Her Last Flight Read online

  Irene’s father taught her how to surf when she was eleven or twelve. This was before the war, before the California beaches began to fill with people surfing or learning to surf. He woke her before dawn one morning and told her to put on her bathing costume, and the two of them drove south from the city until they reached Santa Cruz. Just the two of them. Mrs. Foster stayed abed in their house on Balboa Street; she was by then in the last stages of the sickness that would kill her. Foster smelled a little of whiskey, but then he usually smelled of whiskey. He told Irene to go back to sleep until they got there, so she settled down on the seat and closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep. How could she? She listened to the rattle of axles and the burr of the engine, to Hank Foster’s whistle. Once or twice another car swept by, and the headlights illuminated the air, but otherwise it was as dark as night, as dark as only the hour before dawn can be.

  They reached the bay at last. Foster pretended to wake her and Irene pretended to wake. She made a show of rubbing her eyes like a baby, and Foster laughed. The air had begun to lighten. She saw the stubble on his jaw, the blond disarray of his hair, the creases along his eyes and cheeks. He was wearing his own bathing costume, well used. He untied something from the roof of the car, and that turned out to be a surfboard. It was enormous and ungainly, so heavy (Irene grabbed one end of it to help her father carry it down the beach) it couldn’t possibly float. But it did. Foster explained how he had carved it himself from a local redwood, under the instruction of a Hawaiian fellow who had come to California for surfing demonstrations a few years ago. He’d gone to watch—did Irene remember that afternoon?—and thought it looked so grand, he ended up trying it himself. That was Hank Foster for you.

  They found the edge of the ocean. Even in later years, Irene still remembered the rough sand on the soles of her bare feet, and the chill salt mist that rolled off the sea. She remembered how frigid the water was, how it squeezed the breath from her lungs. She didn’t remember the surfing itself. Probably she never quite made it to her feet on that ungainly board that first morning. But she remembered her father’s strong arm, she remembered the wildness of the surf, the freedom, the understanding that they were doing something forbidden, that Mrs. Foster would be furious when they got home.

  But Irene also remembered the drive back north. The morning sunshine dried her wet skin and Foster told her about the Hawaiian princes who attended boarding school in San Mateo twenty years earlier and used to come down to surf at Santa Cruz. How surfing wasn’t just a sport or a hobby, it was like a religion for them, a ritual of kingship. You couldn’t rule over other men unless you could master the giant waves of Waikiki and Kahalu’u. To test yourself against the ocean was to test the essence of your human spirit.

  They didn’t go surfing every morning, Irene and her father. But they went often enough that Irene soon needed her own surfboard, and the muscle to manage it on the Santa Cruz coastline, both of which she acquired pretty quickly. Irene was tall and athletic, a natural at surfing and pretty much any sport, really. But mostly she had human spirit. That was it, Foster used to say, as they drove north from Santa Cruz toward home, damp and exhausted. That was what made Irene such a natural. She yearned to be free of the earth.

  Anyway, that’s why Irene woke up every morning at four o’clock and drove from her small house beneath the Hollywood Hills down to the beach at Santa Monica. She was the only woman there, but nobody seemed to care. Out there, she was treated—to the extent she was treated at all—like any other surfer. Your sex was irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was to surf well. Today she surfed exceptionally well. The waves were big and slow, the way Irene liked them. She rode them for an hour or so, and emerged from the cold foam tired and exalted, like a warrior from battle. As she walked up the beach to the cliffs, carrying her heavy surfboard, she passed a man, bent down to examine something inside a clump of dune grass, who looked up at her and smiled. She recognized him. He surfed here often; first man on the water, most mornings. As acceptance went, it was a small gesture. Still, it was something. He was what she thought of as a typical California specimen: wide shouldered and underfed, earnest and deeply tanned, couple inches taller than Irene, wet hair slicked back from a hollow-cheeked face, the kind of face that stuck in your mind, that made you think you had seen him somewhere before. Every time she saw him, she thought he should eat more. She hoisted the board more securely on her shoulder for the climb up the path.

  “Hey there! Miss!”

