Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  She turns north again, follows the Clark Fork up to Lake Pend Oreille. She sets down outside a nothing town where she’s been before, not far from a gas station she’s scouted. The owner has a fuel truck, comes out to fill her tank. A risk, but unavoidable. Off she goes. West, then north, following the Pend Oreille River. When it bends to meet the Columbia, she knows she is over Canada.

  She carves her way west, low among the mountains, her wings paring air off the slopes. The weather mostly holds. For a while there is a thick, low mat of cloud, and she stays above it, tobogganing the airplane’s belly along the top, the prop half buried in the mist. This is what she has always wanted: choose a point on a map and fly to it. She thinks Jamie probably also went west, toward the sea.

  Before he left, she’d woken one night to him gently shaking her.

  “You were having a nightmare,” he’d said.

  She’d been dreaming about Trout. She’d been with him in the Travel Air, spiraling down, and Trout was pleading with her to help him, but her controls didn’t seem to be attached to anything.

  “I was dreaming about Trout.”

  “I figured. You were talking.”

  The spring night was rustling and chilly, and she scooted over so Jamie would slide in, head to toe with her.

  She said, “Do you think Trout was afraid?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I want to think he wouldn’t have been. But I don’t think it works that way.”

  “It would have been quick, at least.”

  “Even if he’d known for certain what was going to happen, I don’t think he would have stopped flying.”

  “Not for his kids?”

  She shook her head. “I hope he at least knew Barclay would make sure his family was all right.” They were quiet. She added, “Whatever he felt, it’s done now.”

  But Jamie was asleep.

  More snowcaps appear as she flies on. The country’s emptiness pleases her—she is less likely to be spotted. After some hours, she descends into a long open valley checkered with farmland. Mountains to the north. The city of Vancouver standing up to the west. Beyond, water blues the horizon. The Strait of Georgia. She wants to fly out over it, over Vancouver Island to the open ocean, but she doesn’t have enough fuel or daylight.

  She chances an airfield north across the harbor from the city. When the pilots hanging around ask where she’s come from, she says Oregon. She asks where she should leave the plane for the night, where there is a cheap hotel. They look at her funny, but she stares back hard. She can’t pass for a boy anymore and has no choice but to be an odd, tall, dusty, freckled girl, racoonishly suntanned from her goggles, with short-cropped hair. A man takes a grease pencil and a notepad from the pocket of his overalls and writes down directions to a rooming house a couple of miles away. “Tell Geraldine that Sawyer sent you,” he says, tearing off the page. “She’s a nice lady. I’ll keep an eye on your plane. What’s your name?”

  “Funny, my name’s Geraldine, too,” Marian says. She points to the north and the bigger mountains. “Do you ever fly up in there?”

  He shakes his head. “Not much there for me.”

  Geraldine’s is halfway up a steep hill. Be in by midnight, Geraldine says, no guests, and no drinking in the house. In Marian’s room, a window frames fading twilight, a line of dark blue sea cutting across the gaps between the houses. Restless, she sits on the bed, stands at the window, sits again. A knock at the door. She opens it to Geraldine holding out a folded nightgown. “I noticed you didn’t have any luggage. I thought you might need something to sleep in.”

  The gesture is simple, but Marian is not used to being cared for. “Thank you,” she says, clasping the garment to her chest. Her voice betrays her by shaking.

  “It’s really nothing.” Geraldine is younger than Marian had expected, almost as blond and freckled as herself but soft and bosomy. “You all right?”

  For a moment, Marian wants to tell her everything, to pour out the tale of her parents and her uncle and Barclay Macqueen and Trout. She would tell Geraldine she is only sixteen and has flown here from Montana by herself, and tomorrow she is going to fly out over the ocean just to look around, to see something. Geraldine will say she wished she were half as brave.

  But instead Marian just says she’s fine, that she hadn’t been expecting to spend the night. Engine trouble is all.

  In the morning, she fuels the plane and takes off, circles the field to get her nerve up. Then she follows the harbor out, passes over the strait, over Vancouver Island, and is finally, finally over the sea. Wind draws a delicate pattern on the water like the weave of linen, overlaid by shadows of clouds. Well out from shore, she longs to fly on even though the horizon will only ever recede, but she knows she has to turn around, to go home and face what must be faced. She tells herself at least she’s seen the ocean. Flying back, she turns up an inlet toward the mountains, tells herself she’s just following a whim, though it’s more like a dare.

  At the end of the sound, the water is bright and milky from a river disgorging glacial meltwater, braided with pale sand. She follows it north. The mountains are more rugged than any she’s seen. All the other “x-country” entries in her logbook were only puny feints against the great immensity of the planet, but this—this—is real mountain flying. She should turn around, be on her way back to Montana, but, gunning the engine, pulling her scarf up over her mouth and nose, she ascends. Twelve thousand feet. She flies at a snow-covered saddle, crosses over it into a high bowl. Rock and blue ice loom up, hemming her in. Below, crevasses fissure an ice field. The widest looks big enough to swallow the plane whole. In places, the snow has broken through, and there is blackness underneath.

  The engine catches, sputters with disapproval.

