Again Bonner blinks at her, surprised. He realizes he is being thrown out.
“I’d like to talk to Louis,” Ava continues, “and there are things that need doing around the orchard . . .”
Bonner shakes himself, hiding his irritation. “Of course,” he replies. He stands and straightens his suit. A tall man, Bonner dwarfs the room. “But I’d like to talk to you more at a later date,” he says to Louis. He turns to Ava. “I’d like to talk to both of you more.”
“Well, you’ve proven you clearly know where to find us,” Ava says, a hard note in her singsong voice. The rote words are supplemented with a plastic smile. After ten minutes with the young lady, Bonner already knows: She is not the type to hide her disdain.
Louis stands, looking embarrassed by Ava’s behavior. “I’ll see you out,” he says.
Ava retreats to the kitchen. At the front door, the two men shake hands.
“I’ll be in touch,” Agent Bonner promises.
“All right,” Louis says.
“Oh,” Bonner says, pausing and turning back. He fishes out his notepad and pencil one last time. “What was the name of the man you said tends bar in town?”
Louis blinks.
“You said you could give me the name of the bartender who was there the night you got into that scuffle we discussed,” Bonner prompts in a helpful tone.
There is a pause as Louis stiffens.
“Joe,” he says finally. “Joe Abbott is his name.”
“Very good,” Bonner says, scribbling the name into his notebook.
“And the name of the bar?”
“Murphy’s Saloon.”
Bonner nods and scribbles that down as well.
“All right, then. You take care, now,” he says to Louis.
“You, too.”
Bonner steps out onto the porch where, hours ago, he first met Louis Thorn, and hears the porch door slap shut behind him.
And with that, Agent Bonner finds himself alone again. Looking around and seeing no car, he remembers that the sheriff drove him over to the former Yamada property and that Bonner left his Bureau car parked in front of the sheriff’s office. He shades his eyes and glances up at the late-afternoon sun beating down with surprising heat despite the thick smoke now in the air.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Bonner mutters, putting his fedora on. He sighs and takes his jacket off, folding it over his arm and beginning the long, dusty walk back into town.
3
Louis and Ava peep through the curtains, watching the shape of the F.B.I. agent moving down the drive. Bonner is ambling slowly—probably on account of the heat, Louis thinks.
“I reckon I ought to have offered to drive him into town,” Louis comments.
“No. I think you ought to stay away from him,” Ava says. “As much as possible.” She drops the corner of curtain and steps away from the window, lowering her voice. “He’ll be back for certain. He may have located the Yamadas, but he believes you had something to do with the crash.”
Louis looks at her. She waits for him to say, I didn’t, but he says nothing. The air between them is awkward. First there is the oppressive weight of the crash, the deaths . . . not to mention, the last time Louis saw her, Ava was in a bed, naked. That was only twenty-four hours ago. But neither of them will talk about that now. Not directly. It feels like a lifetime has passed since then.
“That agent,” Ava says now. “He looks an awful lot like—”
“I know,” Louis snaps in a low voice.
Feeling sympathetic, Ava reaches out to touch his shoulder, but the second she makes contact, Louis flinches as though she has stung him.
Fine, Ava thinks. She walks to the kitchen and frowns at the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Louis has kept the rest of the place pristine but, like a typical man, has turned a blind eye to the kitchen. The bachelor life, Ava thinks. She sighs and rolls up her sleeves, then fits the shallow metal washtub into one half of the sink, filling it up with hot water.
“You don’t have to wash those,” Louis says, following her into the kitchen and eyeing what she is up to.
“Somebody has to,” Ava says. “Besides, Mrs. Yamada would not approve of her kitchen being treated like this.”
“It’s not all my mess,” Louis reminds Ava, speaking to her turned back. “I wasn’t here by myself.”
She freezes where she stands at the sink, looks down at the filling water, and sighs. She turns the spigot off. “I know,” she says. She plunges her hands into the water and sets about washing a plate. Plates and cups first, her mother always said, and pots and pans last. Ava is hardly the domestic type, but after years of traveling up and down California and making camp with a group of barnstormers, cleaning up after men has become ingrained in her, like it or not.
