They drew nearer to the planes. On the red plane, Louis saw gold lettering that read CASTOR, and the same gold lettering with the word POLLUX on the blue plane. Louis wondered which biplane—and, by extension, which pilot—to choose. His heart quickened and his eyes darted back and forth. He thought he felt Harry fall back a bit. A gesture of politeness? Or was Harry just as intimidated?
“Well, hurry up and hop in, kid!” the younger, blond pilot called, staring directly at Louis, solving Louis’s dilemma. Louis walked toward the blue biplane, turned his head, and glimpsed Harry walking toward the red.
“The pilot doesn’t ride in the front?” Louis overheard Harry ask in a puzzled voice. Louis rolled his eyes. The way it worked, the pilot sat in the second cockpit, in the back, with the passenger up front; Louis knew that much from books and newsreels, and from building models.
The blond pilot clambered up into the cockpit and handed down a cap and goggles to Louis. They were damp with the perspiration of previous passengers and smelled a little like mildew, but Louis didn’t care; he received them with a sense of awe. Carefully he fit them over his head, doing up the strap under his chin with hands that were still trembling. The pilot directed Louis to climb into the cockpit and buckle up for safety.
“Okeydokey, kid, you all strapped in nice ’n’ tight?” the blond pilot asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“No need for formalities, kid. This ain’t the military or nothin’. Say, why don’tcha call me Buzz?”
“Yes, sir—Buzz, sir,” Louis accidentally bleated out. He twisted in his seat just in time to catch Buzz’s amused, exasperated expression.
“Well, hell . . . sometimes you can’t teach a new dog new tricks, neither. All right. If you’re all set, let’s get this thing on up in the air!”
Louis forced a stiff nod.
“Contact!” Buzz shouted, and pushed the electric starter.
The engine let out a mighty cough and suddenly the front propeller at the nose of the biplane sprang to life. It gave a puttering whir that was at first quite satisfying, then grew slightly terrifying as the blades began to beat the air in earnest. Buzz dropped a hand lever down and the plane began to roll along the empty expanse of Irving Sumpter’s fallow field.
A short distance away, the other pilot, Hutch, yelled out, “Contact!” and Louis heard the second biplane’s engine cough and sputter. He looked over and saw Harry staring straight at him, looking as calm as anything under his own set of cap and goggles. There was no trace of worry etched upon his face, a confident excitement the only legible emotion.
Louis found himself envious of Harry’s lack of fear, and his mind reactively flicked back to something his father used to say over and over again: Damn idiot foreigners. Now Louis’s brother Guy repeated these words, adding, Those Japs cheated your grandfather out of his land, despite the fact these damn idiot foreigners hardly even know how to run a ranch. The last part was open to debate. While Kenichi Yamada had planted several varieties of things in his orchards that neither Ennis nor Louis’s father, John Thorn, would have ever considered—plums, almonds, satsuma oranges—the Yamada family turned a nice profit. Their orchards meant they always had plenty to sell at the fruit-packing sheds dotted along the train tracks in town, and their cattle grazed, fat and happy, on the remainder of the land that, to his dying day, Ennis Thorn insisted they’d swindled from him.
Louis’s attention was brought back to the present as the biplane began to pick up a little speed. After a moment, the second biplane began to drift toward the runway, too. Harry’s confident smile disappeared from sight as Hutch steered his biplane behind the first and pumped the brake. Louis understood they were going to follow each other, one plane trailing the other on takeoff.
“All righty, kid. We’ll get some speed up and be in the air in no time!” Buzz hollered over the propeller and engine. “Ready?”
Louis stared stiffly ahead; he couldn’t see Buzz behind him, but he nodded.
“And . . . up we go!” Buzz announced.
Bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-bump-bump-bump. Crabgrass and gopher holes. Sumpter’s field was hardly a smooth surface, but even so, Louis had not expected the takeoff to be so bumpy or the biplane to bounce so much. He regretted eating breakfast. (His mother, Edith, had served up eggs and ham, along with a no-nonsense expression.) It was rough going for a minute or so, and then . . . all of a sudden . . . the jarring motion petered out and was replaced by a vacuum of friction, a smooth weightless feeling as the biplane lifted off the ground.
