Her Last Flight(100)
“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 romantic 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.