The Spirit of Steamboat Read online

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  I turned and began undoing the hatch. “Let’s try and show a little more enthusiasm, Doc.”

  “I’m just trying to think of what I’m going to tell Martha, Cady, and Henry Standing Bear if I drop you.”

  I sighed. “Positive thinking, Doc. Positive thinking.”

  The blast of air from the open hatch was like diving into an ice rink, and my breath stuck in my throat as I pushed the thing to the side. It was, as Julie had said, as dark as the inside of the proverbial Black Angus.

  As we banked I cast the beam from the headlight around, finally spotting the inside edge of the fuselage underneath me, just before my eyes smeared over with tears, half freezing and blocking my view even with the goggles.

  I reached down and, against every instinct of self-preservation, pulled myself into the bomb bay; I could easily see the otherworldly, low passing cloud cover, or scud, as the pilots would have said, obliterating my view through the open doors. The wind was piercing as I felt Isaac sit on my legs a little early. I could feel his excited grasp around my knees as I inched forward.

  I turned my head to the left, the headlight illuminating the spot where I’d seen Rick place the tow bar, and reached down, but the slipstream snagged my hand with a glacial grip and slammed my forearm into the bulkhead. I snatched my hand back and tried to think quickly, knowing I had a limited time in which I could withstand the cold. My face was already numb and my vision was deteriorating even more as I pushed myself farther out of the hatch with Isaac pulling in the opposite direction.

  That’s when the turbulence really hit.

  Steamboat, like any good rodeo horse, sensed that there was a rider in a tough predicament and decided that now would be the time to take advantage of the opportunity to kick up her heels.

  The B-25 must’ve dropped a good hundred feet; at least that’s what it felt like. My hips battered against the hatch opening, I bounced and fell forward, spread-eagled, my hand actually resting on the inside edge of the bomb-bay doors.

  The plane shimmied to one side with a bone-crushing jar and then rose and slipped sideways as the winds hit us again like a southbound freight—I had became a connoisseur of turbulence.

  The breath I sucked in iced my lungs, and now I couldn’t feel my head at all.

  Isaac was doing his best to hang on to me, but his grip, tenuous from the start, was now around my lower legs, and I was pretty sure he had his feet pressed up against the bulkhead inside.

  There was no way the diminutive doctor was going to be able to pull me back in, so I was stuck with plan A and turned my head as best I could, spotting the bright aluminum surface of the tow bar against the chromate insides of the bomber.

  I spider-walked my gloved hand up, still keeping some pressure against the constant wind, careful to not let any part of my body fall into the blistering slipstream that would, most certainly, yank me from Steamboat like an ineffective human bomb.

  There were more tremors as the Mitchell began a series of shuddering jolts that felt as if we were driving over a washboard road.

  There’s always a moment when you’re in a situation like this, where you think that now is the time to turn mother’s picture to the wall, and I was thinking that if all this shaking and jolting hadn’t loosened the doors enough to allow them to close, what the hell good was I going to do?

  But my hand was resting on the tow bar now, and as I slid it just a little forward, I could see the latch that held it. My thumb was like a broom handle when I leveraged it against the clasp, but amazingly enough, the thing flew up and the aluminum rod came loose.

  The forked tip dropped just a little and the slipstream caught it, sending the other end up into my nose, almost knocking me out cold. My other hand instinctively came loose and grabbed at the thing just as another fit of turbulence hit and the plane veered sideways.

  I felt myself slipping out into the void just as another set of hands grabbed on to my legs. It was just enough to give me the time to jam the tow bar into one of the doors to give me purchase, so I started to try to knock away some of the ice that had built up on the leading edges. It was like pounding on a concrete sidewalk, but parts of it started to fall away and I felt like I was making small progress. I continued chiseling like a jackhammer, pretty sure that the effort was the only thing that was keeping me from falling out.

  I glanced to my right, the safety goggles fogging but the headlamp illuminating a small movement in the hydraulic strut that operated the doors. Figuring it was my last chance, I forced the tow bar up and beat it against the canister, only the adrenaline in my body still keeping me going, and watched as the angular curve of the doors swept up like a mother’s embrace to shut out the freezing sky.

