Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  A round of screeching from the tadpoles. I lift my head and see a wall of approaching water. Lindquist yells something. Just hold on to your board, or something like that. Start paddling.

  I look to the kids, who lie on their tiny stomachs like me, brown arms paddling for Jesus, sweet little lungs screaming out delight. I do what they do, except my screaming is not delight. It’s just terror. This monster rises up behind me and gathers me up in its mighty jaws and spits me to shore in a jumble of board and bone and hair and salt water, and somewhere in the middle of it, I lose the desire to live. I just figure I’ll die, and what I know and all I’ve seen will die with me, and maybe that’s what God intended all along.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  July 1928: Hawaii

  The island of Oahu lies about two thousand five hundred and sixty miles by air from Los Angeles, assuming you travel the shortest possible route over the curve of the globe. (That’s a hundred miles farther than New York, for reference, although a thousand miles shorter than Lindbergh’s historic flight to Paris.) The average cruising speed of Octavian Rofrano’s revolutionary new twin-engine Centauri was about a hundred and forty miles an hour, which represented a 30 percent improvement over the single-engine Lockheed Vega, considered the fastest plane aloft in the middle of 1928. Divide one by the other, subtract three hours to account for the rotation of the earth, and Sam and Irene could expect to arrive in Honolulu at six-thirty the next morning, or approximately eighteen and a half hours after taking off.

  Eighteen and a half hours is a long time to spend in an airplane, especially without stops along the way to stretch your legs and smoke a cigarette. Moreover, the Centauri was flying over the Pacific Ocean, which presented the same featureless, mirage-inducing landscape as a desert. The monotony was not improved by the weather that day. Shreds of fog appeared about a half hour out of Burbank, which soon turned to a bank of cloud so high and thick, Sam pulled back the stick and sent the Centauri climbing all the way up to twelve thousand feet, which was as far as they could safely go without requiring additional oxygen. They now flew above the clouds, but without the ability to drop smoke bombs to measure the wind drift, Irene couldn’t rely on dead reckoning to determine their position. Instead, she tuned the radio to the frequency on which the navy broadcast its navigational beacons. As long as the pings came back in a steady rhythm—as long as Irene could still hear those pings—they were on course.

  To pass the time, she wrote a note to Sam.

  Radio beacon steady. Hold course.

  He wrote back, Nice weather we’re having.

  Here at twelve thousand feet in the air, the temperature was cold, about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Both Irene and Sam had already put on their scarves and their fingerless gloves, and still Irene’s fingers were almost too stiff to hold the pencil and scratch out a reply.

  First she wrote, Nice to meet your wife at last. She crumpled that up and threw it in the wastebasket.

  Next, she wrote, Improvement expected. Clear skies currently in Hawai’i. She crumpled that up too.

  Finally: Your daughter takes after you.

  Sam pulled this note from the clothesline and held it between his finger and thumb for some time. Irene looked over his shoulder. There was a photograph stuck into the instrument panel, a snapshot of a small, towheaded girl wearing a large bow in her hair. Irene couldn’t tell if Sam was looking at her note or the photograph, or both at once.

  After a minute or so, Sam picked up his pencil and wrote on the back of Irene’s note.

  Better she turns out like you.

  In a well-built airplane like the Rofrano Centauri, ably piloted in decent weather with adequate navigational guidance, fatigue was the chief danger. Every pilot had his own method of dealing with this condition. Most favored coffee. Others appreciated the stimulant effect of chewing gum. Singing was popular, or (among the pious, anyway) the recitation of Bible verses, or (for the mathematically minded) the solution of complex equations. In the account of his famous Atlantic crossing, Lindbergh claimed to resort to propping up his own eyelids.