Louis felt a sense of exhilaration and euphoria come over him. But it was short-lived. Buzz pulled back on the stick and Louis’s stomach felt as though it had detached from his body. His innards seemed to drop away from him as the biplane began to climb higher and higher. His body pressed down in the seat as they continued to rise. Then Buzz descended a bit, and Louis suddenly felt light as a feather. As they leveled off, Louis felt a little more normal and Buzz began to make a scenic tour of the area. The snowcapped Sierra Nevadas hovered in the distance on one side of the plane, the flat, fertile Sacramento Valley on the other. Louis peered over the edge of the cockpit and recognized the American River, and from that was able to deduce the names of the mining towns, one after the other, mostly dots along the water.
After a while, Louis relaxed. To his surprise, he was thoroughly enjoying the tour. But as he stared down at the rolling land below with a dazed expression, his ears pricked to the sound of the second biplane. He twisted in his seat and saw that Harry and the other pilot, Hutch, were floating into formation with Louis and Buzz. Harry appeared exhilarated, like he was having the time of his life. He grinned and waved, but Louis only clenched his jaw. The two biplanes flew along like this for a time; Louis found himself slightly distracted and a little less engaged with the scenic tour he’d paid five precious dollars to enjoy.
“Okay, kid! Time to head back now,” Buzz hollered over the noise of the wind and the plane’s engine. Louis turned his head and nodded solemnly, trying to resist the urge to protest. It all felt much too quick; he had just gotten comfortable with the unfamiliar sensations of flying. It couldn’t be over already.
Buzz tilted the wings so they did a slow circle, and the mountains that had been on the left side of the plane slowly swiveled so that now they were on the right. But shortly after they’d turned 180 degrees, something happened that caught Louis completely off-guard. Hutch, the pilot of the other biplane, began making hand signals to Louis’s pilot, Buzz. The young blond pilot nodded in approval and gave a thumbs-up. Louis heard Buzz chuckling.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Buzz said to himself. “Got yourself a goddamned daredevil passenger there, eh, Hutch?” Buzz proceeded to pedal the rudders to catch some drag, slowing down and falling behind Hutch’s plane as though to give it more space.
“What’s wrong with Harry and that other pilot? What’re they gonna do?” Louis shouted back to Buzz. But Buzz didn’t answer; he only grinned and pointed ahead. Louis turned back to face forward just in time to see Hutch (and Harry) corkscrew through the air in a barrel roll. Louis was shocked, speechless. It didn’t matter: Hutch and Harry weren’t done. Once they pulled out of the barrel roll, the biplane leveled off, then—to Louis’s further astonishment—rocketed up vertically into the sky. Up and up the other plane went, until Louis understood on instinct: They were going to complete a loop-the-loop. And, sure enough, they did. They began in front of Louis and Buzz, arced overhead, and turned up behind the blue plane.
Once the red biplane had made its full loop, it leveled out and pulled back into formation behind Louis and Buzz. Louis could hear Harry hooting and hollering from the front cockpit, euphoric from having turned upside down in the air and lived to tell the tale.
Hutch shouted something to Buzz that Louis couldn’t hear, and Buzz shouted something back. When shouting became too difficult, the two of them reverted to their c
omplicated hand gesturing. Louis had a feeling he knew what was coming when Buzz returned his attentions to the passenger in front of him.
“What do ya say, kid?” Buzz hollered. “Whaddaya say we give ’em a run for their money?”
Louis froze, unable to speak.
“How ’bout it?” Buzz prodded.
“Yeah. All right,” Louis finally said, shaking himself.
“What was that?”
Louis swallowed and clinched his jaw to stave off his nerves. “I SAID, ALL RIGHT,” he bellowed, trying to brace himself.
“Woo-hoo! Attaboy! Man after my own heart. Okay, kid. Let’s show them how it’s done,” Buzz said, and Louis immediately regretted his decision as Buzz began maneuvering the plane into position.
As Buzz had before, this time Hutch fell back and let Buzz have the sky.
