Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t like to drink, on account of my father.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. It’s who you are, right? Your childhood and everything. That’s what the shrinks say, anyway.”

  The smoke curled around the two of them. Until she met Sam, Irene had always disliked the smell of cigarette smoke. Now it was familiar and safe, the scent of Sam; not when he was flying, because he didn’t smoke when he flew, but when he was unwinding after. When he was unwound. After a moment of contemplation, he added, “You never had a drink? Not once?”

  “Never.”

  Sam put his hands behind his head and said, “Bertha drinks.”

  Irene thought, Bertha? Who’s Bertha? Then she remembered.

  “A lot?” she asked.

  “You could say that. It’s hard to say how much. She hides it.”

  “That’s a bad sign, hiding it.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Something brushed against Irene’s foot, her leg, winding its way upward. A cat’s fur, clean and fluffy. Irene reached down to pet her, but Sandy had already disappeared to transfer her caresses to Sam. She climbed onto his chest and started her rasping purr. Sam stroked her back and said, “I come up to visit her and Pixie, and there’s bottles in the trash, empty bottles in the cabinets, behind the books in the bookshelf.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “Oh, she takes good care of Pixie, all right. If she didn’t, now . . . if she laid a hand on my girl . . .”

  Sandy was now purring like a propeller engine under his hand, almost delirious. Because the moon was still low in the sky, somewhere behind them, it didn’t yet illuminate much, just the outline of Sam’s head and Sandy’s fur.

  “You have to understand,” he said. “When we met, Bertha and me, I was a kid. War’d just ended. Everyone else who started out in my squadron got killed, except me and Rofrano. So I came out west. Picked up an old Jenny and started barnstorming to make some dough. Then I remembered about Bertha. Her first husband, he was in the squadron, got shot down a month before the Armistice. Good fellow, friend of mine. I knew he’d lived in Oakland. So I thought I should look her up and pay a duty visit. See if there was anything I could do for her. And she—well, I can’t even say how it happened. I didn’t come for that, I swear. I wasn’t in love with her or anything; I didn’t even like her that much. She was just there, is all. She didn’t ask for anything back, just me coming by to—to keep her company. We hardly even talked. I didn’t know much about women. I was in the middle of it before I realized what she was up to. Stupid kid that I was. Then she told me she was having Pixie.”

  “And that’s when you got married?”

  “We got married real quick, ten-minute ceremony at the registry office, just the two of us and some witness from the building permit office upstairs. Nice lady, curly hair, spectacles. I had the sense she felt a little sorry for me. Afterward, we went straight home to Bertha’s place in Oakland and set up housekeeping. Painted the nursery myself. And Bertha set about trying to domesticate me.”

  “You can’t blame her for that, though.”

  “No, I can’t. Can’t blame her for wanting a nice tame husband. She said I should quit all the barnstorming and find a real job in an office someplace, and maybe she was right. She had this idea that she could make me into an accountant or something. That’s what she wanted, to be an accountant’s wife with a fancy house and a daily maid and a nice piece of tin parked out front. And I wasn’t that man.”

  “No, you’re not. Not a bit.”

  “I tried, Irene. Honest, I did. But you know how it is. Flying’s what I do, it’s my blood and heart, the only thing keeping me sane, the only thing I can do better than the other man. Better than just about anybody. You understand, don’t you? How you feel when you’re up in the air, and the earth’s laid out below you, and nothing to tie you down.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Well, Bertha didn’t. She hated it. She hated that I cared about airplanes more than I cared about her; she couldn’t understand why I needed to fly. Especially once Pixie was born. She started having these rages. Then the drinking. She’d always liked the bottle, sure, but it got to be a habit. She’d get a couple of different doctors to prescribe the booze for her nerves or something, buy it all at the drugstore in town that looked the other way. Made everything worse. She’d hit me, throw things, break the dishes, enough to make you think those drys are maybe on to something. Later, she’d calm down and explain how very sorry she was, but I had driven her to it, I’d made her do all that. It was all my fault.” He stroked Sandy for a minute. “One night—must’ve been about a year ago—I figured I’d had enough. Said if she kept on like this, I’d leave for good, I’d take Pixie with me and go.”

