The impulse to flee persists; the horizon beckons. If she could just go farther, live nowhere, possess only an airplane, and if that airplane never needed to land, then maybe she would feel free.
* * *
—
Jamie moves out of the flophouse, finds a small apartment of his own on a quieter street in the same neighborhood, one room only but clean and tidy with pine floors and an oddly miniature bathtub he can only fit in with his knees bent nearly to his chest. “Did you answer an ad seeking a gnome?” says one of his Boar Bristle friends.
Judith has gone to Europe to, as she put it, see what it’s all about. “You won’t pine for me will you?” she’d asked him. “Because I’m going to forget all about you.” And she’d smiled her crafty smile that could have meant either she was joking or she wasn’t.
There is often a loose swirl of women around them, Jamie and his friends, and Jamie now takes his appeal for granted. To demonstrate that he is, in fact, not pining for Judith, he beds the cigarette girl from a billiard hall, a couple of barmaids, a girl he meets out dancing who never stops making tart little jokes out the corner of her mouth, even when she’s naked. He regards his old belief that he should love the women he sleeps with as touchingly na?ve.
Judith has left some of her books in his keeping, and he reads Modern French Painters, Painters of the Modern Mind, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. He worries he has strayed too far toward the picturesque, that his lines lack rhythm, his compositions originality, that he is old-fashioned. He worries he has nothing to say with his paintings and that is why Judith has gone to Europe, to find men who do.
“Thanks, love,” he says to the women he buys beer and cigarettes from, not even hearing the word anymore.
* * *
—
Eleven days into 1935, Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. Stars hang outside the cockpit window near enough to touch, she writes. Ten thousand people surround her after she lands, and her red Lockheed Vega seems to wallow on a human sea.
“I wouldn’t want to fly over that much ocean,” says Marian’s boss, the man with the scarred lip.
He’s not one for posturing, and she likes him for it. Most of the other guys say they’d do it, too, if they had the kind of money Earhart has from her husband and from smiling for pictures and putting her name on malted milk tablets and luggage sets and whatever else. They act like her flights somehow don’t count, aren’t real.
Jane Smith is a real Alaska flyer now. She shuttles between towns and what pass for cities, out to bush villages and encampments and lonely cabins, bringing mail, food, fuel, dogs, dogsleds, newspapers, motorcycles, explosives, wallpaper, tobacco, doorknobs, you name it. She flies men out into the backcountry who strike it rich and others who drown or freeze or get eaten by bears or blow themselves up. She flies corpses wrapped in canvas sacks.
Once, a corpse smells so bad she lashes it to the wing. Once, a woman gives birth in her plane. Once, she lands on the frozen surface of the Chukchi Sea to rescue the passengers of a ship locked in ice. Somewhere she picks up a Russian word, polynya, for the patches of open water in the sea ice where whales come to breathe. The landscape is secretive and harsh and impossibly immense, and she borrows some of its inscrutability for herself, its disinterest in human goings-on. Unfriendliness is another form of camouflage.
In winter, the sun rises in the south. Far enough north, it never rises at all. She wears long johns and wool sweaters and over those a reindeer-hide suit. At first glance you wouldn’t even peg the pilot Jane Smith as a woman, would only see a shaggy block—she still remembers Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, signs a blank postcard to Caleb that way and asks someone going to Oregon to mail it from there—but she carries a knife and a pistol for when second and third glances happen. Rough country.
Cold is murder on planes. Fuel tanks freeze; hydraulic pumps don’t work; rubber tires and gaskets turn brittle and leaky; instruments quit. On cold mornings, she lights a fire pot under the engine, puts a canvas tarp over it to keep the heat in, watches like a hawk because the gas or oil or tarp itself might ignite at any moment and sometimes does. She’s put out more fires than she can remember. She’s broken propellers, skis, a wing, flown with sprays of leaking gasoline fanning out behind her. Once what she thought was solid ground had turned out to be marsh and splashed up at her as the wheels touched, flipping the plane. She was all right, hanging upside down in her seat, mucky water running in under her head. A mule team had to come pull the plane out. She patches skis with flattened-out gas cans, propellers with stovepipes, struts with birch trees. She flies in weather others shake their heads at, stashes her money away as she’s done since she was a child.