The Flying Circus

by Susan Crandall

  “Do you think you can convince him?”

  “Yes. It might take a while, but yes.” It bothered him a little, how easily the lies were coming.

  Reece nodded to the cycle. “So? Do I load it?”

  Cora clutched Mercury tighter, uncertainty in her eyes.

  “Load it,” Henry called. He walked her to the passenger side of the truck, where he shook hands with Hoffman and Althoff. “This is best, Cora. You know it.”

  “I do. I just . . .” She blinked against tears. Then her face hardened. “To hell with him! You come, Henry. Let him wallow in his self-pity alone.”

  Gil’s problem was a whole lot deeper and more complicated than self-pity. “I know where to find you. And they don’t need my name for the posters.”

  One by one, the planes chugged to life.

  “Go,” Henry said, raising his voice over the machines and the prop wash. “If nothing else, we’ll meet up with you at the last show in November.”

  “You promise to find me? No later than November?”

  “I promise.”

  She shifted her weight from foot to foot. “It’s all happening so fast. . . .”

  “You told me there’s no shame in admitting you want something and going after it. Is this what you want?”

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  Henry inclined his head toward the waiting truck. “Then go after it.” Those words cost him more than he’d ever imagined four little words could.

  She kissed his cheek and climbed into the truck. Once she was inside, she held Mercury in the window and waved his paw good-bye.

  Henry stood where he was until the truck was gone and the planes were no longer even specks in the cloud-spattered sky. It was done. She was gone. His heart seemed to grow larger with every beat, trying to burst from his chest, climbing higher in his throat, threatening to suffocate the life out of him. But he wouldn’t die. He’d live every painful day with the yawning hole of her absence in it.

  His knees gave way and he sat in the matted field, listening to the whir of grasshoppers and drone of clover-seeking bees. Picking up blade after blade of grass, he absently shredded them along their stringy veins. He couldn’t go back to Gil without untangling his own emotions first. He had to weigh the risks of talking Gil into following Cora. The risk to Gil’s soul. The risk to Henry’s own heart.

  The break was made. The worst was over.

  The sky streaked and shifted with a sad-looking sunset. Henry got up and started walking with heavy steps back to the Jenny. It was fully dark when he reached the plane. Gil was sitting slump-shouldered with his elbows resting on his knees next to a little fire. His unblinking eyes stared into the low, yellow flames. A half-empty bottle of whiskey dangled from his fingertips, glowing amber in the flickering light. Henry saw a corner of paper with its edge curled and blackened at the side of the fire. One of the flyers for Mercury’s Daredevils.

  Henry sat down on the ground. “She’s gone.”

  Gil’s eyes stayed on the fire as he nodded slowly, then he took a pull on the whiskey bottle. “So I saw.”

  12

  Four days after Cora left their lives, on August 2, President Harding dropped dead. The country went into mourning. Black crepe draped nearly every door. Out of respect Gil and Henry stayed grounded—and near starving—for a week.

  Then days stacked upon days and Henry had yet to say a word to Gil about the offer Hoffman had made. Even Henry’s shame over his behavior couldn’t nudge him over the hump. He had plenty of justifications; he worried most of them were ultimately selfish. He and Gil were somewhere in central Missouri, Henry having encouraged Gil to head west out of Cape Girardeau. Hoffman’s Flying Circus was working its way northeast and then south. Henry had convinced himself that Gil’s unquestioning acquiescence to Henry’s suggestion was confirmation that he had no second thoughts about sending Cora away.

  Were the fellas with the circus keeping her risk-taking in check? The worry was keeping him awake at night, and emptiness rattled around in his heart during the day.

  Henry had known he would miss her—and that thieving mutt—but he’d never experienced anything like this, the mix of aching and longing, the sense of missing something that was crucial to his very being. Every evening as he sat in the gathering darkness, every morning when the sun came over the horizon, his misery grew. That he knew he could join her and the circus, with or without Gil, anytime he wanted, made it worse, not better.

