Her Last Flight(53)

Night fell suddenly, the way it does in the middle of the ocean. One minute they stared, stunned, at a monumental sunset, and the next minute they were sunk in darkness. Sam lit a cigarette that flared bright orange out of nowhere.

“Does it ever seem to you like an article of faith,” he said, “that we’ll see the old thing again tomorrow morning?”

Irene laughed. “That’s not very scientific.”

“There’s more to life than science, Foster.” He stretched and lay back in the sand. “Look at all those stars. You don’t see stars like that in Los Angeles.”

Irene lay back too. They’d spent the afternoon taking apart the right-hand engine, trying to find the source of the trouble, and she was tired enough to fall asleep right there, in the open air. Sam was right about the stars. They were dazzlingly profuse, a spill of diamond dust. Behind the crown of Irene’s head, the moon rose gracefully from the eastern horizon.

“What we need right now is a bottle of champagne,” said Sam. “There’s nothing like an ice-cold bottle of champagne on a beach at night.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t like to drink, on account of my father.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s who you are, right? Your childhood and everything. That’s what the shrinks say, anyway.”

The smoke curled around the two of them. Until she met Sam, Irene had always disliked the smell of cigarette smoke. Now it was familiar and safe, the scent of Sam; not when he was flying, because he didn’t smoke when he flew, but when he was unwinding after. When he was unwound. After a moment of contemplation, he added, “You never had a drink? Not once?”

“Never.”

Sam put his hands behind his head and said, “Bertha drinks.”

Irene thought, Bertha? Who’s Bertha? Then she remembered.

“A lot?” she asked.

“You could say that. It’s hard to say how much. She hides it.”

“That’s a bad sign, hiding it.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Something brushed against Irene’s foot, her leg, winding its way upward. A cat’s fur, clean and fluffy. Irene reached down to pet her, but Sandy had already disappeared to transfer her caresses to Sam. She climbed onto his chest and started her rasping purr. Sam stroked her back and said, “I come up to visit her and Pixie, and there’s bottles in the trash, empty bottles in the cabinets, behind the books in the bookshelf.”

“What about your daughter?”

“Oh, she takes good care of Pixie, all right. If she didn’t, now . . . if she laid a hand on my girl . . .”

Sandy was now purring like a propeller engine under his hand, almost delirious. Because the moon was still low in the sky, somewhere behind them, it didn’t yet illuminate much, just the outline of Sam’s head and Sandy’s fur.

“You have to understand,” he said. “When we met, Bertha and me, I was a kid. War’d just ended. Everyone else who started out in my squadron got killed, except me and Rofrano. So I came out west. Picked up an old Jenny and started barnstorming to make some dough. Then I remembered about Bertha. Her first husband, he was in the squadron, got shot down a month before the Armistice. Good fellow, friend of mine. I knew he’d lived in Oakland. So I thought I should look her up and pay a duty visit. See if there was anything I could do for her. And she—well, I can’t even say how it happened. I didn’t come for that, I swear. I wasn’t in love with her or anything; I didn’t even like her that much. She was just there, is all. She didn’t ask for anything back, just me coming by to—to keep her company. We hardly even talked. I didn’t know much about women. I was in the middle of it before I realized what she was up to. Stupid kid that I was. Then she told me she was having Pixie.”

“And that’s when you got married?”

“We got married real quick, ten-minute ceremony at the registry office, just the two of us and some witness from the building permit office upstairs. Nice lady, curly hair, spectacles. I had the sense she felt a little sorry for me. Afterward, we went straight home to Bertha’s place in Oakland and set up housekeeping. Painted the nursery myself. And Bertha set about trying to domesticate me.”

“You can’t blame her for that, though.”

“No, I can’t. Can’t blame her for wanting a nice tame husband. She said I should quit all the barnstorming and find a real job in an office someplace, and maybe she was right. She had this idea that she could make me into an accountant or something. That’s what she wanted, to be an accountant’s wife with a fancy house and a daily maid and a nice piece of tin parked out front. And I wasn’t that man.”

“No, you’re not. Not a bit.”

“I tried, Irene. Honest, I did. But you know how it is. Flying’s what I do, it’s my blood and heart, the only thing keeping me sane, the only thing I can do better than the other man. Better than just about anybody. You understand, don’t you? How you feel when you’re up in the air, and the earth’s laid out below you, and nothing to tie you down.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Well, Bertha didn’t. She hated it. She hated that I cared about airplanes more than I cared about her; she couldn’t understand why I needed to fly. Especially once Pixie was born. She started having these rages. Then the drinking. She’d always liked the bottle, sure, but it got to be a habit. She’d get a couple of different doctors to prescribe the booze for her nerves or something, buy it all at the drugstore in town that looked the other way. Made everything worse. She’d hit me, throw things, break the dishes, enough to make you think those drys are maybe on to something. Later, she’d calm down and explain how very sorry she was, but I had driven her to it, I’d made her do all that. It was all my fault.” He stroked Sandy for a minute. “One night—must’ve been about a year ago—I figured I’d had enough. Said if she kept on like this, I’d leave for good, I’d take Pixie with me and go.”