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 yelclass="underline" “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 good look at this delightful desolation, the Vega’s cool shadow racing across the godforsaken landscape, where occasional dabs of green were like parsley sprigs on a big empty plate.
The late-afternoon landing at Burbank was blessedly free of unexpected crosswinds and technical stalls. We were close to the ocean now and desert vistas had given way to a breathtaking view of green hills bordering the fertile San Fernando Valley, mountain ranges beyond, some snow-capped, with Burbank and its United Airport nestled in the flatlands between.
The runways below were the five spreading arms of a flattened octopus whose head was a sprawling terminal identified by white letters painted on the tarmac before it: UNITED AIRPORT. On the runways at left and right of the modernistic, T-shaped terminal, giving it plenty of breathing room, were buildings that from my cabin window looked like flat square matchboxes but were actually massive corrugated-metal hangars, their roofs labeled UNITED and BURBANK respectively. Amy set gently down, with none of the melodrama of yesterday’s landing, and we taxied, pulling up before a huge hangar door, over which white painted letters added up to UNITED AIR SERVICES LIMITED.
We were greeted by a trio of the airfield equivalent of grease monkeys, one of whom provided the ladder for Amy to climb down from the cockpit; she greeted them by name (“Howdy, Jim!” “Hey, Ernie!” “Tod, what do you know?”). A fourth man, who brought up the rear in the confident manner of a commanding officer who allows his troops to lead the charge, wore a gray suit and a lighter gray shirt with a gray and black tie and looked as dapper as a movie star, or anyway a movie executive. Small but with a solid, square-shouldered build, he was almost handsome, with bright dark brown eyes, a jutting nose, and a jaunty jutting chin; his slicked-back black hair and slip of a mustache were apparently on loan from Clark Gable.
He and Amy embraced and patted each other on the back like long-lost pals. Both had smiles that threatened to split their faces.
“How’s my girl?” he asked her. “Ready for another foolhardy adventure?”
“Always,” she said, unbuckling her helmet, yanking it off, shaking her mop of curls. “Paul, this is my friend Nathan Heller; he’s been my one-man security team on this lecture tour. Nathan, this is Paul Mantz — he’s the mastermind behind my record flights.”
I had already guessed as much, but extended my hand and said, “Mr. Mantz, I’ve heard big things about you.”
Amy glanced at me, wondering what those big things might be, and I wondered if I’d misspoken: she had never mentioned Mantz to me — everything I knew about the man had come from G. P.
“Call me Paul,” he said, as we shook hands, his grip showing off his strength a little, “and I’ll take the liberty of calling you Nate... and as for what you’ve heard about me, it’s just possible some of it’s true.”
“Well, for one thing, I hear you’re the best stunt pilot in Hollywood.”
He twitched a smile and I sensed some annoyance. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not really a stunt pilot... what I am is a precision pilot. I leave stunts to the fools, kids, and amateurs. By which I mean, the soon to be deceased.”