Chapter 2

The world looked different from close to a mile above the ground, up near the base of the cumulus clouds that were starting to fill the sky. Those were good signs to Bree; they were signs that this was going to be an active day, with a lot of thermals, since the clouds were often the final result of the rising air.

Bree could see the shadows of the clouds dotting the forest below. Below her, she could see the railroad line like a slash through the forest. It was an important navigational landmark; she’d loosely follow the railroad to Warsaw and back. Far below, she could see a train on the tracks, mostly made up of empty open hoppers. She’d ridden one of those rock trains once, and there was a good chance that Josh, Aunt Jackie’s younger half-brother, was running it. He ran the railroad, and often ran one of the trains, especially on weekends, since this time of year they ran seven days a week.

Bree had the nose of the 1-26 down a little for the sake of speed. Under ideal conditions, and at its best gliding speed, the little sailplane would move forward twenty-four feet for each foot it dropped. However, that speed was slow, and Bree knew she had some miles to cover. Worse, on days such as this the air sinks between thermals, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly and she wanted to get through that “sink” as fast as possible. The speed to fly between thermals is always a guess based on the average strength of each thermal. Although very complicated theories have been developed to determine that speed, Bree just based her decision on a plastic ring mounted on the airspeed indicator, adjustable to account for the thermal strength she expected.

Seventy miles an hour was the best guess the little plastic ring had, so seventy was what she flew, burning off in airspeed the altitude she’d so slowly gained in the thermal, heading toward the hole in the woods Jackie had been expecting her to go to. Even at seventy it seemed like things were just crawling past below. In a car it would have seemed pretty fast, but only a muffled whisper of the wind over the wings of the little sailplane and an occasional look out the window could tell her she was moving at all.

In a matter of minutes she’d burned off a couple thousand feet of altitude and gone several miles in the process. She was getting close to the clearcut space now, hoping she would find the lift she expected there. If she couldn’t find it, if it wasn’t working, there was another place close by that occasionally worked. She had altitude enough to spend a little time looking, but not too much. It was still possible to turn the 1-26 toward home and make it if she didn’t waste too much time; taking too long would run the risk of an outlanding if she couldn’t find any lift anywhere, but that seemed unlikely at this hour on a day like today.

She was just coming up on the field when the needle on the variometer jiggled a couple of times, and then settled on the up side of the scale. She would rather have run a little farther, but lift was where she found it. She pulled back on the stick and turned into the thermal, turning her airspeed back into altitude in a climbing turn maneuver called a chandelle. Circling for more altitude, she looked down, to see that the train that she’d passed on her run had almost caught up with her. Instinctively, she tightened up her circle a little, to try to get closer to the core of the thermal and climb faster. Like any airplane, sailplanes sink faster in steep banks, so like much else in soaring, how steep to turn was a guessing game based somewhat on experience, trying to ride the delicate balance between six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Riding that delicate balance was one of the things that excited her about soaring; it was her wits and skills versus physics and nature, a game of finesse that few who had never done it could totally understand, or even care about. This flight was hers to enjoy, and hers alone.

Several miles to the south-southwest from where Bree was having her private dance with sun-powered rising air, Howie Erikson was totally unaware of it, and had he known about it, he probably wouldn’t have cared.

Mornings were for sleeping, at least as far as Howie was concerned, and a nice warm bed was the most preferable place to sleep. It would be better, of course, if his girlfriend Misty Frankovich were there with him, but that wasn’t going to happen, at least not any time soon. Back in the summer they’d spent a fair amount of time playing kissy-face and touchie-boobie but Misty had drawn a firm line at her waist and made it clear that he would cross it at his peril. He’d only made it past there once, when they were both celebrating the football team’s totally unexpected triumph over the vastly-favored Coldwater team in the season opener. Even then she’d only allowed a single touch of the promised land, along with a hint that better things might be expected, just not soon.

Howie lay in bed, half awake, and totally in denial about getting up. If he got up, he’d have to do something, most likely homework. He had a lot of it to get done; he didn’t have football practice till one in the afternoon, but practice the rest of the week ate up the time he had to spend on the books. He’d heard stories about how back in the old days, before last August, varsity football players got cut a lot of slack on homework, but if that had once been true it sure wasn’t any more. That made Saturday morning his time to catch up, which he really didn’t want to face. No wonder he wanted to stay in bed.