  Sandy got up suddenly and nipped Sam’s nose. Ouch, he said, laughing, and Irene sat up a little and took the cat in her arms and buried her nose in the clean-smelling fur. “So what happened? Did you leave?”

  “Leave? Nah. I was just trying to shape her up. I didn’t want a divorce. I couldn’t do that to Pixie, take her away from her mother. But I swear to God, I never figured Bertha’d do what she did.”

  Sandy jumped from Irene’s lap and stalked off into the darkness. The whites of her, enamored of moonlight, vanished last. Irene realized her palms were damp, her heart was thumping. She said daringly, “Well, what did she do?”

  Sam sat up and took out another cigarette, and while he was lighting it, while he held the cigarette in one corner of his mouth and snicked the flame from the lighter, he spoke from the other corner of his mouth. “I had a show down in Vacaville the next day. I drove there, checked into this motor inn, like I always do. Got up in the morning, did some flying, had some dinner with a friend or two, came back in the evening. Manager said there was a parcel for me.”

  The cigarette was now lit. He stuck the lighter back in the pocket of his flight suit and removed the cigarette from his mouth and just sat there, dropping ash into the sand, staring at the salt froth that shimmered atop the reef.

  Irene sat up next to him and gathered her knees in her arms. “So?”

  “She’d cut off her pinky toe—the left one—and sent it to me in a brown cardboard box, lined with tissue. And a note saying she’d slit her throat if I didn’t come back.”

  The next morning, Irene got up early and did the next best thing to taking a bath. She went swimming in the clear, salty water of the island’s leeward shore. The reef dropped off quickly, so she stayed close to the island’s edge, stroking back and forth as the sun rose from the opposite horizon. Then she plunged underwater and opened her eyes. She had seen pictures of coral reefs, but nothing could prepare you for the reality, for the colorful, intricate explosion of life. When she came up gasping, the barrenness of dry land amazed her.

  There was no sign of Sam. The airplane had come to rest on the other side of the rise at the center of the island, and he was probably still sleeping under the shelter of the right wing. Irene crawled onto the beach and let the warm air dry her skin. When she rose and put her clothes on, she thought she saw a flash of movement in the grass, which might have been a bird or might not. Otherwise, the world was still, and for the first time Irene felt the enormity of those hundreds of miles of ocean surrounding them on all sides, those billions of cubic feet of salt water. The insignificance of this speck of land on which they had perched.

  She headed back to the airplane.

  Sam wasn’t in the hollow where he had slept. Irene rummaged in her kit bag until she found her tortoiseshell comb and sat on a rock to untangle her wet hair. As she sat there, swearing, Sam sauntered up from the north, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki trousers, shaking the droplets from his hair.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “My damned hair!”

  He cocked his head to one side. “Why
don’t you cut it?”

  “My mother always said—before she died—” She stopped short.

  “And how long ago was that?” Sam asked.

  “When I was eleven.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s an awful long time ago, though.”

  He held his crumpled shirt in one hand and seemed unaware that his chest remained bare, unaware that Irene was aware. She kept her gaze on his face, but the chest remained at the periphery, pale to the neck, ridged on each side with hungry ribs. When they were little, Irene and her cousins used to swim all the time in the pond at her grandparents’ house, and she hadn’t paid any attention to the boys’ chests, except to envy them for their shirtlessness. Now she tried to summon the old nonchalance.

  “I don’t have any scissors,” she said.

  “I’ve got a pair in the toolkit.”

  She set down the comb. “All right.”

  Sam went to fetch the scissors from the toolkit. Sandy stalked up from nowhere and licked her paws with an air of worldliness. Irene peered closer and saw a smear of blood on the white fur of the cat’s chin, and she thought about the large black rat she’d seen scurrying between some clumps of seagrass yesterday afternoon.

