The Flying Circus Page 4

  A prick of unease nibbled the back of Henry’s neck. She was so convincing in her feigned innocence, so skilled at her duplicity.

  Gil slid a look her way. “Barnstorming.” He explained to Mr. Fessler as he had to Henry and Cora.

  “People pay money to risk their lives like that?” Mr. Fessler asked.

  “There’s nothing that compares to how it is up there.” The tension slid from Gil’s face like melted wax; his eyes glowed as if he’d just seen the face of God. “The wind. The power. The isolation. The view. It’s like you don’t even belong to the earth anymore.” He sat there staring into space for a moment, then seemed to snap back to himself. “I’ll be happy to take you for a ride. No charge. Aviation is going to change the world.”

  “Can’t see much use for it outside of the military. Read about them planes being used for the mail. Been more mail lost in crashes than made it to its destination. Trains are trustworthy. Airplanes . . .” Mr. Fessler sat back and shook his head. “I’ll pass on the ride, but if you want to use my pasture, it’s all yours, son. I doubt you’ll get many customers around here, though.”

  “Oh, Mr. Gilchrist says they always come, Uncle!” Cora then lowered her eyes to her lap, as if she were embarrassed by her lack of restraint.

  She’d turned completely into that “young lady of breeding” who was “enthralled” with nature walks.

  He’d only ever known one girl who could change herself this convincingly.

  Ever since he’d laid eyes on that plane, an idea had been playing in Henry’s head. He needed to put more distance between himself and Delaware County. And planes travel faster than feet.

  He and Gil went to the barn for the night, Henry back in his own clothes, dry and brushed free of crusted mud. They climbed to the hayloft. Once they were settled in the silver moonlight coming through the open hayloft doors—so much for Aunt Gladys’s weather prediction—breathing the comfortingly familiar smells of alfalfa, motor oil, and animal, Henry decided to inch his way toward his new objective.

  “Does the Jenny use a battery or a magneto?” he asked.

  “Magneto. Battery adds too much weight.”

  “But there’s no crank.”

  “Sure there is. The propeller.”

  “But you’re by yourself. You set the brake first, then?”

  “There are no brakes.”

  “But”—Henry leaned up on one elbow—“it’ll run right—”

  “Oh, yeah. You spin it and get your ass out of the way.”

  “Do you use wheel chocks to keep it from moving forward?”

  “Some do. I’m fast.”

  Henry wondered how fast a man had to be to start the engine, run around the wing, and clamber up into the cockpit. “Be easier with two people I imagine.”

  “It is. But you can’t let just anybody prop it; severed body parts are bad for business.”

  Henry barked out a laugh. “I would imagine.” Here goes. “There must be a lot of upkeep on a machine like that one.”

  “Endless.”

  “You know, a good mechanic could get that OX-5 singing like a bird.”

  “I don’t make enough to pay a mechanic. I can barely feed myself.”

  “What if one would do the work for a ride to the next town?” A break in the trail. Did they have dogs after him? There’d be no way to know until he heard them barking at his heels. He’d made one scent break by walking in the river for a long, slow, ankle-turning, mud-sucking mile. But thirty miles in the air, no dog could pick up that scent again.

  I’m thinking like a guilty man.

  And he was acting like one. Guilty men always run.

  “I’ll give you a ride if you want one.”

  “I can’t take something for nothing and I don’t have any money.”

  “I told you, I’m the only one who touches her. You can help me haul gasoline out to the field when we get to Noblesville. It’ll be a fair trade. Now shut up and go to sleep. I want an early start.”

  Even before Henry could spit out his gratitude, Gil’s breathing changed. He was asleep.

  Sleep should have been easy for a man as tired as Henry. But he watched through the open doors of the hayloft as the moon tracked across the night, unable to still his mind. In a bit, Gil’s breathing grew rough. Henry heard small movements, twitching against the straw.

  Did the green-eyed monster-men of the Kaiser’s fill Gil’s dreams? Was he dodging and ducking bullets? Was he rolling his plane through skies filled with artillery fire?

