Storming

Twenty-Nine

HITCH WATCHED THE boy round the corner of the bleachers. Walter held the battered binoculars like they’d crack if he so much as jostled them. Crazy kid. He’d been the sharpest and the pluckiest of just about everybody here today—including Hitch. And there he was thinking he was some kind of failure. Did Nan really realize what kind of boy she had? With a nudge or two in the right direction, Walter would grow up to be some kind of man.

Hitch glanced sideways at where Jael was hanging onto the edge of the bleachers. She’d probably heard his whole conversation with Walter—and the days of hoping she might not have understood it were long over. His neck warmed a bit more, and he turned back to Taos. So he’d gone a little soft over the kid, so what? Couldn’t exactly leave the boy crying in the rain under a splintery bench, especially if that was going to be the last time Hitch ever said anything to him.

Jael shuffled over. She clung to the bleachers and supported her weight on her arms with each step. She looked worse than she’d been even the day after the lightning. Earl’s arm had been so obvious, Hitch hadn’t given much thought to what might have happened to her during the attack.

“That wing didn’t hit you too, did it?”

She shrugged. “No. It is the same hurt from before.”

“I thought that was getting better?”

“Sometimes it is getting better, some other times it is not. There is no sense to it. It was very bad not long ago, but I think maybe now it is becoming better.”

“You should sit down. J.W. seems to have forgotten his car’s here, so I’ll bring it over and give you a ride back to the Carpenters’.”

“Maybe tonight I will stay here. I should be where I can see what is happening.”

“What you should do is go sleep someplace dry and warm. This drizzle’s not going to do anybody’s joints any good.”

He looked at the sky, then let gravity take his head and lean it all the way back on his neck. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t really raining so much as sprinkling, and only a few drops struck his face. Sleeping somewhere warm and dry sounded awful good about now. His muscles stretched all the way down his chest and stomach, and he let out a groan.

“I’m sorry, you know,” he said.

She shuffled a step nearer and leaned a hand on his shoulder to support herself. “For what are you sorry?” She lowered herself to sit beside him.

“I said I’d help you take care of Zlo so you could go home. It’s not working out too well so far.”

“It is not not working out. Not yet anyway.”

He opened his eyes and raised his head. “It’s not going to take long for people to figure out you’re one of them. I’m sure Rick knows it, and Livingstone’s figured it out. He’s only keeping quiet so long as I play along with his heroics.”

“You are good at heroics.” The silver in her eyes had dulled to a pained gray. Her damp hair was crimping into curls, and she looked like a bedraggled little baby swan. “I was hearing what you said to Walter.”

He looked down and thumbed mud from the corner of Taos’s eye. “Yeah, I thought you might have.”

“Thank you.”

“Just being friendly.”

“Do you know he thinks you are hero out of his book of stories?”

“He’s a kid, he’s got a big imagination. Nothing revs a boy’s imagination like an airplane.”

“Maybe this is true. But I think he needs to have heroes more than some little boys.”

“’Cause he doesn’t talk, you mean?”

She swiped a raindrop from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I cannot explain it, but he is sad somehow inside. At his house, his family, they love him. But”—she shook her head—“even with them, he is still somehow not with them.”

“Well.” What was he supposed to do with that?

The boy could sure have chosen himself a nice string of heroes better than him. That was certainly what Nan was always implying. Why not Griff? He was here. He obviously knew Walter and liked him. Griff would be a far better kind of man to look up to. Not as exciting, probably, but the kind that’d show you how to be there for people when it counted.

Not much Hitch could say about that, so he changed the subject. “You do realize all this talk of Campbell’s and Livingstone’s—and mine—could be so much hot air? Even with the dirigible marked, we’d have to stumble right onto it to find it. Zlo is still square in control of this game, no question.”

She touched his shoulder again. Her palm warmed him all the way through his jacket. “We will think of something. Tomorrow will be different day.”

*

“Heetch.”

Somebody was saying his name funny. A woman. And she was poking him.

He shifted in his bedroll and eased his head out from under the blanket. The morning light—more gray than golden—zapped his eyelids shut just as fast as he opened them. He probably hadn’t gotten to sleep until past midnight, what with all the to-do of cleaning up the field and trying to plan for tomorrow.

Or today, rather.

“Hitch. I have thought of plan.”

He flipped over onto his back and squinched his eyes open.

Beneath the canopy of his Jenny’s wing, Jael crouched over him, one hand still extended, ready to jab him again.

He groaned. “Oof. A plan. Right. A plan.” The words circled in his brain, trying to find enough space to land.

She stabbed him again with two pointy fingers just under his ribs.

