We pick our way around the skeletal airplanes, stripped for parts, and the various heaps of metal. When I poked through here a few weeks ago, I thought it looked exactly like somebody’s garage, oily rags and mysterious bits of machines in their haphazard piles, but now my eyes are more suspicious. I consider whether it’s just supposed to look haphazard. I mean, why would you just leave a propeller blade lying there on the ground? Neither Lindquist is the type to encourage disorder, even in a junkyard. I pause to finger the edge of a metal pole that looks as if it came from one of those tent kits for Boy Scouts.

Kaiko calls out from the other side of a stack of tires. “Here we go! Come on and give me a hand with this net, why don’t you.”

I walk obediently around the tires, around the bones of some old crop duster, just sitting there like a picked-over carcass, and there’s Kaiko, standing proudly next to a large, sweeping shape covered by one of those dense camouflage nettings they used in the war.

Ka-thump, goes my heart.

Maybe I should have spotted it before, I don’t know. But it hulks down in the back corner, covered by this netting that does the trick pretty well, makes a thing just dissolve into the background so that your eye passes right over it, unless your eye happens to know exactly what it’s looking for.

I grab another corner of the netting, and Kaiko and I slide it carefully away from the object beneath, the airplane, maybe the most famous airplane in the world. A shape so iconic, so memorable, you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize it for what it is.

A custom Rofrano Sirius, the one flown by Irene Foster in the Round the World Derby of 1937.

“Ain’t she a beauty,” Kaiko says reverently.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

October 1936: California

The airplane arrived in pieces the next day, by train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles and then by truck to Burbank, where Rofrano’s team of mechanics would reassemble it inside Hangar D. Octavian said not to worry about the bill, she could pay it when she was done with the tour. The baby had been born shortly after he and Sophie had arrived at Burbank Hospital the other night, a girl they’d named Clara, and Octavian was in a generous mood.