The Night Flyers

by Elizabeth McDavid Jones

  A soft groo-groo greeted Pam inside. A few birds whirred from their perches to the floor, anticipating dinner. The sounds of her pigeons were gentle and soothing. She felt the tension slowly drain from her muscles.

  Then Henry burst through the door, and the pigeons set up a frenzied din. “It smells in here,” he announced loudly.

  But his comment didn’t register with Pam. She was too intent on frantically searching every nest box in the loft.

  Another pigeon was missing. And this time it was Caspian.

  CHAPTER 8

  PAM’S PLAN

  Anguish ripped through Pam. Caspian gone! Arminger had stolen the one bird that he knew was most special to her.

  Inhuman, said a voice inside her head, echoing Mr. Bagley’s pronouncement about the Germans in Belgium. This proved Arminger was German, if anything did. The word formed itself on her lips and escaped as a rasping whisper. “Inhuman.”

  “Huh?” said Henry. “What do you mean, ‘inhuman’?” His eyes held a spark of interest.

  Numbness was closing in on Pam. She shook her head. She tried to push her voice from her throat. It came out husky. “A pigeon’s missing. My best one.”

  “Is that all?” The spark in his eyes died. “It’s one stupid bird. You’ve got a whole shed full. What are you worried about?”

  Pam’s anger came alive. “Caspian ain’t just any pigeon,” she snapped. “Breeding and training first-rate homers takes years.” A fire had ignited inside her, and she couldn’t stop herself from going on. “That bird”—she mocked Henry’s tone—“is worth a hundred dollars. That’s what the German was going to give me for him.” She couldn’t bring herself to say Arminger’s name.

  Henry stared at Pam with disbelief. “You’re lying,” he said. “If the spy offered you that much money, as poor as your family is, you’d have took it. Your ma would’ve made you.”

  The fire in Pam’s belly blazed higher. “These birds are mine, Henry Bagley, and I do with ’em whatever I want.” Pam held her voice low to avoid scaring the birds, but she let her eyes spit out the fury she felt. She wanted Henry out of her sight before she lost control. She planted her hands on her hips and spoke, emphasizing each word. “Get out of my loft and off our land. Before I sic my dog on you.” Her expression dared Henry to do anything else.

  For endless seconds Henry stood his ground, glaring at her. The pigeons felt the tension and set up a fretful chatter. Outwardly Pam didn’t move; inwardly her mind raced. What would she do if Henry called her bluff? Bos would answer her call in a flash, but if she sicced him on Henry, Mama would be fit to be tied. No telling what fate would then be ordered for her dog. Pam berated herself for tacking the threat onto her demand. She glared back at Henry, furious that he had backed her into this corner.

  Finally Henry spoke. “Like I said, this place smells. But it’s not the birds.” He turned and stomped out of the loft.

  Pam held her breath until the sound of his footsteps died. Then she slowly released the air from her lungs. With it, every ounce of strength seemed to drain from her body. She slumped to the floor and let the birds hop into her lap and perch on her head. Their cooing was rich and throaty, a pigeon melody. It reminded Pam of the spirituals Mama used to sing to put her to sleep: “Way Down upon the Swanee River” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A deep sadness yawned inside her. If only she could stay here in the loft forever and never have to move ….

  Caspian’s little hen Odessa flew from her nest box and lighted on the floor beside Pam. Pam lifted a finger and stroked the bird’s fluffy crown. Odessa puffed her neck feathers and scolded loudly, as if she blamed Pam for the disappearance of her mate.

  That broke Pam’s heart. She couldn’t bear to stay in the loft and listen to Odessa accuse her. The pigeons fluttered off her as she rose heavily from the floor. Her body felt like a millstone. Mechanically she walked to the door, opened it, and went outside. It was still raining.

  She headed to the barn. Across the cow lot, she saw Bosporus standing under a magnolia tree, watching her. He seemed to know he was no longer welcome on the farm. His huge, brindled head was bent against the rain, and his tail hung low.

  Pam’s emotions went out to him. She whistled.

