Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  She climbs, begins her dive.

  * * *

  —

  “I flew a loop,” she tells Jamie on the sleeping porch. “Three, actually.” Her heart races as though she were confessing a secret, though she won’t tell him how she had gone to see Barclay afterward, how, when he opened the door, she had grasped him around the neck and kissed him.

  A heavy pause, then, grudgingly, Jamie asks, “What was it like?”

  “Promise not to laugh—”

  “I might laugh.”

  “—but I felt like I was a fixed point, and I was using the controls to make the rest of the world turn around me. I was literally the center of the universe.”

  He laughs. “You feel that way all the time, though.”

  She laughs, too. “Maybe I am the center of the universe. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Aren’t you worried about what he wants?”

  “Yes, but mostly because I don’t know what exactly that is.”

  “Seems obvious to me.”

  “If I thought all he wanted was to take me to bed, I’d be relieved. That would be simpler.” But she does know what he wants, or thinks she does.

  You have to learn the feel of it. The dive had made her heavy; then, at the top of the loop, she had floated free in her harness.

  Barclay had clutched her to him, lifting her boots off the ground. With her mouth covered by his and her body clamped against his and not even the reassurance of the porch under her feet, the determined impulse that had propelled her to kiss him collapsed into alarm and claustrophobia. He seemed to have gone blind and dumb, like a salmon beating muscularly upstream, driven by instinct. She writhed to get free, and for a second or two it seemed he would not let her go. She twisted, arching her back, and the movement seemed to wake him. He dropped her so abruptly she stumbled.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breathless, holding up his hands as though to prove he was unarmed. “You surprised me. My guard wasn’t up.”

  She tried to steady herself. “It’s all right.”

  They looked anywhere but at each other. Marian went to sit on the edge of the porch, and he followed, sat beside her.

  She said, “I came to tell you I flew a loop today.”

  “I heard Trout got a new plane. One that’s good for aerobatics.” A kingly smile.

  “He said Mr. Sadler wanted another for his collection.” This was the closest allusion she had made to Barclay’s patronage, the boldest of her darting forays toward the truth.

  “Sadler’s quite an aviation enthusiast,” Barclay said.

  “He’s got terrific taste in biplanes.”

  “He says he has a promising pilot.”

  Her pleasure at hearing another person affirm her destiny bordered on ecstasy. Barclay had given her Trout; he’d given her a plane, and now he was offering his belief.

  She asked, “Is your guard up now?”

  “Enough. Why?”

  This kiss was not a straitjacket like the last one but a gathering in. She was aware of his slow breathing, of how, when he leaned just a little bit away, she followed without meaning to. Something bound her to him, a rough pull, strong and coarse as rope.

  He pulled away. “I can’t play at this, Marian,” he said. “We can’t start down this road. You’d better go, and next time you come, we’ll go back to being how we were before.”

  That would have been the moment to ask what he wanted from her. But she didn’t need to.

  “He wants to marry me,” she says to Jamie.

  “He said so?”

  “I just know. Does that make you feel any better?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Why does he want to?”

  “Thanks a lot!”

  “Come on. Why? You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Of course you are.”

  I recognized you as someone I needed to know.

  She says, “I happened to catch his attention in a certain way, and once he has an idea in his head he doesn’t let go.”

  “So you have one thing in common, at least. Are you going to marry him?”

  The elation of the loop is gone; only the plunging sensation of the dive remains. She wishes Jamie would tell her not to, that she doesn’t have to. She wishes he would imply Barclay is buying her so she could rage at the idea, drive it away. She wishes he would ask if she loves Barclay, and she could say she thinks she might. And she does love Barclay, perhaps, or at least strongly desires him, but she also senses she is inside a trap, the dimensions and mechanism of which remain concealed.

  But Jamie knows better than to do any of these things. In the light from the moon, she can see him watching her with the melancholy of someone who has cared for and released a wild animal, hoping it will find its way on its own.

  “Probably I’d better,” is all she says.

  * * *

  —

  September again. She is sixteen, flying every day now. When she can’t fly because of weather, she trails after the mechanics, learns to make repairs.

  “Like a fish to water,” Trout says about her knack for stunts. That is how she feels, too, doing aerobatics: like she has been delivered to her natural element after a cruel separation. No thoughts of Barclay intrude, or of Caleb, or Wallace, or Jamie. In the biplane, she is always the fixed center of the universe, wheeling it around herself with stick and rudder.

  Vrille: Get up high, throttle back almost to a stall. Kick the right rudder, yank the stick back and to the right. Spin down, engine hollering, tail up, violence in the fall, earth revolving below like the dome of a twirling umbrella.

  Slow roll: Keep the nose aimed at a fixed point, push the stick to the right. When the wings have gone vertical, start cross-controlling with the left rudder. Come off the left rudder, push the stick forward. You’ll be hanging in the straps as the plane inverts; your feet will want to fall away from the rudder pedals, but you can’t let them. Then all of it in mirror image, quickly, as the engine can’t be trusted while upside down. It’s like riding a bicycle in one direction with your hands and another bicycle in the opposite direction with your feet.

