Girl Flees Circus Read online

  Aviatrix.

  That sounded like the name of an exotic species of bird and failed to capture the wonder of her miraculous appearance. Goddess-like. Angel, kind of, though you wouldn’t expect one to wear an aviator’s outfit.

  Maybe he had the guts to show up at Louise’s. And maybe not. Sure spoil the pretty pilot’s appetite. If she saw him in the Larsens’ pasture herding cows, she’d probably think he was a “cow poke,” as an Easterner might say. But truth was, he didn’t like cows much and deeply distrusted horses, and last on his list of aspirations would be tender of any kind of livestock.

  Leonard was a very forward-looking fellow. He had an innate belief in creating better outcomes for all endeavors, so it was only natural to consider how to make amends and to mend the damage he’d done. Could that rip in the airplane’s skin be sewn? Then taped? Then painted? What thread would that require? How could you sew the rip once you couldn’t get your hand inside the cavity? Wasn’t there a curved needle? Would Wally know? Was the paint specially made for aircraft, or would plain old shellac do in a pinch? In lieu of tape, how about strips of linen glued in layers over the suture? Then the paint?

  Cross fingers whatever’s wrong can be repaired. He believed most things could. Machines were a closed system, and once you learned how the parts worked in harmony, you could eventually solve the puzzle of why they didn’t. He preferred his new Hawthorne DeLuxe Streamline bicycle to any horseflesh, no matter how fancy. (It had taken him a couple months to save for it, had pasted the torn-out page from the Monkey Ward catalog into his scrapbook: This Motobike represents the highest example of bicycle design and construction … Attractive, lustrous cherry red, with cream ornamental head … and Always dependable New Departure Coaster Brake …).

  When the drilling rig had rumbled into town, he hung around the site asking too many questions. He and Otis and another fellow were hired to erect the wooden derrick. It was a “cable tool” or “percussion drilling” rig, he was told. Simply put, the engine lifted and dropped a heavy, bullet-shaped tong that pounded the earth over and over, and the motor that heaved the cable to raise it ran on kerosene. One-lung, they called them. To his ear, it was music—the engine went POP pop pop pop pop Pop POP in time to the ker-CHUNK of the bit as it punched the ground.

  So, aside from the pilot’s gender, the arrival of the biplane at his doorstep seemed fitting. For a moment, he’d linked the aircraft to the drilling rig. He’d felt all along that he was arriving into adulthood on the breast of a coming wave. The future held undiscovered marvels, and he was eager to encounter them.

  He’d been the first here to know of Lindberg’s transatlantic triumph last year in The Spirit of St. Louis. He’d read about crystal set radios in a newspaper article and had ordered Circular #120 from the Department of Commerce titled “Construction and Operating of a Simple Homemade Radio Receiving Outfit.” He used (again) Wally’s Montgomery Ward catalog next for these: Standard Galena Detector ($1.45), Murdock #55 headset ($4.50) and connecting block ($2.75), 500’ copper antenna wire #12 gauge ($5.50), and a two-slide tuning coil ($3.50).

  At Leonard’s uncle’s store you could buy a clutch of nails and a can of beans, but the inventory was skimpy—Uncle George didn’t stock more than one of anything at a time, and he wouldn’t order an item unless more than two or three customers had bought it recently. If you wanted something others always went for, he’d be out of it. If you wanted something few had sought, he’d never stocked it. But if you were looking for something really common but also not in demand, Purvis Mercantile was your store. Result was—most folks put off buying until they had to go to Loving.

  Uncle George poorly paid Leonard to do almost everything but own the place. Stock the shelves, deliver, clean, sort, inventory, run the register, bookkeep. But since there was little business, Leonard was free to shop his muscles and his talent around the settlement. He was top-of-the-list for handyman tasks, and from Otis he’d learned what makes an automobile go, so he’d kept Mabel’s Model T in top tune. If your butter churn hit a hitch on a turn of the handle, if your apple peeler wouldn’t peel or your gramophone table stopped turning, you called Leonard. He had a knack. But since electricity hadn’t arrived here, he had yet to learn the secrets of devices powered by dynamos. Loving was the closest distance to any electric light, and a few citizens there owned big Magnavox radios in mahogany cases with glowing faces that picked up stations from Denver, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, and beyond.

