Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

One afternoon he came home early from the office and announced that this was it; the big day had come. He had George Stearns bring the car to the front of the house. Almost running a temperature from excitement, I clambered in. Mother and Bridget followed. Bridget was not yet two and hadn’t been talking long; she had even less an idea than I of what an airplane might be, but she had picked up some of my euphoria and for the entire car ride murmured to herself in a singsong voice, “I want to go up in an airplane, I want to go up in an airplane.” We drove for a very long time through parts of Los Angeles that I’d never seen before, flat stretches of irrigated farmland (which in a year or two would be covered with acres of sinister camouflage) and oil wells pumping—like monstrous woodpeckers, Mother said. All the while Bridget chanted, “I want to go up in an airplane,” and I sat, fermenting with ecstasy, unable to speak a word. We came at last to a hangar and an airstrip with a red windsock flapping in the breeze. Father parked the car, and the four of us walked out to the asphalt strip. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, with a sudden strange loud hum in the air. “There!” shouted Father, gaily throwing his head back and his arms out as if to embrace the sky. “Look up, quick, look up!” Right over our heads roared a small airplane doing aerobatics. “He’s doing some stunts for you—now here comes a slow roll,” yelled Father, “and watch this, he’s starting into a loop-the-loop!”

“Where—where?” wailed Bridget desperately, pointing in the wrong direction, as Mother knelt down and tried to turn her head up.

“Look up, Brie, up!” called Father, his voice almost drowned out by the airplane hovering upside down over us. “Attagirl, Brooke, what d’ya think—isn’t that beautiful?” At that moment the plane slowly began to lose altitude, as if on purpose, and, gathering momentum, nose-dived into the asphalt before us. It caught fire almost on impact. I screamed with delight, thinking it was part of the show, and started after Father, who was running toward the blaze, but Mother caught me and yanked me around so I couldn’t see anything but her face.

“Don’t look,” she kept saying over and over, but I couldn’t hear her very well, even in the silence after the engine had gone dead, because my ears were still ringing. “It’s an accident, it’s an accident.” Although I didn’t know what an accident was—at least not that kind—I didn’t dare disobey her. Bridget clutched Mother’s neck and said insistently, “I want to see an airplane, I want to see an airplane.” There was a lot of commotion behind me, people and trucks whizzing past. Father came back after a while. Mother stood up. “Leland, darling,” she said to him, “let’s go home.”

“Nope,” he replied. “I promised Brooke she could have a ride in my plane and that’s what we’re going to do. Right?”

“Right,” I said, much relieved.

“Come on, everyone,” said Father cheerfully, taking my hand and striding across the strip. “Come on, Maggie. Listen.” He stopped to make a sweeping motion in the direction of the charred wreck on the runway before pacing on. “Remember this, Brooke. You, too, Bridget, are you listening? If you’re ever in an accident that you can walk out of, no matter what kind, keep right on going as if nothing happened at all. Airplane, car, whatever—get back in and keep going. Fall off a horse, get right back on, even if you’re scared to death. Only way. Know why? Because otherwise, about five minutes later, you’ll be even more afraid and won’t ever want to try it again. Right. Got it?” And there we were, staring up at his plane. It was called, he said with pride, a Howard, and it was a beautiful dark blue, the color and shape of some sleek underwater creature. I was so dizzy with excitement and love that he had to reach back to haul me up the steps, and then get Bridget, who had curled up into a little ball and wouldn’t let go of Mother. We all sat behind him while he put on his earphones and started the engine; a mechanic in a blue jumpsuit spun the propeller, and the plane started down the runway gathering speed. It lifted off into the air, curving around in a slow arc so that we were pressed down into our seats, and Father turned, grinning, to yell back at us, “How’d you like that?” I never wanted to come down again. Bridget spent the entire ride chanting, “I want to go up in an airplane, I want to go up in an airplane,” disregarding Mother, who would squeeze her and say, laughing, “Brie, you are in an airplane, silly. This is an airplane, darling.”

All the way home, Father animatedly talked to Mother about technical matters: how every airport had its own pattern for instrument landing, how really lousy it was to land by instrument in bad weather. I was too worn out to ask what happened to the stunt pilot; later it seemed that if it was really important to know, Father would have told me, so I forgot about it.

I can’t imagine a childhood without Johnny and Jimmy in it. Johnny was around even the night I was born. It was the Fourth of July, and Mother, who was getting bored with being so pregnant, cajoled Father and Johnny into taking her out to dinner and then down to the amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier. They all tried for the gold ring on the merry-go-round, but Father was much too elegant to set foot on the roller coaster, so Mother and Johnny rode on it seven or eight times—and also the Ferris wheel, for good