The Balloonitic
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, 1908
The courthouse elms were dew-black with dawn when the Balloonitic came rumbling into the Square aboard his mule-drawn buggy, one wheel wobbling out of true. An ancient driver sat at the reins with the surly airman hunched alongside him, his boots propped dusty and seam-busted on the splashboard. A brown mountain of canvas loomed from the bed of the conveyance, dwarfing the odd pair of itinerant wagoners. The fabric was crumpled and creased, the geologic panes etched with the soils of distant hills and pastures and bogs. The bleached white facade of the county courthouse stared down at the soiled heap passing before it, unimpressed.
Carnival tents were sprouting in the Square like overnight toadstools. There was the snake charmer, the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, who gnawed on white clubs of ox bone, his ankle shackled to an iron stake driven deep into the earth beneath his tent. One might have witnessed any of these marvels for a dime. But the three brothers who followed the wagon across the Square, marching along the dark, dew-cut streaks of its passage like tightrope walkers—Billy and Jack and Johncy Falkner—did not come for such lesser wonders. They came to watch a man die.
The buggy halted, and the Gypsy balloonist and his helper stepped down and went to work removing posts and planks from beneath the piled canvas, erecting a crude framework of sawn pine in the middle of Oxford Square, before the four-sided clock of the courthouse, whose faces rarely agreed. Over this, they draped the canvas gasbag, tugging and coaxing corners like men making up a bed, and the helper set a skillet of hot coals beneath the flaccid shroud. The Balloonitic lifted a five-gallon can of coal oil down from the bed of the buggy and, kneeling, slung the first dipper of oil onto the coals. The skillet flashed and crackled, belching black balls of oil smoke into the open maw of the balloon.
He would sling the dipper again and again, twice a minute until, two hours later, the canvas had begun to swell ever so slightly, bulging here or there. By this time, the two younger brothers, Jack and Johncy, had wandered off to pitch rings over the necks of milk bottles or dunk their heads for apples, to gaze upon the prize pumpkins and potatoes in the farmers’ stalls. The streets were alive with horses and carriages, and townsfolk clacked back and forth along the board sidewalks that fronted the two-story brick and stucco facades of the Square’s storefronts, many with balconies or cast-iron columns. Only Billy, eleven years old, stood fixed on the lawn, watching the coal fire fill the shoddy lung of canvas.
By noon, the gasbag had swelled lopsided over the wooden frame, like a sick cloud, and the Balloonitic could stand upright beneath the burled canvas. With each flash of coal oil, Billy saw him silhouetted against the soiled sailcloth walls, his poses strange and rampant, like some shade of man wheeling about the storm of creation, stoking its fire. Suddenly his mustachioed face ducked from beneath the canvas, sooty and red-eyed, wreathed in the blackest smoke.
“Brandy!” he yelled at his helper, who nodded and fetched a pint bottle from the throat of his boot. The Balloonitic took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and sucked on the spout, then pointed the bottle at Billy. “Fetch them little brothers of your’n, and whichever else of these little pie-faces can make themselves useful.”
Billy rounded up ten boys from the shooting gallery and the ring toss and from behind the bearded lady’s tent, where they sat smoking pilfered tobacco and daring one another to lift the flap. They each held one of the mooring lines that dangled from the balloon, watching the sullen globe form beneath the braids of hemp. It flickered and belched, emitting black gouts of smoke, and Billy felt his own chest swelling in unison. Soon a man would ascend into the Mississippi heavens, high enough to see the university, the rail depot, the lazy scrawl of the Tallahatchie River. He would hang amid the clouded aeries of gods and eagles, and then he would fall, returning to the red clay and cotton fields of the state, living or dead. Either was miracle enough.
By five o’clock, the autumn sky was crumbling, laced with fire, and the balloon was huge above them, straining at its moorings. It threw a shadow the size of a house, and the boys were buoyant beneath its power. They were lifted onto their tiptoes again and again. Billy looked at his little brothers Jack and Johncy, who were small enough to be tugged from the turf for long, lazy seconds, their faces soft with wonder.
