The Flying Circus (7 page)

Henry lifted his nose and made a show of smelling the air. “Really? I don’t smell anything.”

Gil looked puzzled and shrugged.

A loud belch came from behind the milk cans.

Gil shot a look over his shoulder at Henry.

Henry patted his chest and covered his mouth. “I do beg your pardon.”

Gil shook his head.

The train passed.

They traveled on, back toward the Jenny.

Henry steadied the cans as they bounced across the pasture. They stopped at a place where the gasoline could be stored in the shade. Gil hopped off and Henry started to move the heavy cans to the tailgate. The dog stayed hunkered down, looking up at Henry with unsure brown eyes, holding half of a chewed sausage between its paws.

“It’s okay,” Henry whispered. “I’m on your side.” He reached down and picked up the scruffy terrier. The matted fur and prominent ribs
confirmed the filling-station attendant’s claim that this was a stray; a dog this size should weigh eighteen or twenty pounds. He didn’t feel as if he was anywhere in that neighborhood. “Can’t blame a starving animal for fighting to survive.”

Gil came back and looked up. “Oh, hell no.”

“He needed help.” Henry set the dog back down on his paws. “Now he’s going on his way.” Henry took the half-eaten sausage and tossed it out of the truck, expecting the dog to follow. Instead the pooch just sat there and stared up at Henry with hope in his eyes.

“Maybe Mr. Sowers”—Henry had read the farmer’s name written in the shingles of his barn roof—“will keep him?”

The farmer shook his head. “Dog’s no hunter. Why would I keep him?”

At that the dog jumped out of the truck bed, picked up the half sausage, and headed toward the road.

The sight of that skinny mutt walking slowly away with his head low made Henry sad. But a man who wasn’t sure how he was going to feed himself had no business taking on a dog. No matter how much he sympathized with the hungry stray.

4

T
he crowd did come, just as Gil had predicted. It came smelling of the anticipation of discovery. People came on foot and in cars, in wagons and on bicycles, in groups and alone. They gathered around the field in little knots made colorful by women’s spring hats and dresses. The bolder of the men and boys ventured close and asked Gil questions about the plane. Two different times, Gil swatted a boy away when he tried to climb up onto the wing. Must have been a bold little devil; the scowl on Gil’s face was enough to scare most folks off.

The whole atmosphere reminded Henry of a medicine show he and Peter had seen years ago. Henry had watched the performances. Peter had watched the crowd.

Even with the good turnout and the excitement, when Gil stood in the seat of his cockpit and invited anyone with five dollars to come and take a ride, people fell silent, their eyes shifting to the ground beneath their feet, to the person next to them. Anywhere but Gil and his Jenny.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, folks,” Gil said, his hands on his hips. “How many airplanes have you even seen in this town?”

Plenty of folks looked as if they had money in their pockets. Many faces held a spark of longing and curiosity. Henry spied a man in a nice suit and starched collar standing with an equally starched and knickers-clad boy of about twelve. Alongside them was a girl a year or so younger than the boy. Her dress, shoes, and bows would have made the Dahlgren girls jealous. The boy was pointing toward the plane, a pleading look on his face as he chattered to his father. The girl had her
hands clasped over her heart, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet so vigorously her ringlets looked like springs.

For one instant Henry was ten years old again and watching his big brother at the Harvest Festival. Henry had stood in grass so heavy with early-morning dew that it seeped through his shoes, at a time of day when most folks held on to their pennies, carefully deciding where to spend them. Peter opened the Lutheran church’s booth, whose purpose was to raise money for Christmas gifts for the children at County Home. (Ironic, when Henry now thought about how close he’d come to becoming a resident there.) Peter started talking, a smile on his face, his arms open and hands gently gesturing for people to come to him. People stopped. Inched closer. Moments later they began to hand over their pennies. Peter’s skill at gathering the crowd and separating them from their money had been so good that the medicine-show man came up and tried to convince Peter to come and travel with his show. Ma chased the man off in short order. Later, when Henry asked Peter how he’d known what to say to get people to spend their money, he’d said, “Just stay friendly and keep talking. Don’t push too hard. Watch their eyes. Everybody wants to feel like they’re doing something special. Make them think they are and you’ll get that first penny, that’s the hardest one. People follow people, money follows money; it’s a fact of life.”

From that moment on, Henry had made a game of studying people, trying to read what they were thinking, figuring how they’d react if he said or did certain things. By looking at their eyes and the way they held their bodies, he could tell if he had a chance of softening them up, or if he should just keep his head down. This became a handy tool of survival when the rules of civility were devoured by German hate . . . and then later with the Dahlgren women.

He slipped through the crowd around the Jenny, keeping the man with the two children in sight.

