“They’re just doing all that to draw a crowd,” a voice said from somewhere down in the tall grass near where he stood. “I hope they haven’t alarmed you.”
Louis jumped. He hadn’t realized he wasn’t alone. His horse whinnied. He stroked the mare’s muzzle to calm her again and cast a hurried glance around, blindly looking for the source of the voice and eventually spotting a figure lying flat on its back. The shape appeared to be lounging, cradling its head in its hands and staring up at the sky overhead. A flash of red hair, a pair of men’s trousers . . . Louis squinted more closely and realized he was looking at a girl.
She sat up, chewing a tall weed that protruded unapologetically from one side of her mouth.
“They make a big fuss on purpose, flying all the tricks they can think of, see,” the girl continued, her teeth still gnashing away at the weed. “That way they get people’s attention, get their curiosity piqued.”
She crawled to her feet, stood up, spat out the weed, and brushed herself off, finishing the performance by giving a lazy, halfhearted yawn and arch of her back. Louis remained silent, a little dumbstruck.
“I guess it’s kind of like their calling card,” the girl added now, since Louis had yet to reply. “A way to drum up business. They’ll fly a few tricks every half hour for an hour or two—see? Hopefully people will get curious enough to come out to have a closer look, until there’s enough people to start offering rides. It’s how a barnstorming act works.”
Louis cocked his head at the girl. “How do you know that?” he asked, finally breaking his mute state.
“Oh,” the girl said. “I thought you’d guessed as much . . . I’m with the barnstorming act.”
He felt like a fool. Of course she was with the barnstorming act. He’d never seen her before, and the towns around those parts were small; new faces were rare. He looked more closely. She was probably only a year or two younger than himself, skinny and on the tomboyish side. She possessed a magnificent bob of red hair that was paired with bright, catlike pale green eyes and rather browned, freckled skin. Louis felt an unexpected sensation of heat rising to his face.
It appeared she was studying him in return. Her small pink bow of a mouth broke into an amused smirk, and she looked Louis over from head to toe as if trying to decide how much of a rube he was.
“My name is Ava,” she said, holding out her hand. “Ava Brooks. The planes are my stepfather’s. I travel around with this act.” She pointed to the sky. “My stepfather announces the show, my mother sells her homemade lemonade, and our two pilots, Buzz and Hutch, do all the flying. I collect money for the airplane rides.”
“Nice . . . to meet you,” Louis stammered, taking her hand. “Louis Thorn.”
They shook, and Ava noted the firm grip of his handshake. He was handsome, too, in a clean-cut, all-American sort of way. There was an easy, friendly air about him.
“Listen, if you’re interested in going up for an airplane ride, they’ll probably start taking folks up in about an hour or so,” Ava said.
“Really?” His face lit up.
“Of course.”
But then a new thought occurred to Louis, casting a small shadow over Ava’s suggestion.
“How much is it for a ride?” he asked.
Ava smiled gleefully, and shrugged. “Well . . . some flying circuses charge their passengers as much as ten or fifteen dollars,” she replied.
“Fifteen dollars?” Louis repeated, incredulous. He coughed and tried to hide his disappointment; he didn’t want the fact of his poverty to be obvious.
“But,” Ava continued, “this one is a little down on its luck. Only, don’t tell my stepfather I said that.”
She chuckled but also glanced over her shoulder, as though the stepfather she had mentioned might suddenly materialize. She turned back and smiled again, but this time there was a vaguely awkward, embarrassed element to her expression.
“My guess is, we’ll probably be asking folks for a fiver,” she concluded.
“Five dollars?”
“Yep. You think you’ll go up for a ride?”
Louis felt his pulse quicken and his palms grow sweaty. Five dollars was a fortune in the Thorn household. He looked up again at the two biplanes as they zoomed overhead in the blue sky.
“I’ll have to go home to fetch the money . . . and put the horse back in the pasture, I guess . . .”
Ava shrugged and smiled again.
