Cloud Waltzer

by Tory Cates

  Meredith trembled. Tension drew in the nerves at the base of her neck and twisted them into a headache that sliced at the aching space behind her eyes. In a dull fog, she pulled back the covers. The morning was chilly, too cool for the light skirt and blouse she’d worn last night. She’d have to try the borrowed clothes. The jeans fit snugly over her hips that were as lean as those of the young boy who owned the pants. The brightly striped T-shirt was a gaudy mockery of the despair Meredith carried within her. She gathered up her own clothes and, like a soldier setting out on a suicide mission, headed for the kitchen. She cauterized the torrent of emotions churning within her with the thought that now all that remained was a professional relationship with Archer. It would have to be enough.

  The sounds of sausage sputtering and coffee perking greeted her. Archer turned. His face was pale. Meredith melted at the sight of it.

  “Archer, please forgive me.” The words sprang from her as naturally as water bubbled from a spring. “Please, I’m trying, I really am.”

  “You are that, my darling,” he said with bleak humor. “You are extremely trying. But I was pushing you again. I shouldn’t have done that. I suppose I’ve been pushing all my life. It’s a hard habit to break. Come on, have some breakfast so we can get out to the launch site before the sun goes down on our solar balloon.”

  His smile was a sun that Meredith had never expected to see again. She came forward to take the plate he handed her.

  “Look at you,” he exclaimed, his mood brightening by the second. “All you need now is a paper route, a baseball cap, and a few frogs in your pocket and you’d make the most gorgeous eleven-year-old boy on the block.”

  Relief caused Meredith to laugh a bit too heartily. She’d won a reprieve.

  * * *

  The scene at the launch site was a repeat of the one staged two nights ago. Meredith could barely believe that such a short amount of time had passed since the night of the Balloon Ball, the night in Cloud Waltzer. But it wasn’t the prancing unicorn balloon that was being inflated this time; it was a second-generation model, Archer’s pet project, a balloon that absorbed its heat, not from canisters of burning propane gas, but from the sun, the dazzling New Mexican sun.

  Phil was already inflating Cloud Waltzer II. If all went according to the plans worked out at Solar Concepts, this would be the only time during the flight, except at landing, when a gas flame would be needed. The balloon rose. The top was covered with a thin black shell that would absorb the maximum number of rays. The bottom half was silver to reflect heat back into the envelope. It had an austere elegance, but Meredith missed the whimsical unicorn that she had come to identify so closely with Archer, almost as if he too were a creature of myth who could never exist for her in reality.

  “Mr. Hanson.” A television reporter trailing a cameraman approached Archer and stuck a microphone in his face. “Do you really believe this thing will fly?”

  “Oh, we know it will fly,” Archer answered. “We’re just not sure for how long. This isn’t the first solar balloon, you know. It is the first built for long-distance flights, though. But we’re still at the experimental stage with it.”

  “Why, then, are you going up? And why are you breaking your long-standing ban on personal publicity to do it?”

  “I believe in solar energy, gentlemen and ladies,” he said, nodding to the female reporters who’d joined the expanding crowd around Archer. Meredith too switched on her recorder. “If my stepping out of the shadows will in any way help move our country toward exploring this alternative more fully, then I’m happy to do so.”

  “Isn’t that a rather contradictory stand for someone to take who made their fortune in oil?” a female reporter asked.

  “It might be for some. It’s not for me. Many fortunes, many industries, many businesses were built on oil, but the day of fossil fuels has passed. We, all of us, need to recognize that. I hope Cloud Waltzer II will help focus that recognition. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a flight to catch.”

  The gathering of newspeople chuckled appreciatively at Archer’s quip. As he strode through the crowd, he stopped beside Meredith. “Why don’t you ride with Phil,” he suggested.

  “Why don’t I ride with you?” Meredith startled herself with her bold question. “I mean, if there’s room.”

  “There’s room, but are you sure you want to come? Like I said, she’s still in an experimental stage.”