Howie was no fan of bird watching, like his big brother Jack was. In fact, he thought Jack was pretty well out of his head to get involved in such a dull and dry thing, when he could be playing football and doing some of the other neat things you only got to do in high school. He knew Jack, his girlfriend Vixen Hvalchek, and a couple of their friends were off on a bird-watching expedition. Vixen was all right, Howie thought, but she was no Misty.

He and Misty had had a pretty good night the evening before. There was really only one teen hangout in Spearfish Lake, the Frostee Freeze, a recycled A&W down by the lakeshore downtown. It was only open in the summer months, and this was the closing weekend for the season. Although it was chilly enough for he and Misty to be wearing warm jackets, they’d hung around until the bitter end, just enjoying themselves, talking with their other diehard classmates, and wishing the place were opening for the summer, rather than closing. Other than a few school-sponsored activities, there wasn’t going to be much real dating the next few months.

Another year, Howie thought, things would be a little different. The biggest thing was that he’d have turned sixteen and would have a driver’s license. Better than that, with Jack gone, the family Jeep would stay behind and more or less become his, except when his dad wanted to run out to the hunting cabin, the main reason for the family’s ownership of the Jeep in the first place. That meant most of the time Howie would be able to get out and around; he could imagine taking Misty down to Camden for an honest fast-food burger and to catch a movie. Better than that, if they wanted to go up to Turtle Hill or out in the woods someplace to get a little physical with each other, they would be able to. That little piece of plastic and the Jeep would open his world up more than anything he could imagine. But that would be then, and for right now, it meant things sucked.

Eventually Howie realized he wasn’t going to be able to put off the inevitable any longer, much though he would like to. He threw the covers back, slid sideways, and swung around to get his feet on the floor as he sat upright. He ached a little; he’d been sacked a couple times by a big dude from the Albany River backfield, until coach Kulwicki had a little heart-to-heart talk with the offensive line. That ended that nonsense, but he couldn’t shake off the damage that quickly in spite of his youth. Fortunately they were going to be facing Frontier next Friday. Although Frontier had been having a pretty good year for them, they were only one of two teams the Spearfish Lake Marlins had a winning record against over the last ten years. That didn’t mean they were going to be facing an easy game; the coaches had already been warning against getting too complacent, but at least Howie thought there would be less chance of getting banged up.

Bathroom, clothes, the usual morning stuff. Howie wasn’t shaving yet, at least not on a regular basis, but every now and then a few whiskers would crop up that needed attention. As ready as he could manage to face the day, he stumbled downstairs, heading straight for the refrigerator.

“Can I get you something, Howie?” his mother Barbara asked.

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” He muttered, realizing he still wasn’t all the way awake. “Something besides cereal.” He usually had cereal for breakfast each morning, mostly because it was quick and he could manage it while he was stumbling around, but he didn’t have to rush off to school on Saturday mornings.

“How about some toast and eggs? It won’t take long.”

“Sounds good,” he said, still looking around in the refrigerator. Toast and eggs would also be better than cereal since he didn’t have to be the one to make it. He found a quarter-full jug of orange juice, and right at the moment that looked pretty good to him. He took it out and poured himself a large glass.

“So,” his mother said, obviously trying to make conversation as she got out a frying pan, “what are you going to do today?”

“Homework this morning, I guess,” he sighed. “Got to do some catching up before Monday, then practice this afternoon. Maybe if I get caught up some, Misty and I can get together tomorrow and fool around with the Nintendo.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of that?” his mother asked, not accusingly.

“I hardly get the time to mess around with it anymore,” he shrugged. “When football season is over with we’ll probably do it a little more, but right now I just don’t have the time, what with everything else.” Not wanting to get into that ongoing hassle, he changed the subject. “So do you have any idea when Jack will be home?”

“I doubt it will be much before dark,” his mother said. “You know how it is when he and Vixen get to chasing birds.”

“Darn it,” he replied. “I was hoping Jack could help me with my geometry.”

“Well, maybe,” his mother shook her head. “My guess is that it’s not going to be early when he gets back.”

