Till We Meet Again (30 page)

“Why wouldn’t you want to put her down on that strip between those two imaginary orchards over there?” Mac asked, pointing, while Freddy, her eyes darting from the instrument panel to the ground, began to glide methodically down to the point at which she would begin an approach pattern for an emergency landing.

“I like the road better … there’s no traffic in either direction. It’s a bit wider, and I can land into the wind and stop quickly. Sooner or later I can hitch a ride to the nearest town and telephone for help.”

“Hmm,” he grunted in approval, sitting with his hands on the cowling of the cockpit while she cut a textbook-perfect pattern on the downwind and crosswind legs of the landing and, fifty feet above the road, glided straight toward the road on her final approach. At that point he pushed the throttle in and the power roared back on. Freddy pulled the stick back carefully to regain altitude without stalling, sorry as always that the simulated emergency landings they practiced so often could never be carried to their conclusion. Probably the highway department would frown on it, or the local farmers would complain.

She approached Burbank with caution. All the commercial airlines that landed in Los Angeles used Burbank, and while they could communicate with the control tower, she had no radio and had to depend on a visual entry into the busy traffic pattern. Something about taking her rightful place in the pattern, and finally working her way through it until she was next in line to touch down, reminded her of the formal etiquette of the dancing class her parents had tried to send her to, for a few miserable months. You had to be exquisitely polite, as if you had on white gloves and your best dress and were waltzing in a room full of other dancers, as you calculated your proper position in the sky. Van Nuys Airport, farther up the valley than Burbank, was much less crowded, and she almost felt that she had it to herself, as she touched down lightly and, without stopping, took off again in the direction of Santa Paula.

The Santa Paula airport was only five years old, a single grass landing strip bordered by a small river along which grew tall trees. “Lets stop here for a few minutes,” Mac suggested. “The café has the best homemade pies in the valley.”

After they had tied down the plane, Freddy realized that they were the only fliers on the field. It was startlingly quiet; no sound of engines or voices, only the wind that always blows at airfields rustled the leaves of the trees. It was so warm that she took off her blue pullover and tied it around her waist and stood, looking around, in her Levi’s and a boy’s white shirt. A heavy leather belt pulled the denim pants in as much as possible at her waist; still the man’s trousers were baggy on her slender frame, but not too long since Freddy had cut them off at the tops of her tennis shoes.

Santa Paula looked like a rural meadow, yet even if her eyes had been closed, she would have known she was at an airfield, for an empty airfield is a waiting airfield, and rare is the flier who can stay away from one for long. It is as drenched with promise and excitement as the backstage of any empty theater before a performance.

Freddy and Mac each ate two slices of apple pie and drank coffee in thoughtful silence. The counter man read his newspaper as she impatiently tried to push her hair behind her ears and contemplated the next leg of the flight with almost uncontrollable curiosity. The Santa Monica Mountains, which lie between the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific Ocean, rise no higher than some four thousand feet. In the short lessons Freddy had taken so far, she had never had the time to spend crossing these mountains, and her experience of flight had been limited to the confines of the valley.

“Hey, Mac, are we or are we not goin’ flyin’ today?” Freddy asked as she finished her pie and looked up to see him looking as if he were thinking of something far, far away and long ago.

“You tell me, kid. This is your show.”

Back in the air, Freddy quickly adjusted her compass heading due southwest and began to climb higher than she ever had before. She planned to cross the range of mountains at Topanga Canyon. The flat terrain she had become accustomed to changed with amazing abruptness as the mountains
reared up quickly under the plane: wild, trackless mountains on which the evil-looking outcroppings of bare, jagged rock had nothing to do with California.

Looking around her, Freddy realized that she could have been over any rough, dangerous, uninhabited spot in the world. Nowhere was there any opportunity for an emergency landing, and she wondered if she shouldn’t climb two thousand feet higher so that if Mac cut the motor she would have a longer glide path. She glanced at him, but he was looking calmly ahead, seeming bored. Better safe than sorry, she thought, and decided to gain altitude immediately.

“Don’t bother. I promise not to do it,” he said, smiling as he read her mind. Two minutes later the narrow mountain pass was behind her wings. As if the planet had decided to play some gigantic feat of magic, before her suddenly appeared an immensity of blue too supreme to have been imagined.

She had known that she was going to see the Pacific, it was plain on the map, but nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the wondrous, shining openness that stretched into infinity ahead of her. It was a new, unknown planet. A pack of sailboats, far below and far away, seemed to flow toward the edge of this endless world, and Freddy, as if she had fallen into a trance, flew toward them. They were venturesome, but not as venturesome as she, for she could overfly them and leave them behind, poor wingless creatures, dependent on wind. West, west she flew, until the sailboats lay directly beneath her, and still west, until they had been left far behind.

“Next stop Hawaii?” Mac asked.

Freddy’s mouth fell open as the spell was broken. She was many miles off course and she’d been flying without thinking, flying heedlessly, enchanted, magnetized, straight into the horizon.

“I don’t … how?… damn, I’m sorry,” she sputtered, looking around and beginning to turn the plane back toward the coast.

“Take it easy. I let you do it.” He watched as she immediately set about regaining a correct course in spite of being stunned by her own behavior. There were two kinds of pupils, Mac thought, those who saw the Pacific for the first time, gave it a quick look, and kept on course as if flying were a chore and the ocean a puddle, and there were those who
lost their heads, like Freddy. Of the latter group, most of them were so upset when they discovered that they’d flown out to sea that they asked him to take over on the flight back to land.