  “If you feel sure enough to go, so do I.”

  “I’d love for you to come.” Turning to Phil, he asked, “Have you gone over the equipment checklist?”

  Phil gave an absentminded nod as he hurried to keep pace with his boss as they made their way to the balloon. Carl, Betty, Marie, and Tomas, the whole crew from Solar Concepts, was hanging on to the basket that strained to escape their grasp. Meredith exchanged greetings.

  “You going to solo like you planned?” Carl asked.

  “No, Meredith’s coming along.”

  “What a trouper,” Tomas called. “I’m only kidding. Most of us have already been up during tethered flights. This is the first free flight, but it shouldn’t be all that much different.”

  “All aboard.” Archer, who’d already climbed into the basket, held a hand out to Meredith.

  Funny, she thought, how far less frightened she was of going up several hundred feet in a relatively untested balloon than she was of letting Archer glimpse her unclothed. Even knowing that this was an experimental flight, in a balloon that had never flown free before, Meredith felt no fear. The crew members let the balloon go. Meredith gloried in the sensation of rising up to a warming sun with Archer at her side.

  “Okay,” he muttered, preoccupied with the altimeter gauge that was charting their altitude. “If the design is viable, we should be able to cut off the burner now.” Cautiously he turned down the valve regulating the flow of propane. The dancing blue flame withered, then died. Silence closed in around them.

  “She seems to be holding steady,” Archer observed after several tense moments had passed and the balloon hadn’t lost any altitude. “Good old Sol appears to be doing his job keeping the air in the envelope heated.”

  As the minutes of serenely tranquil silence, minutes unbroken by the roar of the burner, lengthened, Meredith finally blurted out, “This is absolutely more bliss than any human has a right to.”

  “It would be hard to go back to propane after this,” Archer agreed. “Hopefully we won’t need to if we can maintain, or even increase, our altitude using solar power.”

  As if responding to his wish, the needle on the altimeter swung slightly to the right, registering a higher altitude.

  “We’re climbing!” Archer whooped. “She really works!” He grabbed Meredith in an exuberant bear hug.

  She delighted in the powerful embrace that was augmented by the boyish enthusiasm animating Archer’s features. He was such an intriguing blend of the hard-nosed pragmatist so adept at making tough business decisions and the whimsical dreamer who lived to chase airy fantasies. “The only thing missing is the unicorn,” Meredith commented wistfully, “to make this whole flight seem like something out of a fairy tale.”

  “Are ye saying we should hoist our colors, matey?” Archer asked in a mock pirate voice that made matey sound like mighty.

  “Colors?” Meredith echoed uncomprehendingly.

  “Aye, the proud flag of this great ship o’ the sky.” With a grin that flashed its playful rakishness in the sun, Archer tugged at some lines and a banner the size of several bedsheets unrolled.

  Meredith viewed it illuminated from behind before Archer could tie it down. “The unicorn!” she cried, for emblazoned there on the fluttering banner was the one-horned creature of myth capering as gaily as ever across the boundless sky.

  “I thought you’d like seeing your old traveling buddy up there,” Archer said, gathering Meredith into his arms again for a squeeze.

  Meredith closed her eyes and was overtaken by the half-dreamin
g sensations of silent floating, warm sun, and the security of Archer’s arms around her. She’d never felt so right. The far-off honking of a chorus of car horns brought her to a reluctant awareness. Archer craned to look out over the top of her head.

  “Your subjects await you, m’lady,” he jested, pivoting her in his arms so that she too could peer over the basket edge.

  Far below, so small they looked like a child’s toys, a line of cars was following them. Meredith recognized the logos of all three local TV stations on three different vans.

  “Give the fans a wave,” Archer coached.

  “They’ll never be able to see it from this height,” she protested. Still, she hesitantly held up her hand, and feeling like a ridiculous parody of a high school homecoming queen, she leaned out and waved.