That was about what Howie figured. He knew Jack wasn’t exactly a math whiz, but he seemed to be able to make sense out of it. Having a little help would make the book time go a lot quicker. There were a few things where he and Misty could study together, but she wasn’t going to be much help with geometry; it was the big outstanding issue in the homework pile for the weekend. Without his brother’s help, it would go a lot more slowly.

There ought to be someone else who could help him out, he thought. Maybe someone on the team. A couple hours could make a big difference. His closest friends probably wouldn’t be that big a help – Mike and Greg weren’t doing well in the class either, and the other day Jeff had actually asked him a question about it – one that he couldn’t answer.

He flipped the idea over in his mind a little while his mother scrambled the eggs and waited out the toaster. There were a couple girls he knew who seemed to be getting the class pretty well, Autumn Trevetheck at the head of the list, but sure as hell, if he asked Autumn, Misty would raise hell with him. She’d still raise hell with him if he was hanging out with one of the guys, but it would be a different kind of hell. In the months he’d been hanging out with Misty, he’d learned that she didn’t like him sharing his time with anyone else.

Damn it, he thought, there has to be someone. After a moment, he came up with Jared Wooten. Jared was a pretty good student, and didn’t seem to be having any trouble with the geometry class. He was on the football team, too, although new to it. He was mostly a wrestler, but had more or less volunteered to help out when the old varsity team got flushed. He wasn’t a big guy, but was fast and had snared three passes in the game Friday night, one of them for a touchdown. Maybe he’d be willing to help out for an hour or two.

What’s more, maybe Misty wouldn’t object too much to Jared helping him out. Jared was a pretty good guy, if a little quiet, while he knew damn well that Misty thought Mike and Greg and Jeff were obnoxious assholes. While he liked hanging out with his old friends, he conceded Misty might have a point on that one; as much for her sake as anything else, he’d pulled away from them the last few months. Jared just didn’t fit that description.

It might be worth a try – and wouldn’t be worth anything if he didn’t ask. As his mother brought his breakfast to him, Howie glanced at the clock – it might not be too early.

Getting through breakfast didn’t take Howie long; as soon as he finished, he went to the phone book, looked up the number, and called him up. Jared’s mother answered the phone, and said that she’d get Jared for him. In a moment, Jared came on the line, saying, “Hey, Howie! What’s up?”

“You doing anything?”

“No, not really. What you got in mind?”

“I’m having some trouble making sense of some of the stuff Mrs. Elsasser has been saying in geometry,” Howie said, laying the problem right out. “My brother isn’t around to help out, and he didn’t have Mrs. Elsasser anyway. Any chance you could help me out a little?”

“It’s going to have to be right away,” Jared told him. “We’ve got football practice at one, and when that’s over with there’s family stuff that’ll eat up the rest of the day.”

“I can be there in ten minutes,” Howie said. “I really appreciate this, guy.”

“No problem. It’s kind of dull around here right now, anyway. It’s just that we’re going to have to wrap up in a couple hours.”

“Good enough. I’ll be there in a few.”

Howie finished up the phone call and put his few dishes in the dishwasher. “You found someone to help, I take it?” his mother asked.

“Jared Wooten,” he told her. “I think he can get me straightened out, and that’ll help a lot. I ought to be back by noon or so.”

“What do you want me to tell Misty when she calls?”

“That I’m out getting help with some homework, then football practice. I’ll call her when I get back.”

A couple minutes later Howie was out in the garage, getting out his BMX. It still sucked to have to ride a bike around town when having a car available was so near in the future. He knew how to drive it, and in fact, had driven it a fair amount with someone with him, but he wasn’t old enough for a license yet and that was that. He slung the backpack with his geometry book and notebook over his shoulders, shoved the bike outside, and began to pedal.

At least I got out of there before Misty called, he thought. There was homework that really had to get done today, and giving some attention to her would just make it longer till it was done.

In the northern part of Spearfish Lake, a heavily pregnant Rachel Wooten asked her son, “What was that call a few minutes ago all about?”

“Howie Erikson needs some help with geometry,” Jared replied. “I figured it can’t hurt to help him out a bit.”

“He’s the quarterback, right?” Rachel asked. “I didn’t know you were pals with him.”

“I’m not,” Jared said. “He’s OK, even if he’s not a wrestler.”

