* * *
—
The coral runway on Aitutaki was built during the war and is plenty long and has a radio beacon. “Too easy,” Eddie says when they’ve landed. “Maybe this won’t be such an adventure.”
“It won’t be like this the whole way,” Marian says.
“No,” he agrees.
They have rooms at a thatched and stilted little inn on the lagoon where they’d stayed during their shake-out flight. “Going out tonight?” the innkeeper asks them. “New Year’s Eve? There’s a pub down the road.” He’d been a Seabee in the navy, had helped build the runway and come back after the war. It’s paradise, he’d explained, incredulous anyone would ask why.
Eddie says no to the pub.
At sunset, he swims in the lagoon. The surface is glassy flat, mirroring the lurid pink-and-purple sky, the first few stars. He can see the distant white flutter of surf breaking on the reef and hear, muffled and delayed, the ocean roaring to be let in. The lagoon’s sandy floor is pronged with dead coral and so densely populated with black sea cucumbers it is nearly impossible to take a step without feeling one squish underfoot.
He’d sold the blue coupe to some slick California lawyer who’s now unwittingly zipping around Long Beach in a totem of lost love.
He stands waist-deep and closes his eyes. He’d had some rum before his swim. He thinks he can feel the planet turning. The immensity of the ocean troubles him. This is something he can’t tell Marian. In the war, his worst fear, worse than burning, worse than a parachute failing, was drowning.
He tries to think what the next land would be in the direction he’s facing, more or less due east. Maybe some tiny island, more likely South America, thousands of miles away.
An aerial navigator, the Army Air Corps manual had said, directs an aircraft from place to place over the surface of the earth, an art called aerial navigation. He’d liked the word art, how it had been underlined. He’d liked the idea of himself directing the aircraft. Transplanted sullenly to a navigation classroom after he’d washed out of pilot training, he’d heard more words he liked. Celestial observation. Dead reckoning. Drift. Vector. Point of recognition.
Symbols had peppered the maps. Cities. Airfields. Railroads and abandoned railroads. Lakes and dry lakes. Ovals for racetracks and little oil derricks for oil derricks. Red stars for flashing beacons. Tidy reductions, pleasantly simple. Until he’d been shot down, he’d believed in his art, in a true relationship between three-dimensional space and printed maps, in the possibility of accurately saying I am here. But, after the war, no matter how far he traveled, he felt stuck, marooned, immobile. There must be another trajectory he hasn’t yet found, more equations besides the ones he knows, another, more elusive dimension underlying the mappable world.
Inevitably we will omit almost everything. In flying the length of Africa, for instance, we will only cover one track as wide as our wings, glimpse only one set of horizons. Arabia and India and China will pass unseen to the east and the great stretched-out Soviet beast with its European snout and Asian tail. We will see nothing of South America, nothing of Australia or Greenland or Burma or Mongolia, nothing of Mexico or Indonesia. Mostly we will see water, liquid and frozen, because that is most of what there is.
—marian graves
Oahu, Hawaii
21°19? N, 157°55? W
January 3, 1950
4,141 nautical miles flown
Caleb has grown his hair long again but wears it in a ponytail at his nape now rather than a braid, loose strands flying around his face as he steers his truck up the windward coast, singing to himself. Marian can’t catch the words. Out her window, jumbled black lava rock rambles into the sea, scraping the waves to white shreds. She sticks out her hand and the wind arches up under it like a cat’s back. On Caleb’s side: a fluted wall of rock, the island’s steep green mountain spine.
Mauka. Toward the mountain. Makai. Toward the sea. Hawaiian words Caleb has taught her.
She and Eddie had thought they might fly the whole way from Aitutaki to Hawaii but decided instead to stop halfway at Christmas Island in the Line Islands, a huge flat T-bone of an atoll, nearly naked except for coconut palms, a few villages, an airstrip from the war. Land crabs skittered everywhere. They had spent the night, left before dawn. She’s grateful Oahu has heft and height, a lush and shaggy green pelt.
Caleb is taking her to see the ranch where he works as a cowboy, a paniolo. When he’d first come, he’d worked on a taro plantation, but he prefers this. In his house she’d noticed a photo of him sitting on a horse, a garland of pink flowers wrapped around his hat.