Though I’m supposed to be looking after this cat, it seems to have the opposite idea. It settles on the counter, about a yard away from my coffee cup, and stares at me. Its movements are stiff, and its eyes are rheumy, and its fur seems to be missing a patch or two, but other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, you’d never guess it’s nearly two decades old. I mean it can still leap from floor to stool, and from stool to counter, and I don’t for a minute imagine I could do that.
“So you were Mallory’s cat first,” I observe.
The cat makes some adjustment of its forelegs that might be a shrug.
I reach for my pocketbook and light a cigarette. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”
The bell dingles on the door. I look over my shoulder to inspect the newcomer, and what do I see but Irene Lindquist in some kind of plain, neat uniform, sliding a pair of gloves over her long fingers.
“Ready?” she says.
“Ready for what?”
“I’m afraid I told you a lie. The passengers canceled last night, when they learned about the pilot change.”
“What the devil? Then why did you—” I catch sight of her steely expression. “Oh, no. Not on your life, Lindquist. I don’t fly.”
“You will today.”
“I will never. That’s final. It’s nonnegotiable. It’s the one single incontrovertible fact of my life.”
What I’m trying to tell you is that Lindquist allows me an entire bottle of Olle’s best Scotch whiskey—he keeps a supply in the airfield cafeteria for nervous passengers—on board the airplane, although she won’t allow me to smoke. The other terms of our arrangement aren’t worth mentioning. She drives a hard bargain, that’s all, and the next time Leo tries to tell me his stepmother’s got the kindest heart in the world, oh my, sweet as pie, wouldn’t hurt a fly, that stepmama of mine . . .
At which point I realize I’m singing these thoughts aloud, so I clam up before anything else escapes me.
“Oh, I’ve heard worse,” Lindquist says cheerfully.
Even to my inexperienced eye, this airplane isn’t exactly the raciest piece of metal aloft. It’s designed to carry tourists over the Hawaiian islands or else locals desiring a more snappy form of transportation than the ferries, and what you want for such purposes is an airplane that reassures passengers they’ll hit the ground again safely. It’s a chunky, sturdy beast of two engines and eight seats, not counting pilot and navigator, and what strikes me as I fasten the straps, taking care not to jostle the bottle in my lap, is that the pilot can’t exactly see out the cockpit window.
“Yes, I can,” says Lindquist.
“Not very well.”
“It’s better once we’re airborne, and the plane levels off.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m not complaining. The less I see the better. Are you sure I can’t have one little smoke?”
“Only if you let me take the bottle away.”
“Why am I here?” I wail. “What have you done to me?”
“I have a better question. What makes you think you can write a book about Sam Mallory without ever having flown in an airplane?”
“It is called imagination, Lindquist. You literal types wouldn’t understand.”
She puffs that away and continues doing whatever it is you do, when you’re preparing a machine to fly in the air. I hear the noise of engines like the buzz of angry insects. The air smells of gasoline and engine oil. Lindquist fiddles with her dials, scribbles something in her log, that kind of thing. I close my eyes and recall the way the water surged gently beneath my surfboard—no, hold on. That ended in disaster. Better to think of a ride that ended well, like Leo the other night. Leo before Uncle Kaiko. Leo before the fall. Leo—
The airplane moves. My eyes pop open. I suck down another mouthful of Scotch whiskey, and doesn’t it run smooth against the thump of my heart? The airplane turns. The engines spool to a roar. Build and build, until that ramshackle fuselage shakes under the pressure of so much power held in check, until the whole world rattles, something’s wrong, it’s an earthquake, it’s the end of the universe.
Then we go. Tear along at some godawful speed while the scream climbs up my lungs. No. No. NO! It’s too late, I’m strapped in this goddamn chair like an execution, I can’t get out, I can’t make her hear me through all that racket, my God, I can’t make her understand that I’ve changed my mind, I want to stop, I want to stay safe on the ground, now faster and faster, until I close my eyes again and give it all up. I say to myself, never mind, what does it matter, if I die I die, this is how Velázquez died, I will die as he died, I will know what he knew, I will feel as he felt, I will maybe see him somewhere—not in heaven, sinners as we are and unashamed, but somewhere warmer—and I’ll tell him maybe I might have married him, if he had lived, because it seems I had become a little attached to him after all, it seems I still keep the memory of him tucked deep beneath the glassy surface of that organ most people call a heart. And while I’m thinking all these thoughts, one after the other, experiencing this strange revelation, something happens.
We rise in the air.
All that rattling melts into something like peace.
And I think, Lord Almighty. I’m flying.
I lean forward and tap Lindquist on the shoulder. “Where are we going, anyhow?”
“Just a little island out to the west,” she says, “where we can be alone.”
Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)
August 1928: Howland Island
The island was shaped like a pickle instead of a potato chip not because of some cartographer’s error, but because it was not Baker Island. It was Howland Island, thirty-two miles to the north, and they had only just caught sight of it at the extreme southern edge of the horizon. So Sam and Irene had narrowly made landfall at all.
