The Flying Circus (12 page)

“Bad?” A bitter, breathy laugh reached across the darkness and slapped Henry’s face. “Just don’t blame me for your nightmares.” Gil sounded as if he were getting ready to teach a child a spiteful lesson, one to prove curiosity comes to no good. “I wasn’t a fighter pilot—just so you know. I flew reconnaissance patrols—just a taxi for a photographer most of the time. Sometimes I few artillery observation.” He turned to face Henry, the whites of his eyes showing an eerie blue-gray in the darkness. “So stop goddamn glorifying me when you’re hawking rides.”

Henry knew Gil wanted him to argue, wanted to divert the conversation. But Henry was too close to filling in the gap in Peter’s life to fall for distractions. For years Henry had spent sleepless nights imagining Peter playing cards on the ship to France; Peter climbing a bell tower of an ancient church to serve as lookout for an enemy miles and miles away; Peter walking a foreign landscape in step with his soldier-brothers; Peter dying in a place called Belleau Wood—a name so beautiful it conjured images of his brother lying down on the soft forest floor, folding his hands over his chest, and falling peacefully into an everlasting sleep. Henry wanted . . . no, he
needed
to replace these foolish, childish memories with the reality of Peter’s last months. So he waited.

Finally he prompted, “My nightmares are waiting to be fed.”

“I was probably never in the same place as your brother.”

“Tell me what
you
saw.” Even if it didn’t give Henry any true insight into Peter’s last days, it would at least offer a more realistic picture than what Peter had painted . . . and it might help Henry figure out what made Gil so taciturn one minute and so dangerously jumpy the next.

Gil scrubbed his hands over his face, beard stubble rasping as a background to the crickets and tree frogs. He shifted the way he sat, drawing his knees up and linking his arms around them. “I heard one guy describe the artillery noise not as a sound—because after hours and hours without a break your hearing went—but as a pulverizing beating of your chest, it compressed your lungs and changed the rhythm of your heart. I can believe it. When artillery guns fired at our planes, an explosion within twenty yards nearly shook me out of the cockpit. The first time it happened, I thought the wings would blow off.” Gil said the last words with a dismissive laugh, but with an undercurrent of strain that made Henry glad it was too dark to see the finer details of the look on Gil’s face.

It seemed that if artillery was firing at his airplane, his patrols weren’t exactly the safe air-taxi rides he wanted Henry to believe. Maybe downplaying the danger was a habit of everyone who lived through war. Maybe it was the only way they maintained a shred of sanity.

“I suppose,” Gil said quietly, “the worst thing on the ground was gas.”

Henry wondered if talking about it would release Gil from some of his secret torment. Sometimes the things you kept bottled inside festered; the only cure was to let them out into the air.

“From my nice, safe altitude,” he went on, as if he were talking only to himself, “I could see the spots where the canisters landed—the plumes moving with the air currents, widening as they spread across the battlefield. They looked like thick smoke from a dozen brushfires.” He stopped.

Henry waited.

“The first time I saw it, I circled until the gas dissipated, then made a low pass so the photographer could take some shots. God knows why we thought our air-to-ground shots could tell command anything that those poor bastards on the ground couldn’t.” The sound of Gil’s swallow was dry and constricted. “I couldn’t hear the screams over the noise of the engine, but I didn’t need to. There was nothing down there but writhing pain and chaotic movement.”

After the war, Henry had seen a picture of a line of survivors of a gas attack, shuffling along, following one another hand to shoulder, their eyes bandaged and their skin blistered. Although each man’s face was half-covered by white gauze, Henry had seen Peter behind each and every bandage.

