crash.”
“You’ve done both?”
“Yeah. But the problem with what I do, I’m only flying solo where the business end is concerned…I’m really messing in people’s lives. Sometimes I get hired by the wrong people. Sometimes people I like get hurt.”
“And when that happens, you don’t love what you do.”
“No.” I was staring into my coffee; my face stared back at me from the liquid blackness. “Last year a young woman…young woman died because of me. Because I made a mistake. Because I believed a man’s lies, a man who said he was her father but was really her husband. Because I wasn’t as smart or shrewd as I thought I was.”
Suddenly her hand was on mine. “Oh, dear…. You loved her, didn’t you?”
Why the hell had I opened that can of peas?
“We better get back on the road,” I said, drawing my hand away, slipping out of the booth, digging a nickel from my topcoat pocket and tossing the tip on the table-top. “We can blab just as easy in the car, you know.”
“All right. My turn to drive.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the captain.”
She looped her arm in mine as we walked out. “You’re not such a bad co-pilot to have along for the ride, Nathan.”
We talked more that night, and many nights after that; we became friends and there were times, when I walked her to her hotel room, where I felt perhaps our friendship might be more, moments when I almost had the nerve to kiss her.
But, of course, that would have been wrong.
After all, I was working for her husband.
4
Despite a blunt nose and wooden construction, the Vega was twenty-seven feet of streamlined design; with its fresh red paint job, the monoplane looked as if it were fashioned of metal. Though Amy indicated she was something like the fifth owner of the single-engine aircraft, the Vega awaiting us on a runway of Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Airport might have been brand spanking new; even its propeller had been polished to a silverlike sheen.
This reflected work that G. P. had commissioned. In one of the hangars of the sweeping modern airport with its radio-controlled towers, the Lockheed craft had been reupholstered and repainted, and refitted with extra fuel tanks.
“I didn’t exactly lie to you,” she had said the night before as we paused at the door of her room in the Coronado Hotel in downtown St. Louis.
Looking attractive if every one of her thirty-seven years, she wore a pale blue crepe gown of her own design; she was obviously weary after another long day on the personal appearance trail, having just spoken in a hotel dining room for the Daughters of the American Revolution (introduced as “a ray of hope in these bleak times”), where the only males in the room were the waiters and me.
“Sure you lied to me,” I said, leaning a hand against the wall, pinning her there, her back to her doorway. “You said no flying.”
“No I didn’t.” Amusement tickled her full, sensuous mouth; she had her hands tucked behind her back. “I said we wouldn’t be traveling by train.”
I waggled a finger in her face. “You said we wouldn’t be flying from town to town on this little lecture tour.”
Her chin lifted and she aimed her cool gaze down at me. “And we didn’t. The lecture tour is over, and now we’re flying to California…. What did Slim do to you, up in the air, to spook you so?”
“He had the stick jimmied somehow so that his pal Breckinridge would lose control of the plane. And I just about lost control of my bodily functions.”
Her laugh was humorless and not unsympathetic. “My goodness but that Lindbergh has the sickest sense of humor I’ve ever met in a man…. I once saw him pour a pitcher of ice water down a child’s pajamas.”
She was right about Slim, but I sensed a resentment for, and even jealousy of, America’s most famous flier, from his nearest rival—who happened to be saddled with the Lady Lindy moniker.
“It’s early,” she said. I could tell by her eyes that she had another of the sinus headaches that plagued her. “Want to come in for a moment?”
“You need another neck rub?”
Half a smile settled in the corner of a cheek. “Am I that transparent?”
“Not to most people.”
She had a suite, with a sitting area—this was an extravagance G. P. put up with so that she could receive the press on her own terms. Soon I was sitting on the couch and she was sitting on the floor like an Indian, her back to me, tucked between my fanned-out legs as I massaged her neck. Room service was on its way with some cocoa for her and a bottle of Coke for me.
We were great pals now, Amy and me, having shared the special intimacy of late-night gabfests as we rolled over the roadways of America in the middle of the night and the wee hours of the predawn morning; that big lumbering Franklin became a confessional, as the blanket of stars in clear Midwestern skies lulled us both into sharing confidences.
I knew the bitterness she felt for her family—her mother and sister, who she had to support, her late father, who had boozed their family into periodic poverty. I knew she had still not overcome the guilt for her “manufactured fame,” since on her first and most famous flight, the Atlantic crossing on the
And she knew that my idealistic leftist father had killed himself in disappointment over his only son joining the