  Henry had been nine years old when the war started in Europe—a place so far away that Peter, then sixteen, said it wouldn’t mean anything to the folks of Delaware County. But that’s when things in Delaware County had begun to change. Subtly at first. So subtly that Henry initially thought he’d done something, broken some rule, misbehaved in some way, to draw the nasty looks and turned backs. An invisible cold hand touched the back of his neck every time his teacher walked past his desk, it brushed his cheek when he passed someone on the sidewalk, and it gripped his heart when he sat with his head bowed in prayer in Sunday school. So he tried to be more respectful, more cheerful, more helpful.

  Things only grew worse.

  The first time some kids mocked him with fake German accents, calling him Heinrich the Hun, he finally got it. It wasn’t his fault. It was worse. And damn it, his name wasn’t even Heinrich. It was plain old American Henry.

  German hate became a national pastime after that German sub sank the Lusitania. When the United States joined in the fight, the frosty attitudes turned into flaming rage. German hate even got its own poster and slogan campaign. The one in Henry’s classroom said Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds. The Hun was a gruesome green-eyed monster of a man with a bloody bayonet and crimson-soaked fingers. Once a German, always a German. And Germans ravaged all civilization—usually starting with the women and children.

  Then someone had set fire to Wuesthoff’s Bakery—after the police had hauled Mr. Wuesthoff to jail for “disloyal utterances against the United States.”

  Henry had thought nothing like that could happen to his family. Mr. Wuesthoff acted German. He wore that stupid hat. Even after the first weeks of the war, he continued to stick little German flags in his strudels. Maybe he was a spy.

  Peter had been the one to point out the error of that thinking. “Good God, Henry, do you think he’d do any of those things if he was? He’s not stupid.”

  Spy fever caught on. The Schulers might be spies! Watch them carefully.

  It didn’t matter that the only thing to spy on where they’d lived were cornfields and cows. Wells could be poisoned. Stores of gasoline and grain burned.

  No one cared that Peter and Henry were raised as American boys. Henry didn’t even speak German. When he’d been really little, occasionally he’d heard his parents late at night talking softly to one another in a language with hard corners that didn’t lend itself to quiet whispers. It had made him feel he was being kept from a secret. But after the war started, he was glad he’d never learned the language. It made it easier to believe the Kaiser and his killer-filled country had nothing to do with him.

  What would Gil do if he discovered Henry was a German-bred Schuler and not a star-spangled Jefferson?

  He bet he’d never sit inside the man’s plane, that’s for sure.

  At some point Henry must have fallen asleep, because Gil was kicking his shoe. “It’s time.”

  As they walked toward the pasture, the sun inched over the horizon, silvering the mist that clung to the low spots and snaked in the ditch beside the road.

  “How many people do you think’ll show up today?” Henry asked.

  “None.”

  “But you said they always—”

  “There aren’t going to be any people because we’re flying out of here right now.”

&n
bsp; “What about Cora?”

  “I can’t afford to waste a day hoping a couple of farmers show up. I need to harvest a town.”

  Henry had already decided not to trust her. And the way he’d caught her looking at Gil when she thought no one was watching, as if he were the most interesting man she’d ever set eyes on, told him there could be trouble. What if she got Gil to hang around here another day that could lead to still another? A willful woman could change the course of history—the path of a man’s life was easy pickings. Henry had learned that firsthand. The sooner he and Gil and that airplane were away from here, the better. Yet, sneaking off seemed the wrong way to go about it. “She did feed us.”

  They were getting near the pasture. Traveling the distance had taken a tenth of the time it had taken last night, wrangling that motorcycle across country.

  “I’ll send her a nice thank-you note.”

  “But you said you’d give her a ride.”

  “I did not. I offered her uncle a ride. He declined. And her aunt and uncle fed us.”

  Henry couldn’t ignore his relief. “She’s gonna be mad as a wet hornet.”

