Storming

Two

HITCH NURSED HIS ship back to the airfield north of town. It wasn’t really an airfield, just an empty hayfield some farmer had been talked into renting out for the duration of the show. But even this early in the week, pilots and performers were coming in from all over. He and his crew hadn’t been the first to arrive, and they wouldn’t be the last.

Col. Bonney Livingstone and His Extravagant Flying Circus was one of the biggest in the business. The shows he put on were tremendous spectacles compared to the little hops Hitch was doing. With a dozen planes and twice as many pilots, parachutists, and wing walkers, Livingstone was able to haul in huge crowds and pay out even better purses. More than a few pilots’ ears had perked up when word had gotten around about the big competition Livingstone was staging in Nebraska’s western panhandle.

Below, bonfires speckled the field, bouncing light off the tethered planes. Hitch banked gently and swung around for a landing. As he pulled to a stop at the end of the strip, the sound of singing and the pluck of guitars drifted over. From beside the nearest fire, Lilla Malone waved at him.

He climbed out, snapped his fingers at Taos, and walked over to where his crew lounged around their fire.

“Howdy, handsome,” Lilla said—more to Taos than to him.

He’d found Lilla in Denver some eighteen months back. She wasn’t exactly part of the show, since he would hardly risk her out on the wings or in a parachute, even if it ever dawned on her to volunteer. But it was handy to have an extra person to drive Rick’s car, which he insisted on dragging around from stop to stop. More important, she was as pretty as they came, in a bouncy, sloe-eyed way. Her job was to ride in the front cockpit, waving and smiling, when they buzzed the towns for customers. Then later on, she’d hold the sign, take admissions, and convince folks that if she could survive in that rattling flying contraption, it must be safe.

She pushed up from her seat on a blanket, knee-walked over to Taos, and hauled him halfway into her lap. He licked the underside of her chin, and she leaned back, giggling. “You missed all the fun. We’ve already had a dance and an arm wrestling match.”

“Which you won, I hope.”

She looked confused. “I just watched and cheered. But Rick almost won.”

On the other side of the fire, Rick Holmes balanced a tin plate of boiled potatoes and cornbread on one knee. “The reprobate cheated.” He rubbed his right biceps.

“Sure he did,” Hitch said. “Only way you could have lost. Now where’s Earl?”

“Why?” Rick narrowed his eyes. “You haven’t already demolished that new Hisso, have you? I heard it protesting when you flew over.”

“Ran into a little difficulty.” If you could call a hail of bodies little.

“I warned you not to take it out at night.”

“Gimme a break. I could fly our whole routine blindfolded, much less on a moon-bright night. Had to make sure everything was running smooth before you try that high-altitude jump for Livingstone.”

Rick looked him in the eye. “If you mean you would also probably have demolished the engine at high noon, that’s no doubt true.”

Rick was a bit of a dapper dude, in his pressed pants and embroidered suspenders. He’d greased his dark hair back, widening his forehead in comparison to his chin.

He smirked at Lilla across the fire. “Too much power for our esteemed employer.”

She glanced at Hitch, eyebrows up. She’d never been too fluent in sarcasm.

Hitch gave his head a shake. “Where’s Earl anyway? Crazy stuff just happened.”

“Oh, indeed,” Rick said. “Please tell me it involved discovering a pirate’s buried cache. Because the only bit of news I would be interested in right now is that I’m about to receive the wages you’ve been promising for the last six months.”

Lilla clucked. “Did you forget, darling? He’s told us over and over we’re all going to get paid after we win this show.”

“And if we fail to win the show? Then what?” Again, he directed a flat gaze at Hitch. “The skills I bring to this show are already worth twice what I’m supposed to be receiving in remuneration.”

Hitch stopped looking around for his mechanic and turned to face Rick down. “We’re going to win this one.”

“Certainly. Win with two planes, one parachute, no wing walkers, and a demolished engine. Once again, your business acumen astounds me.”

Hitch swallowed a growl. “How many times we going to have to go over this?”

“Yes, please, don’t fight,” Lilla said. “It’s all right. We trust Hitch, don’t we, darling?”

“Don’t we though.”

“If he says everything’s going to be fine, I know it’s true.” She dazzled Hitch with one of her smiles. “Right?”

Sometimes he blessed her for her blind faith. Other times, it turned his stomach inside out with panic. Lord knew owning his own circus was all he thought about when he was lying awake at night, staring up at the underside of his plane’s wing. Part of his reason for wanting that was so he’d be able to take care of his people. These days, they were just about the only family that would claim him, and he would do whatever he had to do to keep them afloat.

But sometimes the knowledge that they were all depending on him clenched inside of him and made him want to whistle to Taos, jump back into the Jenny, and take off into the blue yonder all by himself. He needed their help if he was going to build a circus like Livingstone’s, but the more people he had to take care of, the less free this life of his started feeling.

