, and I meanwhile suffered from some stubborn, unspecific gastric illness that was melting the flesh from my bones.
Miserable and starved, I sat at the bar of my hotel one evening in July, enduring the heat through a succession of whiskey sours and American cigarettes, when a fellow showed up and asked if I could possibly direct him to Miss Eugenia Everett, the photographer. He wore the uniform of an RAF squadron commander, the same uniform Velázquez had worn, so I told him I was Miss Everett, who wanted to know?
He removed his cap and sat on the stool next to me and placed a worn, yellowing envelope on the counter between us, seam side up so I couldn’t see the name written on the back. He introduced himself as Captain Alfred Hawley and said that he had flown with a certain Captain Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros of the No. 56 Squadron in January 1945, out of the Volkel airfield in The Netherlands; did I perhaps recall Captain Velázquez?
I said I recalled him very well.
Captain Hawley said he was sorry to have taken so long to find me, but his duties with the RAF had not allowed him to pursue any personal errands until recently. He said that he had known Velázquez well during their time together at Volkel, and that about a week before his final flight, Velázquez took him aside and said he’d had a premonition of his own death, and if he should die and Hawley survive, he asked that Hawley deliver a letter to a photographer for the Associated Press named Eugenia Everett. Hawley had said of course, though he assured Velázquez that they would both survive to toast Hitler’s defeat. In any case, there was the letter. Hawley was glad to have found me and discharged his obligation to a brother officer, which had weighed heavily on him during the long, hard months since the loss of Velázquez, a tremendous flier and a damned fine chap.
I thanked Hawley and asked if I could buy him a drink, and after some hesitation he agreed. Lest you think I had any immoral intentions, let me assure you I weighed about ninety-seven pounds at the time, was sick as a dog and wan as a phantom, and fully expected to vomit up those whiskey sours as soon as I returned to the dank, shabby, gloomy garret upstairs that disgraced the name of hotel rooms everywhere. All I craved was some crumb of information about Velázquez and his last days. Hawley spoke for an hour; I won’t bore you with everything he said. Just that Velázquez had turned especially devout in his final weeks, had gone to confession almost daily, which made me glad because I did not want Velázquez to suffer long in purgatory because of me.
Anyway, you’re not interested in all that, are you? You want to know what the letter said. Here it is. You might as well read the whole damned thing.
My dear Janey,
For some time I have reproached myself for withholding from you certain facts regarding the fate of your father. I told you I had made a promise to him. This was true, but I have come to believe that he would not hold me to this vow if he knew that his precious daughter would one day come in search of him.
Yet you generously allowed me to keep my secrets, and when I reflect on the greatness of your spirit, I am once more overcome by this love I confessed to you only once, but which I felt with all my soul from the very earliest moment of our friendship. You will say in your brisk American voice that I am a sentimental idiot, but it is my honor and privilege to be a sentimental idiot on this subject, and to be grateful to God that He has granted me this final joy when I had thought all joy impossible. It is the last remaining desire of my heart to reunite with you after the war is finished, so that I may explain all this from my own lips, but if God wills that we shall not meet again on earth, I pray this letter will find you instead.
You will find the wreckage of Samuel Mallory’s airplane in the shelter of a grand massif in the Bardenas Reales, in the province of Navarre, in the northeast part of Spain. Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, and the diary that belonged to Mr. Mallory, which will shed some light, I suspect, on the events that led to this catastrophe. To all this I can only recommend that you use your immense cleverness to gather all these hints into a map that will guide you to what you seek, because I cannot commit to paper any further confidence, or even reveal to you how this knowledge came to me.
May you discover happiness, my beloved, and may a merciful God forever bless you.
Velázquez
I think about this letter, and the particular phrase Inside this wreckage you will find a h
uman body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, as I pedal my bicycle furiously through the wind and rain down the highway into town. It’s funny how you can assume all along that a sentence means one thing, because of your own particular assumptions, when really it can mean something entirely different if you examine it from a fresh perspective.
When I reach the pier, the ferry is still tied securely to its mooring, and the sign on the gate reads closed for weather. But nearby, a fellow’s bustling about a smaller, nimbler boat, preparing it to launch. I call out and the man turns, and right away I see from Leo’s face that he’s heard about the reporters gathered at the airfield, and not only has he heard the news but he’s holding me responsible.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I yell.