  Sam returned with the scissors and held them out to her. Irene looped her fingers through the handle and seized a fistful of hair, matted and wet from the swim, uncombed since the morning they left Honolulu.

  “Well?” said Sam. “Go on.”

  She handed back the scissors. “You do it. I don’t have a mirror.”

  “I’ve never cut a woman’s hair before.”

  “Neither have I, and at least you can see what you’re doing.”

  “All right. Turn around.”

  Irene turned around on her rock, and Sam went down on one knee and looked this way and that around her hair, brow furrowed. Well? she said, and he replied that it was an awful lot of hair, and how much did she want cut off, anyway?

  “To the ears, I guess.”

  “The bottom of the ears, or the top?”

  “Start at the bottom.”

  Sam took a piece of hair that grew next to her temple, stretched it out, examined it, and lifted the scissors. Irene closed her eyes and heard the soft whisk of the scissors closing, felt the tug of the blades cutting through the strands. She opened her eyes. He took another piece and did the same thing, then proceeded methodically around her head, picking and slicing, picking and slicing. Irene remained absolutely still, her hands folded on her lap. The hair piled up in giant drifts on the sand around her, though she didn’t look down until after it was over. Until Sam sat back and surveyed his work.

  “Now, I’m no expert, but I think I’d better comb it through first and then sort of trim it all around,” he said. “You all right?”

  Irene handed him the comb. “Oh, yes.”

  Now he combed the shortened hair, and it was much easier. He was gentle too. Slow, because they had all morning and all day, there was no hurry at all. Sandy took an interest in the shorn hair, then became bored and wound between Sam’s legs. The sun climbed higher. Sam’s fingers worked their way through Irene’s hair, and already it felt different, lighter somehow, freer. He picked up the scissors again and trimmed carefully. The curls sprang away from the blades, possessed of new, exciting life. When he was finished at last, he stood up and took her hand and pulled her up.

  “How does it feel?” he said.

  Irene shook her head. The damp strands flew around her face and stuck to her cheek. She touched her fingers to her hair in wonder. “It feels . . . I don’t know. It feels like somebody else. How does it look?”

  “Sensational.”

  “Don’t kid me.”

  “I’m not kidding. Come on, have a look.”

  Sam got his shaving mirror out of his kit bag and held it out in front of Irene. She stared back at this woman who was not her, who could not possibly be Irene, modern and tousle-haired and freckled and sunburnt and liberated, her eyes such a pungent shade of blue they might have been pieces of sky. She couldn’t take her eyes off those curls. She lifted them one by one and held them to the sun.

  “You see?” said Sam. “Sensational.”

  Meanwhile, the rest of humanity was working itself up into a state of unprecedented frenzy over the fate of the lost pilots. In the space of forty-eight hours, thanks to the miracle of the modern newswire, Sam and Irene had become just about the most famous people on earth. Members of the press had camped out in their dozens outside the Oakland home of Mrs. Samuel Mallory, who stayed indoors with her daughter and had her food brought in so she wouldn’t have to speak to anybody.

  The press didn’t have to camp out outside the home of Mr. Hank Foster. Irene’s father obliged them by joining the hoopla himself. He chewed the fat with the newsmen, he shared stories and photographs of Irene, he made optimistic, colorful comments about the likely fate of the pilots that were quoted around the world. Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald issued regular statements from Mr. George Morrow, on behalf of the pilots and the navy, in which no detail was too small, no speculation too outlandish, no possible mention of the sponsoring corporations unmentioned.

