Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure (3 page)

Rick flew the other Jenny and did parachute drops. He’d been with Hitch for almost a year, which was almost a year too long for anybody to have to deal with an ego that outsized.

The whole thing had worked—barely, but it had worked—until a competition last month in Oklahoma when Rick had announced, in front of half a dozen other pilots, that he’d been the first man to do a successful handkerchief pickup. That, of course, was downright hogwash. The trick—of flying low over a pole and using a hook attached to the bottom wing to snag a handkerchief off the top—had been around a whole lot longer than Rick Holmes.

Without thinking, Hitch had snorted a laugh and called the lie for the malarkey it was. Rick had gotten about as red in the face as it was possible to get without exploding every single one of his blood vessels. He’d stomped off without another word—but Hitch had been hearing about it ever since. Rick wasn’t about to leave without getting paid, and Hitch couldn’t fire him until he had the money, but that day was coming and they both knew it.

For now though, he still needed Rick. Good pilots were hard to find these days, much less jumpers skilled enough to pull off this high-altitude stunt they were planning for the competition.

Behind him, footsteps crunched through the grass. “Well, how’d she fly? Like a dream?”

Hitch turned around. “You’re not going to believe what happened up there.”

Beneath the upturned brim of his baseball cap, Earl Harper grinned. “Won’t I though? How about that speed? Didn’t I tell you? We more than doubled the horsepower. You should be getting ninety miles an hour, maybe a climb rate of five hundred feet per minute.” He smacked his hands together. “And with that reinforced frame I gave her, you know she’ll take a whole lot of beating. Hot dog, boy. They’re going to have a hard time trouncing us this week.”

“About that...”

The shadow of a day’s worth of black whiskers froze around Earl’s grin. “About what?” He glanced at Lilla.

She turned to sit primly, knees bent, eyes studiously on the fire.

Earl looked back at Hitch. “You
busted
it? Tell me you haven’t already busted that beautiful, brand-new Hispano-Suiza?”

This was where it got tricky. Hitch paid for the planes. Hitch flew the planes. But once Earl got under the hood of anything with oil running through its veins, he thought it belonged to him.

Hitch held out both hands. “Okay, look,
I
didn’t bust it. But there was this woman—”

“Lilla?”

“No, not Lilla...”

Earl lowered his chin. He looked like a bulldog, thick all over and more than a little rumpled. “That’s what this is all about? I told you to wait until morning to take it out, but, no, it had to be tonight.” He turned around and talked to the darkness, both arms raised. “He wants to fly back to his hometown after nine years, he says. He wants to take the new engine out at night, he says. It’s all perfectly innocent, he says.” He turned back and prodded Hitch in the chest. “I thought you were done with the dames in this town!”

Lilla turned her head. “You have a girl?”

“She’s not my girl!” Hitch said. “She plummets out of the sky, ’bout smacks me out of the air, turns into a fireball, then falls into some lake I’ve never even seen before.”

Lilla sighed like it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. “Ohhhh.”

Earl just stared.

Hitch waited. It was a good story. Better than his big wreck out in California, better than the guy who’d had to chase his unpiloted Jenny around the airfield until he could finally sever her fuel line with a shotgun, even better than that crazy Navajo who had dreamed up the stunt of hanging by his hair from the landing gear.

Earl tipped back his head and bellowed a laugh.

Hitch huffed. “C’mon.”

When Earl finally wiped away the tears, he slapped Hitch’s shoulder. “Where do you come up with this stuff?” He shook his head and started toward the Jenny.

Hitch strode after him. “I didn’t come up with it. It happened. I’m flying along, and the next thing I know
bam!
Here are these two jumpers, right in front of my prop. And if that’s not enough, the girl’s wearing a cotton-picking evening gown—or, you know, one of those great big dresses your grandmother would have worn.”

“Sure she did. And where’d she fall from? The moon?”

“Now, there, right there, that’s what you should’ve asked in the first place.
That’s
the question. I’ve been over and over it in my mind. Mine was the only plane out there, I’m sure of it.”

Next to the Jenny, Earl pulled a flashlight out of his jumpsuit pocket and shone it on the engine.

Hitch stood over his shoulder. “And then the other jumper—he was a man, and a crazy lunatic, I might add—he starts shooting flares. Three of ’em.”

The guy must have been reloading the second two by the light of their predecessors. You’d have to be pretty handy to manage that while hanging from a parachute in the middle of the night.

“One of them hit her, and another one caught the exhaust. I’m still trying to figure which he was aiming at and which was an accident. If it was some sabotage job, it’s the most mixed-up thing I’ve ever seen.”

Earl walked around to the plane’s other side and shone the light into the exhaust stack. “Dagnabbit, Hitch. You can’t fly this ship now! Why do you have to go and do these crazy things?”

“You think I’m going to do anything to endanger the plane
or
the engine right now, with everything we’ve got riding on this?”

Earl ducked under the plane and crossed back over to Hitch. “Look. I know you’re trying to do your best here—for all of us. But this is no time to be going crazy.”

“If we’re going to win, we
need
to be faster and crazier than anything any of these people around here have ever seen.”

“You keep busting up your bird and you can be as fast and crazy as you want, but it ain’t getting you off the ground.”

Earl had been with Hitch longer than anybody—going on six years now. They’d hooked up during a stopover in a little Texas town, where they’d gotten falling down drunk. By the time they emerged from their hangovers, Earl had somehow become the first member of Hitch’s little flying family.

Earl got distracted by experiments too often to be the best mechanic running, but he was as true blue as they came. Every month or so, he’d start talking about leaving the circus to settle down somewhere, but it was just talk. Earl wouldn’t leave, not as long as he reckoned Hitch needed somebody around to keep him from pitching head on into trouble.

