The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [7]
Sergeant Hart’s good-natured baritone sent her to his voice mail. “MPD, Vice Sgt. Dan Hart speaking. Keep it brief. Thanks.”
“This is Lt. Annie Goode. Call me back, Sergeant Hart!”
To her puzzlement, she felt so shaken that she had to pull over to the side of the highway. For five minutes she sat there crying, her head against the steering wheel.
Then with a short scream of tires, she raced the Porsche back onto the asphalt. Annie’s best friend Georgette, a psychiatrist, had told her once that speed was her way of staying ahead of the past. “Damn straight,” Annie had admitted.
She hit 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds.
Chapter 2
Speed
For Annie’s seventh birthday, Sam bought her niece a balloon ride. For her eighth, Sam arranged a thirty-minute “Sky Ride” with Dwight Kelvin (D. K.) Destin, U.S. Navy, Retired, a middle-aged African-American Vietnam War vet who owned the tiny local airfield in Emerald, built—he said—on land once farmed by his Algonquin ancestors. He took the little girl up in a Pawnee Cropduster that had his insignia black eagle painted on its side. She so loved this lesson, during which for a few thrilling seconds D. K. handed her the steering yoke, that she persuaded him, a wheelchair-bound grouch, to repair the Piper Warrior her father had left in the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and to teach her to fly it. As fast as it could go.
Going fast had been a habit with her father. But by flying, she could go even faster. On her first ride in the King of the Sky, Annie yelled suddenly and long from joy, a noise no one in Emerald had ever heard the somber child make.
“Feel good?” D. K. Destin asked her. “Want to fly it solo someday?”
She nodded yes, with her solemn blue eyes. “Fast,” she repeated.
“The faster the better,” he agreed. “That’s my philosophy. And I can’t even get out of this chair.” When a Vietcong MiG had winged his A-6E Intruder attack bomber on a deep-strike mission, D. K. had crashed into the China Sea where he had held his unconscious navigator up out of the waves on a fragment of wreckage for five and a half hours, longer than he would have needed to (according to him) had anybody “given a fuck about us.” After rescue, emergency surgery on the carrier saved the navigator but left D. K. unable to walk.
***
After a few dozen hours in the air together, the old combat flyer told her that she was, like him, born to fly. He made her kiss the black eagle painted on the fuselage of his Cropduster and although she was embarrassed, she did so to pledge her allegiance to aviation. Two years later D. K. proclaimed that for her sake he was cutting back on beer. He wanted to live long enough to see her an Annapolis graduate and a commissioned pilot. Annie was going to be Lt. D. K. Destin’s final mission for the U.S. Navy. “Baby, you gonna wave at eagles. You’ll say, ‘’Scuse me, cloud, y’all move on over, here comes the best in the north, south, east, west, and headed for the Milky Way.’ And here’s what you’ll tell the whole fuckin’ world: ‘I am Annie P. Goode and I am Goode to go!’”
It was vaguely evident to Annie, flying high with D. K. above the farms of Emerald, that he was training her to be his victory over a smashed career. After she’d won her first flying competition, he’d made this goal explicit, asking her to take a sacred vow on her gold medal, swearing that someday she would show the U.S. Navy how D. K. Destin, a black man with Occaneechi blood, a man the military had used as a scratch pad, could make her a flyer who was faster than anybody else in America. Annie would be D. K.’s proof that this country’s passing him over for the Medal of Honor had been “racist malefaction.”
“For a little bitty white girl,” he noted with satisfaction, “you are fuckin’ good.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to talk like that,” she primly advised him.
“Talk? Don’t get hung up on ‘talk.’ They shoot you out of the sky? Your plane’s on fire and you’re falling in the shit faster’n a wino off an overpass? You’re going down, the China Sea’s rising