The Flying Circus

by Susan Crandall

  At least Gil wasn’t around to grouse about it. He’d gotten in a dark mood—dark even for Gil—last night when one of the men from the local VFW had tried to get him to come and talk to the veterans at the local post. Cora had tried to coax him out of his glumness, an effort that backfired completely. Soon after that he’d disappeared.

  “This is a bad idea,” Henry said as he looked over his best effort with the materials he had. “It’s way too narrow and too steep.”

  “It’s good enough to at least give a try. Then we can figure out how to improve it.”

  “I know how to improve it. No need to risk your neck.”

  “I’ll take it slow and easy.”

  “It’s a ramp. Slow and easy will just land your front wheel first and you’re guaranteed a crash. You have to hit the ground rear-wheel first—both level at the very least.”

  “I know that.”

  He looked at her. “But did you before I said it?”

  “Good Lord, Henry, I’ve spent every day for over two months on that motorbike. I know how to handle it. Besides, today’s my birthday. Even Mother lets me have my way on my birthday.”

  Henry had almost forgotten about celebrating birthdays. Ever since Peter had left, Henry’s had passed unnoticed by him or anyone else. The last one that counted, Henry’s tenth, Peter had made a cake that had fallen apart when he’d taken it out of the pan. He’d poured icing all over the broken-up pile, and he and Henry had eaten the entire thing right off the serving plate in one sitting.

  “Well, happy birthday, Cora. I’ll take you to a bakery for a cake later. But right now I’ll take the first run at that ramp.”

  “Bushwa!” He didn’t know why she thought saying that was any better than saying bullshit outright. “It’s my stunt. What good does it do me to know you can do it?”

  He’d been through this argument enough to know it was pointless. The first time had been when he’d tried to switch with her when they traveled from town to town. A woman alone out on the road was just foolish. She’d stuck to her guns, accusing Henry of trying to give Gil a reason to boot her from “the team.” When he’d appealed to Gil, he’d gotten, “She’s woman enough to live up to her bargain. No special treatment.” It had taken two weeks before Henry’s gut had grown accustomed to the wait for her safe arrival.

  She handed Mercury over. Then she rode the motorcycle to the far end of the pasture.

  Henry shouted, “Be sure and hit it square!” She waved, but he doubted she’d heard him.

  When she revved the engine, Henry’s pulse accelerated, too. The longer they were together, the more stunts she did, the more nervous he got for her. It seemed counter to logic.

  She raced across the field. It was too rough for a stunt like this, even with a decent ramp.

  Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.

  Her approach angle was off!

  She swerved at the last second, racing past the ramp.

  Henry waved her to come back, but she rode to the far end of the pasture again.

  As Henry watched with a dust-dry mouth, she came at it again. Better approach.

  Twenty feet. Ten. Five.

  She hit the ramp square and was airborne. The engine whined high. Henry had a flash of her unmoving body floating facedown in that pond. I can’t lose you now.

  She landed on the front wheel. The handlebars jerked to the side. The bike got sideways and slid out from under her. She hit the ground and rolled like a rag doll.

  “Cora!” Henry set the dog down and ran, his heart in his throat.

  She was on her side, facing away from him. The motorcycle engine chugged to a stop.

  He slid the last three feet on his knees.

  Just as he reached her, she rolled onto her back. “Uuuuugggghhhhh.”

  She was blinking under raised brows, as if trying to get her vision to clear.

  “Hold still!”

  Mercury lay down and put his face next to hers and laid his head on his paws. His questioning brown eyes shifted between Henry and Cora.

  “I’m . . . I . . . I’m all right.” She blew out a breath that puffed her cheeks.

  “How do you know? Your eyeballs haven’t stopped rattling around in your head yet.”

  She started to sit up.

  He grabbed her shoulders and held her down. “Hold on.” He needed a minute to get his heart tapped back down into his chest.