  Stall turn: Trout doesn’t want to teach her this one, so she reads up and tries it out solo. Bank up vertical until the airspeed falls away to nothing, then just before gravity catches you, left full rudder to cartwheel over the wingtip, feed it right stick then forward, pivot until you’re zooming nose down toward the earth, pull out level.

  Trout is angry, says he’s seen good pilots crack up that way. He won’t let her fly for a week, not until she brings him a few bottles of moon and promises not to do it again. They both know she’s lying, but a truce is made.

  There is more, of course. Immelmann turns and bunts and barrel rolls and chandelles and all of them strung together, one leading into the next as she ties gigantic, elaborate knots over Missoula, plunging in and out of the lost glacial lake.

  The flying-service pilots and local hobbyists forget they’d refused to teach her. They call her the Red Baroness and Lindy Girl. They want her to go to Spokane to compete at an air show, but she has no license and Barclay would not like her to draw attention to herself.

  When the weather cools, a shearling coat and heavy boots appear for her so she can keep flying the open Stearman.

  Another winter. More ski landings. More real mountain flying. A few close scrapes in the cloud: treetops brushing the skis, rocky escarpments narrowly missed.

  In March, Elinor Smith, who’d flown the East River bridges, climbs to twenty-five thousand feet over New York City in a supercharged Bellanca, attempting to reclaim an altitude record. Frost forms on her breathing tube. Something goes wrong, something comes uncoupled or the air bottle cracks. Blackness drops over her like a hood. With an unconscious pi
lot, the plane descends more than four miles. At two thousand feet, Elinor woozes back into consciousness, manages to sideslip the plane down onto a bit of open land, noses over, walks away.

  “That,” says Trout, “is nerve.”

  A week later Elinor goes up again, hits thirty-two thousand feet.

  Marian, sick with envy, circles the Travel Air up to fifteen thousand feet. A little higher. Its ceiling is sixteen thousand, but she thinks the specs are probably conservative. The engine splutters and skips and pops. She adjusts the mix but can’t get it to smooth out. It runs like a three-legged horse. Spooked, she eases down.

  “Lucky,” Trout says when she confesses. “Go too high and you get drunk. There’s a kind of crazy up there. You’ll start seeing things. You’ll think someone’s in the plane with you. You’ll see another ship out the corner of your eye, just off your wing, when none’s there.”

  She needs something to do, she tells Trout, she tells Caleb, she tells Jamie, she cautiously intimates to Barclay. She can really fly now. Trout has drilled her and drilled her, made her land on the tiniest patches of scrub grass and mountain gravel. She could probably land on a fence post like a hawk and take off from it, too.

  “I could fly over the line,” she insists to Trout. “I want to be useful.”

  “I’m all trained up,” she says to Caleb, “but for what? They won’t let me help run the booze. I can’t compete at stunts without a license. I can’t go anywhere. What’s the point?”

  “And we’re still acting out this charade,” she says to Jamie, “where Barclay has nothing to do with any of it. He’s a kindly cattle rancher, and I’m the delivery girl who stops by to chat. What’s the point?”

  “You said he likes things his way,” says Jamie. “If he didn’t want you to be in the charade, you wouldn’t be.”

  In February, Amelia Earhart had married George Palmer Putnam, her publisher and promoter, some say her Svengali. He’d proposed six times. On their wedding day, she wrote him a letter saying neither should expect fidelity and that sometimes she would need to be apart from him and from the confinements of marriage. She asked him to promise to let her go in a year if they weren’t happy together.

  Marian knew nothing of this, of course, could not dream of such a bargain.

  * * *

  —

  Before her seventeenth birthday, three important flights.

  First.

  Weather comes in. Trout, flying the Travel Air, spirals out of cloud, can’t regain control. At least that seems the most likely explanation. There isn’t much left of him.

  Marian spends a long night in the cottage drinking real Scotch, doing her best to harden herself. Hadn’t Trout told her all pilots had dead friends? Hadn’t he said she could end up being a dead friend herself? At his funeral, she barely looks at his wife and children, all of them short and froggy and miserable. (Barclay promises he’ll do right by them.) She tells herself Trout had gone out the way he’d wanted. The final crack-up. Probably he wasn’t even afraid, was too focused on trying to fix what was wrong. Probably it had happened too fast for him to feel any pain.

  His body had been badly burned. His front teeth had been embedded so far in the dash they’d stayed there when they pulled the rest of him out.

  Barclay had sent her a black dress to wear to the funeral, fine soft wool trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon, small shiny black buttons. She wears her flying clothes instead. Jamie sits beside her. Barclay, in the next pew forward, ignores them until the very end, when he turns around and offers his hand to Jamie, says, “Peace be with you.”

  Jamie says with a dueler’s grim resolve, “And also with you.”

  Afterward she goes to the green-and-white house with the dress still in its box.

  “You can have this back,” she tells Barclay. “I didn’t wear it.”

