Cloud Waltzer Read online

  Meredith nodded, knowing that if she spoke her voice would be a quavery embarrassment.

  “I know that it’s probably hard to believe, but there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”

  His tone was as soothing as the feel of the solid earth Meredith was intensely yearning for at that moment. She clung stiffly to an upright strut that connected to the cables at the mouth of the envelope. It was the one position in the tiny basket that kept the view of the ground below at her back. The higher they rose, the greater was the fear that welled up in her. Anxiety seemed to seep up from the empty air beneath them, stealing the strength from her legs and leaving them wobbly and unreliable. Now that same panic was invading her stomach with a growing nausea. She managed to let three words eke out between her tightly sealed lips.

  “Let’s go down.”

  The terrified plea in her voice spoke to the tender place within Archer Hanson that he sometimes feared had calcified from years of having to keep it barricaded behind the unyielding facade of business.

  “Meredith.” He spoke her name soothingly. “I’ll bet if you’d just peek around behind you, you’d like what you saw.”

  Grimly, she shook her head “no.” At the thought that this torture might continue, tears welled up in her eyes. “Please,” she begged.

  Acting purely on an impulse that went far deeper than the ones he’d honed over the past decade, Archer held his arms open. Meredith fled into their safety, burying her head against the solidness of his chest.

  “It’s all right,” he soothed, stroking the silken fineness of her hair. He felt the tremors wracking her finely wrought body and knew then at what great cost she had managed to keep her fear under control. “It’s all right. We’ll take her down. Don’t worry, baby, it’ll all be over in a few minutes.” The endearment slipped out before he’d had time to censor it. His only thought was comfort.

  As he stretched up with one arm to reach the line that would deflate the balloon, being careful to keep the other wrapped tightly around Meredith, his sheltering torso swung out away from her and she found herself doing precisely what she had most feared—looking over the edge down to the earth hundreds of feet below. For a moment she was bewildered. This wasn’t the stomach-wrenching vision she had expected at all. It was as if someone had replaced an illustration from Dante’s “Inferno” with something out of an airborne Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Fiesta grounds far below were dotted with dozens of gay splotches of color that were balloons inflating and just beginning to ascend. From Meredith’s vantage point it looked as if an incredibly indulged young giant had overturned his Easter basket, spilling a rainbow of eggs across the brown earth.

  Archer hadn’t reached the rip panel cord yet, so Cloud Waltzer was still ascending. Or Meredith assumed that it was ascending. Surprisingly, though, it appeared that instead of the balloon rising, the earth was falling away. Whatever the cause, Meredith realized that she had absolutely no sensation of height. Without that key element, the fear that had been strangling her uncoiled and dissipated as swiftly as a wisp of dark smoke blown away by a spring breeze.

  “Stop.” She reached up to halt Archer’s arm.

  He looked down at her. She had the pure look of a delirious child just after a fever has broken.

  “I think I’d like to stay up.” Quickly she added, “Just a moment or two longer.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” His hand went from the rip panel cord back to the blast valve. He opened it up and a jet of flame howled out.

  When the burner noise stopped, Meredith was struck by the incredible silence. There wasn’t even the sound of wind rushing past her ears. Or the feel of it. “There’s no wind up here,” she marveled.

  “There’s wind all right,” Archer said, checking his instrument panel. “A fairly stiff one as a matter of fact. It’s just that we’re moving at exactly the same speed as the wind. We’re one with the wind, so it doesn’t ruffle us.”

  Meredith felt that if she interviewed Archer Hanson for the next ten years, she might never uncover anything more basic about the man than what he had just said. Or, more precisely, how he had said it. An undercurrent of emotion had rippled through his words as strong, yet as nearly undetectable, as the one that carried them through the sky.

  “Why don’t you have a look around?”

  Meredith started at the question and Archer’s arm pulled her to him more tightly.

  “I’ll hang on to you,” he joked, attempting to lighten Meredith’s mood.

