When the weather cools, a shearling coat and heavy boots appear for her so she can keep flying the open Stearman.
Another winter. More ski landings. More real mountain flying. A few close scrapes in the cloud: treetops brushing the skis, rocky escarpments narrowly missed.
In March, Elinor Smith, who’d flown the East River bridges, climbs to twenty-five thousand feet over New York City in a supercharged Bellanca, attempting to reclaim an altitude record. Frost forms on her breathing tube. Something goes wrong, something comes uncoupled or the air bottle cracks. Blackness drops over her like a hood. With an unconscious pilot, the plane descends more than four miles. At two thousand feet, Elinor woozes back into consciousness, manages to sideslip the plane down onto a bit of open land, noses over, walks away.
“That,” says Trout, “is nerve.”
A week later Elinor goes up again, hits thirty-two thousand feet.
Marian, sick with envy, circles the Travel Air up to fifteen thousand feet. A little higher. Its ceiling is sixteen thousand, but she thinks the specs are probably conservative. The engine splutters and skips and pops. She adjusts the mix but can’t get it to smooth out. It runs like a three-legged horse. Spooked, she eases down.
“Lucky,” Trout says when she confesses. “Go too high and you get drunk. There’s a kind of crazy up there. You’ll start seeing things. You’ll think someone’s in the plane with you. You’ll see another ship out the corner of your eye, just off your wing, when none’s there.”
She needs something to do, she tells Trout, she tells Caleb, she tells Jamie, she cautiously intimates to Barclay. She can really fly now. Trout has drilled her and drilled her, made her land on the tiniest patches of scrub grass and mountain gravel. She could probably land on a fence post like a hawk and take off from it, too.
“I could fly over the line,” she insists to Trout. “I want to be useful.”
“I’m all trained up,” she says to Caleb, “but for what? They won’t let me help run the booze. I can’t compete at stunts without a license. I can’t go anywhere. What’s the point?”
“And we’re still acting out this charade,” she says to Jamie, “where Barclay has nothing to do with any of it. He’s a kindly cattle rancher, and I’m the delivery girl who stops by to chat. What’s the point?”
“You said he likes things his way,” says Jamie. “If he didn’t want you to be in the charade, you wouldn’t be.”
In February, Amelia Earhart had married George Palmer Putnam, her publisher and promoter, some say her Svengali. He’d proposed six times. On their wedding day, she wrote him a letter saying neither should expect fidelity and that sometimes she would need to be apart from him and from the confinements of marriage. She asked him to promise to let her go in a year if they weren’t happy together.
Marian knew nothing of this, of course, could not dream of such a bargain.
* * *
—
Before her seventeenth birthday, three important flights.
First.
Weather comes in. Trout, flying the Travel Air, spirals out of cloud, can’t regain control. At least that seems the most likely explanation. There isn’t much left of him.
Marian spends a long night in the cottage drinking real Scotch, doing her best to harden herself. Hadn’t Trout told her all pilots had dead friends? Hadn’t he said she could end up being a dead friend herself? At his funeral, she barely looks at his wife and children, all of them short and froggy and miserable. （Barclay promises he’ll do right by them.） She tells herself Trout had gone out the way he’d wanted. The final crack-up. Probably he wasn’t even afraid, was too focused on trying to fix what was wrong. Probably it had happened too fast for him to feel any pain.
His body had been badly burned. His front teeth had been embedded so far in the dash they’d stayed there when they pulled the rest of him out.
Barclay had sent her a black dress to wear to the funeral, fine soft wool trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon, small shiny black buttons. She wears her flying clothes instead. Jamie sits beside her. Barclay, in the next pew forward, ignores them until the very end, when he turns around and offers his hand to Jamie, says, “Peace be with you.”
Jamie says with a dueler’s grim resolve, “And also with you.”
Afterward she goes to the green-and-white house with the dress still in its box.
“You can have this back,” she tells Barclay. “I didn’t wear it.”
“I noticed,” he says, ushering her into the kitchen. “You didn’t like it?”