“I wasn’t sure if anyone was in there.”
The eyebrows lifted; the purple mouth contracted. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
Neither could have explained the hostility between them. Marian endured its prickly onslaught without flinching, standing with her back against the bathroom door (a faint splash, a low cough) until Trixie flicked her bob and went on her way.
* * *
—
Except for Jamie, who ate a baked potato, they had Berit’s venison stew for dinner.
“You don’t like stew?” Trixie asked Jamie.
“He doesn’t eat meat,” said Marian.
“He don’t have teeth, neither,” said Caleb, who’d shown up unannounced and uninvited, as he often did. “There’s just gums in there. It’s why he only eats potatoes. He gums them up.” Caleb’s mother often spent all her money on drink, and when he wasn’t in the mood to fend for himself, he appeared at the Graves table. Berit clucked over him, fed him sugar cubes, peeled fruit, spoonfuls of jam. She stroked his long hair when she thought no one was looking, its obsidian gloss calling to something unexpected in her orderly Scandinavian soul.
“Doesn’t have teeth,” Wallace corrected. His one unexpected strictness was about correct language.
“He doesn’t?” Trixie asked.
“Jamie has perfectly good teeth,” Wallace said. “Caleb has an odd sense of humor.”
Trixie cast a dirty look at Caleb and turned back to Jamie. “No meat? Why not?”
Jamie said, “It doesn’t agree with me.”
“He means it doesn’t agree with him spiritually,” Wallace said. “Killing animals for food.”
“Why does everyone speak for the dear boy? He seems to have a tongue, as well as teeth.” To Jamie, she said, “What a dear you are. What a gentle lamb.”
Jamie, mortified, kept his eyes on his potato. Caleb laughed.
Wallace said he’d heard on the radio that the young pilot Charles Lindbergh had left New York in the morning and had been spotted passing over Newfoundland in the afternoon, attempting to be the first to fly the Atlantic. “He’s over the ocean somewhere now, they say.”
“Over it if he’s lucky,” said Trixie. “In it if he’s not.” She smirked as though she’d made a witticism.
“If he were older,” Felix said, “I’d say he was suicidal, but he’s a kid, so he’s just damn foolish. I’d put his odds at a thousand to one.”
Marian tried and failed to imagine the sea. She thought of the blue in the atlas, the stories in her father’s books, but its immensity eluded her.
The dining room had flocked wallpaper and an oblong table with mismatched chairs. A glass-front cabinet of the kind that would usually display silver or crystal instead held overflow from Marian and Jamie’s collections of rocks and bones. From a plain pint bottle, Wallace poured out something amber for Felix and Trixie (moonshine tinted with brown sugar, though if they wanted to think it was whiskey, they were free to).
“How’d you learn to fly?” Marian asked Felix, whose hair was still damp from his bath. He was wearing too-big clothes that belonged to Wallace because his had been washed by Berit and hung out on the line along with Trixie’s.
“In France,” he said. “In the war. I wanted to fly, and the French were willing to take American volunteers and train them.”
“I’d want to see a war,” Caleb said.
Felix looked at Caleb, and a distance passed through him, as though he were sliding back away from the table, receding to somewhere else.
“Felix doesn’t like to talk about the war,” Trixie said.
Felix seemed to snap back into focus. “I’ll decide what I talk about, thanks.” He’d been trained in the south, he said, near the city of Pau. When he was ready, he was sent to join a squadron of other Americans at Luxeuil, where they were put up in a villa near a spa. When the weather was bad they soaked in the hot baths or played cards and drank. When the skies were clear, they went buzzing off to do reconnaissance or go after observation balloons, great gray hydrogen behemoths bobbing over the front. “The best way to bust them was to fly up close and shoot an incendiary round from your pistol,” he said, “but they were likely to take you with them when they blew up.”
He’d seen men blown to bits, shot to pieces, hung up in barbed wire with rats eating them. Wounded men crawling. Where did they think they were going? They were trying to drag themselves away from the pain. Men could die in more ways than he’d thought.