He made himself nod to her. “Never starved yet, have we?”

Rick clanked his plate onto the ground. “It’s been a narrow margin.” He rose from his crouch and brushed past Hitch. “If we don’t finish choreographing this sensational new act before the colonel arrives, we’re routed even if Earl is able to repair that wreck of yours again.”

Hitch watched him go.

“It’s all right.” Lilla retrieved Rick’s plate and offered it to Hitch. They couldn’t afford to let the food go to waste right now. “Rick’s upset because he says we don’t have enough money to get married yet.”

To that, Hitch could only grunt. Lilla, bless her loyal heart, hadn’t been gifted with the most capacious of upstairs accommodations. Still, he hadn’t known how truly cramped they were until she’d fallen for Rick.

Rick flew the other Jenny and did parachute drops. He’d been with Hitch for almost a year, which was almost a year too long for anybody to have to deal with an ego that outsized.

The whole thing had worked—barely, but it had worked—until a competition last month in Oklahoma when Rick had announced, in front of half a dozen other pilots, that he’d been the first man to do a successful handkerchief pickup. That, of course, was downright hogwash. The trick—of flying low over a pole and using a hook attached to the bottom wing to snag a handkerchief off the top—had been around a whole lot longer than Rick Holmes.

Without thinking, Hitch had snorted a laugh and called the lie for the malarkey it was. Rick had gotten about as red in the face as it was possible to get without exploding every single one of his blood vessels. He’d stomped off without another word—but Hitch had been hearing about it ever since. Rick wasn’t about to leave without getting paid, and Hitch couldn’t fire him until he had the money, but that day was coming and they both knew it.

For now though, he still needed Rick. Good pilots were hard to find these days, much less jumpers skilled enough to pull off this high-altitude stunt they were planning for the competition.

Behind him, footsteps crunched through the grass. “Well, how’d she fly? Like a dream?”

Hitch turned around. “You’re not going to believe what happened up there.”

Beneath the upturned brim of his baseball cap, Earl Harper grinned. “Won’t I though? How about that speed? Didn’t I tell you? We more than doubled the horsepower. You should be getting ninety miles an hour, maybe a climb rate of five hundred feet per minute.” He smacked his hands together. “And with that reinforced frame I gave her, you know she’ll take a whole lot of beating. Hot dog, boy. They’re going to have a hard time trouncing us this week.”

“About that…”

The shadow of a day’s worth of black whiskers froze around Earl’s grin. “About what?” He glanced at Lilla.

She turned to sit primly, knees bent, eyes studiously on the fire.

Earl looked back at Hitch. “You busted it? Tell me you haven’t already busted that beautiful, brand-new Hispano-Suiza?”

This was where it got tricky. Hitch paid for the planes. Hitch flew the planes. But once Earl got under the hood of anything with oil running through its veins, he thought it belonged to him.

Hitch held out both hands. “Okay, look, I didn’t bust it. But there was this woman—”

“Lilla?”

“No, not Lilla…”

Earl lowered his chin. He looked like a bulldog, thick all over and more than a little rumpled. “That’s what this is all about? I told you to wait until morning to take it out, but, no, it had to be tonight.” He turned around and talked to the darkness, both arms raised. “He wants to fly back to his hometown after nine years, he says. He wants to take the new engine out at night, he says. It’s all perfectly innocent, he says.” He turned back and prodded Hitch in the chest. “I thought you were done with the dames in this town!”

Lilla turned her head. “You have a girl?”

“She’s not my girl!” Hitch said. “She plummets out of the sky, ’bout smacks me out of the air, turns into a fireball, then falls into some lake I’ve never even seen before.”

Lilla sighed like it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. “Ohhhh.”

Earl just stared.

Hitch waited. It was a good story. Better than his big wreck out in California, better than the guy who’d had to chase his unpiloted Jenny around the airfield until he could finally sever her fuel line with a shotgun, even better than that crazy Navajo who had dreamed up the stunt of hanging by his hair from the landing gear.

Earl tipped back his head and bellowed a laugh.

Hitch huffed. “C’mon.”

When Earl finally wiped away the tears, he slapped Hitch’s shoulder. “Where do you come up with this stuff?” He shook his head and started toward the Jenny.

Hitch strode after him. “I didn’t come up with it. It happened. I’m flying along, and the next thing I know bam! Here are these two jumpers, right in front of my prop. And if that’s not enough, the girl’s wearing a cotton-picking evening gown—or, you know, one of those great big dresses your grandmother would have worn.”

“Sure she did. And where’d she fall from? The moon?”

“Now, there, right there, that’s what you should’ve asked in the first place. That’s the question. I’ve been over and over it in my mind. Mine was the only plane out there, I’m sure of it.”

