Till We Meet Again (29 page)

“How about a chocolate soda?” the counterman asked. “On the house?”

“Gee, thanks, but no thanks. I work at the candy counter—I’ve lost my sweet tooth,” Freddy explained regretfully. She wished she had the nerve to ask him for another sandwich instead.

Terence McGuire sat behind his desk in his office, where he should have been paying his bills, and found that he was thinking about his fledgling, Freddy de Lancel. He had taught many men and boys the craft of flying, as well as one or two women, but Freddy was the first girl who had been his pupil.

The craft itself was teachable, he was convinced, to anyone with a grasp of basic logic and enough desire and patience to learn. Unlike some skills, it didn’t require an inborn predisposition, for none of his pupils had flying genes, any more than he had.

Man was not born a flying animal, yet even if no birds had ever existed on the planet to demonstrate the fact of flight, McGuire was convinced that man would have learned to fly, just as, if there had been no fish, man would have learned to swim. Flight wouldn’t have happened during his own century, more than likely, but sooner or later someone, one of the many who had cast their eyes questioningly at the skies since the days that man first stood upright, would have unlocked the secret of flight, just as someone had built the first wheel, someone had rigged the first sail, someone had figured out how to build the Pyramids, and someone else had invented gunpowder. It was in the nature of the beast, he told himself, to keep pushing—regardless of whether it was a good idea or a bad one.

No question about it, you didn’t have to be born a flying version of the young Mozart to become a pilot, and yet … and yet … a few, only a very few, people were
natural
flying animals—no two ways about it. The great majority of the people he’d taught successfully were not. But there had been, among his students, a few who had an immediate feeling of what he thought of as
rightness
in the air. It was as if they had an extra sense, a seventh sense, since the sixth sense was spoken for, that he, Terence McGuire, knew existed, even if he couldn’t spread it out on a table and measure and weigh it. He had it himself, he had had it the first time he took up his first ship, and he believed that Freddy de Lancel had it too.

It wasn’t just her eagerness. Eagerness, all by itself, was a
bad thing in a game in which patience was as essential as the ability to tell your right hand from your left. It wasn’t just her fearlessness. Too many pilots who crashed in training accidents had been fearless. No, there was something else involved in that seventh sense for which he had never found satisfactory words, a sort of
condition of energy
with which she entered into the flying process, so that the tall young girl who entered his office at a run, to let him know that she’d arrived on time, was a subtly different person as she walked out to the Taylor Cub to start her preflight.

Concentration was part of it. He always followed a few steps behind her while she inspected the plane, and he could see that a lightning bolt striking the runway would not have broken her concentration while she was checking the propeller for nicks or cracks both with her eyes and fingertips, looking as if she were positively listening with her skin for any defect in the metal.

You could tell a lot about someone just from watching them do a preflight, he thought. There were the people who did too much, too slowly, double-checking unnecessarily, because, in their heart of hearts, they truly hoped to put off the moment of climbing into the plane. They shouldn’t be trying to learn how to fly. However, with patience they could be taught, and eventually they might lose their fear.

On the other hand, there were the people who cut corners, as if they hadn’t understood that they were entrusting their lives to a piece of equipment in which each bolt, nut and screw had an essential function. Those people shouldn’t be
allowed
to learn how to fly, and after he’d given them one warning he’d refused to take them up again. Most mistakes a student could make were survivable, but improper inspection of the ship while it was still on the ground was not among them.

At this point, after watching Freddy make seven preflight checkouts, he’d be willing to go up in a ship she’d checked out without watching her do it with his own eyes. Not that he’d tell her, of course. Or do it, for that matter.

Damn, but he liked the way Freddy
used
the sky, Terence McGuire thought, getting up from behind the desk he hated. Students tended to bounce all over the sky, slipping and sliding, clawing and clutching, rearing up and plunging down, overcorrecting their mistakes and then overcorrecting the new set of corrections, as nervous and skittish as if they were
unbroken horses. He made sure that there was plenty of sky for them to learn in, but so many of them approached it as if it were an enemy, as if they didn’t trust it.

