In Missoula, the road to the airfield filled with cars and bicycles and people on foot. So many wanted rides in the Jennies that the gasoline man had to be summoned with his truck to keep the Brayfogles in fuel until sunset. Everyone wanted to be closer to the planes, to the sky, to look down on the town and pretend to be Lindbergh （Lindbergh, who was permitted to sleep, finally, at the ambassador’s residence in Paris, his strange future already pulling him along）。
But, before, back in the morning, back when Marian was about to go up with Trixie for her ride, Lindbergh had still been somewhere over England.
“Switch off,” Felix had called, standing in front of the plane.
“Switch off,” Trixie answered from the rear cockpit.
Felix grabbed the propeller and pulled it around a couple times. He took a firm hold and braced his feet. “Contact!”
“Contact!”
Felix swung the blade. There were a few short blasts of clipped sound, like cards being shuffled, as the engine roused itself. A few puffs of smoke, an acrid smell. Then a rhythmic churn: the turning crankshaft, the snare tattoo of the prop. Marian watched through the windshield as the blades blurred to invisibility. A wind came up in the cockpit. The plane jostled in place, wanting to fly. She tugged tight the wide seat belt across her thighs.
They rolled forward, picked up speed, bounced across ruts and mounds until the nose dropped and there was no more bouncing but skimming, the grass a blur. Upward pressure from below the wings. They rose. The stick and throttle and rudder pedals in Marian’s cockpit （which Trixie had cautioned her not to touch） moved as though manipulated by a ghost. The earth fell away.
People and cars moved along Missoula’s streets like pieces in an inscrutable game. Over the river, an osprey flew briefly alongside, clutching a fish in its talons. Heading down the valley, Trixie pulled abruptly up and without warning executed first a roll and then a loop. She swooped high above the mountains, put the plane into a spin. The valley rotated around them; the engine changed pitch; the wires hummed; droplets of hot water from the radiator stung Marian’s face. Trixie pulled out and flew up again, going high before nosing into a dive. Marian knew she was supposed to be frightened, that Trixie was trying to make her recant her wish to fly, but while the earth rushed up from below and her guts pressed into her ribs and her body into the seat, she felt only lightness.
Missoula
October 1927
Five months after the Brayfogles came and went “Jamie,” Marian said, “I need you to cut my hair.”
Jamie was lying on his bed with a volume of Audubon prints Marian had forbidden him from taking out of the cottage. From the doorway, she eyed the book but didn’t remark on it. In one hand she held Berit’s long scissors. She pointed the blades at him. “Please?”
“Cut it how?”
She pulled her braid around over her shoulder, with two fingers mimed cutting it off at the base. “Like that.”
Jamie looked appalled. “Berit would kill us.”
“But she couldn’t glue it back on. I’ll cut it myself if I have to.”
“So do it.”
“You’ll do it better.” Also, she wanted company in her decision, the reassurance of an accomplice.
“I’ve never cut anyone’s hair.”
“You know how things should look.”
“Not hair.”
“Please?”
“No!”
She pulled her braid taut with one hand and raised the scissors behind her head with the other.
“You wouldn’t,” Jamie said.
The tendons in her wrist stood out as the blades gnawed, coming together with a grinding sound. The pale braid flopped over in her hand like a dead bouquet. She touched her mangled nape, felt a close-cropped patch in back with long bits sprouting around it like weeds. The rest fell forward around her ears in hunks. She’d wanted sleekness, lightness, not this. Amusement fought with horror on Jamie’s face. “Now you’ve done it,” he said.
Temper flashed through her. “You wouldn’t help me! You should have helped me!”
She ran downstairs and out to the cottage, fuming helplessly. It seemed to her that Jamie had an obligation to go along with her whims. He should have recognized her determination as immovable and done as she’d asked. She’d closed the scissors partly to punish him for his doubt she would follow through.
In the cottage, she sat in the armchair and tenderly stroked the back of her head. She cried rarely and only if she knew no one would see （the morning her father left, she had only cried after she’d ridden Fiddler far up the Rattlesnake）， but now she chanced a few tears before she passed a hand under her nose and got up to light the woodstove. She knew Jamie would come soon to console her, and everything would be all right again.