The doctor sat down heavily on the bed and placed his right hand over the left side of his chest and winced. His face had gone pale, and he was sweating.
“What’s wrong?” his wife said.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t look right.”
“I’m fine, damn it! Leave me alone! It’s just…” He grabbed his left arm, high up.
“No, you’re not fine. Are you in pain?” She came over to him and put her hands on his shoulders and stared at him.
“It’s…it’s just indigestion. Heartburn is all. Leave me alone,” he said and shook her off him. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “I’m a doctor, I know when something’s wrong.”
WITH THE ALTIMETER READING 2,250 FEET, JORDAN SLID THE wheel slowly, smoothly forward, pulled back the throttle, and stopped climbing. He put the airplane on a heading for the clubhouse grounds two miles away. Below them the black forest flashed past. Jordan turned in the cockpit and looked back at Vanessa. She was smiling broadly, her hair tossed wildly by the wind. She lifted her arms over her head and opened her hands wide.
“Can you fly an airplane?” he shouted above the roar of the engine and the wind.
“Of course not!”
“Put your hands on the wheel!”
“What?”
“You fly it! Hold on to the wheel!”
She grasped the control yoke with both hands, looked at him as if for approval, and he nodded. She’s done this before, he thought.
“You’re sure you’ve never flown an airplane?”
“Never!”
He said, “Okay. Five things to remember! Five precepts.”
She laughed. “Only five?”
“Observe! Think! Plan! Execute! And abandon! You use abandon if execute doesn’t work, and then you go back to observe!”
“Okay!” she shouted. “You’re crazy, you know!”
He let go of the yoke, and suddenly Vanessa was flying the aircraft. She seemed too eager to take the controls, too fearless. He kept his hands loosely on the yoke, not giving the airplane over entirely to her. He was not convinced that she had never flown before. He turned back and asked her to repeat the five precepts.
“Observe!” she began. “Think! Plan…and what?”
“Execute!”
“Right, execute! And abandon!”
“Good! So what do you observe?”
“Oh, Christ! Everything!”
“Start with altitude, bearing, speed!”
“Okay, okay, okay!” she yelled and looked down at the gauges. “Altitude! I’ve got the altitude! And the compass, so that’s bearing! And here’s speed!”
“Good! What else can you observe?”
She peered around his broad shoulders and over the cowling and saw in the distance the moonlit roof of the clubhouse and some other smaller buildings nearby and the broad expanse of the golf course and then more dark forest and beyond the forest the mountains, Sentinel and the big one, Goliath. “Oh, my God! Mountains coming up!”
“Right! So think! Precept two!”
“We’re not high enough.”
“Right! So plan! Precept three!”
She nodded soberly and said nothing. Jordan smiled and waited for her to try gaining altitude on her own. They passed over the rambling rooftops of the Tamarack clubhouse and cottages and outbuildings, the automobiles and trucks and horse-drawn buggies parked along the roadway and in the oval drive, and the large crowd of people waiting on the side of the eighth fairway for the fireworks to begin, their faces all upturned, gazing at the biplane as it soared over them and on into the Adirondack night.
He felt the yoke under his hands move slowly, steadily back, felt the nose lift slightly as the airplane lost speed and gained altitude, and knew that she was executing. Not enough speed, though, and not enough lift. “Give it some more power!” he shouted. A few seconds later the engine noise grew louder, and they began climbing faster. The airplane rose up and over the treeless cliffs of the summit of Sentinel, topping it by less than five hundred feet. Now they were passing over Bream Pond, toward Goliath, but the airplane needed to gain another fifteen hundred feet quickly to avoid slamming into the broad, granite shoulder of the mountain, and there was not enough time to do it at this speed, unless she abandoned her plan and cut hard to starboard, bringing the airplane back toward Bream Pond, Sentinel, and the Tamarack clubhouse and grounds. He waited five seconds, ten, and figured he had five more before he’d take over the airplane, when he felt the yoke turn in his hands a few degrees to the right, from twelve o’clock to two. The airplane dipped to the right, but was losing altitude. Then gaining speed, fighting torque, and pulling out of the turn. But it was too low now and headed for a stand of tall pines on a bluff east of the mountain, unless she saw the notch ahead and slightly to the right and aimed for it.
“Observe!” he yelled and pointed at the notch, a cleft between the pine-topped bluff and the cliffs on the south side of Bream Pond.
She righted the airplane and brought it slowly around, flashing through the notch and missing the trees below by barely a hundred feet. Suddenly they were flying over the still, moon-silvered waters of Bream Pond. Jordan tightened his grip on the controls and took over the aircraft.
“Hey!” she shouted. She tried to turn the wheel left and right, pushed it forward and back. Nothing happened. The airplane was his again. “I’m not through yet!” she yelled.
“Yes, you are,” he said, and he slowed the plane to ninety knots, then seventy, and looped around at the far end of the pond, and came back up its length, where he dropped it into the water a few hundred yards from shore. He taxied back to a short, sandy beach and let the airplane drift to a halt in shallow water, and shut down the engine. The world was suddenly silent, except for the dying waves from the airplane’s wake lightly slapping the pontoons.
“This is a good place to watch the fireworks,” he said to her and pointed back the way they had come. “You can sit here and see them through the notch.”
“Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “But better from the shore,” she said, and hitching her skirt to her long white thighs, she climbed out of the cockpit and splashed to the beach. “Come on! Follow me!” She made her way quickly up the slope, to where an overgrown lumber road passed the pond, and waved to him from there. “C’mon! There’s a grassy clearing I know just down the road where the view is truly splendid. I walk up here lots to swim in the pond and picnic and get away from the family. We can lie on our backs and see the whole valley and sky from there!”
Jordan watched her as she disappeared behind a stand of white birches gleaming in the moonlight. She reappeared seconds later on the far side of the trees, striding down the narrow dirt road toward the opening to the valley and the clear view of the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course below. He watched her walk out of moonlight into darkness, and he knew what would happen if he followed. He started the engine, and the airplane drifted down shore a ways, where he brought it around to face the wind and open water.
“Hey! Where the hell are you going?” she hollered.
“Home! It’s late!”
“What? You’re leaving me here?”
“You left me, remember? Once you abandon ship, there’s no getting back aboard!”
“You bastard!”
He didn’t answer. He shoved the stick forward and quickly moved across the smooth water, hit the step, and accelerated across the skin of the pond as if on skids on ice. Then the airplane lifted free of the water and rose with a roar into the darkness. He was flying through the notch at about twenty-five hundred feet, still climbing, and prepared to make the long, rising turn to the northeast, to pass over Goliath and on to Petersburg and the Tamarack River and his home, where he was late and his wife and sons awaited him, when he looked off to his left and saw the sky light up. A battery of hissing rockets sent long, fiery arcs of red, yellow, green, and blue into the blackness, like thunderbolts cast against the gods. High in the sky above the Reserve, the rockets finished their ascent, lost their force and floated for a second, and one after the other exploded with a luminous flash — gigantic flowers of light that instantly faded, crumpled, and dissolved in the night. Trails of sparks floated back to earth like brightly colored petals. A thunderous boom echoed across the valley, and the sky filled with darkness again.