The Flying Circus (11 page)

That obscure corner turned out to be already occupied. A sullen-looking man missing an arm sat in the shadows, his shirtsleeve pinned to keep it from flapping. His eyes stared at the crowd, unfocused, unengaged. Henry usually took a wide path around men with outward signs of what they’d lost in the war. He started to gravitate to another corner, then stopped. Peter. What if that was Peter—stripped of his place in the world, of his spirit and vigor?

He went and sat in one of five empty chairs near the man. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

The man blinked and nodded, his eyes still focused in the distance.

Henry offered his hand. “Name’s Jefferson.”

The man’s eyes shifted to Henry’s outstretched hand.

“Oh. Sorry.” Henry quickly switched to his left.

The man stayed still for a few terrible, embarrassing seconds, then he shifted sideways and shook with his left. “White, Bob White.”

“Nice to meet you, Bob.”

The man looked as if he was waiting for something. “What, no bird jokes?”

“Do people really do that?”

Bob smiled; it looked like an involuntary muscle movement, not at all associated with emotion. “Almost always.”

Henry shook his head. “Don’t see any humor in it. A person can’t help their name.”

The man nodded and shifted his gaze back into space. “Birds and broken wings.”

Jesus.

Henry realized he’d lost sight of Cora in the crowd. He found her, stepping onto the band riser. She stood there until the end of the song, clapping her hands with the music. Then she walked to the caller and leaned close to the old man’s hairy ear. He nodded, then
said, “Folks! Folks! Give your attention to this lovely young lady for one moment.”

Cora’s dress shimmered as she stepped forward. The sight of her was enough to stop a train; this crowd was easy pickings.

Henry breathed, “Clever.”

“Hello, everyone!” The crowd murmured a hello, like the call and response of a church program. “For those of you who missed the exciting arrival of Mercury’s Daredevils today, you haven’t missed out. Due to popular demand, we’ll be staying on for a second exhibition. My partner”—she waved a hand toward Henry, surprising him that she’d kept track of where he was—“Mr. Jefferson and I want to invite you out to the Sloderback farm tomorrow for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ride in an airplane with our war hero, Captain Gilchrist, and to experience the thrills of a daredevil act without peer. Our exhibition will start at one o’clock . . . after Sunday services. Tell your friends. No one will want to miss this!” She kissed the caller on his cheek. “Now let’s dance!”

The applause told Henry just how much power a pretty woman with an enthusiastic smile carried. Even Bob White had watched her with interest. And she’d timed it perfectly, right in the middle of the evening, after people were wound up and before they’d tired and started to drift away.

The music started. Several young men jostled to be the first to ask Cora to dance.

Bob looked Henry’s way. “You’re with the Daredevils?”

“I am.”

“And your flier is a war hero?”

“He flew in the war, yeah.” One-on-one conversation wasn’t like barking. It required something closer to the truth.

The man nodded. “I tried air service. Didn’t make it out of training. Crashed two trainers. They let you get by with one. But the second got me booted.”

“Is that how you lost your arm?”

“Nah. Germans got the arm.” Bob was quiet for a minute. “Turned out to be for the best. Most of them fighters didn’t come home at all.”

And some came home
broken.
“Come on out tomorrow . . . if you’re not off the idea of flying. We’ll give you a free ride.”

Just then, Cora appeared in front of them. “Would the handsome gentleman like to dance?”

Henry shifted his weight to his feet before he realized she was talking to Bob.

“Sorry, miss.” He lifted the stubby shoulder to accentuate his empty sleeve. “Not much of a dancer.”

“Well, how are your feet?”

A faint smile came to his lips. “They’re good.”

“Then come on!” Cora reached down and took his hand, hauling him behind her.

At first his self-conscious eyes skated around the room. But it was hard for a man to ignore Cora, and she soon absorbed his full attention. About halfway through their second dance, that man changed; Henry saw the man he’d been before the war. It was startling to see the two sides of that divide right next to each other. Was Gil’s old self just a dance away? Or had it slipped so far into the distant past that there was no retrieving it?

When the band took a break, Cora spent some time mesmerizing a group of twelve-year-old boys loitering near the obviously spiked punch bowl. Then she moved on to a little knot of lady wallflowers and received a less enthusiastic welcome and a more suspicious eye. She left them with a smile and a wave (and got several glowers in response) and went toward a group of couples just outside the door smoking cigarettes.

