“He’s got terrific taste in biplanes.”
“He says he has a promising pilot.”
Her pleasure at hearing another person affirm her destiny bordered on ecstasy. Barclay had given her Trout; he’d given her a plane, and now he was offering his belief.
She asked, “Is your guard up now?”
“Enough. Why?”
This kiss was not a straitjacket like the last one but a gathering in. She was aware of his slow breathing, of how, when he leaned just a little bit away, she followed without meaning to. Something bound her to him, a rough pull, strong and coarse as rope.
He pulled away. “I can’t play at this, Marian,” he said. “We can’t start down this road. You’d better go, and next time you come, we’ll go back to being how we were before.”
That would have been the moment to ask what he wanted from her. But she didn’t need to.
“He wants to marry me,” she says to Jamie.
“He said so?”
“I just know. Does that make you feel any better?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Why does he want to?”
“Thanks a lot!”
“Come on. Why? You’re just a kid.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you are.”
I recognized you as someone I needed to know.
She says, “I happened to catch his attention in a certain way, and once he has an idea in his head he doesn’t let go.”
“So you have one thing in common, at least. Are you going to marry him?”
The elation of the loop is gone; only the plunging sensation of the dive remains. She wishes Jamie would tell her not to, that she doesn’t have to. She wishes he would imply Barclay is buying her so she could rage at the idea, drive it away. She wishes he would ask if she loves Barclay, and she could say she thinks she might. And she does love Barclay, perhaps, or at least strongly desires him, but she also senses she is inside a trap, the dimensions and mechanism of which remain concealed.
But Jamie knows better than to do any of these things. In the light from the moon, she can see him watching her with the melancholy of someone who has cared for and released a wild animal, hoping it will find its way on its own.
“Probably I’d better,” is all she says.
* * *
—
September again. She is sixteen, flying every day now. When she can’t fly because of weather, she trails after the mechanics, learns to make repairs.
“Like a fish to water,” Trout says about her knack for stunts. That is how she feels, too, doing aerobatics: like she has been delivered to her natural element after a cruel separation. No thoughts of Barclay intrude, or of Caleb, or Wallace, or Jamie. In the biplane, she is always the fixed center of the universe, wheeling it around herself with stick and rudder.
Vrille: Get up high, throttle back almost to a stall. Kick the right rudder, yank the stick back and to the right. Spin down, engine hollering, tail up, violence in the fall, earth revolving below like the dome of a twirling umbrella.
Slow roll: Keep the nose aimed at a fixed point, push the stick to the right. When the wings have gone vertical, start cross-controlling with the left rudder. Come off the left rudder, push the stick forward. You’ll be hanging in the straps as the plane inverts; your feet will want to fall away from the rudder pedals, but you can’t let them. Then all of it in mirror image, quickly, as the engine can’t be trusted while upside down. It’s like riding a bicycle in one direction with your hands and another bicycle in the opposite direction with your feet.
Stall turn: Trout doesn’t want to teach her this one, so she reads up and tries it out solo. Bank up vertical until the airspeed falls away to nothing, then just before gravity catches you, left full rudder to cartwheel over the wingtip, feed it right stick then forward, pivot until you’re zooming nose down toward the earth, pull out level.
Trout is angry, says he’s seen good pilots crack up that way. He won’t let her fly for a week, not until she brings him a few bottles of moon and promises not to do it again. They both know she’s lying, but a truce is made.
There is more, of course. Immelmann turns and bunts and barrel rolls and chandelles and all of them strung together, one leading into the next as she ties gigantic, elaborate knots over Missoula, plunging in and out of the lost glacial lake.
The flying-service pilots and local hobbyists forget they’d refused to teach her. They call her the Red Baroness and Lindy Girl. They want her to go to Spokane to compete at an air show, but she has no license and Barclay would not like her to draw attention to herself.