Next to the Jenny, Earl pulled a flashlight out of his jumpsuit pocket and shone it on the engine.

Hitch stood over his shoulder. “And then the other jumper—he was a man, and a crazy lunatic, I might add—he starts shooting flares. Three of ’em.”

The guy must have been reloading the second two by the light of their predecessors. You’d have to be pretty handy to manage that while hanging from a parachute in the middle of the night.

“One of them hit her, and another one caught the exhaust. I’m still trying to figure which he was aiming at and which was an accident. If it was some sabotage job, it’s the most mixed-up thing I’ve ever seen.”

Earl walked around to the plane’s other side and shone the light into the exhaust stack. “Dagnabbit, Hitch. You can’t fly this ship now! Why do you have to go and do these crazy things?”

“You think I’m going to do anything to endanger the plane or the engine right now, with everything we’ve got riding on this?”

Earl ducked under the plane and crossed back over to Hitch. “Look. I know you’re trying to do your best here—for all of us. But this is no time to be going crazy.”

“If we’re going to win, we need to be faster and crazier than anything any of these people around here have ever seen.”

“You keep busting up your bird and you can be as fast and crazy as you want, but it ain’t getting you off the ground.”

Earl had been with Hitch longer than anybody—going on six years now. They’d hooked up during a stopover in a little Texas town, where they’d gotten falling down drunk. By the time they emerged from their hangovers, Earl had somehow become the first member of Hitch’s little flying family.

Earl got distracted by experiments too often to be the best mechanic running, but he was as true blue as they came. Every month or so, he’d start talking about leaving the circus to settle down somewhere, but it was just talk. Earl wouldn’t leave, not as long as he reckoned Hitch needed somebody around to keep him from pitching head on into trouble.

That was why Earl, of all people, should know when Hitch was yarning and when he was dead serious.

Hitch leveled a stare at him. “You don’t believe me.”

Earl waggled the flashlight. “Do I believe some parachutist in my grandma’s dress jumped out of the night sky and blew up in a ball of fire? No.”

A wave of disappointment poked Hitch in the gut. He propped his hands on his hips and hung his head back.

Earl sighed. “Now I know this town ain’t where you want to be right now. A bad marriage and a dead wife—that’s not something any of us want to come back to.”

That history was long, long over. But Hitch’s stomach still rolled over on itself.

“Something must have been out there, because something sure hit your engine, I’ll grant you that. But it was dark and you were going fast.” A grin pulled at the corner of Earl’s mouth. “Faster than you’ve ever gone before in this heap. You got the jitters? Fine. Maybe you were even sleepy. We pulled some mighty long hours trying to get here on time.”

Had he been drifting off? Hitch thought back. What had he been thinking about before the parachutes appeared in front of him? He’d had a lot on his mind, that was sure. If he hadn’t needed to be in Livingstone’s competition so badly, coming back home would have been way down on his list of priorities. With any luck, he wouldn’t run into too many folks he knew from before. Most of them—including Celia’s sister and his own brother—wouldn’t be too excited to see him. And there were a few he wasn’t too excited about seeing himself—mainly Sheriff Bill Campbell.

That’s what he’d been thinking. No dozing about it.

And then it happened, in a blur of adrenaline. His memory wasn’t giving him too many clear pictures, just general blasts of color. But he was sure. You didn’t just imagine a girl in a ball gown plummeting out of the night sky.

He rubbed his hand through the short ends of his curly hair. “If I say I’m sure, I don’t suppose that’ll get you to stop looking at me like I belong in the nuthouse?”

Earl snorted. “That ain’t likely any day of the week. Not the way you fly.”

Hitch looked at the plane, then back at Earl. “Can you fix it?”

“’Course I can fix it.”

“Can you fix it in time?”

Earl put on his grumpy face. “Why is it always up to me to work the miracles around here?”

“Because you’re the only smart one of the bunch.”

“You know I’m going to need some money for supplies.”

“Money I haven’t got.” Hitch chewed his lip. “Maybe somebody in town will have a quickie odd job. Or… I could sell something.”

“And what have you got that’s worth selling?”

He mentally rooted through his rucksack. “My old Colt .45 maybe. It’s still in good shape. Somebody might give me more than a couple bucks for it.”

“Better hope so.” Earl hesitated. “And maybe we can take Rick’s car and drive out to the lake, see if we can find any traces of these folks. You’re pretty sure they’re not hurt?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. They walked off just fine. They didn’t much want to meet up with me.” And he didn’t blame them. “I just can’t quite figure where they came from.”

Earl clicked off his flashlight. “Same place all jumpers jump from. No mystery there.”

Hitch stayed where he was and looked up at the moon. Seemed like the old girl was winking at him. Might it be she knew something they didn’t? What secrets did she hold within all that silence?