  I hung there for a moment, trying to get some feeling back in my face and arms, finally lodging the brace in the framework of the doors. Reaching inside my coveralls, I grabbed my handcuffs, securing one side to the tow bar and the other to a crossbeam, making sure that the damn things didn’t open again.

  Careful to not put any of my weight on the doors, I threaded my way backward and finally fell into the cabin with the quilted material folded around me. I slumped against the fuselage and welcomed the relatively warmer air into my lungs.

  After a moment, I pawed the material away and watched as Isaac reattached the hatch and turned to look at me, his glasses crooked with one ear paddle resting on the top of his head, once again revealing the swelled lump. “My God, Walter, I thought we’d lost you.”

  I smiled, sure my frozen face was giving the impression of rigor, and the words fell from my mouth in broken chunks like cubes from a tray. “Me. Too.”

  He leaned forward. “You’re bleeding.”

  Looking at the dark stains on the leather of my gloves, I brought a hand up and then drew it back as he dragged the medical kit toward him and reached for my face. Trying to push him away, I attempted to sit up. “I’m okay.”

  He pushed me back. “Stop being an idiot. I think your nose is broken—it is only the cold that is keeping it from swelling.”

  The words mumbled from my thawing lips as another wave of turbulence attempted to overturn us, causing the plane to rattle like a low-pitch maraca. “Good, it might ruin my boyish good looks.”

  I watched as he rummaged through the kit, ripping apart some gauze and rolling it between his fingers, finally reaching over and knocking the headlamp and goggles from my head and expertly tilting my noggin back. He wiped the blood from my face and mustache and then inserted the gauze in my nostrils. “There, that should at least staunch the bleeding.”

  My head lolled to the right and there was Mrs. Oda, squatting on my other leg, grasping my jeans as if I might still fly out the hatch and disappear. She was so light I hadn’t felt her still sitting there.

  She smiled, and I could see tears tracing down her face again.

  I sighed and studied her—eighty pounds, soaking wet.

  I blinked, but the plane seemed to swoop and wallow, the insides of the aircraft seeming to melt away and then reassemble themselves. I tried to focus my eyes, but nothing seemed to work, so I blinked again, every time becoming more difficult to open them. My voice sounded nasally and muted as I struggled to form words. I could feel the world around me attempting to slip away, and I didn’t have time for that. I shook my head, which did nothing to help it feel better, and then focused on the elderly woman’s face.

  “I know I told you to stay in your seat, but I’m really glad you didn’t.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” He studied me closer. “And what’s in your nose?”

  “I had to hammer the doors with my face but got them held shut with the tow bar and my handcuffs.” I handed the headlamp and the goggles back to Julie. “Thanks, they were handy.”

  I seated myself as she released the hydraulic handle, glanced at Lucian and then me, and massaged her bicep. “That thing is murder.”

  “Tell me about it.”

 
; Her eyes went back to the old Raider. “How are we doing?”

  He nodded. “The drag’s gone, and we seem to be maintaining pressure.” He turned to look at me. “But the fuel situation is worse than we thought; we lost a lot with those damned doors open.” As he spoke, the left engine started backfiring loudly, and he looked at Julie and grimaced. “Next time, don’t ask.” He shone the flashlight on the offending motor. “It’s iced up—we’re going to have to shut it down, but we’re almost to the Colorado border and if I make a jog to the east I think we can descend without hitting the Brown Palace. Get on the radio and let Denver Center know we are declaring an emergency and are turning to a heading of zero niner zero descending to seven thousand five hundred feet.”

  Lucian shut down the left engine, and the resonance of the propellers turned to one but the noise got even louder as he pushed the good engine’s throttle forward to make up for lost power. As the old sheriff turned Steamboat, I heard him mumble, “Let’s hope that’s the only one we lose.”

