interrupted by the occasional town of toy houses.
We didn’t talk much, not with her crammed into that cockpit and the Vega’s deafening prop and engine noise. She was allowing two days to make the nearly two-thousand-mile trek, and had assured me we’d land well before sundown, in Albuquerque.
The trip was mostly uneventful. I ate a box lunch and read the latest issue of
I unbuckled and, moving with the grace of a drunk on an ice floe, made my way to the opening between cabin and cockpit and stuck my head up and in; even right next to her, I had to yell: “Anything I should know back here? Like where my parachute is?”
She hollered back: “We’ve run into some rapidly shifting winds! Don’t panic!”
She was already making her descent toward the runways and hangars of Albuquerque Municipal Airport, where a wind sock on a pole was twirling like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.
“You were kidding with that ‘folds up like an accordion’ remark, right?”
She was sitting forward and her hands clutched the yoke. “More like a Chinese lantern…. Get back and buckle yourself in, Nate! I never lost a passenger yet.”
I did a clumsy native dance back to my seat, buckled in, and then she shouted at me: “I’m going to have to take the shortest runway! That’s going to mean an abrupt approach….”
The Vega was riding the wind like a motorboat on choppy waters.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “‘abrupt’?”
And she answered me by dropping the plane into a steep forward sideslip. My as-yet-undigested box lunch (tuna salad sandwich, apple, and chocolate chip cookie) damn near made a crash landing. Then the ship began a series of wide fishtails, like the Vega was waving hello to New fucking Mexico.
“Shit!” I yelled. “Are we out of control?”
“That’s on purpose! It cuts speed!”
Maybe the plane’s, but not my pulse rate.
The runway was looming before us, and yet she was flying the plane virtually onto the ground, the throttle opened up. We seemed to be running out of runway; she sideslipped so as not to overshoot it and as I waited for the sound and feel of the Vega’s fixed wheels touching tarmac, and as Amy pulled the stick back to set down, a gust of wind suddenly ballooned the Vega back up twenty feet…and then just as suddenly, that gust of wind died.
And left us there.
Before we could drop like a stone, Amy slammed the throttle forward, the wind came back and the Vega set down without a bounce, though we were still at full throttle; fortunately, the runway was built on something of an incline, dissipating the plane’s forward speed. We careened around the arc of the taxi circle at the runway’s end and finally, blessedly, drew to a halt.
In the dining room of the Hilton Hotel on Copper Avenue that evening, I asked her, “What the hell happened today?”
“When?” she asked, nonchalantly cutting a bite of a big medium rare filet of beef.
“When we almost landed,” I reminded her, “then had to land again?”
She shrugged. She was still in her plaid shirt and knotted scarf—we hadn’t taken time to wash up for dinner, Amy being too hungry to bother. “Technically,” she said, “we were in a stall.”
“Jeez, I hate it when a plane crashes on a technicality.”
She smirked, waved that off, chewed, swallowed, not wanting to be impolite and talk with her mouth full.
“We didn’t crash, silly. We were just caught in a momentary vacuum…. It’s as if all the air pressure got suddenly sucked from the controls.”
“So you put the plane on the ground at full throttle.”
“That seemed to me to be the best option.”
“Isn’t that a pretty good trick?”
“It is if you can get away with it.”
I raised my rum and Coke to her; it was all I was having. “Here’s to one hell of a pilot.”
She liked that. “Thanks, Nathan.” She raised her water glass to me. “Here’s to one hell of a guy.”
That was one of the few times I ever heard her swear, and I took it as a high compliment.
At the door to her suite, I asked, “Need a neck rub tonight? Or maybe just some company?”
Halfway inside already, she smiled almost sadly and said, “No, I don’t think so, thanks. I have to call G. P., write a few letters, then I want to get to bed nice and early.”
I’d been hoping to get to bed nice and early myself; only, not alone.
Maybe she could read my mind, because just before she shut herself in her room, she touched my face, tenderly, with the tips of those long tapering fingers. “Cheerio, Nathan…. We have another long day in the air, tomorrow…and I want to be alert, in case it’s eventful.”
But it wasn’t, really. Smooth flying over the brown and tan and salmon vistas of New Mexico, Arizona, and California, canyons and mesas and only the occasional stray city-boy thought that surviving a crash in this country would mean keeping company with sand and lizards and cactuses. She would dip down low enough to provide a
