Girl Flees Circus
Girl Flees Circus
LYNN AND LYNDA MILLER SOUTHWEST FICTION SERIES
LYNN C. MILLER AND LYNDA MILLER, SERIES EDITORS
This series showcases novels, novellas, and story collections that focus on the Southwestern experience. Often underrepresented in American literature, Southwestern voices provide unique and diverse perspectives to readers exploring the region’s varied landscapes and communities. Works in the series range from traditional to experimental, with an emphasis on how the landscapes and cultures of this distinct region shape stories and situations and influence the ways in which they are told.
GIRL FLEES CIRCUS
A Novel
C. W. SMITH
University of New Mexico PressAlbuquerque
© 2022 by Charles William Smith
All rights reserved. Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8263-6407-4 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8263-6408-1 (electronic)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2022936833
Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico—Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—since time immemorial have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.
COVER ILLUSTRATION Gabrielle Hill
DESIGNED BY Mindy Basinger Hill
COMPOSED IN 11/14.5 pt Adobe Jenson Pro,
Fonseca Regular, and Mina Regular
CONTENTS
Arrival
The Guest
Repairs Begin
The Salon
Here Comes the Sheriff
Departure
Civis Aerius Sum
Afterword
Arrival
1
THE AVIATRIX’S BRAND-NEW MONIKER WAS SKIPPY BAKER. She’d dropped it on a farmer whose field she’d landed in last evening, but she’d considered others—Marvella Gold, Harriet Harley, say, or Betty, uh, Armhart? The name had to shine like a screen star’s billing but not sound made up. Tinkering with names was a pleasant pastime while she piloted the Travel Air through a clear, mild morning over stretches of West Texas. She’d never seen such open country lidded by that vast a sky, and the craft ate it up. With the railroad map spread on her lap and the twin shining rails two thousand feet below guiding her as sure as a compass, she sailed past Abilene just after noon, pleased to gain confidence in the airplane, getting to know its in-flight quirks. She knew the specs by heart—where some girls might scribe the name of a crush in diaries over and over, she sketched views of the fuselage from all angles. She admired the aircraft beyond all reason, and on this third day out the vibrations of the Wright Whirlwind 9-cylinder radial coursed through her veins like whiskey shots. Soon you’ll be a crackerjack pilot, claimed Curly, and she could remember his grin and the two thumbs up when she’d done her first solo. (All before squeezing her heart like a marshmallow in his fist.)
But those railroad tracks ran out on both the map and earth. All on the compass now. The day went hot, the air boisterous and rowdy, and the craft turned from a bird into a butterfly—no more straight ahead, steady-as-she-goes, but up and down and sideways, a leap over here and another over there like a drunken dancer, then a wave upending her nose into a stall like a boxer taking an uppercut to the chin. A sudden elevatored downdraft drop put her stomach in her throat and a fist of fear clutched her heartbeats.
And what had begun as a smudge like a bruise on the horizon now pushed rudely at her as she fought to keep the aircraft on a heading.
Uh-oh. Curly, regaling compañeros about these big burly storms out here. Like an ugly dirty iceberg in the sky, and you’ve lost your gee-dee paddle and the current’s rushing you right into it—you can’t go over ’cause it’s just too darn tall some of them 40,000 feet, and too damned pardon my French honey wide to go around, so’s yer lookin at how the bottom of that black mass seems nice and level and flat at about seven eight thousand or so and you’re figgerin on just sort of gliding under it, but what you don’t know is the updraft on those monsters can suck your little crate right up into its dark black heart and zoom you up like a scrap a paper in a whirlwind and spit you out way over whatever ceiling the specs on your craft might claim, air too darned thin to fly in or to breathe and next thing you know you’re blacking out and the little coffin that’s wrapped around you’s headed straight down, and if you’re lucky you’ll wake up soon enough to pull out and keep the nose from digging a twenty-foot hole in Mother Earth.
