Needless to say, the reports of the three men and one woman who made the visit to the Redlite Ranch that Saturday made fast rounds of the company gossip circuit, and no one, not even Angela, was willing to deny that she’d been the most impressed by the partying. Since Angela was the longest-standing non-engineer shareholder and had a hand in many administrative things, much beyond just being the receptionist, she was well-known and well-liked in the company – so the impact of the news both confirmed and enhanced, but at the same time somewhat overshadowed Jennlynn’s announcement of the week before.

Although the twin de-closetings were a main feature of the gossip around the company for a while, in a surprisingly short time it became a fact of life, interesting but not really worth any more than the most casual comment. For a number of reasons, not the least of which that Shirley only had five rooms in the temporary building and was giving short-term tryouts to a number of girls she wasn’t familiar with, Jennlynn only worked at the Redlite one weekend a month for the next several months. By the time the next working weekend rolled around, her working at the Redlite really wasn’t news anymore. She was just a little surprised that no one made the trip that weekend, but was happy that it was fading into the background.

It was just as well. Things were very busy around Lambdatron just then, though busier for some than others; several big projects were right around their crux at the same time. Jennlynn had been one of the busiest people in the company even before the decloseting incident, working sometimes sixty and seventy hours a week; she had weeks in the following months that approached a hundred. Prostitute or not, she was pounding out a lot of hours, and was something of a workaholic anyway. Since she still knew few people in Phoenix, and no one outside the company, she didn’t have much of a home life in her condo; it was mostly a place to sleep, store stuff, and let dirty clothes pile up until she had to make time to do some laundry. And, at that, she was happy with it.

Others around the company knew the kind of hours she was putting in, because they were doing similar hours themselves; Lambdatron was a company that, like many high-tech development companies in the period, attracted workaholics. Sometimes people needed to unwind, and everyone understood that; some of those ways were off the wall, and that was understood as well. Jennlynn’s way may have been a little stranger than most, but hardly beyond comprehension. Once people got over the shock, the general response was, "So be it, you need the break."

Although she had been somewhat in the corner with Stan and others over the way she’d been acting, Jennlynn had still been rather concerned about making the announcement. On reflection over the next few months, when she had time to reflect about it, she’d realized that she’d been ashamed of it, and understandably so. But the reaction she got slowly changed her attitude about it: if she’d had to describe it, it would have been "I am what I am; like it or leave it."

Shortly after the anniversary of her employment, her name, Jim Geletzke’s, and a couple others came up at a shareholders meeting about their eligibility for shareholder status. She was not privy to the discussion at the time, but found out later that it centered around the fact that she was a brilliant and stalwart worker who put in a lot of hours and got results. The subject of her work at the Redlite never entered the discussion, except that someone commented that it was well she’d worked out a way to deal with the high stress levels she’d been experiencing earlier in the year. Rather to her surprise, she was unanimously elected to shareholder status. Although it wouldn’t start to show up until the end of the next quarter, the decision would catapult her annual salary nicely into six figures, and no one doubted that she’d earned it. By any measure, she was an early success in her primary profession as an engineer.

Shareholder status also carried with it administrative duties that she hadn’t previously been involved with. For a number of reasons, Stan put her into a customer relations position, dealing as a project representative on one project, and working with a team to develop new business from other prospects. Her sideline didn’t enter into his reasoning, and he really had done little thinking about it from that viewpoint. She was good-looking and always well dressed, which was a rarity in the company; she could be articulate and charming when she had to be, and she could be hardnosed about a lot of things if she had to be, as well. But she was a brilliant engineer who could spout off ideas on the fly, and for some reason Stan didn’t quite fathom, she was very good at negotiations.

But the project development was more than in just the Phoenix area. Frequently it was in Los Angeles, occasionally in Denver or Houston or San Francisco, occasionally farther afield. Once, there was a meeting in San Francisco, which effectively used up two and a half days due to bad airline connections and the resulting time spent in the terminal, all to do a four-hour consultation and presentation. That was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back in her months’-long dithering about finding a replacement for Magic Carpet.

Really, there hadn’t been that much time to dither, as busy as she had been. The only time she’d given much consideration to a faster plane had been on the trips up to Antelope Valley and back, when she’d sat in Magic Carpet’s seat watching the desert drift slowly by, thinking about the time she was wasting. Cutting the time of flight in half would mean two more hours that she could spend either at Lambdatron or at the Redlite Ranch. Either way, the time was precious, and while the flight gave her time to think and was nice and relaxing and twice as fast as driving, it was time she could be putting to better use.

She had plenty of time to think about it while she was sitting around various airline terminals on the way to and from San Francisco with two other Lambdatron people. Given a faster plane, say something like that Cessna 210 she’d been thinking about, a Mooney Mark 21 or something else in that general speed class, it could have been done in a day – a long day, to be sure, but there would be no expenses for hotel rooms, and, best of all, there was a whole day and a half where the time could be thrown at better things than sitting around in an airline terminal.

