Storming

Ten

THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON, Hitch did a good job finding reasons to stay away from Jael. But by nine o’clock, the sun had set behind the random clouds, turning the sky into a smoky haven for the rising stars—and he was starving.

He left Lilla and Rick at a neighbor’s fire and meandered back over to their own camp to see what he could find in the way of chow.

The field was dotted with twice as many campfires as last night. Planes had kept flying in all afternoon, and this was still the beginning of the week. The show itself wouldn’t start until Saturday.

Just beyond the shadow of the Jennies, Jael sat cross-legged beside a small fire, messing with one of the new spark plugs Earl had bought in town. Taos lay next to her, his chin on his crossed forelegs. Every few seconds, she’d reach over to scratch his ears.

Hitch dodged past her to Rick’s plane.

Earl looked up from wiping his hands with an oily rag. “Well, you’re sure the popular man around camp tonight, aren’t you?”

Hitch managed a noncommittal grunt and stepped onto Rick’s wing to look through the extra gear and supplies stowed in the front cockpit.

“Or could it be you’re avoiding us?” Earl asked.

“Us?”

“Yeah, me and that girl.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Maybe because you’re scared of the both of us.”

Hitch snorted a laugh and dug out some cold potatoes and cornbread left over from the night before. “Don’t flatter yourself, old buddy.” He jumped back off the wing and looked Earl in the eye. “Trust me. I am not about to lose my plane to Livingstone.”

Earl shook his head. “What about that girl? You’ve dragged her into this now too.”

“It was more or less the other way around.” He turned to watch her silhouette against the fire. “She was lost and scared. What was I supposed to do? Somebody did light her ’chute on fire last night.”

“Well, then.” Earl still didn’t sound entirely convinced on that point. “Maybe staying out here in the open like this isn’t exactly the right thing to be doing with her. Not that I’m complaining. She’s a nice little thing. Tad strange in the head maybe, but nice.”

Hitch turned back. “Wait until she wallops you in the shins a couple of times.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“I’m not about to just throw her out, if that’s what you mean. But folks who don’t pull their weight around here don’t eat.”

“She knows what’s what with engines.” Earl nodded toward Hitch’s plane. “Don’t think she’s ever seen a Hisso before, but she picked it up quick when I showed her.”

Earl passed out compliments about as often as J.W. sent Matthew birthday presents.

Hitch stopped chewing. “Well.”

“And here’s something else.” Earl stepped nearer and dropped his voice a shade. “She was talking about seeing ‘ground people’ fighting, killing each other in holes in the earth. Thousands of them, she said.”

“The war?” Back when America had gotten into it three years ago, Hitch had given some thought to signing up as a pilot. Between experimenting with a new plane design, a fling with a girl in San Diego, and a busted arm, it hadn’t happened. But he’d seen the photographs of the wasted battlefields furrowed with trenches.

Earl shrugged. “She talks like a foreigner. Maybe she’s from over there. It’s only been two years. She might have seen all that up close.”

Or looked down on it from the sky. Hitch shook the idea away. Nope. No matter what she said, no fighter pilot in his right mind would have taken her up there.

“You’ve got no idea where she’s from?” Earl asked.

“She doesn’t seem to like talking about it. And what she does say doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why don’t you go have a word with her. You’re about the only person she knows here. Give her a tater, tell her things’ll be fine.”

“Ah-ha.” Hitch grinned. “You do believe it’ll all turn out.”

“Hmph. What I believe is that the good Lord winks at the occasional well-intentioned lie.”

Hitch left it at that and made his way over to the campfire. Taos raised his head and curled his tongue in a yawn. Speaking of crew who didn’t earn their keep.

Hitch flipped him a wedge of cornbread anyway.

Without turning her head, Jael shot him half a glance. She kept right on working on the spark plug.

He held up a potato. “Hungry?” Lilla had boiled them last night, so they were already soft under their papery skins.

She kept her chin tucked and shook her head.

He ducked his head, trying to catch her eye.

Around her neck, the chain from that crazy pendant glinted. He wasn’t about to ask about that right now.

In this light and this mood, she seemed a different person. The wild woman was gone, for the moment anyway. But maybe that had all been nerves. Getting lit on fire last night would be enough to shake up anybody.

And she did have guts aplenty. She’d been scared when she went after him at the Berringers’, and then the boys at the cafe, and then Livingstone—but she hadn’t cowered or whimpered. She’d flung herself right in their faces, and by the time she was done, darned if they all hadn’t been a little bit more wary of her than she was of them.

He crouched near her. “C’mon, I know you’re hungry. We never got a chance to eat those cheese sandwiches earlier.” He wiggled the potato. “Trade you?”

