The Four Corners Of The Sky (18 page)

Sam tried to assuage Clark’s concern about Annie’s flying mania. “It’s like horses, a phase.” But years passed and the phase didn’t. On rainy afternoons Annie read every book the school library had on aviation; she talked endlessly with D. K. about the triumphs of women pilots, how Katharine Wright had worked right beside her brothers Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk; how Amelia Earhart had flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932; how Jacqueline Cochran, who had broken the sound barrier as early as 1953, held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history, more than 200 of them, including in 1964 a speed record of 1,429 miles per hour in the F-104 Starfighter; how the astronaut Sally Ride had rocketed into space from a launch pad in Florida and the whole country had sung to her, “Ride, Sally, Ride!” How Amy Johnson (Annie’s idol because the beautiful British pilot had looked so glamorous and been so daring) had taken the record for flying solo from England to Australia in a secondhand De Havilland Gipsy Moth that her father had helped her to purchase, even though back then girls were not supposed to fly planes.

Annie used her earnings from her weekend job at Now Voyager to pay for subscriptions to aviation magazines, which she scanned each month for stories about women pilots. Sometimes she wrote to these women, asking for their autographs. A retired female air-circus flyer, who’d done nine 360-degree loops in an old Cessna 150 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, wrote her back, enclosing a poster from her flying circus days. The poster was still on the bedroom wall beside Annie’s treasured black and white signed photograph of Amy Johnson. Near them was a framed commemorative U.S. Post Office sheet that D. K. Destin had given her of the stamp for Bessie Coleman, the African American pilot who’d had to make her way from Texas to Paris in 1921 to get a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale because they wouldn’t give her one in America.

“That’s right. Her own country treated Bessie like dog-doo on its shoe,” groused D. K., when handing Annie the framed stamps. “So Bessie got herself to France! The Froggies let that girl fly. ‘Ma chérie, over here you can fly your derrière off if you want to!’ That’s a French word, ‘civilization,’ don’t you forget it. You don’t gotta be a white boy to fly; hell, you don’t gotta be able to walk to be able to fly.”

Annie said, “I want to fly to France.”

“I bet you will one of these days. But you gotta get from one end of Emerald County to the other first. Finish that checkpoint list. Master, on. Radios, on. Mixture, rich.”

One gray morning on her sixteenth birthday, Annie piloted the Piper Warrior solo for the first time. It was scary without D. K. in the plane next to her, correcting, adjusting, without his tapered big fingers signaling her as if in an urgent language for the deaf. She’d felt shaky, first climbing into the plane alone, and she’d stepped back down onto the wing.

He hurried toward her in his wheelchair. “Get back in there! Don’t you prove me right! I’m a sexist child of my times, girl. So you show me a girl can do solo. Show me you can do it, Sugar Pie, because you
can
; you’re the best in the west, east, south, and you know it.”

Annie believed him because, scared as she was, she knew he was right. She climbed back into the plane and he waved her off.

It was D. K. who had replaced the engine in Jack Peregrine’s Piper Warrior and had driven it out of the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and flown it right up off the unmown field into the air with the girl, thrilled, beside him. Day after month after year, with the songs of R&B girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes blasting from a boom box beside them—“Baby, It’s You” and “Come See About Me” and his favorite, Betty Everett’s “It’s in His Kiss”—D. K. made her a flyer. He told her that in the cockpit of a plane, nothing mattered but how good you were.

When Annie’s pilot license arrived in the mail, she announced to Clark and Sam that they better sit down to hear her news. She planned to go to Annapolis and wanted their help to get there. She wanted a career in the Navy.

Clark not only sat down, he looked as if it might be hard for him to get back up.

“I guess we can’t fight destiny,” Sam said.

“It’s not destiny, it’s Destin,” growled Clark. “It’s that damn D. K. Destin.”

Sam advised him, “Don’t blame D. K.”

That night on the porch, waiting for Annie to return from a party, they argued some more.

“You know what? I blame you, Sam! You’ve been behind this from the get-go! Secretly egging her on.”

“It wasn’t all that secret.” Sam smiled, pride in the corners of her mouth. “D. K. says Annie’s a natural.”

Clark slapped his hand on the porch rail. “He says
he
’s a natural too! You want Annie pushing herself up River Hill in a damn wheelchair for the rest of her life?”

“That was in Vietnam. We’re not in Vietnam, we’re in North Carolina.”

