Her Last Flight(44)

“That expression,” she says. “In the other ones, he’s just posing for the camera. When I remember Sam, this is what he looks like.”



I first started taking photographs when I was small, maybe eight or nine. My father gave me one of those Brownie cameras for my birthday one year, and such was my adoration for him, I accepted this present as you might accept diamonds. He showed me how to use it, and even today, when I’m messing about with cameras, I sometimes recall my father’s scent, deep in the cavities of my head, that flavor of cigarettes and shaving soap and perspiration and engine oil and whiskey that set him apart from everyone else. I hear his rumbly voice as he explains how it works, the principles of light, the mirror inside the camera that places an upside-down image on the film in the split second of the shutter’s opening and closing. Then he talks about subject and composition and shadow, and I listen so earnestly because this is my father, who knows everything, who is capable of anything.

Sometimes I think about the time he took me out for a drive to look for things to photograph and how we stopped for lunch at some little roadside diner, I don’t remember where, and how we both ate grilled cheese sandwiches while he told me I shouldn’t listen to a word he said about subject and composition, I should photograph only what I wanted to photograph, and how I wanted to photograph it. I said I wanted to photograph him, so he sat back and smiled, posing, and I told him not to smile, I wanted him to look exactly as he really was and not some grinning stranger. So he stopped smiling and looked out the window, and I took a photograph with my Brownie, kind of blurry because I was too close, just across the table. But I still have that photograph. I wouldn’t trade that photograph of my father for all the gold in Fort Knox, because in that moment we were happy, in that photograph all our happinesses are contained.

Afterward, on the way home, he told me I ought to be a photographer someday. He said I had the instinct for it, because here I was, only nine years old, and already I knew how I wanted to photograph somebody: not as mere fact but as truth.



“What about your face?” I say to Lindquist. “What are you thinking in that photo?”

She laughs. “As I recall, I’m thinking I’d much rather be back inside the airplane.”

But she’s not in the mood to say more. Sometimes photographs have that effect as well; you’re drawn back into yourself, your own reflections on the past, and you don’t want to share them. That’s fine too. I figure she’ll go to bed thinking about what we’ve just seen, about that monumental flight to Australia with Sam Mallory, the flight that changed her life, and not only will she wake up remembering all kinds of details she’s long buried, she will want to unburden them to somebody.



Because of all the bicycling and surfing, I have no trouble falling asleep as soon as I crawl between the fresh new sheets of that bed. My battered, exhausted body can do no more. Not a single clear thought, not a twitch of muscle. For a few blessed hours I am plunged in the deep, and then I burst back out, panting, just as fast as I went down.

I consult my watch. Twenty-six minutes past one o’clock.

As I know from experience, there’s no point in lying flat on your back, or tossing and turning in some vain attempt to get back what you have lost. I throw off the covers and walk naked (I don’t wear pajamas, but maybe that doesn’t surprise you) to the carrying case that holds all my photographic equipment.

The dark of night, I’ve learned, is the perfect time to develop film. In the first place—well, it’s dark, which is a necessary condition for the process. In the second place, making photographs is good for the soul. There’s a routine to it, a series of precise maneuvers on which you must concentrate all your attention. Once, back at the Scribe bar in Paris, Bob Capa told me that he took a hundred and six photographs on the landing beach on D-Day, the best photos he ever took, priceless, historic, irreplaceable, and some goober in the photographic lab back in London mishandled the film and destroyed all but eleven of them. So you see, you can’t let your attention wander. You can’t let any other ideas distract you. For a blessed hour, you can think of nothing else.

So I find a light socket for my red bulb. I lay out the trays, pour in the chemicals. Unroll the film from its casing, clip the ends, load the reel. Another thing I love about developing film at night, nobody bothers me. As much as I enjoy company—a certain kind of company in particular—I prefer to be alone. Answer to nobody, pretend nothing, expend not the slightest effort to entertain, to cajole, to argue your cause. To manipulate the inanimate is so much easier.

Not all the negatives are worth the effort of turning into photographs, mind you. I inspect each one thoroughly, and in the end I find only six I want to print. As I pull each one from its bath and hang it to dry, the way a housewife might hang her laundry, I feel a sense of perfect accomplishment, as if I’ve done all I could. I wash out the trays, put everything away. I unplug my red light from the wall and wind the cord around it. Then I switch on my penlight and gaze at each print in turn.

There is Lindquist with her short silver curls, her graceful, unscarred neck, the firm line of her jaw, although I would have liked her to gaze a little more toward the camera lens, because her eyes are astounding when fixed upon you.

There are the cherubs at play in the surf, goddamn them. Lani in the kitchen. The cherry-red Buick, which looks in motion even when it’s at rest. And last, there is Leo. I pull the photograph from its clothespin to examine it more closely. I realize I’ve forgotten what a perfect specimen he is, how like a drawing from an anatomy textbook. He lies on his stomach in the squalor of a sinful bed. One sheet twines around his ankle; another streaks across the small of his back; he clutches a pillow under one arm. The camera finds the left side of his face, exhausted and happy.