Her Last Flight(3)

GM to rescue at last thank God She will live



I set my thumb on the page and close the book.

Nearby, the metal cross glints in the sun. A skiff of sand whirls in spirals around it. What a mystery! I mean, how the devil do they do it, these tiny, individual grains? How do they swirl about in communion with each other? Create this thoughtless symmetry? Nothing is random in nature; it is all pattern, pattern, pattern.

I open the book again. The wind riffles the pages. I find my place and read the entry again. The mule brays, irritated. I place my finger under the line and trace the words while I read once more, now aloud. Still their pattern escapes me.

GM to rescue? She will live?

Rescue. Somebody came to his rescue? Then why is he dead?

And who is She? There was no she, just this single man in his airplane. No second body lies here, no female body. Besides, Velázquez said nothing about a She.

On the other hand, Velázquez never did reveal a single detail he was bound to keep quiet, did he? Velázquez would never have mentioned this woman if her presence here were a secret.

The wind dies briefly. The sand settles back to earth, as if it had never dared to leave, and I believe I can hear the sound of my blood as it wooshes down my veins.

Well, then. Suppose there was a woman on board, a She. A woman whose presence was a secret. A She who was rescued, as the line suggests, while the man who wrote the line was left behind to die. A woman who flew airplanes. A woman who meant so much to this man, this skeleton, that he would thank God for her survival, even in the face of his own annihilation. A woman, let’s say, who had also disappeared during the spring of 1937—famously so—less than a month before this airplane went down. Two grains of sand, moving in communion with each other.

My God, I think.

Why did I never see it before?

I slide the leather book into the pocket of my coat. My fingers are numb, even inside the gloves. Already the sun falls, the air turns, the wind grows colder against my cheek. The mule brays once more, like he means it, lady. It’s time to go.

I untie the mule from the juniper bush, but before I climb aboard, I turn to the silent airplane, the cross, the dunes of sand, and fix the scene in my memory. This was supposed to be the end of the journey, and it seems it’s only the beginning. The diary is like a hot coal in my pocket. She will live. I stick my foot in the stirrup and swing into the saddle. The book strikes my thigh. A new road stretches before me, toward some destination that is not a place but a person, a woman who’s supposed to be dead but might instead be alive, be saved, according to the orisons of a dying man, preserved in this ink and leather that beats against my leg as the mule strikes off gratefully toward Pamplona.

Because here’s what I know for certain about that pile of abandoned bones, which was once a pilot named Samuel Mallory. There was only one She.

Only one person in the world to make him invoke the name of God.





I




I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

—Amelia Earhart





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





March 1928: California



Irene surfed at dawn, when the gray light coated the water but the sun hadn’t yet crested the mountains to the east. For one thing, there were fewer people around, and for another thing, they were the right kind of people, people who didn’t want to be around other people all the time. People like her.

Like her, they arrived in darkness, driving dilapidated Tin Lizzies held together with spit and baling wire. Like her, they parked along the roadside and carried their boards in reverent silence down one of the paths that led from the cliffs into the dunes. Like her, they dressed neck-to-foot in bathing costumes of thick navy blue serge, because that Pacific current came down straight from Alaska, bearing fog and giant gray whales; like her, they waxed their boards in long, thoughtful strokes, waiting for enough light to see by. Like her, they listened to the noise of the surf, the volume and tempo of the crashing waves, the mood of the ocean this particular morning: whether she was lazy or angry, forgiving or ruthless, bitch or saint. Some unstudied combination of the above.

Then someone stood up, slung his wooden surfboard under his arm or over his head—they were heavy in those days, enormous, carved from redwood—and started off toward the water. One by one, the others followed. They stepped delicately into the wash of spent waves. The coldness of the water shocked them, every time. Their feet went numb, their legs. Still they continued. They unslung their boards and set them in the water and set themselves on the boards, in direct confrontation with the oncoming surf. The breaking waves crashed against them as they paddled onward. Brine filled the cavities of their noses. They watched the breakers and timed each one, calculated the seconds of calm between one wave cresting and the other one building behind it. At last someone made his move. Took his board out beyond the line of breakers and turned to paddle with the current, along the current, fused his puny human momentum with the momentum of the wave below him as the bottom of the wave met the bottom of the continent and climbed upward, upward, until the laws of physics wouldn’t allow any more of this suspense and the wave curled over itself and toppled, and the man either rode this wave or toppled too, depending on his skill and luck. He was joined by another man, and another one, and pretty soon they were all out there silently surfing, like a pack of dolphins, communicating by movement and custom instead of words, while the sun slowly rose above the cliffs and blinded them.