  Bosporus’ head snapped up. He bounded toward her through the swampy cow lot and leaped over the barbwire fence, landing in a puddle the size of the Atlantic Ocean. He struggled in the quagmire for a minute before pulling himself out and shaking his coat, in the process spraying Pam with big globs of mud. Then he planted his muddy, oversized paws on her chest and yipped happily.

  Pam couldn’t help laughing, even though her insides ached. She was losing everything she cared about. First Papa, then her favorite pigeons, soon Bosporus. What next, she wondered, what next?

  She wrapped her arms around her dog’s neck. “I can’t send you away now,” she said. “Not this evening. I need a friend. You can stay inside the barn just this once, huh? Mama won’t know. I’ll get you out in the morning before she sees you.”

  It wasn’t easy coaxing Bos into the barn; he knew he wasn’t supposed to go through those doors. Pam finally had to drag him in, while her conscience screamed at her. Not only was she defying Mama’s orders, she was betraying the careful training she had given her dog. How could he be anything but confused once she had forced him to disobey the very rule she had taught him?

  She could hear Papa lecturing her about consistency with her animals. A well-trained animal, Papa had drilled into her, would give one hundred percent as long as he knew what was expected of him. “Howsomever,” Papa would say, “once them expectations get fuzzy in a critter’s head, he turns to being unpredictable, and he’s ruint for further useful purpose.” Then he would look at her sternly and say, “Don’t you ever forget that, Pammie.”

  She never had forgotten it, until now But you didn’t really forget, her conscience told her. You just chose to ignore what your papa said.

  The accusation stung her, but she knew it was true. Her world seemed to be falling apart, and it was all because Papa had left them, gone to fight in some crazy, faraway war that wouldn’t change a thing in Currituck, win or lose. If Papa had been here, Arminger wouldn’t have dared to steal her pigeons. That she knew.

  But facts were facts. Papa wasn’t here, and Arminger had stolen her pigeons. Now she had to figure out what to do about it. She sighed heavily and sank to the floor of the empty stall. Bosporus sprawled beside her.

  Mama had made it clear that she wouldn’t call the law on Arminger unless Pam had some proof that he was guilty. What Pam needed was evidence, evidence that pointed to Arminger.

  She wracked her brain, going over and over every detail of every conversation she had had with him. But she couldn’t find a single action or word that positively incriminated him. There was only the way she had felt about him, uncomfortable, like he wasn’t quite leveling with her. There were the little things that didn’t add up in his story. A fisherman who knew more about pigeons than about fishing. A truck full of grain for a “few birds.” An obsession with getting her pigeons at any price.

  Arminger was a sly one, all right. He threw money around town to foster Currituck’s goodwill, but no one really knew anything about him. He acted suspiciously, but he never lied outright, at least not a lie that anyone had caught him in. He took her pigeons and slipped away without a trace, knowing full well that a little girl could never prove he was the thief.

  The more Pam thought about it, the madder she got. She would prove it! See if she wouldn’t!

  A plan began to take shape in her mind. So Arminger was fitting out Sanders’ old cabin to set up housekeeping with his sons. Why had he chosen such a desolate piece of land to buy, in the middle of a cypress swamp? A mighty strange place for a herring fisherman to live. It seemed peculiar to Pam that none of the grown-ups had asked themselves that question. Pam figured they were too busy counting Arminger’s money to mind about such a little detail.

  Then suddenly the
perfect nature of Arminger’s setup hit her. Yessirree, a cypress swamp was a strange place to fish for herring. But it was a mighty fine place to hide stolen pigeons. And if everyone thought the place was haunted, no one would ever come to visit and find the pigeons, or anything else he had hidden there, would they?

  Pam clucked. Arminger must be feeling right cocky about pulling everything off as pretty as you please. Not for long, she thought. A plan had laid itself out in her mind like a map. “I’m going out there,” she told Bosporus. “Tomorrow. I’ll go into town with Mama, like I’m bound for school. I’ll tell her not to wait for me after, ’cause I’m going to Nina’s and her father’ll tote me home. After I drop Mama off, I’ll hightail it back here and get the canoe me and Papa made. Then I’ll paddle out to Sanders’ place and find my pigeons. It’s that simple.”

