Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “All right,” he said. “But I’m flying too. If we both fly, we can finish sooner. And when these children are safe in Valencia, Irene, you’re done. Is that clear? You stay in Valencia with them.”

  “Only if you stay in Valencia too,” she said.

  “Irene, I have to go back. I can’t just desert.”

  “The only thing left to do is to fight to the death, and you promised you weren’t going to fight. Remember? Back in California, you said you’d had enough of fighting.”

  “That was before I saw what happened here.”

  “You promised. You swore to God, remember? If you stay here and fight, then I’ll stay here and fight, right beside you, so you can keep your promise to me. You can die in my arms.”

  “Jesus, Irene. How do you remember these things?”

  “That’s my deal, Sam.”

  She stared him down, until she could see him weigh the scales in his head: on the one side, his death wish; on the other side, Irene and the small grasshopper they had made together. Finally he shook his head. The grasshopper won.

  Outside, Raoul was readying his airplane to fly, checking the skin for any holes or ruptures, checking the propeller blades and the wheels. Irene noticed that his eyes were red and she stopped to ask him if there was any news, had he heard anything.

  “Yes,” he said. “They have found her body at last. She was killed in the first wave. A building collapsed on top of her.”

  “Oh, Raoul! I’m so sorry.”

  He turned to climb into the cockpit and stopped, with his hand on the edge of the wing. He spoke into space, but just loud enough that Irene could hear him.

  “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why God should have killed her and the child, when the sin was mine. Why he did not just kill me instead.”

  “God did not kill them, Raoul. The German bombers did.”

  Raoul turned to her and kissed her hand. “Good-bye, Señorita Foster. I fly back to El Carmoli now. May God watch over you and my friend Mallory.”

  All that week they ran to Valencia without incident, not a single German airplane in sight, though the sky was wide and blue and cloudless. Sam flew the only spare airplane he could find in Bilbao, a French-built Potez bomber that could barely manage a hundred miles an hour. In the air, flying the Sirius next to this ramshackle ship, Irene felt like a Thoroughbred trying to keep pace with a Shetland pony. In the back of the Sirius was a woman who was supposed to be chaperoning the twenty-two children crammed in the fuselage, which was not equipped for the transportation of any animal at all, let alone a human child, let alone twenty-two of them. By the final trip, the woman seemed to be drunk. Irene was so relieved when they arrived safely in the municipal airport in Valencia and handed the children over to some supervisor, she nearly threw up. It was the middle of May and the weather had turned hot. Sam followed her into the ladies’ waiting room, which was empty, and waited until she came out of the washroom.

  “I have to go back to Bilbao,” he said.

  “No, you don’t. You’re done, remember? You promised.”

  “Well, there was a radio message from the commandant, and another bus full of children just turned up at the airfield. If I leave now, I’ll get there just before sunset. Then I fly back first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Not without me, you’re not.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re pregnant! Don’t do this to me, Irene. If I lose you, I’m done for.”

  “No. We fly together, Sam. That’s the deal. And if we take my ship, we’ll be there and back in half the time.”

  “Irene,” Sam said wearily, “you are the goddamn most stubborn woman in the world.”

  But the mechanics told them that some of the Sirius’s propeller blades were damaged, and they would need the night to make repairs. They flew the Potez instead and just made it back to Bilbao before sunset, and while the commandant had taken his room back by now, Sam found them a private corner in the hangar, no more than a closet, so they could sleep away from the noise of the children and the pilots. The room had no light at all, and as soon as Sam closed the door Irene took off his shirt, unbuttoned his trousers, and the touch of her fingers on his skin was like the striking of a match. There was no room to make love on the floor, so Irene just braced herself against the wall while the frenzy overtook them both. In less than a minute Sam had finished. As soon as he caught his breath, he apologized. Irene thumped back against the wall and carried his wet, slack body on hers. If she could have spoken, she would have told him that he shouldn’t be sorry, that it was sublime to give comfort to your lover when he needed it. That you knew for certain you loved somebody when his pleasure gave you more joy than your own.

  Somehow they fit themselves in blankets between the walls and fell into oblivion, which ended abruptly in a crash that rattled the floor at eight minutes past three in the morning. Sam bolted up, wide awake.

  “What was that?” Irene said, although it was obvious.

  Sam just swore and grabbed his clothes. The room was black, and he couldn’t find his service pistol. Irene discovered it inside her shoe and gave it to him, although she wasn’t sure what he meant to do with it. Shoot bullets at the incoming airplanes? Another crash made the walls shake, and now the children were stirring on the other side of the partition, crying softly, nobody screaming because they all knew what a bomb sounded like, they knew there was nothing to do but hide and pray.

  “I’m going to man the guns,” said Sam, meaning the three paltry, aging antiaircraft guns atop the control tower. “Get the kids under cover, all right? As best you can.”

  He took an instant to kiss her and ran through the door. Irene shoved her feet into her shoes and followed. The hangar was chaos. The chaperones were not warriors. They didn’t know what to do, whether to hunker down inside or take the children and flee into the farmland. Irene cupped her hands and hollered in Spanish, “Into the cellar!”

