Wingwalkers, p.15
Wingwalkers, page 15
Faulkner left his bicycle in the shadowed lee of the hangar and stepped into the light. He began unbuttoning his coat, shedding the shoddy black wool to reveal the sky-blue splendor of his Royal Flying Corps uniform. He stood glittering in the sun, medaled with stars and wings, an ace hatched from the woolen puddle at his feet. He strode toward the flying machine, this violent contrivance of blade and wire and wing that never failed to swell his heart.
Baby stood waiting, his face hewn wide and sharp. His blue eyes shone. “Bill, you’re going to get oil all over that pretty costume of yours.”
Faulkner raised the narrow point of his chin. “I have come for flying lessons, Baby, not sartorial advice.”
Baby showed a slim smile of amusement. He clapped Faulkner on the shoulder. “I read your story in the student newspaper. The one about the air cadet?”
“‘Landing in Luck.’”
“Yes,” said Baby. His square hand worked on Faulkner’s shoulder. The same hand had steered clip-winged fliers between the clouds and busted the wag-tongued mouths of Memphis welterweights. “Damn good, that story. Authentic. You must have had some instruction, yes?”
Faulkner nodded, his mouth dry with thrill. “That’s right. Cadet Wing, outside Toronto.” He licked his lips, trying to unstick the words from the flypaper of his tongue. “Honestly, it isn’t the flying I’m worried about.”
“No?”
“It’s the landing.”
“Ah, like the cadet of your story.”
“Like him.”
“Don’t let your imagination overpower you,” said Baby. He cocked his head toward the craft. “She’s like a woman. You can’t force anything. You have to be smooth, gentle. You don’t land her. She lands you.”
“Right,” said Faulkner, as if he knew how to land a woman. As if Estelle Warren had not gone to live at the foot of an oceanic volcano four thousand miles from Mississippi. As if Mary Elmore had not left him for this bantamweight god.
Baby squeezed his shoulder. “You ready, Bill?”
Faulkner looked at the bob-winged flier sitting so high and haughty in the grass.
La belle dame sans merci.
This merciless beauty, which could slash the bonds of earth, lifting him high over the postage stamp of Oxford. Which could kill him coming down.
“I’m ready.”
20
Panhandle
WEST FLORIDA, 1933
They followed the white thread of the coast, flying over single-street fishing villages huddled at the sea’s edge, looking down on salt-weathered shacks built in the age of Osceola, king of the Seminole. Great mullet nets hung drying in the sun. Pods of dolphins patrolled the shoreline and snapper boats bounded through the inshore swells, returning from long weeks of fishing the Yucatán reefs.
Pensacola Bay hove into view, where they planned to winter. There were the great wharves and coaling docks, quiet now, and the ship channel where the odd freighter steamed in lazy commerce. The inner shoreline was built on the discharged ballast of old steamers and square-riggers. Bluestone from the quarries of Italy, red granite from Sweden. Crumbled tile from the blasted mansions of France. The city was largely Spanish, with red-tile roofs and wrought-iron railings jutting over sandy streets, where even the flies dozed during the siesta. A great five-sided fort guarded entry to the harbor, the guns pointed seaward.
They landed on one of the outer keys, raking the sand with their wheels and skids. They left their boots standing beneath the wings. The Gulf, cold as slate, rumbled over their feet. They stayed in the vacation house of a lumber family, former friends of Della’s father who used the place only in summer. The cedar shakes were rimed with salt. The sea wind howled against the windowpanes; the house timbers groaned like those of a sailing ship, rattling the nautical decor on the walls. The power was cut off in the winter and they burned wads of old newspaper and dried antlers of driftwood—anything they could for the light and heat and comfort of it. They drank wharf-bought Cuban rum, staring into the bright knives of heat, and made love on a pallet of blankets on the floor.
The Jenny sat hunkered in the side yard, anchored beneath the blown palms. The engine was covered in a green tarpaulin, like the head of a blinkered racehorse, and the wings rocked and shuddered against their moorings. Della drank her coffee in the morning and watched the machine tremble nervously in the wind. Sometimes she wished it would snap free of its anchors and go tumbling through the scrubby island forest, wrecked and scattered among the trees.