Henry followed her like a ghost, now lingering just inside the building’s open double doors. Not doing his part in promotion for sure, but it seemed wiser to draw minimal attention to himself in a place where people could ask him questions that might venture beyond the Daredevils’ exhibition. Besides, where Cora went, he suspected trouble usually followed.

And it did. Before long a flask-toting dandy slid an arm around her and slipped his hand inside the low back of her dress.

A flash of tingly hot possessiveness shot through Henry.

He wasn’t even one furious stride toward them when Cora’s elbow flew up and caught the man in the Adam’s apple. She did it without even turning, not the slightest movement except that snake strike of an elbow. The man stumbled backward, hand to his throat, a long, thin squeak coming from his gaping mouth. His friends, so engrossed in passing the flask they didn’t notice what had happened, turned his way.

Henry had to satisfy himself with beating the man on the back instead of delivering the punch to the face he wanted to. “You all right there, old man?” Each blow of Henry’s hand was so hard it was more likely to knock the breath out of the man than to help him regain it.

The man gave a bug-eyed wheeze.

Henry took him roughly by the arm and moved him toward his companions. “Maybe he needs some water.” Then Henry turned to Cora. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

She leaned close and whispered, “I can take care of myself.”

“I wouldn’t get too cocky about it.” She didn’t seem to know the world held much more dangerous things than a single sloppy drunk at a crowded dance. Henry didn’t waste his breath bringing it to her attention.

The music started again and he pulled her to the center of the dance floor—just in case the guy got his wind back and came looking for retribution. For rich-looking dandies, retribution always seemed necessary to mend their egos.

Henry had never liked dancing. It drew too much attention; and attention always led to trouble. But as he and Cora danced to “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” as her energy filled him and her eyes held his, he forgot anyone else was in the room, in this town, on the planet. He’d never before met a city woman, but he doubted many of them were like her. How could they be? The world would be in chaos. Men would stop working, factories would stall, banks would fold, as men succumbed to a web of desire and carnality.

The dance ended and another began. Henry didn’t consider leaving the floor—for her protection, and to head off any scene with the dandy that might draw the police.

Thoughts of the police made him wonder about Cora’s mother. The woman didn’t seem like someone who would accept the defeat of her plans without a fight. But Cora was right, a woman of age couldn’t be made to return to her family against her will, those days were gone. Money, security, and guilt over neglected duty were the only weapons that could be brought to bear. And Cora had said none of those things would alter her course.

But it was still early, she had yet to go hungry or sleep out in the rain.

The last song had played and Cora had made one last pass around the room to remind people of the Daredevils’ performance tomorrow before they stepped out into the humid night hand in hand, red-faced and still breathless. He felt as if he’d fallen into another person’s life. He supposed he had. Maybe Henry Jefferson would always be the man who danced with Cora, maintained flying machines, and rescued stray mutts.

For now he allowed himself the indulgence of belief.

As they got farther from the lights, he took a careful look around, just to make sure Mr. Fast Hands and his friends weren’t lurking in the shadows; fellas like that tended to prefer the advantage of a sneak attack—and they rarely came alone.

The flow of people thinned as couples and families drifted different ways, the voices that had surrounded them for hours becoming more blurred and distant. Henry listened for the sound of steps behind them until he was satisfied no one was dogging them.

Cora sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. “That was more fun than I’ve had since . . . I don’t know when!”

“You must know every dance ever created.” The dampness prevented Henry from cooling down much. Heat seemed to radiate from where his palm pressed against Cora’s and the place on his shoulder touched by her temple.

“Oh”—she looked up at him, little dots of perspiration lingering on her brow—“I didn’t know any of those. It just took a few minutes to figure out the calls; after that, the guy told us every step.”

Henry had heard the calls, but he’d been so wrapped up in following Cora that he’d never made sense of them. Truth was, it had been impossible to concentrate on much of anything other than Cora moving with the music in that dress.

“I can’t wait to teach you some modern dances, the fox-trot, the Baltimore Buzz. Oh, you’ll love ragtime music, Henry. It has so much
life
!”

Henry wasn’t sure how much more “life” he could withstand holding Cora in his arms without grabbing her off that dance floor and hauling her off like a caveman.

As they walked back to the hotel, she kept his hand in hers. “We really did great tonight. Gil won’t be able to deny it either.”

