Outrage pours out of her. Yes, she tells him. She is. Why didn’t he ever consider whether or not she liked it? Whether she wanted to stop? Why must she always be protected? He can’t keep her safe against the dangers that matter: the darkness, the possibility of falling. His attempts are insulting. And it’s outrageous for him to say he shouldn’t compromise her. What had he done with his patronage and his airplanes except compromise her? What had he done except use her own dreams against her? And even when they both want the same thing—
She stops, suddenly shy about admitting she wants him, wants to see his body and to be touched, that she is not a virgin anyway. （This last she must never say.） Fucking would be more truthful, at least.
“You want to…” He hesitates.
“I want to fly across the line.”
“That’s all?” His disappointment is plain.
“And I want to go to bed with you.”
Shrewdness and thrill, stubbornness and lust, worry and smugness play over his face. “All right,” he says, putting on his hat and opening the door. “All right, fine. To both. Not today, but soon enough.”
* * *
—
Third.
Barclay agrees to be taken up. His first flight.
On a hot July day he arrives at the field and strides around nervously, scowling at the planes. He and Marian have not been to bed yet, but sex now seems like a trapdoor that may open under them at any moment. She has begun flying over the line.
Sadler has taught her the code used for arranging pickups and shown her how to read a special map printed all over with tiny numbered dots. Most are just decoy nonsense, but some are real caches and landing strips.
“You disapprove,” she’d said to Sadler.
His eyes on the map, voice lilting like a man relating an item of mild interest from a newspaper, he said, “It’s not my place.”
Her first run had been to an anonymous farmer’s field in British Columbia. The farmer had driven a tractor out to meet her, pulling a wagon stacked with cases of whiskey.
The sun had been low when she took off again. The weight of the cargo made the fuel go quickly, shifting the plane’s balance, and she’d had to keep a close eye on the trim. Briefly the leadenness had come into her again, the blank, heavy buzzing feeling, but it had passed quickly, never quite taking root. Only two cars were waiting for her small delivery, their headlights pinpricks in the dusk. They’d backed up close to the plane when she’d landed and opened their trunks and also hidden compartments under the backseats. Brisk and businesslike, they’d hauled the cases out. In a few days, a message had come directing her next pickup.
As Marian takes off and circles up, Barclay sinks low in the front cockpit until the top of the flying helmet she’d given him is barely visible. She banks steeply around the city, trying to tip him into looking down, but the little leather dome of him, glossy as a bullfrog’s back, doesn’t move. She can’t even be sure his eyes are open. Her plan had been to go easy on him, take him on a pleasant aerial tour of the valley, but she’s nettled by the idea that he might spend the whole flight hunkered down, stubbornly fearful. She pulls the stick back and punches it to the side, kicks the rudder. The plane turns tidily upside down. Barclay’s head dangles out of the cockpit, and he clutches the edges as though he thinks he’d be able to hang on like a crab were his harness to break. Another kick, and Missoula swings back down.
He twists to look at her, shouts something into the wind, jabs his gloved finger down at the ground. She smiles, turns the nose to the northeast.
When he understands she is flying him out of town, he turns again, shouts again, but what can he do? He is at her mercy, and she has a full tank of fuel.
After half an hour, Barclay, bored with being angry and afraid, is sitting up and looking out. He peers over one side, then the other. Eventually the sawtooth ramparts of Glacier National Park come into view, overlapping rough blue ridges fading with distance. The sun catches the rock layers in the mountainsides. In some places they lie in a flat stack, in others are folded and wrapped like taffy on the mixing hook. Glaciers cling to the slopes, smaller than the ones she’d seen in Canada. Below are bright blue-green lakes of meltwater, opaque as enamel.
She wonders if the fear will return, but she feels only a tightness in her throat that might just be anxiety about what will happen after they land. Before she flipped the plane, she had not considered how he might perceive the maneuver as another rebellion or betrayal, even mockery. Hopefully Glacier’s grandeur will soothe his temper. What would she do if, in punishment, he forbade her from flying the plane? She would leave Missoula, of course. For the first time, she wonders if he could stop her from leaving, if he would.