28
In every picture of them taken during a long stretch of their childhood, Landsman is posed with his arm slung around his sister’s shoulders. In the early ones, the top of her head reaches to just above his belly. In the last such picture, there is a phantom mustache on Landsman’s upper lip, and he has the advantage of an inch, maybe two. The first time you spotted the trend in the pictures, it seemed cute: a big brother looking out for his kid sister. Seven or eight pictures in, the protective gesture took on a menacing air. After a dozen, you started to worry about those Landsman kids. Huddled together, bravely smiling for the camera, like deserving children in the adoption column of a newspaper.
“Orphaned by tragedy,” Naomi said one night, turning the pages of an old album. The pages were waxed board covered with a crinkly sheet or polyurethane to hold the photos down. The layer of plastic gave the family depicted in the album a preserved quality, as if it had been bagged like evidence. “Two lovable moppets looking for a home.”
“Only Freydl wasn’t dead yet,” Landsman said, knowing he was handing her a fat straight-line. Their mother had died after a brief, bitter struggle against cancer, having lived just long enough for Naomi to break her heart by dropping out of college.
Naomi said, “Now you tell me.”
Lately, when he looks at these pictures, Landsman sees himself as trying to hold his sister down, to keep her from flying off and crashing into a mountain.
Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, “In everything but sexual preference.”
It was from an early boyfriend that she had caught the itch to fly. Landsman never asked her what the attraction was, why she had worked so long and hard to get her commercial license and crash the homoidiotic world of male bush pilots. She was not one for pointless speculation, his dashing sister. But as Landsman understands it, the wings of an airplane are engaged in a constant battle with the air that envelops them, denting and baffling and warping it, bending and staving it off. Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it’s going to die. Like a salmon — that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home — Naomi used up her strength and energy in struggle.
Not that this effort ever showed in her forthright manner, her cocky bearing, her smile. She had the Errol Flynn style of keeping a straight face only when she was joking, and grinning like a jackpot winner whenever things got rough. Slap a pencil mustache on the Jewess, and you could have sent her swinging from the rigging of a three-master, sword in hand. She was not complicated, Landsman’s little sister, and in that respect, she was unique among the women of his acquaintance.
“She was a fucking loon,” says the air traffic manager of the Flight Service Station at the Yakovy airport. He’s Larry Spiro, a skinny, stoop-shouldered Jew from Short Hills, New Jersey. A mexican, as the Sitka Jews call their southern cousins; mexicans call the Sitka Jews icebergers, or “the frozen Chosen.” Spiro’s thick eyeglasses correct for astigmatism, and behind them, his eyes have a skeptical wobble. Wiry gray hair stands out all over his head, like beams of outrage in a newspaper cartoon. He wears a white oxford shirt with his monogram on the pocket and a red necktie striped with gold. Slowly, anticipating the shot of whiskey in front of him, he pushes back his sleeves. His teeth are the color of the collar of his shirt.
“Christ.” Like most mexicans working in the District, Spiro clings fiercely to American. For an East Coast Jew, the District of Sitka constitutes the exile of exiles, Hatzeplatz, the back half acre of nowhere. To speak American for a Jew like Spiro is to keep himself living in the real world, to promise himself that he’s going back soon. He smiles. “I never saw a woman get into so much trouble.”
They are sitting in the lounge of Ernie’s Skagway Bar and Grill, in the low aluminum slab that was the terminal building back when this was just an airfield at the edge of the bush. They are in a booth at the rear, waiting for their steaks. Ernie’s Skagway is regarded by many as offering the only decent steak dinner between Anchorage and Vancouver. Ernie flies them in from Canada every day, bloody and packed in ice. The decor is minimal as a snack bar’s, vinyl and laminate and steel. The plates are plastic, the napkins crinkly as the paper on a doctor’s table, You order your food at a counter and sit down with a number on a spindle. The waitresses are renowned for their advanced age, ill humor, and physical resemblance to the cabs of long-haul trucks. All the atmosphere in the place is the product of its liquor license and its clientele: pilots, hunters and fishermen, and the usual Yakovy mix of shtarkers and sub rosa operators. On a Friday night in season, you can buy or sell anything from moose meat to ketamine, and hear some of the most arrant lies ever put to language.
At six o’clock on a Monday evening, it’s mostly airport staff and a few loose pilots holding up the bar. Quiet Jews, hard workers, men in knit neckties, and one American bush pilot, half fluent in Yiddish, making the claim that he once flew three hundred miles without realizing he was upside down. The bar itself is an incongruous behemoth, oak, mock Victorian, salvaged from the failure of a cowboy-themed American steak house franchise down in Sitka.
“Trouble,” Landsman says. “Right up to the end.” Spiro frowns. He was the manager on duty at Yakovy when Naomi’s plane flew into Mount Dunkelblum. There was nothing Spiro could have done to prevent the crash, but the subject is painful to him. He zips open his nylon briefcase and pulls out a thick blue folder. It contains a thick document clipped with a heavy clip and several loose sheets.
“I glanced at the summary again,” he says in a somber tone. “The weather was decent. Her plane was a little overdue for service. Her final communication was routine.”
“Mm,” says Landsman.
“Were you looking for something new?” Spiro’s tone is not quite pitying but prepared to turn that way if necessary.
“I don’t know, Spiro. I’m just looking.”
Landsman takes the folder, and pages quickly through the thick document — a copy of the FAA investigator’s final determination — then sets it aside and picks up one of the loose sheets underneath.
“That’s the flight plan you were asking about. For the morning before the crash.”
Landsman studies the form, which affirms the intention of pilot Naomi Landsman to fly her Piper Super Cub from Peril Strait, Alaska, to Yakovy, D.S., carrying one passenger. The form looks like a computer printout, its blanks neatly filled in twelve-point Times Roman.
“So she phoned this one in, is that it?” Landsman checks the time stamp. “That morning at five-thirty.”
“She used the automated system, yes. Most people do.”
“Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “That’s where? Out by Tenakee, right?”
“South of there.”
“So, we’re talking about a what — a two-hour flight from there to here?”
“More or less.”
“I guess she was feeling optimistic,” Landsman says.
“She put her arrival time at a quarter past six. Forty five minutes from the time the thing was filed.”
Spiro has the kind of mind that is drawn to and repelled by anomaly. He takes the folder from Landsman and turns it around. He pages through the stack of documents that he collected and copied after agreeing to let Landsman buy him a steak.
“She did arrive at a quarter past six,” he says. “It’s noted right here in the AFSS log. Six-seventeen.”