“We were ready to pull up when I saw a man crawling through the mud right toward the German line. He had to have been blinded. I buzzed low—maybe fifty feet—and yelled down, telling him to turn around. My photographer shouted in French. I don’t know if the man didn’t hear . . . couldn’t hear . . . was out of his mind with pain . . . The Germans started taking shots at us. Then at him—I don’t think they would have seen him if I hadn’t drawn attention. The soldier kept crawling, crawling, like he was headed to salvation . . . maybe he was. A bullet finally caught him in the head.” The last words had a take-that tone, as if Henry should be so repulsed he would never ask anything about the war again. “
That’s
what your brother went through. Cold and mud and fear and pain with a bullet at the end of it.”

Horrified? Who wouldn’t be? But Henry had been prepared for the horror.
He hadn’t been prepared for the rush of shame he felt for pushing Gil into painful memories; shame and sympathy. Would he want anyone to do that to Peter if he’d survived and put it behind him?

“You had to try,” Henry said. “Even if it did make the enemy”—he couldn’t bring himself to say
Germans
—“notice him.”

After a moment Gil said, “It was a man’s life. My intentions don’t mean shit.”

Henry didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet.

“Glory went to the flying aces—Rickenbacker, Gillet, Lufbery. And they deserved it; I’m not saying they didn’t. But the soldiers living like sewer rats in trenches filled with water, having their skin and eyes seared with gas,
they
were heroes. Your brother was a hero.” Gil turned to face Henry. “I was just a fucking flier.”

Suddenly Gil stood up, but did not stalk off. Instead he peered in the direction of the road. “Who’s there?”

A dog barked. Mercury shot out of the dark and jumped into Henry’s lap. He smelled like soap. His fur felt smooth, mat-free.

“Well, well. You fellas having a party and didn’t invite me?” When Cora got close enough, Henry saw she was wearing her pants and knee boots again. “Or maybe we’re
all
afraid the plane will take off and leave without us in the morning.”

Henry cringed. That had been exactly why he’d left that warm, dry hotel room. But the truth was, their presence did nothing to ensure Gil’s cooperation. He could jump in that plane and disappear anytime he felt like it. Mercury’s Daredevils! Henry should have shut that idea down the minute it came out of Cora’s mouth. In reaching too far to cover his own tracks, had he ruined his chances to keep traveling with Gil? And he’d topped it off by dragging the man through the hell of his worst memories.

“I didn’t hear the motorcycle,” Henry said.

“That’s because Gil rode it out here . . . at least it’d better be with Gil.”

For a long moment, Gil stayed silent. Henry could hear his own blood throbbing through his ears as his gaze shifted between the two shadowy figures, surprised by the cold dread that gripped his heart when he thought this might be the end. Chicago was less and less appealing. No matter how much he liked the Cubs.

Gil’s rough breathing gradually smoothed out. “It’s here. Best get some sleep, Henry. Cora’s got a crowd coming in the morning.” It was said with minimal condescension, and Henry’s muscles stopped quivering.

From that moment on, Henry didn’t even miss that nice, soft hotel bed.

With Mercury curled at his side, the nightmare images Gil had painted stayed away. A new and unexpected warmth came over Henry as he lay on that boggy ground, listening to Gil’s liquor-induced snores and Cora’s soft sleep sighs. For the first time in years, he looked forward to tomorrow.

7

T
he grass lost the emerald green of spring and the corn grew tall. By Independence Day, Henry’s fear of the past’s walking up and tapping him on the shoulder had quieted to an ever-present, but distant, hum. Getting out of Indiana had probably helped. He’d stopped learning the names of the towns they passed through; they were here and gone so quickly they’d all begun to run together.

Gil had relaxed his rule about nobody’s touching the Jenny but him. Now nobody touched the Jenny but him
or Henry
. He’d even gone so far as to teach Henry how to pilot the plane—with the threat of a long and painful death if Cora found out. Although Gil acknowledged Henry’s gift with machinery, he always did his own walk-around before each flight session—oiled the rocker arms, checked the oil sump, and primed the carburetor.
You don’t hand someone else a half-loaded revolver and have them take a shot at you. And you don’t let another man preflight your plane.
Henry took no offense.

