Calico Pennants by David A. Ross Page A

can’t see the ocean anymore, Freddy,” she said.
    Impressed by her steadiness, Freddy watched as she moistened her weathered, cracking lips with the tip of her tongue. Her sun-bleached, short hair had become dry and brittle, while her brows were golden from many hours spent in the cockpit beneath the blazing equatorial sun. On several occasions she’d told him she was not afraid to die; and in fact, try as she might, she had never been able to envision herself growing old. Weird as such a statement had seemed to Freddy at the time, he was inclined to consider its source. Amelia was an odd bird; she always had been. But so were most of the flyers he knew. They seemed to take some curious and bizarre pleasure from flirting time and again with oblivion. Transfixed, Freddy painted a vivid portrait of her in his mind—one that might somehow endure the outcome of the catastrophe they now faced. “Try the radio again,” he said.
    “WE ARE ON THE LINE OF POSITION 157 DASH 337/ WILL REPEAT THIS MESSAGE ON 6210 kcs./ WAIT, LISTENING ON 6210 kcs./ WE ARE RUNNING NORTH AND SOUTH/ WE ARE RUNNING ON LINE/ WILL REPEAT...”
    She descended another two hundred feet, and still fog inhibited a visual search. Somehow sensing its plight, the plane’s starboard engine missed and knocked, as if the heart of exploration itself had skipped a beat.
    Noonan looked up nervously, expectation written all over his sunburned face. He wanted to say something significant, to recap the myriad events of his life in a single word, but before he could utter a sound, Amelia pulled out the choke, and the engine came roaring back to a measured equilibrium. That was just like her, he thought, disarming disaster with a deft flick of her wrist, controlling the uncontrollable with her cool competence. “I thought you told me we had enough fuel for twenty minutes,” he said.
    “Measuring range is not an exact science, Freddy,” she said to him.
    “What do we do now?” he asked.
    “I’m taking it down a little further,” she said.
    Freddy could now see the foamy waves reflected in her blue-gray eyes. Her slender fingers clutched the stick with white-knuckled determination. Her body had gone rigid against disaster.
    “We’ll continue searching until we’re out of fuel,” she said. “But if I have to ditch her in the ocean... Why don’t you begin unfolding the rubber lifeboat, Freddy? But let’s pray we don’t need it!”
    “Right!” he said as he crouched down to re-enter the fuselage. “And remember Eddie Rickenbacker!” he proclaimed.
    A moment later, at one hundred feet and still flying blind, the fuel was exhausted and the stuttering engines shook the plane before going silent. Rocking and diving, the Electra cut through the fog. The wings tipped, and balance was lost. They both felt the vacuum of rapid descent.
    “This is it, Freddy,” Amelia called out. “I’m afraid we’re going down!”
    Lost in terror and disbelief, the navigator said nothing, but clasped his hands and began to pray. The pilot whispered the defining lines of her own poetical legacy:

    “ Merciless life laughs in the burning sun,
    And only death intervenes, circling down …”

PART II

CHAPTER 8
The Seven Sisters

    AGAIN SHE WALKED the well-worn path of evocation, through the ‘Grove of Many Dragons’. Under the morning’s dun sky, subaqueous spirits embraced the energy of the vegetable world, and a hundred thousand tapered points quivered in the breeze of the storm’s aftermath. In her hand she carried a stone from the beach, washed smooth by the waves and collected at the mouth of the delta. There the waters of the Seven Sisters moved over the rocks on their way to the sea.
    Otherwise featureless, the egg-shaped stone, now wrapped in a yellow ti leaf, would be her offering to Mo’o, the serpentine god she’d never actually seen, (though she’d once felt his cold hand upon her leg). Mo’o lived at the bottom of the pool where the twin waterfalls