Now the Balloonitic emerged from his hide, soot-faced as a smithy or coal miner or fugitive from Hades, his cheeks slashed with tears. His helper came scurrying to him, carrying his parachute like an offering, a giant silk dress folded inside a croker sack. The balloonist heaved himself into the straps and buckles, carefully adjusting his testicles to the gasped dismay of the finer ladies in the crowd, and the helper tied a static line of grocer’s string to a trapeze dangling beneath the mouth of the balloon. This was meant to rip open the chute. Few noticed, as Billy did, how the man didn’t so much as check the knot.
The man settled himself onto the crossbar of the trapeze, wiggling his butt into place, and the balloon bounced and lolled like a drunkard’s head. His booted feet hung short of the earth, like a child in a kitchen chair, and he looked across his gathered flock. Sunspotted farmers in from the fields, their faces sculpted pale by the morning’s straight razor, and fat-cheeked country wives holding babies against their hips, toddlers clung slobbering to their skirts. White-haired captains who fought in the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers or Second Mississippi Infantry, who still wore their battle grays to reunions, the waists of the britches taken out by town tailors in armbands, and their great-grandsons, this motley assortment of boys who held the balloon to the earth.
The Balloonitic’s eyes, red with smoke and brandy, roved this crowd, as if he knew what terrible secrets pumped through the numbered chambers of their hearts.
He looked at the underweight eleven-year-old who’d watched him all day with smoldering black eyes—eyes that looked like they could burn a hole through his canvas moon. “What’s your name, boy?”
The boy stood taller, as if called to attention. “Billy Falkner, sir.”
The Balloonitic gestured the boy forth, clapping a soot-stained hand on his shoulder. “All right, Billy Falkner, tell these slobbering little pie-faces to turn her loose.”
Billy looked to the other boys, wearing the man’s sooty handprint like a badge of honor. “All right, boys, you heard the man. Let slip the lines!”
They did. The braided hemp moorings slithered from their opened hands as the balloon leapt from the rig. A gust of wind shoved it sideways, the swollen canvas bobbing drunkenly across the white face of the courthouse—built after General Whiskey Smith burned the original building in 1864. The crowd gasped as the black elms of the Square threatened to rake the balloon from the sky. The trees missed, their naked clutches falling just short of the dangling man, and the balloon rose and rose, freed of entanglements, rising higher than the courthouse clock. Now the brothers were running, chasing the balloon as it bobbled across town. They hurdled the iron hitching chain that lined the Square, causing horses to stamp and rear, and went skittering and scrambling down the street, between the rowed offices of dentists and attorneys, past the site of the First National Bank of Oxford, where their grandfather, the Colonel, would one day feel entitled, as bank president, to throw a brick through the plate glass window after a night of hard drinking out in the country.
The balloon bobbed above a dusking foreground of steeples and flagpoles and oaks, ever climbing, shrinking, floating high enough to catch the last planes of sun, burning like Mars against the iron sky, and the boys’ lungs were searing as they ran and ran. Billy led them, jumping creeks and ducking clotheslines, dodging barking dogs. His heart was a bloody planet, banging with thunder, threatening to burst from his chest, to follow the fleeing balloon into the dying autumn sky. He realized it was heading for South Second Street, where they lived with their mother and father and grandmother Damuddy on the old Johnny Brown place.
They passed before a row of castlelike Victorians, their lordly turrets bearing iron weathervanes and lightning rods, and they cut through the rattling weeds of an unmown lot. The balloon was threatening to escape them, to wink out of existence against the sheer immensity of sky, when they saw the man detach from his perch. A mere speck, sprouting limbs as he fell, wheeling and flailing through the twilight. A ribbon of silk came streaming from his back, rippling and fluttering for long, fatal seconds that tocked like eons in the skulls of the watching boys. Farther and farther he fell. He was just above the treetops, his death certain, when the canopy exploded into bloom, a patchwork bulb of tattered, hand-stitched panels that yanked him short of the earth.
He dangled in his harness, busted fragments of the chute fluttering about him, while the unweighted balloon went streaking across the sky above him, scrawling smoke against the clouds like a charcoal smudge. Now it curved downward, an amateur meteor diving for the ground.
“It’s headed for our house!” cried Billy. “Hot damn!”
