Chapter 5

Up in the air over the West Turtle Lake Club Bree was totally unaware of her sister’s watching, or even that she was there at all. She knew Becca had been out there a couple times, which was supposed to be a secret, and couldn’t understand how Becca could stand to do something like hang out at a nudist resort, and like it. It was beyond imagination to her.

But she wasn’t thinking about that at the moment; all she was thinking about was that she didn’t want to risk the embarrassment of landing there and being teased about it, so she was doing her utter best to avoid it. Ten minutes she circled low over the club, then fifteen, then twenty, and only a bare few hundred feet had been made good. What lift that she could find was pretty patchy; she’d get a good bump on one circuit, and couldn’t find it again at all on the next, and there were times where she lost ground while feeling about for the thermal. Scratchy, patchy lift like this didn’t make sense to her but she was glad she’d found it at all.

After half an hour of some of the most desperate flying she’d ever done, even her pure force of will wasn’t getting her anywhere. She could scratch around here till the cows came home, but eventually they would. All too soon the sun would be getting too low to provide much heating, and this thermal, if that was what it was, would die out along with everything else. When that happened, she was going down, and that was that.

Though she’d been concentrating hard on trying to keep the 1-26 in the air, she was also looking around for signs that something else might be working somewhere. There wasn’t much; the sky was pretty blue here although she could see cumulus clouds still off to the north, so lift was working somewhere. But presently she became aware that there was a small puffy white cloud off to the northeast, nearly overhead but not quite. That meant there was lift somewhere close – real lift, not this scratchy caricature of a thermal.

After only a few circles she had become aware of a blackened area to the northeast; it shouldn’t have been a surprise, after all. A month before there had been a large forest fire out here; she and Aunt Jackie had flown Rocinante over the fire while it had been going on, spotting for the fire department. An area that big, with all the black of the burned-over vegetation ought to be producing something, she thought. But it was still a ways away – too far to go and see while she was down low.

As hope faded of getting anywhere as a result of this patch of weak lift, a desperate plan formed in her mind. If she could get up enough altitude, she could risk a trip over to the burned-over patch and have enough altitude for a little looking. If she found lift, fine. If she didn’t, she’d have to bite the bullet and come back here and land; she’d probably be too low to work this so-called thermal again. It was the only card in the deck to play, and it wasn’t a good one.

It took her most of her half hour of circling over the West Turtle Lake Club to get high enough to make the attempt. It was hard to make the decision of when to go, but she made up her mind she needed two thousand feet over ground level to try. The altimeter hung just shy of it for circuit after circuit, but finally the needle reached a point where it was time to go.

She rolled out when the nose was pointed toward the black point, almost dizzy from circling for so long. The air was dead, dead, dead, especially as she passed over the dark little lake she’d been near for so long – there was nothing she could do but keep it at the speed for the best glide ratio and hope for the best. The scrubby vegetation below her was closer than she wanted to think about; it wouldn’t be long before she had to find lift or head back.

Her eyes weren’t on the ground below; they were looking ahead, looking for any possible signs of lift – then a black dot appeared in the distance ahead of her, then two, then five, then more. She stared at them for a second and realized what she was seeing: turkey vultures in a small kettle.

Markers!

The relief washed over her as if she’d dived into a lake of it. That many vultures there – they had to have found something!

Turkey vultures usually don’t soar very high, she knew; they were looking for food on the ground as much as they were soaring. She was still a little bit above their altitude when she reached them, off to one side a little, but as she got close she felt the welcome bump of lift, just where the birds had told her it would be. She turned into it, and felt a little surge in the seat of her shorts as the sailplane reacted to the rising air.

After only half a circle she knew what she had was better than what she’d found over the airstrip – two to three hundred feet a minute. It was nothing like those boomers east of Hoselton that seemed so far behind her now, but good strong air, warm enough to punch its way through the stable lake air. She might or might not be able to ride this one up to the base of that puffy little cloud but the chances seemed good that it might get her high enough to risk getting out of the blue hole of the lake. There was a good chance she could find more thermals to the west. If she couldn’t, there were places to the west she had scouted for an outlanding.

While much remained to be determined, one thing was clear: she wouldn’t have to risk the embarrassment of a landing at the West Turtle Lake Club today.

Jackie was getting increasingly concerned. If the air to the north of the lake was as stable as she suspected, Bree would long since have had to run out of sky. That meant one of two things: either she was down or she’d found some little patch of lift to scratch around in trying to stay aloft. She knew that if Bree was low she might not hear a radio call from that far away; the radio could be fluky, especially down low.