A clammy chill ran over Henry’s skin. “Don’t be so sure.” They’d pushed him. Too far? From here on out, Henry had to keep his own goals in mind and not get railroaded by Cora’s. If there was a here on out.

They reached the hotel. Cora kept his hand in hers until they entered the elevator. The elevator operator’s eyes stayed on Cora until Henry said, “Third floor, please.”

“Oh, um, yes, sir.” The man’s eyes snapped to the front of the elevator car, his cheeks redder than Cora’s after dancing for an hour.

“I’ll take Mercury out before I go up to my room,” Henry said.

“No need. I had one of the hotel employees take care of him.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Good night, Kid.”

Kid
. He rode to the fourth floor as deflated as a blown tire.

Once in his room, he looked at that nice dry bed and fluffy feather pillow, then he turned around and went back out the door.

6

H
enry walked with his head down, his hands fisted in his pockets holding on to the sensation of Cora’s palm against his. The sky had cleared, leaving the night still and moonless. The weight of the darkness draped Henry’s shoulders and settled heavily against his chest. The air was full of sounds from unseen creatures, leaving him feeling like the last human on earth. An owl hooted and another answered. The grit of the wet road grated beneath his feet. Something about the sound of his lone footfalls in the night comforted him, a testament to the course of his life. Alone. Separate. Not his choice, but his fate. He had to be content as an outsider, watching others live lives with families and love and belonging. The irony that he now shared his path with a woman who’d fled the very things he longed for did not escape him.

He wondered if Gil was like him, once part of a loving family that life had stripped from him; or like Cora, fleeing the constraints of family bonds. Or maybe Gil had always been an outsider, even in his own family. The more Henry thought on it, the more he felt the man Gil was now was not the man he’d grown into from childhood. Although Henry could see the same brokenness he’d seen in his pa, something else was in Gil’s eyes, too, a foundation of warmth Henry doubted Pa had ever had. All of the softness in Gil lay deeply buried under harder emotions that Henry couldn’t quite pinpoint. Anger? Loss? Because of the war? It had certainly changed Peter—a fact Henry only knew because of the letter his pa had hidden from him.

Pa’s pride in Peter’s service had made him stand a little taller, even in the accusing glare of the most suspicious of anti-German souls. Pa and Henry read and reread every letter from Peter until they were wrinkled and grayed from handling. Those letters had been filled with the conviction he was fighting the good fight, proudly serving his country. His fellow soldiers didn’t question his loyalty. To them he was a Hoosier, not a German. For that alone, he’d written, joining up was worth it. But as summer faded to fall, and fall turned to winter, so did Peter’s letters, losing all color and life. Until the last one, written just two days before he died:

Dear Pa,

Please don’t show this letter to Henry. He’s too young. I’m already on the verge of madness, and if I don’t tell someone, I fear I will lose my mind completely.

You’ve never seen a place so stripped of life. Truly hell on earth. There isn’t so much as a living blade of grass standing between us and the Germans. Mud. Mud. Mud. Our daily battle isn’t against the enemy, but against the rats for the driest places to sleep, for a stale ration of food. Sickness downs more soldiers than weapons, while the incessant shelling shakes the ground and rattles nerves to the point of insanity. Our line has not moved from this trench in weeks. I know I will die here.

Make sure Henry never goes to war. It won’t make any difference.

Peter

Not
Your loving son, Peter
, as all other letters. Just
Peter
. Pa
had
hidden it. Henry found it when he’d been getting Pa’s funeral clothes from the drawer; the paper and envelope were as worn and muddy as Peter must have been.

I will die here.
Had Peter really known? He’d been surrounded by death for months. Even before he’d shipped overseas, the training camps had been overrun with killing influenza. But Peter had never once expressed a fear of death, let alone the conviction of it. Had he
sensed death’s presence at his own door, just as Henry had known it stood outside the threshold for Pa six months later? Henry had wondered, what guise had death been wearing when Peter had opened that door? That question had been a cancerous partner in Henry’s grief.

When the telegram informing them that Peter had been killed at Belleau Wood had arrived, Pa crumpled it in his work-worn hand and held it to his heart so tightly his whole body shook. “We sacrificed him for nothing. Nothing,” he sobbed, his German accent even thicker in grief. After that day, he was a silent kaleidoscope of guilt and pain. Even though his body continued to move and breathe for months, Henry knew his pa had died on that bloody battlefield with Peter. Pa had stayed locked in his silent repentance, fading a little more every day, until the memory of his voice became just a distant whisper in Henry’s head.