“We could be in a lot of places where Annie could get herself killed.”

“Why did you say that? I’m already worried. Where is she, why aren’t she and Georgette home? It’s after eleven.”

Clark showed her his watch. “It’s ten after eleven. Take it easy.” It was in this back and forth way that they calmed each other.

When the catalogue arrived from the Naval Academy (the Navy was the first branch of the armed services willing to train women pilots), it started the worst fight of the family’s life together. Clark accused D. K. and Sam of collusion in supporting Annie’s desire to go to Annapolis. “It’s all his macho Mach and fixing up damn Jack Peregrine’s damn Piper Warrior. And it’s you, Sam, with your ‘women can do anything,’ even stupid things like drop bombs for the U.S. Navy.”

“Nobody said I was going to drop any bombs,” Annie shouted. “What is it with you two and bombs?”

“Right,” Clark threw open his arms. “I’m sorry, those Tomcats aren’t carrying missiles. My mistake.” He swung an arm in outstretched irony, knocked over the salt and pepper shakers on the table, quickly sprinkled salt over his shoulder. “Have a life, have children—”

Annie yelled at her uncle. “You don’t have children! This is because I’m a girl! You think a girl can’t be a fighter pilot?”

Sam agreed. “You’re a Republican and a sexist pig, Clark Goode.”

To their shock, Clark, leaped to his feet, shouting. “
I’m a Republican and I think a girl ought to have more sense!
And D. K. should have more sense! And Sam, the Great Liberal, you should have more sense. But I’m a sexist pig because Annie wants to go learn how to fire Sidewinder missiles on poor bastards on the other side of the fuckin’ world?”

His outburst, indeed the length of his sentence, left Sam and Annie slack-jawed and produced an agitated growl even from Teddy. “Take it easy,” Sam advised.

“Excuse me. I was eighteen years old in Nha Trang and my friend’s head was blown off and hit me in the fucking chest. And I’m a sexist pig? Why do you want Annie fighting some idiotic war for fat rich bald men to make money blowing up other countries and then make more money selling them reconstruction?”

Sam handed him a baby aspirin from her pocket. “Take this before you have a heart attack! For God’s sake, Clark, it’s 1993. There are no wars anymore! The Navy’s a career for Annie, not an invasion.”

“Oh, fine! Then there’s no problem!”

Clark slammed out of the house in a temper so uncustomary for him that the aunt and niece looked at each other stunned. He didn’t come home till late that night and strode past them straight to his room.

But the next morning he was back in the kitchen, slowly making coffee as usual. He raised his mug when they sat down to breakfast. He said, “I guess the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” He took Annie’s hand. “You want to join the Navy?”

The young woman squeezed his hand affectionately. “You joined the Army. You thought it was right to go to Vietnam.”

He moved his hands away to his glasses, took them off, put them back on. “I was wrong, Annie. There was nothing right about it. Nothing.”

She noticed his hands were old, freckled. “Yes. I want to fly jets. D. K. says I’m really good.”

“Of course you are.” He kissed her hands, one, then the other, pressing them together. “It’s just…” He sighed. “You want to fly, fine. Fly tourists to Heathrow, fly college kids to Cancun.”

She pulled away. “I want a chance to do something special and the Navy’s my chance. Sam! Tell him it’s my life.”

Clark folded his napkin. “I know it’s your life. That’s my point.” He left the kitchen.

Sam called an old friend, a state senator, about Annie’s applying to Annapolis. The senator arranged a nominating letter. Jack Peregrine’s daughter became the flyer that she had always assumed her father had never become himself, just as she’d assumed he’d never swum around Manhattan, or won a Silver Star, or beaten Minnesota Fats at nine-ball, or almost sold her to gangsters for $25,000 dollars, or studied with Einstein—unless he’d misheard Einstein’s theory of relativity and thought E=mc2 meant that nothing could ever be true.

At Destin Airworks on the outskirts of Emerald, Sam, Clark, and D. K. huddled under the overhang. The wind suddenly swung back like a boomerang, bringing rain again, blowing the black eagle banner sideways above the hangar. Annie untied the lines from the wings of the Piper Warrior. The plane was old but—as D. K. said—“If you keep your parts oiled, old can be better than new.”

