Syd was standing up and out the door before another word could be said. He was worried. Syd always worried, but now he was worried about his brother’s moods. They walked together across the courtyard, and Syd said, “I wonder when they’ll let Mum come over.”

This caused Chaplin to break stride. Syd wasn’t joking. He truly didn’t know. In rapid succession, Chaplin felt pity and admiration for Syd, and he felt like the worst son in the world, again, and then he said, “Yes, I wonder.”

14

They were heading north to no particular place. The war had moved eastward, and the sky was more or less empty. Every so often, a vibration pinged up Ripley’s rudder control, which was mated to a secondary control in Lee’s cabin—a type of improvised Morse code—as Lee pointed out good places to land. Then he was asking if they were going to land soon.

Ripley put the nose down, increasing their velocity, then pulled back on the stick with a kind of steady joy, sending them into the beginnings of a loop.

As they ascended, Lee didn’t enjoy the carnival-ride feeling. Thrown backward, blood rushing against gravity, he ticked off his faults, beginning with ambition, and they climbed upward until they were inverted and Ripley cut the engine.

Lee lurched up at the ground, his shoulders squeezed against the narrow leather seat straps. His scalp tingled, and his palms went slick and cold. His Springfield clattered out of the cockpit until it was also hanging in the air, secured by its strap, and then—it wasn’t.

They came out of the loop, upright, engine firing. Lee looked below him, as if he might see his only means of defending himself piercing cloud after cloud as it fell to earth, but it was already gone. He sat back in his seat and stared straight ahead at the gasoline tank. Then he put his head into his mittens.

The DH 4 continued on its uncertain way. Ripley was descending now like a falling leaf. He leaned into the throttle. Down they went, passing numerous likely landing sites near air hangars, machine-gun nests, bivouacs, and such. They circled a vineyard that had gone to the rambles, its hillocks and fields chaotically spotted with wildly growing autumn grapes. A single wattle and daub building stood in the flats. Its roof was mostly intact, enough of a rarity to invite exploration.

Landing would be quite the stunt, in that even here, away from the main battlefield, there were more crater holes than patches of level earth. And as they drew closer to the ground, it was apparent that the clearest part of the field itself was dotted with the stumps of former grapevines, small mushrooms half concealed by weeds. Landing was dangerous. Taking off would be almost impossible.

Ripley threw the plane into a vertical bank, and dropped sideways, killing all forward speed. They fell a thousand feet.