Her Last Flight(71)

“You have to understand, we don’t care much about the outside world around Hanalei.”

I nod. “That’s why she landed here.”

“I guess so. I think she hated all the fuss.”

“And how did you feel? Getting a new mother after all those years? And then your brother and sister coming along.”

I observe him carefully. I am not so drunk that I can’t pay attention. I note his hesitation, the brief furrow of his brow as he gives his answer some thought.

“I was just happy for Dad,” he says. “And I was happy for her. For Irene. I thought she’d had a rough time, and now she had someone to take care of her, for a change.”

“Everyone needs that, I guess.”

“Everyone but you. Isn’t that right, Janey?”

I put my hand on the doorknob. “Good night, Leo. Pleasant dreams.”



Inside the cottage, I pour myself a glass of water from the tap and swallow a couple of aspirins. Leo was right, I can take care of myself, all right. I know what to do when I’m going to bed a little the worse for Olle’s fine Kentucky bourbon.

But I don’t hit the sack right away. Instead I light a cigarette and dig out the leather diary from its hiding place—I won’t tell you where—and flip to the last few pages. I should explain that this is not some ordinary diary. More like a journal, a bewildering mishmash of jottings and engine diagrams, telephone numbers and map directions, which takes on narrative form only at the end, in which Mallory writes of his ordeal in the Spanish badlands, the anguish of his own injuries and the infinitely worse anguish of watching Irene suffer, while helpless to save her. His devastation that he will never see his daughter again. It’s not something I enjoy reading, and yet since I first discovered the diary, these harrowing words have drawn me back to read them, over and over, until they’ve scored themselves upon my skin. I seem convinced of something essential inside them, some secret to life itself; that if I experience Mallory’s agony often enough, I’ll discover what it is he’s trying to tell me.

I come to the last line:

GM to rescue at last thank God She will live



Every story has a hero and a villain, doesn’t it, and if it doesn’t—why, we fashion them ourselves. We want to take sides. We want to pledge our allegiance to one person or the other, one cause or another; to atone for our own thousand failings by planting ourselves on the high ground of righteousness, so we can crush some other poor schmuck beneath our heels and feel we are not simply right, but good.

All along, I have figured this story has one villain, and I thought I knew who it was. But maybe I was wrong, all along. Maybe I should have learned by now that nobody is all good or all bad; that hardly any battles are fought between good and evil. There is more good and less evil, or more evil and less good, but the only time I’ve ever felt the presence of absolute evil was when we opened the gates at Dachau and saw what men had wrought. And I’ll bet even those SS guards thought they were doing the right thing at the time. The human brain is capable of all kinds of contortions, all kinds of earnest and precise blindnesses, in order to protect itself from the idea that it might have made a mistake. That it might have taken the wrong side.

That final line, the last words Sam Mallory ever wrote, as he lay injured in his airplane and waited to die: what if I’m wrong about that?

I run my fingers along the ink, where Mallory’s fingers left their mark, and tap some ash into the dish beside me.



As usual, I wake up in a sweat a few hours later. To pass the time, I reach for the newspaper clippings my old friend Bill sent me, the ones about Howland and Australia and the scandalous Honolulu photographs that apparently drove Mrs. Mallory to attempt her own life. Eventually I fall asleep again and rise at nine. Lindquist is gone. I snatch some coffee from the kitchen and bicycle down the highway, right through Hanalei, until I reach the village of Kilauea and the post office on the main road, which serves more or less the same variety of purpose here. The woman at the counter doesn’t seem to recognize me. I ask if I can send a telegram. She hands me the form, and I tap the pencil against my lips a few times before I compose the message.

BILL YOU BIG LUG STOP HOW ABOUT PULLING ALL YOU CAN FIND ON GEORGE MORROW STOP SEND TO YOURS TRULY CARE OF KILAUEA POST OFFICE STOP HAWAII BEATS ALL STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE STOP MUCH LOVE JANEY





III




Flying with me is a business. Of course I make money. I have to or I couldn’t fly. I’ve got to be self supporting or I couldn’t stay in the business.

—Amelia Earhart





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





October 1936: California



Irene had wired ahead to George:

LAND BURBANK APPROX 5PM STOP NO PRESS STOP REPEAT NO PRESS STOP LOVE ALWAYS IRENE





When the airplane rolled to a stop outside Hangar A, however, Irene looked out the cockpit window and saw four or five men in shabby blue suits gathered respectfully at the corner, holding their notebooks and their cameras. A couple of flashes went off. Landon took off his radio headset and turned to Irene. “I guess your public awaits,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I told him not to call the press.”

“No such thing as bad publicity, right?”