She raised her chin and looked at him square. Her eyes charted his face, like she was searching for something. And maybe she found it.

The corner of her mouth lifted. “Tonk you. For earlier. I have sorrow for giving hurt to your leg.”

“Ah well, shinbones of steel, don’t you know?”

“You were right in what you said. You are not—none of you are not—what I am all my life thinking Groundsmen are like.” She offered the spark plug.

He gave her his most charming smile and handed over the potato and a good-sized chunk of cornbread. “Afraid that’s all the dinner we’ve got to offer right now.”

“No, this is very much.”

“Then you must not be in the habit of eating too good.”

She shrugged without looking up from the cornbread. “Some do.”

“But not you?”

“On bottom is where I am living.”

“Earl says you’re pretty good with engines. How’d that come to be?”

“Engines”—she pronounced it ennjuns_—“are my work. Not like your engines.” She held her hands far apart. “_Bolshoe, and slower. But same still.”

Big, slow engines. From something like a Sopwith Rhino triplane bomber maybe?

“They let you work on engines?” No matter how good she was, a female mechanic wasn’t exactly most pilots’ first choice. “You’re in charge of them?”

“No, they are not allowing.” She smiled, a bit sadly. “It is secret. I am having no family, not since long ago. So I am _nikto_—having no place. All through my life, I help Nestor with engines.” She looked down at her potato. “But he is _merviy_—dead.”

“What happened to him?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “He… was owning thing that is having importance. Someone had desire for it.”

Meaning the “sky people” had killed him? Skepticism washed over Hitch, but then an image flashed through his mind: the falling body Scottie had talked about.

“I’m… sorry.” He eased back to sit and propped one knee in front of him. “And how’d you end up here?”

“Was mistake.”

“Your mistake… or somebody else’s?”

“I took the…” She mimed putting on a harness, then made an exploding motion with her hands.

“The parachute.”

Another shrug. “I had to go away from there. Before time had all vanished. The ball gown was a—how do you say?—a mask, but for whole body?”

“A disguise?”

“That. Because Zlo—he has celebration for what he has done.” The lines around her mouth tightened. “He has thoughts that he has won.”

“Zlo? That’s the guy who lit you on fire?”

She tucked her chin in a nod.

“And what was it he did that was worth celebrating?”

“He changed everything.” She blew out a deep breath. “Um, your word for it, I have no knowledge for. But he is—” She made a pushing motion with both hands, then glanced at him to see if he understood.

“He pushed you? Lucky thing you had your ’chute already on.”

“And I—” She added a pulling gesture.

“Ah.” That explained why they’d been hanging onto one another before their canopies opened last night. “And you’re sure he survived the fall too? He’s the one you saw in town?”

She nodded.

None of this made a lick of sense. They were having a party up in the sky someplace, so she put on an old-fashioned dress to escape notice—and then ran away with a parachute, only to be tackled and sent hurtling through the night? If Earl had thought last night’s story was crazy, this one plumb ran away with the farmer’s daughter.

“Well, that’s not so good,” he said carefully. “Why’d he push you?”

Her face stilled, and she pulled back, retreating into her secrets once more.

For a few minutes, they ate without talking. Taos edged closer and propped his chin on Hitch’s leg. His eyes followed the food from Hitch’s hand to his mouth. Hitch fed him a few crumbs off his fingertips.

Jael broke the silence with a soft laugh. “I have not seen this—what you call this animal?”

“You’ve never seen a dog?”

“No.”

Where did someone spend her whole life without ever seeing a dog?

“I had small, very small animal.” She cupped her hands. “Much hair, long tail. His name was Meesh.”

“A mouse?” he guessed.

She shrugged again. She looked at the fire, then back at him. “I am also having sorrow for what I did to man with mouth hair. If I gave trouble to you, I am having sorrow.”

“Yeah, well.” He fed Taos the last potato skin. “If you gotta give trouble to somebody, might as well give it to me. I should know what to do with it if anybody does. What happened with Livingstone this afternoon was more my fault than yours.”

“And this custody he said? He will not do this to you?”

He stood up and dusted off his pants. “Oh, I doubt it. Unless he gets his dander up again.”

“But you have brother who will help?” She stared up at him. “The man with orange phosphate and cheese sandwich—he said you have good brother who is deputy? This is custody man, yes?”

“Oh, Griff. First I’d heard of that. To be honest, I don’t much like it.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Despite what folks think, I know for a fact the law around here isn’t exactly… Well, the sheriff ain’t a custodian, let’s just say that.”

“Would they do custody to Zlo?”

He looked down at her. “Griff would.” Unless Campbell had gotten to him, changed him.

Hitch looked west, to where his family’s farm lay a few miles off. Like enough, Griff was still living there, though he could be married with little ones, for all Hitch knew.