Taking quick glimpses of the map she tried to pair something on the paper with its like below, but instead of landmarks, nameless gullies and miles and miles of cruelly featureless plain. No hills, mountains, highways, railroads, rivers, or lakes, only the seemingly endless and threatening sky looming ahead.
She’d never encountered a storm this huge—the ugly dark strato-cewm-you-loahs like Himalayan peaks shooting up to she couldn’t guess the elevation, impossible to top them—the craft officially had a ceiling of 16,000 feet, and just like Curly said the air there was far too thin to breathe, and besides, oxygen hadn’t made the list of things snatched up in her hasty departure. Oh, this son-of-a-biscuit-eating storm—was it a tornado?? It might tear the ship apart, and she didn’t know whether to try for a forced wild landing on unknown ground and wreck or get herself ripped to shreds aloft. Oh, why oh why!! You stupid little crud knuckle! You thought you could do this? What would Curly say or do? Hang on?
Her hands might’ve shaken had they not been welded tight to the stick. Then the headwind came hard at her and not even that big J5 could do much more than suspend the ship as it shoved against the front, marking time mid-air, rain pelted her windscreen and drenched her, the airplane shook and shuddered, dipped and see-sawed side to side, and it was only by the keychain Curly had hung from a knob on the panel that she knew she was right-side up. It was crucial to keep the wings level and the craft from turning without her knowing, but lost inside the horrendous rain without horizon or ground to judge by, she had to trust the turn indicator and her altimeter to stay aloft and true. Curly said he knew a pilot strapped a half-full pint of whisky to the panel as a level and when sloshing turned it useless, he drank it. Watch your tach and air speed—if the speed goes down but the engine revs up, you’re likely heading uphill, if your tach backs off and your air speed jumps, you’re probably in a dive. If the wind in the struts start to whine and sing, you need to pull her up or look for a hole in the cloud floor to dive into.
The blithering snot-booger rain turned into stinging flecks of hail—would it tear holes in the wings and elevator? Would she go down like a tattered kite? The upper wing shielded her a bit, but the prop wash peppered her with pellets of ice, and she was shivering terribly in her coveralls.
Holy malarkey, oh my dear Heavenly Father! Please let me live through this! If you do, I’ll … turn myself in!
The storm pummeled her on and on, she wrestled it like busting a bronc, and when at last she spied a glimmer in the west she figured she’d fought her way to the backside. Within minutes the air was sweet and calm and clear, cooler now from the rain, water on the wings and the windscreen glistening. Her breathing slowed, though she still trembled, and she banked right and left a bit to prove she was master now. Soon the air was friendly enough that she took big sloppy slugs from her water jug and ate an apple the farmer had blessed her with this morning. Then she unleashed her harness, wriggled free of her bottoms, and jammed her pee-pot underneath her.
Resettl
ed, she squared her shoulders. The storm was all behind her. She sighed, deep, swiped her goggles with her sleeve, settled back into her pilot’s posture. She was drenched but knew the warming air would dry her. Her compass showed that despite the tumbling and pitching, she still roughly hewed a southwesterly line. All seemed if not well at least a lot better. In fact, darned if she didn’t feel a little bit, well, proud now! A story she could tell in the hanger lounge. Beat a big storm and lived to tell about it!
As for the promise in the prayer—well, all the danger wasn’t over, right? And so didn’t her contract with the Lord include safety clear to Los Angeles? If you promise if I live through “this,” who’s to say what the length or breadth or depth of “this” is?
She looked down to read the map.
Gone! Flat blew out of her lap!
A frisson of fear zapped her nerves, but she slapped it back. That railroad map wouldn’t be much help now, anyway. The flat terrain still lay as featureless as before—just a big brown table studded here and there with stunted trees. The dash clock showed she’d been aloft a little over six hours. The ship boasted a range of 650 miles on 67 gallons, but that depended upon cruising constantly at 103, and though she’d pushed the craft along earlier, having bucked the head wind through the storm made it impossible to calculate how far she’d gone and how far she had to go before her next check point, Pecos, Texas.