Then all was lost behind the trees. The boys turned up their street and flashed through the bricked gate columns of the property and up the gravel drive, running around the big, many-chimneyed house and scrambling over the panel fence in back. They rose on the far side, black-kneed, to see the chicken coop crushed beneath the smoking wreckage of the balloon. The roof was caved, the gaped planks spewing forth a squawking blizzard of outraged hens, their shorn feathers curling and slivering through the air like confetti.
Billy was about to order Jack and Johncy to chase down the fleeing poultry when there came a roar from the pig lot. He looked to see the Balloonitic rise cursing and flailing from the crumpled remains of his silken canopy, bursting as from the belly of a giant beached jellyfish. He was coated in goo and shit and pig slop. An orange rind stuck to his cheek; ringlets of curdled cheese adorned his head. There were chicken bones pasted to his knit cotton jersey. He raged while the hogs shuttled themselves to one corner, squeaking and coy, like schoolchildren at their first dance.
“Shit a bag of brownstones!” he screamed. “Fuck my ass with a horse-head cane!”
The oaths echoed off the back of the big house, where the chimneys were smoking, and Billy looked to see their father stride square-jawed from the back door. Murry Falkner was a former coal-shoveler and railroad engineer who once survived a pair of shotgun blasts at the counter of Herron’s Drugstore, where a man he’d beaten with his fists returned with a slug-loaded 12-gauge and blasted a hole the size of a baseball in his back with one barrel and unloaded the second into his mouth, failing to kill him.
“Country slop-eaters!” roared the Balloonitic, brandy-drunk, staring down the huddled pigflesh. He pawed at the buckles and straps of his harness. “Hell-spawned, chap-lipped, mud-mouthed fornicators!”
Murry Falkner stood at the edge of the lot. “Sir, there’s a Christian woman inside this house. I won’t have her scandalized by such foul language.”
The Balloonitic didn’t seem to hear him. He kept fumbling with his straps and risers, cursing in cadence. A foul, vivid stream. Billy had never heard anything so sublime. The man cursed the sky that quit him, the earth that received him, the sun that was going down. He cursed his father for siring him, his mother for birthing him, his brother for not strangling him in his crib. He cursed Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He cursed the Valley of Death, the Gates of Heaven, the Halls of Justice. The Sons of Liberty, the Communion of Saints, the College of Cardinals, the Fraternal Order of Police. The Fathers of the Church, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Mothers of the Twelve Tribes. The United States of America, the state of Mississippi, and the town of Oxford. He cursed the owner of this pig lot.
Their father turned and walked back into the house. In his right hand, when he reappeared, was a single-action Colt’s revolver, long-nosed and nickeled like a fancy watch. He strode toward the pigpen.
“Uh-oh,” said little Johncy.
The boys watched their father step over the hip-high fence without breaking stride. He stood at the edge of the crumpled parachute, about to level the pistol when the warp-wheeled buggy came rattling and skidding around the side of the house. The helper was at the reins, the bed full of greasy carnival men. They leapt down and rushed the pig lot. They surrounded the Balloonitic, placating him with a swarm of helping hands, unbuckling the harness and sliding down the straps and picking the cheese curds from his hair. Someone handed him a bottle of brandy. They surrounded Murry Falkner as well, smiling and chattering in soothing voices, throwing their arms wide in explanation, in demonstration of good nature and universal brotherhood. One extracted a sheaf of soiled bills from his pocket, licking his thumb.
Ten minutes later, the canvas balloon had been piled into the buggy, the parachute heaped like whipped cream on top. The Balloonitic sat on the buggy seat, head back, snoring. A worm of saliva crawling from the corner of his mouth. Their father stood as before, the long iron finger of the pistol held against his leg. In his other hand, a strangled wad of bills. They could see his chest moving up and down, heavy as a bellows. His eyes were on the shattered henhouse, the scattered hens, the drunken airman snoring amid such calamity. The balloonist’s helper climbed into the buggy, released the hand brake, and Little Johncy started toward their father.
Billy caught him by the collar of his shirt. “Leave him.”
Instead, one of the hogs was first. A red Duroc shoat, newly weaned. She waddled toward their father, braver than the rest, and snuffled at his backside like a friendly dog. Murry Falkner raised the pistol and shot her between the eyes.
The balloonist snorted at the report, then turned aside. His helper slapped the reins.