Mark felt it too. “I’m starting to get a little worried,” he said finally.

“I am too,” Jackie agreed. “I’m tempted to give her a call, but if she’s scratching down low somewhere she may not want the interruption. If she’s down, she’d give us a call on her cell phone.”

Mark started to reply, but the words never left his lips – he was interrupted by Bree’s voice on the radio speaker, speaking as always in a flat, professional-sounding monotone that made it sound like nothing in particular out of the ordinary was going on. “Climbing through three east of Turtle Hill.”

Jackie glanced at the clock on the wall again. “Tell me she hasn’t been scratching like hell for the last half hour,” she sighed.

“She might tell us when she gets back,” Mark smiled, “but I doubt if she’d say anything on the radio about it.”

He thought back a year and a half, to the news show where he’d heard the recorded voice of US Air Captain – and glider pilot – Chesley Sullenberger saying flatly and emotionlessly, “Can’t make Teterboro.” His words had signified that that the powerless US Air 1549 was going to have to land in the Hudson River. No emotion, just a flat statement of fact as if it was something that he’d done thousands of times before. Bree had watched that show and the follow-ups with him; Mark knew just exactly where that professional tone she used had come from. When you got down to it, he thought, Sullenberger wasn’t a bad role model for a kid like Bree to have. He could think of worse ones. Lots worse.

“Sounds like Bree,” Jackie sighed, reaching for the microphone to acknowledge receipt of Bree’s transmission.

“Boy, Coach Reardon sure is sneaky, isn’t he?” Howie said to Jared as they took a break at the drinking fountain during practice. Coach Kulwicki had called for a five-minute break, and right now the two of them needed it bad. So did the rest of the team, for that matter.

“Looks like it to me,” Jared agreed, sweat running down his face. It was a warm afternoon – not like the scorchers they’d endured when practice started over a month before, but still uncomfortable.

Practice today was tough. It was always tough, but today it was tougher than normal. The handful of football players who had only been suspended for part of the season were back at practice for the first time today. Howie figured that part of the reason this practice was so tough was to make perfectly clear that things were not the way they used to be. Already one of the former players had walked off the field when it had become clear he wasn’t going to get his position back without working for it. Just because he was a senior didn’t mean he could waltz in and expect to be the king of the hill, which would have been the case only a few weeks before.

In a way, Howie was a little relieved to see the handful of older players return. As the quarterback, he depended on the line to keep the opposing team out of his hair for at least a second or two while he did what he had to do. So far they’d been able to manage it, but only because the coaches had more or less been able to keep the other team guessing what was happening at all.

Like most high school football teams, the basic offense was a running offense. Every now and then a high school team might try a pass play, but only in desperation. Since desperate was a good way to describe the crowd of mostly freshmen and sophomores as they tried to stand off older kids on other teams, and Howie had a great arm despite his relatively small size, they threw the ball a lot. The opponents never knew what was coming; Howie had often thrown a pass right on first down, and the other teams just hadn’t been able to adjust.

The only way that was going to continue to work was to keep the other teams off balance. Now, with the return of a few of the older, bigger kids, Kulwicki and Reardon had decided to use Frontier to lay a little false trail. The plan was to run the ball a lot more often, since the teams they’d been facing had been starting to get set up to defend against pass plays. That would keep the rest of their opponents guessing, at least for another game or two, and the relatively weak Frontier team was a good place to try out the unusual – for this team – new offense.

That, however, put a lot of load on Howie as the quarterback, and on Jared. Though he was inexperienced as a running back – not that the rest of the team was much more experienced – he was fast, strong, and had good moves that were a holdover from his wrestling. He was expected to be one of the two leading ball carriers, although there were others Howie could hand the ball off to if it was needed to keep the other team guessing.

Several of their teammates were standing around, goofing off; some of the kids who had just come back today were sitting down, breathing heavily. If it was a long afternoon for Howie, how long an afternoon was it going to be for them?

“Crap on this,” Howie said. “Let’s find a little shade and sit down for a minute.”

“Talked me into it,” Jared puffed.

There wasn’t much shade to be found nearby; the best they could do was under the bleachers, and the way the sun was coming in they didn’t provide a lot of shade. But it would do; they wouldn’t be there long.

