“Tell me about the flying,” he says.
She tells him in minute detail, pleased to have the chance. Jamie frets about the dangers, about Barclay. Caleb has no patience for technical details. Talking to Wallace is like talking to a mop soaked in gin. But Barclay listens to even her most involved technical treatises.
He’s never been up in an airplane. He doesn’t like the idea of it.
She’s told him that someday she’ll take him up. You’ll like it, she says. You won’t believe how much you can see.
He says he’s content with the view from a car.
He asks broader questions about her life. He is polite but persistent, like a newspaper reporter.
“So this barnstormer,” he says, “with the ridiculous name—”
“Felix Brayfogle. It’s not ridiculous.”
“So this Frederick Boarsnoggle flies over you, and you almost fall off your horse, and after that, you just know you need to fly airplanes.”
“Yes. Deep down and without a doubt.”
“My word. But why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some idea.”
She says, “You know how you said I was someone you needed to know right from the start? Even when you had no idea who I was?” He nods. “It’s the same.” Love, she means. Love sprung from nothing.
“It can’t be quite the same thing.”
“Maybe not. But I wanted to see other places, too, and I realized an airplane would get me there.”
“I keep telling you, you’ll find Montana’s as good a place as any.”
She gropes for how to make him see it her way. “And I get tired of worrying about Wallace. I used to feel so guilty he’d been saddled with us, but lately I can’t trust him to take care of himself.”
“What about Jamie?”
“I’d feel bad leaving it all on his shoulders.”
“I mean—wouldn’t you miss him?”
“Awfully.”
Barclay is solemn. “I told you I have a sister? Kate? I wish I could hold her life in my hands like an egg, make everything good for her. It’s a burden—the wish itself, and the fact it’s impossible.”
“That’s what I mean. Things might be better without anyone to worry about.”
He leans forward, his folded arms sliding on the table. “That’s not true. That would be the most terrible loneliness.”
* * *
—
In the spring, she learns to land at night. Lights have been installed at the airfield.
Trout teaches her to step hard on the rudder and whip around in a ground loop to avoid onrushing obstacles. She is usually close to the chalk line now, sometimes right on it.
May 1930: Amy Johnson, age twenty-six, daughter of a Yorkshire fish merchant, flies solo from Croydon Aerodrome just south of London to Darwin, Australia, in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth. Ten thousand miles in an open biplane at eighty miles per hour, always too hot or too cold, sunburned and reeking of gasoline. When she takes off she has only eighty-five hours of flying experience and no knack for landings. But she has a ground engineer’s license, knows about engines. Near Baghdad, a sandstorm forces her down, and she sits on the plane’s tail with her revolver, goggles caked with sand, listening to what might be the howling of wild dogs, might only be the wind. She breaks the speed record to Karachi but smashes a wing. Repairs take time. In Rangoon, she smashes another wing, the undercarriage, and the propeller. More repairs. The whole trip takes nineteen and a half days, the last spent fighting headwinds for five hundred miles across the Timor Sea, worrying about fuel. Then Darwin, and fame, but not the speed record she’d wanted.
As Marian’s sixteenth birthday approaches, Trout says it’s time for real mountain flying. Finally. They follow canyons, ride updrafts over ridges. Treetops whip by just under the wheels. She learns there is another landscape above the rocks and trees, an invisible topography made of wind. She learns if she flies straight at the lee side of a ridge and doesn’t rack off in time, the air will turn to quicksand, sucking her down.
To practice landings, they go to some of the wilderness strips where Trout hands off cargo to the bootleggers. She has to land short, real short.
Trout bemoans that he can’t teach her more advanced aerobatics. “The big girl’s no good for it,” he says about the Travel Air, “but you ought to have some practice. When things go wrong, you’d be calmer in your head if you were used to being turned every which way.”