“If you’re going to do real mountain flying,” Trout says, “you have to be able to land on half a dime. Otherwise you’ll roll off a cliff or plow into the trees.”
“When am I going to do real mountain flying?” she asks, feigning impatience though she knows she isn’t remotely ready to land anywhere except on a flat runway with plenty of open space.
“Not real soon,” he says.
He chalks a line on the Missoula strip. She’ll have to land short to hit it. Mountain flyers have to know how to land short, he says. He wants her within fifty feet of that chalked line nine times out of ten. Her ambitions for herself are all about accuracy, precision, steel nerves, the seat of her pants.
* * *
—
And there is Barclay Macqueen.
“Trout says I need to get rid of my old instincts and replace them with new ones,” she tells him on his porch, delivery basket forgotten at her feet. “Because if you do what feels natural, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Like if you’re long on approach, you can’t just point the nose at the ground because that’ll increase the speed and you’ll balloon up and away. Or if you didn’t turn tightly enough to line up, you can’t just add rudder or you’ll skid into a spin. Trout says then you might as well aim for the cemetery and save everybody some trouble.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Of course it’s dangerous.”
When she’d returned for her second lesson with Trout, she had known she was accepting Barclay’s patronage and therefore his presence and also the unanswered question of what he would eventually ask for in return. But, she told herself, even if she hadn’t gone back to the airfield, he would have insinuated himself into her life some other way.
“You’re not afraid?” Barclay says.
“No.” Then: “Maybe a little sometimes, but it’s worth it.”
“Frankly, I’d prefer you to stay on the ground.”
She is afraid he’ll say what would seem to follow: He’d prefer her to stay on the ground, and so he will keep her there. But he bites into one of the cream puffs Stanley has sent. A shower of confectioners’ sugar speckles his black waistcoat.
They have never acknowledged he is paying for her flying. He has never mentioned the message she’d given to Sadler, her plan to pay him back, which she has chosen to take as tacit agreement. She has never told him she knows Wallace’s car is in his garage. They have not spoken again of Miss Dolly’s. They pretend they have simply struck up a friendship, the delivery girl and the well-heeled cattle rancher. This can’t last, this state of congenial denial. The suspense of it weighs on her.
She waits, but he only goes on eating the pastry. More sugar clings to his chin, and as she realizes he isn’t going to cut off her lessons, she goes giddy with tenderness. She reaches to brush at his chin, but he catches her wrist, stays her hand.
* * *
—
Aloft, life is more relentlessly three-dimensional than on the ground. She has to be aware of the plane’s three axes, where it is in space, where it will be in another second, another minute. Trout makes her take off and land, take off and land until the regular rise and fall of the horizon, the surge and easing of the engine, begin to feel like functions of her own body. She learns to wallow just shy of a stall, slowing her glide enough that the controls go slack but not so much that the buoyancy falls out from under her. She learns how to sideslip in a crosswind. （Helpful for short landings, though she’s still not close enough to the chalk line, most times.）
She no longer marvels at Missoula’s miniature streets and buildings. The city is no more noteworthy than the pattern of a familiar rug.
“Enough circles,” Trout says one day. “Let’s go somewhere.”
They fly up to Flathead Lake and back. Not far but somewhere. In her logbook, for the first time, she writes in the notes column “x-country.”
“X-country” makes regular appearances. Trout instructs her in navigating by train tracks, roads, and rivers, by the compass and the clock. She keeps a map pinned to one knee, a notepad strapped to the other for jotting calculations. She learns the air is smoothest at dawn and dusk. She learns to always be looking for where she can land if the engine quits.
She had not understood the emptiness of Montana, had never quite lost the fanciful idea that once she got up high enough she would find a magnificent vista onto the rest of the world. So far she’s only found valleys and mountains, trees and trees and trees, the sun’s fading stain. She longs for something different.