“Oh, crap,” Howie said as he sat down, well, more fell down than sat. He took off his helmet, in hopes of feeling a little cooler air for a moment. “I am beat to shit already, and I know when I get home Misty is going to be all over my ass wanting to go somewhere. She doesn’t like the idea of me leaving her behind so I can go to football practice. I mean, she likes the games but doesn’t seem to understand the work that has to go into it.”

“Her brother is on the team,” Jared said, nodding his head toward Rusty Frankovich, one of the few seniors to escape the mass suspensions of a little over a month earlier. Howie knew it was by sheer luck; Rusty’d screwed up somehow or another, he wasn’t real sure why, and had been grounded by his parents so had missed the illegal beer party. Howie was damn glad he had; he’d been about the best and most experienced lineman he had in front of him, and the guy had made any number of plays that had kept Howie’s ass from getting screwed into the ground. “You’d think she’d understand it from that.”

“Apparently not,” Howie shook his head. “And as far as I know she’s never been on any teams, so doesn’t know what it’s like from that angle, either. Shit, we were out at the Frostee Freeze last night until it was almost too damn late, and I know damn well she’s going to want to do it again tonight. Then she’ll want to play Nintendo or something all day tomorrow, and I’ve still got studying to do. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a lot of fun and we’ve had some good times together, but every now and then it gets to be a pain in the ass.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jared shrugged. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“You don’t? You might be the lucky one at that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind having one, but I don’t think I’d want a girlfriend who would be that demanding. I mean, it would be fun to be able to hang out with someone, but I don’t think I’d want to let it get too serious.”

“You might be the smart one at that,” Howie sighed. “I’m starting to get a little tired of things having to be her way all the time. I mean, I’m willing to give some, but between school and studying and football and her, there aren’t enough hours in the day. Something has to give. About all I can hope to do is to make it through the rest of the season somehow, and then I won’t have football hanging over my ass.”

“All right, let’s get going,” they heard Coach Kulwicki call. “Don’t plan on sitting around on your dead butts all afternoon.”

“I guess that means us,” Howie sighed as he slowly got to his feet. The break had been much too short, and it would probably be a while before they got another one. At least Howie was getting into better shape, and he’d been in better shape than most of the team when practice had started a few weeks before. “I’ll tell you what, if I didn’t think all this work was going to be worth it I’d be tempted to hang it up, too.”

“Don’t want to do that,” Jared said, working his way to his feet as well.

“Oh, hell no,” Howie agreed. “I’m not quitting. It’s only a few more weeks. I’ll make it through somehow and put up with Misty if I have to.”

As it turned out, Bree couldn’t ride the thermal east of Turtle Hill up to cloud base. Either the stable lake air stole its strength or the sun’s heating was starting to lose its effect; she didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that she did get high enough to get away. Only a few more miles to the west and she should be out of the wind shadow of the lake, and she could see from the clouds in the sky that thermals were still working there. All she had to do was get to them.

When the thermal finally sank to the strength of the scratchy one she’d been working low over the West Turtle Lake Club airstrip, she knew it was time to go. It was still uncertain enough that there was no thought of running at the speed indicated on the speed-to-fly ring. Until she reached real lift to the west, it was again going to be a case of drifting along at minimum sink rate, hoping to stretch her glide. She wasn’t close enough to home to be able to make it back, but one more halfway decent thermal and she could make it. She checked her watch; she still had more than an hour to go on her five-hour endurance qualification. If she made it back to the airstrip, she could dink around overhead until she made it with a little time to spare.

By now, after her ordeal over the West Turtle Lake Club, a lot of the tension had gone away. For the first time, she began to wish she’d brought her MP3 player with her; it would give her something to listen to so she could kill time a little better. But the feeling only lingered for a moment; she had one more thermal to find.

After several minutes she was starting to get low enough that it was a concern, but that clearcut where she’d found a thermal she’d ridden earlier wasn’t far ahead. It was the first place she steered for – actually, a little northeast of it, since the wind ought to be carrying the thermal that way. After the difficulties of the last hour and more, she was more than a little relieved to find it was still generating a thermal. It wasn’t as strong as earlier, but it was up, and she was content to ride it clear up to cloud base. Less than an hour to go, now, and making it back was no longer a consideration. She had it made.

In only a few minutes she’d ridden the thermal as high as she needed to make it back at all, but since there wasn’t anything else to do, she circled to ride it higher. In another ten minutes or so, she was high enough that she could put the little Schweizer’s nose down to redline speed and still make it back to the airstrip in a thrilling finish run, as if she were in a race.