He needed to talk to Griff now, before any more time passed. Seeing him wouldn’t get any easier, and it might get a whole lot harder.

So much water had flowed under that bridge. When he’d left, Griff had been a skinny twenty-year-old kid, still working the fields beside their daddy. He’d always looked up to Hitch, always backed him—and, in that quiet, intense way of his, always seemed aggravatingly intent on reforming him.

He’d be a man now—and he’d have become that man without Hitch’s influence. It was a strange thought. His kid brother had been making all his own decisions for almost a decade now. And somewhere along the way, one of those decisions had been to send Hitch a letter saying he never wanted to see him again.

And then Griff had apparently made the marvelously intelligent choice to go to work for the one man in this town Hitch would have warned him to stay away from.

Hitch rubbed his shoulder; it got stiff sometimes on account of the crash that had kept him out of the war. “Reckon maybe I’ll walk on over there tonight.” He was stalling, and he knew it. He glanced at Jael.

She had picked the spark plug back up, but she was watching him. “Tonk you.”

He looked away, suddenly embarrassed. “You don’t have to keep saying that. I really haven’t done anything.”

“You have been giving me help. You have been giving me”—she held up what was left of her cornbread—“what this is. In morning, I must go. I must go where Zlo cannot look for me.”

“Yeah, well.”

That probably was her best choice. Like Earl said, she was mightily out in the open here in camp. And the kind of chaos she seemed to trail in her wake wasn’t exactly the sort he was equipped to handle, especially with Rick on the prod like he’d been here lately.

Trouble was she’d still be a sitting duck wherever she went. No job, no place to stay, no friends. And it wasn’t just the language she had trouble with. There was also the little matter of basic, everyday social conventions.

“Look,” he said. “You don’t have to go just yet.” He slapped his leg to Taos. “If they can find this guy and put him in jail, then after that, it should be safe enough for you to go find your folks again.”

A flicker of something kind of like hope passed across her face and almost—but not quite—dispelled the doubt.

He took a breath. “I’ll ask Griff about it.” He started walking before he could let himself change his mind.

*

Hitch wandered up the familiar dirt road, listening to the tree-lined creek that bordered it on the one side. He came around the bend into view of the single-story farmhouse he’d grown up in. Hardly anything had changed. Same white curtains, gone yellow after his mother’s death. Same willow rocking chairs on either side of the door. Same sag in the bottommost porch step.

Lights shone from the kitchen window, so somebody was home. When he reached the black Chevrolet Baby Grand roadster parked in front of the porch, dogs started barking. He stopped at the base of the steps and waited, Taos alert at his side. His heart was thumping harder than it had any right to. He hooked his hands into his suspenders, then put them in his pants pockets instead.

Inside the kitchen, a shadow moved against the curtains, and a voice quieted the dogs. A man’s silhouette darkened the screen door, his face hidden in the shadows.

Hitch’s mouth went dry.

The screen door creaked open, and there was Griff.

“So,” his brother said. The dim light shone against the side of his face. “I’d heard you were back.”

“Hullo, Griff.”

Griff came forward and let the door bang behind him. The skinny kid was indeed gone. His shoulders had broadened, his voice had gotten a little deeper, and, beneath his rolled-up sleeves, his forearms were hard with muscle. Hitch had always favored their father, with his dark curly hair; Griff had gotten their mother’s tawny coloring and that sideways slip of the mouth that could telegraph either happiness or anger.

Right now, it looked like anger.

Quite a few words started running through Hitch’s head. Words like: I’m sorry. I missed you. I should have come back. But none of them quite wanted to surface.

Better to start with business, feel out the water, then see what happened.

He cleared his throat. “Got a problem I thought you could help me with—”

“Nan came by,” Griff said. “Told me you’d flown in for this big air circus.” His tone was tight.

Great. Hitch might not have any of the right words for this. But anything he could say right now would have been a better way to start this reunion than whatever Nan’d had to say. She was scared of something having to do with Hitch, and folks who were scared didn’t always say the most helpful things.

Nothing for it now. He took a breath. Should have started with this anyway.

“I got your letter.” He left his hands anchored in his pockets to keep from uselessly moving them. “It’s been awhile back.”

Griff looked him in the eye. He had always been mild-mannered enough, gentle even. He was the one who took care of the orphaned kittens and calves. He was the follower; Hitch was the leader.

But right now, every muscle in Griff’s body was cinched tight. His cheek churned. “Apparently, it was far enough back for you to forget what it said.” He looked ready to pop Hitch one if he came a few steps closer.

Hitch kept his ground. “I know what it said. I thought maybe it was time to come back anyway.”

“You’re really going to stand there and tell me that? After nine years?”