Sky liked to be treated with decent respect, combined with a calm, quickly responsive but determined hand on the stick, and dancing, dancing,
dancing
feet on the rudders.

As important was the fact that at each lesson he could see her precision improving. Precision was primary in this game … without precision, no other flying ability or combination of abilities was worth damn all. At each lesson, Freddy was achieving a higher degree of predictability and smoothness in the angles of her banks and turns, maintaining her airspeed and altitude exactly where he wanted them, more and more of the time.
Exactly
, McGuire was not backward about telling his students, meant just that: no room for any variance whatsoever.

With more and more frequency she was executing a perfect rectangle, that fiendishly finicky series of steps that set up a good landing, a procedure involving dozens of elements of coordination of mind and body. It was utterly elementary when you knew how to do it, McGuire reflected, and a nightmare of frustrating inaccuracy until then.

Freddy’s landings were becoming more and more consistent as well: a steady floating descent toward the numbers painted on the end of the runway, and then a quick and gentle setting down, tailwheel touching simultaneously with the two front wheels, a merger with the ground in which an ordinary passenger wouldn’t be able to separate out whether the plane had just decided to dissipate its speed and settle down on its own, or whether the pilot had put it down with a complicated knowledge as much in the body as in the head. It was all done through a series of totally unmagical and logical steps, yet, McGuire mused, no matter how many students he had taught or would ever teach, there would always be magic in a good landing.

Fortunately the kid didn’t have a speck of passivity in her. A pilot with precision and accuracy down cold wouldn’t be worth a hoot in hell if he weren’t always on the alert, ready to react immediately to a change in conditions: a sudden gust of wind, a sudden drop in the wind, the appearance of another plane where it had no right to be; engine failure or any of the other devils that would always lie in waiting where man, machine and air came together … part of the price of flight.
Or part of the challenge, depending on how you looked at it. If you ran out of lift and airspeed, you were in trouble, but if you ran out of ideas at the same time, you were dead.

McGuire ran his hands over the map box Freddy had given him for Christmas. Somehow she’d persuaded her high school to let her out of home economics and nutrition and managed to take shop instead, just as he’d told her to do four years ago. When she’d shamelessly fooled him into giving her a first flying lesson. He could still see the glory on her face that had caused him to tell her father that it wasn’t her fault. The map box was a product of her shop class, a tall, long and narrow wooden case of her own design, with a number of deep drawers, each one with a metal pull and a place for a label on it.

The pile of maps that Mac was used to searching through now lay neatly in drawers that slid in and out with a smoothness that made it a pleasure to use. He’d given her two hours of air time for Christmas, and he didn’t know whether he or Freddy had been the more delighted with the exchange of gifts.

Today it wouldn’t be an exchange, he thought, whistling cheerfully in anticipation of the look on Freddy’s face when he told her that today her birthday present was a cross-country flight, the destination her choice, the flight time his treat. Of course, they’d have to be back by sundown since the landing strip wasn’t lit, and in the middle of the winter it would be dark very soon after five o’clock.

High school was still out for Christmas, so that she was due to show up for her lesson early in the afternoon, any minute now. After a week that had been spent giving lessons to would-be pilots, like the local doctor whose girlfriend thought he looked like Lindbergh, and the local banker whose wife hoped he looked like Lindbergh, and the local lothario who wanted to look like Lindbergh, and who persisted in wearing a helmet and goggles inside a closed cockpit, it was only natural, McGuire told himself, that he was looking forward so keenly to giving a lesson to someone who looked like a cross between the way Carole Lombard must have looked when she was the same age and … what the hell, why not admit it, Amelia Earhart, before she’d cut her hair so short.

“Cross-country? Oh, Mac, I can’t believe it!” Freddy fizzed with excitement, jumping up and down as if she were six
instead of sixteen today. “It’s the best birthday present I’ve ever had.”

