The Angel's Cut (5 page)

Hintersee and Xas stood up together, then stooped and peered out the tops of the promenade deck windows.

They saw two fire trucks burst out of one of the hangars, followed by a knot of men, who scattered as though propelled from a shotgun muzzle. The running men were all looking up at something beyond the field, behind the airship. The trucks continued on to the west-facing airstrip, but the men all ran to a standstill, some stopping with their palms
flat to the tops of their heads, as though protecting their skulls or submitting to an arrest. They looked appalled.

Hintersee and Xas exchanged a look. Then they hurried around to the other side of the gallery, and its west-facing windows.

As Xas stooped again to look out the downward-angled window he felt his captain delicately and deliberately place a hand on his back. Beneath his clothes, the layers of leather and cotton, his feathers compressed and rustled—the down that lined the deep channels of scars where his wings once joined his body. Xas heard Hintersee draw a sharp breath at the sensation. Or possibly the man was reacting to what they were looking at.

There was smoke over the sea, a clot several thousand feet up, from which a light rain of sparkling debris drifted down. There was a trail of smoke that twisted in descent from the point of the crash—a midair collision. A number of planes, tiny at this distance, were patrolling a point on the sea, out over Redondo Beach, where the trail touched—the place where an aircraft had entered the water.

The airfield's fire appliances were parked either side of the west-facing strip—just waiting. The riggers finished positioning the airship at the platform and tethered it to its anchors, then they gathered on the west side of the ship with the men from the hangars, and stood, eyes shaded from the lowering sun and their shadows stretched out on the turf.

The officer Hintersee had sent to oversee the riggers reappeared in the salon. ‘Do you suppose there's anything we can do, captain?' he asked.

One by one the stunt planes came in to land. First one of the Spads, then a Sopwith. Some of the planes shut down their engines on approach, landed and rolled to the end of the airstrip to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Xas waited till he saw Millie bring in her Spad, then he stepped away from Hintersee, whose hand slid from his back.

News cameras had arrived. They had come to film the celebration of the embarkation, and
Lake Werner
's departure, its society pages passengers, the jazz band, the spectacle of it all. Now they shouldered their cameras and ran toward the stunt pilots, whose planes had taxied into a little cluster, some with their engines still running as though they planned to go up again. A few of them had sprinted from their planes to the hangars—to the radio box, around which the ground crew had gathered. They were all listening for news.

Hintersee looked at his officer. ‘Would you go and ask if we can assist in any way.'

The man clicked his heels and went off.

‘I should join them,' Xas said.

Hintersee said, ‘You should take a moment to explain yourself to me.'

Xas stared. Perhaps he was trying to stare Hintersee down. He didn't understand what he was trying to do. Eventually he said, ‘I never even
think
about what you want me to explain. My mind says “No” and jumps ship. Hans was attacked by an angel because he was an angel.'

‘Hans!' said Hintersee. ‘
You're
Hans. You're the man I lost.'

Xas took his captain's hand. He felt his skin chilling Hintersee's rather than warming it. He had isolated himself so
thoroughly that nothing could be impressed upon him, neither warmth nor pity. He said, ‘Captain, you're an airman, like me. Like me you know there's nothing but grief on the ground. Have you ever been able to tell that story? Anyone who tells that story sounds mad. Do you want people to think you're mad?' Xas drew the man closer to him and said, ‘You've told
me
now. And that has to be enough.'

‘You jumped,' Hintersee said.

‘That isn't your business. I jumped, but it isn't as if I'm a deserter.'

Hintersee was pale, the contrast between his skin and hair so pronounced that his hair and beard looked like a black balaclava. Xas found that he wasn't just holding his captain's hand, he was holding Hintersee up. The man was faint—from Xas's implied threats as well as the workings of his own powerful feelings. Xas held his gaze. ‘Don't expose me,' he said. ‘All you need is to
know
. You don't need to tell anyone.'

