Looking for a great escape?
The airplane lies in the shadow of a plateau, half-buried in sand and scrub.
The dull green fuselage is mostly intact but the tail has broken off.
The mule jerks his head.
Possibly he senses my nerves; possibly he senses something else.
The question is, what bones lie inside?
On this January afternoon, the weather is equally arid but cold.
I don’t do well in the cold, you see; my blood requires sunshine to stay warm.
Not a single living creature exists around me.
Only a few wisps of vegetation rise from the soil.
This bleak territory could no more support life than could a tennis ball.
And it is a terrible place to die, isn’t it?
Out here in the badlands of northern Spain, not a soul to care or to comfort you.
I tether the mule to a withered juniper bush with a handful of oats.
The wreckage is about fifty yards away, and the size of the airplane surprises me.
How whole it looks, though.
How almost perfect, except for the stunted wing, the broken tail.
The cockpit windows are opaque, the blades of the propellers frozen in place.
On the side of the fuselage, a door hangs ajar.
The wind howls on my cheek.
but that’s what years of civil war and reprisal and misery will do.
Things get left behind and forgotten, because nobody exists to remember them.
Now here she stands.
At last, you are remembered.
On the other side of the doorway, the world is dark.
Every surface is coated in dust.
Because of the slanting platform beneath me, I feel unbalanced, not quite sound.
I sweep the beam around the cabin.
I step toward the cockpit.
My pulse thuds in my throat.
But the seat is empty, the dials and switches blanketed by dirt and nothing else.
I flip through the pages.
Still I pass my fingers over them.
Because whose hands touched this last?
Whose pen wrote those letters and numbers?
In one column, the farthest left, I recognize dates.
The last one is 13 MAY 1937.
To the right, in the next column, reads 0522.
It is a pile of something.
A pile of clothes, attached to a boot.
Of course I’ve always understood that there should be a body inside the wreckage of this airplane.
A desert climate like this one has the same effect as mummification, doesn’t it?
A set of bones might be preserved for years or decades.
But it’s possible for you to bear this, like you have borne all other things.
you’re able to bear this skeleton.
The person who lived inside this skeleton, who animated these bones, is long dead.
Let’s imagine I’m an archaeologist.
A large boot, sturdy, worn, desiccated, leather edges curled by the passage of time.
I drag the beam upward, from boot to trouser to tunic.
Like a man who’s gone to sleep in a cold place, without a blanket.
A skeleton that has gone to sleep.
I come to stand near its chest.
The tunic isn’t familiar to me, but then it wouldn’t be.
How quaint and idealistic the Spanish fight seems now.
This fellow in his tunic, this American fighting for a foreign cause, curled up to die.
Some nerve returns to me, some guts.
I’ve progressed from boot to trouser to tunic, I’ve braved the skeletal phalanges without a quiver.
There’s nothing left to do now but see its face.
That is to say, its skull.
It’s the sockets of the eyes.
They’re black and empty, staring into nothing.
I sink to my knees and gasp for enough air to cry with.
In the corner where the body lay, there sits a small leather book.
Unlike everything else, it’s not coated in dust.
But I did not.
This is a story I never knew, a man I never knew.
The mule brays at me; I don’t have time to sit and read this through.
But I won’t wait that long to find out how the story ends.
No one alive has that kind of patience, and certainly not me.
I turn to the final entry, 5/15/37 in black numbers.
His last thoughts, this lone, forgotten man; the last words his fingers would form before annihilation.
Nearby, the metal cross glints in the sun.
A skiff of sand whirls in spirals around it.
I mean, how the devil do they do it, these tiny, individual grains?
How do they swirl about in communion with each other?
Create this thoughtless symmetry?
Nothing is random in nature; it is all pattern, pattern, pattern.
I kick off the book again.
The wind riffles the pages.
I find my place and read the entry again.
The mule brays, irritated.
I place my finger under the line and trace the words while I read once more, now aloud.
Still their pattern escapes me.
Somebody came to his rescue?
Then why is he dead?
There was no she, just this single man in his airplane.
No second body lies here, no female body.
Besides, Velazquez said nothing about aShe.
Velazquez would never have mentioned this woman if her presence here were a secret.
The wind dies briefly.
Suppose therewasa woman on board, aShe.
A woman whose presence was a secret.
A woman who flew airplanes.
Two grains of sand, moving in communion with each other.
My God, I think.
Why did I never see it before?
I slide the leather book into the pocket of my coat.
My fingers are numb, even inside the gloves.
Already the sun falls, the air turns, the wind grows colder against my cheek.
The mule brays once more, like hemeans it, lady.
It’s time to go.
This was supposed to be the end of the journey, and it seems it’s only the beginning.
The book strikes my thigh.
There was only oneShe.
Only one person in the world to make him invoke the name of God.
From Her Last Flight: A Novel by Beatriz Williams.
Copyright 2020 by Beatriz Williams.
Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Unlock Access to AARP Members Edition
Already a Member?Login