  Her gesture was followed instantly by another round of raucous honks. Meredith responded with a far more energetic wave. Honks answered the second wave as well. For a second she was convinced that she’d set up a dialogue with the far-off cars when she glanced over her shoulder at Archer. He was busily working the lines that held the unicorn banner in place, making it rise and fall in the wind each time Meredith waved.

  “You rat,” she railed jokingly. “You had me believing they were honking at me.”

  Archer tied down the lines again and turned his attention back to Meredith. “They were. I was just giving them the right signals. The whole world should be honking and clapping and bowing at your feet, paying you homage.” What had started out as lightly barbed teasing mellowed into something with an indisputable core of truth as Archer’s gaze paid homage in its own way to the woman before him.

  The honking became a distant, earthbound nuisance that they both easily ignored. The borders of their world had suddenly become very small. They extended no farther than the wicker basket they stood in, each wondering what the other was truly thinking.

  “How do you do what you do to me?” Archer asked, his voice insinuatingly low. But he realized that he was the one who would have to provide an answer to the provocative question. His eyes seared her with a questing gaze. “I’ve never been so consumed by anyone before in my life. This is absolutely pagan, but I want you again, Meredith. Right here. Right now.”

  Like two wires split but still arcing electricity, Meredith felt the charge that never completely died away between them. “It’s the same for me,” she confessed, Archer’s ragged honesty summoning forth her own. “But it’s probably even more unique in my life. Before I met you, I’d even worried that I might basically be asexual. I’d just never responded terribly strongly to any man before.”

  “You?” Archer questioned, remembering not only the heat of the response she stirred in him, but her own giving warmth as well. The memory flickered at his groin, waking him with a teasing excitement. “My darling, you are far from asexual. You can believe me on that score.”

  “I really haven’t had too many worries since I met you,” Meredith teased back enticingly, enjoying the sexual tension that crackled between them. She was safe up here. Safe from exposure, from Archer’s scrutiny. She could revel without fear in a sensation she’d known precious little of in her life—that of desiring and being found desirable by a man.

  “You’re adorable in that outfit,” Archer growled playfully. “You know that, don’t you? Come here, I feel like doing nasty things with the paper boy.”

  Meredith laughed at his joke, at the notion that it was possible for him to do anything “nasty” with her. She laughed at the endless azure of the sky above. Her smile fading, she stepped forward. Suddenly, the entire morning, the balloon launch, even the months of research and development that had gone into the solar balloon, seemed nothing more than a prologue to this moment, to Archer’s kiss.

  A dizzying languor crept over Meredith as Archer’s tongue found hers. She felt doubly adrift, floating several hundred feet above the waking city and floating as well in her own pool of rapidly warming desire. Just as the balloon responded to the invisible zephyrs that batted it about the sky, Meredith was a captive of her body’s will.

  His hand slid under the striped T-shirt to coax her nipples to tautened life.

  “Archer,” she reprimanded him, “someone might see us.”

  “Someone? Like who?”

  Of course there was no one, and nothing except the emotional phantoms that had populated Meredith’s mind for so long. Oh, they whispered to her, you might have fooled him for now, but wait until he sees all of you, sees the not-quite-right body. Wait until he finds out why you really left Chicago. Wait until he hears the word anorexia.

  The incessant buzzing rose to a terrifying pitch. Meredith knew only one way of silencing the destructive voices. She clung to Archer, her mouth drawing passion, strength, and reassurance from his.

  The trembling fierceness of Meredith’s kiss stirred Archer profoundly. He knew, he felt in his bones, that she was the woman he’d searched for all his life. Surely, the searing heat that flashed between them would be enough to melt the damnable walls she’d constructed around herself. It would have to be. Because, Archer swore to himself even as they shared one another’s breath, he would spend his life alone before he shared it with a woman he could never fully have in all senses of the word.

  A sixth sense stronger even than the surge of passion that was rolling over him alerted Archer that all was not well. His eyes flew to the altimeter. The balloon was falling.