As he said this, pressing his point with his gaze and his grip, Xas realised that he wanted the option to stay where he was for a time—Los Angeles, where he'd just happened to find himself.

Xas lowered Hintersee into a chair. He drew his cuff down over his hand and dabbed at the man's tears.

‘I need to pray,' Hintersee said. ‘That's what I need.'

Xas snatched his hand back, and straightened abruptly.

Hintersee lunged forward and grabbed his sleeve. ‘Wait,' he said. ‘I think you
are
a deserter. An angel visited you, and you didn't stop to hear him.'

‘We're finished,' Xas said, refusing anything further. Then he walked away.

He walked away, but with the feeling that he wasn't going far and, try as he might, he was going
somewhere
after all.

When he'd lost his wings, and his lover, Xas had gone on not as people do in their grief, but unimpeded, like a high altitude weather system, full of ice. Forty years after Sobran's death the Wright brothers made their flight, and though there were people who said flying machines were only a novelty, others kept building them. In 1909, at the Great Week of Aviation in Rheims, Xas had begged and bargained for a five-minute joyride. He went up, and was separated from his shadow. He felt that separation as the end to a long endured pain. For a short time his suffering was three hundred feet below him in the grainfields, the grandstands, the mud. He had found his way to Friedrichshafen and the Zeppelin factory in order to live in the air. For the last twenty years, that had been his only purpose. He may have jumped ship, but he found the air circus, and the French war films. He found his job flying mail and supplies in South America, and his job spotting schools of tuna. But it seemed to him now that each of his flights was shorter than the one before, and he could feel something pushing up against his persistence. He could feel a barrier before him like a great body with bones of thunder. And—as he stepped down from
Lake Werner
onto the carpeted platform and walked away between the incongruous silk ropes and potted palms—a song started up in his head. It was one of the songs he and his brothers would sing when they
weren't singing God's praises. A song about the air: ‘
What does
it take to turn a wind? Mountains. Or another wind
.'

The Travel Air camera planes had collided. They were flying over the bay at five thousand feet, into the sun. They were flying at the same level, chasing Millie's smoking Spad. One plane had veered toward the other. Their wingtips touched, one spun around and slammed into the other. Both went down, tangled, and on fire.

Millie had looked back to check her smoke trail. She saw the point of impact above her, a patch of smoke and below it a scarf of sparkling debris. She looked all about her like an owl, checked for clear air, then winged-over and turned back. She saw the planes falling. Saw them smash into the water.

Everyone on the Pacific Coast Highway saw the crash. Fishermen saw it, and rushed to the spot. Two bodies came up right away.

The boats were still out there, but it was night. The Navy was on its way, but it was night. Conrad Crow was out on the water with the searchers, but there wasn't any more anyone could do.

Xas sat with Millie in her Buick. It was dusky where they were parked, but the coloured lights and camera flashes and band music reached them from where
Lake Werner
was having its ceremonious send-off. Millie smoked cigarette after cigarette and, now and then, held her hands out in front of her to see whether they'd stopped shaking. She kept saying, ‘It was the camera crew—not one of us. I was
feeling spooked, and it turned out I was right. But I was right without getting it right.'

‘I heard Crow say to his brother, “Careful of your turns”,' Xas reminded her. ‘People can read the possibilities of danger without it ever reaching the level of rationality. There was no evident reason to be afraid.'

Millie tossed her head. ‘
Evidence
,' she said. ‘At least I know it's not you who's the Jonah, because you're lucky.'

‘Jonah wasn't a Jonah.'

She said, ‘Hold out your hands.' When she saw that they had no tremor she said, ‘You didn't know them.' Then, ‘Would you fly Cole's Fokker back to Mines for me?'

‘Yes.'

She told Xas how to get to the other airfield, told him to follow the coast south and count the piers. She told him where he would have to turn inland.

When the moon came up they got out of the Buick. They walked across the field to the dark shape of the Fokker. Millie spun the propeller for him. He taxied out to the west-facing strip and took off.