  “I noticed,” he says, ushering her into the kitchen. “You didn’t like it?”

  “Trout would have laughed at me from heaven.” She drops the box on the table.

  “You believe in heaven?”

  “No.”

  “So? What do you think happens?”

  “I think nothing happens. Is Sadler here?”

  “Mr. Sadler has business in Spokane.”

  “It’s time for me to start flying over the line. I know where the landing strips are. I’ve practiced on them. Without Trout, I’m the only one who can do it.”

  He leans against the sink and lights a cigarette. “That’s not true. The country’s lousy with pilots.”

  “It was my condition from the beginning. You know it was.”

  “Marian, I never agreed to your so-called condition.”

  She gapes at him. “You did. You let me keep taking lessons.”

  “You can’t assume you have a deal with someone just because you issue a decree.”

  “I said I didn’t want lessons unless I knew I had a way to work off what I owe you. It’s not fair otherwise.”

  Amused: “Not fair you should have what you most wanted?”

  “Not fair you won’t give me a way to pay you back.”

  “Isn’t it a little unseemly to try to leverage Trout’s death into a flying opportunity the very day of his funeral?”

  “His number came up,” she says, defiant. “He always said it could.”

  He smokes, watching her. “Are you really this hard?”

  “Trout would have said I was ready. I know the mountains. You know you can trust me. If not this, then let me drive for you. Let me do something. I’ll go back to collecting bottles. Anything. I feel like some rich man’s daughter, or like I’ve been taught to fly just because it’s funny to see a girl in an airplane, like a dog walking on its hind legs.”

  A long silence. He offers his gaze as a kind of challenge; she holds it. Finally, he says, “I don’t think of you as a daughter, or a dog.” He shifts, stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray. “But the biplane can’t hold much cargo anyway. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

  Like that, without fanfare, the charade is over. “It holds thirty cases,” she says. “Maybe a few more. Trout told me. That’s not nothing if it’s premium brands. And you’d keep your air routes open in case you wanted to get a bigger plane again.”

  “It’s not enough to justify putting you on the wrong side of the law.”

  “I’ve been on the wrong side of the law for years,” she says, feeling blustering, silly.

  “But not on my account.” She tries to interrupt; he cuts her off. “Just this one little time, Marian, I won’t give you what you want. Not right now.”

  “But soon?”

  Hesitantly, he rests one hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently, as though testing fruit. “If a pilot with Trout’s experience died, how can you know it won’t happen to you?”

  “I can’t, but I have to do it anyway.”

  “If anything were to happen to you, I would never forgive myself.”

  “It wouldn’t be your fault.” She steps so close her left foot is between his feet. “Let me jump the line. Please.”

  He seems almost as though he will agree but recovers himself, moves away. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t offer yourself.”

  “You’re the one trying to buy me.”

  “I’m not trying to buy you, I’m trying to help you.”

  “Then help me by letting me be useful.” She storms off, out the door. He doesn’t follow.

  That night in the cottage with Caleb, she does what she has not done before: She fucks him. She has never before associated that word with what they do, but now it fills her head. She sits atop him, furious, gouging with her hips.

  At first he responds in kind but then turns passive and watchful. At the end, he pushes her off, comes into an old washing flannel
. She has struck the wall—not hard—but she shouts at him. He covers her mouth with a hand, and she bites. Part of her wishes he would slug her like he did when they were kids, but even as he yanks his hand back, grimacing in pain, she knows he won’t. Instead, he pulls her roughly to his chest, holds tight until she quits fighting. She thinks he is waiting for her to cry. She will not. She can’t. Eventually, they fall asleep.

  At dawn, after he has dressed, he sits on the edge of the bed, his hair loose down his back. “We have to stop this,” he says. “Whatever you have with him, you have to sort it out. I can’t help you with it.”

  “No,” she says. “No one can.”

  * * *

  —

  Second.

  The plan is not a reaction to Trout’s death. She had been mulling it over for months, but she’d hesitated because of how worried Trout would be and because she’d feared Barclay would blame him. Now the consequences are only hers.

  On a clear June morning, she takes off in the biplane, fuel tank only half full, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to draw attention. She purls up a lazy loop. When she’s leveled off again, she turns northwest, following the railroad.

  Jamie has disappeared for the summer. A few weeks before, at the end of May, Wallace had found a note from him on the kitchen table that said he was going away but would come back in time for the start of school. They shouldn’t worry. Marian was hurt he had left without telling her, then envious. She might have gone with him if she’d known. Then she was hurt afresh by the thought that he hadn’t told her for exactly that reason.

  A map is pinned to her knee, the route already plotted. She’d left a note of her own in the hangar: Gone x-country, back tomorrow. She knows Barclay has spies who will find it when she doesn’t come back. After that, lickety-split, he’ll have his people calling every airfield for three states in all directions, promising an irresistible reward for any information about any lone girls in Stearman biplanes. She’d left the note only because otherwise he’d have filled the sky with search and rescuers.