What if Peter had survived? For years, Henry had held on to the shiny images of Peter’s life, imagining a joyful reunion that could have been, pretending he’d never laid eyes on the naked, broken spirit of that last letter. But he’d been a foolish child. What new form of his brother would have come home? Who had Gil been before war plucked him from his ordinary life and cast him into a sky that was now his only refuge? If Henry could understand Gil, maybe he would better understand the change that had come over Peter.

Soon Henry passed the hulking, black shadow of a brick farmhouse. He felt it as much as he saw it, heard the change in the reverberation of the sound of his steps. The Jenny was tied down in the next pasture, which was still hidden in the blanket of darkness that swallowed everything more than five feet in front of his face.

He found the gate more by touch than sight. After he let himself through, he walked toward the far side of the field, stumbling and twisting an ankle more than once on rough ground that he could easily have navigated in the daylight.

Gil had mentioned on occasion he’d had folks help themselves to bits and pieces of his unattended plane—which accounted for his tying down far as he could get from the road, in the shadow of a cluster
of trees. He’d said he didn’t know if people wanted souvenirs or what, but he
did know
it made his life a damn sight more difficult to return to discover a missing magneto switch, altimeter, or control stick. Once he’d come back to find the propeller gone. Times like that, he lost days waiting for a part to come by train.

Henry finally saw the black outline of the wings against the grass—close. Startlingly close. The grass was wet, the ground boggy under his feet. He wondered if it would be too soft for Gil to take off in the morning. Wouldn’t Cora be disappointed—

He hit the ground face-first, teeth clacking, breath leaving in one huff. A weight landed on his back and a hand pressed against the back of his head, driving his face, nose to chin, deeper into the soft ground.

He opened his mouth and it filled with mud.

He couldn’t breathe.

Fighting the urge to flail, he braced his hands by his chest and drew his knees as far beneath him as he could. He heaved his belly off the ground and threw himself to one side. Not far, but enough to topple whoever was on his back. As the man beside him scrambled to right himself, Henry threw himself on top of him, determined not to let him get away with one of Jenny’s vital parts.

The man thrashed. His hands found Henry’s face. Thumbs pressed against his eyelids, pushing his eyeballs deep into their sockets. The pressure sharp, building.

Henry grabbed at the hands, pulled the wrists. No use. He balled his fist and took a wild swing, landing a solid punch on the side of the man’s head.

“Fuck!” A confusion-laced groan rode out on a ragged, booze-soaked breath.

Well, Christ. “Gil! It’s me, Henry.” Henry slid off and they sat thigh to thigh. He swiped the mud from his mouth with his shirtsleeve. When he put his teeth together, grit ground between them. He spat a couple of times but it was still there.

Gil sat up slowly. “You’re supposed to be at the damned hotel.”

“So are you.”

For several minutes they sat. Gil’s breathing evened out. Henry’s limbs eventually stopped trembling.

“I’d think a shout would be enough to scare off someone trying to steal a control stick,” Henry said. “Suffocating the poor bastard in the mud seems a might extreme.” He’d meant the words as a joke, but the truth of Gil’s intent sank in. A chill ran over Henry’s skin.

Sounding uncharacteristically rattled, Gil said, “It’s not . . . I . . . I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .”

“Here,” Henry finished for him. “You weren’t here. Like in the hall at Cora’s house.”

After a few minutes of silence, Gil got to his feet and reached out a hand to help Henry up. “Sorry.”

Gil went and sat near the tail of the Jenny.

Henry followed and sat next to him. “The war?” When he blinked, he saw Peter’s scratchy writing on that tattered, muddy letter;
Truly
hell on earth.
“That’s where you were, wasn’t it?”

The weight of Gil’s sigh told Henry it was.

Tonight had gotten him to thinking. People generally fell into two categories: ones you wanted to be near, and ones you wanted to give a wide berth. Gil’s behavior should place him in the second category. He was gruff and distant. He didn’t seem to particularly care if anyone liked him. Yet Henry was compelled to stick with him—and not just because he offered a place to hide. It was because of Peter. Gil was nothing like Henry’s charismatic brother. Yet when he looked at Gil, he saw war. Peter’s war.

