Russell Banks - The Reserve

“Where the heck do you actually fly ?” Jennifer Armstrong wondered. “I mean, with those things on it, pontoons. What do you actually use it for?”

“Transportation,” Jordan said. He flew it mainly here and there in the north country.

“Interesting.”

But he was thinking of taking a trip to Greenland soon, Jordan told them, and would fly it there. He wanted to make some pictures of the glaciers to illustrate a book. An account of his previous travels there.

“Your own book? One you wrote yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting,” Jennifer Armstrong said and got up to make herself another drink.

“You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Mr. Groves?” Evelyn Cole said. “We have a dozen lake trout from this morning’s expedition. Our boys are very good providers.”

The pilot felt suddenly physically fatigued, as if he’d been running. He took a few seconds to answer, then said, “I don’t think so. It’s getting dark, and I’m expected at home. But thanks.” He wondered if her “boys” were the doctor and his friends, or the local men working in the kitchen shack out back. His friend, Hubert St. Germain, was the regular guide and caretaker for the Coles. He wondered if Hubert was the good provider.

Maybe he ought to stay for dinner, Jordan thought. He was as aware as Vanessa that the good doctor collected artists, but the man also collected art, and Jordan had a few small, unsold Adirondack landscapes and a dozen woodcuts that he wouldn’t mind placing in Dr. Cole’s collection. They might make the doctor reconsider his passion for James Heldon. Jordan was conscious of Vanessa standing behind him, and he waited for her to say something that he would have to defend himself against without at the same time alienating her father. It was not easy for him to be polite to these people.

But Vanessa said nothing. It amused her to see the degree to which her parents and their friends bored and slightly irritated the artist and the ways he did the same back to them. She left the room for a moment and returned wearing a pale linen jacket over her blouse. She made herself a martini and again took up her position behind Jordan, who was slumped in a wide, cushioned chair made of wrist-thick branches of a birch tree with the bark left on for rustic effect. It was an uncomfortable chair, and she could tell from his glum expression that to Jordan it was also ugly and pretentious, and so it was to her now, too. Most of the furniture was of that type — it was the desired style, meant to look handmade, cumbersome, rough, as if built by a local woodsman with ax and adze, which was in fact the case — but up until this moment she had seen it only through her parents’ and their friends’ admiring eyes.

She leaned down and placed her face next to Jordan’s and whispered, “I won’t be happy until you take me for a ride in your airplane.” Her cheek nearly brushed his, then pulled away. The others seemed not to notice. They were discussing the annual fireworks display at the Tamarack clubhouse tonight, which they could not see from the camp unless they rowed out to the far side of the lake in the guide boats around nine o’clock and faced the northeast sky above the distant clubhouse and golf course. They wondered whether it would be worth the effort.

“When?” Jordan asked her.

“Now,” Vanessa said.

Jennifer Armstrong said, “I hate to complain, but every year I’m rather disappointed. The fireworks are really mostly for the locals, I think.”

“Good public relations,” Bunny Tinsdale said. “Bread and circuses for the hoi polloi.”

Jordan stood and declared that he had to leave. He thanked the doctor for his hospitality and for showing him the Heldons, nodded to the group, and quickly departed from the room. The sun had disappeared entirely behind the Great Range, and the lake was black, and the temperature was dropping fast. Outside on the deck he stopped to roll and light a cigarette and checked the wind. In the west, above the sooty mountains, the sky had faded from lemon to silken gray. The air was still smooth, he noted. The blue-black eastern sky was clear, with swatches of stars already visible, and over the treetops behind the camp a half-moon was rising. The pilot smoked his cigarette and made his way in the gathering darkness down the path to the lake and walked along the shore to his anchored airplane.

She was waiting for him when he got there. She stood barefoot on the rocky beach in her white skirt and linen jacket, looking eager and elegant and brave. Jordan said nothing to the woman, and she said nothing to him. He stepped into the water and she followed. Grabbing a wing strut with one hand, he swung himself onto the nearer pontoon, turned, and extended his other hand to her. Refusing his help, she stepped gracefully onto the pontoon and made her way along the lower wing to the aft cockpit and situated herself there.

Jordan untied and retrieved first one anchor, then the other, and quickly seated himself in the forward cockpit. He switched on the ignition, double-checked fuel and oil-pressure gauges, and started the large radial engine. The propeller rotated feebly for a few seconds, then the engine coughed, grumbled, and came to life. Jordan cut the float rudders to starboard, bringing the airplane around, facing it into the light northeast wind. He nudged the throttle forward, and the aircraft began to accelerate, bumping across the low ripples of the lake on a bearing that took it gradually away from shore, toward the farther side of the narrow lake.

As the airplane passed the camp, Jordan glanced to his right and saw that Dr. Cole and his guests had come out onto the deck. They watched the airplane reach the far side of the lake where it had first touched down and thought they saw a passenger in the cockpit behind the pilot, but couldn’t make out who it was.

Without breaking speed, the pilot brought the airplane around to starboard again, carving a tight turn into the northeast, heading it directly into the wind, then pushed the throttle ahead another notch, accelerating as it came out of the turn. At about forty knots, the airplane squarely hit the step, the gathering surge of water just ahead of the pontoons. As the nose of the airplane rose, the pilot pulled back on the control yoke and pushed the throttle all the way forward. For a few seconds the airplane fought the water, working its way up and over the step, until it leveled off, and then it was airborne and climbing.

From the deck of the camp, Dr. Cole and his wife and their friends watched the airplane rise off the surface of the lake and soar overhead and disappear into the night sky behind them, and when they turned to go back inside and get dressed for dinner, they realized almost as one that the artist’s passenger was Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa. No one said it aloud until the couples were in their respective bedrooms — Dr. Cole and his wife in the master suite, a large, high-ceilinged bedroom just off the living room, with its own fireplace, and the others in the guest quarters, a low structure called the Lodge that was attached to the main building by a roofed-over walkway — when husband and wife said to each other, “Well, that was fast,” and, “I don’t know where she gets the nerve…,” and, “I didn’t even see her leave the room.”

Dr. Cole pulled on his dinner jacket, brushed his lapels, and shot his cuffs. Checking himself in the mirror, he straightened his bow tie and said to his wife, “What do you think? Is she all right?”

“No, of course not! When has Vanessa ever been ‘all right,’ Carter?”

The doctor sat down heavily on the bed and placed his right hand over the left side of his chest and winced. His face had gone pale, and he was sweating.