was pretending not to notice, in the interest of keeping their relationship strictly professional, or—the explanation he preferred—he’d done a very good job of masking his feelings, in the interest of maintaining his masculine pride.
He’d hoped that the shared routine of piloting the Hawker would have the same effect on his perception of her as it had on his perception of Sally McCabe, his copilot back when he was flying a 727 for Federal Express. That hope failed, he’d come to realize, because it hadn’t been the workaday association with Sally that had made her androgynous; it was Sally herself, a Miss Six o’Clock in the figure department, who never wore makeup and kept her hair cut boyishly short and was kind of boring, too. Not much amperage in Sally, whereas Mary had more than a twenty-four-volt battery and would need to wear a dropcloth to hide the virtues of her body. He liked the smart remarks that crackled from her mouth as much as he liked its shape. And those cascades of blond hair—well, Stevie Ray was singing now what that did to him.
Every time I see you, I feel so fine
My blood is runnin’ wild.
Her only interest in him, far as he could tell, was in his role as her mentor. She was competitive and ambitious. She admired Tara Whitcomb and was envious of her at the same time for establishing a feminine beachhead on one of the last male-held islands in the world. Commercial airlines, fearful of lawsuits alleging sex discrimination, courted female pilots, but there was no affirmative action program in the bush-pilot fraternity; a woman had to prove herself, and Mary was determined to do just that, eager to learn the tricks and techniques that would turn her from an average flier into a polished ace like Tara. The fine points that would shave minutes off the time it took her to reach cruising altitude, to save fuel costs. Things like that. He was just as eager to teach her, though he did so with conflicting hopes. Hope A was that his skills and knowledge would overwhelm her into falling in love with him; Hope B was that nothing of the sort would happen, sparing him, her, and Tony from entrapment in the awkward geometry of a love triangle. It was the more realistic hope by far, because his age, bulging gut, Dumbo the Elephant ears, and obnoxious ways were liabilities that outweighed his assets by a considerable margin. Hope B, however, dissolved in a stormy fusion of jealousy, heartache, and bug-eyed lust whenever he saw Mary and Tony walking hand in hand into the tent they shared. Hope A then would get the better of him, and he would give serious thought to putting a big move on her when her boyfriend was away, just to see what would happen. But he never got beyond the thinking stage. He behaved impeccably. No advances or innuendos; no invitations to meet him for a drink at the bar. Although he liked to think that his self-restraint evidenced a certain nobility in his character, proving that he treasured loyalty to his former first officer above all else, he knew it was due only to his fear of making a fool of himself.
“Dead ahead. The envy of every guy, lust-object of every size queen.”
Mary pointed through the windshield at the landmark, a red rock pillar, rounded at the tip, rising in the haze-dimmed light from between a pair of low testicular hills. A couple of months ago, when Dare took him up for an aerial tour of Nuba landing strips, Suleiman had dubbed this formation “The Mahdi’s Penis” in tribute to his hero’s manhood.
“You’ll make a shallow turn when we’re over it,” Dare instructed Mary. “Bearing three one zero. Michael’s boys are supposed to light a fire when they hear us, give us the wind direction by the smoke, but don’t count on it.”
She’s my sweet little thing
She’s my pride and joy
She’s my sweet little baby
And I’m her little lover boy.
“Wes, think we could conclude our program of in-flight entertainment? It’s distracting.”
He switched the cassette player off as she banked into the turn and commenced to descend, shooting over Manfred’s hospital, its new tin roof and the solar panels atop it glinting off the starboard wing. She dropped to two thousand feet, which became fifteen hundred when the land ascended to the plateau west of the hospital. A thousand feet now, eight hundred, coming in on her base