Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  They have never acknowledged he is paying for her flying. He has never mentioned the message she’d given to Sadler, her plan to pay him back, which she has chosen to take as tacit agreement. She has never told him she knows Wallace’s car is in his garage. They have not spoken again of Miss Dolly’s. They pretend they have simply struck up a friendship, the delivery girl and the well-heeled cattle rancher. This can’t last, this state of congenial denial. The suspense of it weighs on her.

  She waits, but he only goes on eating the pastry. More sugar clings to his chin, and as she realizes he isn’t going to cut off her lessons, she goes giddy with tenderness. She reaches to brush at his chin, but he catches her wrist, stays her hand.

  * * *

  —

  Aloft, life is more relentlessly three-dimensional than on the ground. She has to be aware of the plane’s three axes, where it is in space, where it will be in another second, another minute. Trout makes her take off and land, take off and land until the regular rise and fall of the horizon, the surge and easing of the engine, begin to feel like functions of her own body. She learns to wallow just shy of a stall, slowing her glide enough that the controls go slack but not so much that the buoyancy falls out from under her. She learns how to sideslip in a crosswind. (Helpful for short landings, though she’s still not close enough to the chalk line, most times.)

  She no longer marvels at Missoula’s miniature streets and buildings. The city is no more noteworthy than the pattern of a familiar rug.

  “Enough circles,” Trout says one day. “Let’s go somewhere.”

  They fly up to Flathead Lake and back. Not far but somewhere. In her logbook, for the first time, she writes in the notes column “x-country.”

  “X-country” makes regular appearances. Trout instructs her in navigating by train tracks, roads, and rivers, by the compass and the clock. She keeps a map pinned to one knee, a notepad strapped to the other for jotting calculations. She learns the air is smoothest at dawn and dusk. She learns to always be looking for where she can land if the engine quits.

  She had not understood the emptiness of Montana, had never quite lost the fanciful idea that once she got up high enough she would find a magnificent vista onto the rest of the world. So far she’s only found valleys and mountains, trees and trees and trees, the sun’s fading stain. She longs for something different.

  They could be at the ocean in one day’s flying, she tells Trout.

  All in good time, he says.

  One day, somewhere between Kalispell and Whitefish, he points down at a roof in a valley. “That’s Bannockburn.”

  “What’s Bannockburn?”

  “I’d have thought you would know. It’s the Macqueen ranch.”

  A big house with chimneys. Forest and mountains and grassy valleys all around it. “How far does the land go?” she asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know. All this and then some.”

  Bannockburn, Jamie tells her later, is the name of a poem about a battle the Scots won against the English. He’d read it in school. He finds it for her in a book. Robert Burns.

  At Bannockburn the English lay,—

  The Scots they were na far away

  But waited for the break o’ day…

  What happened after the battle? she asks Jamie. They were independent, he says. For a while.

  Now’s the day, and now’s the hour is the line that lodges in her mind.

  She stays aloft longer than planned one evening, solo, flies west toward the setting sun. Darkness comes up from behind her, spreads over the dome until only a band of deep rusty red is ahead of her. When she turns back, the stars have crowded in from behind. Trout gets some of the airfield guys to light up the runway with their headlights so she can land. He’s too relieved to be angry, too angry to be relieved. “If you got killed, who do you think he would blame?” he asks her.

  October leans into November. The trees are tipped with gold, the cottonwoods bright as apricot flesh. The landscape flares and shimmers.

  * * *

  —

  Some money goes missing from her nooks and crannies in the cottage. Wallace, of course. She puts the rest in the bank, though it feels strange to deposit her ill-gotten gains in so law-abiding a place. A few of her father’s older and more richly illustrated books disappear next, and some of the more obviously valuable knickknacks. A jade horse. A string of ivory beads carved to filigree.

  “Where are they?” she demands of Wallace in his studio. “Who’d you sell them to?” She is certain the answer will be Barclay Macqueen. There are no canvases on the easels. He hasn’t been painting. As far as she can tell, he hasn’t been going to the U, either, but she doesn’t know if he’s been fired or has just stopped showing up. Dust coats the craggy patches of dried paint on his palettes.

  Wallace is wearing his bathrobe over a collarless shirt, open at the neck, and he is barefoot and hungover and slumped sorrowfully in an armchair, his head resting between thumb and index finger on a propping arm. She stands over him. Jamie skulks in the doorway. “I sent them to a curiosity dealer in New York,” Wallace says, “someone I knew when I lived there. The horse was very valuable.”

  “I’ll buy it back. How much did you get for it?”

  He quotes an astronomical sum. She can’t buy it back.

  “It wasn’t yours to sell.”

  “Marian,” says Jamie. “It wasn’t really ours, either.”

  She looms over Wallace. “Why don’t you make more paintings and sell those? You’re supposed to be a painter.”

  Wallace shrivels into the chair. “I’ve lost the ability.”

  “No,” says Jamie. “You just need to go out into the mountains like you used to.”

  Wallace shakes his head. “I’ve tried. I try, and there’s nothing. It’s like my painting arm has been amputated.”

  “That can’t be,” says Jamie. “It’s in your head.”

