I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (4 page)

We’ll have to leave early so I can get some sleep.

I know. I’ve already …

Hello! Miss Earhart, George, so glad to see you. The guest of honor, please, right this way.

After dinner they walk down to the beach with their drinks and the women take their shoes off. The air is heavy with flowers and salt, and she walks next to Owen, who was at dinner. G.P. is in the house making a telephone call. The businessman and his wife and the rest of the guests are smoking and talking about a picture.

That one where Kate Hepburn plays a boy.

You didn’t see it?

It was just awful.

Do you like her?

When she’s all done up, I suppose.

Was Cary Grant in that?

Oh, yes, I saw it.

Their voices mix in and then out of the waves and eventually disappear. She and Owen walk along the flat
plateau of sand. The water comes up to their ankles from time to time.

I heard you dropped the trailing wire, he says. His jacket is dangling from one finger. He’s carrying his shoes in his hand.

It’s too long. It’s a nuisance.

Why didn’t you tell me?

I didn’t think it was important.

You know it’s important. Your radio’s no good without it. You won’t get enough frequencies. You won’t have the power.

I’m not worried about it. Your trousers are getting wet.

He bends down to cuff them and she looks at the water.

If you’re not going to take the key transmitter, you’ll need the trailing wire, he says.

It’s not worth it to take the transmitter. You know I can’t operate Morse code well enough. And I just told you, the trailing wire’s too long. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

They walk in silence for a while.

They stop for a moment while she picks up a shell. She holds it to her ear.

It seems to me that you’re being reckless. First Noonan. And now this, with the radio.

Maybe I am. Maybe it doesn’t matter. She holds the cool shell up to his ear.

Don’t say that, he says.

I have a feeling this time.

Don’t say that.

All right. I won’t.

They keep walking along, away from the house. They hear low swinging music playing. Across the road, behind a fringe of palms, people dancing on a veranda.

They stand for a moment in the calling night. The sky is aswarm with stars.

They stand for a while longer.

A man and a woman come walking down from the party. The woman laughs and the man is smoking. She kicks off her shoes, but he keeps his on. She grabs his hand and then lets it go. He holds his cigarette in his fingers, puts it back in his mouth, and looks out for a moment at the water. He is wearing a white dinner jacket and black pants. The woman runs ahead of him down to the water.

He waits because he sees two figures on the sand, and he watches them while he smokes. He drops his cigarette into the sand and he laughs and then he starts unlacing his shoes.

When Amelia catches sight of Noonan, he is following the woman to the water. He doesn’t look down to where she and Owen are standing. He doesn’t seem to have seen them. He takes off his jacket and then his shirt and then his pants and he walks into the water.

Some party, Owen says.

We should be getting back.

She leaves the shell on the sand and they head back.

Two days later, at dawn, she slips into the cockpit of her Electra. Noonan is in the rear cabin. G.P. climbs up onto the wing and kisses her before she closes the hatch. She pulls on her gloves. She waves one last wave. She starts the motor. It is already warm.

As the sun brushes up against the sky and lightness spreads out all around, she starts the motor. She signals to have the wheel chocks removed. She pulls down her goggles and adjusts them. She sees the puddles on the ground and the streaks of grease that float like rainbows on the surface of the puddles. She sees the shadows of the propellers begin to blur—and the light, she sees it changing on the surface of the puddles. She sees the mechanics and the others back away from the plane. She sees their feet step gingerly backward.

When she pulls out, the crowd that has assembled at the field surges violently forward, knocking over three policemen. Women fan themselves to keep from fainting. A photographer scrambles up a fence. In the center of it all, her plane gleams dully, like a barge of beaten silver. It glides down the runway and it stops and it turns and the crowd tenses and even she has to catch her breath. She is alone in the cockpit, alone with the sky ahead of her. She catches sight of Owen, in the distance, riffling through
the pages of his notebook. He takes a pen from his pocket. He scribbles in his notebook: 5:56,
the dawn, breaking
. Then the engine revs up and kicks in and it builds and she is alive inside the color of the sky.

