At the end of the field, she pivoted the aircraft, and we looked through the windshield, straight back to where we had just come from. I noticed a strip of surveyor’s tape tied to a tall pole set in the ground. It fluttered in our direction as Jocelyn increased speed, inciting the roar of the engine, the propeller a pale blur in front of us. We’d moved forward slowly at first but accelerated rapidly toward the end of the field. The shuddering of the fuselage abruptly stopped and we were airborne, gaining altitude and sailing toward the line of foothills before us.
“Having fun?”
“Yes! Where are we going?”
Jocelyn turned to me and laughed. I couldn’t see much of her behind the microphone and her aviator’s sunglasses, but she was distinctly laughing, and it seemed more than a little emphatic with the distortion through my headset. She said, “We sure are, honey. We’re going someplace.”
I gazed at the landscape passing beneath us and it seemed to bear an expansive sense of time and of the imperishability of the earth. I had a glimpse of myself as a particularly pathetic exemplar of our race and its fragile gyrations. Never comfortable with this long view, I was grateful when it passed. Only animals really knew how to live.
Airplanes had come to seem quite different machines after the catastrophe in New York. They were overnight turned into projectiles; even if, as now, we used them for something else, they went on being projectiles. I let my gaze drift to Jocelyn’s skillful hands on the controls and could feel the relationship between her floating hands and the movement of the aircraft. Her eyes interrupted their almost robotic scan of the horizon only to flick temporarily to the instruments. The sun coming through the canopy made me sleepy, as did gazing at the wavering shapes that appeared in the blur of the propeller. The inside of the plane smelled entirely of its new upholstery. It was surprising to compare our considerable airspeed to the slowness of the passing landforms below: they came and went as though operating in a different timescape from the one in which the airplane flew. We had stopped talking.
We began to descend after meeting what looked like a wall of mountains; a shadow in one of them slowly opened to reveal a pass into which Jocelyn, still descending, guided the plane. I looked anxiously from side to side as the blue sky in the opening above us seemed to be narrowing. Jocelyn lifted one hand to point through the windshield at a mountain goat grazing at eye level. We were in a canyon that turned slowly to the west between many-hued granite walls and grassy ledges. Below, some trees were scattered on either side of a sparkling creek which, with its regular flashes of white water, must have had a considerable gradient. Teal scattered up from back channels of the creek so far below. The walls on either side confirmed that the only possible direction for the plane to fly was straight forward. I couldn’t picture climbing back out. I was uncomfortable.
We were nearly on the floor of the canyon. There was no possible place to set down, and my attempts to exchange some kind of glance with Jocelyn failed. When I asked her what was going on and got no answer, I could see that she little wished to have her concentration broken. Then the canyon curved quite rapidly to the west, narrowing all the while, and, more quickly than I could quite absorb, a flat meadow rose up before us and we were on the ground, tail wheel down and the windshield elevating as the plane changed its angle and stopped. Jocelyn increased the throttle slightly before slowing the propeller to a pause. The quiet was startling. She swept her headset off with one hand, shook out her hair, then turned to me and said, “Happy?”
“Can we get out of here?”
“We’ll find out!” She laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She pushed open her door, and the cockpit filled with balsamic air and the fragrance of wildflowers. I looked around as best as I could beyond the bright wings of the plane. This was some sort of box canyon, and on either side of the meadow in which the plane sat, aspens grew straight up, protected from winter winds. Here and there water ran down the walls of the canyon, catching the light. I imagined the place quickly filling with shadows later in the day, and this thought came with some apprehension because despite the great natural beauty, my main interest was in getting out, which looked to be something of a feat. It was reassuring to climb from the plane and feel solid ground once more.
But Jocelyn’s cheer was infectious. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got to show you something.” So I followed along. The only bearing I had was Jocelyn herself, and she moved confidently along the meadow at her persistently lively clip, the same gait she used when walking around her airplane or coming into town and into my room, the same heedless forward motion. With one hand, she gathered up her long hair and twisted it into a knot on top of her head. She tied the Windbreaker around her waist by its sleeves and hopped on one foot as she retied the shoelace on the other. There were many hawks in this canyon, small, rapid short-winged hawks that cried out to one another as they crisscrossed overhead. “You’d never get out of here on foot,” said Jocelyn. It was true, but I couldn’t think why she’d say it. When I asked her where we were going in such a hurry, she only smiled. It seemed to me that we were heading toward a small grove of old cottonwoods at a place where the granite wall receded in a kind of shelter. It could have been an Indian place or a shepherd’s place: I observed some smoke blackening its stone from this distance. When we reached it, I saw that it was indeed habitable — there was a rough lean-to shack apparently thrown together from fallen trees and limbs, enclosed nonetheless with a canvas fly secured against a small opening in front. “You don’t think we’re staying here tonight—”
She said, “We’ll see,” and held the canvas back for me to enter.
The sudden new light into the interior must have been dazzling because it was a moment or two before Womack put the gun down. Or he may simply have been confused, for he was clearly in very bad shape.
Jocelyn said, “I’ve brought the doctor.”
“I didn’t know who it was.”
“Who could it have been?” Jocelyn said, I thought rather sharply, and then to me, “See what you can do. I need Womack.” She bent to sweep a little spot on the floor and sat down. Womack was covered by the sort of light blanket that might have been from the airplane’s supplies.
He said, his tone a slight wail, “My leg is broke.” His speech was impaired by a lip swollen with infection.
“How do you know?”
“I know, I just know.”
Jocelyn said, “He doesn’t know. He’s not a doctor, you’re a doctor.”
I would have to examine Womack. I have examined an infinite number of people old and young, fat and thin, with little other than appropriate objectivity, but I had a strange aversion to examining Womack. His darting and conspicuously dishonest eyes and the fleshy face that seemed at odds with his remarkably skinny body gave me the creeps. I uncovered him and found that he was quite naked under the blanket. Jocelyn burst into laughter and Womack looked over at her, lips pulled back over his crooked teeth in imploring misery. She covered her mouth in a mock attempt to conceal her mirth, then left to get some things from the plane, which turned out to consist of a very nice collection of medical supplies.
“Where did these come from?”
“The nice old doctor in White Sulphur.”