Hitch dropped his hands from his pockets. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“Was a time when people around here needed you.” Griff came forward, the porch creaking under him. “But you weren’t here, and it was pretty clear you had no intention of being here any time soon. So guess what? People moved on. I’ve no doubt that’s hard for you to believe, seeing as you always thought life revolved around you, but that’s what happened. Life moved on.”

A bitter taste rose in the back of Hitch’s throat. He’d been prepared for the anger. He could overcome anger, given enough time. But this was something else again. This was a door, barring him from his own past, from childhood memories, from the only true family he had left.

And like enough, it was his own fault. He’d let people down, no question about that.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “If I could have, I would have come back.”

Griff huffed and shook his head.

“I figured you and Pop had each other. Then when I got word he’d died, so much time had passed. And then… I got your letter.”

“You don’t see it, do you, Hitch? You never have.” Griff turned to the house. “You can’t just dance back in here and expect everything to be how it was. There’s penance to be paid, I reckon.”

If Griff thought staying away from home for nine years had been nothing but larks and laughter, then he didn’t understand penance. Hitch might not have wanted to stay in Scottsbluff. But it didn’t mean he’d never wanted to come back. Likely, he would have come back, if it hadn’t been for the sheriff.

His stomach cramped up. “So I hear you’re working for Campbell now?”

Griff looked back. His frown tilted sideways. “Is that what this visit’s for? I heard about the disturbances at Dan’s cafe and the pilots’ camp. If people want to press charges, don’t expect me to interfere on your account. There’s more important things going on in this town—”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why?”

Hitch cleared his throat. “Don’t tell me you haven’t figured out what Campbell is by now—behind all that strength and benevolence and ‘what’s right for the town’ talk? Once he gets his hooks in you, it’s not so easy getting them out.”

Griff held Hitch’s gaze for a moment, then leaned back. “Bill Campbell hasn’t got his hooks in me. And I know exactly what he is.”

“Then why work for him?”

“Maybe because I know what he is. You can’t solve a problem by walking away from it, can you?”

Then Griff wasn’t an idiot or a dupe. Hitch should have known better on that one.

Even still, the one thing Griff didn’t understand here was that there were some problems that could only be solved by walking away. Griff wouldn’t be standing on that porch if Hitch hadn’t done as Campbell dictated and walked away. Their daddy wouldn’t be buried on his own farm if Hitch had stayed.

The explanation for that stuck in his throat. Whether or not he’d left because he had to didn’t change any of the accusations Griff was leveling at him. He could have snuck back for the funerals. He could have written. He could have explained.

But he hadn’t. Because there had been that part of him—under the surface, where he didn’t look at it—that had been plenty happy to go. He’d left the earth and entered the sky. In so many ways, he had gotten exactly what he wanted. And he’d never looked back.

Too late for explanations now.

He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “what I’m here for right now is a good lawman. Guess we both know that isn’t Campbell.”

For just one second, Griff looked like the earnest kid he used to be—eager to help, eager to impress his big brother. Then his face hardened again. “Is it trouble you found waiting for you here, or did you bring it with you?”

“Not my trouble at all. There’s a girl I ran into last night. She’s… not from around here. Doesn’t hardly speak English. But she thinks some mug is after her. She’s pretty worked up over it. Says his name’s Zlo. She thought she saw him in town this afternoon.”

Griff frowned. “Not much I can do unless he actually attempts a crime.”

“I’ve been hearing about these bodies you’ve found around town. This guy Zlo might be tied up with them.”

Griff’s stance stiffened. “And what makes you think that?”

“Just a hunch, let’s say.”

They stood in silence. From somewhere under the porch, crickets sang. The breeze, still hot, carried the sweet smell of tall alfalfa.

“So was that it?” Griff asked.

No, not by a long shot. It was supposed to be reconciliation, maybe even forgiveness. Out of all the people he’d left, his brother was the one he loved the most. More than Celia, more than his father. Hitch had never really believed Griff’s letter. No matter how stupid the scrapes Hitch had gotten the two of them into while they were growing up, Griff had always forgiven him. Could Griff really have learned to hate him somewhere in that long stretch of time?

“It doesn’t have to be it,” Hitch said. “I’m here now, and I’m sorry for messing things up. We could let the past stay in the past.”

“It’s not the past I’m worried about.” Griff’s tone was cool. “It’s the fact it’ll happen again if I give you half a chance. If I could, I’d throw you right out of the county.”

“Right.” That was all Hitch could manage to say.

Griff retreated to the screen door and screeched it open. “This isn’t your home anymore, Hitch. You lost the right to call it that when you left us.”

That truth was a fist in Hitch’s gut. Because the truth was: Griff was right.