Cora had stopped sleeping with the hammer hidden beside her—even after Henry had given her fair warning not to startle Gil out of a sleep—which just showed how naive she truly was. Even though the three of them spent day and night together, she didn’t know any more about either his or Gil’s past than she had that first night. It surprised him that she hadn’t tried to find out; most girls were full of questions. It also made him suspicious. He knew why
he
didn’t pry into people’s pasts. The crowds generally came, tromping down the purple clover and yellow wood sorrel in field after field. Some days people shoved money into
his hand in a near-desperate way, as if they were in danger of being left on the sidelines of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He supposed for most of these folks that’s exactly what this was, once in a lifetime. And so the three of them were making enough money to keep the machines running and to feed themselves. Henry considered it acceptable. Gil thought it a cornucopia. Cora insisted they were missing opportunities.

Early on, Gil had told Henry and Cora that as long as they were all working together, they would both get a 30 percent share of the take after expenses were met, including maintaining the machines and their meals. Henry thought it more than fair, especially since he was only contributing his mechanical skills and not a machine.

As the weeks passed, things were changing step by step. Mercury’s Daredevils (despite Gil’s refusal to say the words, the name had stuck) was in flaming yellow and red on the sides of the airplane and on the handbills Cora had sweet-talked out of a young printer in Rockville. (The paint on the plane came about less from sweet talk and more from a water-on-stone wearing down of Gil’s resistance.) They now had a routine, a schedule of events for their shows.

Henry had modified a pair of goggles for Mercury (Cora had dubbed them doggles). If she put on her leather jacket and his goggles weren’t on yet, he ran and got them and commenced a jumping, whining fit until they were on his head. She’d been teaching him some good tricks both on and off the motorcycle. He could now ride on the little seat over the gas tank that Henry had crafted for him. The dog still preferred riding inside Cora’s jacket. Henry couldn’t blame him—for multiple reasons.

That they were charging
only
for plane rides had been a sticking point with Cora. At their last stop she’d set out a can with a sign asking for what she called “tips.” She’d said—with a whole lot of wanna-make-something-out-of-it
in her voice—that it was the only way people could show their appreciation for her daredevil act. Amazingly, Gil hadn’t risen to the bait. It had been the first glimmer of hope (false as it turned out) that things would settle down between the two of them.

They were somewhere in central Illinois getting ready to perform
at an oval, dirt racetrack used for sulkies and motorcycles. The main attraction, other than the selling of rides, was a heavily publicized race between man and woman, airship and motorcycle. A true competition between the sexes. It had been Cora’s idea—a reenactment of their first meeting. The stakes, also devised by Cora, would not only establish the equality of the sexes, but the loser would be forced to “challenge the Grim Reaper” by submitting to dangers at the hands of the winner. If Gil lost, he would “ride the bucking and swerving mechanical bull” (the handlebars of Cora’s motorcycle) as she cut didoes and thrilled the spectators with “terrifying speed.” If Cora lost, she would put her “delicate feminine physique in mortal peril” as she sat on the wing while Gil performed “death-defying feats in the air.” Cora had a way with the ballyhoo.

Gil hadn’t been at all happy when he’d discovered the stakes she’d advertised. Henry was pretty sure it wasn’t because he was afraid to ride on the handlebars of Cora’s motorcycle.
Gil’s acknowledgment that she was every bit as much a daredevil as he was coming hard and slow. Henry thought perhaps it was compounded because their motivations for taking life in hand were so different.

Henry sat across the fire from Cora, a position he repeatedly chose. He could look at her without drawing attention to the sad fact that he couldn’t keep his eyes off her—it was getting worse by the day. Luckily Gil hadn’t noticed. And Cora, well, she was all-business, focused solely on building this show into something more than a second-class act held together by spit and determination.

She got to her feet. Gil’s eyes came open.

She leaned over him and poked him in the center of his forehead. “If you let me win tomorrow, I swear I will skin you alive. Be a man and accept this challenge with integrity.”