  “Of course it’s in my head,” says Wallace. “You do it then if it’s so simple. I see your little sketches. Go ahead and make paintings people want to buy.”

  “People do buy Jamie’s watercolors,” Marian says. “He sells them in town.”

  Wallace, even in his shame and dishevelment, summons a dismissive grimace. Now that Jamie’s drawings and watercolors have become very good, at least to Marian’s eye, Wallace ignores them.

  “At least I’m trying,” Jamie says. “At least Marian’s trying.”

  “I’m trying, too,” Wallace says. “I’m sorry if my efforts don’t impress you. Did you have a use for that jade horse? Please tell me what it was.”

  “Enough,” Marian says. “It’s done. What did you do with the money?”

  “I needed to settle a few debts. Urgently.” Wallace’s cheek is mashed against his palm now as though his head is growing heavier and heavier.

  “A few,” Marian says. “But not all.”

  “No. Not all.”

  She puts a lock on the cottage door.

  * * *

  —

  November leans into December.

  Commander Richard E. Byrd, a navigator famous for flying over the North Pole with pilot Floyd Bennett in 1926, flies over the South Pole. Eventually, after he’s dead, a consensus will emerge that he and Bennett probably hadn’t actually made it to the North Pole (erased sextant sights in Byrd’s diary, unanswerable questions about the plane’s maximum speed, the time elapsed). But Byrd and his crew really do fly over the gleaming white disk of the polar plateau all the way to the South Pole in a plane named for Bennett, who’s dead by then.

  In Missoula, a browning and dulling, the earth waiting sullenly for snow. A dusting falls, then a thick smooth skin of white. Trees and rocks show through like abrasions.

  If the cloud ceiling is too low, Trout will shake his head, send Marian away. Sometimes
cloud comes when they’re already aloft, layers closing in or walls rising up, blocking the way.

  “Inside there’s just gray nothing,” she tells Jamie. “Sometimes you feel like you don’t even exist, or like the world doesn’t.”

  “That sounds awful,” he says.

  “But when you come out the other side, everything seems brighter, like a blindfold’s been taken off.”

  Sometimes when they emerge, even when she’s been concentrating on staying level, the wings are disconcertingly tilted.

  “I’d know if we banked enough to matter,” Trout tells her. “You’ve got to learn the feel of it. Seat of your pants.”

  But the wings tilt when he is at the controls, too. It seems to her that a malevolent force lives in the clouds, something that tips them askew just to prove it can. Also, if Trout is so confident in the seat of his pants, she wonders why, when the cloud is serious, he turns them back, lands as soon as they can.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes—irregularly and not often—she wakes on the sleeping porch to a dark figure standing over her, touching her shoulder. She never startles, always knows before she is even awake that it is Caleb. Does Jamie stir when she gets up and they go together to the cottage? If he does, he doesn’t let on.

  “Do you do this with Barclay Macqueen?” Caleb asks in the cottage’s narrow bed. They are crowded in shoulder to shoulder, on their backs. Near the ceiling, the wings of her model airplanes are chalky with moonlight.

  “I don’t do anything with him.”

  “You go see him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “People know.”

  “I’m delivering what he orders from Stanley.”

  “What does he need from Stanley? He has all the booze in the world.”

  “He doesn’t even drink.”

  “He’s a bootlegger who doesn’t drink?”

  “He acts like its impolite to mention he’s a legger. We pretend he’s not. And we pretend he doesn’t pay for my flying.”

  He puts his hand between her legs. “What would he say about this?”

  Her imagination reels, returns an ominous red wash of feeling, like the glow of a forest fire over the horizon. “I’d never tell him, not for anything.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “What do you care?” she says. He is touching her more purposefully. He reaches for the envelope he has put on the windowsill that contains rubbers. They use them when they have them, or else he pulls out. The prospect of a baby makes them laugh with horror.

  “Of course you like him. He’s the one who let you fly.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “So you do like him.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “You like this, too, though.”

  “Shhhh.”

  * * *

  —

  In the winter, she learns to land on skis. It’s not so difficult, though judging altitude is tricky, as a snowfield looks the same from ten feet as it does from a hundred. Sometimes the moment of contact catches her by surprise. Then there is the trick of reversing the engine to stop, as the skis have no brakes.

  “Sit and visit,” Barclay says. In the cold months, they sit inside at the kitchen table. She is never sure whether Sadler is somewhere in the house, though once in a while a creaking floorboard might give him away. Barclay is careful not to touch her, but, near him, her whole body is a receptor. His presence saturates her. She feels she has just emerged from cloud into a vibrant, revelatory world.

  “Tell me about the flying,” he says.

  She tells him in minute detail, pleased to have the chance. Jamie frets about the dangers, about Barclay. Caleb has no patience for technical details. Talking to Wallace is like talking to a mop soaked in gin. But Barclay listens to even her most involved technical treatises.

  He’s never been up in an airplane. He doesn’t like the idea of it.

  She’s told him that someday she’ll take him up. You’ll like it, she says. You won’t believe how much you can see.

  He says he’s content with the view from a car.