“First things first!” Buzz shouted, and all of a sudden the biplane spiraled into a series of three barrel rolls in succession. Hutch had only done one, Louis dimly recalled, trying to keep his breakfast down for the second time that afternoon. Buzz piloted them through three—a kind of one-upmanship. It wasn’t so terrible, the barrel rolls. It felt a little like being the meat on a spit, but they were over almost before they began.
Buzz leveled off. Louis realized what was inevitably coming next. As they flew on, Buzz pulled the stick back. They began to climb straight up, as though going up a wall. Louis patted the belts that held him in the cockpit. Suddenly the belts felt very thin; Louis felt strangely naked. But before he could dwell on this feeling, the biplane had pitched so that now the top of his head was pointing directly down at the ground.
This was more of a ride than Louis had been expecting. Only a little while earlier, he had been standing on the ground, trying to envision what the pilots were seeing and feeling as they completed their loop-the-loops. Now Louis was flying one right along with Buzz. It seemed to last forever, and then, at the same time, it was over almost immediately.
Finally they leveled back out, and Buzz piloted the biplane back over to rejoin the red biplane carrying Hutch and Harry. Now it was Louis’s turn to hoot and holler at the top of his lungs; he couldn’t stop. Harry waved, and in his giddy, elated state, Louis momentarily forgot how much he hated him, and waved back.
12
Once back on the ground, Louis’s legs quivered as he tumbled down from the cockpit. The ground beneath his feet didn’t seem stationary anymore, as if all along the dirt were really an unsteady sea and Louis had just never known it.
“Ya all right there, kid?” Buzz asked, retrieving the cap and goggles he’d given Louis.
“Sailor’s legs,” Hutch commented, ambling over from where he’d landed the other biplane, wearing a friendly smile. “Except we ain’t hardly sailors. But after bein’ up in the air, every other element—earth, water, what have you . . . just seems heavy and inelegant. It’ll pass. Just give it a minute.”
Harry followed close on Hutch’s heels, still grinning. Louis smiled back for the second time that day, but then, thinking of his brother, thinking of his family, forced the smile again from his face.
From across the field, Ava watched the group approach, intrigued by the intense air of excitement that hummed in the air around them. She noticed Buzz and Hutch were more animated and amused than usual; usually they got bored taking passengers up for tourist rides. They were laughing and clapping the two young men on the back, she noticed. She shot Louis a slightly bewildered smile.
“So . . . how was it? Terribly frightening?”
Her question was directed to Louis, but before he could answer, Harry piped up.
“Piece of cake,” he said, grinning.
Ava turned around to take in the sight of Harry Yamada afresh. He was so confident, so cocky. She arched a skeptical eyebrow.
“Piece of cake?” she questioned.
“Sure.”
Ava rolled her eyes.
“Your pilots—Hutch and Buzz, here—even flew some stunts with us,” Harry added for good measure.
This was news to Ava; Hutch and Buzz had performed the stunts out of sight from Sumpter’s field. That certainly wasn’t part of the tourist ride. Surprised and troubled, she looked to the pilots for confirmation.
“Stunts? Which stunts?”
“Just a few barrel rolls and a loop-the-loop,” Hutch answered.
“And . . . that . . . didn’t intimidate you at all?” she asked. Her eyes flicked involuntarily to Louis’s own; after all, Ava thought earlier she’d detected the sensible sentiment of caution in him.
Louis looked to Ava and then to Harry and back again.
“Nah,” he lied, shaking his head.
“As a matter of fact,” Harry said in a sure voice, “I’d have liked to do more.”
“Like what?” Ava snorted, annoyed by his overconfidence.
“I don’t know.” Harry shrugged. “Maybe go out for a walk on the wings.”
“Now, don’t talk nonsense, boy,” Buzz interrupted with a dismissive tsk. “That wing-walking business is only for madmen. Even Hutch and I ain’t crazy enough to leave the cockpit.”
“Not voluntarily!” Hutch said. “I done a parachute jump once or twice, sure—but that was the Army’s idea, never mine.” He chuckled at his own joke.
“I’d do it,” Harry said. “If someone’d let me go for a walk on the wings, I’d go up in a heartbeat.”