  Her name had not been uttered by either of them since she’d left. It seemed best to leave it that way.

  Henry thought it telling that Gil had been lurking nearby, watching as she got into that truck with Reece Althoff and rode out of their lives. Gil’s feelings for her obviously went deeper than a regretted kiss. Henry wondered why, then, had Gil sent her away? To protect her from his darker side? Or had he been sacrificing what he wanted in order to put her in a place where her talents could shine? Or could Gil simply not bear to watch Cora take such continual risks? If things went wrong, it’d be one more death collected on his soul.

  With Hoffman’s Flying Circus she would finally be able to implement daring in a way that didn’t involve piecemeal equipment like ramps of scavenged wood of questionable integrity. But would it be enough for her? Henry suspected an empty place was inside Cora, too—although better concealed than Gil’s—an empty place she tried to fill with adoring eyes and applause. Maybe that’s what had drawn her and Gil to each other, that deep, aching need for something to fill the cold, empty void.

  As Henry sat in the still, late-August heat beneath a giant elm at the edge of a Missouri field, he contemplated a compelling need of his own. One he’d been willing to sacrifice his feelings for Cora in order to satisfy: a family; as simple and as complicated as that. It didn’t seem like such an outrageous wish. But fate intended for him to be alone. Why else did it keep putting a family—natural, adopted, and makeshift—within his grasp and snatching it away?

  He was feeling sorry for himself. But he thought he’d earned a good day of wallowing. Then he’d have to figure out what he was going to do about pulling Gil back from the brink.

  Gil had always vacillated between stony silence and sparse communication. But something about his silences was different now, as if he’d found a way to make an absence of words even more oppressive. Before Cora left, Gil had stood with his toes curled over the ledge that fell away into darkness. Now that precipice had narrowed to a knife edge. Henry feared the waft of a single feather could send him either into the black void or shift him back to, if not the light, at least the shadows.

  And then there was Henry’s own darkness. Yes, he was going to have to do something about that, too.

  After he’d joined with Gil and Cora, he’d taken the wrongs—done to him and by him—of his previous lives and locked them away in the cellar of his soul. For the most part, he’d been successful in keeping them weak and starving down there in the musty dark. He didn’t know if Gil’s current despair fed the monsters in Henry’s cellar, or if his own tormented feelings for Cora had given them second life. Whatever the cause, his nights had become littered with the colliding fragments of pain he’d gathered throughout the years, each one a shard buried deep, cutting away at the foundation of a deceptively sturdy-looking dwelling.

  How could he turn Gil away from his demons if his own continued to grow out of control?

  It was time to admit the sad, horrible fact that Cora’s absence was as destructive as her presence had been.

  Henry ached for the loss of possibilities at the same time he rejoiced that at least she wasn’t Gil’s. What kind of person did that make him? Selfish? Certainly. Thankless? Undoubtedly. A betrayer? Probably. Just as he’d been in the end at the Dahlgren farm.

  The sound of the Jenny’s turning over jerked Henry out of a drooling doze he hadn’t realized he’d fallen into. The heat wa
s suffocating, even in the shade—just one of the reasons he’d been dreaming he was facing the fires of hell. Cows stood in the creek that ran on the other side of the nearby fence, huddled in fly-swatting masses in the spotty shade.

  Why was Gil climbing into the plane? It was too hot to draw a crowd, the air too choppy to put on a show or give rides that wouldn’t return customers to the ground shaken and sick. Henry got to his feet and walked to the edge of the shade, watching as Gil took to the air.

  Instead of heading toward town to attract a crowd, Gil started his aerobatics right out there in open country. It was a ridiculous waste of gasoline, considering how low they were on both money and fuel. The man must really need the sky.