  He asks broader questions about her life. He is polite but persistent, like a newspaper reporter.

  “So this barnstormer,” he says, “with the ridiculous name—”

  “Felix Brayfogle. It’s not ridiculous.”

  “So this Frederick Boarsnoggle flies over you, and you almost fall off your horse, and after that, you just know you need to fly airplanes.”

  “Yes. Deep down and without a doubt.”

  “My word. But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  She says, “You know how you said I was someone you needed to know right from the start? Even when you had no idea who I was?” He nods. “It’s the same.” Love, she means. Love sprung from nothing.

  “It can’t be quite the same thing.”

  “Maybe not. But I wanted to see other places, too, and I realized an airplane would get me there.”

  “I keep telling you, you’ll find Montana’s as good a place as any.”

  She gropes for how to make him see it her way. “And I get tired of worrying about Wallace. I used to feel so guilty he’d been saddled with us, but lately I can’t trust him to take care of himself.”

  “What about Jamie?”

  “I’d feel bad leaving it all on his shoulders.”

  “I mean—wouldn’t you miss him?”

  “Awfully.”

  Barclay is solemn. “I told you I have a sister? Kate? I wish I could hold her life in my hands like an egg, make everything good for her. It’s a burden—the wish itself, and the fact it’s impossible.”

  “That’s what I mean. Things might be better without anyone to worry about.”

  He leans forward, his folded arms sliding on the table. “That’s not true. That would be the most terrible loneliness.”

  * * *

  —

  In the spring, she learns to land at night. Lights have been installed at the airfield.

  Trout teaches her to step hard on the rudder and whip around in a ground loop to avoid onrushing obstacles. She is usually close to the chalk line now, sometimes right on it.

  May 1930: Amy Johnson, age twenty-six, daughter of a Yorkshire fish merchant, flies solo from Croydon Aerodrome just south of London to Darwin, Australia, in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth. Ten thousand miles in an open biplane at eighty miles per hour, always too hot or too cold, sunburned and reeking of gasoline. When she takes off she has only eighty-five hours of flying experience and no knack for landings. But she has a ground engineer’s license, knows about engines. Near Baghdad, a sandstorm forces her down, and she sits on the plane’s tail with her revolver, goggles caked with sand, listening to what might be the howling of wild dogs, might only be the wind. She breaks the speed record to Karachi but smashes a wing. Repairs take time. In Rangoon, she smashes another wing, the undercarriage, and the propeller. More repairs. The whole trip takes nineteen and a half days, the last spent fighting headwinds for five hundred miles across the Timor Sea, worrying about fuel. Then Darwin, and fame, but not the speed record she’d wanted.

  As Marian’s sixteenth birthday approaches, Trout says it’s time for real mountain flying. Finally. They follow canyons, ride updrafts over ridges. Treetops whip by just under the wheels. She learns there is another landscape above the rocks and trees, an invisible topography made of wind. She learns if she flies straight at the lee side of a ridge and doesn’t rack off in time, the air will turn to quicksand, sucking her down.

  To practice landings, they go to some of the wilderness strips where Trout hands off cargo to the bootleggers. She has to land short, real short.

  Trout bemoans that he can’t teach her more advanced aerobatics. �
��The big girl’s no good for it,” he says about the Travel Air, “but you ought to have some practice. When things go wrong, you’d be calmer in your head if you were used to being turned every which way.”

  “Trout says you’ve got to practice spins so you know how to get out of them,” she tells Barclay. “He says a pilot needs to learn not to panic. He says your reactions get faster.”

  She knows what she is doing, what she is asking for, what will happen. In a few weeks, she arrives at the airfield and there beside the Travel Air is a brand-new bright yellow Stearman biplane. Trout’s smile hangs between his ears like a ragged hammock, but while they walk around the plane to admire its gleaming sleekness, the dashing set of its wings, he says in an undertone, “You sure about this, kid?”

  She is beginning to understand how Wallace built his debts. Just this one last thing, she tells herself. Then she will be ready to start flying across the line, paying down her debt. “At least this way I’ll learn some stunts,” she tells Trout.

  Trout sits in the front cockpit and Marian behind, both in helmets and goggles and parachutes, harnessed in over the shoulders. The Stearman has a stick instead of a wheel, and at first she’s awkward with it. (“From the elbow, not the shoulder or you’ll pull at an angle,” Trout said on the ground. “You have to learn the feel of it.” The great unifying thesis of his instruction.) She likes the way the open cockpit fits snugly around her, how her legs extend out to meet the rudder pedals. She likes her face in the wind.

  Their third time up, the stick jerks in her hand—Trout signaling he wants to take over. He climbs high, starts a dive. As Trixie Brayfogle had, he pulls up into a loop, but this time Marian is not watching the tumbling sky and ground. She watches the gauges. They level out again. Without turning to look at her, Trout raises both hands to tell her she is back in control. He’d already talked her through it: the necessary altitude and airspeed, the RPMs, the limits of all these things, the lightness and slowness she would feel at the top, the dive back toward the earth. “A loop is just another turn,” Trout says. “Only it’s flipped up on its side.”