The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: Grounded

"No," I said.

"Suit yourself."

I stood beside the Cub with one hand on her cold cowling.

Then I called Warrick. That was five.

He didn't say I told you so.

He said, "Stay at the hotel by the harbor. Lock the door. I'm coming."

"You can't fly a plane."

"I can sit in one. They sell tickets."

He came the next afternoon.

The mail plane to Fairbanks. A jet to Anchorage. A jet to Juneau.

I watched him come down the airstairs off the 737 into the rain.

He was gray-green and walking very carefully.

"How was it?" I said.

"The jet was fine."

"You look terrible."

"The jet was fine. The jet before it had turbulence over Cordova." He swallowed. "I'm told."

I put my arms around him on the tarmac, rain and all.

"Elden?" I said into his coat.

"Nowhere. I walked the whole terminal like a target. Nobody said a word to me."

"He doesn't need to. He's already got what he wanted."

We went home the same way he'd come, backward.

Three airlines. Two days.

I sat in the passenger seats with my hands in my lap and my jaw tight.

Warrick held the bag the whole way, and for once I nearly needed it.

At Coldfoot I took a cloth to the whiteboard.

Mail Mondays. Freight Wednesdays. Fuel Fridays. The clinic run. The lodge.

I wiped all of it.

The camps called on the base radio that night, one after another.

Who's bringing the stove oil? Who's bringing the mail?

Warrick answered every call himself.

Nobody, for now.

On the third night the cook came out to the hangar, where I was sitting under the Otter's wing doing nothing.

"The family on the lake is down to two days of stove oil," she said.

"I know."

"Three kids and a goat."

"I know."

She looked over my shoulder at the left seat of the Otter, and then across the hangar at Gussie, who was pretending to sort sockets.

Then she went back to the bunkhouse.

I got up.

"Gus."

"No."

"You don't know what I'm going to say."

"You're going to say the paper says you can't pilot. It doesn't say you can't sit in the right seat and talk."

"That's exactly what I was going to say."

"No."

Warrick came in from the cold, stamping snow off his boots.

He looked at us both.

"I'll come," he said.

Gussie stared at him.

"You hate flying."

"I'll come anyway. For luck. If you're scared, you'll have to be less scared than me, and I'm very scared."

She laughed, which was a mistake, because then she couldn't say no.

The first day she couldn't push the throttle.

She sat in the left seat with her hand on it for twenty minutes while Warrick held the grab handle and I talked about nothing.

Then she took her hand off and climbed out and threw up behind the hangar.

The second day she pushed it.

We went down the strip and into the air, and she flew a circuit with her teeth clenched so hard I could hear them.

She landed long and hard and fine.

"Again," I said.

"No."

"Again."

On the fourth day she flew the stove oil to the lake herself, me in the right seat with my hands under my thighs, Warrick in the back holding a drum steady.

On the sixth day she greased a landing on the frozen strip at the far camp, between the snowmachine headlights.

The man whose girl I'd flown out stood at the end of the strip clapping with his gloves on.

When she shut down, Gussie sat in the left seat and didn't move for a while.

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