The naval air station was just down the coast, across from the coastal fort. Flights of shiny new pursuit planes rumbled overhead, silver-winged, fat as bumblebees, trailing faint whispers of smoke. Their bodies gleamed bright and vicious against the winter sky, barbed with guns, ready for war. Della and Zeno and Sark would stop, their feet in the cold wet sand, and watch the machines peel from formation, one after the next, to practice their gunnery.
“Too bad we can’t take one of those to California,” said Della.
Machine guns crackled over the bay.
“They’d shoot us to pieces before we even slipped the tarmac,” said Zeno, watching them pull up from their strafing runs. “Jenny’s all we got for now.”
They removed the cover from the Model A Ford in the garage and bucked and sang over the toll bridge into town. An eight-story stucco hotel dominated the waterfront, lit like a giant gambling boat at the edge of the bay. Young sailors and air cadets strode beneath the streetlamps, their uniforms starched crisp, stretched tight across their proud chests. They sat drinking sangria in a street-front cantina, the windows thrown open in celebration of the Repeal. Zeno’s tongue and teeth were red, as if he’d been drinking blood. He was watching the white teeth of these youths, bared in glee. The unlined skin. He was thinking, Della knew, of the boys he’d watched burn or fall or crack into a thousand shattered pieces.
A pair of young air cadets crashed into the bar beside her, chuckling, ordering double rums. The nearest one side-eyed her, belching through his teeth. “You ever made time with an aviator, honey?”
Della sipped her sangria, not looking at him. “Once or twice.”
The second cadet laid his head nearly flat on the bar, so he could see past his friend. “How ’bout two at once? A double-decker?”
Zeno straightened slightly from his stool. “How ’bout three?” he said.
The cadets squinted up at him, as if trying to discern his breed.
“You with that old foghorn?” asked one. “There’s gray in his hair.”
Zeno swirled his bloodred drink, the chipped ice jingling. “And whiskey in my prick. You want a draft?”
Della could feel their young bodies go rigid beside her. She sat hunch-shouldered between Zeno and them, one hand on her drink.
“Some mouth you got, old man. Careful you don’t find a fist in it.”
Zeno’s tongue swirled over his teeth, slowly. His next words could bust bottles and overturn tables, split knuckles and knock jaws out of hinge. He didn’t know but to fight.
“You little know-nothings—”
Della’s hand found him under the bar, cupping his groin. His voice caught. She gripped him like a control stick, unseen, sipping her sangria with her free hand. Another drink and he might not have felt her, might have shot off his mouth like a gun. Now he stood there, silenced, his neck tendons flexed. The cadets stood wet-mouthed, like dogs before their master, awaiting command. Della stroked him with her thumb.
She looked at the two cadets. “Zeno was in the Lafayette Escadrille.”
Both their heads cocked at the same angle.
“No,” said one.
“Yes,” said Della.
“Whiskey ’n’ Soda,” said the other. “You knew them?”
He meant the squadron’s mascots, a pair of African lion cubs known to tumble and paw about the airfield.
“Knew them?” said Della. “They licked his face.” She squeezed him. “Didn’t they, honey?”
“They licked my face,” said Zeno.
The cadets turned toward the bar.
“Get this man a whiskey-soda, a double on the double!”
* * *
They stopped one hundred yards short of the air station gate, parked in the darkness between streetlamps. It was nearing dawn. The cadets lay snoring in the rumble seat, one head propped on the other’s shoulder. The four of them had drunk until the cantina closed and then found their way to the speakeasies of Palafox Street and finally to the sailors’ taverns near the coaling docks, where tattooed stevedores and merchant seamen swam in flickering red light, their teeth flashing like knives.
