The Game of Love and Death(3)

FLORA Saudade stood on the lower wing of the butter-yellow Beechcraft Staggerwing C17B, ready to refuel the plane. She ran her hands over the upper wing, loving the way it was set behind the lower one. This little detail was everything. No other biplane was crafted this way. It made the Staggerwing an oddity. Flora, an oddity herself, loved that about it.

It made the plane look fast. Even better, the plane was fast: blisteringly so. The previous year, a pair of aviatrixes had flown a similar model across the country and won the Bendix Trophy, along with a seven-thousand-dollar prize. The thought of speed like that set off fireworks in her chest. If only.

But this particular plane wasn’t hers. It belonged to Captain Girard, who’d known her father in the Great War and who’d been something like a father to her since she was a baby herself, teaching her everything he knew about airplanes since the day she told him her dream of flight. He’d hired her on as one of his mechanics. He had an official pilot, though, a man who used the plane to ferry executives to their meetings around the country because this was faster and more impressive than travel by rail.

There wasn’t a businessman around who’d trust Flora to do the actual work of flying him, although plenty had unknowingly trusted her to make sure the plane was safe, which was every bit as important. People were funny about things they couldn’t see. If they couldn’t see it, it wasn’t there. Or at the least, it didn’t affect them. But the world didn’t work that way, did it? There were things all around that you couldn’t see, and these things had power.

And so, even though the captain had been nothing but generous, it would take years of what she made at the airfield and at her other job, singing at the Domino, to afford a plane of her own. A Staggerwing could cost seventeen thousand dollars. She’d have to win something like the Bendix to afford the down payment. Which she couldn’t do without a plane of her own.

Frustrated, as always, Flora reached up to fill the gas tank on the upper wing, inhaling the blue-smelling fumes of ninety-octane fuel. She caught a glimpse of the sky and frowned. The clouds overhead didn’t look good. She hoped they’d hold off for an hour or two so she could get in a flight. But you never could trust a spring sky in Seattle.

She hopped down, her boots crunching on the gravel runway. She climbed on the other wing to fill the tank on the opposite side. Fueling the plane always took a while: one hundred ten gallons of gas was a fair amount, and the men at the airfield were about as keen to help her as they were to see her in the cockpit.

She checked the snaps on her blue canvas coveralls. Securely fastened. She had a superstition that if she wasn’t buttoned up, nothing else could be. And while she was under no illusions about her own mortality — everybody and everything died someday — she aimed to keep that someday far in the distant future. Just thinking of it gave her a headache.

The plane looked good, so she turned the props over by hand to make sure no engine-damaging oil had accumulated in the pair of bottom cylinders. Satisfied, she opened the door on the port side and climbed in past the pair of seats in the back. Feeling her usual preflight giddiness, she walked forward to the front, where the polished wood on the instrument panel beckoned.

She strapped herself in and looked out the windshield. It wasn’t raining yet, but it would be soon. She could feel it, the sense of change and trouble in the air. Because the plane had a tail wheel, she couldn’t see the ground around her. But she’d checked and trusted it was clear. One of Captain Girard’s men waved a flag and Flora accelerated. When she reached forty miles per hour, the tail wheel lifted, giving her better visibility. She pushed the engine more, and at sixty miles per hour, the plane rose. Faster still, and she was fully airborne.

Flora smiled. Every time, this separation of herself from the earth below was a miracle. She rose, and gravity tugged downward on her belly as she ascended and nosed south. If not for the clouds, she’d be able to see Mt. Rainier, a snow-capped volcano that overlooked the city like a pointy-headed god. Below her, Lake Washington extended its own limbs, a long green-gray body of water that reminded her of someone dancing. The lake’s south end looked just like an arm flung skyward, where the north was a pair of bent knees. Pointed Douglas firs and brushy cedars surrounded it. And then, clustered around twisty roads, tiny houses and all the lives and chaos within.

She exhaled. The sky was hers. Hers alone. And it was forever, and when she was in it, she was part of something infinite and immortal. As long as she took care of the plane, it would take care of her. It was nothing like the jazz music she performed at night, which was never the same thing twice: sometimes wonderful, sometimes agonizing, always dependent on the moods and whims of others, influenced by the appetites of the audience.

She didn’t care for this dependence. Other people were forever grating her nerves or letting her down, or just plain leaving, sometimes for good. She trusted the Staggerwing as if it were her own body. Even the drone of the engine pleased her. As dissonant as it was to her musician’s ears, the steadiness of it freed her mind from heavy thoughts.

But today, she would not fly for long. A change shuddered across the sky. The engine rattled. A quick thing, as subtle as a pair of thrown dice. Then the rain. One drop, then another, and another hit the windshield until water trails streaked the glass. And while it was unlikely that this would turn into a thunderstorm, Flora knew she had to take the plane down. Thunder and ice were her enemies in the air.