It’s not long after we take off that I realize what a mistake I’ve made. It’s not long, but it’s too late. What I understand right away is that I’ll never go to New York again. Why I think of New York, I don’t know. It occurs to me that I have walked through Central Park for the last time.

Never again will I see the tops of those trees, burnished, on fire, lost to me.

I
T WAS A DEMENTED TRIP
. The entire journey, flying as fast as possible like fugitive angels, took more than a month, during which time we spent our days feverish from the flaming sun or lost in the artillery of monsoon rains and almost always astonished by the unearthly architecture of the sky. In spite of the hazardous conditions, or perhaps because of them, Noonan drank and I flew with reckless, melodramatic abandon, and as the voyage progressed we carelessly flung overboard any pretense of civility. Much later, when I looked back on the flight, it seemed to me that we had been two lost souls in an immense netherworld, traveling toward an arbitrary goal, wondering which of us was more forsaken: the navigator who didn’t care where we were going, or the pilot who didn’t care if we ever got there.

•

We must have both known that we shared something, a secret craving for oblivion. But there is no such thing as oblivion. Oblivion is a lie.

They climb slowly. For thirteen minutes, they climb slowly, and then they swing in the direction of Puerto Rico. Underneath them the water is a pale, pure green, and underneath that the sand is white. The gauzy shapes of giant fish swim over the sand like clouds above the desert.

At six o’clock she tunes in to WQAM. They will be broadcasting the weather conditions every half hour. When she tunes in they are sending out a description of her takeoff. She listens in suspense and smiles. It is hot in the cockpit and so she takes off her jacket. She hears that she has gotten off safely.

Dawn turns to day and the light grows hazy. A few clouds glide under the Electra’s wings, like swans under a bridge. The shadows of the clouds draw giant petals and paw prints on the surface of the pale-green sea.

In San Juan, a Miss Montgomery, the only private flyer on the island and a wild beauty who smokes thin cigars, puts them up for the night. At dusk she drives them to her sugarcane plantation. Along the way they
pass banana trees and breadfruit trees and pineapple growing along the ground. They drive along a road that smells like coffee and she explains that they are driving through a coffee plantation. Miss Montgomery is smoking one of her thin cigars, and she talks with it in her mouth.

I have sixteen hundred acres, she says.

They are suitably impressed.

The car bumps along a dirt road up to her house, past field after field of sugarcane. Along the side of the road there are wildflowers, and parrots up in the trees. Up ahead they see her house, which is painted white, with a balcony of bougainvillea. Behind it the sea appears to rise straight up, like a backdrop of bright blue sky.

With the help of a bottle of rum made from her own cane, Miss Montgomery persuades Noonan to play dominoes on the veranda.

Ice, Mr. Noonan?

No, thank you.

Your move.

Yes, my move.

Later, in a room with a view of the sea, she is awakened by the sound of laughter coming from another room, Miss Montgomery’s room. She recognizes Noonan’s low, dark laugh. It is a laugh that has liquor in it.

The next day when they take off he’s hungover and half asleep. She’s furious when they land nineteen minutes
behind schedule. She threatens to have someone else sent for the job, immediately, before she leaves the continent. But he persuades her to keep him. He says it won’t happen again. He smiles his smile. He is very persuasive.

On good days we groped through clouds that hung down like dirty laundry, and slept on flattened mattresses in one of our many exotic ports of call. But more often we suffered through schizophrenic weather and spent the night in hangars, on rancid cots with sinister stains, in the shadow of our battered ship.

One night we were staying in a hotel, the Palace Hotel. We ran into an old friend of his, a radio operator. The two of them spent the whole night drinking. I came downstairs at three in the morning and found him drinking at the hotel bar. I was wearing my nightgown and my flight jacket.

What do you think you’re doing? I said.

I’m dictating my will, he said.

We have to be on the airfield in two hours, I said.

You are a magnificent creature, he said.

It doesn’t take long for him to realize that flying with her isn’t like flying with other pilots. Sometimes when she is angry she plays hide-and-seek with the clouds, looking for weather to cheer her up. She likes to drop a
thousand feet in a matter of seconds. She seems to have no fear. It terrifies him and makes him sick. When they land he pukes on the runway, right next to the plane, and curses her under his acrid breath.

