Flight (Plot Summary)
Contents: IntroductionCharacters Style Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Plot Summary
“Flight” opens at an unspecified time, probably in the 1930s, on the Torres farm on the California coast, fifteen miles south of Monterey. Nineteen-year-old Pepe Torres is amusing his younger brother and sister, Emilio and Rosy, by skillfully throwing his switchblade at a post. The knife is his inheritance from his father, who died ten years earlier after being bitten by a rattlesnake. Their mother scolds Pepe for his laziness and tells him he must ride into Monterey to buy salt and medicine. He is to spend the night in Monterey at the home of a family friend, Mrs. Rodriguez. Pepe is surprised that he will be allowed to go alone, and he asks to wear his father’s hat, hatband, and green silk handkerchief. He tells his mother that he will be careful, saying, “I am a man.” His mother responds that he is “a peanut” and “a foolish chicken.”
Before sunrise the next morning, Pepe returns unexpectedly to the farm. He tells his mother he must go away to the mountains. He tells his mother that he had drunk wine at Mrs. Rodriguez’s, and that a few other people had shown up as well. He tells her about a quarrel he had with a man. His knife seemed to fly on its own, and the man was stabbed. Pepe concludes by saying, “I am a man now, Mama. The man said names to me I could not allow.”
Mama Torres agrees that Pepe is now a man, but she also has her doubts. She has worried about Pepe’s knife-play and where it might lead him. She gives him his father’s black coat and rifle, as well as a water bag and some provisions. Dressed in his father’s garments, Pepe hurries off to the mountains. Mama Torres starts the formal wail of mourning for the dead. Emilio asks Rosy if Pepe is dead, and Rosy replies, “He is not dead. . . . Not yet.”
Pepe rides into the mountains, and as he climbs, the trail changes from soft black dirt beside a stream to redwood forest to rough, dry, rocky open country. He avoids a mounted man on the trail. As he rides higher toward the pass, he glimpses a dark figure on the ridge ahead, then looks quickly away. He stops in the evening by a small stream, tying the horse. A wildcat comes to the stream and stares at Pepe, who does not use the rifle for fear of revealing his location to his pursuers. He sleeps, then wakes suddenly in the night when his horse whinnies to another horse on the trail. After hastily saddling his horse and going up the hill, he realizes that he has left his hat behind.
He continues riding into the dry waste country. Then, without warning, his horse is shot dead from under him. Pepe, under fire, crawls up the hill, moving “with the instinctive care of an animal.” He worms his way up, running only when there is cover, otherwise “wriggling forward on his stomach.” He waits as wild animals go about their business, the buzzards already circling over his dead horse below. When he sees a flash below him, he aims and fires. In the return fire, a chip of granite embeds itself in his right hand. Pepe takes the stone out and the cut bleeds. He stuffs a dusty spider web into the wound to stop the bleeding, then slides and crawls slowly up the hill. He is almost bitten by a rattlesnake, and lizards scatter before him as he crawls upward. He sleeps in the bushes until night. His arm is infected and swollen tight inside the sleeve of his father’s coat. He leaves the coat behind. He is very thirsty and his tongue is swollen.
That night he comes to a damp stream bed and digs frantically for water. Exhausted, he falls asleep until late the next afternoon. He awakens to find a large mountain lion staring at him. The big cat moves away at the sound of horses and a dog. Pepe crouches behind a rock until dark, then moves up the slope before he realizes he has left his rifle behind. He sleeps, then awakens to find his wound swollen and gangrenous. He clumsily lances the wound with a sharp rock and tries to drain the infection from his hand. He climbs near the top of a ridge only to see “a deep canyon exactly like the last, waterless and desolate.”
He sleeps again in the daylight, awakening to the sound of pursuing hounds. He tries to speak, “but only a thick hiss came to his lips.” He makes the sign of the cross with his left hand and struggles to his feet. Standing tall, he allows his pursuers to take aim. Two shots ring out and Pepe falls forward down the rocky cliff, his body causing a “little avalanche.”