D. K. was much grayer than when he’d first begun to teach his prize pupil; his tight cornrow braids, even his once sable-brown skin, had grayed. And his torso had so fattened from decades of being confined to his wheelchair that he wore nothing but black pajamas all year like, he said, “the fuckin’ Viet Cong.”

Now that Clark and Sam had seen the latest air traffic weather readout, they were urgently trying to stop Annie from leaving for St. Louis until morning.

“I continue to blame the two of you for this whole thing,” Clark told Sam and D. K. “If it wasn’t for you two, she wouldn’t know how to fly a plane.”

Sam said, “Oh shut up, Clark. If it wasn’t for the two of us, you’d have her still riding a tricycle.”

“That’s a real slow way to St. Louis,” laughed D. K.

Annie called from under the plane. “Just keep talking among yourselves if it makes you feel any better.”

“Fine,” sighed Sam. “If you’re flying…fly.”

L
ifting himself in his wheelchair to ease his back, the crippled vet said maybe it was just as well that his legs were numb because everything else had started to hurt. “Getting old sure isn’t for sissies.”

Staring glumly at the weather radar on D. K.’s small screen, Clark mumbled, “Isn’t getting old what we want Annie to do?”

D. K. admitted that Annie’s insistence on taking her small plane up in this rain, when no commercial planes were flying, was “Mustang but shaky.”

“‘Mustang’ meaning foolish bravado?” asked Clark.

D. K. stroked his grizzled cornrows. “There’s a lot of bravado rusted in gook at the bottom of the China Sea. Bad day, you get hosed, you deep-six fifty million bucks worth of A-6E without a cloud in the sky, so what the fuck, who knows?”

Clark looked dubiously at the black whirling clouds. “I hope you do. Exactly how dangerous is it?”

“Don’t ask me, Clark. Dina fell down four little steps and she was dead the next morning. I knew this old guy, flew in the 303rd, Hell’s Angels, out of England, 364 combat missions by 1945. Not a scratch on him.” D. K. shrugged, shoving his wheelchair over to the Piper Warrior and calling under the wing. “You done under there? You check it all again?”

“Done.” Annie crawled out from where swirling script still faintly spelled
King of the Sky
. She wiped her hands on an old towel and handed the vet her checklist. Then she took her uncle aside. “Clark, you want to know something, don’t ask D. K., ask me.”

“You’ll just say you can do it.”

“’Cause that’s the answer. The answer is, I landed a fifty-two-thousand pound Super Hornet fighter jet in force-three winds on the deck of the
USS
Eisenhower
when it was rolling in twenty-foot swells. That’s the answer.”

“Annie’s got the stuff,” D. K. called over agreeably.

“Excuse me.” Clark pointed at the wheelchair. “
You
had the stuff, according to you, D. K.”

D. K. winked at his star pupil. “In St. Louis, whatcha wanna bet, they won’t be firing rockets at her.”

Sam patted Clark’s arm ironically. “‘We’ve got that going for us.’ But, D. K., is the
King of the Sky
mechanically sound for a long trip?”

Annie made a comic choking noise. “Sam, you’re a woman who’s owned—just in the twenty years
I’ve
known you—a Gremlin, a Pinto, and a Yugo, and you’re asking about good mechanics? Ha!”

“It is what it is.” D. K. spun away in his wheelchair, calling to Sam to help him throw on the runway lights. “Go, Annie P. Goode!” he yelled over his shoulder.

Clark masked his distress by giving Annie a wry hug. “If this is good-bye, can I have your Porsche?”

“No. It goes to Georgette. What do you need a Porsche with a souped-up eight for? You never go over forty.” Annie tossed the duffel bag into the plane along with the tote bag of food Sam had packed for her. “You okay, Clark?”

“I baked you a cake. You know how long it takes to squirt icing for ‘Happy Birthday, Annie’ out of a soggy paper cone? Too long. That’s why your cake says ‘Happy B’d’y, A.’ I figured, know what? She’ll think Brad made it.”

“You baked a cake for me?”

“I’m freezing it. So come back.”

She straightened her uncle’s glasses; one stem was taped. “Okay.”

He held up the Maltese. “Say goodnight and good luck, Malpy.”

Lightning lit the distant sky and thunder echoed along the tin roof of Destin Airworks. Jumping out of Clark’s arms, the dog raced off into the darkness.

Sam was wet through by the time she ran back into the hangar. “Annie, I changed my mind. Let’s do call the St. Louis cops. You’re right. Let the police find Jack! You stay out of it.”