He couldn’t hold her gaze, lifted his hands again. “None of this is any of my business, but I think he means well.” He glanced back at her. “Don’t you?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Can I level with you, Marian?”
“Sure.”
Trout cleared his throat, stretched his mouth in a wide grimace. “You’d be doing me a big favor. He’s gotten it into his head that I should teach you to fly. I’m a good teacher. I promise. And I do other flying for him. Transport flying. Up north. You follow?”
Of course. No wonder there were no seats for passengers. The plane was for bringing liquor from Canada. She shook her head at her own slowness.
“No?” he said.
“No, I follow. I just…feel stupid.”
He pointed the butt of his bottle at the plane. “You can put skis on it, handy for winter. You can put on floats and land on water. What I bring back is only a drop in the bucket, but your friend is smart enough to know that you get enough drops and pretty soon you’ve got a full bucket.”
Skis! She momentarily forgot her crisis, so thrilling was this idea. “You land on skis?”
“Learn to fly with me and you will, too.”
Here was a new image to ponder and burnish. Herself swooping the Travel Air low over a smooth white plain, sending up rooster tails of powder as she landed.
“I’ve got a wife and kids. I’d owe you a big one.” He offered a sad twist of his long lips. From inside his jacket he pulled a notebook and a pencil and handed them to her. “Here. You keep track of your flights in it.”
The logbook’s pages were ruled, and there were headings for Date, Aircraft, Aircraft Number, Engine Type, Weather, Duration, and Notes. Trout handed her the pen. “Go on and fill out the first line.” When she paused at Duration, he said, “Thirty-seven minutes. Then put ‘instruction’ under Notes. Geez, you have terrible handwriting.”
She tried to hand the logbook back to him, but he said, “No, it’s yours. Keep it. And I almost forgot. I’m supposed to tell you happy birthday.”
“It was yesterday,” she said.
She and Jamie were fifteen.
* * *
—
Marian drove from the airfield to the green-and-white house. She knocked at the front door, kept knocking until Sadler opened it. “He’s not here,” he said.
“You tell him,” Marian said, “I have a condition.”
“Oh?”
“When I’m qualified I’ll go to work for him flying across the line. I don’t need charity.”
“He won’t agree.”
“That’s fine,” Marian said, “because, like I told him, I never wanted to fly anyway.”
They stared at each other, and she intuited how much Sadler disliked her for complicating his duties. None of it was her fault, she wanted to say. Barclay could have just left her alone. “You’ll tell him?”
Sadler rubbed his cheek as though testing his shave. “You want my advice?”
The question exhausted Marian. “How should I know if I do without getting it?”
He studied her for a long moment, said, “I’ll tell him.” He shut the door.
As she drove back to Stanley’s, she pressed on the accelerator. The boxy old delivery truck swayed around the turns. Giddily she imagined pulling back on the steering wheel, feeling the tires part from the road. Barclay would agree. She knew in her gut he would. He wouldn’t mean it, would have some plan for going back on his word, but she wouldn’t let him. She was going to learn to fly, and then she was going to go to work as a pilot. A force was pressing up from under her. Lift. It was lift.
Manifest, Manifest
Six
Once, when I was fifteen and on hiatus from Katie McGee, my dirtbag friend Wesley and I liberated Mitch’s Porsche in the middle of the night so we could drive out to the desert to drop acid and watch the sunrise. We’d had visions of lying on boulders under the starry sky, but it was freezing and windy, and we ended up sitting in the car with the heater on. Once the drugs kicked in, I didn’t like how his face looked. I kept trying to focus on anything except him, but his horrible face kept looming closer and closer, gray and papery and blank, as though someone were shoving a wasp nest at me. Dawn had been a red slit, night sliced open with a scalpel, with the bristly silhouettes of Joshua trees raising their clubbed arms against it.
When I came back, Mitch, who was in one of his periods of sobriety, was lying out by our pool with the newspaper. “Where’s my car been?” he asked when I flopped onto the chaise next to him.