Once a riderless horse had run into the hangar at their aerodrome from God knows where, dreadfully burned, perhaps mistaking the structure for a barn. They’d shot the poor thing to put it out of its misery.
“One time,” Felix said, “I was shooting at a German and his engine caught fire, so he climbed out onto the wing and jumped. He was wearing a huge brown fur coat and looked like a bear falling through the sky. He had no parachute. He’d decided he’d rather fall than burn. I might have done the same. His plane flew on for a bit without him, burning, then broke apart.” Unobtrusively, Wallace refilled Felix’s glass. “Still,” Felix said, raising it, “I’d take all that over what Lindbergh’s gotten himself into.”
* * *
—
The Brayfogles chose the cottage and its single bed over the sleeping porch. After dinner, Caleb went off into the night, and Jamie and Marian were sent upstairs to make themselves scarce. They knelt together on Marian’s bed, a russet-colored coonhound asleep at the foot, and watched out the window as Felix sat on Fiddler’s fence and smoked in the twilight. When the gelding strolled over, the man extended a hand, stroked the old horse’s cheek.
“Imagine having an airplane and being able to go wherever you want,” she said.
“Why did he have to tell us about that burned horse?” Jamie said.
Usually Jamie’s presence gave Marian a sense of symmetry and rightness, of having been properly balanced. Without him she was like a too-light canoe, at the mercy of the current. He was the calmer one, less impulsive. Ballast. He was not exactly part of her, but he was not entirely other, either, not like Wallace or Caleb or Berit or anyone else.
But in this moment, she wished him impatiently away. She didn’t want to think about the burned horse, only about Felix.
“There’s nothing you can do for it now. Don’t think about it.”
“Do you know,” he said with vehemence, “that sometimes I wish people didn’t exist? I really do.”
“People died, too,” Marian said. She stroked the sleeping dog, who stirred and uncurled onto her side, lifting a leg to show her belly. “Millions of them, wasn’t it?”
“But the horses didn’t understand what any of it was for.”
For Jamie, there was little solace in watching his own horse stand outside in the pleasant evening, leading a comfortable life, because he could imagine all too clearly Fiddler’s panic and confusion if he were to be set on fire, if he ran from the pain but could not escape it.
Marian, still gazing at Felix, said, “I wonder why he married her, though. She’s not very nice.”
“I don’t care,” Jamie said. “We’ll never see them again.”
The world out the window—the tidy barn and cottage, the opalescent sky—struck Jamie as an illusion, a perfidious veil beneath which roiled suffering and death. That Marian did not see as he saw, that she only rested her chin on her fist on the sill and stared moonily down at a stranger and dreamed of flying away from their house where they were safe together, made him feel terribly alone.
He said good night and went to his room, the coonhound following. The dog jumped up onto his bed, circled, and settled. Everything in the shape of the animal commanded love: her long soft ears, the black hairs mingled with the red on her flanks, the way she slung the tip of her tail cozily over her nose. He could not make peace with the magnitude of suffering in the world. I
t registered in him as a wave of heat and tingling, an acceleration in his heart and a lightness in his head—a sensation both puny and unbearable. The only way to live was to shut it out, but even when he turned his thoughts away, he was still aware of it, as one who lives alongside a levee is aware of the deluge waiting on the other side.
To soothe himself, he took his sketchbook from under his pillow, sat cross-legged, and began to draw the dog.
* * *
—
Marian lay down in bed but wasn’t ready to sleep. She thought of Felix, turned over her collection of memories from the day: his tan forearms and calloused hands, his soapy smell after his bath, his shoulders under her thighs. There was a pressure between her legs. She ground the heel of her hand there, was startled by the way a ball of sparks burst loose inside her like a blown dandelion puff.
Faint voices downstairs. She slid out from under the covers, eased around the door, monkeyed down along the banister to avoid the squeaky spots in the stairs. Wallace and Trixie were sitting on the porch, beyond the yellow splash of light from the kitchen. Marian crouched near an open window.