“Honestly,” Louis says, “you don’t have to do that.”
“Go and shave the other half of your face,” Ava replies. She turns to look at him and manages a weak smile, an imitation of her normally jaunty self. “You look ridiculous. Even more ridiculous than usual.”
Louis knows this isn’t an accurate slight against his looks. This is simply how Ava used to joke—with both of them: Louis and Harry. She is trying to put him at ease, attempting to force a small flicker of normal life in the midst of gruesome disaster.
Louis walks away without saying anything further, and Ava is left alone to ruminate over the rapidly graying dishwater.
Over the kitchen sink is a large window. It faces west, lining up almost exactly in the direction of the airplane hangar, the latter still sending a dirty column of leftover smoke into the sky. Ava finds it impossible not to stare out the window at the hazy plume as she washes, rinses, and sets each dish absentmindedly on the drain board.
Since the moment she rushed into the parlor and found him sitting with the F.B.I. agent, Ava hasn’t been able to read Louis. Is he even sad? She knows this is Louis’s way: When emotions run high, he retreats into a stoic shell of himself. But she also knows Louis was angry with Harry . . . so very angry. And he had his reasons to be angry. She tried to decipher his expression when he’d said, Did you see the crash? Harry and Mr. Yamada . . . She’d held Louis’s gaze for only a moment or two, but then something she glimpsed in his eyes made her look away, acutely uncomfortable. She can tell the F.B.I. agent suspects Louis had something to do with the crash, and Ava understands that the agent has a reason to wonder.
Ava rinses the final frying pan and dries her hands on a dish towel as she continues to stare out the window. The firemen were able to extinguish the blaze; she knows there are no more flames, but the crash site is still so hot, smoke continues to rise, the dirty haze like a permanent smudge marking the sky. Looking at it, Ava feels utterly hollow. Not only is it terribly grim to think of the two dead bodies the firemen pulled from the wreckage down there, but Ava is also aware she is watching a part of her past turn to ash.
The fact of the crash means that the last of the two biplanes, Castor and Pollux, are gone: two twins, forever separated. The first biplane vanished into the black pit of Earl’s debt, and the second is now a strangled heap of engine parts and smoldering metal. It is strange to comprehend: So many of Ava’s formative years revolved around those two airplanes.
Sounds like a rather remarkable childhood, Agent Bonner had said. Perhaps it was. Ava can hardly remember a time when she didn’t hear the thrumming whine of airplane engines or wake up to two planes sputtering through the air as a pair of pilots practiced trick after trick: loop-the-loops, barrel rolls, falling leaves, harrowingly close fly-bys that, during shows, made the spectators down below gasp. All of these aeronautical feats were commonplace in the realm of Ava’s life—as was the constant camping, traveling from farm town to farm town. They would start at one end of California’s Central Valley and travel down to the opposite end, then start back north again. They took only the stormiest months of
the winter off, and only then because Earl had yet to figure out a way to draw a crowd when it was pissing down rain.
It had been a simple outfit, at first: Earl hired Buzz and Hutch, a pair of pilots who were hard up for work, and the idea was mainly to sell airplane rides to curious farmers (and their wives and children), to fly into town with the festive air of a carnival, and then disappear before the authorities came sniffing around. Mostly, the main thing Ava recalled from her “rather remarkable childhood” was a sense of loneliness.
But everything changed when Louis Thorn and Harry Yamada joined their barnstorming act.
“Eagle” and “Crane”—those were the names that the other two pilots eventually bestowed upon Louis and Harry. Buzz and Hutch had insisted every pilot worth his salt needed a “call sign.” They nicknamed Louis for his blond, freckled, all-American looks, and Harry . . . well, they named Harry after a bird, too, to match Louis. But being about as sensitive and diplomatic as a pair of sledgehammers, Buzz and Hutch declared it ought to be a “Jap” bird—hence Crane.