“What was it like over there?” Gil was Henry’s chance to fill the blank space in his brother’s life. Peter had been his parent, his teacher, his best friend—and the keeper of their mother’s memory. Ma had died when Henry was just six; too young for many recollections to survive. But Peter had kept her alive, sharing stories of her life, telling him just what Ma would think of this or that if she were still here. He and Peter had been more than brothers. And they did not have secrets. Ever. That’s probably why Henry had eagerly accepted the wartime fantasy Peter had spun. If not for the discovery of that final letter, Henry might
have lived forever believing Peter’s war life had been lived almost completely away from the fighting, filled with nothing but camaraderie and dedication up until a quick, unquestioning patriotic end.

Gil shook his head. “It’s over and done.”

Henry was half-surprised that Gil didn’t get up and stalk off. That he didn’t wasn’t quite an invitation to cross the threshold, but at least it was an unlatched door. “Is it? Over?”

“More over than I deserve it to be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I shouldn’t have made it home. I made some bad decisions. And others paid for them.”

“I’m pretty sure war comes from bad decisions—and others
always
pay for them.”

Gil sat silent.

After a moment, Henry said, “I lost my brother in France. At Belleau Wood.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if he could scrub away the false images Peter had planted; the adventure of seeing a new country, life with a family of soldier-brothers positioned far away from the danger, idle hours filled with jokes and high jinks.

“He was a marine, then?”

“Yes.” Henry gave a scoff. “Oh, I know he lied to us—to me. I just want a better picture of what war is really like. I’ve read some military accounts, seen photos in the newspaper. But what he
lived
 . . . I have no idea. And don’t just say ‘hell.’ Everybody says that.”

“Why in God’s name do you need to know? Your brother didn’t want you to.”

“Because I was just a kid then! If I’d been older, he would have been honest with me—that’s the way it was between us. I owe him the respect of acknowledging what he went through.” Henry paused, his throat constricting. “Without him—” His voice broke and he sounded like the scared little kid he didn’t want to be anymore. What would his life have been like without Peter; with Ma gone and Pa so . . . so closed off? Henry found himself on the verge of tears. He hadn’t cried over Peter for years.

Gil sat quietly for a long while. Henry imagined that door Gil had left ajar was inching closer to latching. And then, his brooding voice slipped softly into the silence. “Belleau Wood. The marines took a hell of a beating those first days. I can’t even imagine. . . .” He stopped and swallowed hard. “It was a waste, you know. All of it. The blood. The destruction . . . And for what?” His voice rose. “Promises were
not
kept. Nothing changed.”

“My brother said something like that in his last letter—the one he had Pa hide from me. That it didn’t make any difference.”

“Your brother had it right.”

“Maybe. But there’s this whole part of his life that I don’t know anything about. It makes it worse . . . not knowing.”

Silent seconds stretched into a minute, maybe two, before Gil finally said, “I was just a green kid who wanted to fly—had ever since I saw Lincoln Beachey race a Curtiss Pusher plane against a car at a racetrack in Columbus when I was fifteen.” Henry heard the awe of the boy Gil must have been in his voice. He fell silent for a bit. As much as Henry wanted to press for more about the war, he didn’t interrupt Gil’s memory that seemed to hold wonder instead of wounds. Henry got the impression there wasn’t much of Gil’s past that was like that.

Finally he went on, “I went over there before we were in the war, joined the French
armée de l’air
.” He rubbed his hands together just beneath his chin; Henry heard the sandpaper roughness. “I didn’t go for any noble cause. I did it to run away.” An edge of self-loathing was in his voice. “And I just wanted to be around planes.”

Running from what?
Those dangerous words were on Henry’s tongue, but he managed to stop them before they left his lips and got turned right back at him.

Gil drew in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “Air service was different than ground soldiering. I didn’t live in the trenches. I wasn’t shelled incessantly. I didn’t slog a hundred miles in the rain on muddy roads. We fliers didn’t even leave our billets when the weather didn’t cooperate. I flew my patrols and returned to the airfield, got fairly
steady meals, and slept in a mostly dry cot.” He shook his head. “I can’t help you. It wasn’t the same.”

Henry knew things had happened to Gil, things that made him tense and vigilant even in his sleep. “But you saw.”

Gil closed his eyes. “Oh, yes. I saw.” His eyes opened again. “You don’t want to hear any of it. Your brother was right about that, too.”

“I do. I want to know what his days and nights were like. Nobody who wasn’t there can help me. I . . . I know it was bad.”