The fuel gauge needle was tickling the Empty bar.
Also, she was running out of afternoon. In all that trackless waste a half mile beneath her wheels, could she spot a stretch suitable for putting down? But then what? She might as well set down in the Amazon, where the last thing the natives might offer would be a barrel of high-test gasoline. Here, unless someone saw her alight (or crash), she’d have no notion of which way to walk or how far. Cowboys might one day ride up on her desiccated corpse. Headline in the paper: GIRL FLEES CIRCUS! And below—Bones Found in Desert.
It wasn’t like her to take the gloomy prospect when a sunny one lay handy. But that native cheerful outlook got sorely chafed as the miles rolled on without any sign of habitation; meanwhile, that needle got tired of tickling the Empty bar and just laid its head down on it like a pillow.
Just when hope became a frayed rope about to part, she spotted a thin, meandering road hardly wider than a wagon trail going south, so she banked low to follow it. She took heart that the ruts were well-worn and clean of weeds She sailed over a truck trundling north against her flow, and the dust plume off the wheels scurried sideways and showed the wind was westerly. Within minutes, just as the engine hiccupped once, on the horizon up popped several buildings lined beside the road, and a bit to the west, what looked to be a wooden oil derrick. That might mean fuel! Guess the Lord had no quarrel with her quibbling about the terms!
She chanced one quick low pass over the settlement to check for obstacles in the only street—it was empty—and she read the plume of exhaust from the drilling rig’s engine like a wind sock: she’d be landing with a cross wind, a stiff one maybe, and she’d have to sideslip the craft to keep it on that narrow line, all the harder when the sputtering engine would be little help. She banked and turned and came in from the south. Her luck had held! Not just a place to safely land but also maybe she’d get fuel, supper, and a bed—she was suddenly bone-tired and utterly drained, and she eagerly anticipated rolling to a stop and climbing down to stretch and …
Damnation! A Model T rolled out into the street and wheeled right into her path. She yanked the stick back and hoped she had speed enough to hop the thing without stalling—
2
MABEL WAS SORELY SHAMED HER AUTO CAUSED THE ACCIDENT with the airplane. Her father had bought her the Ford Model T “Tin Lizzy” back in ’24 never dreaming she’d use it to move herself all the way from Cincinnati to somewhere way out West. Her mother feared she’d wind up with a cowpoke and never come back. Besides, everything there must be so primitive. Lying, she assured them she had electricity and didn’t mention that a lack of plumbing meant she had to do her business in an outhouse behind the church/school along with her students and whatever town folk found themselves beyond reach of their own privies.
She’d claimed this post would only be a year. She didn’t tell them it was on the way to farther west. (When she’d heard Al Jolson sing “California, Here I Come” something swoony crept over her like a cozy blanket. Palm trees, oranges big as softballs, and ocean waves—lots of ocean waves—swarmed behind her eyelids.)
And yet now she was about to start her third school year. The Golden State’s beckoning call had faded, and less often she insisted to herself that she wasn’t marking time or just saving up to go. That first year was rough, though. The “school board”—a dozen ranchers, farmers, and merchants who’d pooled their money for her salary—had put her up in what they hilariously called “a cottage” but was hardly more than a lean-to attached to the hip of the settlement’s lone café. But even when some said pity she had to live in “a rebuilt pig pen,” somebody pointed out that she’d turned down Arabella Bohanan’s offer to lodge in her handsome Spanish hacienda.
When the board begged her to stay, they enticed her with a ream of outlandish compliments, higher pay, and better digs: everybody pitched in to knock up a cozy cabin alongside what was called “the church” due to a structure on its roof that might be a steeple or a miniature oil derrick. A service did take place first Sunday of every month when a preacher of any denomination would circuit by. Usually, though, pews were shoved against the walls to accommodate the dozen school desks or when folks had a yen to put on a rowdy hootenanny with a motley trio who played wash-tub bass, a “gittar,” and a “fiddle,” all three of whom distressed Mabel greatly with their nasal yodeling and habit of drooling “baccy” spit onto the wooden floors of her school room.
