Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  She sat. “Sometimes.” He lit a cigarette for her—ready-made, not hand-rolled—then his own. She noticed his hands were lightly freckled, the nails clean and carefully trimmed. She thought of Caleb’s cigarette case, Caleb at her breast. Caleb was not so unlike this man but less controlled, less formed. Caleb’s nails were bitten to the quick.

  “I’ve just come back from Chicago,” Barclay said. “Have you ever been there?”

  “Only on a train when I was a baby.”

  “Have you ever been outside Missoula? Excluding infancy.”

  “I’ve been to Seeley Lake, and my uncle took me to Helena, once.”

  “But not outside Montana.” She shook her head. He said, “Well, Montana’s a good place. As good as any I’ve seen.”

  “I want to see other places.”

  “Elsewhere is overrated, in my experience.”

  “What places have you been?”

  “Oh, lots.”

  “Outside America?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been to the Arctic?”

  “No, thank god. It sounds terrible.” He saw her reaction. “You’d like to go? You don’t think it sounds lonely?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  He had a crooked smile, higher on one side. “I’ve had enough of being lonely, I think.”

  She nodded, at a loss for what to say.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m lonely?”

  “All right.”

  “So ask.”

  “Why are you lonely?”

  “It’s a chronic condition. My father sent me away to Scotland, where he came from, when I was very small. To a cold, dark, dismal school run by cold, dark, dismal people. Dark in terms of their souls, not their skins, which were extremely white. I’ve always been considered a curiosity. Brown for a Scotsman, ghostly for a Salish. My mother is Salish. Did you know that?” Underneath his careful ease she caught an almost imperceptible quiver of nerves, like fishing line gone taut after a bite.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been asking about me?”

  “No,” she said too forcefully. “I heard it somewhere.”

  He seemed amused. “That must mean you know my name, even though, rudely, I haven’t introduced myself.”

  “You’re Barclay Macqueen.”

  “What else do you know about me?”

  “You have cattle up north.”

  “What else?”

  “You’re a businessman.”

  “What kind of business?”

  She looked him full in the face, dragged on her cigarette. The tobacco was milder than anything she’d smoked before but also richer. “Cattle. Like I said.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Not one thing.”

  “You understand discretion. That must serve you well in your business.” A sidelong glance. “The bakery business.” She smiled, looked away to hide it. He said, “What do the girls at Miss Dolly’s say about me?”

  Frightened but bold, she said, “They say you like everything just so.”

  He had a rough, barking sort of laugh. “That’s true. I do. Why shouldn’t I? Everybody should know what they want.” His eyes moved over her face. “Marian Graves. What is it you want most?”

  No one had ever asked her such a question. To be a pilot. To be a pilot. To be a pilot. Telling him would be so simple, would require only four words. But she said, “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes too much discretion becomes a hindrance.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “If you won’t tell me what you want, then I can’t help you get it. And I do want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “I like your face.” He tossed his cigarette to the ground and pressed it out under a polished black shoe. “Would you like to know what I know about you?”

  Almost in a whisper: “Yes.”

  “Your father was the captain of the Josephina Eterna and was sent to prison. Your mother was lost. You and your brother were sent here to live with your uncle, Wallace Graves, who is an excellent painter, in my opinion, but a drunk and a very bad gambler. Are you impressed? I know you aren’t yet fifteen. I know you’re a good driver and mechanic and that you’re Stanley’s bottle man. Bottle girl. Stanley seems to enjoy the novelty—you’re a sort of flourish for him. He has style, for a small-timer. And you don’t steal, and you don’t talk. As to why you haven’t run into more trouble with feds or the like, that’s partly down to luck and partly down to lawmen being lazy and corrupt. And, for the last few months, it’s been partly down to me.”

  She tried not to show how startled she was.

  “All because I like your face,” he said. “Even now, when you’re disguised as a boy, however unconvincingly, I like it very much. There’s something Shakespearean about your appeal. You won’t know what I mean.”

  “You mean Twelfth Night.”

  “And As You Like It. And The Merchant of Venice. I thought you didn’t go to school.”

  “There are other ways to learn things.”

  “That’s true.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her boot, tossed the butt away. Her nervousness had given way to a gathered, deliberate feeling. She knew, without knowing how she knew, how he wanted her to be. Amused, aloof, a little tough. She was aware of the sharp edge of the porch against her fingers, the way he watched when she stretched out her legs.

  He went on. “What I couldn’t entirely understand at first was why you would drive for Stanley. For money, yes, but most girls your age aren’t so compelled by money that they leave school and indenture themselves to moonshiners. And since your brother is still in school, the impetus can’t have come from your uncle, or else he would have made your brother leave, too, and go to work. How am I doing?”

  “All right.”

  “All right. Good enough. So I’ll give you some of my hypotheses and tell you my conclusion, and you can correct me if I’m wrong.” Watching her, he said, “I thought maybe you’d taken it upon yourself to help your uncle with his debts, of which he has many, and more all the time. But I never heard about you trying to pay anyone. So then I thought maybe you’re after thrills. Otherwise, why would you have let Dolly’s girls dress you up like that? You like being disguised. As a whore, as a boy.”

