It was over quickly. She had not felt pleasure, but she did feel relief. She stood and dressed. “I still don’t want to be your girl,” she said, looking down at him, stretched out in the moonlight like a slender basking cat. She knew this was the truth; Barclay had made it true.
His teeth glowed. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
She poked his ribs with her foot. “Ass,” she said and started for home, drowsier with each step.
In the morning, for the first time: her monthly blood.
Missoula
September 1929
Two months later
“At the airfield?” Marian said, looking at the delivery list Mr. Stanley had given her.
“Special order. Gent called Marx,” Stanley said.
“I know everyone at the airfield, and no one’s called Marx.”
“He’s been vouched for.”
“By who?”
“By someone who’s good enough for me and so’s good enough for you.”
When she arrived, a couple of pilots were sitting on oil drums outside the general office, leaning against its corrugated side, drowsing in the sun. The afternoon sky was deep blue, undiluted by cloud. If she were them, she would be up flying. She called out the truck window, “I’m looking for Marx?”
They stirred. “Yeah, the new guy,” one said. “Try the hangar down at the end.”
The other one said, “Got any free samples today, Marian?”
“I’ve got some day-old buns.”
“What about something that comes in a bottle?”
“Depends—you want to take me up?”
“Depends.”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ve got to go see this Marx first.”
The pilot shrugged. “I might’ve gone home by then.”
She drove down to the newest and largest hangar. Inside was airy coolness, grids of smoked-glass windows. At the far end, big sliding doors had been rolled open onto the field, and the bright rectangle of light was sliced across by the long orange wings of an aircraft, nose pointing out, black fuselage sloping down to an orange tail.
“Hiya.” A man was sitting in a camp chair under the portside wing reading a newspaper, his feet propped up on the bottom rung of a stepladder. “You must be Stanley’s famous delivery girl.”
“Who wants to know?”
Letting the newspaper flop across his lap, still with his feet propped up, he regally held out a dirty hand, large for his skinny arm, with broad fingertips like a frog’s. “Tough guy, huh? I’m Trout Marx.”
“Marian.” She balanced the basket on her left hip and leaned down to grasp his hand, gripping firmly, thinking wistfully of Felix Brayfogle. This man was remarkably ugly. No mystery about the derivation of his nickname. His mouth was downward-bent and almost impossibly wide, more like a grouper’s than a trout’s, really. When he spoke, he revealed a yellow saw of crooked teeth. The rest of his face offered little compensation. His eyelids were droopy, though one more than the other; his ears were short, scooped tabs stuck to the sides of his big, round head, and he was entirely bald. But he had a calm, cheerful way and a goblinish charm. Marian said, “Nice ship.”
“You like planes?”
“Yes.”
“Been up in one?”
“A few times.”
“Ever been at the controls?”
“No one’s ever given me the chance.”
“No? Why not?”
No need to explain the obvious. She set down the basket and walked under the wing, looking up at the smoothly varnished fabric. The plane was new enough to still smell faintly of bananas, a chemical joke played by one of the solvents in the doping. She closed her eyes, inhaled.
“You look like you’re smelling a bunch of roses,” Trout said.
“Better than roses.”
She circled around to inspect the silver propeller and grease-blacked sunburst of engine cylinders. Her gut feeling was that if she played her cards right, he might take her up; she had to be careful not to say anything to make him brush her off as just a kid, just a girl. “What’s the make on this?”
“That’s an upgrade. Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Four hundred fifty horsepower.”
“Top speed?”
“They say a hundred and forty, about, but I’ve done faster and it didn’t catch fire or nothing. Those lights were custom. Good for landing at night.”
“Do you do a lot of night landings?”
“Some. You seem to know a thing or two about planes, don’t you?”