  Irene swung awkwardly, bracing her foot on a firm patch of sand. The fellow stood a few feet below, looking up at her. One hand shaded his brow from the rising sun and the other hand cradled some object next to his chest.

  “I don’t mean to bother you or anything, but . . . well, you don’t happen to be looking for a cat, maybe?”

  “A cat?”

  He moved his hand to reveal a small feline head, white fur and pink nose, crisp triangle ears. A patch of gray-brown tabby spilled down its forehead, and a ginger patch surrounded the right eye. “Well. Kitten, I guess. Not yours, is it?”

  “I don’t have a cat.”

  “Found it huddled in the grass there.” He nodded at the nearby dune. “Must’ve got lost from its mother or something.”

  “Of all places for a kitten.”

  “Or else some bastard dumped him here.” He turned the kitten to face him, revealing a skinny, delicate rib cage and ragged fur. The white patches were immaculate, as if bleached. The head was so absurdly large for that emaciated body. The man rubbed his nose against the tabby patch on its forehead and addressed the tiny kitten face with just enough volume so Irene could hear him. “How’d you get here, little guy? Beach is no place for you.”

  The kitten yawned. Irene shifted her weight, because the surfboard was heavy and dug into her shoulder, but she made no move to leave. The sight mesmerized her, the frail calico belly encompassed by those bony hands, the thick nose caressing the minuscule feline nose. Kitten in relief against dark serge bathing costume, tanned surfer’s skin. From the look of that wet, heavy hair, this man had already encountered the ocean this morning. The drops still rolled down his temples and neck and forearms; the sleeves of his bathing costume were rolled to the elbows.

  “He’s awfully fetching,” she said.

  “Yeah, a real heartbreaker. What am I going to do with you, fella?”

  “Can’t you just take him home with you?”

  “I just might.”

  The kitten leaned into his cheek and closed its eyes in a delirium of relief. Irene’s foot began to slip; the sand dissolved beneath her. She scrabbled a bit and the kitten opened its eyes to regard her.

  “Oh,” Irene said.

  The eyes were lighter than Irene expected, pale amber. The kitten blinked and gathered itself. In a single athletic spring, it soared from the man’s grasp to the sand next to Irene’s left foot and wound itself around her bare ankle.

  “Well,” the man said.

  “Oh, he tickles!”

  “That’s gratitude for you.”

  Irene choked back a giggle.

  “Say. You all right? Let me give you a hand with that board.”

  “No, thanks. I’m perfectly—perfectly fine—”

  “You sure?”

  Well. The board was heavy. The path was steep. The man was attractive. On the other hand, while he had that kind of face that stuck in your mind, it was also the kind of face that said he might be trouble. Irene couldn’t say why. He seemed straightforward enough. Kittens adored him. His chin was sturdy and all, his smile was sincere. His voice made an easy California rumble. Behind him, the waves roared in from across the Pacific, keeping time to the beat of the universe. The kitten rubbed its cheek on the round bone of her ankle.

  “I guess I’m all right,” Irene said. She pulled her leg free from the kitten, swung forward again, overbalanced the eighty-pound surfboard on her shoulder and toppled back into the sand at Trouble’s feet.

  Trouble had a n
ame, it turned out. “Mallory,” he said, sticking out his hand, when Irene’s surfboard was safely secured to the roof of the Model T and they had both visited the huts to change into dry, respectable clothes. The kitten now nestled in the crook of Mr. Mallory’s arm, purring like a motorboat. Irene stuck out a finger and rubbed its forehead.

  “Irene Foster,” she said.

  “You know, you’re the only girl who comes out here mornings.”

  “I’m no girl. Twenty years old last month.”

  “Still and all. Who taught you to surf like that?”

  “My father.”

  “You don’t say. Surfs out here too?”

  “No,” she said. “Just me.”

  Mr. Mallory squinted his eyes a little, like he was trying to figure out what she meant by that. He wore a newsboy’s cap over his damp hair, and he grabbed the brim and pulled it lower on his forehead, while his face turned away to observe the western horizon, the grand Pacific. He tickled the kitten’s chin, and it stretched out obligingly, eyes closed.