  “No doubt—Oh, shit!” Gil broke into a run. “Hey!” he shouted as he leaped the wire fence. “Get away from there!”

  Henry looked across the pasture. Tilda stood eating the wing of Gil’s plane. Henry took off on Gil’s heels.

  “Shoo! Shoo!” Henry waved his arms over his head as he ran.

  “Get!” Gil swatted the air.

  Tilda finally turned their way. As Henry got closer, he’d swear he saw bored defiance in her big brown cow eyes.

  Gil thumped her hindquarters.

  She took a reluctant step away from the wing.

  Gil growled and ran his hand over the fabric.

  Henry took a step closer. The cow hadn’t been eating it exactly. More like licking it like a lollipop.

  “Why would she do that?” Henry asked.

  Gil poked at the wet spot with a finger. “Not too bad,” he muttered. “Some cows like to lick the dope on the fabric.”

  “Dope?”

  “The stuff that stretches it tight.” He flicked a finger against the dry area of the wing. It sounded like a drum. Then he did the same to the wet spot. It sounded a little duller, but still sounded solid. “The vapors will knock you on your ass when you’re putting it on. Worse than a bad drunk. Maybe it gives ’em a cow buzz. I should have stayed with her last night.”

  “Tilda?”

  “You’re a real vaudevillian.”

  Henry shrugged.

  Gil untied the ropes that kept the Jenny anchored to the earth, and Henry pulled up the stakes.

  “We’re really going without seeing her?”

  Gil didn’t pause coiling the ropes. “You’re more than welcome to stay behind, Romeo.”

  “I’m not the one she—” Henry decided to quit while he was ahead. “Where do you want these stakes?”

  Gil took them and stowed everything behind the rear cockpit. Then he climbed back to the ground with an oil can in his hands and stepped up on one of the wheels. Henry figured he was lubricating the rocker arms. Gil did the same on the other side of the engine. After that he walked around the plane, ran his hands over the propeller, checked tautness on some wires, looked at and moved the flappers on the tail and upper wings. Then he went back to the front and rotated the propeller a few times.

  Henry braced for the roar of the engine before he realized Gil hadn’t turned on the magneto switch yet. Wouldn’t that give a lot of credence to his claim of being a good mechanic if Gil had noticed?

  “If you’re coming with me, climb up into the front cockpit. Careful. Just step right there close to the fuselage or you’ll go through the wing.”

  Henry hopped to, figuring the fuselage must be what a pilot called the body of the plane. “Fasten that belt around your lap,” Gil called as he put his hand on the propeller.

  At first Henry couldn’t find a belt; then he located the two halves on the floor on each side of his seat. His stomach got a little queasy as he fastened it. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he’d be sitting where he was right now.

  Gil gave the propeller a hard pull. The engine caught in a deafening roar. The wind from the blades sucked Henry’s breath away and tried to rip the hair from his scalp.

  The plane inched forward. He located the magneto switch in his cockpit, in case he had to cut the engine before the plane ran over Gil.

  But Gil was as fast as he claimed. By the time Henry spun around to look for him, he was already stepping into the rear cockpit. He sat down, pulled on his goggles, and gave Henry a salute.

  That tiny gesture made him realize how much he missed being a part of something outside himself. It was almost as great a gift as his first flight.

  Gil throttled the engine and swung the nose toward the expanse of pasture. Before Henry could blink, they were bouncing along, gaining speed. The nose of the plane was so high that Henry couldn’t see where they were going. Gil was even lower behind him.

  “How can you see?” Henry shouted, but his words were torn away and tossed into the air.

  The plane crabbed a little sideways, giving him a glimpse of what was in front of them, and then straightened out.

  The vibration set Henry’s teeth to clattering against one another. His eyeballs shook. He slid lower in the seat and braced his arms and legs against the inside of the cockpit.

  The noise! The wind! The jouncing!