“What’s a fornicator?” asked Johncy.
Della the Daring
GEORGIA COAST, 1933
Della the Daring stood on the right wing, one hand on the banshee wire, the land a patchwork of green one thousand feet below. The wind skirled through the struts and guys, the sky itself threatening to rip her from this audacious contraption of wood and fabric and wire that dared its power, that buzzed high among its white cathedrals of cloud. It was a Curtiss Flying Jenny, a two-seat biplane that once trained the aviators of the Great War—men like the one who sat begoggled in the rear seat, a white silk scarf strung like a vapor trail from his neck, a pint bottle of bootleg whiskey huddled between his knees, nearer even than the control yoke.
Her husband.
He screamed over the clattering engine, the shriek of wind. “Hat trick!”
She nodded.
They were over Georgia somewhere, another nameless hamlet whose dusty streets lay flocked and trembling with the pink handbills they’d rained from the sky that morning, the ones that announced the coming of DELLA THE DARING DEVILETTE, who would DEFY THE HEAVENS, shining like a DAYTIME STAR, a WING-WALKING WONDER borne upon the wings of CAPTAIN ZENO MARIGOLD, a DOUBLE ACE of the GREAT WAR, who had ELEVEN AERIAL VICTORIES over the TRENCHES OF FRANCE.
Zeno dipped the wing toward the field of spectators, their faces sprung round beneath the sun, their mouths stove black with awe, and the devilette watched the shadow of the machine rip across them like something come wicked from the sky, a beast to pluck them bloody and rootless from the fields. She walked farther out on the wing, kinking her silver-clad body through the maze of wire trusses and interplane struts that divided the airfoils.
She was wearing her silver lamé jumpsuit, her show name stitched blood-red between her shoulder blades—DELLA THE DARING—and she wore a leather helmet and knee-high riding boots polished to an arrogant luster. She didn’t wear a parachute. The slipstream slung the metallic fabric of the one-piece suit hard against her, tight against her breasts and hips, streamlining her.
Her nails were sharp, unpainted, and the outermost bracings sang like piano wire in her hands as she knelt on the ribbed surface of the wing, then lay down flat on her belly. She could feel the spruce spars and ribs trembling against the cloth that bound them, against her own body, the whole wooden skeleton of the machine threatening to jump its skin. She removed her leather flying cap and stuffed it down the neck of her suit.
The wings bore wooden skids designed to prevent the craft from catching a wingtip and cartwheeling during a rough landing. They dropped in half hoops from the outmost struts, like the curved rails of bentwood rocking chairs, and Della the Daring slid her legs over the leading edge and hooked them cross-ankled in the spruce hoop, climbing down so that she hung monkeylike from the underside of the wing, her bottom flashing silver over the upraised faces of the crowd.
She knew, as she always did, that some part of them wanted her to die. She could almost feel their eyes pulling her to earth, the compounded force of their wills, the dark curiosity of what she might look like skewered in the crown of an oak or busted like a watermelon on the hood of a T Model Ford. But when the machine roared upward into the sun with her body dangling from the wing, Della knew she was pulling their red hearts high into their throats, and it was their own blood they could nearly taste on their tongues.
The sun roared across the heavens, the green world wheeled and righted, and Zeno banked again for the field. This time Della hung only by her ankles and a single hand, the other plunged low in the slipstream, her fingers clawing through the wind. She’d removed the pin that bound her hair, and it tore in flaming tongues behind her, a banner of fire.
In the middle of the pasture, there stood the boy she’d paid a quarter to hold his hat doffed, waiting. Zeno lined him up as if for a strafing run, nosing into a dive, and the wind came shrieking through the wings. The earth rose beneath them, like the swell of a vast green sea, and Della watched the spired pines at the edge of the field whip past her—more than once she’d felt the brush of such trees, a cloud of needles torn fluttering in her wake—and now the blades of pasture grass were singing beneath her.
She had eyes only for the hat.
It was a tweed flatcap, doffed high like a salute, and she raked it fast from the boy’s hand as she passed overhead, like a hawk ripping a mouse from the field. Zeno blasted them nearly vertical from the ground, and now it was not only the crowd but the weight of the earth itself that tugged so hard at her body, jealous perhaps of her leaving it so freely, and she held fast to the bend of spruce.