T
hirst woke Flora before dawn. She felt that she had been on a two-day drinking binge. In fact, she
had
been drinking for two days, but with an intervening night of sleep—without which she'd be far the worse for wear.

Flora's drinking was opportunistic—she drank when there was something to drink. If the booze didn't come easily she didn't bother. She would keep only a little of her share of the Jose Cuervo Millie brought up from Mexico four or five times a year. Flora put up part of the cash to buy the liquor. For each hundred she staked she could earn up to five. She owned her house, and those closest to her understood that it was paid for as much by bootlegging as editing film.

Flora's drinking and criminal activities had, like her job and injuries, moved her further into the world of hard-living, enterprising men. Prohibition was in full force, but beating the revenuers had become both big business and a
national sport. Everyone Flora knew drank too much, but since they weren't supposed to be drinking at all there were no guidelines as to what constituted too much. People finished bottles rather than carry them, or they carried flasks as their fathers and grandfathers might have carried guns. Flora knew dozens of other amateur criminals; those who, like her, smuggled mainly to supply their friends. For instance, Gil, while scouting locations in Mexico on his brother's yacht, brought booze up from Tijuana. Sometimes it seemed to Flora, whose grandfather had come to California after gold and ended up herding sheep in the Imperial Valley, that these adventurers—pilots, filmmakers, smugglers—had all found another frontier. The sky was the West, and movies were the West, and Mexico, though south, was West too. Flora always felt alive and whole when she was standing in the dark desert listening for the engines of Millie's plane. She had lost so much, and her life perhaps mattered less to her, but, as a trade-off, she was comfortable with things that would formerly have terrified her—her desert vigil, her drinking binges, herself alone in her house, on a hot night, with the windows open to any breeze, drunk and without apprehension asleep on the window seat, only the lace curtains between her and the man standing on her porch, unknotting his tie.

That morning Flora lay for a minute or two, feeling groggy and parched. Then she thought: ‘Someone has been here.' The room smelled of whisky, tequila, and sour milk—and of some man's cologne. Flora touched her damp, naked chest and found something coiled there—a silky
ribbon. She picked it up and squinted at it. The ribbon was a black silk bow tie.

Had Cole looked in on her before flying off on
Lake
Werner
? But Cole wouldn't call in at Flora's house just to say so long. He'd only come if he wanted something from her, something urgent and work-related. Cole wasn't exactly Flora's friend, but, of the few people who might come to her house late and find her drugged with drink and in her icy compress of milk-soaked sheets, only Cole would let on that he'd seen her. He had left his tie as a calling card on an earlier occasion (and a note on the pad on her porch that she only ever checked when she came in). He perhaps meant to be polite. Cole was more mannerly than diplomatic because, in fact, diplomacy actually demanded that he go away without letting on he'd seen her.

Flora wasn't really disturbed by Cole's visit. He was an oddball, a creature of habit who was also perverse and unpredictable. He was, for instance, capable of revising in an instant whom he loved, but not his preference for canned peaches over any other fruit. Flora sometimes thought that she was perhaps the only person about whom Cole had any enduring protective feelings.

While she ran herself a bath Flora checked the notepad on her porch. She found a note in her employer's dashing and elegant hand. She saw that he had pulled off three pages—sheets faded by light and dimpled by damp—before he found one neat enough to receive his writing. Cole wrote that he wanted her to start work on a new cut that day. He told her where she could find him. When she got up—
he wrote—she was to hurry over to Mines Field. And could she bring sandwiches?
Turkey or chicken,
he wrote,
not beef,
beef gets stuck in my teeth. It's too chewy. And no tomato, because it
wets the bread. And have them put any beetroot in the middle
between the meat slices so it won't make the butter pink
.

‘Jesus,' Flora muttered, and ripped the note off her pad.