By the time they got to Phoenix any reservations she may have had had evaporated. On the way to her condo from Lambdatron that evening, she took a swing by the airport and managed to talk one of the people at Hernando Air Services out of a copy of Trade-A-Plane.

The bright yellow paper was and still is the largest aviation-related classified paper, published three times monthly. Nothing but ads, but just about anything in the sky from spark plugs to supersonic jets is available in its many tabloid pages. Jennlynn wasn’t looking just yet, but she’d learned when she bought Magic Carpet that the paper was a good place to have a look at the market and see what was available at what price; the possibilities looked good. Since the real deals disappear quickly, she took out a three-month subscription for airmail delivery – and placed an ad to sell her little Cessna, at a figure higher than she’d paid for it.

The list of potential airplanes was long, and she really wanted to find a plane somewhere in the southwest because of the potential time and expense of flying to say, New England, only to find out that an advertised plane was a loser. She was also looking for a bargain; she put her spending limit at $50,000, including the trade-in of Magic Carpet, and arranged for a line of credit at a local bank, just so she’d have the cash on hand when she decided to jump and not have to mess around with rolling over some stock from the market.

Nothing really jumped out and bit her in the first airmailed issue of Trade-A-Plane, but the following issue had what looked like a deal, in fact, a couple of them – a 1966 Cessna 210, and a 1962 Mooney Mark 21. Both were pretty old, which helped keep the price down, but from what she could tell from the ad, the engines had a lot of time left on them, and the aviation electronics – avionics – package of radios and radio navigation equipment seemed pretty reasonable. They were both sitting at an airplane broker’s lot in northern Colorado; a long haul in Magic Carpet, but it looked like it might be worth the trip. She called the broker, made sure the planes were still there, and then called the office and told them she’d be taking a couple days off. Before dawn the next morning, she and Magic Carpet were heading for Greeley, Colorado.

Jennlynn had been warned by a guy at Hernando, where she normally had her maintenance done, that this broker wasn’t above pulling a fast one, and to be careful. Jennlynn was not above pulling a fast one herself, and after a long, slow day in Magic Carpet, she stopped at an airport a few miles away from her destination and got a ride to a nearby motel for the night. The next morning, when she got dressed, she didn’t wear the comfortable flying clothes of the day before, but something that approached the conservative end of what she thought of as work clothes – her work in Nevada, that is.

She knew she’d been pretty lucky when she’d bought Magic Carpet – she could have easily been taken to the cleaners since she hadn’t known then what to look for. By now, though, she’d had years as an aircraft owner, had spent time dealing with mechanics, and had had a couple classes on aircraft maintenance that gave her a lot better idea of what to look for when checking over a used plane for potential purchase. She was a long way from being a mechanic, but she could spot telltale wear in some critical areas, leaking hydraulics, and many other such things.

The Cessna proved to be a dog at pretty much first glance. While it was pretty much as advertised, it bore the signs of hard use, and there were stains of leaking oil and hydraulic fluid in places where it would be best if they didn’t leak. The Mooney, though – that was a different story. It was turbocharged, so would move right out, especially at altitude. It didn’t have the avionics package that the 210 contained, but it was pretty good, better than Magic Carpet’s – and her little Cessna had seen her through her instrument training, so it was better avionics than most Cessna 150s. The broker had one of the guys who worked with him go with her while she took it out for a half-hour test flight, and she was fairly impressed. When they landed, she checked the plane over thoroughly – giving the broker and an assistant several good views of cleavage and long legs in the process. She looked over the maintenance logs and decided the Mooney would do if they could work out a reasonable trade-in on Magic Carpet. It took some hammering, with several buttons undone on her blouse, but in the end they came up with a number of $42,500, which allowed her $9,500 onMagic Carpet – the exact figure she’d paid for it a little over four years before. Considering that it was four years older and getting close to needing a major overhaul, it was an excellent price, and there was no reason to not go ahead with the deal.

The paperwork went quickly; while a secretary was working it up, she skimmed through the flight manual and picked out a few important things that the broker’s assistant had already gone over; when it was done, the broker gave her a few points from experience about the care and feeding of Mooney Mark 21s.

Everything else done, she went out to Magic Carpet one last time to clear her stuff out. There were changes of clothes and aviation maps and things of that nature, a couple good armloads to haul over to the Mooney. She went back over to make one last check for anything she’d left behind, and climbed into the left seat one last time.

All of a sudden, a flood of memories washed over her. She and Magic Carpet had been through a lot together: the first days of awe of being an airplane owner, the nervousness of her private license checkride, then, not long after that, the wondrous, adventurous flight to Michigan . . . and the bitter, heartbreaking trip from Michigan to the Mustang Ranch – near the end of her funds, with only money for gas, twice landing late at airports after the gas pumps had closed, spending the night in Magic Carpet’s seat, crying herself to sleep. Magic Carpet had sat outside the Mustang Ranch for three weeks while she turned herself into a prostitute, carried her to Bettye’s where she’d met the best friends she now had, where her life had been idyllic. Every time since, when she’d taken off for a month or a week or a weekend at Bettye’s or the Redlite, it had been Magic Carpet that had carried her there. It had seen her through her commercial pilot’s license, her instrument rating, her still-unused flight instructor certification – she had over 500 hours flight time by that point, and less than fifty of those hours had been in something other than this little green and white airplane. It really had been her faithful magic carpet.