That was why Earl, of all people, should know when Hitch was yarning and when he was dead serious.

Hitch leveled a stare at him. “You don’t believe me.”

Earl waggled the flashlight. “Do I believe some parachutist in my grandma’s dress jumped out of the night sky and blew up in a ball of fire? No.”

A wave of disappointment poked Hitch in the gut. He propped his hands on his hips and hung his head back.

Earl sighed. “Now I know this town ain’t where you want to be right now. A bad marriage and a dead wife—that’s not something any of us want to come back to.”

That history was long, long over. But Hitch’s stomach still rolled over on itself.

“Something must have been out there, because something sure hit your engine, I’ll grant you that. But it was dark and you were going fast.” A grin pulled at the corner of Earl’s mouth. “Faster than you’ve ever gone before in this heap. You got the jitters? Fine. Maybe you were even sleepy. We pulled some mighty long hours trying to get here on time.”

Had
he been drifting off? Hitch thought back. What
had
he been thinking about before the parachutes appeared in front of him? He’d had a lot on his mind, that was sure. If he hadn’t needed to be in Livingstone’s competition so badly, coming back home would have been way down on his list of priorities. With any luck, he wouldn’t run into too many folks he knew from before. Most of them—including Celia’s sister and his own brother—wouldn’t be too excited to see him. And there were a few he wasn’t too excited about seeing himself—mainly Sheriff Bill Campbell.

That’s
what he’d been thinking. No dozing about it.

And then
it
happened, in a blur of adrenaline. His memory wasn’t giving him too many clear pictures, just general blasts of color. But he was sure. You didn’t just imagine a girl in a ball gown plummeting out of the night sky.

He rubbed his hand through the short ends of his curly hair. “If I say I’m sure, I don’t suppose that’ll get you to stop looking at me like I belong in the nuthouse?”

Earl snorted. “That ain’t likely any day of the week. Not the way you fly.”

Hitch looked at the plane, then back at Earl. “Can you fix it?”

“’Course I can fix it.”

“Can you fix it in
time
?”

Earl put on his grumpy face. “Why is it always up to me to work the miracles around here?”

“Because you’re the only smart one of the bunch.”

“You know I’m going to need some money for supplies.”

“Money I haven’t got.” Hitch chewed his lip. “Maybe somebody in town will have a quickie odd job. Or... I could sell something.”

“And what have you got that’s worth selling?”

He mentally rooted through his rucksack. “My old Colt .45 maybe. It’s still in good shape. Somebody might give me more than a couple bucks for it.”

“Better hope so.” Earl hesitated. “And maybe we can take Rick’s car and drive out to the lake, see if we can find any traces of these folks. You’re pretty sure they’re not hurt?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. They walked off just fine. They didn’t much want to meet up with me.” And he didn’t blame them. “I just can’t quite figure where they
came
from.”

Earl clicked off his flashlight. “Same place all jumpers jump from. No mystery there.”

Hitch stayed where he was and looked up at the moon. Seemed like the old girl was winking at him. Might it be she knew something they didn’t? What secrets did she hold within all that silence?

Three

WALTER LIKED THE early mornings, especially in the summer—with the full moon still hovering near the horizon, on its way to setting. It nestled, white as a heifer’s face, against the blinding blue of the morning sky. He craned his head back.

Maybe there’d be a real live airplane up there today too. The posters for the big show had been plastered all over town for weeks. His insides jigged at just the thought of it. He couldn’t help a grin, and he pulled in a deep breath.

There was something about the air at this time of day, all shiny with the mist rising off the dew-speckled cornfields. Even in a bad drought, everything smelled wet and alive. This late in the summer, the cornfields should have been towering far over his head—they should have been up over even Papa Byron’s or Deputy Griff’s heads. But thanks to the dry weather, the corn was barely taller than his four feet five and a quarter inches.

Cane pole over his shoulder and wearing only his patched overalls, he ran through the crabgrass and the purple alfalfa flowers that bordered the road to the creek. The dampness of the earth under his toes crinkled up his legs, straight to his head.

As Mama Nan would say, good sweet angels, wasn’t this the life! Seemed like the right moment to do a war whoop and a dance, for the fun of it. Problem with that was it involved saying something out loud. He opened his mouth, loosened his throat muscles, and waited. But speaking up felt wrong, even out here, where nobody could hear him. It would be kind of like cheating, since everybody wanted so much for him to say something back home.

He hadn’t said hardly a thing since that day four years ago, half his whole life past. That was the day he’d gotten so scared and let the bad thing happen to the twins down by the creek. Evvy and Annie had been just babies then. He was supposed to have taken care of them. But he hadn’t, and they’d just about died. And Mama Nan...

Sometimes her face from that day still flashed through his mind. Her eyes had been huge, her mouth open, gasping, like somebody had whacked her across the shins with the biggest stick they could find. She just stared at him and stared at him. And then words started coming out of her.

He didn’t remember exactly what she said. But whatever she said had been right: it had been his fault.

He had stood there, wet and shivering, on the creek bank. Nothing would move. No part of his body would work right. Not because anything was wrong with him—he wasn’t the one who’d just about died—but just... because.

And then he’d stopped talking.

But he didn’t like to think about that. Much better to enjoy the sunshine and the morning. Maybe one of these days, he’d finally say something again—and make Mama Nan happy with him. But for right now, it could wait.

He set down his pole and rolled a somersault. Surely, God would know a somersault meant the same thing as a war whoop anyway. It was a sort of a thank-you for early summer mornings like this, when Mama Nan and Molly were baking and Papa Byron was starting up his rusty old tractor. If everybody was too busy to notice him, that meant he got to go fishing.