  Possibly she had the word wrong, but everybody understood when she yanked open the wooden hatchway to the bunker beneath, which had been dug out of the clay some weeks before. Sam had shown her, the first day. It was damp and primitive, nothing but dirt floor and no lights, but it afforded some cover from the bombs that now made the whole building shudder, made such a racket it got into your head so you couldn’t think. Explosion after explosion, each one louder and bigger, so you knew they were getting closer. Irene thought she could hear the rat-a-tat of a gun, in between the blasts, and she hoped to God it was the Republican antiaircraft guns and not the German strafing.

  She kept on shooing children down the ladder. There was only the faintest light to see them. The last one scrambled beneath the floor of the hangar, and Irene set her foot on the ladder, but she couldn’t force herself down. She thought, Someone’s missing, I’m sure there’s somebody missing, that can’t be all of them.

  She called out and heard nothing except the mad detonation of bombs, the roar of aircraft engines, all of which had grown so loud they drowned out the sound of the guns. Irene ran frantically around the hangar, looking beneath airplanes, behind wheels, in corners, but she couldn’t see a thing, only shadows that might or might not be objects, might or might not be a terrified child. It was just too dark. She thought she heard a whimper. She stood still and closed her eyes. The hangar rocked around her. She turned left, took four steps, and stumbled over a small, warm, sobbing body.

  “There you are,” she said, although she couldn’t even hear her own voice. She scooped up the child—he was so light, like a bird, underfed and hollow-boned—and carried him in her arms toward the hatchway, from which the tiniest light drew. She set the child on the top step of the ladder and gave a small push, yelled down below that there was another one coming, and then the whole world turned as bright as day, as hot as the sun, as a bomb dropped right on the southeast corner of the hangar, fifty feet away, and detonated.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  November 1947

  It would be romanti
c and fitting, I suppose, to tell you that Lindquist and I fly to Ki’ilau by moonlight inside the Rofrano Sirius that sits at the back of its hangar, shrouded in camouflage netting. But when we arrive at the airfield, Lindquist makes no move to the hangar that harbors the world’s most famous airplane. We take the company ship instead, the one we flew a few weeks ago, when we went on our picnic.

  I am no more inclined for flight tonight than I was then, but what choice do I have? She’s found me out. She knows my weakness, my terrible need. She understands how deeply I require the knowledge inside her head.

  I did not lie to you. I never said I wasn’t Sam Mallory’s daughter, did I? Since leaving home, I’ve told only one person, and that was Velázquez. I told him in the last hours I knew him, as we walked around the dusky streets of Paris together. It was my final hope, my single remaining card to play, my ace, and though Velázquez was at first disbelieving, then astonished, and then struck with awe at this evidence of God’s mysterious ways, still he wouldn’t break his promise. He apologized and explained that it was not his secret to tell.

  I forgave him for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for misleading you. It’s just that I don’t tell anybody who I am. People have a way of making assumptions about you, when they discover you were spawned by some famous person, some person they think they knew because they read about him in a newspaper. And to reveal your true self to another person, that’s like taking a knife and paring away a section of your own skin, so that somebody else can see the workings of your blood and muscle for himself.

  But here is the truth. When I was thirteen years old, as I said before, my mother told me my father had left us for good this time, had taken up with one of his whores and wanted no more to do with us. She packed me in the car and took me to Reno, Nevada, where you could then obtain the most efficient divorce in America. She told me we would move to a new home in Washington State, containing a new father, whose name she adopted for me. She told me that Mr. Everett would take better care of me than Mallory ever had, and I should take him to my heart. I didn’t believe her. I tried to run away and find my father again, but I didn’t get far before my stepfather found me and brought me back and whipped me on my naked buttocks with his belt. He told me that my mother had just been protecting my feelings, that my father was actually dead, he had been killed in an airplane crash like the crazy fool he was, and I should forget he had ever existed.

  I don’t think my stepfather quite realized what kind of effect this statement might have on me. He wasn’t a man of much imagination, so he couldn’t have understood what it was like when your father made his living in an airplane, flying stunts, flying races, flying for daring distances over water, just flying, all the time, every day, so that his daughter would lie awake at night and pray and pray that his airplane would not crash, that her father would return to her and cradle her in his arms just one more time, that was all I asked of God. When Mr. Everett told me that my worst nightmare had come to life, that my father’s beloved body had gone to earth and been destroyed, I felt not sadness but relief.

  Finally, there was no need to worry that he would be killed, because he was already dead.

  Except that Sam Mallory was not dead yet. Just imagine my astonishment when I left home and got out in the world and discovered that he was still alive and kicking in 1936, the year before my stepfather popped my cherry on the Chesterfield sofa of his private office. Just imagine my guilt that I hadn’t succeeded in escaping that day when I was thirteen, that I might have found my father and saved him if only I’d been more intrepid, more clever, more determined.