  “This isn’t a disguise. It’s practical.”

  He smiled briefly, indulgently. “Or I thought you might be saving up to run away. But then you bought a car and didn’t go anywhere. So I concluded the car wasn’t it. There was something else you wanted to buy. And then it came to my attention that you’d been haunting the airfield. I made a few discreet inquiries and discovered that, yes, you’d been hanging around and pestering the pilots for lessons ever since Lindbergh’s flight, which makes it two years. But no one will teach you.”

  She hadn’t expected him to be so methodical in uncovering her deepest wish. She hadn’t known it was something that could, with enough patience and persistence, be excavated.

  “That must be frustrating,” he said, so gently, “for someone who wants more than anything to be a pilot.”

  She was afraid. This fear wasn’t her earlier keyed-up nervousness or the jitters she’d felt in the river with Caleb, not ordinary anxiety but an inarticulate dread, some primal resistance to the thing that roiled between them. “I don’t want to be a pilot,” she said. “It was only something that got into my head for a while. I thought it would be a lark to learn to fly.”

  “I wish you would trust me, Marian.”

  “A bootlegger I met in a brothel?”

  She meant it as a joke, a leavening, but she had misjudged. His face closed. “I’m a rancher,” he said quietly. “That’s important to remember.”

  An owl glided overhead. It flapped in among the trees and disappeared. Barc
lay watched it, scowling.

  His shift in mood made her uneasy. She wanted to be back in his good graces. She said, “I was tired of school and wanted to make some money. Wallace never wanted kids of his own, but he took us in because he’s good-hearted. There was no one else. I wanted to pay him back, that’s all. Help out.”

  “But what do you want for yourself? Beyond this ambition to ‘help out’?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. The usual things.”

  He leaned toward her. “I don’t believe you one bit.”

  She was aware of his maleness, the breadth of him, the sureness with which his black shoes were planted on the ground, that scent she’d noticed at Dolly’s, some kind of hair oil or perfume, bitter and musky. She wondered how old he was, couldn’t guess. (Twenty-eight.)

  His crooked smile swung up again. “In your research, did you learn I was only nineteen when my father died? I came home after one year of university in Scotland. He left everything to me. The ranch, but also the responsibility of taking care of my mother and my sister and, very much to my surprise, quite a lot of debt. I thought there must be some mistake. One of the largest landholders in the state, a man who made a performance out of being pious, temperate, living well but not extravagantly. I couldn’t understand how he could have been in debt until I started going through his papers. Mismanagement, that’s all it was. The simplest thing in the world. Trusting the wrong people. Bad investments. He dug in deeper and deeper until he’d dug himself into a nice, deep, black pit. Fortunately, he relocated to a literal pit before he could dig us under any further. I couldn’t bear to tell my mother. In the end I didn’t have to. It turned out I had a knack for identifying opportunities, and this was eight, nine years ago—a time of great opportunity.”

  The early days of Prohibition. He looked at her to be sure she was following.

  “I got us out of the hole, and then I kept working. I wanted to be sure I’d never be back in it. I found the men who’d ruined my father, and I ruined them.” The crooked smile. “Not that they knew it was me. I prefer an indirect approach.” He grew abruptly somber. “I’m saying this because I want you to know I understand what it’s like to be burdened by someone else’s mistakes when you’re young. I know what it’s like to be underestimated. But being underestimated can be an opportunity, Marian, if you know how to take advantage. Do you see?”

  In her experience, being underestimated hadn’t gotten her anywhere, certainly not behind the controls of an airplane, but she said, “I think so.”

  “When I first saw you—I don’t know how to put it. I recognized you as someone I needed to know. You fascinated me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have—” He broke off, scraped moodily at the grass with one heel. “I meet girls all the time. Ordinarily I forget about them right away. If you were just another one, I would have forgotten about you already, too. I thought I would. I waited for you to go away. Instead, you’re always here.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “Just from that one glimpse. Do you ever think about me?”

  At the memory of when she thought about him, how she thought about him, she flushed. “I have to go.” She stood, took the basket.

  He reached out, grabbed her leg just below the knee through her trousers. His grip was strong, like the jaw of an animal. “Marian. All I want is to get to know you. To be your friend.” He recovered himself and let go, looked up into her face. “Here’s a piece of advice, now that we’re friends. If you’re giving Wallace money, you might as well throw it in the river. I’ve looked into what he owes. He won’t ever be able to pay it off, and at some point it’ll all come due. But I could help.”

  She longed to ask exactly what Wallace owed and to whom. His debts seemed to her like a dark well she was forever peering into, listening for the splash of a dropped pebble. She said, “Just because I was dressed up like a whore doesn’t mean I am one.”

  His expression did not change. “Remember you can always come to me.”

