In response, Lee tucked a finger down his collar and showed off the latest dolls—slightly ratty, but still there. He smiled at her, an easy smile, a share-the-wealth smile, a you-taught-me-as-much-as-I-taught-you smile. Here it was a couple months later, that smile said, me with my dogs and the puppets you gave me, you as the judge, and ain’t it grand?

Only when Janis’s face showed nothing did Lee realize how profoundly he had just shot himself in the foot.

“I guess you do think I’m a sucker,” she said quickly, with the calm of a woman who has survived yet another heartbreak. “Those two minutes are up,” she added, just as a faint drone began somewhere in the distance.

This was the late moment when Lee concluded that, though it might work for other men, he shouldn’t keep leading with that “sucker” business. He tried to apologize, but she was interested in the grandstands, the sky, the ground, and then her megaphone went to her lips, and she called, “Okey-dokey, gents and blokies, we’re gonna wrap it up,” but there was enough distraction in the stands that she had to repeat herself, and by then the drone had become differentiated: it was a pair of DH 4s, flying low and slow.

“That would be me,” Lee said, as well assembled as he could manage. He was beginning to sweat, so he stood with his hands in his pockets, one hip cocked out, slouching, and then occasionally pointing westward, until the men in the stands began to catch on.

The two planes flew a hundred feet above the earth, not ten feet separating them. Deep in a knot of men arguing over a distribution of winnings, one private threw his arm forward and pointed, yelling “My God!,” which brought his comrades to crane their heads. Heads turning everywhere swept the motion through the stands and down the fields where the overflowing crowds stood, thousands of men starting to call out, some audibly, most only issuing astonished gasps, as Nanette was clearly outlined on the wing of one plane. She wore a sporty leather helmet and, more functionally, goggles.

The sight of a dog on the wing of a moving plane caused fists holding money to clench involuntarily. And then the planes passed directly before the stands, not fifty feet from the ground now, and there was wild clapping, which lasted until each plane made a graceful cloverleaf turn and began a lazy path back toward the stands. Applause ceased, for it was beginning to dawn on the men what, exactly, was promised next.