John took two spoons from his pocket and handed one to her. “Oh, I’m always trying.”
“That’s the problem, actually,” Helen said, taking a spoon from him. “Lately you’ve been a little too romantic.”
“Do tell.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Helen said, spooning soup into her mouth. “It’s just that, these last few weeks, it’s been a bit much. With all the lovey-dovey stuff, I mean. The kisses and the hugs and the constant
John took a swallow of soup. “You’re saying I’m smothering you.”
“A little. It’s like every second: ‘Oh, Helen, I just love you so much. I mean, you’re so beautiful and smart and funny and—’”
“I’ll try to rein it in.”
“That’s all I ask,” Helen said, tipping the pot for him so he could get at the heavier noodles. “Too much romance just scares a girl off sometimes.”
“You know,” said John, “you’re a pretty good actress, Helen.”
Her face broke into a wide grin. “You think so?”
Though it was hard to tell in the dim firelight, John thought he saw a blush rise on her cheeks. My blushing bride, he thought.
“I half believed you myself,” he said.
“I used to take lessons, when I was a girl,” she said.
He offered her the last of the soup, but she shook her head.
“I wouldn’t have thought they had acting classes in a cow town like Bunting,” he said.
“Where?”
He finished drinking the final bit of soup. “Back in Bunting, Kansas,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Helen said, grabbing the pot from him. “I’ve never been to Kansas. I’m from Layman, Missouri. Born and raised.” Then she headed down to the river to clean up for bed.
The next morning they woke to find that the weather had turned on them. The winds had picked up; dark storm clouds crowded the sky. They tried to fly farther south, but the going was difficult. One rattling jump after another. John would take the plane up through the cloud cover to see if the air above was calm, find out the atmosphere was all roiling turbulence, and have to come back down. He’d land in a field, wet and chilled, wait a while, and then try again. It wasn’t fun, but through the whole ordeal Helen never questioned him, never complained. She never got scared either—never seemed to, at least. Even when the plane hit wind swells that nearly tipped them out into the sky, she just put her hand on the rim of the cockpit to steady herself and waited, trusting that soon enough, John would set things right again.
She was a strange bird, he thought, studying the back of her head. The interlacing weave of her braid. The small white cups of her ears. He liked her, though. He could tell already. She was intelligent and funny, with opinions on everything under the sun. Whenever they landed to gas up, she started in: Charlie Chaplin was the best actor in Hollywood; didn’t John think so? Prohibition was one of the stupidest ideas in history. In a hundred years, the country would have at least eighty states to it. Maybe even a hundred.
Around one in the afternoon, the weather finally cleared, and they made a hurried push south. Helen used the map to help guide them, and John quickly discovered that she had a keen eye for navigation; she often spotted subtle natural markers in the landscape before he did. A dried riverbed. An overgrown cattle path. A road sign, bleached white by the sun.
By three o’clock they were into Oklahoma. By four they were less than a hundred miles from the town of Mooney, their destination. The only trouble they had came when the plane’s radiator cap snapped off at six hundred feet up. Exposed to the open air, John knew, the radiator fluid wouldn’t be able to cool the engine, and the plane would be in danger of overheating and stalling out. There was no way to reach the cap from the cockpit, though. To reseal it, he’d have to climb out on the wing—a maneuver he’d managed in the past, but hated to perform. The wing doping was slippery, and the slipstream was tricky; the current could shift violently behind the propeller.
Helen’s face went pale when he told her what he was about to do. “What are you talking about?” she screamed. “Who’s going to fly the plane?”
“Just hold the controls as tight as you can!” he yelled, already standing up in the back cockpit. “This’ll take less than thirty seconds!”
The stunt went smoothly; Helen held the levers dead-steady while John slipped out onto the wing and screwed the cap onto the radiator nozzle. As he was climbing back into the cockpit, he gave Helen the thumbs-up, but she stayed frozen in position, gripping the controls, apparently afraid to let go. Her brown eyes looked huge to him, magnified behind her goggles.
They reached Mooney around seven o’clock, too late in the day to start barnstorming. John landed the plane in a scrub field just outside town. He figured they could relax that night, then go charging into Mooney early in the morning. Get in a full day of showboating. Besides, it was a Friday night. No better time to barnstorm than a bright weekend morning.
They set up camp beside a small pond, cooking a can of tomato soup for dinner. By the time they were done eating, the sky was dark.
“What did it feel like out there today?” Helen said as she laid her blanket beneath the starboard wing.
“What did what feel like?” John asked. He was already wrapped in his blanket on the port side of the plane.
“What does it feel like to be out on the wing like that?”
John laced his fingers behind his head. The night sky was clear, the stars brilliant. The full moon sat low on the horizon, like a dime balanced on its edge. “It was cold,” he said. “The wind’s strong out there.”
“But what did it feel like?” Helen said, lying down. “Out there all alone? So high up?”
“I don’t know, Helen. It felt like being out on the wing.”
“Would you teach me how to do it?”
John glanced over to see if Helen was kidding, but she was just a shape in the darkness.
“What’s to teach?” he said. “You just climb out. There’s nothing special about it.”
“So can I try tomorrow?”
John laughed. “No.”
“Why not, if there’s nothing special about it?”
“Because,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to go out there. The cap is fixed. Plus, it’s dangerous. You could get blown off. I had trouble holding on myself today.”
“Just for a minute. I won’t even let go of the cockpit rim.”
“Forget it.”
Helen sighed and lay back down. “What a mean husband I’ve got.”
“I thought that was how you liked them.”
“I said I didn’t like it when my man gets too romantic on me. I didn’t say I wanted him mean.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Do you think we’ll get a crowd tomorrow? The town seemed pretty big on the map.”
“Go to sleep.”
“I could see the cemetery from the air, too, right before we landed. And it looked huge.”
“Go to sleep.”
“The stars are too bright. I can’t.”
Less than a minute later, though, Helen was asleep.
John lay awake beneath his wing for a long time. He stared up at the night sky, trying to let its twinkling clockwork lull him to sleep. But Helen’s mention of the Mooney cemetery had reminded him that tomorrow was Saturday; in the morning, Rollie would visit the Williamsburg Cemetery, where John’s mother was buried. He made the excursion every week of the year, no matter the weather. He always went early, just after dawn, when the grounds were still empty and glistening wet, crows roosting on the gravestones. John had accompanied him on many occasions, but June, John’s mother, had died giving birth to him; he had not known her, and standing with his