  She tries to circle up and out, but the plane is sluggish, heavy. She adjusts the mix, but still the engine protests, begins to miss. Her heartbeat seems to miss, too. A stiffness creeps into her limbs. Her armpits prickle.

  She circles and circles. The cold wind on her face feels as sharp and violent as glass shards. Her arms are so heavy; she can barely work her feet on the rudder. No one will ever find her. No one will even know where to look. The blackness at the bottom of the crevasse will swallow her. Snow will shroud her. But, on the other hand, then no one will know how foolish she’d been to come into these mountains. She will not give them her broken body, will not leave her teeth stuck in the dashboard of the plane. Barclay will have no recourse but to wonder. In his mind, a phantom version of herself will go on living a thousand different imagined lives in a thousand different places. He won’t be able to consign her to the past, to the ranks of the dead. The engine misses badly; the plane dips woozily.

  Jamie will never know what a lonely, needless death she’s contrived for herself.

  The thought of Jamie strikes her like a slapping hand. The buzzing in her head clears. No. No, she will not leave him alone in the world, will not punish him for his summer escape by vanishing forever. Willing movement into her leaden arms and legs, pressing into her own body as though shifting a heavy weight, she pushes the stick forward and dives, following the curvature of the bowl. When she is barely skimming over the ice, she pulls up. Rattling and sputtering, just barely, she clears the opposite ridge.

  Descending, her face and hands thaw. Terror comes alive in her. She trembles hard enough on the controls to make the plane bobble. She turns south.

  The pilots in Missoula are relieved, want to know where she’d gone. “To Vancouver and back,” she tells them, wooden. She’d had to spend another night out, sleeping in the plane in a field.

  “Any good?” one asks, perplexed by her flatness.

  “It was all right.” Why hadn’t Trout told her about the blackness that lived in the depths of ice?

  “Macqueen is fit to be tied,” another says. “He was around all m
orning, looking up at the sky like he was about to go up there and tear down the whole damn thing.”

  * * *

  —

  She’s only been home an hour before Barclay shows up, driven in his long black Pierce-Arrow by Sadler. At the door, Wallace asks feebly what he wants.

  “I want a word with Marian.”

  Marian is listening from the stairs. “It’s all right, Wallace,” she says, coming down. Without protest, her uncle shrinks back into the house. Marian leads Barclay to the cottage.

  He shuts the door behind them. His anger makes his freckles stand out; his eyes are almost black. In a quiet voice, he asks how she could have betrayed him so spitefully. She is stupid, foolish, selfish, and he never should have trusted her. Of course it had been a mistake to allow her to fly. “I should have known,” he says, “that you’d take everything I’ve given you and throw it back in my face.”

  Marian stands and listens without flinching, and when he is done, all she can do is cry. She bends like a willow in the gusts of her own sorrow. He will think guilt is what wracks her, won’t guess it is grief—grief for Trout, but also for the idea she’d had of herself as fearless in the air, of the sky as an ally rather than an indifferent immensity full of ungovernable forces.

  The fury goes out of him. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Please, Marian. I was only angry because I was afraid I’d lost you.” He gathers her against himself. “Why did you do it?” he asks in a fervent murmur. “Why would you run away like that?”

  “I wasn’t running. I wanted to go somewhere. Like I’ve been telling you.” When she feels him start to pull away, she holds on, says, “I wanted to see the ocean.”

  “And did you?”

  “Only the edge.”

  “It all looks the same.”

  She wants to explain the crevasse to him, how she had not crashed into it but had been swallowed nonetheless, but she only says, “I had a fright in the mountains.” Hurriedly, she adds, “I went up a little too high, that’s all. I learned a lesson.”

  His arms tighten around her. “Sometimes you seem so wise and sometimes very foolish.” The warmth of his body intervenes between her and the ice, the blackness. She would have told Jamie about the crevasse if she could have, if he were there, and then she would have been fortified in her dealings with Barclay. But Jamie had left her behind. And Caleb had cut her loose.

  She presses her face into Barclay’s neck. He goes very still. She says, “I’ve been having nightmares about Trout.”

  Again she thinks he will tell her not to fly, even forbid it, but he says, “Don’t expect yourself not to be troubled, Marian. Something would be wrong if you weren’t.”

  His kindness, as Geraldine’s had, makes her cry. But her tears are gentler now, a slow seep from under her lids, a fluttering in her abdomen. He kisses her just under her ear.

  Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.

  Barclay has one hand around her shoulders and the other lifting underneath her backside, hoisting her against him. Barclay is pressing her backward like a dance partner, guiding her toward the narrow bed. They are lying down. He has her trousers undone, his hand inside. She pushes back against him, slides her hips. His eyes are glassy, his expression slack. She keeps moving, holding his gaze.

  Outside, Sadler coughs.

  The sound is so clear, as though Sadler were sitting in the armchair a few feet away. Barclay snaps out of his reverie, removes his hand. Immediately it seems impossible that they had, seconds before, been doing what they’d been doing.

  He stands up quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  She fastens her trousers. “For starting or for stopping?”

  “Starting,” he says as though it should be obvious.

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “Too much.”