“Where’d all the stuff in that cottage come from?” Trixie was asking. “Felix was quite intrigued.”
“Those were my brother’s things,” Wallace said.
“Should I conclude he was some kind of explorer?”
“In a way.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Marian likes to go out there to read.”
“She’s sweet on Felix,” Trixie said. “Dear thing. It’s cute, really. Although I’m afraid she thinks we’re rivals.”
“It’s that she doesn’t have a mother. She doesn’t know how to be around women.”
“Women love Felix—your girl isn’t the exception. I get weary, trying to fight them off.”
“He seems devoted enough, not that I know anything about it.”
“He is, I suppose. Enough.” The rasp of a match. A whiff of smoke. “Say, it must have been strange to have kids dumped on you out of the blue. How long have you had them?”
“Since they were babies.”
“You’re good for taking them.”
“No. Dutiful. If I were good, I would have—I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have done. Paid more attention. Been better.”
“I’d have left them on the church steps. In a reed basket like Moses.”
“Ah,” said Wallace. “I think Moses was left in a basket among the reeds.”
“Either way, I would have found some reeds.”
Marian’s skin prickled as though with sunburn. She went stealthily back up the stairs, heaping recriminations on herself for never before having considered the magnitude of her father’s imposition on Wallace. How could she have been so stupid? How could she not have realized Wallace didn’t want her and Jamie? Only because Wallace was too kind to let on. She got into bed and looked out at the lit window of the cottage. Tears came, but she blinked them back. For as long as she could remember, she had planned to leave Missoula as soon as she got big enough, but now her resolve was tugged into trim, made taut like a sail.
* * *
—
In the morning Wallace drove them all to the field, and after the Brayfogles pumped air into the planes’ tires and topped up the water in their radiators, the three Graveses watched Felix’s Jenny bump across the badger-holed grass, Felix flying from the rear cockpit and Trixie riding in front. As they flew low over downtown, Trixie climbed onto the bottom wing and leaned out, gripping the rigging wires and shouting down through a megaphone in her best carnival barker’s voice about the Flying Brayfogles! Today only! Lindbergh special only $4.00 a ride! Come on up! Aerobatics at two! Parachute jump at two-thirty!
After they came back and landed, Trixie told Marian to get in the front cockpit of her plane for a ride. “Couple of gals aloft together,” she said, more to Wallace than to Marian, who was doing a poor job concealing her disappointment over not going up with Felix. Trixie wore a leather cap and goggles, but Marian was bareheaded, fully exposed, as she wished to be.
* * *
—
By the time Lindbergh landed, he had spent thirty hours and thirty minutes in the air and been awake for fifty-five. To keep from falling asleep, he’d flown low enough over the ocean to feel the salt spray. The waves had risen out of the dark like furrows plowing themselves up from a black field.
He had circled, confused, over the airport at Le Bourget. Bright winding tributaries of light flowed out from the yellow lake of Paris, surrounded what should have been a deserted patch of grass, shut up for the night. Cars, of course. A hundred thousand people had driven out to Le Bourget to see him land.
Just after Felix and Trixie concluded their show with Felix’s daring parachute jump, word of Lindbergh’s safe arrival reached Missoula. Felix had landed and was gathering his parachute when church bells rang and sirens sounded. The crowd at the airfield stirred, murmured about Lindbergh, but no one knew for sure until a man tore up in a runabout, sounding his horn and shouting, “He’s landed! He’s landed in Paris!”
People embraced; they threw hats and handkerchiefs. In France, the crowd at the aerodrome had nearly pulled Lindbergh and his plane apart in their mad adulation, thousands of people all reaching for the tall man, the salt-crusted wings.
In Missoula, the road to the airfield filled with cars and bicycles and people on foot. So many wanted rides in the Jennies that the gasoline man had to be summoned with his truck to keep the Brayfogles in fuel until sunset. Everyone wanted to be closer to the planes, to the sky, to look down on the town and pretend to be Lindbergh (Lindbergh, who was permitted to sleep, finally, at the ambassador’s residence in Paris, his strange future already pulling him along).