  Now, Sam and Irene were fortunate to share this burden of staying awake during their audacious voyage across the Pacific. They had filled several Thermoses of coffee and packed some sandwiches, though not many because nothing sent you to sleep so quickly as a full stomach. Since Sam flew the airplane, it was Irene’s job to supply cup after cup of java, and also to look the other way when this gluttony reached its inevitable conclusion. (A pair of milk cans, if you have to ask.) She was also supposed to pass notes every ten minutes, to which Sam was supposed to answer back. After six hours of steady and uneventful flying, however, Irene had run out of both technical observations and small talk.

  She wrote, Good idea to tell press this was test flight.

  Sam replied, Live and learn and handed back his empty coffee cup. Irene filled it and passed it on, then poured herself a cup of coffee and wrapped her frozen hands around the mug. Sam had told her about the start of the Dole Derby, about Lindbergh’s flight and the chaos of departure. The throngs of press and spectators that nearly caused disaster. He’d insisted on this misdirection, and he’d been right. Why, the excitement over the supposed test flight was nutty enough; imagine if all those reporters had known they were leaving for Australia that very day! It was unnerving, the idea of all that mass attention directed on the two of them.

  Irene set down the cup and leaned down to retrieve one of her maps from its case on the floor. But her hand didn’t encounter the metal edge of the map case. Instead, it sank into a nest of warm, soft fluff.

  The fluff moved, jumped into Irene’s lap, and started to purr.

  By now, Sandy was maybe seven or eight months old and had grown into a large cat, a diligent mouser, who considered Hangar C her personal dominion and Sam Mallory her personal servant. She looked up at Irene and stretched one lazy paw over the side of her lap. She had a narrow, pointed face and a pair of tawny eyes, which conveyed both affection for her human subjects and an insuperable right to occupy whatever space she pleased.

  Irene reached for the notepaper and wrote: Stowaway. She clipped the note to the clothesline and ran it forward. Sam glanced left in surprise; the next note wasn’t due for several minutes yet. He read it, frowned, and looked back. His mouth made a round, panicked hole.

  Sandy, on the other hand—Irene could have sworn the cat grinned back at him. It was a love affair between the two of them—unequal, naturally, in the face of Sandy’s obvious superiority of status—but a love affair nonetheless. From Irene’s lap, Sandy jumped to her accustomed place on Sam’s shoulders and started to lick his leather cap. Then she draped herself comfortably and went back to sleep.

  As dawn approached, the clouds thinned and then disappeared altogether. The black ocean spread beneath them, split apart by a cold white moon. Irene’s head was now intolerably heavy. She thought about Lindbergh propping open his eyelids. She took her pencil and dug it into the back of her hand, just to create some sensation, any kind of stimulation to her nerves. The airplane began to dive. Irene looked at Sam and saw that Sandy was gone and Sam’s head was bent to his chest. She lunged forward and grabbed the stick.

  “Wake up!” she yelled in his ear, but she couldn’t even hear herself. Still, the jostling woke him. Sam took the stick back and shook his head a little. Irene sat back in her chair and hunted for the Thermos of coffee, but it was empty. There was only one Thermos remaining. Irene opened it and poured some coffee into Sam’s cup, although it wasn’t that hot anymore, just warm. She nudged it into his hand and he drank. His eyes were wide and staring. Sandy wandered up, having completed a routine patrol of the premises, and sniffed at the box of sandwiches. Irene unwrapped one and fed the cat a few delicate bites of chicken. She poured some water into a coffee mug so that Sandy could drink.

  When the cat was satisfied, Irene put her headset back on and turned the volume as high as it would go. Faintly the pings of the radio beacon
came to her, just a hair off. Irene wrote a note to Sam: Adjust bearing two degrees south.

  Sam nodded. The ship banked slightly and righted itself.

  Irene calculated their position. They were now only three hundred and seventeen miles from Honolulu, or should be. She wrote another note.

  Two and half hours left.

  Then, You OK?

  Sam handed back the empty coffee cup and read both notes. Sandy was back on his shoulders now, grooming her long fur in preparation for another nap, cleaning Sam’s leather cap. He glanced back to Irene and lifted his left fist, thumb pointed upward.