With a brilliant older brother and a gorgeous younger sister, she’d been the invisible middle child, the one least talked about and from whom the least was expected. She’d gone off to Stephens for two years without hardly a soul missing her. On Mabel’s first visit back to Cincinnati after a year of teaching out West, her sister, recently debutante-ified, had badgered Mable to bob her hair and buy step-ins and an Empire-waist dress in an effort to slim down her bust and hips to comply with the current boyish fashions. Felicity also scolded her about being out in the sun so much—Mable’s skin looked “like leather.”
Out here, no hair stylist existed to maintain that fashionable bob; it grew into unruly bangs and page-boy curls then just a long mess draping over her shoulders that she dealt with the way women here did: pinned up in a bun, swirled into what might look like a cow patty atop her head, and tucked under a hat, or tied back with a comely ribbon. When they felt a need, the women cut their own or each other’s hair with sewing scissors.
Surprises had held her here. One—she was far from invisible. She taught a dozen or so students ages eight to fifteen, and she was respected by almost all and even adored by a few. Her opinion on matters big and small was valued—she was an ambassador of a larger world, someone who’d been to college, had lived in an eastern city, owned books, could recite poetry by heart, practiced pretty penmanship, and by default inherited the traditional “schoolmarm” virtues of a superior moral sensibility and judgment, so people often sought her opinion.
Living here, she’d grown confident, felt her dormant self swell to fill the new, expanded borders of her life.
Why are you going back? Her baffled folks had asked that first visit home.
Sky. How do you talk about sky? And does it sound moonstruck daffy to even bring it up?? Illustrated-Bible sunrises and sunsets! Ohio had sky, of course, but it was like the ceiling of your parlor: imminently useful and ever-present but hardly ever noticed. Out here the sky was everywhere, and you lived in it as if a fish in an ocean of air. The settlement had but one building over one story, so nothing manmade obstructed your view of the heavens day or night. It had a hundred colors—from the deep lavender just aft
er sunset and the later inky charcoal to the blistering white on a summer noon that peeled your eyeballs back. And at night—at night! Here on the plains deep after the sun lay down to sleep the sky asserted itself with a magnificent and admirable arrogance, strewing buckets of stars on an overhead screen, everything adazzle and alive. Make you gasp, reel, and brace yourself against the nearest solid object. It seduced her into studying—of all things! Who’d have thought?—astronomy.
And then the daytime sky had myriad moods, many weathers posted on the compass points of this great expanse—you’d note a thunderstorm on the far horizon marked by curtains of surly gray rain, while turn a tad to the north or south, and the horizon looked as serene as a preacher’s wife.
Below the sky the terra was humble, scrub oak and sandy hillocks, mesquite thickets, native grasses—never an actual tree unless one had been planted—and the earth itself ruddy in the banks of arroyos where the water plumed and spumed, tumbling boulders when a rain did finally come.
And you could spook your back-home folks right good with tales of rattlers and tarantulas (What’s that? Well, a spider big as a BASEBALL!), as well as coyotes, though they were as skittish as whipped dogs.
She’d considered learning to ride a horse but hadn’t gotten to it. (Ditto hoist a firearm.) People didn’t find that strange, anyway, since she owned and operated a motor vehicle. Her Lizzie was one of a half-dozen vehicles in the settlement, and she was generous about taking somebody to a doctor in Loving or the train station in Seagraves (and more than once a goat, a sheep, or a calf). Leonard had begged her to teach him to drive, and she’d been pleased to do that, though she’d foreseen the next step—his wanting to borrow it. (He argued he could make a trip for her, save her time and effort.)