“I thought I remembered the name,” Rachel replied. Even though had been a Spearfish Lake girl, she wasn’t really tuned into football. It still surprised her that Jared had gone out for the team in the midst of the confusion following the suspension of most of the old varsity team after their getting busted at an illegal beer party. So far, it had worked out pretty well, though.

The lousy record of the old football team over the past decade and more had produced not a little resentment among other student athletes. It seemed unfair that the truly bad football team filled with bad actors got so much community attention, while good athletes on other teams mostly got overlooked. There were a number of trophies in the school testifying to the skill of both the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams in the years the football team had been so poor, including several state championships, but they always seemed to be overshadowed by the laughingstock of the football team. Needless to say, that didn’t go over very well with the basketball players.

Jared knew how that worked. He was a wrestler, and he was good – as a freshman he’d come close to medaling in the state individual finals downstate last spring, and the reaction he’d mainly gotten was, “If you’re so good, why don’t you go out for football?”

Up until six weeks before, his answer had always been something like, “Because I don’t want to have to hang out with those jerks.” If the company was appropriate, he might replace the last word with “assholes.”

Jared knew what an asshole was. He’d had plenty of chances to learn, for the description fit his real father to a “T.” He was an abusive, overbearing, self-centered jerk, and both Jared and his mother had often felt the weight of his tongue, and occasionally his fists. It had been a miserable existence Jared would have thought normal, except for noticing the fact that his schoolmates had fathers who seemed to love them and liked to have good times with them.

His life changed drastically one day when his mother showed up at his school in California, along with his grandparents, his Aunt Ruth, and his Uncle Randy. He never saw his California home again; they went straight to the airport, and in a matter of hours were settled in Randy’s home in Spearfish Lake. Jared’s father didn’t have to think very hard about where his wife and son had run off to, and a couple days later, carrying a gun, he broke into Randy’s home to drag them back where they belonged. But it didn’t happen, mostly because Randy, not a big guy and smaller than Jared’s father, also had several black belts and a willingness to use his skills. Several broken bones later, his father was hauled off to the hospital, then the local jail, and eventually to the state prison. Jared had not seen him since and had no desire to do so; in fact, his interest in wrestling – and martial arts – was rooted in building up skills that would most likely be needed if his father ever showed up again. If he did, he was going to be in for a surprise.

In the years that followed his move to Spearfish Lake, Randy had taken quite a bit of time to show Jared what a father was really supposed to be. It had been Randy who had gotten him involved in youth wrestling and Little League, and taught him the basics of martial arts, as well. It had been the difference between night and day, and he’d blossomed as a result. Then, about two years after their leaving California, his mother had started to get involved with Jim Wooten, a construction superintendent in Randy’s construction business, then married him. Jim – or “Dad,” as Jared now preferred to call him – had filled in a lot of the rest of the education about what a father was really supposed to be. Not long afterward there came a formal adoption, and when Jared was offered the option of a new last name, he’d agreed eagerly. Like his old last name, the old days in California were now nothing more than a fading bad memory.

“Well, it’s nice of you to help him out,” Rachel offered.

“No big deal,” Jared replied. “Like I said, Howie is all right, and I wouldn’t mind knowing him a little better.”

Jared was pretty sure his mother was setting herself up for another lecture about how he ought to work harder at having more friends and being a little more social. Unlike a lot of kids he knew, with parents who picked at them over everything under the sun, it was really about the only thing his mother tended to get on him about. And at that, he conceded, she might be right.

He was something of a loner; it was something his birth father had beaten into him years before, when he hadn’t been allowed to have much in the way of friends, even among his classmates. Even today, there was a reserve left behind that didn’t allow him to be close friends with anyone, male or female. There were girls in his class he’d like to know better . . . but somehow, he was reluctant to get too close to anyone. Joining the football team a couple months before had been a big step in the direction of doing something about it.

“Would you like me to throw a snack or something together for you two?” his mother asked.

“Not now,” Jared told her. “This may not take long.”

“Don’t forget, we’re going over to your grandparents after football practice,” Rachel reminded him.

“I already told Howie we had some stuff coming up,” Jared replied. “Besides, if it takes until we have to leave for football practice he’s probably not going to get it anyway.”

Only a few minutes later the doorbell rang. Just to be on the safe side, to be sure it wasn’t his former father showing up to make trouble Jared took a look through the peephole to discover it was Howie, carrying a backpack. He opened the door and said, “Hey, Howie, how you doing?”