“There ought to be time enough for all that,” she said. “Earl likes to make sure we’ve drawn a decent crowd first before we start to sell individual rides. If you do want to go up, I’ll be taking money right over there.”
She pointed in the direction of where a wooden caravan that was hitched to an old Model A was parked some distance away in the field. Someone had set a rickety old wooden table and chair out in the open air. Tied to the table with rope was a handmade sign that read SCENIC AIRPLANE RIDES SOLD HERE!
“Will I see you there?” she asked.
Louis turned back to Ava. Her eyes flashed like a dare. There was nothing to do but grin and nod like a fool.
10
After about an hour’s worth of flying stunts, Buzz and Hutch had managed to attract a small crowd. They performed trick after trick, until finally enough people had gathered so that an audible “Oooh!” and “Ahhh!” could be periodically heard at the completion of each feat.
Earl stepped up onto a crate and shouted into a megaphone.
“Let’s give ’em a hand, folks!”
Sensing that enough of a crowd had gathered to merit his presence, he had emerged from the caravan to play host and do the announcing. From where she was sitting, Ava could see that, as usual, Earl was dressed to the nines in a loud red jacket and stood very erect, his shoulders thrust back and his dark hair heavily oiled.
“Can’t say you see something like that every day, now, can ya?” he bellowed.
The sixty or so people who had congregated in Irving Sumpter’s field obediently applauded, despite the fact that it was clear the performers, high up in their biplanes, could not hear their appreciation. Sumpter himself stood nearby, arms folded, taking stock of the goings-on. When the planes had touched down in his field earlier that morning, Sumpter saddled his horse and went out to investigate. By the time he reached the planes, a puttering truck hauling a caravan had come bumping along over the rutted land. Earl hopped out and offered Sumpter a ten-dollar bill to “borrow” the field for the day.
“Alllll-righty, folks!” Earl shouted now. “Who wants to go up for a ride? Step right up and form a line! Don’t push: I promise you, everybody gets a turn! Best scenic tour you’ll ever take!”
“How much?” someone hollered.
“Why, the ride is free!” Earl called back in reply.
There was an astonished gasp.
“But the landing will cost you five dollars!” Earl concluded.
A ripple of good-humored chuckles sounded from the onlookers. It was a common joke among barnstormers; the crowd couldn’t know how the tired punch line had been pilfered from a flying circus back east, which in turn had stolen it from yet another circus down south.
“Step lively, now!” Earl continued, but sales were temporarily interrupted when the two biplanes came in for a landing. All heads turned and watched as first one and then the other flew lower and lower and eventually touched down upon the yellowing crabgrass of the fallow field. The first plane bounced along, taxied, turned, and rolled to a stop. Minutes later, the second rolled in next to it. Shouts and cheers floated into the air as the two pilots laughed and hollered back and forth to each other.
“Meet our aeronautical masters of the sky, folks!” Earl called out, waving an arm toward the two pilots as they approached.
“Mr. Ray ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson!”
Hutch climbed down from Castor, the red plane, and
raised a hand in a kindly wave.
“And his esteemed colleague, Mr. Charlie ‘Buzz’ Lambert!” Earl shouted, gesturing to the second pilot.
Buzz descended from Pollux, the blue plane, gave a cocky grin, waved—and quickly added a wink when his gaze fell upon a young lady in the crowd.
“Now, my friends . . . as I was saying, five dollars is a mere pittance in exchange for the adventure of a lifetime! You won’t regret it! Yes, indeedy, folks! Right this way!” Earl continued in his signature showy tone, “Step right up and purchase your ride—ahem, I mean to say, landing, of course!—from the lovely lofty Ava here!” He paused ever so briefly to make a sweeping gesture in the direction of where Ava sat presiding over a cigar box of cash, collecting bills and coins. “That’s right, folks! That lil’ lady will help you to purchase what is guaranteed to be the most memorable experience of your lives! Around here we call her Lovely Lofty Ava, First Lady of ‘Avi’-ation, hah!”