But, before, back in the morning, back when Marian was about to go up with Trixie for her ride, Lindbergh had still been somewhere over England.
“Switch off,” Felix had called, standing in front of the plane.
“Switch off,” Trixie answered from the rear cockpit.
Felix grabbed the propeller and pulled it around a couple times. He took a firm hold and braced his feet. “Contact!”
“Contact!”
Felix swung the blade. There were a few short blasts of clipped sound, like cards being shuffled, as the engine roused itself. A few puffs of smoke, an acrid smell. Then a rhythmic churn: the turning crankshaft, the snare tattoo of the prop. Marian watched through the windshield as the blades blurred to invisibility. A wind came up in the cockpit. The plane jostled in place, wanting to fly. She tugged tight the wide seat belt across her thighs.
They rolled forward, picked up speed, bounced across ruts and mounds until the nose dropped and there was no more bouncing but skimming, the grass a blur. Upward pressure from below the wings. They rose. The stick and throttle and rudder pedals in Marian’s cockpit (which Trixie had cautioned her not to touch) moved as though manipulated by a ghost. The earth fell away.
People and cars moved along Missoula’s streets like pieces in an inscrutable game. Over the river, an osprey flew briefly alongside, clutching a fish in its talons. Heading down the valley, Trixie pulled abruptly up and without warning executed first a roll and then a loop. She swooped high above the mountains, put the plane into a spin. The valley rotated around them; the engine changed pitch; the wires hummed; droplets of hot water from the radiator stung Marian’s face. Trixie pulled out and flew up again, going high before nosing into a dive. Marian knew she was supposed to be frightened, that Trixie was trying to make her recant her wish to fly, but while the earth rushed up from below and her guts pressed into her ribs and her body into the seat, she felt only lightness.
Missoula
October 1927
Five months after the Brayfogles came and went
“Jamie,” Marian said, “I need y
ou to cut my hair.”
Jamie was lying on his bed with a volume of Audubon prints Marian had forbidden him from taking out of the cottage. From the doorway, she eyed the book but didn’t remark on it. In one hand she held Berit’s long scissors. She pointed the blades at him. “Please?”
“Cut it how?”
She pulled her braid around over her shoulder, with two fingers mimed cutting it off at the base. “Like that.”
Jamie looked appalled. “Berit would kill us.”
“But she couldn’t glue it back on. I’ll cut it myself if I have to.”
“So do it.”
“You’ll do it better.” Also, she wanted company in her decision, the reassurance of an accomplice.
“I’ve never cut anyone’s hair.”
“You know how things should look.”
“Not hair.”
“Please?”
“No!”
She pulled her braid taut with one hand and raised the scissors behind her head with the other.
“You wouldn’t,” Jamie said.
The tendons in her wrist stood out as the blades gnawed, coming together with a grinding sound. The pale braid flopped over in her hand like a dead bouquet. She touched her mangled nape, felt a close-cropped patch in back with long bits sprouting around it like weeds. The rest fell forward around her ears in hunks. She’d wanted sleekness, lightness, not this. Amusement fought with horror on Jamie’s face. “Now you’ve done it,” he said.
Temper flashed through her. “You wouldn’t help me! You should have helped me!”
She ran downstairs and out to the cottage, fuming helplessly. It seemed to her that Jamie had an obligation to go along with her whims. He should have recognized her determination as immovable and done as she’d asked. She’d closed the scissors partly to punish him for his doubt she would follow through.
In the cottage, she sat in the armchair and tenderly stroked the back of her head. She cried rarely and only if she knew no one would see (the morning her father left, she had only cried after she’d ridden Fiddler far up the Rattlesnake), but now she chanced a few tears before she passed a hand under her nose and got up to light the woodstove. She knew Jamie would come soon to console her, and everything would be all right again.
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