Once, she flies to McCarthy, only knows she’s to pick up a man and bring him back to Anchorage. He’s waiting beside the airstrip in handcuffs. He’s a miner, she’s told. He raped another miner’s wife.
Fine, she says. She has them stow him in the back with some bundled furs she’s picked up. They cuff him to his seat. Fifteen minutes in the air, and she rolls the old junker plane tidily upside down. She figures if it breaks apart at least she’ll take him with her, but they come upright again. He’s screaming, both his shoulders dislocated.
Bad weather, she says when she delivers him under a bright blue sky. Got bumped around a bit. The story gets out, makes a man think twice before he tries to get close to her.
Come summertime, the one-eyed circumnavigator Wiley Post is touring Alaska with beloved national wit Will Rogers in a nose-heavy, cobbled-together plane: wings from one model, fuselage from another, pontoons from yet another. Marian glimpses them in August when she’s up in Fairbanks, shakes her head at that plane, those fat pontoons. Near Barrow, at the northern edge of the continent, Post and Rogers crash taking off from a lagoon and die. Marian knows lots of dead pilots now. Alaska’s an easy place to crack up. Bush pilots fly into mountains, vanish over the ocean.
All the more reason to keep to herself. No need to mourn.
* * *
—
Helen Richey, a well-known racer and aerobatics pilot, gets hired by Central Airlines to be the first American woman to fly commercial passenger aircraft. But she’s rarely on the roster, isn’t trusted in bad weather, is asked to give talks promoting the airline instead of actually flying. The men in the pilots’ union—there are only men in the pilots’ union—won’t let her join. She quits. What else can she do? No American airline hires another female pilot for another thirty-eight years.
A new American plane, the DC-3, makes commercial passenger travel profitable, can take off from mud, sand, snow, whatever you want, develops a reputation for being tough, even indestructible. Two propellers, a ninety-five-foot wingspan, an engine that can be serviced quickly and easily. The wartime version will be the C-47. Ten thousand of them. Skytrains, Dakotas, Gooney Birds. They’ll fly the hump from India to China, schlepping cargo through a maze of mountains too high to fly over, the passes still at fifteen thousand feet. They’ll disperse D-Day paratroopers like dandelion seeds. They’ll crash in jungles and deserts and mountains and cities. They’ll litter the ocean floors. Of the ones that survive the war, plenty will be repainted, refitted, find new peacetime careers. One will be the Peregrine.
In November, a balloon called Explorer II is released in South Dakota, reaches 72,395 feet with two men inside, an altitude record that will stand for almost twenty years. In their photos, seen for the first time: the curvature of the earth.
Jamie happens upon the images in a magazine, goes home and slathers white gesso over a canvas, erasing a half-finished harbor scene. He begins again: a segment of his neighborhood from a high angle, almost a bird’s view, slightly warped as though by the shape of the planet, with shallow bands of harbor, mountains, and sky squeezed in at the top, ever so slightly bowed. What he wants to express, he has come to realize, is infinite space.
A Mr. Ayukawa, who owns a department store in Japantown, buys the painting from Flavian’s gallery. When Jamie stops in to collect the check, Flavian relays an offer of a commission. Mr. Ayukawa would like a portrait of his daughter. “He’s a businessman,” Flavian says, his voice heavy with significance. “You know my meaning? He is in many businesses.” Jamie is reminded unpleasantly of how people had talked about Barclay Macqueen. “You are a polite person, but you should be extra polite to him. Oh—you know that Judith is back?”
“I’ve seen her.”
Judith had swanned into a Boar Bristle lecture, her new French husband in tow—a poet, apparently. She’d kissed Jamie on both cheeks, told him he must go to Europe, that Vancouver was utterly provincial, that art here was barely even art. He’d wanted to ask her why she’d come back, then, though he suspected the answer was because in Europe she would not have the pleasure of lording her time in Europe over everyone else. He remembered Sarah Fahey’s sister calling Seattle a backwater, how she’d made him embarrassed for believing Seattle marvelous and cosmopolitan.
He went out and got drunk after that, painfully nostalgic for the months he’d spent enchanted by Judith, the thrill of climbing the dark stairs to her studio, the way her skin was always filmed with fine gray dust from her clay. He’d really thought—fool—that when she came back she would feel more for him than before, that somehow the expansion of her world would not diminish his place in it.