The Four Corners of the Sky Page 14

  “Not really.” Annie studied the certificate.

  Sam’s familiar frown deepened. “Well, like when I was eating the chicken korma, I was remembering squeezing soy sauce out of a plastic packet in a booth at House of Joy. The soy sauce squirted onto my mother’s blouse sleeve. A gray silk blouse with two little covered buttons at the cuffs. Grandee was furious at me and hit the back of my hand hard with her fork. She didn’t like chopsticks and always used a fork.” Sam answered an accusation no one had made. “All right, all right, my mother wasn’t a loving person. But she had great style.”

  Annie patted her hands. “No wonder you eat everything with chopsticks, even French fries.” She took Sam back into the living room, pointed out a photo on the piano. In the picture, Sam stood among thousands of placard-waving protesters at the 2000 inauguration in Washington. “You’ve got the love thing and style too. Look at you. It’ll always be 1968, Sam.”

  “I wish,” sighed her aunt. “Check out the gray hair in that crowd. We’re practically on walkers. Where are all the young people?”

  Annie pointed at a group photo of her first flight-school class at their graduation. “Here we are. In a land called Reality where you know you can’t change human nature.”

  “The world is fixable, Annie. You just need to get the real news so you know what to fix.”

  Annie straightened the Navy photo. Two of those classmates were dead now. She said, “We’d rather hear the news on comedy shows.”

  Sam helped Annie slip into Jack’s old leather flight jacket, rolling up its sleeves for her. “That’s about the only place you can hear the real news these days. Vietnam, we had Cronkite.”

  Laughing, Annie put on her Navy cap. “Sam, just leave war to pros like me.”

  “You think you’re so cynical. Good lord, you telephone Georgette practically every day. There’s no reason to do that but love.”

  “Sure, and I buy organic. But most of all, I work hard to get promoted and—” Annie smiled, patting her flat abdomen, “—stay in shape.”

  Sam pushed a curl back off her niece’s forehead. “Well, an elliptical trainer won’t make your heartstrings zing—”

  Annie started melodramatically up the stairs. “Please, I beg you, don’t sing some awful love song.” Her mockery of Sam’s romantic songs was an old joke between them. “Love is not a many-splendored thing. Love does not make the world go round.”

  Sam called after her, “Yes, it does.”

  Annie turned back at the landing. “Well, I hope it doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry because I am looking forward to a major apology from Jack Peregrine!”

  Sam patted the carved peregrine hawk in the newel post as she shouted up the stairs to her niece. “Love means saying you’re sorry and hearing ‘I’m sorry,’ every goddamn day of your life. But oh sweetie, maybe you won’t hear it from Jack.”

  There was no answer. Annie had already gone into her room.

  “I’m talking to thin air,” Sam muttered.

  The tall white-haired woman walked back to the piano and picked up the Navy photograph in which her niece was smiling broadly, saluting her commanding officer, Commander Campbell, as he pinned a Commendation Medal on her. Sam compared the photo to the one of the seven-year-old Annie with Jack, seated in The Breakers restaurant. In both pictures, Annie had the same jubilant smile. “Oh, Anne Samantha, look at you.” Sam moved her fingers for a moment against the glass of each picture frame, tapped each small exultant face. “Look at you.”

  The day that Annie’s acceptance to Annapolis had arrived in the mail, Sam had felt the heft of the Academy’s packet, thinking that it wouldn’t be so heavy if it were a rejection; thinking, as she raced up the stairs to Annie’s bedroom, that this news would help her niece, this would fix things. Because Annie had been shut up there all day crying. A boy had thrown her over for another girl, a girl on her track team, the girl from whom Annie had to accept the hand-off baton on the last leg of a 4 x 400 relay race. Only a week ago, the girl had dropped the baton behind the fast-sprinting Annie in the blind hand-off and so they’d lost the race. Annie had been furious at the girl, who’d smiled at her smugly, bafflingly. Then the boy had broken the news. After school, Annie had driven home crying so hard that she’d begun hyperventilating and Sam had finally had to hold a paper bag to her face. She hadn’t cried that hard since the day her father had left her at Pilgrim’s Rest when she’d hidden in the barn behind the wheel of the Piper Warrior.