  Mallory, she thought. He had a name, Mr. Mallory, and as she repeated the words in her head, some bell dinged. Some ring of familiarity.

  She nodded to the kitten. “What’re you going to name him?”

  “I don’t know. Sandy?”

  “I guess that makes sense. My father used to say you should never forget where you came from.” She reached out again and smoothed the fur between its ears. “Besides, it’s practical, isn’t it?”

  “Practical? How so?”

  “Why, if he turns out to be a she, you can keep the name.”

  Mr. Mallory looked a little shocked. He held up the kitten and peered underneath. “I’ll be damned. You might be right.”

  “Just a hunch.” She glanced to the car, because her cheeks had turned a little warm. “I’d better be off.”

  Mr. Mallory tucked the kitten back into his left elbow and touched the brim of his cap with his other hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Foster.”

  “Likewise, Mr. Mallory.”

  “Suppose I’ll be seeing you around, some morning.”

  “I’m here most mornings. When I can get the car started, anyway.”

  Mr. Mallory stroked the kitten with his large, bony fingers. He squinted at some point over her shoulder, toward the ocean. Irene shifted her feet.

  “Look, Miss Foster. I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. Glad to meet you at last, that’s all.”

  Irene opened her mouth to say Likewise and realized she was only repeating herself, the same bland word. Instead she said, “I suppose we were bound to meet sometime, both of us surfing here like this,” which wasn’t exactly true.

  But Mr. Mallory nodded, just as if their meeting were indeed inevitable, and said, “I guess you’re right.” He turned to his car, a handsome Nash Six, canary yellow, four or five years old in Irene’s estimation. Took a step or two. Stopped and turned and touched his cap again, and for some reason this image of Mr. Mallory stamped itself on her brain, tanned and sober, touching his cap while the rising sun tinted everything gold, so that ever after, when she thought of him, or when she sat in the dawn, he made this picture in her mind.

  She waved and got inside her own car, her father’s old Tin Lizzie held together with baling wire, and set the choke. Went around to turn the crank but though the engine turned and turned it wouldn’t start. Mr. Mallory noticed her trouble in the nick of time and came over from his Nash, which had started impeccably from its automatic ignition. He opened the hood and they peered inside together.

  “Spark plug’s blown out,” she said.

  “Got a spare?”

  “No. You?”

  “’Fraid not. But they’ll have plenty at the airfield. I’m headed out there now.”

  “Airfield?”

  “Where I work.” Mr. Mallory straightened from the innards of the Model T and smiled at her confusion, for maybe the first time since hauling her surfboard up the dunes, and Irene thought it was worth the sacrifice of a mere commonplace spark plug to experience a smile like that. He yanked down the hood and dusted off his hands.

  “I’m a pilot,” he said.

  And that was when Irene put one and one together, Mallory and flying.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re Sam Mallory. The Sam Mallory.”

  He scratched his head and peered at the sun. “Does it make a difference?”

  Irene bent down to pick up Sandy, who had escaped from the Nash and wandered across the grit to curl around Irene’s ankles. “Of course not,” she lied.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  The boy sprawled beside me is the kind who sleeps deep, apparently. I like that in a fellow. You can slither out of bed, dress and brush your teeth, even write him a tender good-bye note if you’re so inclined, and he won’t so much as flutter an eyelid.

  Dear Boy [I can’t remember his name],

  That was too lovely for words and just what a girl needs. A thousand thanks for the ride out there [he captained the boat from Oahu yesterday afternoon] and the ride in here. I enclose a five dollar bill. As I tried to explain last night, I might allow my escorts to pay for dinner, but I always buy my own drinks. You can keep the change for good luck.

  Yours always,

  Janey

  I lay the note on the nightstand and pull the camera from my pocketbook. My companion’s all tangled up in the sheets like a Bernini god, except tanned. I find an angle that preserves his modesty. The light’s not terrific, but I open the aperture as far as it will go and hold myself steady.

  Click.

  Then I steal out the door before he starts to miss me.