“But now you’re wasting time,” he said, shutting down his smile. “You can be as grateful as you want to when it’s too dark to fly.”

“Oh gosh,” she said in the tone of voice of someone who has thought of an impediment to a priceless treat.

“What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” Freddy said hastily. “It’s O.K. I just have to be home at a decent hour tonight to get dressed up. My parents are taking us out to the Brown Derby for dinner, since I wouldn’t let them give me a sweet-sixteen party. Can you imagine me and a sweet-sixteen party?”

“Frankly, no. So, where are we going?”

Freddy had been flying in and out of the many airports around Dry Springs for touch-and-go landing practice, and some of them appealed to her more than others. “Burbank,” she decided quickly, picking the biggest and busiest and most challenging one first. “Then Van Nuys, then Santa Paula—then out over Topanga Canyon … and then …”

“Catalina?” He’d like to see her land at that tricky mountain airport, the shortest and least forgiving landing strip in the area.

“No, Mines Field—and then back.”

“Mines Field? Are you planning to get a head start on the National Air Races?”

“O.K., Mac, so I just want to see it, I’m curious, I admit it, is there something wrong with that?” Freddy said in slight embarrassment as she busily took the necessary maps out of his box, so that she could plot her flight plan on paper.

In the air, Freddy realized how far she had progressed in three months. The terrain, which seemed to be fed toward her in a never-ending strip from the horizon to her wingtips, had once been bewilderingly unfamiliar. Now it was speckled with friendly landmarks: occasional farms; the scratch tracks of dirt roads; the deeper, darker scars of almost-dry riverbeds with the welcome olive green of the trees that grew along them; particular confirmations of the dry yellowish earth of the San Fernando Valley; and even the individual shapes of certain spots where the vegetation native to California grew in unwatered soil.

Freddy’s eyes had been constantly roving through the sky and over the land beneath her, as Mac had taught her, her
head moving from side to side so that her knowledge of what was going on in the sky and on the ground was as complete as possible at all times. Not watching for traffic was, in his book, as unsurvivable a mistake as not checking to make sure you had gas before you took off. Many experienced pilots had inexplicably failed to take these elementary precautions and died because of a moment of absentmindedness.

As she handled the controls he was quiet, letting her do as she pleased while he watched for mistakes. No question about it, she was a true flying animal, born to fly as some humans were born to ride horses and others were born to swim. He’d bet money he didn’t have that one day she’d learn everything he knew and maybe more.

Although Mac wasn’t issuing his normal instructions, Freddy heard his words in her ears. “The
earth’s surface
is what you fly by,” he’d said. “You mentally smooth it out and keep your fuselage
parallel
with the surface over which you’re flying. The horizon isn’t important unless there’s a mountain on it. Always, at all times, you must be aware of the earth’s surface.”

The first time he’d said those words she’d been disappointed. Freddy had imagined that once she could handle a plane she would experience a kind of blazing burst into a state of exalted freedom from the earth. But the more she flew, the more earth and sky fused into one, so that her freedom existed
within
a great bowl, an inexhaustible bowl in which all things were important, a bowl whose edge was the horizon, ever-changing as she approached it, luring her on and on, without end, because once the horizon was no longer ahead it disappeared and a new horizon beckoned.

She didn’t agree with Mac that the horizon wasn’t important. To Freddy’s eyes, the sight of the horizon filled an elementary need, and caused a basic hunger to fly toward it and see what lay beyond. She knew it was the same for him, but that, as her teacher, he wanted her to concentrate on other things.

Casually, and so quickly that she didn’t notice, Mac pulled the throttle back so that the plane’s power went dead. “Your engine has just failed,” he said in the sudden silence. “Where are you going to set her down?”

“There’s an unplowed field by the right wing,” she answered him.

“Where else? Forget unplowed fields. That’s too easy.
Pretend they’re not there. Assume that this valley is covered with orange orchards. What’s your second choice?”

“That road over to the left. It’s wide enough and there’s no traffic on it.”