Less than a minute later, Henry was escorting the trio toward the plane. “Here!” Henry shouted. “Captain Gilchrist! We have our first adventurers. These children refuse to miss the chance to tell
their
children that they flew in an airplane with a war hero!”

Gil glowered. Henry hoped no one else noticed.

At least Gil managed a smile as he reached down and pulled the boy up onto the wing. Gil instructed where it was safe to step and not put a foot through the fabric, then helped the boy with the deep step-over into the front cockpit. Once the kid was seated, Gil hopped down, turned his back to the crowd, and whispered to Henry, “How’d you do it?”

“The boy flies free. The dad and daughter go together for five dollars.”

“That’s fifteen dollars’ worth of rides!” Gil hissed.

“We need to break the ice. Show folks it’s safe. What better way than seeing a parent let his kids fly? Besides, the father’s sworn to secrecy about his special deal.”

Gil’s glower returned.

“Maybe you’d rather get back up there on the wing and try to intimidate these folks into handing over their money.”

“I don’t intimidate—”

“You intimidate just by the way you stand up there with your hands on your hips. People need to be courted, not scolded.”

“I can’t buy gas if I fly people for free.”

“Oh, you’ll make money. Leave it to me.” Under his breath Henry said a prayer hoping he could deliver. “Climb in. I’ll prop the plane.”

Gil didn’t move.

“They came because they’re curious.” Henry looked over his shoulder. “Check out their eyes, the way they’re standing. We have ’em. Let’s not lose ’em.”

“There’d better be a line when I get back down here,” Gil groused as he hoisted himself up onto the wing.

Henry gave a confident grin.

After the spectacle of the Jenny lumbering airborne and people oohing and aahing as the boy waved his cap as he flew overhead, Henry went to work. When Gil landed ten minutes later, four people stood behind the man and his daughter, their five dollars each already safely in Henry’s pocket—insurance against second thoughts.

Once the boy bounced excitedly around the crowd, describing the miracle of flight and the amazing sights to be seen, ten more got in line.

Henry took the money, assisted people in and out of the Jenny, and propped the plane, cutting Gil’s time on the ground by at least half. While Gil was in the air, Henry entertained the folks with stories of dogfights and heroism (based on newspaper accounts and his own imagination). He left Gil’s name out of the stories, just in case he got wind of Henry’s exaggerations. Henry even drummed up a little business for farmer Sowers’s wife, who, in addition to refreshments, had a nice assortment of jellies, early peas, cheese, cream, milk, and fresh eggs for sale.

The line for the Jenny was still growing, as was the crowd, when Gil and Henry had to fuel the plane—another process that went much more quickly than usual with Henry helping filter the gasoline through a chamois to reduce the amount of crud that ended up in the plane’s tank. Gil was back on the ground with the empty milk can and Henry was just screwing on the plane’s gas cap when he heard the sound of a high-winding motor. Voices in the crowd started to rise.

From his perch on the wing, he saw Cora and her motorcycle cutting pell-mell across the pasture. She seemed oblivious of the flapping of the broken chain guard that downed the occasional wildflower like a scythe. Once she got in front of the crowd, she perched one knee on the seat and held her other foot out behind her, much the way Henry had seen on a poster for the circus, only those girls were wearing feathers and sparkles and were on horseback.

Cheers and whistles went up.

Gil muttered a string of curses.

Henry’s heart seized up. She was going to ruin everything.

When Cora maneuvered back onto the seat, she was close enough that Henry saw the gray fluff he’d taken for a neck scarf tucked into her jacket was actually a familiar scruffy gray face nestled just under her chin. She aimed her bike at the side of the Jenny and hunkered down, the Red Baron zeroing in on a dogfight.

Gil shouted for her to stop, spread his arms, and braced his feet, as if his body could shield the Jenny from the momentum of nearly four hundred speeding pounds of mammals and machine.

Henry shook off his stunned amazement, jumped off the wing, and rolled away from the plane.

Was she that crazy?

She sped up.

Flat out on the ground, Henry waited in stunned horror for the destruction of two machines, their owners, and one innocent mutt.

Just a few feet shy of Gil, Cora cut the handlebars and spun the motorcycle 180 degrees. The bike leaned over so far she put her foot on the ground—as if she had a chance in hell of stopping the downward momentum. Instead of slowing, she added power—an act totally against instinct and the only hope she had of keeping the machine from landing on its side and sliding out from under her. The turn complete, the bike righted, its rear tire spinning. Soil and grass clumps peppered the Jenny like hail. Henry, on his belly, received a mouthful of dirt. A rock caught his forehead, stinging like fire.

The crowd roared.

When Henry opened his eyes, Gil was on his ass, legs splayed, having stumbled backward.