The Centauri wasn’t in bad shape, all things considered. There was no apparent structural damage. The engines and the wheels had come through the hard landing fine, except for a blown tire. The only destruction came to the longwave radio antenna, which had broken off, leaving them unable to communicate.
“But they know we’re here,” said Sam. “That was my last transmission, that we had sighted land and were headed down.”
“To Baker Island. And they’ll sail on over to Baker Island and find no trace of us, and they’ll think we ditched at sea and drowned.”
“Baker’s not so far away. We’ll see a ship and signal. Anyway, they’ll look for us here, if they don’t find us on Baker.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Positive.”
It was almost noon. After landing, they had crawled out of the ship and taken their bearings, had drunk some water and settled under the shelter of a wing and slept several hours, while the equatorial sun rose at last and carpeted the landscape in heat. Irene had woken first and shook Sam. Now that it was light, she saw that he had cut his forehead, which was smeared and crusted with dried blood. They had gone down to the beach and washed it with salt water, and now they were staring at the empty horizon.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Sorry for what?”
“Panicking.”
He lay back in the sand and shaded his eyes. “You did just fine.”
“But why did you make me do it? We could have been killed.”
“Because I knew you could do it. You’re a natural. Anyway, I figured you needed the practice.”
“The practice?” She hit his shoulder. “The practice?”
He opened one eye at last and squinted at her. “One day you’re going to be flying solo, and you’re going to have to crash some bird somewhere, and I want you to know how to do it. I want you to live.”
I want you to live. Irene looked up at the hot sky. She wanted to say something, but her throat was stiff and dry. Sam lay back in his flight suit, tanned and relaxed, hair damp, one blue eye squinting in her direction. As if they were on some kind of vacation! The air was hot and dry and smelled of the ocean. Irene heaved
herself to her feet and strode back to the airplane.
According to the charts, Howland Island was about twice as big as Baker, a thousand acres or so, made of coral sand and surrounded by reef. Nobody lived there, except birds. You couldn’t live there. The surface was flat and nearly barren, just scrub grass and a few trees huddled atop a small rise near the middle. Irene had a dread feeling that there was no fresh water of any kind.
At least its desert qualities made it easy to land on. The Centauri had dug ruts into the sand and grass, but it hadn’t spun or crashed or been damaged by trees. Just an intact shell of an airplane with no fuel. Irene ducked under the tail and kept walking westward. The sun was high above her, beating down on the brim of her hat. The ocean rushed against the reef. The tide was low, exposing the shallows, and Irene thought they could probably catch some fish there, some crustaceans or something.
Water was a bigger problem. Irene had packed a makeshift distilling kit among her equipment, but distilling seawater was a lot of work for meager reward. Still. Enough water to keep them alive, if they needed it.
If they needed it?
My God, they were marooned! They were shipwrecked on a deserted island! They were alive. They were lost! They were not lost. They were only stuck.
She stopped and folded her arms and stared at the western shore. The waves washing up and tumbling around the coral. No surfing here. Sam came up beside her and stood too.
“You should get out of the sun,” he said.
“How long, do you think? Until we’re rescued?”
“Shouldn’t be long. A few days.”
“What if it’s longer?”
She meant survival. But as they stood there together, side by side, watching the empty ocean, gathering sunshine, nothing but grass and sand and rocks and salt water and the two of them, the question took on something else, some untoward quality. Some intimacy that answered itself.
By the summer of 1928, the Pacific Command of the U.S. Navy had grown accustomed to assisting American flyboys on their harebrained adventures. After all, it was in the nation’s interest to promote aviation and thereby encourage the development of the world’s best airplanes and pilots; you never knew when another war might break out and such things would be required without delay. Last year there was the Dole Air Derby to Honolulu—what a circus that was—and before that you had several individual attempts to span the Pacific from San Francisco to Hawai’i, some of them foolhardy and some of them heroic, and some of them both at once. So the navy knew how to communicate with men in the air, and it knew how to fish them out of the water.
Tracking them down on some scrap of an island in the middle of the Pacific, now. That was a new one.
As it happened—and this should come as no surprise to those familiar with the pattern of threads linking just about every paid-up member of the American Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with all the others—Admiral John Smith, the officer in command of the South Pacific fleet in the middle of 1928, was an old friend of Mr. George Morrow, the two of them having prepped together at St. Paul’s in the first decade of the century. They had worked closely together in the arrangements for the landmark Mallory–Foster flight to Australia, and when the first garbled Morse code came through to the USS Farragut at 0323 local time on the morning of the second of August (something about an engine, possible detour) Admiral Smith immediately sent a relay on to Mr. Morrow, who had been delivered to Sydney by ocean liner a day earlier.
We can only imagine Mr. Morrow’s true feelings as he received this message in the middle of the Australian night, from the comfort of his hotel suite overlooking the harbor. History records only his official reply to Admiral Smith, which was sent nearly two hours later, sometime after Sam and Irene had landed on Howland Island:
COMMENCE SEARCH WITH ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES STOP INFORM IMMEDIATELY OF ANY DEVELOPMENTS WHATSOEVER
It’s also worth noting that the Sydney Morning Herald had, during this period of time, somehow obtained the details of the accident and duly broke the news in its early edition, which carried the following headline:
PILOTS MISSING OVER PACIFIC!