Soon they were over the five hangars and the single runway of Mines Field, where the National Air Races would take place in six months. Bulldozers were already at work extending the runway, and bleachers were being built. Freddy circled the field, and then, looking at her watch, decided not to touch down there but to head back directly over the Santa Monica mountains in the direction of Dry Springs. She had lost precious time in her headlong embrace of the Pacific. She changed her compass heading and landed at her home base just after four-thirty in the afternoon of the winter day. The sun was low, but it was so clear that the air was still bright. As she stopped at the spot where the Taylor was always tied down, Mac spoke casually.

“I got you another little birthday present. I’ll just go into the office and find it.”

“You’ve given me my present,” Freddy protested. She felt curiously empty of emotion. The cross-country flight seemed to have used up all her excitement.

“Don’t complain. You’re only sixteen once. And Freddy, while I go get it, take her back up, circle the field three times and come down.” He opened the door, jumped out of the plane, slammed the door closed without looking at her, and walked away quickly.

For an instant Freddy sat motionless, watching McGuire’s back as he strode toward the hangar. Had he said to take the ship up
alone
? No, he hadn’t said “alone,” but that’s what he’d meant.

“YES!” Freddy shouted in victory to the empty cockpit. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said out loud, unconscious that she was speaking in a serious, imperative undertone as she taxied to the end of the runway and raced toward her takeoff point, her throttle full open, in an ecstasy of thrust, passionately urging on the plane as she approached that miraculous and logical instant at which she would have enough speed and enough lift so that her wings would rise irresistibly into the golden air, the beckoning sky, toward the setting sun.

As she took off, quickly rising, she was the archer, she was the arrow. She never glanced toward the empty right-hand seat. Time existed, but not for her. Freddy’s hands
moved calmly as she reached the right altitude and began to make the necessary adjustments for turns and banks, her heart beating madly with a joy she’d never known as the light plane responded to her touch as if it were her own flesh. The patterns she had cut so often seemed to be made of a new material as she flew alone, the landmarks around the airport registered on her mind with new import. There was a divinity in the moment, a divinity in the edges of her wings as they embraced the night, in the steady roar of the motor, in the knowledge that one machine and one human being, aloft together and alone, made more than one entity. She heard herself laughing and she saw the evening star in the deepening blue of the sky.

Below, Mac stood at the edge of the runway, gazing upward, his eyes never leaving the silhouette of the plane, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously in his pockets. Why the hell had he let her make that long cross-country flight before her solo? It was late in the day and she was tired and probably more emotional than he knew, after the flight over the ocean. Yesterday she’d been only fifteen, too young to solo, and who would argue that the passage of twenty-four hours made her old enough today? What was wrong with his judgment? So what if it was her birthday—he could have postponed it to another time. Could have and, damn it,
should
have.

And yet … and yet … she was so
ready
. Watching Freddy fly today had caused him to relive the pure emotion that he had felt when he was a student pilot, an emotion that he believed he’d forgotten years ago. He’d thought that becoming a mundane teacher of what had once been his obsession had burned out his joy in the purity of flight, but today Freddy had made him relive the poetry, breathe again the air that lured him to leave the planet earth time after time. Christ, but the sky was getting darker by the second. It was almost the shortest day of the year. The temperature must have dropped twenty-five degrees since they’d been at Santa Paula. He was cold, but he couldn’t dash into the hangar and get his jacket as long as Freddy was up there. He’d never known a plane take so long to make three circuits of any airport.

Freddy flew on. She saw the evening star again and knew it was sending her a message, a friendly and important message that she had already accepted as one she might never
decipher, no matter how much it meant to her. How she longed to climb up into the heavens until she could see the stars of the constellation of Capricorn. The books said that they were far away, too far to be seen. She didn’t believe it, would never believe it, for she knew that she flew now under Capricorn, the constellation of her birth

Looking below, she picked out Mac’s figure, a solitary dark shape on the runway. She waggled the wings of the plane to let him know that she’d seen him, completed the third circuit and, with a sigh of rebellion, but acceptance, prepared to come in.

Mac didn’t move as Freddy made a perfect landing, the red plane set down sweetly on its front wheels, its small back wheel touching down at the same time. His hands were still clenched as she taxied over and came to a stop not far from where he stood, and they relaxed only when she cut the engine. The door opened and she hurtled out of the plane in one bound, almost knocking him over with the force of her rapture as she flung her arms around him. She burned in the night like a Fourth of July sparkler, her red hair whipped by the wind, her eyes so incandescent that they flung light wherever they looked.

“I did it! I did it!” she exclaimed, and kissed him all over his face She opened her arms wide and looked up at the evening star as if she owned it. “I did it, Mac! Oh, thank you! Thank you!” He found he couldn’t speak. He felt as young, as triumphant, as intoxicated as she; the emotions he had long forgotten closed his throat with prohibited tears. He tapped his watch and shook his head warningly. “I know,” Freddy said. “I have to go or I’ll be late. I’m late already. Oh, Mac, I don’t care. O.K., I’ll go, I’ll go. But Mac, I’ll be back! There’s so much to learn.”

Forgetting to fill in her logbook, she gave him another huge hug and a last grateful kiss and ran out to the road to hitch a ride back home. Mac still stood on the landing strip. On his cold cheeks he could feel the warmth of her impulsive kisses. It seemed as if her strong arms were still wrapped around him, her wildly happy voice still rang in his head. He sighed and shook his head. As he started to tie down the Taylor he stopped and rubbed his cheek with a slow, meditative, half-astonished grin. Sweet sixteen, he said to himself, sweet sixteen—so that’s what it was all about.