“Oh, OK,” Howie shrugged. “It’d be better if I could make some sense of this geometry. I’m usually not that bad with math, but there’s something that just isn’t making sense.”

“Well, let’s go out to the kitchen, spread out, and see if we can make it come together for you,” Jared said. “It’s probably just something simple.”

The two of them trooped through the house to the kitchen and pulled out a couple chairs. “Nice house,” Howie observed absently.

“Not bad,” Jared replied. “It was a little on the small side until Dad and a couple of his friends from the company added on a couple rooms upstairs last summer. Since there’s another kid on the way, Mom and Dad figured we needed more space. So what’s your problem with the geometry?”

Howie spent the next few minutes explaining what his problem was, while Jared tried to understand why he was having the problem in the first place. In fact, it proved to be pretty simple – Howie didn’t quite understand a couple of the basic concepts of the Pythagorean Theorem, one of the foundations of geometry. Jared thought Howie had to be thinking about football or that redheaded girlfriend of his when he should have been listening to Mrs. Elsasser, not that Jared thought their teacher was all that good anyway. She’d been shifted over from teaching at the elementary school, and was finding it a little difficult to relate to older kids.

Once that much of it got worked out, Jared spent a little time explaining it a little better, with a calculator running a couple examples of how it worked. Once the groundwork was laid, it was no trick to return to the problem at hand, and Howie was able to zip right through it. “Hey, that’s pretty simple,” he finally said. “It just wasn’t making any sense to me.”

“Pretty straightforward,” Jared told him. “Actually, once you get very far beyond that it turns into trig, and that’s a lot more complicated. I know some of the basics, but I’m looking forward to getting into the real thing. It ought to be interesting.”

“You must be pretty good at math,” Howie sighed. “I’m afraid I have to struggle to keep up.”

“I’m not bad at it,” Jared replied. “Dad says that most people reach a mental block about math at some point. His was at reducing square roots, and he didn’t have anyone to help him over the hump, although he knows how to do it now since there’s some work stuff he has to do it for. He says he’s probably learned more useful stuff about math on the job than he did in school.”

“I guess you learn stuff better if you know you’re going to have to use it.”

“Probably so,” Jared conceded. “What do you think you’re going to wind up doing?”

“No idea,” Howie replied. “I just don’t want to have to work in the plant like Dad. Now my brother, he wants to be a professional birdwatcher, if you can believe that.”

“You’re kidding! A professional birdwatcher? I’ve never heard of anything like that!”

“No, he says there are people who do population studies of birds and things like that. He’ll probably find it interesting if he can find a job doing it, but he’s planning on studying wildlife biology, so he might actually manage it. His girlfriend is big into it too. In fact, they’re off watching migrating ducks and stuff at some marsh somewhere right now. I guess if that’s what they like it’s all right. How about you? What do you want to do?”

“You know,” Jared smiled, “deep down inside, I’d like to be a heavy equipment operator. Bulldozers, graders, something like that. That’s what dad was until just recently, and Uncle Randy says he’d really like to be one, instead of managing the construction company. But I’m probably going to have to go to college, so I probably won’t be. Maybe something in construction management, or maybe be an architect. I’ve got a few years to figure it out.”

“No reason you couldn’t be,” Howie said. “Me, I think something like running a bulldozer would be cool at least some of the time, but I don’t know if that’s what I want to do forever.”

“I know it’s cool,” Jared grinned. “Dad and Uncle Randy have let me run one a few times, just fooling around.”

The two of them talked about heavy equipment for a few minutes, just something to talk about, soon it was after noon, and Jared could see it was getting close to the time they would have to head to football practice. “We’re both going to have to go pretty soon,” he said.

“That’s cool,” Howie replied. “I really had to get this geometry stuff figured out. You’ve been a big help with it. I’m going to try to pay more attention to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to have you straighten me out again later.”

“No big deal,” Jared smiled. “Feel free to ask. It’s kind of nice to be able to hang out with someone, even if homework is involved.”

“Sounds good to me,” Howie agreed. “Maybe we’ll have to find a chance to hang out just for the sake of hanging out sometime.”

“Sure,” Jared said. “I’d like that.”

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