“I read a lot.”
“That so? What do you read?”
“All the flying magazines. What’s in the newspapers. Books.” She was particularly sharp-eyed for mentions of women pilots, studying their exploits as though reading tea leaves. She didn’t idolize them, the way she did male pilots, but envied them with a rawness that sometimes curdled into dislike. The obligatory photos of them powdering their noses in the cockpit disgusted her, and the fuss around Amelia Earhart, who was given credit for being the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air even though she’d merely been a passenger on the Friendship, baffled and annoyed her. You might as well celebrate a sack of ballast.
She preferred Elinor Smith, who’d gotten her license at sixteen and, at seventeen, flew a Waco 10 under the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges on a dare. （There she was in all the newspapers afterward, powdering her goddamn nose.） Next, Elinor had set a record for solo endurance flying—nearly thirteen and a half hours—and after someone broke it, she set a new one. Twenty-six and a half hours in a big Bellanca Pacemaker. After that she set a women’s speed record: 190.8 miles per hour.
“What kind of books?” Trout said.
“You know. By pilots. About pilots.” Proudly: “I read one about the theory of flight.”
“What’d that one say?”
“It was about Isaac Newton and lift and Bernoulli’s principle, that sort of thing.”
“Ber-who-lli’s principle?” Trout said. “Never heard of it. What’s it say?”
Marian, who had intended only to make a breezily knowing allusion, climbed up on the landing-gear strut and peered through the side window into the cockpit. The long fuselage was empty except for two wicker seats bolted to the floor side by side at the controls. “It’s hard to explain, but it has to do with how the air pulls the plane upward.” She hoped he wouldn’t press.
“Well, I’ve been flying a long time, and I never heard of it.” He set aside the newspaper and got to his feet as she hopped off the strut. He only came to her shoulders, but he looked strong. Sturdy. He said, “You want to go up or just stand around drooling? It’s a good day for it.”
For a moment, she stared fiercely at the plane. Then she said, “I have money. If you’d be willing to teach me a few things, I can pay you for a lesson.”
Hands in his pockets, he grinned, showing all his frightful yellow teeth. “Good for you. Money’s a useful thing. But this’ll be free of charge. She’s already fueled up. I just need you to help me roll her out.”
For such a large machine, the plane moved easily. They each took a side and pushed a wing strut as though leaning into a plow, emerging into the bright day. Marian’s body coursed with so much adrenaline she felt translucent. Here was her teacher. He had arrived, as she’d known he would.
“You know how to do a walkaround?” he said, shading his eyes and looking up at her.
“Only in theory.”
“Like Ber-whatzit’s theory? This one’s pretty simple. You give the plane a good looking over and make sure there’s no holes in it and no oil’s leaking out nowhere. You check the tires. That’s about it.”
The Travel Air proved to have no obvious holes or leaks, so Trout opened the cabin door, down near the tail, and told Marian to go sit in the seat on the right. “Starboard,” she said.
“Oh-ho! We’ve got a regular Ber-whoozit on our hands!”
She had to stoop as she walked up the cabin’s sloping floor. The inside smelled of gasoline. Bolt holes on the floor showed where more seats could go, but there were only canvas straps and metal hooks. “You fly a lot of cargo?”
“Some,” he said, climbing in after her.
Once they had settled in—an elbow-to-elbow squeeze, even for a small man and a skinny girl—he pointed out instruments set into the dash: “There’s your fuel gauge, your compass, your altimeter, your tachometer, your oil pressure, your clock—”
“I know what a clock is.”
“You’re a damn genius. There’s your air-speed indicator, your rate-of-climb indicator…” He showed her the levers, the pedals, the twin steering wheels yoked together, the crank up above their heads that adjusted the horizontal stabilizer, the brakes that could only be operated from his side. “You don’t have to remember everything right this minute,” he said.
But she did remember.
Never before had she ridden in a plane that didn’t require someone to swing the propeller. An electric motor got the flywheel spinning, the engine caught, a cloud of smoke billowed and dissolved. A few spluttering bursts became the uneven rattle of pebbles shaken in a can, then the impatient waltz beat of a galloping horse, then a steady metallic panting. The propeller blurred.