  Closing her eyes, Meredith pivoted around within the comforting confines of Archer’s one-armed embrace. She pulled in a deep breath and opened her eyes. The world lay at her feet. But not the world of ground-level folk. No, from her lofty perch the world was a tranquil, slow-moving place. It was a place where anxiety, all the myriad anxieties that had nibbled away for so very long at her, had no right to exist. The first one she jettisoned was her fear of height.

  “Only birds and angels have any right to this view.” She breathed the words, not wanting to disrupt the indescribable serenity.

  Archer’s chest rumbled at her back with an approving bass laugh. “I’ve logged hundreds of hours of flight time with dozens of different passengers, and that is the best explanation I think I’ve ever heard of why ballooning is so addictive.”

  They floated in a companionable silence over earth that was a patchwork of browns, beiges, and grays. So far below that they looked like plastic figurines, dogs barked and long-eared hares fled from the strange roaring noise that came from the sky when Archer fired up the burner.

  “This is how I always imagined flying would be,” Meredith said, unable now to tear her eyes from the panorama. “Just floating effortlessly like this.”

  “That’s pretty much the way it took me my first time up,” Archer replied, scanning the far horizon.

  Meredith felt suspended in a fairy tale as they drifted toward the Rio Grande. Early morning sunlight glinted off the river, making it into a gilded serpent slithering through the lush greenness that kept it confined. To her left, curls of smoke unraveled like skeins of gray wool from chimneys throughout the city, signaling that Albuquerque was waking up. Overhead, so high that the whine of the engine was silenced, a jet hurtled through the air, slicing the sky with a ruler-straight trail. Meredith felt oddly sad for the passengers on board who might never learn what flying was really all about. She was equally pleased with her own introduction to the experience.

  All these observations acted like the sluice that drained off the last bits of Meredith’s fear. Once it had all been siphoned away, she became abruptly and acutely aware of the broad chest at her back and the strong arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. Just a moment before they had been a comforting necessity. Now they were becoming far more. Meredith could feel his warmth enveloping her, swirling about her, carrying his smell. It wasn’t the thought-out scent of an expensive men’s cologne. Instead Archer Hanson smelled like clothes dried in sunshine and a fresh breeze combined with a more elusive scent. The combination of Archer’s feel and smell was one that Meredith found increasingly arousing. It was a response that left her confused and threatened.

  “I’ll be all right now,” she said evenly, shifting slightly to move out of Archer’s grasp. She turned toward him in time to see the expression of contentment he’d worn replaced first by surprise, then embarrassment. Both were rapidly supplanted by a mask of neutrality that guarded against such displays of emotion.

  “Your color’s improved,” he remarked, as if commenting on the weather.

  “I imagine that if I looked as bad as I felt right after we took off that I must have been a fairly frightening sight.” Her words strained for a lightness that she didn’t feel. It almost seemed that when Archer had cloaked her in his embrace, he’d also wrapped a force field around her. Now she couldn’t break free from it to chart her own course again. More brusquely than she’d intended to, she asked, “How about that interview you promised me?”
She fished in her pocket for her small digital recorder.

  “Promised you?” Archer took a deliberate step away. “As I recall there was a rather large ‘maybe’ hanging over this interview I allegedly promised you.”

  Meredith slumped and tucked her recorder back into her pocket. She was ready to concede defeat. She shrugged her shoulders and looked up at Archer. He was a disturbing man. Everything about him as he stood there before her—the thoughtful gaze that animated his eyes, giving them a depth of concerned warmth, the high forehead now gently creased with indecision, the sculpted lips curving with tenderness—was at odds with what she knew rationally about the man. She knew he was the privileged son of a rich man. She’d overheard yesterday how he’d squelched the trouble at his mine that she assumed was a worker protest. She knew that concerned, indecisive, tender men didn’t survive and thrive in business the way Archer Hanson had. She knew all that, but it still wasn’t enough to subdue the perplexing impact he kept having on her.

