The roaring stopped. The balloon lifted free of the ground and slowly swung up, righting the basket as it did so, and another man climbed into the basket. The basket was tethered to a truck and to a smaller vehicle. George pulled on the blast valve, giving it a three-second shot of flame up into the balloon, waited, and then did it again.
“Short blasts are the way to do it,” Joya explained. “You don’t get any reaction for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, and then you get the lifting effect of the new heat.”
She took me closer to where we could look up into the balloon. It was blue and white and crimson, segmented like an orange, and there was enough daylight coming through the fabric to dim the long blue flame of the burners. The sun broke through. Kesner was walking around, arguing, waving his arms. Josie Laurant arrived, leading her small entourage, and Kesner picked her up and put her in the basket. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was visibly angry. They brought the camera boom close and wanted the area cleared. I went back to the number-two balloon with Joya.
There was no diminution in my awareness of her special attitude toward me. She carried on a second conversation at a nonverbal level. She was telling me that she and I had some sort of arrangement. And, in addition, she was curious about me.
It seemed an unemotional curiosity, speculative and slightly anxious, expressed by the quick sidelong glances, the set of the mouth.
The number-one balloon lifted to the limit of its tether. The breeze kept it canted toward the northeast. Kesner yelled through his bullhorn. They seemed to be having trouble over there, doing the scene in between the blasts of the burner needed to keep the balloon aloft at the end of the tethers.
“You want to take this flight with me, Mr. McGee?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t be in the way?”
“I like the extra weight. Dave was going to come along. Let me ask him.”
She went over to the truck and in a little while she came back with leather gloves and a helmet. “He says sure. See if these are okay. If you lose balance or something, you might touch the burner or the coils that preheat the propane. Helmet is standard for landings. They can get rough. The thing is to face the direction of flight, hang on, and don’t leave the basket. That’s important. Without your weight it could take right off again and get in trouble. Look, do you want to try it or not?”
“I’d like to try it, but not very much.”
She studied me and smiled. “That’s an honest reaction. This should be a routine flight. What do people call you?”
“Travis. Or McGee. Or whatever, Joya.”
“Joya Murphy-Wheeler. With a hyphen, Travis. Mostly what you have to do is keep out of my way which isn’t easy, and admire the view.”
We killed time for an hour, and finally they took Josie down to ground level and let her out, and put another propane tank aboard and another smallish dark-haired woman dressed like Josie.
“That’s the stunt woman,” Joya said. “Linda.” She said the name the way she might say “snake.” They took the number-one balloon back up again to twenty feet above the ground. Linda held the burner support, straddled the side of the basket. The man with her, who had been in the long scene with Josie, grabbed for her and missed as she toppled over the side. She fell neatly into the safety net, bounced up, clasped her hands over her head, duck-walked to the edge of the net, grasped it, and swung down. George stood up out of his concealment in the basket and hit the blast valve for a few seconds. The balloon sagged down anyway, and the crew grabbed the edge of the basket. The actor climbed out and then was told to climb back in. The dummy was brought aboard and stowed. After a small conference, Linda climbed aboard, too, and Kesner yelled through his bullhorn, “Joya, get your people ready to go.”
It took about thirty minutes to get all seven balloons inflated. They seemed to come growing up out of the field like a crop of huge poisonous puffballs. The gas blasts were almost constant. Joya had arranged the signals. When number one took off, number three followed almost immediately, staying near it, gaining a little height on it. Joya’s crew people, Dave and Ed, held the basket down and made bad jokes about what I might expect of the flight.
“Weight off?” Joya ordered. They removed their hands. We had positive buoyancy, and she blasted for eight or ten seconds. A little while after the blast ended, we began to lift more rapidly, following the first two in their mated ascent.
“I’ll have to try to stay close, for the sake of the cameras, but then we’ll peel off.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t steer these things.”
“You’ll see.” She worked the blaster valve, ripping the silence with that startling bray, a snorting sound that shot the blue flame high into the envelope. Without that noise, there was a strange silence. We were moving with the wind, so there was no wind sound. I heard the other balloons blasting in short staccato sequences, then heard the wicker of the basket creak as she rested her hip against the edge. The ground had dropped away. Behind us I could see the pattern of vehicles, of the muddy paths, the trailers and trucks.
“There!” Joya said.
I looked where she pointed and saw the lifelike dummy ejected from the number-one balloon, about seventy feet above us and ahead of us. I heard the rattle of the clothing as the dummy fell, turning slowly. It seemed to pause and then pick up a terrible speed as it dwindled below us to smack into the tough pastureland.
We held position for a little while until Joya said, “I think they have enough.” She pulled the line to the maneuvering vent and bent to watch the variometer scale, explaining that we were too high to use visual reference points to indicate altitude. She let us sag downward until it seemed to me that our descent accelerated. At just that point she began feeding it short intermittent blasts. The harsh sound startled me each time until I learned to watch her gloved hand on the lever.
The others were far ahead of us, much higher and leaving us well behind. “Higher wind speeds aloft,” she explained. “They’ll be coming down soon, to fly close to the ground. That’s when it’s best. You’ll see.”
She gave all her attention to stabilizing the balloon at the height she wanted, explaining that as we came down we were pushing cooler air up into the envelope, thus decreasing lift. She leveled it out at about twenty feet above the ground. The breeze carried us along at I would guess ten miles an hour. Now and again she would pull the blast lever for a short sequence of that ungodly racket, and in a little while I began to comprehend the rhythm of it. If there was a tree line ahead she would give a two-second blast which, thirty seconds later, would lift us up over the trees.
We moved in silence, looking at the flat rich country. We heard the birdsongs, heard a chain saw in a woodlot, heard horses whinny. Children ran and waved at us. We crossed small country roads and once saw our reflection in a farm pond. “What do you think?” she asked.
“There aren’t any words,” I said. There weren’t. In incredible silence between her infrequent short blasts for control, we moved across the afternoon land, steady as a cathedral, moving through the land scents, barn scents, the summery sounds. It was a sensation unlike anything else in the world. It was a placid excitement, with the quality of an extended dream.
We beamed at each other, sharing pleasure. It made her strong plain face quite lovely. It was the instant of becoming friends.
At last she bumped it up to two hundred feet, where her exquisite coordination was not as imperative. We used the wrench to cut an almost empty tank out of the line and tie in another full one. She explained that we had wasted gas by using the maneuvering vent to drop us down, but she had wanted to get down quickly and get away from the others. From our altitude I scanned the horizon and could see but two of the others, little round pieces of hard candy way off to the west of us. “Divergent winds at different altitudes,” she explained.