  One by one the parts for the crystal radio arrived by mail, and within a day he’d built it on the base of an apple crate end. He strung the antenna up one of the lodge poles of his teepee and through the top. Then it went fifty feet or so to his uncle’s building, ran back the way it came and down to the block. Supposedly, this arrangement would bring in stations within three hundred miles.

  He knew radio signals traveled much farther at night. So, after dark, he slipped the headphones on and “tickled” the crystal with the feeler, gently ooching the slider along the tuning coil. A lot of static, crackling. He swept across the cylinder of copper coils with a sinking heart, but then, suddenly—music! An orchestra jiving on a happy ragtime number! He jumped up and shouted and would’ve danced if the wires to the headset hadn’t yanked him back.

  “Hey, it’s music on the radio!”

  Mabel! She’d love to hear this, he bet. Wally and Otis! He had wanted to run into the streets, wake people up, lasso them into his teepee to hear the marvelous music, free to whoever wished to listen in. It was wonderful to think of music floating out there all the time, soaring like flocks of notes in migration, and he had a memory of characters in a Shakespeare play Mabel had the older kids read—characters wandering lost in a wood at night, hearing music and not knowing where it came from, marveling at it, putting it down to the work of nymphs or sprites.

  The night of May the 21st just last year, his radio brought him the news of Lindberg’s solitary Atlantic crossing, and Leonard proudly trotted about like a town crier the next morning to repeat it.

  So, the appearance of this aircraft today scarcely a year later was like a prophecy fulfilled, the arrival of a moving outer boundary of the future, the way water spreads across a floor.

  But that pretty pilot? How did she fit the picture? Her face—those eyes and generous, mulberry-colored lips—aroused him deeply and made him tremble with a nameless fear. Like trying to walk the rafter of a barn, teetering, flapping your arms like a bird, you’re racing across praying you’ll reach the other side before you fall.

  His one-room digs had one good chair, an old, upholstered wingback a rancher’s wife had bartered for his labor, and he was perched on it now with his elbows on his knees and his palms cupping his chin. Going to supper at Louise’s was the last and the first thing he wanted to do. His one good Sunday shirt was currently at Wally’s awaiting being laundered. More than one female had remarked upon his table manners and not to praise them. He had a thousand questions for the pretty pilot but couldn’t ask them unless he had the guts to put himself within range of her attention.

  2

  YOU DON’T LIVE ON A FARM YOU DON’T HAVE TWENTY THINGS to do at once. Louise was used to that, so soon as she’d told Howard to build a fire under the wash pot in the yard, she steered the injured aviatrix into the kitchen. Mabel dogged her heels expecting to be given tasks, but it was easier to do things herself than to coach another woman. Louise sat the pilot at the table, fetched a bottle of alcohol and a clean cloth.

  “Honey, you mind shedding your uppers?”

  The pilot was clad in a canvas two-piece overall set, and without hesitation, she unbuttoned and shrugged free of the top. Under it was a filthy cotton blouse that might’ve been red in the last century, and beneath that a dingy white linen camisole hugged her small breasts. She seemed dazed, passive. Shock?

  “Honey, how about that hat?”

  The pilot tugged the helmet up from her head, undamming a waterfall of strawberry blonde coils. Cleaned up
, the kid would be cute as a bug. Louise would guess eighteen, maybe a tad older.

  Mabel hovered. “Mabel, would you look in the pantry? There’s a basket of eggs I gathered this morning. Maybe you could get a bowl and scramble them? There’s bacon in the ice box too, and we’ll hash a couple potatoes. We can toast the butts of bread loaves I’ll scare up. Howard likes breakfast for supper, and it’s always easy.”

  Mabel said, “Should I salt and pepper the eggs when I mix them or wait? You want me to keep the skins on the potatoes or peel and mash them?”

  Louise endured a current of irritation. She’d forgotten that Mabel lived mostly on canned goods. What Louise needed right now was a woman who knew her way around a kitchen.

  “Just beat the eggs with a fork. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “How many eggs?”