“Ow! Stop with the poking already. Give me a chance to wake up.”

“You are very slow with this waking up. Earl has been awake for many hours.”

“Don’t give him too much credit. He probably rolled over onto his busted arm.”

“No.” She rocked back on her heels. “He has been working on plane, to get it ready for when we need it.”

“By himself? With that arm?” Hitch propped himself on his elbow and craned a look around at the front of the plane.

Where the propeller should have been, the naked shaft glinted.

“Matthew Berringer took him to his house to do this carving,” Jael said.

“And he didn’t wake me?”

She shrugged. “He said he did not need you. And that you are”—she squinted one eye, like she was trying to remember a word—“bear, when you are woken up.”

“But you’re not scared of bears, is that it?”

She scootched back on her heels, and when she was clear of the wing, she stood. “Walter has bear. It is furry and… sweet.”

“Ri-ight.” He pushed back his bedroll and looked around for his boots. “So what’s this plan of yours?”

“I will tell you in car.” She gestured to J.W.’s jalopy. “Should I drive?”

“No. You should not drive.” He laced both boots all the way to the top and knotted them off. Then he raked a hand through his hair, grabbed his jacket, and crawled out from under the wing.

Uniform gray covered the sky, but it wasn’t raining anymore. Along the horizon, the clouds darkened into black streaks that blocked sight of anything past Scotts Bluff.

He turned all the way around until Jael was in view once more. “So we really are blockaded. At least it’s not raining here.” He touched the Jenny’s wing. It was only slightly damp from yesterday’s drizzle. “If it got much wetter, we would’ve had to wait for the spark plugs to dry out before we could take off.” He checked the engine, but Earl had already opened all the compartments to let her dry. “Guess that means the drought’s broken, for what it’s worth.”

“You are very slow this morning,” Jael said. She had rummaged through the grub sack and come out with what was left of Lilla’s biscuits. She held up the plate. “For first meal. Now let us go.”

“All right, all right.” He leaned his neck to first one side and then the other to crack it, then trudged after her.

Today, she hurried to the car with barely a glitch in her stride and climbed into the seat, up and over, without bothering with the door.

He cranked the engine, then slid beneath the wheel. “Guess sleeping cold and damp agrees with your joints after all.”

She grinned. “I thought of something that is very interesting.”

“What?” He turned the jalopy around and bumped across the field toward the road. “That being around Earl is what makes you sore?” Earl would say it was Hitch who had the talent for making people sore.

She bit her lip, still grinning. Her eyes sparkled. All in all, she looked far too pleased with herself. “Not Earl. Schturming.”

“How’s that?”

“Lightning is what made me hurt in beginning, yes?”

“Right. Although you’re lucky to be feeling anything, if you want my opinion.”

“Yes, but how it is hurting does not have sense. One hour it is almost all gone, and then I am hardly able to be walking.”

He turned onto the road, headed toward the lake, and gave the car the gun. “You’re the first person I know who’s stayed around to tell me how it felt after getting that close to a lightning strike. Maybe that’s just how it goes.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.” She handed him a biscuit. “It is like you said yesterday. The weather makes people’s bones to hurt. Well, Schturming causes weather, yes?”

He bit past the flour powdered on top and into the fluffy—if cold—insides of the biscuit. “And when are you figuring on getting to the plan part? _Schturming_’s making weather all over the place today.”

“But I am not talking about weather, I am talking about dawsedometer. When it is near, I hurt. And since it is inside of Schturming, that is how we find it.”

“That is… interesting, if it’s true. Kind of like barometric pressure—which this dawsedometer thing probably warps like crazy.”

She made a confused face.

“Barometric pressure. I guess you’d say it’s part of what makes weather. At any rate, it can make people’s joints hurt.” He chewed his biscuit. “But even if that’s true, what’s it get us? You just want to drive around until you start hurting?”

She raised both eyebrows, mouth cocked. “You have better idea?”

“Not really.”

“Then we drive.” She settled back in her seat and pulled out another biscuit. “You will find it. You have luck.”

“You can’t trust luck.”

She looked over at him. Her face was clear except for two serious little lines between her eyes. “I trust you.”

“Well…” He dug around for the right thing to say.

What did he want to say anyway? He had wanted her to trust him. He’d wanted her to like him, almost right from the start. Well, now she liked him and trusted him—and he’d gone and kissed her, and who knew exactly how she felt about that now that she’d cooled down. At any rate, she wasn’t too burnt up about it, from the looks of things.

He cast her a sidelong glance. “You do know you shouldn’t count on me too much, right?”