  That she lay back without a bunch of sass told him just how shaken up she was. He unbuckled and pulled off her leather helmet, then explored her head for lumps with his fingertips. From there he checked her neck, arms, and legs, running his hands over her limbs, gently checking flexibility and probing for broken bones.

  “See? Fine,” she said, seeming to get some of her starch back.

  Mercury inched closer and licked her cheek.

  “Unzip your jacket.”

  “Why, Henry, you rascal . . .”

  He rolled his eyes. “I want to check your ribs.”

  “That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard from a fella trying to get in some heavy petting.”

  “Shut up.” But now that she’d said that, when he put his hands on her midsection and ran them over her sides, all he could think of was the way she’d looked in that wet blouse. When he pushed that image away, the sight of her in her fancy dance dress crept right in and took up residence in his head. “This hurt?” He gave her sides a squeeze.

  She kicked her legs and swatted his hands away. “Tickles.”

  At that he pronounced her intact enough to get up.

  “How’s the motorcycle?” she asked as he helped her slowly to her feet.

  She wobbled. He wrapped his arms around her and held her to his chest. “Just stand here for a second.” He pressed his cheek against the top of her head and closed his eyes. After all of his years alone, he’d forgotten how good holding another person could feel.

  She pulled away slightly and looked up at him. “You’re shaking.” Touching his cheek, she said, “And white as a ghost.”

  Mercury jumped up and gave a bark. It brought Henry back to his senses before he lost his mind completely and kissed her. There were a hundred reasons why he couldn’t let that happen.

  Letting her go, he said, “I get a little shaken up watching bullheaded recklessness resulting in near death.”

  She blinked and the soft kiss-me look left her eyes. “You’re being melodramatic. I wasn’t even hurt.”

  “Keep doing stupid crap like this and your luck will run out.”

  “The ramp worked! I just needed more speed and to shift my weight a little more.”

  “No. No. No. No more on this ramp. You’ll have to wait until we can build a proper one.”

  “If we spend money on it, we’ll want to knock it down and take it with us. And we can’t do that without a truck.”

  This kind of talk always led to the flint-and-steel sparks between her and Gil. Expand. More exciting stunts. More daring exhibitions. She sang that song morning and night. Some of her ideas were crazy, sure, but a lot of them were good. But Henry was the only man balancing the canoe, so he had to act accordingly. He’d grown accustomed to his role as referee and peacemaker, quietly nudging Gil this way and Cora that. But he had a growing feeling Gil had just about hit his limit. Henry feared the next clash would spell doom for their partnership.

  Reason 101 why he couldn’t let himself fall for Cora.

  Gil returned just before showtime, looking like a man who’d spent his night making love to a bottle of bootleg. Henry wanted to take the man by the shoulders and give him a solid shake, one that would no doubt send Gil’s hungover head off his shoulders. If people saw him like this, their show was doomed. Goddammit, didn’t he know what was at stake?

  It hit Henry just then. Gil didn’t care. None of this mattered to him.

&nbs
p; For some reason that made Henry angrier. He gritted his teeth and breathed deeply before he did something that would just make things worse.

  Gil probably wouldn’t even have noticed the ramp if Cora hadn’t marched right up to him and said, “Don’t even waste your breath trying to kill this idea. It’s going to be a great draw. I’m thinking of raising the Flaming Arch so I can vault from the ramp right through it.”

  For crying out loud. They weren’t even incorporating the ramp yet, let alone adding fire to it. Did she think getting a preemptive volley in was some sort of achievement in itself?

  The truth was, Gil didn’t usually actively object if additions were quietly incorporated; approval by abstention. But for some reason Cora felt the need to go after everything head-to-head. For a woman with a fancy education and fine social graces, she sure didn’t grasp the concept of finesse. Or maybe she just liked fighting. Henry couldn’t tell for sure.

  Gil stared at her with bloodshot eyes. Before he gathered his ammunition for a return barrage, Henry stepped between them. “You look like hell. We need to get you cleaned up. You’re intimidating enough to the customers without this added air of . . . degenerate drunkard.” He nudged Gil toward their camp setup. “I left water by your shaving kit.”

