The plane was red, with two propellers and two skis. Redwood and I were sitting behind the pilot. Beside him, a second yoke moved with his steering as though maneuvered by a phantom copilot. We’d passed over a braided river and flats of pine forest and clumps of autumnal cottonwoods turned such a bright, sweet tangerine it hurt my teeth to look at them. We’d entered a world of snow and rock. My eyes couldn’t make sense of anything because everything was too big and also too simple, only ice, only snow, only rock, and we were dwarfed by the cliffs and ridges, the glacier’s cracks and wrinkles, the sheer granite faces. Denali’s summit was in cloud. There was no life in any of it.
“Do you know who Marian Graves was?” Redwood said into his headset.
“Can’t say I do,” said the pilot.
“She was a pilot in Alaska,” I said. “Before the war.”
“Best job there is,” he said.
“My dad used to fly,” I said. “As a hobby. He had a Cessna.”
“Oh, yeah?” the pilot said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He doesn’t fly anymore?”
“No.” I said, “I took a flying lesson once. I didn’t like it.”
“What didn’t you like?”
“The feeling, I guess?”
“Best feeling there is.”
“That’s what the other pilot said.”
He laughed.
I said, “I felt like I would fuck it up.”
“Nah,” the pilot said. “You’ve got to trust the plane. The plane wants to fly.”
He landed on a glacier in a bowl of ice and peaks, a frozen amphitheater he said was bigger than Anchorage. He shut off the engines, and we got out into the silence. The landscape was huge and beautiful in the way the concept of death is huge and beautiful—its beauty doesn’t really apply to you. Stepping in the snow, I had a suspended, tentative feeling, like I might plunge through. This, I wanted to tell the pilot, this is how it felt. But he would just tell me to trust the glacier.
Redwood had walked away, but he came back, offered his hand. I took it. The landscape was the opposite of Adelaide Scott’s sculpture. Here you could only see the whole thing. You couldn’t pull it down to a scale that made sense. The silence felt as huge as the sky, and we were so tiny it couldn’t possibly matter what we did. So we finally kissed there in the snow, and I closed my eyes and hid from what surrounded us.
D-Day
England
June 1944
Six months after the torpedo
May 15, 1944
Hi Kid
I bet you’re surprised to hear from me, the way we left things. I promise I’m not writing to mope or scold, even if returning your letters seems like an act of aggression. I just thought you’d want them. I’m in ████████ towing targets for gunnery trainees, if you hadn’t already heard. Cochran pretended like this job was some big top-secret special deal, but it’s about as much fun as being a clay pigeon and half as glamorous. The flight line is shit city. Red-lined █████ as far as the eye can see and no spare parts or time to fix them. █████████████████████████████████████████████
I don’t know what the gunnery boys think about us being girls （seems like they’re mostly confused about whether to aim at the target or the plane）， but the pilots are pretty frosty. Here they are, bunch of hotshots fresh out of flight school, thinking they’re on their way to combat and instead they got sent to tin can alley. Bad enough before we showed up and started doing the same job. Boo hoo is how I see it.
The girls say it’s better than it was at the beginning, especially since the boys have realized that with us flying they can spend more time playing cards and less time getting shot at. We’re always volunteering anyway because we’ve got something to prove. I’ve tried to make friends with the mechanics because, as I see it, having them on my side is my best chance for not packing it in. A girl named Mabel crashed before I got here. She would have made it, but her canopy wouldn’t open and she burned up alive. The sticky latch had been marked on the form, but no one did anything about it.
There was another crash that killed a girl—the form said throttle problem, but ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ Jackie herself came down to investigate but kept her trap shut about whatever she found. She worked pretty hard to get us this gig, and if anyone important gets the idea we’re causing trouble, they’d be happy to get rid of us.