“Oh, I have no integrity.” Gil stood and looked down at her. “But you won’t win. You’re just a girl.” As he turned and walked away, he threw Henry a rare smile.

Cora’s fists settled on her hips. “Keep thinking that, buddy! Right up until your fine dinner of crow,” she hurled at his back.

She sat back down right next to Henry.

He thought of his first sight of her, tearing across that field, determined to win that race come hell or high water. “Is this need to win something Gil brings out in you, or were you born this way?”

She grinned. “Oh, I was definitely born this way.”

His stomach knotted. “Don’t let your pride get you killed.”

“Pride? Seriously, Kid, pride’s got nothing to do with it.”

“What is it then?”

She sat staring into the low-flickering flames for a bit. “I don’t know what to call it. It’s basic, primal; like hunger or reacting to pain. I think it all started with Jonathan. He loved to show off by doing things I was too little to do. That’s why I started doing handstands on the rafters in the stables, because Jonathan could run across them faster, but he was too scared to try a handstand.” She smiled. “It was always so tedious when girls visited the Hudson Valley house; it was all about pushing dolls in prams and having boring tea parties. But when they were boys! Of course, they always assumed they could beat me at everything.

“We had a pair of giant Norway spruce trees that were great for climbing competitions. I always got higher. Then I’d set the top of the tree to swaying. I was the pirate queen in the crow’s nest, and those boys would have to do whatever I told them to. It was great.” She sighed. “Maybe I’m really a boy inside.”

Henry looked over at her. “Oh, I seriously doubt there’s anything boyish anywhere in you.”

She cast him a sideways look. “Well now. I suppose I’ll take that as a compliment.” She waved toward her pants and boots. “Considering how I dress.”

Henry decided to leave it right there. He stood. “You’d better get some sleep.”

She reached out for him to give her a hand up. He pulled her to standing, then spent the next few heartbeats staring into her eyes. “Good night, Cora.” His mouth was unnaturally dry.

“Night, Kid.” She slapped his shoulder.

He slunk to his blanket like a kicked puppy.

H
enry set up the race finish line with a rope decorated with checkered flags rigged with a thin thread to break away when tugged, suspended between the top of the grandstand and a tall pole near the inside of the oval. It was just high enough that Gil could nab it with his wheels as he raced above Cora’s head. Another finish-line rope was at motorcycle height.

Gil stood with his hands on his hips, looking up into the overflowing grandstand. “By God, you do seem to know how to get a crowd, I’ll give you that.”

Cora looked up at him with a smile. “Lookey there. And you didn’t even have to spit those words out from between clenched teeth.”

“I’m starting to think we might be able to do pretty well in a city,” Henry offered. “Maybe Chicago.”

A glimmer of panic in Cora’s eyes was quickly overcome by a bold smile. “Let’s not push it, Kid. Remember, Gil made it plain, he’s a barnstormer—and he owns the Jenny.”

Then she spun on her heel and walked away.

Henry recognized the anxiety in her eyes. Fear of discovery, of exposure. Logic said Cora should be jumping at the chance to hit a city like Chicago. It was a curious reaction, for sure. Of course, he was in no position to ask questions, lest he be asked some himself.

The airship/motorcycle race would be the grand finale of the show. Prior to that, it was business as usual. The motorcycle revved up and Cora signaled Henry to pick up the megaphone and announce her first stunt.

She did some tricks with Mercury on the motorcycle, saving his on-the-ground doggie antics for entertaining folks waiting while Gil was giving rides.

When she took a break, she came straight to Henry. “You know, I’ve been thinking. You’re so good with modifications, I want you to work on a way to lock the throttle on the motorcycle.”

“Lock it? To keep it off?”

She looked at him as if he were stupid. “Not off! What good would that do? On. So I can let go of the handlebars. And I’ll need something I can engage to help stabilize the front wheel—you know, make it harder for it to turn.”