With Louis and Harry on board, the show escalated, eventually growing into something bigger and more extraordinary than anything Earl had ever imagined. Ava, too. Her life had been unexpectedly changed by Eagle & Crane; she had, in her own way, fallen in love with them both.
Eagle & Crane. Louis and Harry. Ava continues to peer out the window, full of the awareness that her love for the two young men—and one in particular—is the cause of the smoke she is watching now, steadily rising into the air.
4
Los Angeles, California * 1924—1934
There had, of course, existed a time before Ava and her mother joined the traveling barnstorming spectacle. When she thought even further back, Ava could remember a time before they lived like vagabonds out of a caravan, a time before the view out her window changed weekly, a time before the sound of biplanes constantly droned overhead.
When she closed her eyes and concentrated, Ava could remember all the way back to a little Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles. She remembered the bright green of the small, sloped lawn, how the afternoon light burnished the house in gold and how bougainvillea crept along the champagne-colored stucco, enveloping the arched doorway in fuchsia flames. She remembered how ripe oranges materialized in winter: Giant, heavy globes, they bent the limbs of a tree in the backyard, bobbing on the branches like Christmas ornaments. A suit of armor stood at attention in one of the hallways inside the house—a prop auctioned off by a movie studio and the sort of faux-medieval décor preferred in those days by plenty of respectable Angelenos, who seemed bent on creating their own mythologies and coats of arms.
For the first five or six years of Ava’s childhood in that house, the atmosphere was routine, cheerful. Her mother left the radio switched on all day while she puttered about doing chores; Helen Kane chastised folks to “button up your overcoat” and Cole Porter insisted, “Let’s misbehave!!!” as her mother hummed along and pinned laundry to a line outside. It was difficult to remember rain ever falling during her childhood—in that backyard, or upon that roof, or even in Los Angeles more generally; it seemed the sun shone every day, except in June, when a dull fog rolled in off the Pacific and hung persistently in the air, thick and shapeless, gray as a dull nickel.
Ava remembered her father—red-haired, like Ava herself—as he sat bent over a desk, doing calculations while wearing a green banker’s visor. Ava was still quite young, but she possessed a dim understanding that the visor fit in with her father’s profession somehow. His job had something to do with the banks; it seemed he was always on the telephone to New York. He worked in an office downtown, a tall-ceilinged, mahogany-paneled space that was perpetually hazy with cigarette smoke, the blinds partially drawn against the brash glare of the blinding Los Angeles sunshine outside. Ava’s mother took Ava to visit him there a handful of times, and her father had always looked busy, distracted. He kept very early hours, often rising before the sun to work, but he also finished early. Bankers’ hours, he called them. In the evenings he sometimes took Ava and her mother to a baseball game, or else a picture show. If they were bound for the movie house, her mother liked to dress up, to set her dark hair in pin waves. More often than not, she even reached for the garden scissors and clipped a pair of camellias from one of the shrubs that grew on their front lawn, insisting they each tuck one over an ear.
Ava’s father, usually a fairly serious man, would laugh, and grin, and wolf-whistle at the two of them, and say things like What a pair of movie stars! How’d a fella like me ever get so lucky to be surrounded by two such gorgeous dolls?
Perhaps all little girls believe their mothers are glamorous, but Ava suspected hers was more glamorous than most. Ava’s mother’s name, Cleo, was short for Cleopatra. Her mother looked the part: a full red mouth, regal cheekbones, and thick, black, silky hair—the opposite of Ava, whose pale pink lips made a small, demure bow, and whose red hair sprouted from her head like a flame. Cleo also possessed the kind of hourglass figure that was difficult to hide, no matter what she wore. It was difficult not to notice the way people reacted to her mother. Even when she was only running simple errands, men and women alike constantly threw looks at her mother.
Unfortunately, Ava’s mother was fickle when it came to the kind of attention she received: Sometimes she liked it, but more often than not it proved too much for her to bear. The contradiction puzzled Ava. Her mother had a fanciful nature and loved to dress up, yet she could be painfully withdrawn. Finally, one day, it dawned on Ava: Her mother wasn’t dressing to attract notice; she was “playing dress-up.” Too much attention gave Cleo clammy hands and a tight feeling behind her eyes. When life made demands on her, Cleo got terrible headaches. During such times, she retreated to her bed and drew the curtains, transforming day into night.
