Emily drew in a sharp breath. “I will not jump out of your airplane, I promise you.”
“You say that now.” Then Nina laughed and tickled Emily’s knees. “I’m kidding, silly. You need a parachute in case we crash. Remind me to show you how it works before we take off.”
After Nina got out, Emily didn’t slide to the opposite end of the front seat like I’d expected. We were still close enough for me to feel her body trembling. “We got here so much faster this time,” she said. “There was hardly any time to think.”
“A stagecoach is picturesque, but it isn’t speedy,” I said. “You know, you don’t have to go up in Nina’s plane if you don’t want to.”
“I want to. I asked her to take me up. But now that we’re here I can’t stop thinking about Will Rogers.”
Will Rogers, in case that name is unfamiliar to you, was a celebrity before the war. In vaudeville first, then the movies. Also he wrote newspaper columns everybody and their dog read during the early years of the Depression. One of his sayings that always stuck with me was, “Everything’s funny as long as it’s happening to somebody else.” He’d died a few years earlier in a plane crash with the most famous pilot of the day aside from Charles Lindbergh.
“You know what’s interesting about that Wiley Post,” I said.
“Wiley Post? Who’s he?”
If Emily wasn’t thinking about the accident, the last thing I wanted to do was bring it up. “Wiley Post was Will Rogers’s friend.”
“Oh, wait. Yes, yes, yes. I’d forgotten his name for a minute there. He was the pilot who—” She looked relieved to have remembered that, then distressed when she remembered the connection. “Well? What’s interesting about Wiley Post? Other than how he died and took Will Rogers down with him?”
“Oh,” I said, “He was blind in one eye. But he could fly planes better with one eye than most people could with two.”
“Until, you know,” Emily said.
“I don’t think the plane crashed because he was one-eyed. I think it was equipment failure. That’s the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, anytime.”
Emily started trembling again. “Do you think the man with the keys to the hangar has gone home for lunch? If Nina can’t find him, we might as well give up and go back.”
“That’s possible,” I said. It was also possible that Nina, if she couldn’t find the man she was looking for, would heave a rock through the airport office window and go through his desk to find the key. Or that she’d pick the hangar lock with a hairpin. If she’d had on her gun belt I wouldn’t have put it past her to dig around in her pocket, find a bullet, and blow the hangar’s lock off. Not being able to find the man who had the key to something didn’t seem like enough reason for Nina to call it a day.
Emily took a firm two-handed grip on the stick-shift knob, as if she believed she’d slip to the floorboard and slide under the seat if she didn’t hold on to something tight. “I’m afraid of heights,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. “Sometimes I get dizzy just looking down a flight of stairs.”
“Then why on earth did you ask Nina to take you up in her airplane?” I asked.
“Because I’m every bit as dull as Portia says I am,” she said, opening her eyes and giving me an earnest look. “I thought turning myself into the sort of person who flies around in airplanes would impress her. That’s all I want in life.”
“To impress a thirteen-year-old child?”
“Who is my daughter, yes. If I had that, I could die happy. Just talk to me until Nina’s back, all right?”
“It messes with your depth perception when you’re blind in one eye,” I said. “Have you ever looked at photographs through a stereoscope?”
“A stereoscope?” she repeated faintly.
“Those wooden photo viewers with the long stick that has a rack at the end to hold two photographs of the same thing.”
“Of course. My mother had one.”
“Do you know how it works?”
She shook her head.
“It’s based on human anatomy. The photos are taken from slightly different angles, the way each of our eyes sees everything we look at. When you just have the one eye, you don’t get the other point of view, so it’s harder to judge distances. Your perceptions flatten out.”
Much later on, Emily had me recap that explanation for Nina’s edification. Once I’d wrapped up my lecture, Nina said, “Given how far apart your eyes are, Em, you ought to be able to see clear through to the other side of things. Like those characters in comic books, the ones with X-ray vision. What color underwear do I have on today?”
Without missing a beat, Emily said, “You aren’t wearing any underwear.”
Nina applauded delightedly. “We should work up a vaudeville act,” she said. “Take it on the road. Ward can drive our carnival wagon.”
That day at the airport while Emily and I waited and wondered what had become of Nina, Emily closed both eyes, then cracked open the one closest to me. After studying me for a moment, she said, “This isn’t making you look flat, but it is making my head hurt.” She straightened up and closed one eye, then the other, staccato. “I see what you mean about the different angles, though. I’ll have to find my mother’s viewer. She had a box of photos of the San Francisco earthquake. You’d think she’d want to forget all about that, since we lived through it.”
“You were alive then?”
“I was. Barely. I was three, so I don’t really remember it. I looked at those photos so much growing up, though, that I’ve almost convinced myself I do. My mother always said the earthquake was really a blessing in disguise because it cleared out some awful slums.”
“What happened to the people who had been living there?” I asked.
“They found someplace else to live, I suppose.” Emily closed both eyes and collapsed against the seat. “Tell me another story, Ward. Quick.”
It didn’t seem like the time or my place to take on the right or wrong of her mother’s assessment of those poor displaced unfortunates, particularly not when my own sainted mother might have said something pretty similar prior to becoming displaced herself. I was about to launch into the story about the kinetoscope and the two cats boxing when Nina rounded the corner of the hangar waving a ring of keys, the caretaker and the gangly kid trailing in her wake.
“But how can that thing fly?” Emily asked. “It doesn’t have any wings.”
The three of us stood in front of the hangar while the custodian and the gangly kid wheeled Nina’s plane out by straps they’d threaded through its undercarriage. Where the wings should have been the plane was squared away into something resembling shoulders. Aside from that it looked a little like one of those plywood cars kids build to race in soapbox derbies.
“Watch,” Nina said. “You’ll love this.” She climbed onto a wheel alongside the cockpit—the way I got to the driver’s box of the stagecoach, I couldn’t help thinking—and lifted an L-shaped metal pin on the fuselage’s upper shoulder. Stepped off and stooped to free its twin down below. Trotted to the airplane’s tail, grabbed what I realized was the tip of a folded-away wing, and swung it forward until its inner edge was flush with the cockpit. Then Nina slid the pins into fittings inside the wings, twisted the upright of the pins flat, and battened them down with little leather straps that snapped into place. Very small leather straps, narrower than my belt, joined with the sort of snaps you sometimes found on a pair of trousers. I glanced at Emily. She was very pale.