Her thought drifted back to the regionals earlier in the summer. That was a race, of course, and on a couple strong days the fiberglass ships had made their final glides at close to their maximum speed, going through the finish gate only a few feet above the ground, then chandelling up into the landing pattern. Bree had been thrilled to watch them, especially the big open-class birds with wingspans twice that of the 1-26. They came flashing through the finish gate at perhaps a hundred and fifty miles an hour, with only the roar of the wind over their wings announcing their presence. When the pilots pulled up, the long slender wings bent through an arc of perhaps thirty degrees. The open class ships, in an effort to go faster were loaded with a couple hundred pounds of water ballast that had to be dumped before landing; as they swooped upward they left a trail of water behind them.

It had been one of the most thrilling things Bree could imagine; some day she hoped to be in a big sailplane like that, doing that. It wouldn’t be soon; she couldn’t imagine having the money for such a bird for years, maybe decades to come. The open class ship pilots she met were all older men, spending the money they’d earned in a lifetime of work, playing at something they loved.

Maybe someday, she thought, as an idea started to rise in her mind . . .

“Man, am I glad to have this afternoon over with,” Jared said to Howie as they trudged across the field to where their bikes lay waiting.

“No shit,” Howie agreed. “At least we don’t have practice tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Jared agreed. “In wrestling you work like hell for a few minutes, and then you get to take a break. No breaks here, although the wrestling practices get a little bad sometimes.”

“Yeah, but that’s in the winter and you’re inside,” Howie pointed out. “It wasn’t this hard last year when I was on JVs. People screwed around a lot more. There just isn’t any screwing around now.”

“Probably worth it,” Jared agreed, obviously pretty tired himself. “At least that’s what the scoreboards have said.”

“That’s true,” Howie said. “Hell, we’ve done things this year we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing last year, but boy, am I tired. I don’t think I have the energy to ride my bike clear the hell across town, but I guess I’m going to have to. I ought to be able to sleep in some tomorrow – well, at least until Misty calls me. I’m glad I got the tough part of my homework done today. With a little luck I should be able to work my way through the rest of it tomorrow.”

“As far as I know we’re not doing anything tomorrow,” Jared told him. “If there’s anything I can do to help, give me a call.”

“Well, possibly. It sort of depends on Misty again. Maybe I can get her to study together some tomorrow. That might kill two birds with one stone, except Jack would give me hell for throwing stones at birds.”

“Jack? Oh, your brother, the birdwatcher,” Jared laughed. “I don’t know him, but from what I’ve heard about him, he might get a little upset at that.”

“He’s actually pretty cool. It’s just he’s a bird brain all the time.”

“It must be fun to have a brother about your age. I’m so much older than Jimmy it’s not a lot of fun. Hell, he’ll be starting kindergarten about the time I’m graduating.”

“That sure doesn’t sound like the same thing,” Howie agreed. “You know, that’s really not that far off. It just seems like it.”

The two continued talking as they walked across the field to where their bicycles were lying in the grass. Once again Howie wished he were just a few months older; it would be a longer walk to where the Jeep had to be parked, but he could drive it home rather than having to kill himself on the bike as tired as he was.

It was only as they neared the bikes that they discovered that Jared’s father Jim Wooten was waiting for them. “So how did the practice go today?” he asked.

“I think I may survive,” Jared said. “I wish I’d known this was coming. I might have been in a little better shape.”

“Look on the bright side,” Jared’s father smiled. “You’re going to be in great shape for wrestling season.”

“Yeah, if I’m not so busted up that I can’t wrestle at all. I don’t want to guarantee it. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I have to run out to Spearfish Signs and pick up a sign we’re going to need on the job Monday,” Mr. Wooten replied. “I just had a call it was ready, and thought I could stop by and catch a few minutes of practice. Looks like you’re coming along pretty good.”

“I think we are,” Jared agreed. “Since this is the first year I’ve done this it’s hard to tell.”

“Lots better than last year,” Howie agreed. “I was never as tired as this after practice last year.”

“Good, you may be learning something,” Mr. Wooten grinned. “Hey, if the two of you don’t want to ride your bikes home, throw them in the back of the pickup. It’ll mean a trip out to Spearfish Signs, but that shouldn’t take long.”

“Talked me into it,” Jared said.

“If you don’t mind,” Howie said. “I wasn’t looking forward to riding my bike home.”