“You’d honestly wing walk, son?” Hutch asked, shaking his head.
“I would.”
“Hey, Hutch,” Buzz chimed in, “I think we got these kids too excited—all the blood’s rushed to their heads from that loop-the-loop.”
“What’s this I hear?”
Ava recognized her stepfather’s voice and turned to see Earl. Here he came, his silky jacket completely out of place in the farmer’s field, flashing bright red under the afternoon sun. Ava knew he would have something to say about Buzz and Hutch flying a few barnstorming tricks with passengers in tow—but what Earl’s take on this situation would be, she couldn’t guess.
“What’s this?” he repeated. “Am I to understand you performed some stunts with these passengers in your planes?” A stern expression on his face, Earl gave his pilots a questioning stare.
“It wasn’t their idea; we asked ’em to,” Harry intervened, not wanting to get the pilots into hot water. “And it was all very safe.”
“Safe?” Earl roared, still using his highly dramatic, carefully articulated announcer’s voice. “Why, of course it was safe! Above all else, my pilots are the safest in the state—nay, the nation! My flying circus has been in business for years and is top-notch, I assure you!”
Ava listened with skepticism, aware of the fact that the circus was neither licensed nor legal. Earl paused and gave Harry and Louis a quick once-over.
“Allow me to introduce myself: Mr. Earl Shaw, founder and owner of this spectacular barnstorming show.”
Ava watched as her stepfather gave his signature bow. She had witnessed this bow many times throughout her time with Earl. He generally performed it when he was cornering an unwitting “customer.” Ava knew it was not a bow of subservience; it was Earl’s way of asserting himself, of cornering his prey.
“No, no, dear boy, I wasn’t at all concerned for your safety. As I say, I only employ the safest pilots in the world!” he continued.
He smoothed his dapper black moustache and squinted his eyes, and Ava felt even more certain Earl was silently hatching some sort of plan. She looked at the two young men, wondering if they were savvy enough to catch on.
“It’s only a matter of our fee for such embellishments!” Earl said finally.
“Your fee?” Harry blinked.
“Absolutely, my boy! Why, it seems to me, if the ride we furnish for you involves additional entertainments, we’re obliged to charge you extra. Otherwi
se, it would hardly be fair to the other passengers!”
Aha, Ava thought. So that was it. She had to hand it to Earl: He always managed to come up with an angle.
Buzz made an effort to steer the conversation away from money. “Well,” he said, “if you can believe it, now these fellas want to go wing walking.” He thumbed toward Louis and Harry with a friendly chuckle. Buzz had miscalculated, however, because Ava saw Earl pause. Then his face lit up even brighter.
“Is this true? Are you boys in earnest?” Earl asked.
“Absolutely,” Harry answered for them both. Ava’s eyes flicked again to Louis’s face as she wondered if he felt the same.
“Hmm,” Earl mused. “We would have to charge even more for that,” he said. “Seeing as how it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience—wouldn’t you agree?” He eyed Harry up and down, making a quick calculation of the maximum the boy might be able to afford. Ava could already guess what Earl saw and what he was thinking: The boy was an Oriental of some kind, but he spoke excellent English, looked very kempt. America was a country of immigrants after all, and there was no telling nowadays who had coin to spare.
“Well, if you have your hearts set on wing walking, we might be able to accommodate you boys if you return again tomorrow—for an additional fee, of course . . .” Earl glanced in the direction of where Irving Sumpter stood, and Ava guessed that he was calculating how much the old man would demand in order to use the field a second day. Sumpter looked like he’d be glad for the extra spare change, anyhow. Earl returned his attention to Harry. “So . . . shall we expect you tomorrow?”
“How much?” Harry asked, cutting to the chase. “How much to go up again and take a walk on the wings?”
“Ten dollars,” Earl Shaw proclaimed.
“Twice the price?” Harry asked.
“Why, yes—and at that amount, it’s a steal!” Earl replied, once again twirling his moustache between his thumb and forefinger.
“Just so I’m clear: If I turn up tomorrow with ten dollars,” Harry recited carefully, “you’ll let me go up in your plane with one of your pilots and wing walk?”
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