“You think that’s what this is about?”
“What what’s about?”
We had spoken little about the threatening notes; I had moved from bodyguard to trusted confidant to friend, and it had just never come up, even if my erection had.
“Could one of your admirers be behind those sick notes?”
She made a goofy face and waved that off. “Why would an admirer threaten me?”
“To stand out from the anonymous crowd. To be special in your life.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, then, neither does G. P.’s theory.”
“You mean, that it’s a rival aviatrix.”
She nodded. “I’m sure there’s jealousy, but my peers know I’ve been their champion, that nobody’s worked harder for the betterment of female pilots than Amelia Earhart.”
I was aware, from the question and answer portions of her lectures, that as a founding leader of the Ninety Nines she had worked to make that organization of women pilots a central information exchange on job opportunities.
But I also knew that efforts like that could be dismissed as self-aggrandizement and politics.
“People can be pretty damn petty,” I pointed out. “Besides, Amelia-Earhart-who’s-done-so-much-for-the- betterment-of-female-pilots, trust me…anybody who refers to herself in the third person has enemies.”
She pretended to be annoyed. “You think I’m self-important?”
“For a celebrity, not particularly.”
“Is that what I am? A celebrity?”
“It’s what puts the gas in your airplane, Amy.”
Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I’d lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers. The weariness was gone, her eyes a piercing blue-gray, her chin firm, and she made a striking Lindberghesque figure in her brown broadcloth chinos and boots befitting a farmer, and of course a properly wrinkled, oil-stained leather flying jacket with its collar winging up, zippered a casual two or three inches, blousing open to reveal a brown-and-tan plaid shirt with a brown bandanna knotted gaily about her graceful throat.
“So is the Vega a good plane?” I asked, working my voice up above the airfield noise. It was windy enough to make my suit and tie flap; my fedora was flattened to my skull with a hand trying to prevent the hat’s takeoff, and with my small suitcase in the other hand, I looked like a door-to-door salesman who wandered off his route.
“It’s fast,” she said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
“Well, the heat buildup in that cramped cockpit can get pretty disagreeable; that’s why I don’t need a flying suit.”
“The question was, is it a good plane?”
“Yes and no.”
“Tell me the ‘no’ part.”
“It can be a little tricky near the ground. That single-chassis construction, with the no-longer-on fuselage, won’t take any plane of the year awards.”
“Why’s that?”
“Folds up like an accordion in a crackup.”
“Jesus! What do you do about that?”
She shrugged. “Don’t crack up.”
And she climbed the small ladder leaning against the plane by the wing, opened the isinglass cockpit cover, and crawled in.
With that heartening observation to cheer me, I boarded through the cabin door toward the middle of the aircraft, crawling over massive fuel tanks to take the single remaining seat, where I buckled myself in. Glancing around at the boxlike tanks that provided less than reassuring company, it occurred to me I was seated in the middle of a flying bomb.
Though she was somewhat above me, I could still get a good view of Amy in the claustrophobic cockpit, her legs resting practically up under the engine mount. No wonder it got hot up there. She started the engine, and while it idled she watched the response of the panel of round dials, checking oil and fuel temperature and engine revolutions per minute.
Curling her long, feminine, artist’s fingers about the stick, she taxied down the runway, turning into the wind, holding the brakes steady and hard, yanking the stick all the way back into her midsection. Revving the motor, she reached up and turned a switch; the sound of the engine’s thrum shifted, and apparently this was what she wanted to hear, because her smile was reflected in the windshield.
With her left hand, she advanced the throttle, slowly, easily, and the churning of the propeller grew to a hard fast roar, as the Vega built speed, racing down the runway. She eased the throttle ahead, to its limit, keeping the stick forward, bringing up the tail; the plane seemed to want to get into the air but she wasn’t quite ready to let it.
Then she yanked back on the stick and the plane rumbled off the runway, riding the wind, climbing to ten thousand feet and lending me a fine view out my little window of the rolling countryside, shades of brown alternating with emerging green and occasional patches of snow, threaded by sun-glistening rivers and tributaries,
