“Mattie...” Her name came out as a plea—one she clearly didn’t want to hear. “Please reconsider.”
Mattie shoved her finger into his chest. “I won’t, Leo. And when I’m Miss Modernity and you’re Mr.Yesteryear, I am going to thrash you just like I said I would when Vera first hired us.”
Leo reached for her, but she whirled from his grasp. And then she left him. Alone. With his old memories and new fears.
Chapter Nine
The warm summer sun beat down on the farmer’s field in Southern Michigan. The intense rays glinted off the nearby river, making the water look like a molten strand of silver as it cut through the land dotted with grazing cows. Sticky humidity saturated the air, intensifying the cloying smell of cotton candy and popcorn. Not even a single puffy cloud offered relief. Yet instead of seeking the shelter of the trees dotting the bank, a huge throng of over a hundred crowded on the dry, heat-drenched grass. They’d laid blankets on the ground, and more than one family had brought a basketful of cold fried chicken. The greasy odor mixed with the scent of butter and sugar that hung in the atmosphere.
As Mattie’s and Carrie’s biplanes zoomed overhead, the spectators shielded their eyes, not wanting to miss a single stunt. A few of the younger set had donned round, newfangled sunglasses, the dark lenses giving them a chic appearance as they gazed skyward. In contrast, some of the older women had dug out their broad-brimmed hats from a decade before. The out-of-vogue headgear afforded more protection from the sun than the now-popular tight-fitting cloches. The men in flatcaps and panamas fared better than those in fedoras and straw skimmer hats.
Yet despite the oppressive heat, no one seemed to register their own discomfort, at least as far as Leo could tell. It was as if the audience members had somehow left their sweltering seats on the brownsunbaked grass and joined the female pilots in the cool heights of the air. People always had the same spellbound reactions. It didn’t matter whether a flying circus performed in the desert towns of the Southwest, the wide-open sweeping Great Plains, or the quaint little villages of New England. Folks always reacted with the same wonder, even if their excited words were tinged with the hodgepodge of different dialects that made up the States.
Leo didn’t often observe the crowds. As the McAdamses’ star performer, he’d had the most airtime, and he’d also stayed hidden until it was his turn to burst onto the scene. But Leo found he liked watching the people and their animated, upturned faces. He stood off to the side, shaded by the trees lining the steep gulch that plunged downward to meet the winding river. He wasn’t quite part of the throng, but he wasn’t thousands of feet above them either.
Vera’s sequin-covered head appeared first from Mattie’s Jenny. The shiny red slivers of metal caught the light perfectly and made her cap look like a blazing scarlet ball. She leaned far out of her seat, waving to the crowd. Mattie was flying the plane so low that Leo could even make out the brilliant cherry of the flapper’s unusual bespoke fingernail polish. The breeze caught the dyed ostrich feathers tucked into the folds of her head covering, and the fuzzy tendrils fluttered madly in the wind, as dramatic and unrestrained as their wearer.
Vera climbed onto the wing of the aircraft like a fairy-tale princess descending from her coach to a plush red carpet. Instead of a long, puffy ball gown, the heiress wore a tight-fitting leotard glittering with cherry-red sequins. Her only wink at propriety was the flounces at the bottom of the garment and her dark stockings. Although circus performers had worn such revealing attire for years, it was another thing to see the long legs of a wealthy society darling. The outfit might have looked garish if Vera hadn’t worn it with such brazen boldness, challenging anyone to call her tawdry.
Sharp whistles from the men rent the air as some doffed their caps and waved them over their heads. The younger women clapped and hollered. Leo detected clucks of disapproval from the broad-brimmed-hat-wearing matrons, but he noticed none of them rose to stomp off in a huff. They all wanted a performance, and Vera was going to give them one. Society rules be damned.
In a blazing stream of red, the flapper twirled her body through the wooden struts and wires supporting the wing structure. While the crowd watched Vera’s flashy acrobatics, Leo kept his attention on Mattie. She flew with such technical precision that awe swelled in Leo’s chest and caught in his throat. Despite the fact that one wing now held over a hundred pounds of extra, always-shifting weight, Mattie kept the old trainer balanced.
