The Hellfire Club(21)

The three mares stood frozen in rapt attention. Margaret and Gwinnett lay still on the sand, similarly enthralled. If birds were chirping, Margaret couldn’t hear them.

Teardrop gave a snort, then quickly turned tail and trotted away from the other four ponies. As quickly as the conflict had started, it came to an unremarkable end. The remaining ponies in the string continued grazing on the cordgrass.

Margaret exhaled. Adrenaline was coursing through her veins, pounding into her stomach. The raw confrontation—sex, violence, status—terrified and thrilled her.

“That was intense!” she finally said. “I could use a drink.”

Gwinnett looked at his watch. “It’s six fifteen in the morning, Mags.” He smiled. “And more important, my flask is back at the campsite.”

Half an hour later, after the ponies had galloped off, Margaret and Gwinnett walked back to their camp, where another researcher—a cheery blond graduate student named Annabelle Lane—was lighting a match from a small fire over which a pot of hot water was just starting to boil. The match blazed and she lit her cigarette. Gwinnett ducked into his tent, and Lane continued to heat water for their coffee.

“Tell me everything!” Annabelle said, and Margaret described how Teardrop had challenged the alpha in the string and been chased away.

“So where does he go now?”

“After the colts run off they all tend to find one another and then they form these roving bands of bachelor stallions.”

Annabelle rolled her eyes. “Sounds like commons on a Saturday night.” She opened a collapsible metal cup and shook in some instant coffee from a tin. She handed it to Margaret, then carefully poured hot water from the pot into the cup. “Hold on, I’ll get you a spoon,” Annabelle said.

“And some sugar, if you have it?”

Gwinnett emerged from his tent with a small flask. With Margaret’s assent, he poured a couple of sips of bourbon into her coffee.

“How’d you sleep?” Annabelle asked, handing Margaret a spoon and two sugar cubes.

“Like a baby,” Margaret said. “I woke up every hour and cried.”

Annabelle and Gwinnett smiled indulgently.

“You should get a vinyl airbed,” Annabelle suggested.

Margaret settled herself on the ground next to Annabelle. “When I was a kid, my mom and sister and I moved right near here, on the mainland, to stay with my uncle, and the three of us would sleep in a tent throughout the whole summer and into the fall. Slept soundly every night.” Margaret recalled the comfort and security she’d felt in those moments, ensconced between her older sister and mother in two sleeping bags her mom had ripped apart and sewn together, a cocoon for the three of them.

“Where was your father?” Gwinnett asked, taking a seat on a large rock.

“You ever hear of the USS Shenandoah?” she asked.

“Of course,” Gwinnett said. “I’m navy myself.” He paused, clearly aware of what her question implied. “Horrible thing.”

“What was it?” Annabelle said.

“Dirigible crash in Ohio,” Margaret said. “My dad was killed, along with thirteen other men.” She hadn’t spoken of her father’s accident since the first time she told Charlie about it, more than a decade before. She wasn’t sure why she had just decided to break her long silence—maybe being back on Nanticoke justified a moment to indulge that pain. She felt anew that sinking feeling in her chest, the fresh grief always there no matter how skilled she’d become at ignoring it.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said, looking down into her coffee.

“What Mags isn’t saying is that her father was a true hero,” Gwinnett said. “The military at the time was convinced rigid airships like the Shenandoah were the future of warfare because they could fly so high. And this was the navy’s first one, so it was akin to on-the-job training for its crew. Margaret’s father and the other men were truly on the front lines.”

Margaret walked to the fire to pour herself another cup of coffee. “It was a real mess,” she said. “We found out later the commander had tinkered with the design. The navy had ordered everyone to fly despite the bad weather. No one wanted to. But there was this mad race to come up with a vessel that would be the world’s best. We weren’t even in a war!”

“Kind of like the way the U.S. is treating the atomic race today,” Gwinnett said.

Margaret stirred the instant coffee in her cup. Annabelle and Gwinnett were silent; the only sound came from a distant chorus of gulls, egrets, and red-winged blackbirds.

“There were forty-three men in the crew,” Margaret said. “Twenty-nine survived. My father was not among them.” She lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the ground.

“There were four zeppelins in the U.S. around that time,” Gwinnett recalled. “Three were made by the Americans. They all crashed. One was made by the Germans. It didn’t.” He took a swig from his flask. “Our great infallible capitalist system at work.”

Margaret didn’t know how to take his remarks. She looked at Annabelle, who was nodding in agreement.

“I’ll be right back,” Annabelle said, suddenly standing. She went to her tent, reached in, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and headed to a nearby grove.

“So, Margaret,” Gwinnett said, moving so close to her that their knees were nearly touching. She looked at him expectantly. “I noticed you threw up this morning. Twice.”