  After Gil walked away, taking the fumes of residual alcohol with him, Cora asked, “Why do you always step in like that?”

  “Why do you always want to fight?”

  Cora looked momentarily startled by the biting anger in Henry’s voice. She seemed to weigh her options. Then Henry saw belligerence win over good sense. “You never want to go against him. Why?”

  The show was in less than a half hour. Someone had to put an end to this foolishness.

  “He’s been nice to me.” He sounded like the pathetic orphan he once was.

  “Well, isn’t that just ducky. I suppose I haven’t? Honestly, what has Flyboy done for you, other than keep you from your job in Chicago?”

  She referred to that job as if it lived in the same universe as unicorns. Which was pretty darned accurate.

  “Come on, Henry. These bush hounds are eating up our little exhibition. We can make this big if you’ll back me up once in a while. Who wouldn’t want a life like this over working twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a smelly meat-processing plant or shoveling coal in a steel mill? There’s no shame in admitting you want something and going after it. You need to stop being afraid Gil’s going to up and leave you.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “If Gil really wanted to be alone, he would have left you standing in Uncle’s pasture that first morning.” Her smile turned devilish. “Flyboy wants us here. He just won’t admit it.”

  At that moment, Henry understood the real root of his fear, a fear that had grown stronger day by day. It wasn’t his worry over losing a place to hide, to reinvent himself. It wasn’t missing out on the rare opportunity to work on an airplane, or losing the connection he felt to Peter when he was with Gil. Mercury’s Daredevils had become his home. His family.

  That awareness brought with it the kind of deep-seated peace he hadn’t felt in years. He hadn’t even known it was missing until it slipped back into his soul.

  On the heels of that realization was the certainty that disaster would soon come to call.

  Gil’s recovery was remarkable. Even that first customer wouldn’t have guessed the man had been out all night drinking. By one o’clock, black Model T’s and a few fancier and more colorful makes—Oaklands, Studebakers, Henry even spotted a Pierce-Arrow and a Stutz Bearcat—were parked cheek to jowl with wagons, buggies, and horses along the side of the road. Shops had been closed, fields abandoned. Boys walked prized bicycles through the gate, parking them within eyesight—not that anyone kept eyes on the ground when Gil took to the air and performed loops, spins, and barrel rolls.

  The first time Henry had seen Gil do a loop, his ears had told him the carburetor was gravity fed, which meant that when it was upside down the engine didn’t get gas. When he’d asked Gil about it during their first day together, he’d said that it wasn’t a problem, as long as you got the plane upright while the prop was still turning fast enough to restart the engine.

  “And if you don’t get it turned over in time?” Henry had asked.

  “If I have enough altitude, I can nose it down and use the wind speed to turn the prop.” Gil had sounded quite matter-of-fact.

  “If you don’t have the altitude?”

  “I’ve done plenty of dead-stick landings.”

  “Dead stick?”

  “Prop is wood. No power and it sits there like a dead stick.”

  “You glide? Steer using those flapper things on the wings and tail?”

  Gil had given Henry one of his few true smiles. “You always steer using those ‘flapper things.’ If you’re going to talk airplanes, you need the lingo or you’re going to sound like an idiot.”

  Henry hadn’t argued the point, but it seemed an extremely slight risk; so few planes were around he’d probably never come across someone who could tell the difference.

  “The flaps on the wings are ailerons. They control banking. The wood posts between the wings are struts. The tail has a rudder behind the vertical stabilizer; it works same as a rudder on a boat.” Gil had used his hands to demonstrate the movements. “The stationary crosspiece is the horizontal stabilizer. The flaps on the horizontal piece are the elevators, move the nose up and down.”