  Just imagine my fury at the woman who had stolen him from me, who had known him when I had not, who had won his heart and kept it for her own exclusive use.

  Anyway, I’m telling you now, better late than never. I was born Eugenia Ann Mallory of Oakland, California, daughter of Samuel and Bertha Mallory. My father was the greatest pilot the world has ever known, and I am here to find out how and why he came to die on the badlands of northern Spain, at the exact moment I needed him most.

  Lindquist flies by moonlight and what she calls dead reckoning, and when we land we make only the softest of bumps before rolling to a stop in the middle of the night grass. She takes me to the same place we had our picnic. The moon stands above the horizon and strikes a luminous path across the ocean before us. Lindquist sits right at the edge of the cliff, and after a second or two of hesitation I join her, even though I’m dead scared of heights. Did I mention that? Something to do with my fear of airplanes, probably. I don’t look down, that’s all. If I do, the vertigo will overcome me, because I’m already a little dizzy. My heart thumps in my chest like a dynamo. Lindquist doesn’t speak, so I pipe up in order to break this terrible silence. I ask her how she figured out I was Mallory’s lost daughter.

  “Do you remember when I brought you out here a month or so ago?”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Well, I had my suspicions. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Your hair’s dark, for one thing, and what I remember most about Sam’s little girl was her bright blond hair—”

  “My mother loved that hair. Started to go dark right after Dad came back from Australia. Stood to reason, I mean she was a brunette herself. But she was real disappointed. She had her heart set on a blonde.”

  “Did she? I guess I’m not surprised. Nothing that woman could do would surprise me.” She crosses her legs, Indian style. “Still, every time I looked at you, I heard bells dinging in my head. You look like him. Your eyes are alike, and you have his jaw, just a little softer, but I only recognized that later. It was your gestures, your way of speaking. The way you sit and look at the person you’re talking to. So I thought I’d bring you out here, away from all the distractions. I watched you while you ate and talked. And I just knew. You were like Sam reborn as a woman.”

  “Except I hate to fly.”

  “That’s no surprise. It must have terrified you as a child, the way he kept crashing and getting hurt.”

  I pull my cigarettes from the pocket of my jacket. “You’ll excuse me.”

  “That’s another thing, the way you smoke like a chimney.”

  “I do not.” I light the cigarette. “I only smoke when absolutely necessary.”

  “My God.” She puts her face in her hands. “My God. I can’t do this.”

  I’m calmer now. My heart has settled back into something approaching its usual rhythm. In my other jacket pocket hangs my pistol. I don’t know if I mean to use it. Depends on what Lindquist has to say, or what she means to do with me, Sam Mallory’s last remaining issue, as we dangle from this cliff in mutual desperation.

  “Can’t do what?” I ask.

  “I haven’t told a soul. That’s the only way you survive, you keep it locked away so you can’t think about it. If Olle knew . . .”

  “Not even Olle?”

  “This is off the record, do you hear me? This doesn’t go in your book. I don’t care how you end it, you can’t write this.”

  I wet my finger and hold it in the air. “Scout’s honor.”

  “I’m only telling you because you’re Sam’s daughter, and you have a right to know. Nobody else does. Nobody else has the right to know a thing about him.”

  I flick some ash down the side of the cliff. Below us, the water churns against the rocks.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  May 1937: Spain

  Irene regained consciousness inside an airplane. For a moment, this didn’t seem strange to her. She was aware of pain, but it was a foggy, unspecific kind of pain, as diffuse as it was terrible, and she realized she was drugged. Morphine?

  Baby, she thought.

  She tried to move her arms, but she was strapped to something, a stretcher. She screamed out, My baby, where is my baby? She couldn’t feel if it was still there. She couldn’t feel her stomach at all. The grasshopper stirrings had gone quiet, but then this human insect of hers went to sleep all the time, went st
ill for hours, so maybe it was drugged, too, on the morphine they had given her.

  A bomb. That was it; that was what had happened. A bomb in the hangar. She was badly hurt. She was on an airplane, somewhere above the Spanish countryside, and though she couldn’t see anything, she knew it was one of the Republican airplanes, a Potez bomber by the sound of it. Sam’s airplane.

  She felt her mind slip away again. Sam was alive. Everything would be all right, because Sam was still alive.

  They were landing. Irene felt the sharp angle of descent. She thought hazily that it was too sharp, they were descending too fast, something had happened. She heard somebody’s voice, Sam’s voice yelling to her, but she couldn’t make out a word of it.

  We’re cracking up, she thought.

  Something was wrong with the engines. One of them had gone out. There was a cough, a sputter, and the other engine died.

  No fuel, she thought.

  How had they run out of fuel? The mechanics should have filled the tank last night, after they arrived back from Valencia. Maybe the mechanics had forgotten. Maybe they had forgotten to tell the mechanics? Sam was shouting at her from the cockpit. Telling her, probably, to brace herself. As if she could. She heard him better now that the engines were dead, but the thing about coasting, it was still noisy. There was the rattle of the airplane, the roar of the wind around you.