  “I think there are about a dozen.”

  All this time, Louise had the cloth in one hand and the bottle of alcohol in the other, her hands poised over the girl’s bared shoulder. The cut was no longer bleeding, but the coagulant residue streaked down to her inner elbow.

  She smiled into the girl’s harried upturned face.

  “My, you’re a mess! Hang on, this may smart.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Mabel. Louise supposed that was meant to distract her. The pilot said, “Skip—py Baker,” just as the damp cloth swept across her cut, and she winced.

  “I’m Mabel, and your nurse there is Louise.”

  “Thank you,” said the pilot. “Mind telling me where I am? I lost my map. Is this still Texas?”

  “No, New Mexico,” said Louise.

  “Noname,” offered Mabel.

  “There’s no name?” The girl looked puzzled.

  “Yes. I mean no. Noname. That’s the name.”

  “No Name’s the name?” She seemed troubled, as if they were poking fun at her.

  “You got it.” Louise grinned. “Some people want to say No-NAH-may so it sounds like an Indian chief, though.”

  “Or NO-nah-may.”

  “Or Non AHmee, like Bon Ami.”

  “If you say it real fast it sounds like Nonum.”

  The girl shook her head as if shooing gnats.

  Mabel, who enjoyed the novelty of it and always offered this snippet to folks back East, said, “Some people say when this burg got noticed by the map-maker for the new state government, he asked somebody around here and they told him it didn’t have a name. So, he wrote down Noname on the map—made it look like one word, poor cursive skills, you know—and that just stuck.”

  Louise kept dabbing the cut with the cloth until she was down to the raw, clean flesh and her cloth was pink. With each swipe a grimace rippled across the girl’s brow. The cut oozed and seeped. Louise was pleased to prescribe further treatment.

  “Skippy, looks to me like you’ll live! But I think you need a couple of stitches. Do you mind?”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Mabel had been opening the cabinet doors one by one without choosing a vessel, as if she was looking for one labeled “for scrambling one dozen eggs,” so Louise said, “Top row. The blue one.”

  Louise retrieved her surgical needle and thread from a drawer in the kitchen counter. She sterilized the needle with the alcohol. To her surprise, the pilot bent her head to watch as she prodded the lips of the cut and sent her needle through. The girl’s jaw muscles beat in time with the poking, and her lips pressed tight.

  Louise put a dressing on the cut, smoothed it with her palm, patted it. “There, now! All done!” she said, as if having just put the finishing touches on a new hairdo. The pilot peered at the bandage. She burst into sobs. She bent forward in the chair and planted her face in her palms, her shoulders heaving. Louise and Mabel exchanged looks of alarm and curiosity, then Mabel slipped into a chair beside the girl and curled her arm around her shoulders.

  “There, there,” she cooed. “Is it hurting?”

  Violent shake of her head. She gasped, sniffled. But when Mabel drew her closer, she exploded again and planted her face in Mabel’s chest. Howard had come into the mud room carrying a bucket of warm water and had advanced across the threshold before the ensuing drama smacked him in the face. Louise saw him reel backward and retreat into the yard.

  Louise and Mabel waited patiently, miming to one another over the girl’s trembling form. Mabel could feel a peculiar smile threatening to creep over her face. It seemed inappropriate, this smile, but dimly she tried to cast it as a sign of pity (poor thing!). The girl’s heat, her damp cheeks against her breast, the unruly curls smelling of dust and maybe petrol billowing up around Mabel’s chin—the contact overwhelmed her with feelings of … being a mother? Big sister? Friend?—and aroused an indefinable and shocking pleasure. She didn’t often hug or get hugged out here. It’d been so long she’d apparently forgotten to miss it.

  The girl pulled herself away, blew and wiped her nose on a sleeve of her undershirt, mildly shocking them.

  “I’m okay now, really, I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be!”

  “It’s okay, honey. What’s upsetting you?”

  Both women’s attention leaned forward; both believed it might be a “who” and not a “what” sparking her misery.

  She sighed. “Last thing I ever wanted was to wreck that ship.”

  Looked as if she might break down again, but she ferociously sucked in air, then whooshed it out through ballooning cheeks.