  In later interviews, Irene would insist that she never dreamed that the world was holding its breath as she and Sam awaited rescue on Howland, and in view of her natural modesty, she was no doubt telling the truth. Despite having experienced the vast outpouring of interest in Sam Mallory’s disappearance and miraculous resurrection the year before, Irene was the kind of person who simply couldn’t imagine such a magnitude of fuss being made about her. She hoped that a ship or two might be dispatched in their direction, and was embarrassed to occasion even that much trouble. When that longed-for ship hadn’t appeared by the fourth day, she just assumed it was because the U.S. Navy had more important priorities than a couple of lost pilots, whose misfortune was their own doing. Maybe she was right. Despite countless interviews and research through official and personal correspondence, nobody’s yet established just why Sam and Irene were left marooned on Howland for so long, when any fool with a map could see that they might be found there.

  Nobody can pinpoint a reason why the world—and the pilots themselves—were left in suspense for so long.

  Despite careful rationing, Sam and Irene ran out of sandwiches and condensed milk on their seventh day on Howland Island. Irene suggested they look for crabs. She used to go crabbing all the time when she was younger, and her father would take her down the shore for the day.

  Sam and Irene set out together on the leeward side of the island in the late afternoon, carrying one of the empty water cans. They wore swimming costumes, which they’d both packed in their kit bags because a swimming costume didn’t weigh all that much, and they’d certainly expected to go swimming once they reached Australia. Irene’s was a plain, modest suit of navy blue serge; Sam’s was nearly identical except larger and less copious on the chest. The water was warm and clear and remarkably calm, just lapping against the pale sand while the sun glittered on top. Irene marveled at the sight of her feet as she waded out. From the other side of the island, they heard the soft, steady crash of the surf, but here there was nothing but peace, and the fish that nibbled curiously at their toes, and the bright red strawberry hermit crabs that crawled along the reef, scooping up all the smaller creatures. Life grew abundantly here, in the nutrient-rich waters that swelled up the walls of the extinct underwater volcano on which they were perched. Irene plunged her hand in the water and lifted out a wriggling crab.

  “Here you go!” she said. “Dinner.”

  Sam waded over with the empty can. “Blow me down.”

  Irene dropped the crab inside and said, “Now it’s your turn.”

  “Me? I’m just looking out for sharks.”

  “You’re not scared of the claws, are you?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “You are too. Come on, here’s another one. Just put your hand in and grab him from the top.”

  Sam made a fed
-up noise and dropped his arm into the water. When it came out, a red crab dangled from his fingers. “Dinner,” he said.

  He dropped the crab in the can, and the pair of hermits scuttled over and under each other. Sam peered in, expression of wonder.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never been crabbing,” said Irene.

  “I grew up in Kansas, for God’s sake.”

  “Still. You’ve lived in California for years.”

  “Never went crabbing, though. You have to start young with these things. Your dad has to teach you.”

  “Well, now I’m teaching you,” said Irene.

  Sam looked up from the water can. The sun was heading down. Sam’s face, already deeply tanned, had turned to gold in the horizontal light. He was grinning. He grinned all the time now, like they were on some kind of exotic vacation instead of marooned together on a barren island, supplies running low. Irene smiled back, because you couldn’t help smiling back at a grin like that, Sam Mallory’s grin.

  “You’re teaching me a lot of things, I guess,” he said.

  That night they cooked the crabs in the small pit they’d excavated from an old guano mine, a scar left in the ground by the American Guano Company some fifty years before. Inside this pit, they made the tiny, efficient fires that distilled seawater into something potable, and now they boiled the crabs in the seawater—the fresh water was far too precious—and it turned out all right. For fuel they dried handfuls of tough sea grass and bound it into sticks. Irene could build a decent fire, too, but Sam seemed to have some elemental connection with the whole business, from first spark to dying flame to ember.

  After dinner, they lay in the sand and stared at the stars, as they did most nights. There wasn’t anything else to do when the sun went down, nothing to see by, so they talked and watched the night sky. Sam was intimate with all the constellations, but Irene hadn’t paid much attention to the stars at all until she started learning the principles of celestial navigation.

  “The same stars that guided Magellan,” Sam pointed out.