Let’s allow your mother to rest, Ava’s father would say if he was home when Cleo got one of her headaches. He would take Ava for a walk or buy her an ice cream, and by the time they returned, her mother would be back on her feet, humming a quiet tune and cooking some supper.
* * *
The Great Crash of ’29 happened on a Tuesday, around the time of Halloween. Ava remembered the three pumpkins they had carved and set out on the terra-cotta steps that led up to their little Spanish bungalow. Ava had arranged the pumpkins in descending size to resemble her family: a daddy, a mommy, and a baby.
That afternoon, Ava’s mother walked to the kindergarten schoolyard to fetch Ava once school was out, and on the walk home they stopped at the corner store to buy a few groceries. When they approached their house, Ava noticed her father’s Ford coupe parked at the curb, indicating he’d finished the workday and come home. This wasn’t terribly unusual: Ava figured he was keeping “bankers’ hours,” just as he said. Recently he’d explained to Ava, too, that clocks kept different time in New York, so that while it was one time here, it was a different time there.
She skipped happily enough up the steps, but as she passed the three pumpkins, Ava felt a curious chill.
Inside, all was quiet. Ava went to her room to play. She assumed her mother would pop her head into her father’s office to chirp out a quick greeting, then stow the market items in the kitchen icebox. Only a minute or so had passed when Ava heard the bloodcurdling scream. She dropped the hard plastic horse figurine she was holding and ran toward her mother’s cries.
A half dozen eggs were splattered on the hallway floor just outside her father’s office, yolks oozing from their broken shells. Her mother had fled to the front parlor and sat sniveling on the settee, shuddering as though the bullet had ripped through her, too. Black mascara was already beginning to run down her face. No one stopped Ava from looking into the office, and so she did, just to check. Her father’s forehead was slumped over his desk, lifeless. His hand still clutched the revolver. Ava was five at the time—much too young to understand what she was seeing. And yet, somehow, she did.
>
Seeing her father, his head tipped upon the desk, his skull looking as fragile as one of the eggshells lying in a shattered heap on the floor, Ava only understood one thing: Something had broken her father, and as a consequence he had gone someplace she and her mother could not follow. He was no longer in the room, and he was not coming back anytime soon.
* * *
They remained in the little Spanish bungalow for a time. Policemen came and went and her father’s body was taken away, but there was little way for life to resume as it had been before. When Ava’s mother learned that her husband had died with not a penny to his name and owing debts, she contracted one of her terrible headaches and retreated to her bedroom. When Ava checked on her, Cleo was curled up in bed like a child. Ava remembered peeking through a crack in the door and staring at the curve of her mother’s back, her mother’s birdlike bones showing through her satin nightgown, the ridges of her spine like a sagging string of pearls.
Ava turned six. Unable to rouse her mother from bed in the mornings, Ava found the jar where her mother kept grocery money, purchased milk and white bread from the corner store, and walked herself to and from school. But she sensed even this arrangement—reduced as it was—could not hold up for very long. Unopened mail was piling up at their house. Notices appeared, tacked up to their front door. Collectors began knocking, while Ava’s mother only burrowed deeper under the bedsheets, hiding like a frightened animal, until finally one day the collectors returned with the police.
The officers put them out on the street with only what they could carry. Ava felt a pang to realize yet another of her mother’s mistakes: Perhaps they might’ve sold their possessions. Fake Hollywood prop or not, she wondered what the suit of armor might’ve fetched in price.
All they had left now was the cash Ava’s mother had long ago squirreled away in an old hatbox. They found an apartment for rent by the week, but by the second week it was already too expensive, so they moved to a seedier apartment, in a seedier neighborhood, and then still a third apartment, in an even worse part of town. It became obvious to them both that Cleo would have to look for a job, some way to make an income. Ava knew her mother was terrified; she had never worked a day in her life, and felt qualified for nothing.
Eagle & Crane Page 3