He knew where this was going. “No. Impossible.”

“Kid, you’re a horrible liar and a great inventor. You can do it.”

“You have no business riding a motorcycle standing up on the seat. That’s what you’re aiming at, right?”

“Only when we’ve got a smooth enough surface. I’ve already been practicing doing a handstand on the handlebars, but it’s really tough to keep the throttle just right.”

She was crazy. “Too impractical. Every surface will need a different speed, and probably a different gear, to keep you upright and not have the motorbike run away.”

“Did you just say
impractical
? Good golly, Kid, everything we do is impractical.” She started back to the motorcycle. “Time to light it up.”

Gil had landed and was fueling up. It was Cora’s turn again.

As Henry prepared the Flaming Arch of Death,
he was already figuring in his head how to give Cora what she wanted.

After a fast lap around the track, she stopped in front of the grandstand and unzipped Mercury from her jacket. She sat him on a little platform on the ground that was just above seat height of the cycle.

Henry picked up the megaphone and played it up to the audience. “The next stunt is so dangerous, Cora Rose, woman daredevil, will not risk the life of her faithful companion, Mercury.”

Mercury spun around in place on the platform, stopping every third revolution to paw at Cora, trying to get her to pick him up. She made a show of soothing him and kissing him good-bye. Then she took off with a spray of dirt and went to the fourth turn of the track.

“Easy, boy,” Henry said through the megaphone as he walked past Mercury. “If she makes it through, she’ll come back and get you.” He walked back to the arch
.
He’d crafted it out of a lightweight, collapsible metal frame (for transport), to which he attached tightly wound
kerosene-soaked rags. When it was first finished, he’d wanted to do the first test run. But Cora had argued there was no difference between the combustibility of men and the combustibility of women; and she was the one who had to be able to do it in a show. Of course, she’d won.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll keep your eyes on the young lady on the motorcycle as she attempts to speed through the Flaming Arch of Death.” Henry lit the narrow arch. Flames licked high. “As you can see, there is only a narrow opening, which is completely filled with flames, above, below, and on both sides. Now, let us pause and offer a quick prayer for Cora Rose’s safety.” Henry bowed his head. Mercury buried his nose in his paws with his tail still in the air. Men’s hats came off and the rumble of the crowd silenced.

Henry raised his hand over his head. Cora revved the engine. The kid Henry was paying fifty cents started a dramatic roll on his drum.

Henry dropped his arm.

The motorcycle roared down the straightaway.

“Oh, no!” Henry shouted through the megaphone. “No! Mercury, stay!”

Mercury was pawing at the air, standing on the very edge of the platform.

As Cora flew by, the dog leaped.

The crowd gasped.

“It’s too late!” Henry shouted.

Cora caught Mercury, doubled over him, and barreled right through the arch.

Every straw boater, fedora, and flowered hat in the grandstands turned toward where Cora stopped and put her feet on the ground. She held Mercury in front of her face for a moment as if lecturing him, then lifted him up over her head.

Mercury yipped and waved the way she’d taught him.

The applause was so loud, Henry could feel it in his chest. “Ladies and gentlemen! A true death-defying miracle! Cora Rose and her faithful dog, Mercury! Next time we’ll have to tie that little feller up!”

Henry announced the race. Gil took off in the Jenny and did a loop and a spiral before he disappeared into the west.

Cora did a lap on the track. Henry’s narration kept the drama high as he explained she was getting warmed up. “We’ve come into a modern age, for sure. Women have the vote. Now we have to ask, what’s next? A woman president?” Men booed. “Ah, now, gentlemen, it’s time to put something else to the test. Can a mere woman master a machine well enough to beat a man in an aeroplane? Impossible? Well, ladies and gents, keep your eyes on the sky in the west. History is in the making!” Henry explained the race would be run down the front straightaway, a competition with no turns, just as their initial meeting had been. Although, Henry said, Cora had been at a keen disadvantage then, racing over an uneven pasture.