  * * *

  —

  She’d had no reason to be curious about the house when she arrived, but on her way out she paused, contemplating its separate green-and-white garage alongside which she’d parked Stanley’s truck. The structure resembled a miniature barn, wide enough for two cars, with sliding doors padlocked shut. There were two small square windows on each long side, and she thought if she found something to stand on, she could see in. She was curious what Barclay drove. She’d seen bootleggers’ cars around, here and there, powerful Packards or Cadillacs or Studebakers, Whiskey Sixes, and she’d heard stories about souped-up engines, false floors and hollowed-out seats, armored gas tanks, flanged wheels for driving on railroad tracks and across trestle bridges.

  A bucket and a wooden crate had been left beside the garage, and she stacked them and climbed up, cupping her hands against the window. Inside was a car she’d seen in magazines but never in person, a gleaming black Pierce-Arrow brougham, long and low with wide running boards, swooping fenders, whitewall tires. A silver archer on the hood pointed its arrow at the oncoming world. All her confusion about Barclay was, for the moment, supplanted by a longing to lift that hood and look at the eight (eight!) cylinder engine underneath. A wild impulse seized her to go knock at the door again and ask if she could see the car. She knew Barclay would comply, would maybe, perhaps, even let her drive it, but then she would already have begun to owe him.

  She was so enraptured that at first she didn’t notice the second automobile on the far side of the Pierce-Arrow, in the shadows, mostly covered except where the tarp had gotten hitched up in front, showing a bit of gray paint and a bumper she knew well.

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t want to make deliveries to that house anymore,” she told Stanley. “Someone else can do it.”

  Stanley looked weary, his hair white with flour dust, his big hands clasped over his apron. He’d been making money hand over fist since the Volstead Act passed, but Marian had no idea what he spent it on. He lived in the same house as before, worked every day in the bakery. His wife wore ordinary clothes. He must be stashing it all away. “You gotta,” he said. “He asked for you specially. He didn’t try anything funny, did he? Because if he didn’t, you gotta. Do it for me, all right? I’ve taken a lot of chances for you, put a lot of trust in you. He’d ruin me in a heartbeat if he wanted, and he asked for you specially. Okay?”

  What could she say?

  * * *

  —

  She could only remember one other night when she hadn’t been able to sleep. The night her father came home, she had lain awake on the porch while Jamie slumbered on the other cot. He’d been as anxious as she was, maybe more so, but somehow he’d managed to drop off, so only she had heard their father’s voice, low and indistinct. Only she had seen his shape in the cottage window when he closed the curtains. In the moonlight, the tall grass between the house and the cottage had looked tipped with silver, like the fur of a wolf.

  For the almost five years since then she’d slept easily every single night—You’re a genius for sleep, Wallace said—but now she lay awake again, thinking about Barclay Macqueen, listening to Jamie’s breathing. An odd longing for her brother came into her. How was it possible to miss someone who was asleep just there, on a cot across a narrow gap, almost close enough to touch? But at the same time he seemed impervious, irretrievable, like something glimpsed from a moving train, already receding into the distance.

  Barclay Macqueen. When she closed her eyes, she found herself looking through Gilda’s window at the beast, through the window of Barclay’s garage at that bit of gray hood. Why did he have the car? To worsen her lot? To take something from her? Or would he offer to return it as part of some future bargain? Jamie would say she should have nothing to do with Barclay. He would say he had a bad feeling, and she would struggle to explain that she had a bad feeling, too, like she was in a river being pulled toward a
waterfall, panicked but also violently, recklessly curious. In her cot she pressed her heel against the bruise Barclay had left when he clutched her calf, felt a dull pain and sharper pleasure.

  She threw off her blanket, pulled on her boots, slipped from the porch. There was a moon, nearly full. She walked surefooted in the dark to Gilda’s cabin. Nothing happened when she tapped on the window of the tiny closet where Caleb slept, only a ripple in the reflected moon. He must be in the mountains. No light at Gilda’s window, either, but when Marian turned to retreat home, she saw a shadow on the grass. Caleb was sleeping outside on a bedroll.

  No fear in her, only a daring indistinguishable from necessity. She dropped beside him with the urgency of a soldier entering a foxhole. He startled awake, but she put her mouth on his before he could speak. He relaxed. He understood. She stripped off her pajamas, and he made himself naked in a single motion. He had always seemed like a person on the verge of nakedness. He rolled her onto her back. She felt his penis poking against her, nosing around, wayward, and then hard pressure, heat, a dull sawing. She observed the pain and strangeness with detachment, observed the way his black hair slid over his shoulders, the rise and fall of his hips between her knees. She imagined Barclay’s hips, Barclay’s shoulders, Barclay’s breath against her neck. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she pressed them to the grass.

  It was over quickly. She had not felt pleasure, but she did feel relief. She stood and dressed. “I still don’t want to be your girl,” she said, looking down at him, stretched out in the moonlight like a slender basking cat. She knew this was the truth; Barclay had made it true.

  His teeth glowed. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  She poked his ribs with her foot. “Ass,” she said and started for home, drowsier with each step.

  In the morning, for the first time: her monthly blood.

  Missoula

  September 1929

  Two months later

  “At the airfield?” Marian said, looking at the delivery list Mr. Stanley had given her.