  Julie held up her map and started talking to a notepad on her lap. “According to our NAV radio this heading will put us south of Cheyenne. Denver Center says that puts us east into warmer temperatures, but Stapleton is reporting high winds at fifty gusting to sixty-five knots out of the west and drifting snow. The cloud bases are eight thousand with temperatures of, um . . . forty-seven degrees!” Looking up from her notes, “Forty-seven degrees, how could that be?”

  “Must be Denver is really having that Chinook, Toots.” He shook his head. “Those damn things can happen anywhere up and down the eastern face of the Rockies from northern New Mexico all the way up through Alberta. Their warm winds damn well melt ice in a hurry—lakes can lose an inch an hour.” Steamboat side-stepped again, and I watched as Lucian looked around as if it were a personal affront. “Crazy bitch of a storm, but we already knew that.”

  I readjusted the packing in my nose, which did nothing to get rid of the headache that was starting to build behind my eyes. “We’re going to make it, then?”

  “Not really.” Julie’s voice had a note of finality. “We might make Greeley or Fort Collins, but there’s no way we’ll make it to Denver, even with the warm winds.”

  “Can we get the girl into Denver from there?”

  She shook her head. “The AWC says I-25 is closed, even to emergency vehicles.”

  “What about secondary roads?”

  “Walt, as bad as it is up here, it’s even worse down there.” She glanced at Lucian. “Anyway, Stapleton doesn’t matter—the favorable runway is closed with drifts, so unless they get it open soon, I don’t know how we’re going to land this thing with the kind of crosswinds they’ve got, forty knots at least, Chinook or no Chinook . . .”

  The old Raider’s voice broke in, sure, steady, and perhaps a little annoyed. “We’ll make it.”

  I stared at the side of his face. “Greeley or Fort Collins?”

  “Denver.”

  Julie looked at him, the disbelief on her face writ large. “Lucian, not meaning any disrespect, but it’s physically impossible; we’re going to be way gallons of fuel short. With that engine shut down and the right side at max continuous power, our fuel burn is out of sight.”

  “We’ll make it.” He turned back toward the windshield and peered through the dark smudges of black clouds when his attention was drawn to the bucking horse charm that hung from the canopy. I think it was the first time he’d noticed it, and I watched him take the thing between his fingers, to test the golden metal, perhaps beseeching the trinket for a little luck. He fingered the cone-shaped, fancy-dance bell, and I’m sure it was the pistons in the engine shutting down, but just in that instant I thought I could once again hear drums—ancient drums, persistent and primeval.

  “Do either of you know the difference between anxiety and fear?”

  He glanced at Julie and then back at me, and I felt like I was in a classroom. I shook my head, thinking the drumming was a leftover from the concussion. “Lucian, let’s try and stay focused here, shall we?”

  He studied the bucking horse and rider in his hand and ignored the shuddering thumps of the wind. “I am focused; I’m more focused than you are. Now I asked you a question—do you know the difference between anxiety and fear?”

  He took his gnarled hands from the yoke of the B-25, giving Julie a chance to absorb the impact of the next windy salvo; I guess he thought she needed something to do besides being the plane’s unofficial Cassandra.

  I nodded. “Yep, I think I do—”

  “Anxiety is something generated by a feeling that you might not succeed. Fear is something else—that is what you feel when you are in an inextricable position.” He smiled that matinee-idol grin of his, and I wanted to punch him. “You know who said that?”

  Julie’s eyes watched mine, and she looked at Lucian and me, not sure which of us had been concussed. “No. I don’t, Lucian, but—”

  “Jimmy Doolittle said that to me on the deck of the USS Hornet, the night of September 17, 1942 . . .” His voice tapered off but then gathered itself like the turbulence that rocked Steamboat. “I was anxious. Hell, I don’t know . . . Maybe I was scared.” He turned as if we were having a casual chat in the front seat of a pickup truck. “It was late and we were all supposed to be in our bunks, but I was concerned about my ship, so I went up on deck and walked to the flight line where she was tied down—almost like those navy boys had to make sure all sixteen of those birds wouldn’t fly away on their own.” One of his hands came up and took his glasses away, as if they were blocking his view of the past. “It was wet; fog so thick you could’a cut sheep out of it with shears. I guess we were about three-quarters of the way between the Midway Islands and Japan.” He sighed to himself. “People always ask what you think about in moments like that; what’s going through your mind? Well, in those situations I’ve had only one thing go through my mind, ever: please don’t let me be the one that screws up.”