The vast tarmac of the air station lay on the other side of the fence. Naval biplanes gleamed metallic under the moon. There were Curtiss Hawk fighters, sharp-beaked as raptors, built to fly from the flattop islands of aircraft carriers. There were Sparrowhawk pursuit craft, each designed to hang from the trapeze of a dirigible airship, and a squadron of brand-new Goshawk bomber-fighters. Their stainless steel propellers shone like giant scimitars, cocked before engines the size of wagon wheels, the cylinders arrayed like iron spokes.
“Wright radials,” said Zeno. He might have been looking at a painting in the Louvre. “Nine cylinders, seven hundred horsepower.”
The gleaming planes seemed to be taunting them almost, so close yet out of reach, protected by razor wire, barricades, and roaming patrols of military police armed with canines and submachine guns. An impossibility. The Jenny seemed so fragile in comparison to such machines, a plaything of balsawood and parchment and glue—a craft as delicate as their own dreams, held together with faith, chance, endless maintenance.
Still, staring at these warplanes, Della felt a tenderness for the Jenny, which had carried them so far already and kept rising, morning after morning, season after season, ready to start bounding westward again once the days warmed and they could earn their bread and fuel from the crowds. Despite the winter hiatus, Della had the feeling they were finally heading someplace instead of circling—that they were pulling out of the old spin.
She touched Zeno’s back. “We better see if we can wake them.”
He nodded.
Della shook the cadets gently, watching their eyes open slowly, hazed with dream, trying to discern their whereabouts. They fumbled and hiccupped, trying to extricate themselves from the vehicle. Zeno righted each man, gripping him by the shoulders, while Della fixed their hats and neckerchiefs.
One of the cadets held up his hand in salute. “Whisky-soda,” he slurred.
They stood behind the cadets, aiming them, then set them walking like windup toys. A wind had begun to blow in from the sea, shoving the aspirant fliers off course, but they succeeded in correcting themselves again and again, zigzagging toward the air station gate, tacking against the wind like sailing ships.
Della watched them closely, willing them along with her heart. She was only slightly older than they were, but they seemed so young to her. Still boys. Young men who’d yet to be truly afraid, to realize they could die. They were fearless, cocksure, their shoulders pinned high and tight. She hoped such reckless faith would keep them alive through the months to come. She hoped they would settle safely to the earth, softly, each and every time.
Zeno stood beside her, his shoulder touching hers. She looked up at him. He, too, was willing them along, his arms crossed, his thumbs sticking up. She knew he was seeing not just these fliers but all the others he’d known. The boys with their caps set so rakish and bold, their collars popped careless, their cigarettes smoking before their spotless cheeks. Young men with wings pinned over their hearts, so sure of their immortality, who now lived only on mantels and bedside tables, inside attic trunks and cellar albums and in the broken hearts of mothers and wives and sweethearts, in the bent postures of fathers behind plows or the tills of country stores.
The guards stood on either side of the gate, stony with duty, their mouths grim beneath the white domes of their helmets. The cadets passed with little drama. Then they were gone, vanishing into the vast night of the airbase.
Zeno spat. “Cocky little bucks.”
But his eyes gleamed. He put his arm around her, squeezed.
* * *
The wind came cracking across Pensacola Bay, slamming the body of the Ford. The automobile lurched on the three-mile bridge, hunting for traction, the windshield clattering in its frame. Dawn was coming—a rumor of light in the east. Gulls raced landward on the gales, quick as bullets, and waves crashed against the bridge piers, spitting foam high over the rails. Zeno fought the wheel, a cigar hanging from his teeth.
This wind had come whirling up from Cuba and roaring across the Gulf, unchallenged but for the odd freighter or cutter or fishing trawler. Now, land-fallen, it seemed angry, bending trees and banging shutters, scalping dunes and shoving automobiles off course. Della thought of the great thunderheads that might follow on such a wind. A squadron of them, like great hydrogen airships, bellied with fire and war. Her belly sang with anticipation.