  Among the many gifts I received from that nice young man last night, he told me where to find Irene Lindquist. I don’t believe he meant to do that, but when a fellow’s plied with enough drink and female companionship, his lips will loosen in more ways than one.

  A good thing, too, because the rest of the locals in this two-bit Hawaiian village weren’t inclined to admit she exists, let alone lives among them, even though I know for a fact that Lindquist, together with her husband, Olle, runs an island-hopping operation called Kauai Sky Tours out of an airfield five miles away. By the time the good captain sauntered through the door of the town watering hole last night at a quarter past nine—acting as if he owned the joint, and it turned out he did—I had just about given up and prepared myself to walk those five miles through the darkness to wait for Lindquist at her place of business, since I wasn’t getting anywhere else fast. Tenacity, that’s what separates success from defeat. Also a willingness to do what’s necessary, though I admit that going to bed with this particular informant wasn’t exactly a noble sacrifice, except of sleep.

  Outside, the sun’s just begun to color the eastern horizon. The air tastes of the tropics, a pleasant change from my previous assignment in Nuremburg, Germany, which stank of rain and human decay. This place, you’d think it never heard of war. The vegetation tumbles from every nook, streaked with flowers; the lane meanders toward the beach as if it’s got all the time in the world. While the birds twitter and toot in abundance around me, there’s neither sight nor smell of another human being. Just the scent of sultry flowers and salty ocean. The sound of my own footsteps on the packed earth.

  Lindquist likes to surf in the morning, before anyone else is up. So my sea captain informed me last night, anyway, under a certain amount of duress. He wouldn’t reveal exactly where she surfs, but my money’s on the beach. Isn’t yours? Anyway, I’ve already discovered, in the course of my research, that Hanalei Bay is favored territory among those who enjoy the act of skidding on the ocean. Stands to reason I should find Irene Lindquist (not her real name, by the way, but we’ll discuss that later) somewhere along that sweep of sand, and it suits my purpose that we should meet at dawn, before the sea is peopled.

  Now, my informant’s bedroom isn’t far from this beach, because nothing in Hanalei is far from the
beach. Already the waves beat incessantly against my ears. Another hundred yards and the Pacific Ocean will wash up before me, and there she’ll soar, Irene Lindquist herself, right across its surface, hiding in plain sight. Assuming that dear, strapping boy was telling me the truth last night, of course. Boys will say anything when you have them at your mercy. But I have the feeling this one was on the level. He has an earnest face; the kind of face I’d like to photograph, if some grander mystery weren’t consuming my imagination at the moment.

  At first glance, the beach appears empty. The waves hurtle in from the northwest, golden-pink in the rising sun, but nobody rides them. On the other hand, Hanalei Bay swoops down in a magnificent arc, and there’s plenty more beach to explore. If I were a surfer, I might know where to go looking for this woman, who has surfed all her life. Where the best waves form, according to the laws of physics and geography. But I don’t surf and never have. I’ve got my instincts, that’s all, my instincts and a Rand McNally map, and it seems to me that the beach to the right ends in some kind of river mouth, while the beach to the left winds all the way around to a cliff called Makahoa Point, if I’m interpreting Rand McNally correctly, which I am. Maps and I, we get along pretty well.

  To the left it is.

  The sand is soft and cool, like powder. I remove my shoes—a pair of ragged espadrilles I acquired in Spain—and enjoy the way this unfamiliar substance pools around my feet. The dawn grows bright behind me. Ahead, the beach turns northward and narrows as it approaches the cliffs at the tip of Makahoa Point. Thus far, no Lindquist. Nobody at all. I might be the only person left alive after some great epidemic. Of course, it’s also possible that Lindquist has had some advance notice of my arrival, and chooses not to expose herself to discovery. You ask a few questions in a tiny, no-account burg like this one, where everybody’s knee-deep in each other’s beeswax, and it doesn’t take long for word to get around. And believe me, I understand the impulse to run for cover at the first sign of predators. I’m camera-shy myself. Would a million times rather stand on the taking side of the lens than the giving, and I don’t have half as much to hide as this Irene Lindquist. If indeed she’s the woman I’m searching for.