  The buffeting continued, and Julie fidgeted, acting a little more nervous than before, now that she was in control of the aircraft. She stared at him and tapped a gauge—evidently it was catching. “Lucian, the fuel indicators are nearly empty.”

  The Raider ignored her and continued talking. “They told us that if any one of our planes hesitated in starting that the navy boys had orders to push them over the side; there would be no time for fiddling around and if the damn things coughed or sputtered, into the drink they went.”

  He felt in the pocket of his leather jacket, and I noticed the patch on the left chest, a particularly ferocious-looking lion crouching out of a white arrowhead in a red background, and above it, a well-worn leather name tag that read CONNALLY. “Hell, I’d flown that plane in California, Texas, Missouri, and Florida . . . all over the country, and I damn sure didn’t want it getting dumped into the Pacific.” He shook his head. “Of course she ended up at the bottom of the East China Sea, but that was okay, that was after she’d done her job.”

  Julie pleaded. “Lucian, we have to find a place to land.”

  He thumbed some tobacco out of the beaded pouch the Cheyenne Elders had given him into the old briarwood pipe. I knew the beaded design on that tobacco bag well—Dead Man’s Pattern they called it—and I also knew the Elders spoke carefully when they said his given Cheyenne name, Nedon Nes Stigo—He Who Sheds His Leg. “See, when you’re attached to a piece of equipment in that kind of mission it becomes a part of you and the only thing I could think at that point in time, while sittin’ there on that tire of the left landing gear and looking up at those two Wright-2600-92, fourteen-cylinder, air-cooled, radial engines was—you better damn well start.”

  “Lucian—”

  Ignoring her, he struck a match and lit his pipe even though the vague scent of high-octane aviation fuel pervaded the cockpit. “They did, and as the bow on that carrier lifted up on a wave, we took that bird off into the morning sky, turned, and headed straight into the Rising Sun.”

  Julie le
aned forward to confirm her suspicions and then looked at him. “Lucian, the fuel gauge reads almost empty.”

  He shone his flashlight toward the left engine and stared at her as if he’d just remembered that she was there. “Restart number one.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, she’s deiced; eight thousand feet and descending, the warmer temperatures thawed this frozen turkey out. According to your ceiling report, we should drop below the clouds any minute, Toots.” He reached up and—if I had not known the man, I would have thought the gesture was caused by nerves—tapped the navigation radio. “Which is a damn good thing since our VOR is so weak we lost reception at this altitude.” He stared out the murky glass. Out there, somewhere, was Denver. “Reduce airspeed to a hundred and sixty.” He turned to look at me as he leveled off the aircraft. “Miles per hour; I did that for your benefit.”

  Static. “Walter.”

  I stared at Lucian. “Yep?”

  The old Raider looked toward the back. “That wasn’t me.”

  Static. “Walter?”

  I glanced up at the pilot and copilot, now both turned and looking at me. I cupped my own mic. “Doc?”

  Static. “I need your help. Now, Walter. Right now, please.”

  Crawling through the bomb-bay space again, I became aware of a noise in the aft compartment that I hadn’t heard before, which was, in itself, amazing since you really couldn’t hear anything over the constant thrum of the engines. “What’s that noise?”

  Isaac was crouched by the gurney and equipment in front of an orange device with a complex array of dials and gauges and an oxygen tank. At the instrument panel a red light was beeping and blinking like the one on the desk phone I’d inherited from Lucian—the one I planned on getting rid of as soon as I got back to Durant.

  “It’s the ventilator.” He struggled to get to his feet, and I watched as he steadied himself on the rail of the gurney and adjusted the dials, punching a button that reset the machine. He turned back to look at me. “Something is wrong, but I’m not sure what.”