Higher and higher they rose, clawing skyward until the machine slowed, its power spent, and hung there, a black cross pegged against the white face of sun. Della cast away the hat. It tumbled and slid earthward, strangely slow, an object newly anointed with power. She knew they should make these farm boys pay them for the privilege of standing afield instead of the other way around. After all, from this day forward, that cap would be hallowed. Every girl in the county would want to touch it, and every man would tip his own hat to the boy who’d held it. The boy’s children and grandchildren would be told of the day he stood unmoved beneath the fell swoop of the flying machine, and years later, looking at the hat hanging from a tack on the wall or sitting on the mantel, he would believe the story of his own daring—he would forget he’d been struck too rigid with fear to do anything else.
What was the price of that?
In the relative quiet of the stall, as Zeno heeled the near motionless machine back toward the earth, she could hear him yelling from the cockpit. “Death hang!”
When they again crossed the field, she was hanging upside down by only her knees, her arms dangling, her body limp as something on a meat hook.
How loudly they cheered.
“Eight dollars?” asked Zeno. He looked around. The crowd was gone, the Jenny parked behind him like a pinned moth, his old terrier leashed to one of the struts. “You’re telling me I had my wife crawling all over that paper-and-matchwood crate at one thousand feet of altitude with no parachute for eight goddamn dollars?”
The man offered the hat upon a pair of upturned palms. It was a tatty flatcap not unlike the one Della had snatched from the boy in the field.
“I done what ye said,” he said. “It’s full, ain’t it?”
The man wore a set of hard-beaten overalls, the denim worn thin and colorless against a washboard. That morning, after landing, they’d found him in a neighboring field whipping an ancient mule that looked made solely of dust.
Zeno pointed at the hat. “Who, when told to pass a hat, passes one of these? You pass a top hat, or a bowler at the least. Something with some size to it, some depth.”
The farmer spat. “Ain’t got a top hat.”
Zeno still had on his belted leather coat, the fur collar hackled about his mustachioed face. He snatched the cap and stared into it. A nest of dirty coins and dander and pocket lint, laced with swirls of gray hair from the farmer’s own spotted pate. “Where’s the paper money?”
The man sniffed. “Wasn’t none.”
Zeno’s eyes scoured the man, the bandy legs, the face like dried tobacco leaf. “Designs on a new mule, friend? Is that it?”
The old farmer seemed to grow taller before them, his spine straightening, His eyes went white-lipped, round. “Are ye saying I stoled ye money, son?”
“How ’bout you empty the pockets of them dungarees and show me different.”
“I never emptied my pockets for no man. Specially not no Gypsy.”
Zeno grinned, his smile wide as a knife. “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
Della, standing beside her husband, looked down to see a crude blade in the farmer’s hand, a yarn-handled shard of iron cut from the leaf spring of a Ford. Behind her, she could hear the low gurgle of threat starting in the old dog’s throat.
“Zeno,” she said, clutching his wrist.
Zeno seemed only to calm, smiling at the blade just inches from his belly. He folded the cap of jingle money under his arm and reached slowly into the chest pocket of his flying coat, extracting his pint bottle of whiskey.
“Best ye give me my cap back,” said the old farmer.
Zeno had a long pull off the bottle, then belched through his teeth. His cheeks, swarthy already, were dusked with oil smoke. A paler band across his eyes, where his goggles had rested. “With the money still in it, I take it?”
The farmer nodded.
Zeno stoppered the bottle. “You one-gallused son of a bitch.”
“Best ye hurry it up,” said the man, “before I get antsy.” He wiggled the knife.
Zeno nodded and pulled the lapel of his coat to stow the bottle. Della knew his long-barreled English revolver was hanging right there under his armpit, unseen. The same one he’d carried over France.
“Zeno,” she whispered.
He tucked away the bottle. His hand emerged without the gun. “You cut me, you’re gonna have to cut her, too.” He cocked his thumb at Della beside him. “You think you could cut on a thing pretty as that?”
The farmer looked at her, his tongue skidding over his gums. His face fell to the cruel implement in his hand, as if he’d found it lying in the grass.
“No,” said Zeno, “I didn’t reckon you could. ...
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