  Late through the night Sam had sat beside the bed where Annie had finally fallen asleep. She knew how her niece must feel. Sam had cried the same way when her partner Jill had not only left her but had charged her for more than her share of their condo equity.

  ***

  Wes Campbell, Annie’s commanding officer at the Annapolis base, called her cell phone while she was packing. He was sympathetic. “Lieutenant, it’s okay. Family emergency. I see here you’re owed three separate weeklong leaves that you never took. Make this one of them.”

  “I just need to find my dad, sir. I don’t need a week.”

  “Lieutenant, you’re taking a one-week leave starting at 0800.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be back well in time for my test flight.”

  Campbell chuckled. “I know that. We’re counting on you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No hesitation?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, good.” Commander Campbell liked the young female officer, whom he had personally chosen for the new F-35 Lightning II test flight. He made his joke about how times had changed from his own all-male days at the Academy in the ’60s, when midshipmen still wore glasses and had acne and everyone’s haircut was as flat as the runway on an aircraft carrier. He made this joke so often to female midshipmen, it was like a rite of passage when they first heard it from him.

  He asked, “Your dad go by Peregrine or Goode? You gals here at Annapolis have so many names hyphened together, it’s hard to know what the hell to call you.”

  “I don’t know what name my father’s going by these days, sir,” was Annie’s reply.

  The commander frowned as he hung up; he often didn’t catch the tone of this generation’s remarks. Was that humor? Just a fact?

  ***

  Up in her bedroom, Annie slid her neatly coiled jump rope in her duffel bag, then studied her birth certificate before placing it in her purse. The piece of paper looked real. Had she actually been born in that hospital in Key West, twenty-six years ago on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m.? Had she really weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz.? Was it even possible that her mother’s name had, quite coincidentally, really been Claudette Colbert? Unlikely.

  There was a lull in the storm; rain fell slow and soft. Clark was waiting in his Volvo to drive to the airfield when Annie carried her Navy duffel bag out onto the porch. Malpy raced into the opened car. Clark called to Sam, now kneeling in a flowerbed, moving fallen branches off the plants. “Let’s go!” They’d driven off so many times in just this way, year after year.

  Sam leaned into the car, upset. “We lost most of the hollyhocks and foxglove but for some reason those hideous orange irises of yours look pretty good.”

  “Every cloud has a silver lining, as I learned when my cousin died and left me his classic GTO.” Clark pointed behind Sam. “Did you lock the front door? Go back and check the door.”

  “Nobody’s going to rob us,” Sam said. “A tornado just went through here. People are busy.”

  “Drug addicts don’t mind a little storm. Remember that burglar that broke into Georgette’s house in the ice storm?”

  “That was nothing. She played her barking Doberman tape and he ran off.”

  “I’m locking the door.” Clark loped up onto the porch to lock the front door and then returned to the car.

  Annie checked her watch. “You want to drive me to the airfield or not?”

  “I do not. Did I ever?” He started slowly forward.

  From the backseat, Sa
m called, “Be careful, Clark. The drive’s flooded.”

  “Wait’ll she gets to the sky.” Her uncle eased the station wagon out into the gravel road. “This cousin’s GTO, which I sold for two hundred bucks—”

  Annie took a long breath. “—would be worth a fortune today.”

  “Would be worth a fortune today.”

  From the back seat Sam muttered, “I’ve got an Armageddon feeling. Like Tippi, being driven away from the doomed house at the end of The Birds.”

  Annie turned around and repeated what her father had told her so often as he’d spun her in the air all those years ago. “Don’t worry. I’m a flyer.”

  Clark pointed up at the car roof. “So proudly we hail.” Tiny pellets of hail were striking the car.

  “Now, there you go,” smiled Sam. “We are actually hearing a new pun. You never know what life will bring.”