  It had been Henry’s first flight lesson. At that moment, he had begun to love the beauty of the whole, not just the wonder of the engine. As he learned more about piloting, his respect for Gil’s extraordinary talent in the cockpit grew. He had put that plane into a spin just to teach Henry how to pull it out. Even after the instruction, Henry was pretty sure if he ever lost it to a spin, he was just going to be one dead pilot. With increased knowledge came the ability to tell when Gil was pushing too far—even for his skills.

  Such as now, when he turned the Jenny upside down while on a much-too-low pass over the field.

  Henry stood on his straw bale, megaphone to his mouth, adding ballyhoo to their exhibition. Words died in his mouth. What in the hell was Gil doing?

  People went wild, yelling and waiving their hats in the air.

  Turn it over. Turn it over. Turn it over. Gil might be good at dead-stick landings, but inverted dead stick was impossible, no matter how good a pilot he was.

  At the engine’s silence, a unified gasp came from the crowd.

  Turn it over. Henry’s eyes stayed on the prop. Over. Roll over.

  Gil finally turned the ship right side up.

  Henry’s stuttering heartbeat filled his ears. He leaned forward, as if his physical urging could keep the plane’s speed up.

  Gil was headed straight for dense woods. With no power.

  Then the engine caught, thrumming once again. It had only been seconds, but to Henry it had been an eternity.

  Gil pulled up and banked left, barely clearing the trees. Cheers and whistles rose after the breath-held quiet of the pasture.

  Cora’s voice came over Henry’s shoulder. “Now that, Kid, is the monkey’s eyebrows . . . to make every one of those people stop breathing like that.” She thumped him on the back. “Just think how much better it’ll be with a wing walker.”

  He was surrounded by lunacy. Pure lunacy.

  He turned to tell her to forget it, but she was already throwing her leg over the motorcycle and zipping Mercury into her jacket. At least since the dog was with her, he was assured she’d steer clear of that damned ramp.

  Henry took up the megaphone again as she and Mercury took the field, starting off with some crowd-pleasing, dirt-tossing figure eights. Cora’s uncommon show of female daring was nearly as unique as the appearance of an airplane. When she stopped and the engine idled, Mercury barked and howled for more. The dog was a
natural showman, just like Cora. Henry was surrounded by attention-grabbers. This was to his advantage; to most people watching the show he was no more than a hand to take money and a voice in the background.

  Gil made a pass overhead. He waggled his wings and flew off, giving Cora the field. She rode balanced with her knee on the seat, then navigated through the course she’d set up that morning, plucking hankies off various obstacles as she raced past.

  Then, her routine completed, she rode pell-mell to the end of the field, stopped, and unzipped Mercury from her jacket.

  Henry flashed hot. He dropped the megaphone and took off at a run. “No!” She revved the engine twice and took off with a rooster tail of grass clumps and dirt.

  She hit the boards good and square and shot off the end. She shifted her weight, landing on the rear wheel. But the motorcycle hit the ground hard, causing her to jerk the handlebars. The front wheel wasn’t perfectly straight when it hit the ground. She wobbled wildly, but somehow saved it. She’d only been airborne for about ten feet, but the crowd reacted as if she had flown halfway across the pasture.

  Henry’s teeth hurt from his clenched jaw. His tight fists pumped as he ran. Selfish. Spoiled. Bull-goddamned-headed.

  She swung the bike around as she stopped, raising her fists in what Henry was beginning to think of as her Warrior Maiden pose. Her careless attitude blurred his vision.

  Mercury barked as he raced up and launched himself into Henry’s arms. The jolt brought him back to his senses. He drew up and forced himself to stand there while he drew deep breaths and got ahold of himself.

  By the time he and Mercury reached her, she was surrounded by a dozen adoring boys still in knickers. A newspaper photographer was setting up a camera-topped tripod, asking to take her picture. She rolled the motorcycle back on its new stand and held out her hands for Mercury. Henry bit his tongue and handed the dog over. She posed astride the bike with his furry, doggled face sticking out of her jacket. Henry had never seen anyone look so pleased with herself. Which went through him like a red-hot dagger.