  Bosporus looked at her with bright eyes and lolled his tongue out of his mouth. I have complete confidence in you, he seemed to be saying.

  “Thanks, boy,” she said, scratching behind his ear. If only she had so much confidence in herself.

  CHAPTER 9

  INTO THE SWAMP

  The walk home from town the next morning seemed like nothing to Pam, though it was over six miles. She was in high spirits. At last she was doing something about Arminger, rather than sitting idly by while he helped himself to her pigeons one by one.

  A chalky sky threatened more rain, but some sun managed to filter through the clouds, and the air smelled new. The soggy fields teemed with birds: flocks of grackles, killdeers with their mournful kill-dee, kill-dee, bobolinks and meadowlarks crooning.

  At home Pam grabbed a cold sweet potato and a couple of biscuits from the kitchen to eat later. She carried her belt hatchet and pocketknife as she always did when she went into the woods. Best to be prepared, Papa always said. From a shelf in the shed she pulled down one of the special baskets Papa made for carrying pigeons on his fishing boat. Inside the baskets were little hammocks called corselets. Strapped securely into corselets, the birds couldn’t injure themselves on a rocking boat. Pam placed Odessa gently into a corselet and fastened the basket over her own shoulders.

  She planned on sending Odessa with a message so that Mama wouldn’t worry about her when she discovered Pam’s deception, as she surely would. Mama would be riled as a winter storm with Pam for fibbing, but at least she wouldn’t be sick with worry on top of it. Of course, there would be some punishment awaiting Pam when she got home, but Pam wasn’t going to worry about that now.

  Judging by the way Pam’s stomach growled, it was along about noon before she and Odessa were paddling toward the swamp. Pam pushed through the slow, brown water against a current that sucked hungrily at greenlichened rocks.

  She wasn’t sure exactly where Sanders’ place was. She remembered that it was up one of the small creeks that branched from the cypress swamp Papa called the Little Dismal, as opposed to the Great Dismal, which spanned the North Carolina-Virginia line north of Currituck. Although Pam and Papa had camped in Sanders’ dilapidated cabin on overnight hunting trips, Pam had never paid close attention to how they got there. She usually had her mind on their hunting, or on the sights and sounds of the swamp: turtles sunning on cypress knees, fish snapping at the fly hatch, herons and kingfishers and osprey, even an occasional gator lazing on the muddy bank. The swamp was a world unto itself, a world that Pam respected and loved. But today there was no time for idle observation. She had to concentrate on finding her way to Sanders’ cabin—and quickly—because another storm was gathering. She could feel it in the air and see it in the way the leaves turned their undersides to the wind.

  By the time the canoe skimmed into the Little Dismal, the swamp did indeed look dismal, even creepy. Slate-colored clouds had gobbled up the sun, and the water was inky black. In the twisted cypress knees Pam could see the shapes of gnomes and dwarfs and every kind of creature she had read about in Grimms’ fairy tales. The cicadas buzzed, and somewhere in the belly of the forest a wildcat screamed. As Pam paddled deeper into the swamp, a mist began to rise and snake through the trees. Some animal rustled a holly bush onshore. Pam couldn’t shake off the feeling of being watched, though she knew the swamp wasn’t haunted; that was superstitious mumbo jumbo. Still, when the oo-whoo-oo of a dove drifted across the dark water, Pam shivered and paddled harder.

  At the mouth of each small creek, she scanned the bank for a familiar landmark. She remembered a huge tree on Sanders’ creek that Papa had always remarked on, though she couldn’t for the life of her recollect what kind of tree it was. I’ll know it when I see it, she kept telling herself.

  And she did. It was the largest cypress tree she had ever seen—its trunk was at least seven feet around, and its bulbous knees protruded another fifty. Confident now, Pam paddled up the narrow creek, poling in places that were too shallow for paddling.

  She found Sanders’ cabin on the edge of the creek. It was built of pine logs, now grown over with moss and lichens and hugged by maidenhair ferns. It had once sat in a clearing, but the sweet gums and pines had encroached on it. Virginia creeper wound up its walls, and poison ivy tangled with trumpet vines on its roof. Its windows gaped like lifeless eyes.

