Her Last Flight(104)
When they had crashed in the middle of the night, Sam had carried her out of the wrecked fuselage because he was afraid of fumes. Now it was morning, and the desert heat began to take hold. They lay quietly in the shade while Irene dangled between sleep and hazy half-consciousness, and Sam gave her water and stroked her hair. In a moment of lucidity, she asked if he was hurt.
“Oh, just my bum ankle,” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“A little.”
“You should walk. You should try to find help.”
He was smoking a cigarette. She could smell the tobacco, a more pungent variety than the ones he used to smoke back in California. She wanted to turn her head and look at him, and possibly she could have done if she tried hard enough, but her skull felt so heavy and her neck so stiff. So she just imagined him instead, hair askew, smoking thoughtfully against a boulder or something while a blue sky surrounded him.
“Irene,” he said, “there’s nobody for miles. This is the desert, the badlands.”
“You should try.”
“Can’t leave you here alone. Might be days.”
“Then at least you’d save yourself.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, stroking her hair, “don’t worry. They’ll send someone out to look for us. Just sit tight, all right?”
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”
He laughed and kissed her forehead and said she was the same old Irene, the same good sport, game for anything. What he didn’t say was that his bum ankle was actually broken in several places, and that his left ear was nearly torn off, and a deep gash cut through to the bone of his left thigh, narrowly missing the femoral artery. No, he wasn’t going anywhere, and certainly not miles out into the scorching desert. Not unless he had to.
Still, when night fell again, Sam managed to drag her back into the fuselage, which had settled deep enough in the earth that it was not such a great height, just a ledge. In the darkness, she couldn’t see the blood, or his mangled face, so she didn’t know how much effort this required. She went to sleep, and sometime during the night she dreamed that they were outside, the three of them, alone in the night, Sam and Irene and their dead child, who was wrapped in a bundle in Sam’s arms so she couldn’t touch him or see him. She tried to scream, to give some voice to her anguish, but the peculiar paralysis of dreams had stiffened her so she could neither move nor speak. The stars twinkled coldly at her grief. Even though she couldn’t actually say the words, she heard her own voice ask Sam where they should bury the baby, and he replied that when the sun rose he would dig a hole beneath a boulder nearby that reminded him of a bear.
She realized she was awake. She asked Sam to repeat what he had just said.
“I buried him with my own bare hands in the graveyard next to the airfield,” Sam said.
“Him,” Irene said.
“Yes. The commandant promised to put up a headstone when the bombing stops.”
As he spoke, Sam made some rustling movements. Irene didn’t know he was binding up his thigh and his ankle with some gauze in the medical kit. The iodine and the morphine he saved for her, because he knew that burns were the most painful wounds of all, and the most susceptible to infection.
“Did you give him a name?” Irene asked. “Will there be a name on the stone?”
“Henry Foster Mallory. Is that all right?”
Irene couldn’t think. She didn’t remember that she herself had told Sam, if their baby was a boy, to name their son after her father. Between the physical pain and the morphine for the pain, there was not enough room for memory or even grief. She only felt grief when she was asleep.
But she wanted to feel grief. She wanted to mourn. So she just said, Yes, that’s perfect, and let herself go.
After that, Irene did not want to live. She could survive the loss of a baby, because women did that all the time, and she could survive pain because she had experienced physical agony so often before. But she could not survive both at once, and when their water began to run out the next day, there was just no point in living, was there? Nobody was going to rescue them. She begged Sam to take his service pistol and shoot her. If she were dead, he could keep the rest of the water for himself; he could go for help, he could save himself.
Sam said that if she were dead, he would have no reason to save himself. He went on changing her bandages. He moved her inside the airplane, to shelter her from the sun, and sat with her, and brushed her hair, and wrote in his diary. He said he wanted some record of events to survive when the wreckage was found. In case his Pixie ever grew up and wondered what had happened to her father.
In the meantime, in the outside world, people were still obsessed with the mystery of Irene Foster’s disappearance, although not so much as three weeks ago because hope of discovering her alive had begun to fade. The Sahara was a harsh, miserable, inhospitable climate, after all. You could not survive long. So airplanes continued to crisscross North Africa, but not so many as before, and interestingly George Morrow was not among them. George Morrow was in Spain.
He had flown from Casablanca a week ago, and while there’s no record of exactly where he first landed—so much Republican paperwork was destroyed in the course of war—it’s certain he arrived at the government-held airfield in Valencia on the fifteenth of May. Probably he had heard some rumor, or received an anonymous note, because the Foster disappearance had captured attention everywhere, even in the midst of war, and many in Spain did not approve of wives leaving their husbands for lovers. So Morrow came to Valencia and asked to speak to the commandant, and the commandant—after some persuasion, no doubt—admitted that they had recently received word that Miss Foster and Mr. Mallory had gone missing while flying between Bilbao and Valencia, and that one of his best pilots was out right now, scouring the desert in order to find them.