  “I can understand your refusal,” she answered with a mounting relief that her association with Archer Hanson would soon be at an end. “I haven’t done much to win your confidence.”

  “Actually, you’ve come a lot closer than any other writer who’s ever approached me.”

  “Close, but no cigar, eh?” She smiled. Her spirits, no longer inhibited by the burden of tying Archer down to an interview, rose by the second. After a few minutes of drifting soundlessly, like a lily pad carried along on a lazy river, Meredith was again recaptured by the delight of ballooning. Which was why, when Archer asked, “Tell me about your father,” she didn’t stiffen and evade the topic. The freedom of floating high above a care-ridden earth with a man she could no longer deny she found attractive, but one she would never see again, certainly one she no longer had to worry about treating professionally, acted on her like a truth serum. She felt liberated from the restrictions that usually constrained her.

  “Old Andrew Tolliver senior?” she joked. “It’s funny the way certain men ask me about my father. They’re like young boys in Little League asking about Babe Ruth. But you’re not a Little Leaguer, are you, Archer? And you too had your own Babe Ruth of a father to contend with, didn’t you?”

  Archer’s response was lost in the growl of the burner as he opened the valve to release a blast of propane. The heat generated by the ignited gas poured down on Meredith like a heated rain. Several seconds later the balloon began a leisurely climb. Meredith knew that if she’d wanted to drop the subject Archer had brought up, he wouldn’t object. But, for some reason, she wanted to tell him the whole story. To tell him more than she should allow herself to reveal. She compromised by giving him a sketchy outline of the rise of Andrew Tolliver.

  “When my father entered the investment firm that had been in the family for a couple of generations, it was on a distinct downhill slide. My grandfather’s other sons were bleeding the business dry. I suppose my father could have lived a country club existence like them, but instead he dived into the business and turned it around.

  “There were a few lucky investments at just the right time. That’s usually how the tale is told, just a few incredibly lucky investments. But behind the luck were twenty-hour days and weeks of research. One by one, he bought out my uncles until he had regained full control of the firm. My father was in his late thirties when my older brother, Rory, was born, and from day one he was the heir apparent. There was never any question that he would study finance. Although with what my father had taught him growing up, he knew more than most of his professors.

  “I was sort of an afterthought, born a couple of years after my brother. My mother was never a strong person. I always considered her more as a sister, a frail, unworldly sister whom I had to shield from the harsh realities of life. Anyway, with my father so absorbed in Rory and the business, and my mother sort of off in her own world, I more or less raised myself. No one interfered when I announced that I planned to study literature and eventually teach. No one even much cared. Until Rory died.”

  Meredith realized that she hadn’t meant to tell that part of it. Certainly she hadn’t intended to let her voice catch and go ragged.

  “And so you inherited the mantle.” Archer summed up what had happened as if he’d been there. Meredith nodded affirmation.

  “Yes, I charged in to fill the void that couldn’t, would never, be filled. I switched my major to finance, then went to graduate school at Wharton. After a year of what my father called ‘tempering’ on the Street, I started to work at Tolliver Investments. And boy, did I work!” Meredith’s laugh was dry. She attempted a smile, but it never reached her eyes. For her vision had turned inward, back to those nightmare days when she could never work enough hours, could never know all she had to know, could never fulfill her father’s dream, could never, in short, be Rory. And then the dieting had started. But she couldn’t tell him about that. Or about Chad. Or about how terrifyingly close she’d come to spending her life in a world she’d narrowly escaped.

  “But you asked about my father, didn’t you,” she concluded.

  “Actually,” Archer interrupted, “you’ve answered my real question. Still want to do that interview?”

  The question was so unexpected that it took Meredith a moment to comprehend it, then another to answer in the strongest of affirmatives. “What made you change your mind?” she stammered, still adjusting to this radical change.