  Meredith, seeing the concern that furrowed Archer’s brow, glanced down. The cars on the highway below were much larger than they’d been before.

  “We’re losing altitude.” Archer’s voice was calm and steady as he checked out the craft for an explanation. “There’s the culprit,” he announced, craning his neck backward.

  Meredith followed his gaze. The envelope puffing out far above their heads looked like a mosaic. The black coating was fissured by a multitude of cracks.

  “The heat-absorptive covering obviously wasn’t pliant enough,” Archer observed caustically. Disappointment weighted down his every word. He was a man with a low tolerance for failure. “We’ll have to use the auxiliary propane system.” For Archer that was the final admission of defeat. He began rummaging through the small gear box.

  Meredith felt a surge of tenderness watching his enthusiasm drain away. That emotion was replaced by mild alarm as Archer’s search of the basket grew more frenzied.

  “What is it, Archer?”

  “The damned lighter, I can’t find it.” He patted all his pockets and scanned every inch of the basket a second and a third time. “Phil must have forgotten to pack it,” he concluded. “You don’t have a lighter? Matches?”

  “I could rub two sticks together,” Meredith volunteered in an outburst of nervous humor. When Archer managed only a tight smile, she asked soberly, “How serious is it?”

  Archer checked their rate of descent on the variometer. “We’re picking up speed and, as the air in the balloon continues to cool, we’ll pick up a lot more.” Seeing Meredith’s apprehension, he smiled his usual easy smile. “We’ll make it. We’ll just have to do it by the seat of our pants. We can’t fire up the burners. That means no luxury landing. Just consider this your first parachute jump. Think you can handle it?”

  “I’ll try,” Meredith promised.

  “Good.” His gaze lingered on her before turning to the stretch of earth below them. Meredith looked down and gasped. They were directly above the highway running north to Santa Fe. Vehicles from VW beetles to monstrous semis roared along its four lanes.

  “Now, aside from the obvious,” Archer said with deadly calm, “we’ve got two problems. The first is not landing in the middle of the interstate. The second is not running into those power lines,” he said, pointing to the high-tension lines running along to the east of the interstate.

  Meredith looked up at the maze of cables running from the crown of the balloon down to the metal frame and metal reinforced floor of the basket. The danger of contacting t
he power lines ahead was obvious. If they collided with the high-voltage lines, the balloon would turn into one big conductor, drawing electricity down the metal cables onto the metal-framed basket floor they stood on. There would be no chance of survival. Equally menancing was the four-lane interstate below.

  “God, I wish I hadn’t brought you along,” Archer breathed fervently.

  “Listen, Hanson,” Meredith said in her best tough-cookie imitation, “if you can handle this, so can I. If you’re going to wish for something, why don’t you wish for the wind direction to change.”

  “Now, that would be helpful.”

  Meredith heard the tightness in Archer’s voice. He was looking overboard. The balloon was stubbornly following the course of the highway. Worse, it was sloping in ever closer to the busy thoroughfare. She almost felt as if she could lean out and touch the high, flat tops of the trucks booming past beneath them. For reasons she barely understood, though, she wasn’t afraid. Instead, an odd exhilaration beat through her. It was nearly a relief to face a real, tangible danger after all the psychic ones her mind had conjured up.

  “What’s your plan?” she asked levelly.

  “Try to stay up until the wind shifts us clear of the highway and hope to hell it moves us to the west and not toward the power lines.” Even as he spoke, they shifted, moving away from the highway. They moved east.

  “We’ve got to dump her before we hit the lines,” Archer shouted, staring straight ahead at the onrushing pylons. “Watch the highway,” he ordered, grappling with a tangle of cables, “and tell me the instant we’ve cleared.”

  Meredith turned away from the treacherous power lines. She could smell the diesel exhaust of the trucks blasting by and feel the balloon jerk as it was caught in the wake of their passing. At last the basket moved off the asphalt. The instant it was skimming above the shoulder of the highway, Meredith screamed, “Now!”