“This ‘count on’—what is that?”

“It means… depend on, to be sure of something.”

“You are not sure of yourself?”

“Oh, I’m sure. It’s just that what I’m sure of isn’t always what other people want me to be sure of.”

“You are very worried about disappointing people.”

Most of the time, there weren’t any people in his life to disappoint. It was only since coming home that the Groundsworld—as she called it—had started reaching out for him with its expectations and responsibilities.

He guided the car around a puddle. The left front tire hit the rut anyway and bounced hard.

“I’m not worried,” he said. “There’s things I’ve done—mostly long ago, before I left home—that I’m not proud of. I wish they could’ve turned out different. But the truth is, even if I had ’em to do again, they’d happen the same way. I am what I am, and I can’t help it when people expect me to be something else.”

She chewed on that for a minute. “You think you are still same person you were—before you left all this time ago?”

“Sure. People don’t change.” He gave her half a grin, trying to make it a joke. “It’s a common myth.”

She ate her biscuit slowly, watching him. Then she licked the crumbs off her fingers and shook her head. “People change. But it is slow. It is not that they decide tomorrow they will have differences. It is that they decide every day, for many days. Or maybe they do not decide—and it happens anyway, without them even having knowledge of it.” She spread her hands. “It is not change. It is what you call… um…”

“Evolution?”

“Maybe. I do not know this word.”

He steadied the steering wheel over a series of ruts. Maybe she was right. Maybe not. He wasn’t entirely the person he had been nine years ago. Back then, he’d been as sure as shoeshine that running away was the only right choice. But now, a niggle of doubt surfaced.

What would have happened had he stayed? Maybe Campbell would have backed down sooner than risk his crooked dealings being revealed in open court. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone after the Hitchcock farm like he’d threatened. Even if Campbell had held fast, maybe Hitch spending a few years in prison would have done less to hurt the people he cared about. Maybe Celia wouldn’t have gotten sick and died.

He might have a family now. A little stability. A few bucks in his pockets. Would that have been such a bad thing?

His chest tightened. And leave the air? Let gravity chain him to the ground?

He shook his head. “People don’t change. They want to, but they can’t.”

Jael drew in a pained little gasp.

He looked over at her. “Nothing personal.”

“No…” She sucked in another breath, past her teeth. She sat up, rigid in her bouncing seat, both fists clenched in her lap. Her skin had gone tight over her face. Her eyes were wide, her forehead lined. “I am having pain again.”

“What?” He hit the brakes hard, and the jalopy nearly swerved off the road. He leaned his head back and scanned the sky.

Nothing but clouds.

She leaned forward, wincing. “Move slowly.”

He let up on the brake. “If you’re right about this, you’ll deserve Livingstone’s prize all to yourself.”

They crept down the road—four hundred yards, five hundred, then a mile. He alternated his gaze between the road ahead and the hazy sky that stretched out across the lake on one side and the unplanted fields of gray-green sagebrush on the other.

When you came right down to it, this was ridiculous. It was like looking for a mosquito smashed onto the Jenny’s top wing. Maybe you’d find it if you looked long enough, but, even then, it’d be nothing but a fluke.

Jael snatched at his sleeve and pulled his arm, nearly turning the car into the barrow pit. “Wait!”

“Hey! Let up. You want to wreck us?”

Still hanging onto his arm, she dragged herself across the seat toward him. Her eyes strained for the sky. “Ssh! Engine—turn it off!”

He killed the engine and followed her gaze.

Even without sunlight, he still had to squint against the gray of the sky. “I don’t see anything.”

She leaned halfway over the top of him and pointed. “There.”

He followed her finger.

High above, skating along the bottom of the clouds, something flickered. Halfway across the field, a speck about the size of his thumbnail blinked against the clouds. He squinted harder. He should never have given Walter his field glasses.

“It’s probably a buzzard.”

She gave her head a sharp shake. “No.”

It flashed red and swung around. It didn’t look like a bird circling. More like something swinging.

It was the wing.

He thumped the steering wheel. “Hot dog, girl! I do believe you’re right. Let’s get you out of here and find me a plane!”

They careened back into camp to find Earl overseeing as Matthew and J.W. screwed the new propeller into place. Hitch skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. In Nebraska, it somehow managed to be dusty even after it rained. He shut off the engine and started to climb out.

Jael grabbed his sleeve and leaned across the seat. “Hitch. I think Zlo would be having desire for airplane. He would want it for protection and attack, yes?”

Hitch didn’t have to think about that for more than a second. “Of course, he would. Who’s gonna be satisfied with a dirigible when you can have a plane too?”