Leo turns away and ducks into the deckhouse. I climb off the bicycle and jump over the railing.
“Don’t you dare ignore me! I need to find her right now!”
“You don’t have the right!”
“I have every right! You lied to me! About your father and Irene!”
He flinches at that. “Because I had to! Irene told me to. And it turns out we were right. Now beat it.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Ki’ilau!”
“In this weather?”
“Yes, in this weather!” He reaches for the rope that secures the boat to the piling. “Irene took off from the airfield almost an hour ago.”
“And how the hell do you know she went to Ki’ilau?”
He doesn’t answer that, just unwinds the rope and prepares to cast off, and a terrible feeling takes hold of me, fear and also anger. A clatter of metal sounds behind me, and Sophie Rofrano’s urgent voice. She leaps off a bicycle and runs up the dock to the railing.
“Leo! What’s happened?”
“Sophie! Jesus. Thank God.”
“What’s wrong? Where’s Irene?”
“She’s flown to Ki’ilau,” Leo says. “And she’s taken the kids with her.”
The kids.
To be clear, I don’t give a damn about Irene Lindquist at the present moment, clinging to the railing of Leo’s boat as we tear across the water. I don’t care whether she cracks up in this tempest or does not, whether she lives or does not. My anger toward Irene has returned at full force, so thick and bubbling it may blow at any second.
But the kids.
About a quarter mile out, the squall starts to die away, but the sea remains rough. Nobody speaks. Leo’s busy keeping the ship on the right side of the ocean’s surface. As for Sophie, she’s as keen as I am. Her delicate profile points into the wind. Her teeth are bared. You get the idea she relishes this struggle, man against nature, and who would have thought that petite, elegant Sophie Rofrano was a fighter? But Sophie was the one who wrangled me aboard, Sophie was the one who took Leo by the shoulders and insisted that Janey Everett was friend, not foe.
Was she right? I don’t know. I don’t know a damned thing anymore. It seems to me that my fate is not in my own hands but elsewhere, laid out in some grand design beyond my comprehension. The rain spits in my hair. We’re near the edge of the squall now. The blue sky beckons just above the charcoal shadow that is Ki’ilau, and I’m made of yearning for that patch of hope. Of all the things I have ever loved, the darlings who have vanished, one by one, only this remains. The weather buffets the ship. We pitch and plunge, heel and dive. What use is knowledge? All you can do is close your eyes, not even pray, because God has already decided what he’s going to do with you. God has already decreed whether you will live or not live, die or not die, and you must meet your fate as Velázquez did, stoic and obedient.
As I mentioned before, Leo cut his teeth in the South Pacific during the war, so I suppose it’s child’s play to him, bringing this mere civilian craft through a dying squall to the small dock that extends from the beach on the leeward side of Ki’ilau. All the same, the boat twists and lurches at the whim of nature, while the engine grinds us closer. Sophie snatches a coil of rope. At the last second, a wave starts us crashing into the wood, but Leo makes some final adjustment and we kiss the dock instead.
Sophie leaps to shore.
I follow her and fall to my knees, stunned by solid ground. While the two of them mess around with ropes and pilings, I start down the dock to the beach. Leo calls after me. I shift to a jog, into the soft sand to the hills beyond, and the path that leads up to the plateau where Lindquist likes to land her airplanes.
Leo shouts again. “Janey! Wait!”
I don’t wait. I scramble up the path, slipping a little because the ground’s still wet. Out here in the middle of the Pacific, just about every island is a volcano, or used to be a volcano, or a part of a volcano, and I swear you can feel the soul of it under your feet, in the dark, crumbling rock that was once so mighty. I climb and climb. Now the squall is well past, the clouds are parting. From the east comes a gold sun to burn away the haze. I reach the top of the slope and pause to pant. The plateau stretches before me, covered in grass. In the distance, a flash of silver. Behind me, a male voice shouts my name. I lurch forward toward the silver object, running as I have not run in many years, through the wet grass that soaks right through my shoes and socks, the strips of haze that soak my skin and hair. A half mile, or maybe more, I don’t know, and the object takes shape, takes on wings and a tail, a fuselage, a nose that tilts to the clearing sky. A hundred more yards, another hundred, and I come to a stop, heaving for breath, beside the most famous airplane in the world, Irene Foster’s silver Rofrano Sirius that vanished into thin air a decade ago.