Ava resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She hated when Earl trotted out all that “First Lady of ‘Avi’-ation” garbage. Part of the reason she hated it was because it struck her as misleading; after all, Ava had still never been up in an airplane—not once.
There was a second reason, too. Earl had only started using lines like that in reference to Ava in recent years. Ava was dimly aware that she was no longer a child; she had grown into a young woman, and she felt the new weight of male eyes on her. She hadn’t quite made peace yet with her new role. She had watched Earl use her mother’s beauty to charm customers—even back in the old Pandora’s Wonder Tonic days—and Ava was queasy at the idea of Earl using her own femininity to perfect his hustle.
By that point, people were beginning to approach her where she sat at the little rickety wooden table. The first stragglers were shy, but soon a lively group began to crowd around, and eventually the aspiring airplane passengers formed a small line. Ava took money, made change, and kept track of whose turn it was to climb into one of the two biplanes.
After helping the first five or so customers, she looked up briefly from the cigar box and felt her eyes scanning the horizon around the field, searching for the young man she’d encountered earlier. Would he come back? If he did, was it because she’d smiled and teased him a little and given him little opportunity to decline? Was she no better than Earl? No, she told herself. Her friendliness was sincere in a way Earl’s wasn’t. And there had been something about the young man; she’d taken an instant liking to him.
She glanced around the field again, and—as if on cue—her eyes hit upon the figure she sought. There he was: the young man who’d introduced himself as Louis Thorn. Ava watched as Louis picked his way across the field, shading his eyes and watching as Castor and Pollux took off with fresh passengers in tow.
As he turned back, his eyes caught Ava’s and he gave a tiny, subtle wave. She smiled in return. She continued to watch Louis out of the corner of her eye as he stepped into the line that had formed in front of her table. Ava went on selling rides and taking money, keeping note of Louis’s position in line. A few more people stepped into the line behind him. Eventually, it was his turn to pay his money and buy an airplane ride.
“Why, hullo again,” Ava chirped, genuinely happy to see him.
“Hi,” Louis replied, sheepirh. She noticed that he’d changed his clothes; he was now attired in a nice white cotton shirt and brown slacks. She watched as he felt for his shirt pocket and produced five one-dollar bills.
“Five dollars,” Louis said, as though to verify the number of bills he’d just dropped on the table.
She couldn’t help but notice the tremor in his hand. Ava took his money and folded it around the growing wad of bills lumped within the cigar box. She glanced up at Louis and smiled in a manner that she hoped reassured him.
“It’s very safe, you know—traveling by airplane,” she said. “Why, they say it’s even safer than traveling by automobile, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m not scared,” Louis said, but he’d rushed to say it and said it a little too quickly. Ava looked at him, and in that second the two exchanged a look of knowing.
The moment was interrupted by the sound of an amused grunt—covered by a quick cough—emanating from somewhere over Louis’s shoulder. Ava wouldn’t have paid it much mind, except for that fact that when Louis turned around to address the person, she noticed Louis’s whole body palpably stiffen. She peered over his shoulder and noticed a second young man around the same age as Louis. Ava took a closer look and noticed the other young man was Oriental.
Slowly, Louis turned around.
“Got something to say?” he asked the young man standing behind him.
Ava was surprised by the aggression in Louis’s voice: When she’d encountered him alone in the field earlier, Louis had struck her as having an easy, open disposition. She wondered what it was about the second young man that rubbed Louis the wrong way.
Feeling the weight of her gaze, the young man glanced at Ava. As they locked eyes, a small chill ran over her skin and up the back of her neck to the base of her skull, a ripple of . . . something. Ava was hard-pressed to identify her reaction. She studied his features as if some answer were to be found there. The young man’s dark hair was surprisingly thick and ever so slightly wavy, combed back from his forehead and face to reveal a pair of high, haughty cheekbones. His nose was rather long but flat and narrow, his mouth and chin finely carved, set in a stern manner. But it was the expression inscribed upon his brow that caught Ava’s attention the most. His eyebrows were downright cocky and amused. His face struck an interesting contradiction between stern and jovial.