  They raised Oahu with staggering precision, at a quarter past six in the morning. Sam saw it first. He nudged a nodding Irene in the shoulder and pointed out the cockpit window. Irene saw a smear on the horizon and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, it was still there, surrounded by the salmon-pink reflection of the sunrise behind them.

  Together they stared at this miracle, this mountain rising out of the ocean. Of course, Irene could not yet confirm that this was Oahu itself, instead of one of the neighboring islands—Kauai to the north, or Molokai or even Maui to the south—but that didn’t matter. They had plenty of fuel left. They had found Hawai’i like a speck of dust on the great Pacific. When at last the distinctive shape of Diamond Head grew clear from the window, she wrote a final note to Sam: Diamond Head sighted to south-southeast. Begin approach to Rodgers Field.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  Well, I’m alive after all. Coughing and sputtering, drenched and tumbled, on my hands and knees where the foam washes up, surfboard missing, swimsuit almost torn from my body, but I guess that counts as living, since I’m aware of it. Cogito ergo sum, as the philosopher said.

  My stomach heaves, and out comes about a quart of the Pacific Ocean.

  A pair of long, elegant feet appear to my right, then the bottom edge of a surfboard as it plants in the sand. Dimly, I hear the laughter of children.

  “Well done,” says Lindquist, without irony. “Now get out there and do it again.”

  Lindquist is the kind of mother who believes in routine, which means dinner at six o’clock sharp. The children are sent to the kitchen to help Lani prepare the food and set the table. I wander into the library in search of Olle’s liquor cabinet—Lindquist, it seems, doesn’t touch alcohol—and discover several bottles of fine old Kentucky bourbon whiskey, which gives me a new affection for old Olle. While I’m savoring a sour, I hear some commotion from the driveway, the putter of a small motorcycle and Lindquist’s voice calling out to somebody, who answers back in a voice not unfamiliar to me.

  I look out the back window and consider the distance to the guest cottage.

  “Janey,” says Lindquist, when she appears at the library door a moment later. “Look who’s come for dinner.”

  Mindful of manners, Leo’s brought a couple of bottles of wine to dinner at his stepmother’s house, even though he knows she doesn’t drink. “You and Janey can share them,” she tells him. “I’ll just stick to water.”

  Naturally, the children adore him. He’s their brother, after all, and they’ve known him all their lives. They pepper him with questions about Uncle Kaiko.

  “Aw, you know Uncle Kaiko,” he says. “He woulda checked right out of the hospital this morning if Dad hadn’t held him down. He likes the morphine, though.”

  “I thought you were going to stay there overnight,” I say.

  “I thought so too, but the fellow who was supposed to cover for me ate some bad clams at lunch, so I had to take the afternoon boat back after all.”

  “What a shame.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “Did Olle say how much longer he means to stay in Honolulu?” asks Lindquist.

  “Surgery went all right, but the doc wants Kaiko to rest up a few more days. I guess we’ll see. Dad might come back early, though, if Kaiko drives him crazy enough. But enough about all that. Kiddos? How do you like having a houseguest around here?”

  Doris leaps at the opening. “We taught Janey how to surf!”

  “Miss Everett,” says Lindquist.

  “Oh, you can call me Janey. We’re practically related, since you just about killed me this afternoon.”

  “Aw, I’ll bet you were a natural,” Leo says.

  Wesley jumps from his chair. “A big wave took her under! You shoulda seen it, Leo! She about drowned!”

  “Sit down, Wesley,” his mother tells him.

  Wesley sits, sort of, but his arms keep demonstrating the massive arc of the wave that was nearly the death of me. “It came over like this! She missed the top and just went head over—head over—” He’s laughing too hard to go on, the little brat.

  “She looked like a drowned rat,” Doris says helpfully.

  Leo looks at me. “You all right?”

  “Perfectly fine, thank you.”

  “So?” he says to Doris. “Then what happened? Did she pick herself right back up and get back in the water?”