When it was still dark Xas landed at Mines. He climbed out of the cockpit, and down the ladder of the Fokker's canted-back wings. He left the plane parked facing other ranked aircraft as if they were soldiers and it their drill sergeant, and headed toward several rectangles of yellow light. As he came nearer he saw that the lit room was a lounge-cum-office, with desks and swivel chairs, sofas and coffee tables. It was by far the most humanly inviting place in that vast blue twilight. There was a man at a radio, another man pacing back and forth before the glass inset in the top of the door Xas meant to go through—to go through and say: ‘
I've just
returned the Fokker Frank flew out yesterday. Frank is at St Mary's
.'

If Xas had had something in his hand, something to return—if he'd come with more than the Fokker and news to deliver—he'd have gone on into the lit room.

But instead as he was heading over to the office, he passed a hangar. In the nearest corner of the hangar's big opening he saw a solitary light, a lamp suspended over a trestle table. The lamp cast light down in a cone within which bugs were flying in tight spirals, circling the cord of the light switch. The lamp illuminated plans lying on the table, and a figure stooped over them. Xas did notice the person, but what made him pause
and turn toward the hangar was what he glimpsed beyond the veil of downcast radiance. There was a sleek shape in the partly illuminated space: a plane with an aluminium fuselage, a body that looked all-of-a-piece, and as silky as the silver nitrate dope that coated
Lake Werner
's outer fabric.

Xas went in to take a closer look. He walked right by the person at the table and stopped beside the plane. He stroked its fuselage and traced the flat rivets that stitched its seams.

The plane had a high tail, and two torpedo-like ailerons at the ends of its wings. The metal frame and glass panes of its cockpit were the only things that interrupted its whittled smoothness. It looked as if it had been dipped in a river Xas knew—a river in Hell—and was still wet with that river's mercury.

Xas moved around the aircraft, continuing to caress it, slipping his fingers into one of the gills that let out engine exhaust, and peering behind the propeller, trying to see something of the engine. He said, without looking at the person at the plan table, ‘Is it built for speed or distance?' The plane had been made to break records—that much was clear to Xas. But he hadn't heard of it, hadn't seen its picture in a newspaper, so it perhaps wasn't yet finished.

The figure under the light didn't reply.

Xas squatted to pat the plane's wheels as though it were a horse and he was checking how sound its knees were. Then he turned around, trying to put all his questions in some order.

The man under the light was young. He had glossy brown hair parted on the side, but with a floppy boyish forelock
that clearly required more hair cream than he was prepared to use.

Xas got up and went toward the table and the man suddenly switched out the light. ‘I don't know you,' he said. He looked away from Xas when he said it, and began adjusting his pencils and slide rule so that they lined up with the top edge of the plan.

‘I brought back the Fokker Frank flew out of here yesterday. Frank couldn't himself because he had a problem with his ear.'

The man scowled down at the plans. He tugged at one earlobe then said, ‘I
don't
have any problem with my ears—I just don't
know
you.'

‘He's deaf,' Xas thought, ‘more than a little—and refusing to admit it.'

He moved around the table so that he stood beside the man, who glanced at him sidelong from under his eyelashes, then turned the plans face down on the table.

‘That's a beautiful plane,' Xas said. ‘Is it built for speed or distance?' He spoke clearly, and inclined closer.

The man turned his head all the way across his own shoulder, giving the angel his better ear.

Xas moved around behind the man, to get at that ear. He repeated his question again, and was finally answered.

The man spoke slowly and quietly, his words in batches rather than sentences, as though they were peas he was shelling into a bowl before him for, as he delivered his information, he seemed to set something aside, the casing of each thought. After a moment Xas began to wonder
whether what he was setting aside was
himself
. The man seemed so deeply interested in what he was talking about that, when he answered, he apparently hadn't any urge to
own
, wasn't proud of what he knew and what he had done.

‘This aircraft didn't handle well with a bigger engine, the engine we wanted to put into it. We were aiming for speed.
Distance
is probably the greatest challenge, because the true future of aviation is in delivering mail and passengers—not its use in warfare, despite what you'll hear.' He went on, ‘You see, the two problems that have to be solved for long-distance flight are fuel and altitude. This plane has a skin that offers as little resistance to air as possible. We first tested it in a scale model in the variable density wind-tunnel at Langley. That went well. It has a water-cooled engine, so we've been able to close its engine in. The engine cowling reduces drag. That works for speed, but, like flying at altitude, it also works for distance, for fuel economy.' He paused. ‘Can you follow what I'm saying?'