By now Ava had asked the young man for his five dollars, and he had paid it. He was handsome, Ava realized, a beat too late, and she found herself blushing with this obvious albeit belated discovery. Ava forced herself to stare down at the cashbox sitting in front of her with sudden concentration.
“Harry Yamada,” the young man said, extending a forthright hand.
Ava looked at the hand but did not reach to shake it. Out the corner of her eye, she noticed a smug twist of Louis’s lips as he observed her snub.
“If you’ll both just stand over there while you wait your turn,” she said to Louis and the second young man. She pointed at the accumulating group of future passengers, all of them waiting to go up, and the two young men joined the shuffling group.
Louis nodded and moved in the direction she indicated. The other young man—Harry, as he’d introduced himself—followed. The air of animosity between the two boys did not dissipate, but, for the slenderest of seconds, Ava thought she saw Harry turn back and wink at her—a flirtatious, mocking wink, as though he’d known her blush was for him. She gasped at his audacity, but in the next second he was facing away again, a placid, businesslike expression on his face. It had happened so fast, Ava wasn’t entirely certain it had happened at all.
11
How had he not noticed Harry Yamada standing behind him? They’d exchanged less than a handful of words over the last seven years. Both were acutely aware of the feud that existed between their families, and the two took great care to avoid each other.
Now Louis narrowed his eyes at Harry.
The grunt could have meant anything, but Louis took it precisely in only one manner. The resentment ran deep, and it didn’t help that Louis had been obliged to quit school a year and a half earlier to help out on his family’s ranch full-time, a humiliation Harry Yamada did not have to endure, as his family had a significantly better parcel of land. The Yamadas were well-to-do; Harry and his sister, Mae, always had good clothes and new schoolbooks. By contrast, Louis was one of twelve children born to Edith Thorn, who, ever since Louis’s father passed away some eight years earlier, had been left to rely upon her children to run the family ranch.
It didn’t help, either, that all the Thorn children had been taught that the Yamadas’ superior
acreage originally belonged to their grandfather, Ennis Thorn, and that Ennis had been tricked out of the land in an act of grave injustice. The story had been handed down—first from Ennis to his son John, and then from John to Louis and his many brothers and sisters. With their father dead, Louis’s eldest brother, Guy, was chiefly responsible for keeping the story alive. Louis looked up to Guy, who worked harder than anyone Louis had ever known. So when Guy warned Louis to “keep away from the thieving Japs who stole our land,” Louis did his best to oblige. But Louis, being Louis, found that hostility did not come naturally to him.
“Got something to say?” Louis repeated now.
Harry shrugged and shook his head. He raised his hands in a show of innocent ignorance. This much seemed aimed at placating Louis. But there was a hint of some additional gesture—not quite a grin, but almost. It struck Louis as superior. He grew more irritated than ever.
Louis returned his attention to the two biplanes. They went up and down, up and down, flying off into the distance and disappearing for about ten minutes or so at a time. With every landing, they unloaded a fresh, giddy passenger flushed with excitement and loaded up a wide-eyed, uninitiated pale passenger in exchange.
The better part of a half hour elapsed, and finally it was Louis’s turn to go up. Both biplanes landed within a minute of each other; each unloaded a passenger. This meant Louis and the person after him—in this case, Harry—would be going up at the same time, each with a different pilot. Louis would rather not go up at the same time as Harry Yamada, but he couldn’t think of a way to raise an objection that wouldn’t sound childish. So Louis simply eyed the two pilots, who stood up in their cockpits and began to climb down. They approached the waiting crowd and waved Louis and Harry over.
“C’mon, boys!” the older pilot hollered. “We don’t have all day!”
Louis found himself rooted where he stood. Then his feet came unstuck and his legs operated on instinct. He could hear footfalls behind him. Louis gritted his teeth and picked up the pace.
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