“He would chase after you, I think.” Her eyes sparked with the same excitement that was running all through his body. “If you were only plane he is having sight of—you could lead him to . . .” She gestured with both hands, trying to find the word.

He didn’t need her to say it. “Ambush.”

She grinned and nodded. “I would make you take me, but I can hardly walk when I am in nearness to it.”

He winked at her and squeezed her shoulder. “You’re already a genius. No need to be a hero too.” He slid all the way out and slammed the door. Then he gave caution a good heave into the wind and leaned back over the door, trying to keep a straight face and failing. “You deserve a kiss, but I have to tell you, I don’t want to get myself smacked again.”

Her eyes flashed wide for a second. Then something that might have been a smile tugged at the edges of her mouth.

He turned away before she could respond—either way—and jogged off.

Livingstone had wandered over to observe the Berringers’ work.

Hitch hesitated. If he told Livingstone about this, the man would want in on the hunt. But if every plane in his troupe went roaring out there right now, they’d lose any chance of surprise. Zlo would just rev those big engines—and that big cannon—and disappear again.

Better to leave now without saying anything, and let Earl fill Livingstone in after, so he could get the rest of the pilots ready when Hitch brought Schturming to them.

Hitch angled around to stay out of Livingstone’s line of sight and stopped beside Earl, his back to the plane.

“Finally decided to get up, did you?” Earl said.

“I apologize right now for all the times I groused about you being an early riser.”

Earl looked at him suspiciously. “How’s that?”

“We found Schturming.”

Earl’s eyebrows sprang upwards. “That crazy wing idea worked?”

“Sure did. The plane ready to go?”

“She’ll hold together, I reckon.” Earl cradled his splinted arm and winced. “Where is it anyway?”

“Keep your voice down.” Hitch shot a glance over his shoulder.

Livingstone was already looking their way.

He turned back. “If I’m going to do this right, I need to do it by myself. I’m faster that way and a whole lot less likely to get noticed too soon. I’m going to try to sucker Schturming into following me. Ten minutes after I’m in the air, you tell Livingstone to head out and meet me at the Bluff. I’ll lure it there, and if he’s got enough pilots waiting for it, we can maybe maneuver it into crashing against the crags.”

“You have thought this thing through, right?”

“Of course.”

Earl glared at him. “Of course you have.” His arm must be bothering him. He always got extra cranky when he wasn’t feeling well. “And in all your thinking it through, I’m sure you spent a nice amount of time remembering that if you get this plane shot out of the sky again, all our plans are going to go up in smoke. You lose with Zlo, you lose with Livingstone, you lose with Campbell. And even if they don’t scalp you amongst the three of ’em, you’ll still be stuck here for a good long time. Now, are you telling me you’re sure sticking your neck out for this little hick town is what you want to do?”

If he thought about it, he probably wouldn’t be so sure. So he didn’t think about it. “I’m sure.”

Earl’s grunt didn’t sound too surprised. “Right. Just so we’re clear.” He jutted his chin. “Watch your tail.”

“What?” Hitch turned in time to see Livingstone approach.

The man had a gleam in his eye. “Did I have the good fortune to hear you have accomplished the impossible in discovering our quarry for us?”

“Look, it’s just a one-man mission to start with. Earl will tell you about it.” He eased past Livingstone. “We send any more planes than mine out there, and we could end up with a sack full of nothing.” He pointed at Matthew. “You want to give that propeller a heave when I tell you?”

Livingstone stepped a few paces away and snapped his fingers at one of the kids hanging around the planes. “Rally the pilots. Tell them I want them in the air in five minutes. We’ve found the sky beast.”

Hitch turned on him. “You send twenty planes screaming out there, and Zlo’ll see us coming a mile off.”

“Piffle.” Livingstone turned away, headed for his own plane. “You overestimate yourself, as usual. You’ll need help, and we must stick together.”

“And it’ll look better in the papers, I suppose?”

“Now you’re catching the vision, old boy.” Livingstone gestured to Earl as he passed. “Since that arm unfortunately keeps you from any useful assistance, why don’t you drive on down to the farmhouse and telephone the gentlemen of the press at the Star-Herald and the Courier?”

Earl watched him go, mouth open. Then he looked at Hitch. “I know we’re supposed to be nice to him. I know I told you to be nice to him. But I hope you win all his publicity away from him, just for the principle of it.”

“I’ll settle for beating him to that field. If I can get enough of a head start on him to get Schturming to think I’m the only one, it might still work.” Hitch clambered into the rear cockpit. “Let’s go!” he shouted—and Matthew spun the engine to life.