Thirty feet away, Cora slid the motorcycle in a quarter turn and stopped dead, revving the engine twice before she cut the power, pulled off her leather helmet, shook out her hair, and held her fists over her head.

“A woman!”

“Have you ever . . . ?”

“Good heavens!”

“Bravo!”

“Well, I’ll be!”

“Did you see that?”

Before Henry could spit the dirt out of his mouth, Gil was up and stalking toward Cora, clumps of dirt and grass falling from him as if he’d sprung from the depths of the earth itself.

Henry scrabbled to his feet, stumbling to catch up. Gil was about to make a horrible mistake.

Gil hooked Cora by the waist and yanked her off the bike, which fell to the ground with a thud. He had her by the shoulders, nose to nose, looking ready to give her a swift shake when Henry threw his arms around both of them in what he hoped appeared to be a celebratory three-way hug (four if you counted the wriggling dog inside Cora’s jacket). He tightened his grip when Gil tried to shrug him off.

Gil growled, “You spoiled little bit—”

“Spoiled!
I
wasn’t the one who sneaked off—”

“Listen!” Henry shouted in Gil’s ear, shaking both him and Cora. “Listen! They love her!”

Murder raging in his eyes, Gil kept struggling to be shed of Henry.

“No harm done.” Henry squeezed again.

“Only to Flyboy’s overblown pride.” Cora’s body was as stiff as Gil’s.

“This is money in your pockets!” Henry said, giving them both a shake.

The dog whimpered.

Henry eased his grip—for the pup’s sake. “People love a spectacle. The more unexpected and daring the better.” Harry Houdini came to mind. “Cora’s definitely unexpected.”

“
Know who she is?”

“Pretty little thing, ain’t she?”

“Is that a dog inside her coat?”

“. . . not from around here . . .”

“A woman! How . . . how . . .” This last from a female, definitely not in the same enamored tone as the man who’d uttered the same words earlier.

Henry released them and grabbed a hand from each, spinning them around to face the crowd, keeping himself in the middle. He raised their hands over their heads and grinned victoriously.
A stunt well planned and executed.

A cheer went up.

He bent at the waist, forcing Gil and Cora to share a bow—not that Gil did much more than lower the shoulder Henry dragged down.

Then, just when Henry thought he’d saved them all, Cora chirped, “See what an asset I am to the team!”

Henry had to tighten his hold on Gil to prevent him from strangling her right there in before a hundred adoring people.

G
il spent the rest of the day in simmering silence. Dark moods made Henry edgy, always had, even when they were no particular threat to him. His natural inclination was to cajole—teachers’ frowns were appeased by generous good deeds, Ma’s anger cooled with a sweet smile and a corny little soft-shoe, Peter’s rare spates of irritation were diluted with a joke, the littlest Dahlgren girls’ foul humor nearly always succumbed to funny faces. But today Gil’s face had been so thunderous, his body so tense, Henry hadn’t even attempted to nudge him out of his mood.

As the sun set, Gil climbed into the passenger seat of the dusty Model T owned by the last customer and drove off toward town without so much as a wink or a wave—or pausing to tie down the Jenny.

Henry secured the plane, driving the stakes with heavy blows that did little to release his own frustration. Gil hadn’t welcomed Henry’s involvement in his business, but the man’s irritation had been salved by the steady flow of five-dollar bills. Cora on the other hand, well, she was nothing but pure aggravation. She had to go.

He went over to where the motorcycle leaned against a tree to remove the last remaining piece of the chain guard so no one would get cut on it. Then it hit him. He didn’t know why it hadn’t before then. That front wheel shouldn’t have been rolling at all. His pride took a lick when he saw it was straight and true as new.

“Hey, how’d you fix this wheel?”

Cora stopped unloading the knapsack she’d retrieved from the edge of the field where she’d left it before her grand entrance. “I didn’t.”

“Looks fixed to me.”

“It’s a different wheel. That tarp in the shed covered a bunch of spare parts that Jonathan kept.”

“You had a spare wheel all the time!”

She smiled sweetly and shrugged.

“We could have changed it yesterday and not broken our backs.”

Tilting her head, she said, “And Gil would have flown out of there before dark. Probably without either one of us.”

A manipulator, just as he’d thought. He shoved his hands on his hips and briefly wondered if Cora and Tilda had been in cahoots.

He knelt and checked the installation of the wheel; did she even know how to do it right? “This axle nut is loose! The whole wheel could have come off and you’d have broken your neck.”

“But I didn’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “I only had one wrench, so I did the best I could.”

“How’d you get the bent one off without some leverage?”

“It wasn’t all that tight either.”

“It’s a miracle you’re alive.”

“Jonathan used to tell me that a lot—mostly when he was trying to scare me out of running across or doing handstands on the rafters of the stable at the Hudson Valley house.”