  Chapter 17

  The Great Waldo Pepper

  Shortly after Annie’s birth, Jack Peregrine had won in a poker game in Key West, or so he’d told Sam, the old single-engine 1975 Piper Warrior, with engine troubles, that he’d brought to Emerald. In the barn at Pilgrim’s Rest he repainted its body. He planned to fix its engine and even burnt a crude landing strip into a long flat meadow behind the barn. But as far as Sam knew, Jack had never flown the little red and yellow Warrior on whose wing he had written, “King of the Sky.” Instead the plane waited unused in Emerald until the seven-year-old Annie began sitting in it alone for hours, hoping she could, by her stoicism in the cockpit, compel her father to return. She found an ignition key taped to the underside of the wheel cap, near where on her arrival she had huddled so long crying. She used this key to pretend to start the plane, although the motor was long dead.

  One Sunday evening, as Sam, Clark, and she sat on the couch with Teddy, watching the movie The Great Waldo Pepper, the quiet little girl suddenly announced that she intended to fly the Piper Warrior herself. It was, after all, her airplane.

  For the next two years, Annie spent daily hours in the barn playing at flying the single-engine plane, cleaning it, studying it. Since the birthday when Sam had given her that first ride with Georgette in a tethered balloon and the flying lessons in the Pawnee Cropduster at D. K. Destin’s airfield on the outskirts of Emerald (“Private Planes, Sell or Rent, Low Monthly Rates, Rides, Instruction, Groups or Single”) the small airport had become her favorite place, and D. K., one of the few African American naval combat pilots in Vietnam, had become for a while the most important person in her life. At every meal she asked in her solemn watchful way for flying lessons with the retired lieutenant. It was the first thing for which she asked her aunt and “uncle,” other than information about her missing parents.

  Sam tried to assuage Clark’s concern about Annie’s flying mania. “It’s like horses, a phase.” But years passed and the phase didn’t. On rainy afternoons Annie read every book the school library had on aviation; she talked endlessly with D. K. about the triumphs of women pilots, how Katharine Wright had worked right beside her brothers Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk; how Amelia Earhart had flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932; how Jacqueline Cochran, who had broken the sound barrier as early as 1953, held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history, more than 200 of them, including in 1964 a speed record of 1,429 miles per hour in the F-104 Starfighter; how the astronaut Sally Ride had rocketed into space from a launch pad in Florida and the whole country had sung to her, “Ride, Sally, Ride!” How Amy Johnson (Annie’s idol because the beautiful British pilot had looked so glamorous and been so daring) had taken the record for flying solo from England to Australia in a secondhand De Havilland Gipsy Moth that her father had helped her to purchase, even though back then girls were not supposed to fly planes.

  Annie used her earnings from her weekend job at Now Voyager to pay for subscriptions to aviation magazines, which she scanned each month for stories about women pilots. Sometimes she wrote to these women, asking for their autographs. A retired female air-circus flyer, who’d done nine 360-degree loops in an old Cessna 150 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, wrote her back, enclosing a poster from her flying circus days. The poster was still on the bedroom wall beside Annie’s treasured black and white signed photograph of Amy Johnson. Near them was a framed commemorative U.S. Post Office sheet that D. K. Destin had given her of the stamp for Bessie Coleman, the African American pilot who’d had to make her way from Texas to Paris in 1921 to get a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale because they wouldn’t give her one in America.

  “That’s right. Her own country treated Bessie like dog-doo on its shoe,” groused D. K., when handing Annie the framed stamps. “So Bessie got herself to France! The Froggies let that girl fly. ‘Ma chérie, over here you can fly your derrière off if you want to!’ That’s a French word, ‘civilization,’ don’t you forget it. You don’t gotta be a white boy to fly; hell, you don’t gotta be able to walk to be able to fly.”

  Annie said, “I want to fly to France.”

  “I bet you will one of these days. But you gotta get from one end of Emerald County to the other first. Finish that checkpoint list. Master, on. Radios, on. Mixture, rich.”

  One gray morning on her sixteenth birthday, Annie piloted the Piper Warrior solo for the first time. It was scary without D. K. in the plane next to her, correcting, adjusting, without his tapered big fingers signaling her as if in an urgent language for the deaf. She’d felt shaky, first climbing into the plane alone, and she’d stepped back down onto the wing.

