Page 96 of Shadow Ticket
Alarmed gazes skyward. “This one again!”
“Take cover!”
Catching the last of the departing sunlight, a white apparition comes sailing ominously in.
Shouting down through a megaphone, “Need a ride, sister, I’ll be right with you.” Since she began flying the autogyro, something in Glow Tripforth del Vasto has begun to stir, something deep and each time less disposed to forgive. Across her face now and then there will drift, only for a second but ominous while it lasts, some sign of a counter-angelic presence that lives to do harm, till all goes flickering back to normal, likely nothing more than one of those twitches in the everyday weave and reweave, you’d like to think, and yet…There are times when enough, frankly, is enough. Some annoyances do really have to be seen to. In the interlude of waiting for the rotor to get back up to speed in a loud rising scream, as Sturm kiddies mill about, cringing, taking snapshots, raising steins in salute, Daphne runs and climbs into the mother-in-law seat in front of Glow, hollering, “Noisy rig, ain’t it?” except nobody hears her over the racket, bedazzled by the twilight flickering between the vanes as they slowly begin to roll, to pick up speed. She falls into a light trance, next thing they’re headed down the road at about the local speed limit for farm wagons, and up into the sky they’re taken. Or what, with a gyro, passes for sky. Because down this low, as Daphne is soon to learn, the ground also figures as part of the flight…not really transcending the earth, not soaring into some higher element, but following perfectly the nap of the terrain, every hollow and haystack, every turn of creek, tobogganing hill, and lover’s leap…
“Thanks for the lift.”
“Halo’s in the shop or I’d blink it at you.”
“I want to believe they’re only being obnoxious but I think it’s worse than that.”
“It’s worse.” Glow and her skycraft have tangled more than once with Hitlerist gunboys in biplanes and sport zeps, and it hasn’t ended well for any of the lads. “Flight these days isn’t as much fun as it was once upon a time. Borders less easy to cross, sharpshooters, ack-ack fire, airborne pursuit and interception.”
At first, too busy to feel anxiety, each time she stalled or lost the engine Glow undramatically settled in a long and serene lapse to earth as the rotorvanes slowly, deeply folded her to a safe landing, till one morning, as she flew along a ridgeline in the Pyrenees, there came to her unbidden the certainty that she would never crash in this thing, along with its corollary vision of the future of autogyroing—a flood of no-talent stumblebums barging into skies already crowded enough, fools smiled on by the gods of flight, guaranteed happy landings every time, parachuting down on those pale vanes graceful as wings…
“Gyros are forgiving ships, 90 percent foolproof—and there’s the danger. The idiot appeal. Man in Indiana taught his dog how to fly one, now the dog flies him everywhere, a sky chauffeur, wears this li’l sort of outfit, hat, goggles, and so forth…Fools will flock to this machine, attracted by the simplicity of operation. Romance on the cheap. Too many will do things wrong and have accidents far enough short of tragic to give the rest of us a bad name, with insurance companies and loan officers suddenly all over the place.
“But look, right down there’s a tavern, it’s cocktail hour, and the least you can do is buy me a drink.” Gliding to earth with the accustomed racket which brings half the customers outside to have a look.
Glow’s been a longtime regular here. “Place back then was no bigger’n a hiker’s hut, and Miklos here was running his own distillery down in that patch of woods.”
“Back when you were using your own wings, the way the people tell it,” Miklos bringing glasses and bottles. “We never quite got used to you being mixed up with that Spanish guy.”
“Aha,” Daphne lifting her glass, “I knew it, romance in the air.”
“I was still only a subdeb, too busy breezin’ through the season, disrupting lives, and thinking I was so seductive. Then one night in Berlin, at the Femina-Palast, I think, though Porfi recalls it otherwise, I was approached by this slick-haired tango juvenile in an all-black turnout, you could say unpromising relationship material, you know the sort, no point risking even a distant nod unless a gal’s confident enough she can handle herself through any escapade, which in those days I thought I was. My error and oh sister was it.” Suddenly up close came this thin mustache, high collar, an elegant briquet snapped open, suavely extended, a sleek art deco–shaped flame…How can a girl resist, she wondered, just audibly enough, and didn’t, findingherself dancing some Gardel and Le Pera number with the as it turned out notorious Porfirio del Vasto, doing business at the time under a different name that no longer comes to mind.
“Gracious,” Daphne pretending to fan herself, “how soon is the movie coming out?”
“My undoing,” Glow with a comparably sincere sigh. “The gyro, that damn loud billowing thing, is what did the trick, more than Porfirio himself, even when I could hear him over the noise, murmuring, ‘I couldn’t let one go for any less than such and such,’ and ‘I’d consider monthly installments, if we can agree on the interest,’ which I’m hearing as playfully coded romantic declarations…
“Smooth? George Raft could’ve taken lessons. Shows you how desperate for attention a girl can get.”
“Couldn’t’ve been that bad, could it?”
“There were moments. Our honeymoon in Mallorca…really something, would you like to hear the details? They’re sure engraved in my memory, I can tell you.”
“OK with me if you care to skip it.”
“I’ll take that as please do go on, oh very well, if you insist…”
—
Daphne finds herselfnext day almost relieved to be clamorously back in the air, moving at pretty much the altitude and speed of lucid dreaming, slipping along the terrain so unexpectedly close below, fields of cloud stretching away like prairie, then all at once a hell of a lot of trees. Glow’s laughter streaming across the altitudes like a white silk aviator’s scarf.
A cloud comes out of nowhere to enfold them. Glow cuts the engine and they volplane through. In the relative quiet, they can hear bells of livestock from somewhere below, conversation among invisible steeplejacks whom they seem to be hurtling through this zero visibility within feet of, apt at any moment to hit a hillside, self-impale on a treetop—
Then abruptly out again into blessed sun glare, sky blue, Glow starts up the engine again…the racket resumes.
Late in the day as factory shifts are ending, commercial windowscatching the last fume-broken rays of the sun suggestive as fortune-telling card layouts no one here quite looks upward to read. Another sizable country town, once believed safe, independent, overrun by the War and broken, left to a diminished history in its seldom traveled corner of the old empire. “Quite a few of them out here, take your pick.”
Evening falls, the gyro goes sailing into and through a Searchlight District where public lamps of varying colors and intensities abound, thickets of electric arc beams crossing from every roof, prismatic, cylindrical, masses of shadow, flanges and vanes of light.
Daphne and Glow have found one of the few cafés to remain open after dark. The garish sky above like an anxiously held breath.
“For the moment it’s enough work just trying to stay away from Porfirio, meaning away from Spain. He has this notion that Spain is my destiny.”