  “Let’s just say that for reasons of my own, I decided you were the one person who could do a profile on me. There is another, less mysterious explanation; I want some publicity on a project I’ve been working on. A solar-heated balloon. You build your story around that and I’m yours. Of course, to do the story right you might have to come aloft for a few more flights.” There was an impish quality to his grin that Meredith found as beguiling as the prospect of future balloon flights.

  “You have yourself a deal, Mr. Hanson.”

  “Good.” He nodded with satisfaction. “Very good.” He twisted around. Far below a plume of dust marked the trail of Phil’s Jeep and the pickup as they paralleled the course of the balloon. Archer picked up the CB radio. “Carl, you down there?” he asked conversationally, skipping the CB jargon.

  “Come in, Cloud Waltzer, I read you.”

  “Carl, take your next right and cross the river. We’ll be bringing her down in that field.”

  “Will do.”

  As the air in the envelope cooled, the balloon began to sink as slowly and smoothly as a western sun. They passed over the interstate and an eighteen-wheeler boomed out a greeting on its air horn. They floated on until they were hovering above a grade school. Out in the play yards children waved and ran shouting after the unicorn that galloped away from them. Meredith leaned over the basket rim, waving for all she was worth at the delighted children until they were but tiny stick figures in the distance. Soon they were skimming above the tops of the huge cottonwoods nourished by the Rio Grande. Then the river itself, flowing stolidly south, was beneath them.

  “All right, a few landing procedures,” Archer announced, never taking his eyes from the empty field the balloon was drifting toward. “Face in the direction we’re headed. Hang on to that strut you’re holding now. And keep your knees bent. Got all that?”

  Meredith nodded her head. The closer the balloon angled toward the earth, the more their speed seemed to increase. Meredith figured she probably wasn’t Archer’s first passenger to make that observation when he offered an explanation.

  “It seems like we’re going faster now than we have been. But that’s only because you have things by which to gauge our speed.”

  As they angled in low over the field, it came alive with jackrabbits bolting away in all directions. And their apparent speed did seem to increase. Meredith clutched at the suede-covered metal, fearing for a few seconds that they would crash to the ground. From the corner of her eye she caught flashes of Carl, Phil, and the other crew members running across the dusty field toward
the landing balloon.

  “Hang on,” Archer advised needlessly, blasting hot air into the balloon so that they leveled off. They drifted several hundred yards, scraping tumbleweeds with the bottom of the basket, until Archer shut off the valve and pulled the cord that opened a vent at the top of the balloon. The basket settled gently onto the ground. Carl was the first crew member to reach them. He, and then Phil and the others, grabbed onto the rim of the basket and held them down as the envelope continued to deflate.

  “Ace chase!” Archer boomed out, congratulating the crew members for their vigilant pursuit of the elusive windblown bubble. With a feline grace, he swung out of the basket, turned, and offered a steadying hand to Meredith. The earth felt clumsy and ungainly beneath her feet after an hour of sliding over vaporous puffs.

  With well-practiced coordination, Archer, assisted by the crew members, fell to securing equipment, detaching the envelope from the basket, milking the last bit of hot air from the nylon shell, and stuffing it back into its canvas bag to await the next flight.

  “Okay, guys,” Archer said, calling his crew together when all the gear had been stowed. “I’d like to make an announcement. That was Meredith’s maiden voyage.”

  “A virgin balloonist?” Tomas asked with a gleam in his eye.

  “That’s right,” Archer confirmed. “I suppose you know what that means.”

  “We most certainly do,” Phil piped up, heading for the bed of the pickup, where he retrieved a box with a large canvas sheet stuffed on top. He stood behind Meredith and draped the material around her shoulders.

  “What is this?” Meredith asked, not certain she liked the way everyone had closed around her in a semicircle with Archer at its head.

  “This is the initiation ceremony for first-time balloonists,” Archer answered. “Now, if you will all bow your heads.” His tone was so solemn as he made the request and everyone else complied so quickly that Meredith did so too, lowering her head until she was staring at a bush bristling with goat’s heads stickers beneath her boot.