  “Then why did you stop?”

  “I have no right to compromise you like that.” She turns her head to the wall, waiting for him to leave, but he sits on the edge of the bed. “You’re upset.”

  Outrage pours out of her. Yes, she tells him. She is. Why didn’t he ever consider whether or not she liked it? Whether she wanted to stop? Why must she always be protected? He can’t keep her safe against the dangers that matter: the darkness, the possibility of falling. His attempts are insulting. And it’s outrageous for him to say he shouldn’t compromise her. What had he done with his patronage and his airplanes except compromise her? What had he done except use her own dreams against her? And even when they both want the same thing—

  She stops, suddenly shy about admitting she wants him, wants to see his body and to be touched, that she is not a virgin anyway. (This last she must never say.) Fucking would be more truthful, at least.

  “You want to…” He hesitates.

  “I want to fly across the line.”

  “That’s all?” His disappointment is plain.

  “And I want to go to bed with you.”

  Shrewdness and thrill, stubbornness and lust, worry and smugness play over his face. “All right,” he says, putting on his hat and opening the door. “All right, fine. To both. Not today, but soon enough.”

  * * *

  —

  Third.

  Barclay agrees to be taken up. His first flight.

  On a hot July day he arrives at the field and strides around nervously, scowling at the planes. He and Marian have not been to bed yet, but sex now seems like a trapdoor that may open under them at any moment. She has begun flying over the line.

  Sadler has taught her the code used for arranging pickups and shown her how to read a special map printed all over with tiny numbered dots. Most are just decoy nonsense, but some are real caches and landing strips.

  “You disapprove,” she’d said to Sadler.

  His eyes on the map, voice lilting like a man relating an item of mild interest from a newspaper, he said, “It’s not my place.”

  Her first run had been to an anonymous farmer’s field in British Columbia. The farmer had driven a tractor out to meet her, pulling a wagon stacked with cases of whiskey.

  The sun had been low when she took off again. The weight of the cargo made the fuel go quickly, shifting the plane’s balance, and she’d had to keep a close eye on the trim. Briefly the leadenness had come into her again, the blank, heavy buzzing feeling, but it had passed quickly, never quite taking root. Only two cars were waiting for her small delivery, their headlights pinpricks in the dusk. They’d backed up close to the plane when she’d landed and opened their trunks and also hidden compartments under the backseats. Brisk and businesslike, they’d hauled the cases out. In a few days, a message had come directing her next pickup.

  As Marian takes off and circles up, Barclay sinks low in the front cockpit until the top of the flying helmet she’d given him is barely visible. She banks steeply around the city, trying to tip him into looking down, but the little leather dome of him, glossy as a bullfrog’s back, doesn’t move. She can’t even be sure his eyes are open. Her plan had been to go easy on him, take him on a pleasant aerial tour of the valley, but she’s nettled by the idea that he might spend the whole flight hunkered down, stubbornly fearful. She pulls the stick back and punches it to the side, kicks the rudder. The plane turns tidily upside down. Barclay’s head dangles out of the cockpit, and he clutches the edges as though he thinks he’d be able to hang on like a crab were his harness to break. Another kick, and Missoula swings back down.

  He twists to look at her, shouts something into the wind, jabs his gloved finger down at the ground. She smiles, turns the nose to the northeast.<
br />
  When he understands she is flying him out of town, he turns again, shouts again, but what can he do? He is at her mercy, and she has a full tank of fuel.

  After half an hour, Barclay, bored with being angry and afraid, is sitting up and looking out. He peers over one side, then the other. Eventually the sawtooth ramparts of Glacier National Park come into view, overlapping rough blue ridges fading with distance. The sun catches the rock layers in the mountainsides. In some places they lie in a flat stack, in others are folded and wrapped like taffy on the mixing hook. Glaciers cling to the slopes, smaller than the ones she’d seen in Canada. Below are bright blue-green lakes of meltwater, opaque as enamel.

  She wonders if the fear will return, but she feels only a tightness in her throat that might just be anxiety about what will happen after they land. Before she flipped the plane, she had not considered how he might perceive the maneuver as another rebellion or betrayal, even mockery. Hopefully Glacier’s grandeur will soothe his temper. What would she do if, in punishment, he forbade her from flying the plane? She would leave Missoula, of course. For the first time, she wonders if he could stop her from leaving, if he would.

  The fuel needle drops lower, and she steers back toward Kalispell. Barclay has not turned around again, has not acknowledged the wonders she has shown him. As they pass into the ordinary greatness of lesser mountains, she feels peevish and depleted, as though she’d stayed too long at a fair or picnic.

  Clouds are coming in, getting denser and lower. By the time they land in late afternoon, it is overcast.

  “We’ll have to wait out the weather,” she says to Barclay as he climbs out of his cockpit. She is casual, pretending she has not just kidnapped him and turned him upside down.

  He looks at the sky. Calmly, he says, “I have a place here. An office. We’ll go there.”

  As they walk into town, Barclay takes a ring of keys from an inner pocket of his jacket. “It’s a good thing,” he says, “this didn’t fall out and land on someone’s head back in Missoula.”