She rode with one hand on Zeno’s thigh, her feet tucked beneath her. Her white canvas shoes lay dirty and limp on the floorboards, coated with the filth of barroom floors. The thin line of Santa Rosa Island rose into view, like a long ship in the Gulf. Deckhands were on the bayside docks, double-lashing yachts and teak-decked cabin cruisers, their hulls jostling on the swells, and the flags of the coastal fort snapped hard in the gusts. There was a wild electricity in the dawn, an apocalyptic hum that stirred the blood. It made Della’s thumb work back and forth on Zeno’s thigh, as if shaping the clay of his flesh.
When they reached the house, Sark was watching through one of the front windows, his ears perked for their return. They parked in the garage and shuttered the windows of the house and built a fire in the potbellied stove. Soon they had a mouth of coals going, cozy and red, as the wind skirled about the house. The nautical decor shuddered on the walls, the braided halyards and ships’ wheels and porthole mirrors. The lifeboat compass rattled on the captain’s desk, as did the harbor bell and the engine order telegraph, the needle quivering at FULL STEAM. The floors seemed almost to sway. They might be riding high in the cabin of a galleon or man-of-war, their cannon bristling over rising mountains of seawater.
Zeno stood wide-legged before the stove, the poker dangling at his side. He was staring into the red fury of the coals, entranced. As if these were the most precious of gemstones, glowing with unearthly power.
Della walked up behind him, unseen, and unzipped her jumpsuit, slipping the sleeves. The metallic suit fell away from her like the thinnest armor and she stepped fully from the legs, emerging white and naked from the crumpled metal, as from a wrecked machine.
She knelt and wound herself between Zeno’s spraddled legs, coiling herself around one of his great thighs, and then began climbing the front of him, grasping his trouser pockets and his belt buckle and the lapels of his leather flying coat. The firelight slithered up the narrow valley of her spine, flowing like lava against her skin. She could feel the heat rising through the curls of her hair, glowing, her chest swelling.
She set one foot against Zeno’s knee, spreading her body wide against him. She grabbed hold of his leather collar and hauled herself from the ground, scaling his body like a tree until she hung in his branches, her feet hooked around his trunk. She felt child-light in his arms, weightless. A creature immune to gravity and loss.
“Baby,” he said, his voice deep, happy.
Della pressed her face into his neck, scratching her cheek against his jaw. Then she brought her lips to his ear, taking the lobe between her teeth. Outside, the wind howled.
“Captain,” she said.
* * *
Della woke to silence. Her flesh felt viscous, melted like candlewax into the pallet on the floor. Her limbs glowed. Zeno snored peacefully beside her, clad in a wrecked toga of blankets, his stocking feet pointed dead upright. Sark lay curled at the foot of the front door, sleeping, while thin spears of sun shot through shutters and doorjambs, suspending lazy mobs of dust motes. Della watched them. How strange for the world to orbit the fiery ball of the sun, like a moth about a flame. So close to being consumed. A long finger of sunlight slipped through a chip in the nearest shutter and ran slanted across the floor. She watched for the minutest shift in this beam, like the sweeping hand of a clock. Some sign of the great wheeling of the earth. The velocity that sustained them.
She slithered from the tangle of blankets, silent, and moved featherlight across the floor, stilting on the balls of her feet, her heels high and round and small. She wanted to see what new world lay beyond the walls, struck bright and clean in the storm’s wake. Zeno would twist and writhe and groan beneath the blast of light, but she didn’t care. She wanted to come slinking back into bed with him, bathed in sun. Spend the day crawling over him, burrowing herself into the nooks and corners of his flesh. She wanted to lick the whiskey-sweat from his neck, bury her nose beneath his chin.
She lifted the nearest window and swung open the shutters, closing her eyes against the glare, feeling the blast of light on her skin. She could feel herself glowing, her face lifted high to the sun. Her heart was a warm engine, running steady when she opened her eyes and looked down at the yard.
The Jenny. She lay smashed beneath a fallen palm tree, her cleaved wings sprung nearly vertical, like a cricket’s legs, the spars and ribs stabbing through the painted canvas of her skin. The wheels were splayed flat beneath her belly, her propeller shorn from its hub. Their home for so long, their world. She seemed so fragile now—like a dragonfly, a dream—a world wrecked, exploded into this tangled mess of stray wood and wire.