A lot of joy, a lot of work, a lot of sorrow, especially when the plane had carried her from Bradford the last time. Right then it had been the only friend she had left in the world, the only thing she could depend on. Her life was considerably different than she’d expected it would be when she first put her hands on the controls – better most likely, but unimaginable to her then. It was going to be harder than she’d ever dreamed to walk away from her beloved little Cessna. A lot of memories. It wouldn’t be easy.

Helpless to stop, she felt hot tears welling up in her eyes. "I’m sorry," she told Magic Carpet out loud. "I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish I didn’t have to sell you. Just be as good to the next person as you were to me."

With tears still rolling down her face, she got out of Magic Carpet for the last time, walked across the pavement the few yards to the Mooney, and barely succeeded in not looking back.

* * *

It was late in the morning when she pointed the Mooney down the runway at Greeley and opened the throttle. The new plane was considerably faster than Magic Carpet, and had to be going faster on takeoff, but once she got it in the air and threw the switch to retract the landing gear, it proved to climb quickly – faster than the Cessna, and at a speed higher than the 150 could do on the level and wide open. She knew that it had considerably more altitude capability than her old plane, but now, with a new plane to learn, was not the time to head out into the high country; she had enough to deal with. She punched right on up to 10,500 feet, a comfortable cruising altitude and as high as she would want to go for any length of time without an oxygen system, which the Mooney didn’t have, shoved the nose over and trimmed it out for level flight, less watching outside than watching in awe as the airspeed indicator climbed – 180, 185, 190 MPH. Airspeed indicators under register with altitude, and she knew how to compensate, so she was thrilled to see that she was moving over 200 miles an hour.

By the time she got to Phoenix in the late afternoon, after a half-day’s flight that would have been a long, tedious day in Magic Carpet, she was a little less sorry that she’d traded in her little Cessna. The Mooney was fast, it handled nicely, had a reputation of having few bad habits, and was a lot easier on gas than the slightly larger Cessna 210 would have been – in fact, better per mile than the 150. It could go at least twice as far on a load of fuel than the 150, which would mean the end of having to make a fuel stop each way on the run to Antelope Valley. The one on the way back was a slow and troublesome one at Las Vegas since the Kingman airport fuel pumps were closed on Sunday. The Mooney had four seats to Magic Carpet’s two, so would be a lot more usable for business. What was more, it was a far more capable airplane in many ways, and she was a far more capable pilot than she’d been when she’d bought the little Cessna. It had long since been time for her to be moving up, and this was a good plane to move up to.

It had been a slow afternoon, and from higher up than she would have been in Magic Carpet the countryside still seemed to slide by slowly, although things went by on the map a lot more quickly. It was good to have a chance to think, to get used to this strange airplane a little. At one point, she thought whimsically that she ought to name it; "The Mooney" would get dull, up against the memory of a name like Magic Carpet. She wasted a pleasant half hour throwing around ideas in her mind. One thought stuck with her: a lot of the time, this plane would be making the Antelope Valley run, so maybe she ought to tie it in somehow, and tie it in with flying. The old west term for prostitutes came to mind, and with the all-white plane it was a no-brainer: Soiled Dove. Since she would be using this airplane for Lambdatron business somewhat, and while Lambdatron people knew of her part-time job, it was not common knowledge among customers and not anything that was volunteered, though would be admitted to, she realized that it probably wouldn’t be good public relations to have that name painted on the cowling. But, no big deal; Soiled Dove tickled her fancy; it was enough.

She landed at Phoenix and told the people at Hernando Aviation to give the Mooney a good going over, since her examination of the plane at Greeley had been nonprofessional and probably on the superficial side. When she called and talked to the mechanic the next afternoon, he said, "I can’t believe you beat that airplane out of him for that price. You got a helluva deal."

"Did you find anything wrong?"

"A few little things, nothing major," she was told, "And we went over it pretty good. Fixed everything, and found nothing really worth the mention. We ran a compression check on the engine, and it’s a touch on the light side. You’re going to be needing a major, well, not in the short term, but it’s on the horizon. Probably this side of a thousand hours."

There was nothing wrong with that; she’d only put about five hundred hours on Magic Carpet in four years of flying. "I was going to be needing a major in the foreseeable future on the Cessna," she said. "So what I lose on one hand I gain on the other."

"That’s almost true," he said. "It’ll be a more expensive major, but that’s a heck of a lot more airplane. You’ve come up in the world some, Jennlynn."

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.