  “Don’t look like nobody’s setting up housekeeping here,” Pam said aloud. Her voice rang through the stillness. She banked the canoe and walked around to the front of the cabin. The door stood slightly ajar. When she tried to push it open, it stuck at first, and when she pushed harder, the door caved in and she crashed onto the cabin floor. Odessa in her basket on Pam’s back squawked in alarm, and something hairy bumped against Pam’s face.

  Pam screamed and flailed her arms against her attacker.

  Chirr-chirr, she heard behind her. She turned in time to see a mother raccoon with a kit in her mouth scurrying through the gaping doorway.

  Pam crawled to her feet and gazed around. The inside of the cabin looked as desolate as the outside. Clearly no one had been living here, at least no one human. From their nest in the fireplace, the remaining raccoon kits squeaked for their mother. Pam knew their mama would return. But their pitiful cries echoed the desperation building in Pam’s own chest.

  Here she had expected to find her pigeons, to nail Arminger once and for all. Instead, all she found was an empty cabin and a nest of brokenhearted babies.

  She unstrapped Odessa’s basket and eased herself to the floor to think. Arminger wasn’t living here; Arminger wasn’t building here; Pam didn’t think Arminger had even been here. A chill started creeping over her as she realized that Arminger had intentionally deceived everyone in Currituck.

  But why?

  Because he really is a spy.

  The answer suggested itself with perfect logic in Pam’s mind. Her heart hammered as the significance of those words pierced her understanding.

  That would mean that Mama was wrong about Arminger’s being a decent person … wrong about there being nothing to spy on in Currituck.

  And if Mama could be wrong about that, maybe she could be wrong about other things. Like the reason they weren’t getting letters from Papa.

  Pam felt like a spider dangling above a chasm on one thin string. For she knew, if all this was true about Arminger, his presence in Currituck spelled danger—to American soldiers, to Papa, to everything she held dear.

  Back outside the cabin, Pam scribbled a note to let Mama know she was safe. She rolled the note up and slipped it into the cylinder-shaped tube fastened on Odessa’s leg. Then she tossed Odessa into the air and watched her float upward into the charcoal sky. The bird circled once, flapped her wings vigorously, and disappeared. At the exact same moment, a wolf howled deep in the swamp. The tree frogs and cicadas rumbled, and a great cavern of loneliness opened inside of Pam. She had the feeling she was the last human being on the face of the earth.

  Later, paddling hard through the black swamp, Pam barely felt the rain on her neck, barely felt the cold night-mist rising. Her emotions boiled inside. She felt betrayed and angry and
scared, all at once. Arminger had pretended to be a friend to her, and to the whole town, all the while plotting against them. It was more than Pam could handle alone. She would have to tell Mama everything she knew.

  It was late when Pam hit Scuppernong Creek. The rain had stopped, the stars had emerged, and a wedge of moon had slinked into the trees. Pam let the current carry her downstream. By then her brain had gone numb. The black trees glided past like figures in a dream. At her own landing Pam somehow found the strength to hoist the canoe onto the bank and stumble up the rise to the house.

  A single light burned in the back of the house—Mama’s room. Pain’s heart twisted at the thought of Mama, rocking for hours, pretending to read her Bible but worried to distraction over Pam. Apprehension gnawed at her. How would Mama react to her disobedient daughter’s homecoming?

  Pam crept into the dark kitchen. On the stove Mama had saved supper for her: Irish potatoes, field peas, and cabbage. Pam remembered that she hadn’t eaten since the sweet potato in early afternoon, but her stomach turned at the thought of food. A floorboard creaked under her foot.

  “Pam? Is that you?” A halo of light appeared at the end of the hall, then Mama’s ashen face in the doorway. Her long brown hair was disheveled and there were dark circles under her eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Pam croaked. Her throat was too tight to say more.

  Mama set the lamp on the kitchen table. She looked old. “Child, where have you been?” Her voice was shaking.

  “Didn’t you get Odessa’s message?” Pam asked. She felt suddenly limp, and she grasped the edge of the table to steady herself. She wanted to fall into Mama’s arms, but she wasn’t sure how she would be received. Was Mama mad or fixing to cry?