  While the crowds were thin, Gil had been taking Henry through some basic stunts, first on the ground to explain how to execute them, then in the air so he could feel them, which was simultaneously terrifying and like arriving at the gates of heaven. Stunts used the basic principles of all flight—power, yaw, roll, drag, and lift—manipulated by the same tools: throttle, rudder, ailerons, and elevators. You had to know the right combinations and when and to what degree to apply them to keep yourself out of trouble—or in the case of a spin, get into trouble and then back out. Gil had said Henry was a natural pilot, but warned him not to rely solely on instincts when stunting, because in a spin your instincts would lead you in the wrong direction. Henry wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready to try a spin. But riding through the stunts had made him even more aware of the value of a well-maintained and well-tuned machine. Of course limitations of budget prevented their Jenny from achieving either.

  Gil did a climb that inched toward vertical until the Jenny stalled and nosed over to the right and went into an accelerating dive. The plane was too underpowered to complete loops without gaining airspeed in a dive, so Henry anticipated a loop next. Gil plummeted past the point where a prudent flier would have pulled into a loop.

  Cold lead fingers gripped Henry’s heart. He’d known this was coming. He had. He thought he had more time.

  A handful of seconds from doom, Gil pulled up into a loop that started and ended much too close to the ground.

  Climbing to a semi-sane altitude, he did a spiral and a lazy eight. Just as Henry was beginning to think he’d overreacted to the dive, Gil put the plane into a steep-angled spin, nose much lower than the tail. Henry watched the descent with dread. Pulling out of a spin took a lot more skill than pulling out of a dive—and it needed more altitude for recovery.

  That altitude passed.

  Henry ran into the field, squinting against the sun, shouting and waving his arms—a useless gesture. Gil’s world was a rotating blur of sound and color, his ears filled with painful pressure.

  Gil’s instructions shot through Henry’s mind, a jumble that would do no good if he needed them. But Gil wasn’t Henry. Gil could fly an orange crate if they stuck wings on it. Reece had said.

  Pull out. Pull out. Pull out. Now!

  Henry squeezed his eyes closed. Every muscle in his body was stone.

  The engine roared, passing so close overhead that it rattled Henry’s teeth.

  His eyes snapped open. The Jenny inverted, righted, then climbed.

  Henry’s hands fisted at his sides. “Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. Goddammit!”

  Gil swung around in his landing approach.

  Then he was on the ground, taxiing to the tie-down stakes.

  The second his feet hit the ground, Henry was on him. He shoved Gil in the chest hard enough to knock him off his feet.

  “If you’re so goddamn set on killing yourself, just get it over with! And don’t fucking make me watch!”

  Gil stayed on the ground, leaning back on his elbows. The calm look on his face made Henry want to punch him and keep punching.

  But he held his hands in check and let his voice deliver the blows. “What is wrong with you?” He took a step backward. “Do you want to die?” He took a step forward and leaned down toward Gil’s face and shouted, “Do you?”

  Gil’s voice was soft when he said, “I should have died a long time ago.”

  “But you didn’t! Goddammit, you didn’t! Get the hell over it.” Henry walked in a tight circle. “All of this talk about ‘should have died’; ‘I won’t live to be an old man’ . . . it’s bullshit! Bullshit you hide behind so you don’t have to make the effort to rejoin the human race. The war fucked all of us. All of us!” The last words were closer to an insane roar than a shout. Henry was trembling so hard, he sat down hard right where he was. The sun beat down on him. He was covered in fresh sweat. Nauseated. Weak. Spent. “My brother did die. If he had lived, I hope he wouldn’t have wasted that gift the way you are.”

  Gil got up. Peeled off his helmet and goggles and tossed them up into the Jenny. His leather jacket followed.

  “She thought she could save you, you know,” Henry said, trying to slow his breathing.

  Gil stilled, but didn’t turn to look down at him.

  “I don’t think you want to be saved.”

  Gil started walking toward the road.

  “Where are you going?” Henry called.

  “To find a drink.”

  Henry threw himself onto his back and balled his fists against his forehead. He whispered, “Yeah. You do that. Maybe you’ll stumble off a bridge and be put out of your misery.” Then he muttered, “I should have gone with Hoffman.”