I told Lindquist nothing more than the truth that evening at Coolibah, after the charades, when I said I had no recollection of my mother trying to kill herself, or of discovering her unconscious as Lindquist claims I did. At the time, I was only a kid, so I suppose Nature took pity on me and buried that memory in some deep, secret place I’ll never discover.
What I do remember is when Dad came home from Australia. I recall we were alone, the two of us, and Dad was holding me and wouldn’t let go, and I didn’t want him to. I wanted my father to hold me forever. When he pulled away, his cheeks were wet, and a little bit rough. I guess he hadn’t shaved. I told him he couldn’t go away again, not ever, and he promised he wouldn’t. He said he would look after us both from now on, Mama and me, and that nothing could take him away from me, or me from him.
Of course, he didn’t keep that promise. After all, he had to go on making a living, doing the only thing he knew how to do. But when do we human beings ever keep our promises? We mean so well, and we fall so short. He would leave for another air show, another race, another exhibition, and Mama would turn to me and say, That concubine’s going to take him away from us, just you wait. She’ll take everything, and leave us with nothing.
It was not until later that I understood what she meant. You see, in my innocence, I thought a concubine was an airplane. I thought it was the airplane that drew him irresistibly from my side, an airplane that fought me for his love.
Only later did I realize it was a woman, all along.
Now the airplane stands before me, but there’s no sign of the woman, or the children. And I have come full circle and understand that my father was not pulled from my life by the airplane or by the woman, each on its own, but by the two of them together in an irresistible passion and also by an equal and opposing force that pushed him away, which was my mother. But that’s all past and doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is what remains of him. What I might still grasp with my two hands, if only she’ll let me.
A streak of sunlight finds the airplane’s skin and flashes white. The brilliance blinds me. The following breeze streams in, blowing the haze apart, carrying the cacophonous chime of birds, and as I stand there panting in my wet shoes, my wet skin, blind and afraid, the chime clarifies and becomes human.
I turn and open my eyes.
The tribe of them jogs across the grass, Sophie and Leo a
nd Lindquist herself, led by a pair of scampering sprogs, tumbling tadpoles, as wet as I am, sunlight dancing on hair, alive.
Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)
May 1937: Bardenas Reales, Spain
When Morrow left, Mallory pulled his cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He couldn’t walk after Irene; even if he had the strength, his ankle was broken, his thigh split apart, his head concussed. Cuts and bruises lay everywhere on his ribs and arms and legs, stiffened during the long days and nights, so that it was agony just to move. Instead he lit a cigarette and reached for his leather diary and the pen clipped inside. He smoked for a moment, wrote a broken half-sentence while the sound of voices drifted through the hatchway, while the engine of Velázquez’s airplane started with a cough and whine.
GM to rescue at last thank God She will live
The diary fell from his hands. He didn’t have the will. He wanted to listen to the sound of Irene’s going and then slip away into rest, because Morrow was right about one thing. This was his fault, all of it. Irene, her pregnancy, her dangerous days here in Spain, the crackup, his own death—all of it was Mallory’s doing, the work of the devil on his own shoulder, his recklessness, his death wish.
And now he was going to die at last, here in this wreckage in the middle of the Spanish badlands. He was going to get his wish. But Irene would live; that was the important thing. He had not also killed Irene. Instead of wishing Morrow to hell, he should have thanked him. Morrow would take care of her. Morrow would put Irene back on her pedestal in the center of his life, and he would revolve around her to the end of his days, which would be long and many, because Morrow had no death wish. Morrow was not reckless and impulsive and passionate. He would give her everything she wanted, a home and airplanes and probably children. Away from Sam, Irene would thrive. Like Pixie, who had found another father, a better father, and was better off without him. This was the right end, the just end, the only possible end.
Her Last Flight Page 34