  “It was my fault,” said Mabel.

  The girl’s brows hiked up with astonishment.

  “My automobile. In the street, when you were …” She waved one hand as if imitating a bird.

  “Oh, no! It was the pig in the road that made me ground loop. Hit my right strut. Is it okay, you think? Where it is, I mean? I was so rattled after it happened that I didn’t even think to check all the damage, but I guess when I ground-looped, the elephant ear probly got smashed on that side …” She started weeping quietly, eyes squinched, then she swiped at them with the hem of her undershirt. That is one unhygienic garment, thought Louise.

  “There’s folks here good at fixing things,” Mabel said brightly.

  “You think it’s okay there in the road?”

  “Hardly anybody comes that way past sundown,” said Louise, “and there’s room to pass. Don’t worry, hon.”

  “After you’ve had a chance to rest and eat, we’ll go take a look!” Mabel offered. “Make sure.”

  “Oh, thanks! I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “Well, whatever trouble you might be we’re inclined to call excitement,” said Louise.

  Mabel went to breaking eggs one by one over the blue bowl without keeping shards of shell from falling into the mix, but Louise ignored that. She needed to get the rest of supper in order. The girl had fallen into a brood that twisted her lips and knotted her brow.

  “You have a hotel here?”

  “Gosh, no,” said Louise. “But you needn’t worry. There’s plenty of room right here.” She gestured toward the hallway.

  “Me, too,” Mabel said meekly. “Besides, I could stand the company.”

  “Aw, gee, thanks so much! You’ve both been so kind!”

  “Nice of you to say,” said Louise. “And believe me, it’s nice to have your efforts appreciated.” She was on the verge of adding for once but bit her tongue. She went into the mud room and picked up the bucket of warm water.

  “Hon, why don’t we go clean you up and let you rest?” In part to keep Mabel from following her, she said, “Mabel, would you set the table, please? There’s silver in the sideboard in the dining room.”

  “How many places?”

  “Well, four. Five if Leonard shows up.”

  The pilot followed Louise into what had been Izzy’s room, and, to judge by the décor and furnishings, might still belong to her. The pilot sat on the bench at the marble-topped vanity; she was massaging her left wrist with her right hand and clenching her jaw. Louise poured water int
o the porcelain wash basin with the rose pattern. She opened a drawer in the vanity, drew out a washcloth and towel, and handed the stacked pair to the girl.

  The girl had carried her coverall top wadded under her right arm; Louise took it from her and, though she recoiled a bit to do it, set the garment on the pristine pink coverlet on Izzy’s bed. Then something turned over in her.

  “I know you’d probably like something fresh to wear once you’ve washed your face and such—I know I do.” She went into Izzy’s closet and drew out a linen blouse with a sailor collar and blue piping. She held it up. “Our … daughter, she’s a tad bigger than you, but I think this might do.”

  “Oh, it’s too pretty and clean.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Louise heard both I’m not worthy and Don’t like snobby stuff in equal parts.

  At the washstand she scrubbed her face, arms, and neck, using mostly her right hand. Louise watched from the corner of her eye. Maybe another injury? “Don’t mind me.” It nagged at Louise not to violate her privacy but reminded herself she had innkeeper’s rights. Seeing her at Izzy’s vanity pricked at her mysteriously. It violated some rule that she suddenly wanted to flout.

  “I’ll just …” She futzed about, slapping at the bed covers and tugging at a curtain hem. The hangered blouse lay on the bed, confronting her as if occupied by its surly owner. It prodded her memory—this garment was a favorite not of Izzy’s but of Howard’s. Seeing the pilot in it—what effect would it have? Good or ill? Had she picked it for that reason? Should she substitute something unfreighted?

  The pilot forked her curls back from her face with the tined fingers of her right hand. Her skin was flushed, a rosy sheen on her damp cheeks. Young. She caught Louise’s gaze in the mirror.

  “Hon, you can use those combs and brushes. Whatever’s there.” Open the drawers. Use what you find.

  Take what you want.

  “My hair’s so dirty.”

  “It bet it’s beautiful after a wash. We can give you a good scrubbing tomorrow. If you like, I mean.”