  Henry crossed his arms over his eyes and just stayed there in the shadow of the Jenny. It was too hot to think. It was too hot to worry. And it was damn well too hot to hike after a man who didn’t want to live.

  He awoke a while later to a gust of wind, roiling clouds, and green-hued light.

  “Oh my God!” He jumped to his feet. Thunder rolled overhead like a barrel across an empty hayloft.

  He grabbed the tie-down rope nearest him and hurried to one rocking wing. The rope was three feet too short. The plane wasn’t square in the same spot as when tied down before.

  He ran to the other side, glancing around him. The wind buffeted the trees in multiple directions. The Jenny shook on her wheels as if she were racing across a bumpy field as Henry grabbed the other wing rope and lashed it tight. He could swing the tail easily enough. He hoped to hell two tie-downs would hold it until he could reset the other stake. It didn’t look as if he had much time.

  The tail rope wouldn’t reach. Henry got the tail off the ground far enough to give it a jerk inching it closer to the tie-down.

  He heard an advancing rumble and looked up. A wall of hail was headed across the field, bouncing off the hard ground. “Oh, no, no, no, no.”

  The first baseball-size ice chunk went through the turtleback behind the cockpit and clanged against the metal tools inside. The second hit Henry’s shoulder, sending a knife of pain clear across his chest. He covered his head with his arms and tucked himself under the horizontal stabilizer. He stretched out on his belly, trying to get the rope through the tail skid. Still too short.

  Suddenly it sounded as if Henry were in the middle of a cattle stampede. The ground vibrated. A hailstone struck his ankle. It felt as if it chipped a bone through the leather of his boot. He balled himself under the tail and helplessly listened to the fabric being pummeled and ripped. His gaze was even with the ground. It was thick with hailstones.

  Then the hail stopped, but the roar did not. He raised his head and peered out from under the bucking shelter of the plane just in time to see the tornado shatter the Browns’ barn. Debris circled the funnel like flies swarming garbage.

  He looked around for a low spot.

  The creek.

  He rolled out from under the Jenny’s tail and made a dash for the fence. The cows had all shifted their tails toward the fence, into the wind. Henry put his left hand on top of a fence post and leaped over. It sounded as if he were being chased by a train.

  He threw
himself into the creek bed where it made a slight curve and the water had hollowed out a shallow divot in its west bank. He pressed himself into it, turning his face to the dirt and covering his head with his arms.

  His ears popped. The sound around him intensified. Cows’ moos were cut off in screams. Wood popped and snapped. He heard and felt debris hitting the ground.

  A great thud shook the earth. Something huge landed at his back, pressing him into the bank.

  The noise moved off and left only the muted static of rain.

  Henry’s torso was pinned tight. He pushed with his knees against the dirt and didn’t feel the slightest shift at his back. The tree. He was pinned. No one could see him . . . if anyone ever came.

  The cool flow of water stroked his side.

  What a fucking unlucky way to die.

  13

  The creek continued to rise, even after the storm left behind silence punctuated only by tranquil bird-chirping. Henry shivered, unable to believe an hour earlier he’d been suffocated by the heat. He’d tried to dig his knees deeper into the bank, hoping to get better leverage, but had no luck. He could only move his elbows forward about six inches before they jammed into solid dirt. Debris pressed against his forearms, leaving them pinned uselessly over his head.

  He tried to wiggle and worm toward his feet, but only wedged his shoulders tighter.

  Blind animal panic set in. He yelled for help until his voice started to fail.

  He forced himself to stop, to lasso that panic and rein it in. Use your head. Breathe. In. Out. Yelling was useless. The nearest farmstead to the Browns’ was only a small bump on the horizon.

  Someone will come. Gil will come.

  That brought a slow parade of ways Gil could have died: a cracked skull from a hailstone, impaled by debris, his body lifted and tossed by the tornado, struck by lightning, crushed by a fallen tree. Or was Gil trapped alive somewhere? His return to the field was Henry’s only hope. Unless the farmer came out to check on his cattle. Doubtful it would be in the next little while; Henry had seen the house and barn being hit.