Xas nodded. The man gave a little stiff, unwilling smile. More a spasm than a smile. He went on, ‘The higher up you can take a plane, the less resistance there is, and the less fuel you have to carry. But a pilot still has to breathe. We tried carrying bottled oxygen. We took her up to twenty-five thousand feet, and tried to do without oxygen for a time, to conserve it. But if you stop sucking on the tube, while it isn't in your mouth and warmed, condensation from breath that's already accumulated in the tube freezes and blocks it. So, if you've left off the oxygen until you're desperate and dizzy, there's a danger you'll find the tube blocked and
you'll have to do something drastic like biting the tube in two below the ice.
Then
you're left with a short tube and have to keep your head down throughout the rest of the flight, which is mighty uncomfortable. Anyhow—we solved that problem by installing a small heater in the cockpit. Which, unfortunately, means more weight.' He shrugged.

Xas said that creatures with wings had trouble flying at high altitudes because there was
less
resistance, less air for their wings to clutch on the downbeat.

The man leaned nearer. ‘Did you say “creatures with wings”? What creatures? Bats? Bugs? But you mean birds.'

Xas didn't acknowledge the peculiarity in his wording, though it had led this proud deaf man to question what he thought he'd heard and Xas had the impression that this wasn't something he did very often. He said, ‘When geese fly at altitude they go in a V formation, the strongest one going first and the rest benefiting from its and the others' turbulence.'

‘I didn't know that.' The man seemed genuinely interested. ‘At higher altitudes even a propeller will run out of air. But we haven't reached that limit yet. We don't yet know how high we can go—what the actual atmospheric limits are. The object now is to fly as high as possible in order to fly as far as possible, in the lightest possible craft, that uses the least possible fuel. So you see—it's all about possibility. This aircraft's engine is modified to run on tetraethyl-lead, which doesn't freeze. Now—' he said ‘—a bird on a long journey must refuel as it goes. It catches its dinner. Right?' He kept his head inclined toward Xas, eyeing
him sidelong. ‘By the way, why did you say “creatures with wings”? Are you some kind of foreigner?'

‘I said
birds
. Birds can fly enormous distances close above the sea. That's one way they conserve energy. The air moves slower over the sea. An albatross gets lift at the crest of each wave, on the slower, denser air there, then dives into accelerating air along the troughs of waves. It can go like that, sharply up, then slowly sliding down, for thousands of miles.' Xas tried to explain what he knew about albatrosses, what he'd seen when he had travelled among them, riding down the air before the dark blue, foam-streaked faces of the Southern Ocean's towering waves. He knew another trick for long-distance flight, but couldn't explain it to the man, since it was only available to angels. An angel, invulnerable, could find a storm cell and rise inside it, up among the lightning and giant hailstones then, with an extra effort, escape the top and fly away in a long shallow glide, letting down over tens of thousands of feet, and thousands of miles.

The man said, ‘Sometimes I have impractical dreams in which I try to design an aircraft that can make the same minute adjustments to the air that a bird's body can.'

Xas noticed that this was the first time he had volunteered the personal pronoun in relation to these experiences of flight. He'd talked of problems having to be solved or having been solved without once saying ‘I'. Xas hadn't been able to tell if he was a designer, engineer, or test pilot. Now he thought perhaps the man was all three.

‘I'll tell you why,' the man went on. ‘Why I have my impractical dreams. Have you ever made a parachute jump?'

Xas nodded. As ‘The Indian' he'd had to wear a parachute to perform his soaring stunts. His fellow wing-walkers would have thought it very odd if he'd trusted to skill and timing alone, and there had been times when he'd missed and had to pull the ripcord.