She buzzed low enough that every now and again he caught a glimpse of her broad smile. Her engines drowned out any sound, but Leo knew she was laughing and whooping in equal measure.
Another cheer and gasp arose as Alice stepped onto the green wing of Carrie’s Jenny. Her sparkling outfit was identical to her cousin’s except for its turquoise color and the peacock feathers. She grabbed onto one of the ropes and spun her body around it like a wooden button on a string.
Clapping, yells, and more whistles filled the air, but Leo paid attention to the pilot. Like Mattie, Carrie controlled her craft beautifully. The wing barely even dipped as Alice tumbled and whirled.
With the audience energized, the two pilots withdrew farther across the sky, strategically maneuvering their aircraft to hide the movements of the daredevils on their wings. Leo watched with his arms folded over his chest as the throng collectively leaned forward. Some members even stood up, as if it would garner them a better view.
It didn’t. Both aviators knew how to flawlessly position their planes, and they allowed not a single peep of their intrepid passengers. Tension built, so thick it practically rolled from the crowd like a palpable fog.
Without warning, the planes simultaneously swerved so that they flew side by side, their noses pointed straight toward the crowd. Vera and Alice dangled upside down from the sturdy trapeze bars that hung from one wing of each plane.
Their legs draped over the trapeze bars, each cousin reached up and grabbed the metal tube with one hand while releasing a foot. Then, buzzing a thousand feet in the air, they each stretched out their free arm and leg, making their bodies into vertical slashes, heedless of the wind buffeting them. They did not move quickly, but they didn’t need kinetic energy to impress.
“They’re magnificent, aren’t they?”
Leo turned at the deep voice to find Alice’s husband, John, standing beside him. Leo had been so focused on the aerial stunts that he hadn’t even heard the other man’s approach. Leo had begun to bob his head in agreement, but now that he knew the speaker of the question, he froze.
An entirely new wonder now held Leo in its thrall. John was... relaxed. His hands were jammed in his trouser pockets and his shoulders were loose as he gazed skyward, where his wife dangled a thousand feet above him byone hand and a foot. There was no net to save Alice if she fell.
The cousins proceeded to twist their free legs, wrapping them around their bodies in partial loops. Then they grabbed their feet withbothhands so that each woman’s only contact with the bar was one knee draped over the metal. It made a lovely but lethal shape.
Yet John did not tense. He didn’t lurch forward as if he could run and catch his wife in case she fell. His stance was not callous or uninterested either. He was engaged in the performance, his eyes carefully watching each move Alice made.
“How do you do it?” Leo asked before he thought better of it.
“Aerial gymnastics?” John asked absently. He spared a glance at Leo before his chin snapped back in the direction of his wife, as if it were attached to her by an invisible spring. “I suppose it isn’t so muchdifferent from your flying. You may have an engine and canvas wings, but the important thing, the lack of a safety net, is the same. Of course, that’s the mental side. On the physical, we’ve spent our lives training our bodies to perform.”
“I didn’t mean acrobatics.” Leo shifted his eyes from watching Vera and Alice to where the pilot seat of Mattie’s JN-4 was situated. At this angle and with Mattie’s head-on approach, he could not actually see her. But war had taught him the exact configuration of planes, and he had an instinct for estimating where each portion of the craft would be positioned over the next few seconds.
John followed his gaze. Although Leo doubted that the man carried the specifications of a JN-4 in his brain, the circus performer seemed to instinctually know exactly where—or ratherwho—Leo was looking at.
“I might not know you and Mattie much, but things seemed pretty stilted between you this morning. I’m assuming it has something to do with the stunts she wants to make and you thinking she’s not ready for them.” John wasn’t asking a question, just stating a fact.
Leo shoved his hand in his hair. Vera and Alice were now hanging with both hands on their respective bars, their arms fully extended, their legs stretched into splits. He had no idea how they managed to cling on when traveling at such a high velocity. But they did. If it had been Mattie dangling in the air like that, he couldn’t have handled even a simple conversation, let alone a philosophical one.