  “Yes, she did,” I tell him.

  “Only because Mama made her,” Doris says.

  “Like riding a horse,” says Lindquist. “You fall off, you get straight back on again. And then she did very well. We’ll make a surfer of her yet.”

  I drink the wine. “I’m afraid I’m not planning to stick around that long. But I appreciate the thought.”

  Leo falls quiet. The conversation turns to school, about which I have some opinions, because it’s awfully satisfying to have opinions about other people’s affairs, don’t you think? Lani brings in dessert, which is some kind of pound cake dressed in pineapple sauce, and then Lindquist shoos the children off to help clear the table and bathe and change for bed. As I said, a mother who believes in the healthfulness of routine, or else she has another design in mind when she exits the room on some motherly errand, and Leo and I are left alone to contemplate each other across the table.

  He rises and divides the remaining wine between my glass and his.

  “Not staying long, you said?”

  “I’m here on business, I’m afraid. Isn’t that the very first thing I told you, the other night? Are you here for business or pleasure, you asked me, and I said Business, plain as day.”

  “Irene says you’re writing a book.”

  “Well, Irene’s right. I’m writing a biography of Samuel Mallory. The pilot? He taught your stepmother how to fly.”

  “Yes,” Leo says. “I know.”

  “I should hope so. He was one of the greatest pilots of his time. So I’ve come to talk to your stepmother about him, since—well, since I suppose you could say she knew him best. Didn’t she?”

  Leo pushes away his wineglass and leans forward to fix his eyes on mine. “So listen. I think it’s time we got something straight between the two of us.”

  “I think that’s a fine idea.”

  “I don’t hold it against you, sleeping with me to get to my stepmother—”

  “To be fair, I didn’t know she was your stepmother.”

  “Doesn’t matter if you knew or not. You wanted something out of me, and you got it, and no harm done. We both had a real nice time. No hard feelings. I just want to make things absolutely clear, though, for the future. If you do a single thing to hurt Irene, I mean if you cause her the smallest amount of misery—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Because she’s been through hell already, and she’s got the kindest heart in the world, and I know Mallory meant the world to her. I don’t want her having to relive all that. It’s in the past.”

  “I appreciate your concern for her, Leo. I really do. But she agreed to speak to me. I wouldn’t be here if she didn’t. I told her exactly what I wanted from her, and she said yes. She wants the story told. She wants the truth told. And sure, sometimes it stings a little, when you bring up all the old memories. Like lancing a boil, as they say. But in the end, we all feel better when the truth is out there in plain sight. Nobody
likes a secret.”

  “That’s a cute speech, Janey. But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d asked one.”

  “Can you promise me you won’t hurt her? And I don’t mean lancing some damn boil. You know what I mean. If you use her the way you used me—”

  “Believe me, I won’t do that. Not unless she invites me, anyway.”

  He brings his fist down on the table, hard enough that the wine sloshes in its glasses. “You tell her the truth and nothing but the truth. So help you God. That’s what I’m saying. You come to her clean. She gets to decide what she tells you and doesn’t tell you.”

  I spit in my palm and hold it out to him. “Promise.”

  He stands up and clasps my hand. “All right, then.”

  His grip is strong. He doesn’t pull back, and neither do I. We stare at each other across the table. From somewhere upstairs comes the sound of a child calling Maaaama!

  “You’re staying in the guest cottage, is that right?” Leo says.

  “That’s right.”

  He nods and releases my hand. “I’ll walk you back.”

  If you’re thinking Leo has any designs on me, now that we’ve reached our little accord, you’d be wrong. We walk across the lawn in silence, though I’m crackling with electricity. When we reach the door, he stops. He must have gone home first before he came to dinner, because he’s changed out of his sea uniform and now wears a white shirt and pressed trousers, a navy blazer, a plain blue tie, none of which I can make out in the darkness. Just the reflection in his eyes of the lights from the main house.