  Suddenly the bumping stopped. The noise of the wheels on the ground silenced. The vibrations changed, and Henry’s stomach slid to the tail of the airplane. For a moment he was so dizzy, he thought he was getting ready to have a fit of some sort.

  He inched his eyes up over the leather-wrapped edge of the cockpit, careful not to lean too far to the side, just in case it might throw the plane off-balance.

  Oh my God in heaven! The ground was falling away. Trees had shrunk to the size of bushes. Cows were team oxen for toy soldiers.

  He was flying. Flying!

  He sat up straighter. Now that he was looking at something outside the plane, the dizziness left him. The wires between the wings began to sing in the wind, adding to the magic of the music of the machine.

  Impossible!

  The wind buffeted him, making it hard to breath and his eyes water, but if he kept low, it wasn’t so bad.

  The road was an endless arrow shooting to the horizon, the creek a winding ribbon tucked in rounded mounds of trees. Fields were patchwork squares and rectangles in shades of green and brown.

  Gil tilted the plane to the side and Henry grabbed hold, fearing he’d tip out. What must it be like to go upside down? The plane circled and lost a little altitude. They cleared the lightning rods on the Fesslers’ barn by only thirty feet, the rooftop of the farmhouse by slightly more.

  Amazing! He was a hawk. An eagle.

  In leaving the ground, he left all of the craziness behind. Nothing could touch him, no hatred, no rumors, no law. If only it were possible to just keep flying, on and on until the land turned into ocean and back to land again. If only he could go far enough to be certain what was left behind him never caught up.

  But they didn’t fly on. Gil circled the farmhouse again. Saying thank-you and good-bye? Or taunting Cora?

  Just then she shot out the back door, her hair flowing and the hem of her robe flapping behind her. She waved her hands in the air.

  Gil waggled the wings and veered away from the Fesslers’ farm.

  Henry’s last look down at Cora made him a little sick.

  She was jumping up and down, shouting, shaking her fists. Henry didn’t need to hear her to know what she was saying.

  3

  Henry had never had the audacity to imagine he would someday fly in an airplane. Such things were for heroes and
adventurers, not orphans of poor immigrants. But last night in the hayloft, his heart had lifted and soared above the earth on slippery currents of air.

  Reality turned out to be nothing like his imaginings.

  In his mind, flying was smooth and graceful, like sliding on ice or bobbing gently on a river current. Birds sure made it look that way. But the air turned out to be unpredictable, as bumpy as the roads below in places, just trembling roughness in others. He quickly got used to the isolating noise of wind and machine and the steady vibration of the engine, which numbed his butt in short order. The jostling and jerking soon ceased to spur fear that the plane was disintegrating around him—it was nothing but stitched fabric and wood strapped behind a ninety-horsepower engine, after all.

  Even after he settled and began to understand the normal ways of the plane, his stomach still lurched when the plane fell straight out from under him. Henry knew engines well enough to know one irrefutable fact: they were unreliable. The first time his seat dropped from beneath his butt, he figured he was good as dead. The spike of desire to live had surprised him, especially after the number of times over the past two days self-pity had made him half wish he could disappear from this earth.

  After a handful of intermittent sudden drops, he realized the engine had nothing at all to do with it. It was air, all air. Once that became clear, he immersed himself in appreciating this incredible gift Gil had given him. He would never again take his first flight . . . or likely any flight at all.

  From up here with this larger-than-life view he felt detached from the earth and all of its creatures. Henry began to understand the change he’d noticed come over Gil when he’d looked over his shoulder at the man. The tightly wound tension that was ever present when he was earthbound had vanished; without the tightness around his mouth and the furrowed forehead, he could have passed for an entirely different person—a younger person. Henry wondered if the man Gil had been before the war was the one in the air, or the one on the ground.

  Henry counted every mile west as a mile banked toward safety. If only they would cross a mountain range or vast canyon, some substantial landmark to stand between him and his past. But he had to satisfy himself with counting land parcels and dots of towns as evidence he was indeed putting distance between himself and those who hunted him.