  He hurried toward her in his wheelchair. “Get back in there! Don’t you prove me right! I’m a sexist child of my times, girl. So you show me a girl can do solo. Show me you can do it, Sugar Pie, because you can; you’re the best in the west, east, south, and you know it.”

  Annie believed him because, scared as she was, she knew he was right. She climbed back into the plane and he waved her off.

  It was D. K. who had replaced the engine in Jack Peregrine’s Piper Warrior and had driven it out of the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and flown it right up off the unmown field into the air with the girl, thrilled, beside him. Day after month after year, with the songs of R&B girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes blasting from a boom box beside them—“Baby, It’s You” and “Come See About Me” and his favorite, Betty Everett’s “It’s in His Kiss”—D. K. made her a flyer. He told her that in the cockpit of a plane, nothing mattered but how good you were.

  When Annie’s pilot license arrived in the mail, she announced to Clark and Sam that they better sit down to hear her news. She planned to go to Annapolis and wanted their help to get there. She wanted a career in the Navy.

  Clark not only sat down, he looked as if it might be hard for him to get back up.

  “I guess we can’t fight destiny,” Sam said.

  “It’s not destiny, it’s Destin,” growled Clark. “It’s that damn D. K. Destin.”

  Sam advised him, “Don’t blame D. K.”

  That night on the porch, waiting for Annie to return from a party, they argued some more.

  “You know what? I blame you, Sam! You’ve been behind this from the get-go! Secretly egging her on.”

  “It wasn’t all that secret.” Sam smiled, pride in the corners of her mouth. “D. K. says Annie’s a natural.”

  Clark slapped his hand on the porch rail. “He says he’s a natural too! You want Annie pushing herself up River Hill in a damn wheelchair for the rest of her life?”

  “That was in Vietnam. We’re not in Vietnam, we’re in North Carolina.”

  “We could be in a lot of places where Annie could get herself killed.”

  “Why did you say that? I’m already worried. Where is she, why aren’t she and Georgette home? It’s after eleven.”

  Clark showed her his watch. “It’s ten after eleven. Take it easy.” It was in this back and forth way that they calmed each other.

  When the c
atalogue arrived from the Naval Academy (the Navy was the first branch of the armed services willing to train women pilots), it started the worst fight of the family’s life together. Clark accused D. K. and Sam of collusion in supporting Annie’s desire to go to Annapolis. “It’s all his macho Mach and fixing up damn Jack Peregrine’s damn Piper Warrior. And it’s you, Sam, with your ‘women can do anything,’ even stupid things like drop bombs for the U.S. Navy.”

  “Nobody said I was going to drop any bombs,” Annie shouted. “What is it with you two and bombs?”

  “Right,” Clark threw open his arms. “I’m sorry, those Tomcats aren’t carrying missiles. My mistake.” He swung an arm in outstretched irony, knocked over the salt and pepper shakers on the table, quickly sprinkled salt over his shoulder. “Have a life, have children—”

  Annie yelled at her uncle. “You don’t have children! This is because I’m a girl! You think a girl can’t be a fighter pilot?”

  Sam agreed. “You’re a Republican and a sexist pig, Clark Goode.”

  To their shock, Clark, leaped to his feet, shouting. “I’m a Republican and I think a girl ought to have more sense! And D. K. should have more sense! And Sam, the Great Liberal, you should have more sense. But I’m a sexist pig because Annie wants to go learn how to fire Sidewinder missiles on poor bastards on the other side of the fuckin’ world?”

  His outburst, indeed the length of his sentence, left Sam and Annie slack-jawed and produced an agitated growl even from Teddy. “Take it easy,” Sam advised.

  “Excuse me. I was eighteen years old in Nha Trang and my friend’s head was blown off and hit me in the fucking chest. And I’m a sexist pig? Why do you want Annie fighting some idiotic war for fat rich bald men to make money blowing up other countries and then make more money selling them reconstruction?”

  Sam handed him a baby aspirin from her pocket. “Take this before you have a heart attack! For God’s sake, Clark, it’s 1993. There are no wars anymore! The Navy’s a career for Annie, not an invasion.”

  “Oh, fine! Then there’s no problem!”