Aircraft Disappears During the Night
U.S. Navy Sends All Available Ships in Search of Flying Pair
Possible Crash Landing at Sea; Rescue May Take Weeks
Australian Navy Gallantly Offers Assistance
The news electrified the world.
Back on Howland Island, the Flying Pair at the center of all these radio transmissions and newspaper headlines were busy unloading cargo from the fuselage of the Centauri, which was heating rapidly under the scorching sun. They made an inventory of supplies. There were five gallons of drinking water in a lightweight aluminum canister, specially designed by the Carnation milk company in exchange for promoting the many nutritional properties of Carnation condensed milk, of which they also carried a dozen cans. (Mr. Morrow had made this arrangement, of course.) Before their departure from Honolulu, the head chef of the Moana Hotel had personally prepared two dozen Hawaiian ham sandwiches, with his compliments. Sam and Irene, pausing for lunch, each ate one and pronounced it delicious. That’s some ham, Sam said, licking his fingers, and in fact this became the slogan for the Hawaiian Canned Ham Company after the whole affair was over, except that Irene’s photograph appeared in the first advertisement, tanned and smiling as she held up a sandwich. (The terms of this deal were also negotiated by Mr. Morrow, on Irene’s behalf.)
Beyond the water and the condensed milk and the sandwiches, there wasn’t much in the way of emergency supplies. Difficult decisions had had to be made as regards that all-important trade-off between comfort and weight, and once they’d committed to carrying a radio set equipped for both short- and long-range transmission, they’d had to sacrifice other items. Already they’d drunk the remaining coffee in the Thermos containers, which had turned lukewarm anyway. They had a bottle of concentrated lime juice, as recommended by an expert on diseases of nutritional deficiency; two pounds of chocolate, supplied by the Hershey Company; two pounds of powdered eggs; five pounds of ship’s biscuits, courtesy of the navy; and a can of peanut butter from the Pond Company, made according to a new process that churned the butter smooth and kept the oil from separating. Irene had never tasted peanut butter, but Sam said it was delicious, rich in protein and vitamins, a fine choice for emergency rations.
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Irene.
Sam shrugged and held out the tin to Sandy, who sniffed it delicately and thoroughly before lashing out her pink tongue for a sample. “Sandy likes it,” he said.
“That’s because she’s hungry.”
“You might be pretty hungry yourself in a few days.”
“In a few days, we’ll be on our way to Australia.”
Sam covered the tin of peanut butter and set it back in the food locker, which was made of the same lightweight aluminum as the water cans. “I certainly hope so,” he said.
“Hope so?”
Sam brushed a little sand from his clothes and stood and stretched. Sandy wound around his legs, sniffing for more peanut butter. Irene stared at his profile while he reached into his pocket and drew out a pack of cigarettes—among their emergency rations were a dozen cartons of same—and lit himself up. He strolled to the beach, and Irene rose to follow him.
“Tell me something,” she said. “That race to Hawai’i last year. How long were you out there floating on the ocean, before they found you?”
“Eleven days.”
“Why’d it take so long? They knew where to find you, more or less.”
“Because it’s a big ocean, Irene. If they pick the wrong spot to look, why, you’re on your own. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Of course she knew that. It was just something you didn’t want to admit to yourself, didn’t want to think about when you were starting on your journey, deciding what to pack and what to leave behind, making all these plans and calculations. Now here they were. It wasn’t the wo
rst that could have happened, not by a long shot. They were still alive and uninjured, except for a couple of scratches. They were on solid ground, a charted island known to mariners. Undoubtedly the navy was on its way to rescue them. It was all just a matter of staying alive! Irene folded her arms and stared at the reef, bubbling and frothing in the rising tide.
“Anyway,” said Sam, exhaling smoke, “at least we’ve got each other. We’re not alone. That’s something.”
The sun beat fiercely on the crown of Irene’s hat. Birds squawked overhead, looking for lunch inside the coral. Beyond the reef, the water was calm and blue without end, the horizon perfectly flat. Sam’s shoulder was round and sturdy next to hers.
“That’s everything,” she said.
Night fell suddenly, the way it does in the middle of the ocean. One minute they stared, stunned, at a monumental sunset, and the next minute they were sunk in darkness. Sam lit a cigarette that flared bright orange out of nowhere.
“Does it ever seem to you like an article of faith,” he said, “that we’ll see the old thing again tomorrow morning?”
Irene laughed. “That’s not very scientific.”
“There’s more to life than science, Foster.” He stretched and lay back in the sand. “Look at all those stars. You don’t see stars like that in Los Angeles.”
Irene lay back too. They’d spent the afternoon taking apart the right-hand engine, trying to find the source of the trouble, and she was tired enough to fall asleep right there, in the open air. Sam was right about the stars. They were dazzlingly profuse, a spill of diamond dust. Behind the crown of Irene’s head, the moon rose gracefully from the eastern horizon.
“What we need right now is a bottle of champagne,” said Sam. “There’s nothing like an ice-cold bottle of champagne on a beach at night.”
Her Last Flight Page 16