She returns his lack of faith in her with her own judgment: she decides that he is a coward. At night, victim to the fires in his brain, he tosses and turns and flinches in his sleep like an animal roasting on a spit. His feet stick out one end of the short blanket. She notices that he’s afraid to clip his long, lethal toenails because he doesn’t want to cut himself, and this makes her worry about his ability to perform his demanding job.

But he always recovers from his late nights and alcohol just in time to accompany her to their social obligations, guiding her with arch looks and bemused glances through the maze of unfamiliar people and places. At every stop they are received by local dignitaries, acting governors general and local welcoming committees. Lunch is usually prepared by a team of expatriate wives, and it usually consists of something like beefsteak and grape juice and apple pie, for these women are eager to cook a patriotic meal. There is usually someone official who sits next to Amelia. The wives sit on either side of Noonan and cut his steak.

•

On one of our stops Noonan visited a fortune-teller, whose psychic powers amazed him. Alarmed by nightmares I had been having in which the Electra fell violently out of the sky, I also went to consult with her. The runes said that there was nothing in my future to prevent a long and happy life, and that prediction gave me hope. Exhilarated by the possibility that we would complete our journey, I decided to assume full command of my ship. That was how the battle of wills between me and Noonan stopped being an amateur match of pussyfooting and became obsessive and more intense than ever. We argued openly, we threw off the mantle of decorum, and we engaged in long-winded tirades strung with pornographic curses that offended even the airfield mechanics who didn’t speak any English.

He was afraid of her lack of fear, and she was frightened by his cowardice. The more he drank, the more reckless she became; the more reckless she became, the more he drank. Crazy, they both were. No one had ever had access to their madness, ever really noticed it, but for them it was ordinary, a necessity.

Later, as we settled into some semblance of a routine, Noonan drank and I flew with less and less inhibition. Soaring blindly over the blank page of the barren
desert, we puzzled over the elusive landmarks described on our indecipherable land maps:
In the bed of the Wadi Howar two heglig trees about four hundred meters apart were ringbarked. They mark the intersection of the twenty-fourth meridian
. In a stupor of intoxication and heedless freedom, we lost ourselves in the arid romance of the places over which we flew—Qala-en Hahl, Umm Shiayshin, Abu Seid, Idd el Bashir. And we let ourselves be mesmerized like religious fanatics by the waves of heat dancing off the rippling sand and by the silence that blanketed the bleakest stretches, where every now and then a caravan trail led off to nowhere, or a camp with a tent or two stood out from its surroundings like a mockery of survival.

We became voyeurs of the intimate relationship between wind and sand. We watched the air draw fine lines on the surface of the desert and make wrinkles in the face of the wasteland. We saw a dust storm whip the ground into the air until the world disappeared from sight. Later, in the aftermath of the apocalypse, ominous black eagles appeared out of nowhere, winging around us, like carpetbaggers hoping to benefit from the devastation of a war. During this time we spent many hours without exchanging a word, and this, probably more than anything else, is what brought us closest together. We saw the same sights and felt the same breezes. We watched the same sun and the same moon dip in and out of the same clouds. We felt the same rain and heard the
same silences. It was like sharing a dream with someone else. For a little while, we were as peaceful as two angels riding a tandem bicycle, cruising through the heavens, and for days I did not think about the pestilential odor of Noonan’s breath or the suicidal candor with which I had ignored my own safety. Instead I dreamed of nothing but porcelain clouds cascading in slow-motion waterfalls against a backdrop of robin’s-egg blue.

None of our dreaming was in vain. The reverie we fell into from Khartoum to Karachi helped alleviate our fear of crashing in the desert, and then, when we least expected it, we arrived safely in Calcutta. Approaching the metropolis, we saw factories and little villages, and we had the feeling of returning to civilization. It was not the most benign sensation, however, and it brought with it a suspicion that amidst the trappings of society, however foreign, we would be unable to continue our truce. And that is exactly what happened.