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 memor
y 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.”
“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
The 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.
The Flying Circus Page 11
