Her Last Flight(79)
I turn to Kaiko. “Well?”
“Right this way. It’s in the back.”
“Of course it is.”
We pick our way around the skeletal airplanes, stripped for parts, and the various heaps of metal. When I poked through here a few weeks ago, I thought it looked exactly like somebody’s garage, oily rags and mysterious bits of machines in their haphazard piles, but now my eyes are more suspicious. I consider whether it’s just supposed to look haphazard. I mean, why would you just leave a propeller blade lying there on the ground? Neither Lindquist is the type to encourage disorder, even in a junkyard. I pause to finger the edge of a metal pole that looks as if it came from one of those tent kits for Boy Scouts.
Kaiko calls out from the other side of a stack of tires. “Here we go! Come on and give me a hand with this net, why don’t you.”
I walk obediently around the tires, around the bones of some old crop duster, just sitting there like a picked-over carcass, and there’s Kaiko, standing proudly next to a large, sweeping shape covered by one of those dense camouflage nettings they used in the war.
Ka-thump, goes my heart.
Maybe I should have spotted it before, I don’t know. But it hulks down in the back corner, covered by this netting that does the trick pretty well, makes a thing just dissolve into the background so that your eye passes right over it, unless your eye happens to know exactly what it’s looking for.
I grab another corner of the netting, and Kaiko and I slide it carefully away from the object beneath, the airplane, maybe the most famous airplane in the world. A shape so iconic, so memorable, you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize it for what it is.
A custom Rofrano Sirius, the one flown by Irene Foster in the Round the World Derby of 1937.
“Ain’t she a beauty,” Kaiko says reverently.
Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)
October 1936: California
The airplane arrived in pieces the next day, by train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles and then by truck to Burbank, where Rofrano’s team of mechanics would reassemble it inside Hangar D. Octavian said not to worry about the bill, she could pay it when she was done with the tour. The baby had been born shortly after he and Sophie had arrived at Burbank Hospital the other night, a girl they’d named Clara, and Octavian was in a generous mood.
Irene stared at the bright, wide interior of Hangar D and her airplane in pieces on the wooden floor. There was the silvery fuselage, there were the wings and the tail, the mighty engines, the crushed landing gear that would be replaced by a new one. Tools and rivets and everything else. She wasn’t thinking of the latest crackup; she thought about the flight to Rio de Janeiro, the way the city had looked when she plummeted down from the mountains to the landing strip, glazed in afternoon gold. How she had gazed through the window in wonder and remembered why she flew. Why flying mattered, and the rest of it was only the means to fly, the price she had to pay.
She spent all morning in the hangar, discussing the accident and the damage with the mechanics and with Rofrano, how long the repairs would take and how much they would cost, and then she went to the Burbank Hospital to visit Sophie and the new baby.
Sophie was in excellent spirits, as you might imagine. She was one of those women who gave birth like a peasant in the fields, and she was already disobeying the orders of the doctors and nurses by pottering around the hospital room, doing this and that. She carried the baby around like a small white-bundled football in the crook of her right arm. For some reason, this reminded Irene of Sam, who used to carry Sandy around the same way.
“She’s been an angel,” Sophie said, “although they’re generally angels at first, and then they wake up on the third day and turn your life upside down. Would you like to hold her?”
“I’d be afraid to.”
“Don’t be silly.” Sophie thrust the baby to Irene, who had no choice but to hold out her good arm and accept this present. “Open your eyes, Clarakins. That’s the most famous woman in the world holding you. And if you’re lucky, she might just teach you to fly someday.”
“Her father ought to teach her that.”
“No, I’d rather she learned from another woman. Octavian’s a darling and I adore him, but he can’t help condescend a little. He’d call her sweetheart or something, and she’d never learn properly. You taught me more about flying than my husband ever did.”
Irene thought about Sam, who had taught her to fly and never called her sweetheart. She peered into Clara’s face, which was squished shut and somewhat red, not at all like a baby in an advertisement. “Should I be doing anything? Is she breathing?”
“Of course she’s breathing.”
“How can you tell?”
“My dear,” said Sophie, “you just know. Now tell me about the airplane. What does Octavian say? Can it be fixed quickly?”
They spoke about the airplane. Sophie was something of a mechanical genius, knew everything about engines and aerodynamics. She took Clara back, to Irene’s relief. Outside the window sprawled Burbank, bigger and bigger every day. Outside the door, the nurses giggled and listened through the keyhole, thrilled that Irene Foster stood on the other side of it. Irene interrupted herself in the middle of a discussion of ailerons. “How did you meet? You and your husband.”