“Sure, no problem,” Mr. Wooten said. “You’re Howie Erikson, aren’t you? The quarterback?”

“Yeah,” Howie agreed, “Thanks for the offer.”

“Sorry, Dad,” Jared said, “I should have introduced you.”

A few minutes later Howie and Jared were sitting in the cab of Mr. Wooten’s pickup truck, their bikes riding along in the back. Howie was thinking that even sitting in Mr. Wooten’s truck for a while and not having to ride his bike home would give him a little time to rest up before having to deal with Misty. The seat felt good; he was sore and the rest was badly needed.

Howie only had a general idea of where Spearfish Signs actually was – out north of town someplace; he’d seen a sign for it. It proved to be a couple miles up a rough gravel road, out past the Run-8 Kennels barn; he’d been out there once sometime before on a brief class trip to see how sled racing dogs were trained, and even had a brief ride on a dogsled. He had seen how it could be fun, but it was awful damn cold, too. Eventually Mr. Wooten parked the truck in what seemed to be something like a farm yard, next to a big steel building.

“You might like to come in,” Mr. Wooten said. “This is kind of interesting.”

Howie didn’t really want to get out of the comfortable seat of the truck but Jared wanted to see what was going on, so he had to let him out. Once Howie was on the ground, he figured he might as well see for himself. It was a little cluttered inside; completed and half-completed signs hung all over the place, with rolls of plastic and who knew what all else. The tall woman who worked there gave them a quick explanation of how the signs were made. Howie had always figured signs were painted, but these were strips of plastic cut on a computerized machine and fastened onto a background. It was mildly interesting, but Howie’s mind really was elsewhere, mostly wondering if Misty was going to be bitching or whining. Or both. He didn’t look forward to either. Misty was fun most of the time, but there were times he wondered if she was worth the effort, too.

All of a sudden a voice came from the loudspeaker of a radio on a workbench. No call sign or anything, just a woman’s voice in a flat monotone: “Five miles northeast for the finish gate.”

“Finish gate?” the tall woman frowned.

“She’s going to have a little fun, and she deserves to celebrate her triple crown,” a tall man standing around said. “Let’s go watch.” The tall man turned to the Wootens and Howie. “Come on outside with us. This ought to be a sight to see.”

The five of them trooped out of the building and around a corner. Howie was a little surprised to not see just a farm field back there, but an airstrip. There was a small airplane sitting near the building, shiny white, but looking pretty old.

The tall man and woman looked to the northeast. “There she is,” the tall man said, pointing at a little white dot in the sky. It took Howie a few seconds to see it, and he wondered what the big deal was. Still, they’d said it might be interesting . . .

The white dot got bigger and bigger, and soon Howie began to see that it had wings attached. It was coming right for them – not to pass overhead, but right for them, and coming pretty fast, too, the way it got larger in the sky.

Only in the last few seconds did Howie realize that the silent airplane wasn’t going to hit them, but it wasn’t going to miss by much. By now it was clearly a glider; he couldn’t see any sign of an engine, or hear any noise from one, and it was moving like a bat out of hell. Now he could hear a little whooshing sound he realized was the sound of the wind on its wings. Then it was very near, coming fast.

The glider flashed by maybe a hundred yards out, not more than ten or twenty feet up; then the nose pulled up, and it began a slow climbing turn to the right. In a few seconds it was perhaps five hundred feet up, just floating along parallel to the airstrip, heading away. In only a few more seconds he could see the white of its wings as it made a right turn, stayed steady for a second or two, then made another turn to line up with the airstrip. Wow, he thought. That was exciting!

He could see the glider descending now, heading down the airstrip. In only a few seconds it was floating along a few feet above the airstrip, coming back toward them, much more slowly now. My God, Howie thought, is it going to float right off the end of the airstrip?

But, no. As it got close, he could see some kind of dark area come out from above and below the wings, and the glider touched down on its single wheel, but continued to just roll along. The pilot turned the glider a little to head almost for them.

The glider was moving slowly now, turning slowly so it was almost perpendicular to the airstrip, heading for what obviously was a hanger. Only a hundred feet or so away he could see the glider slow quickly to a stop on the skid under its nose, the wings still level until it stopped; then one wing slowly drooped to the ground.

“That was pretty cool,” Jared said. “You don’t see something like that every day.”

“No kidding,” Howie agreed. “Whoever’s flying that must know what they’re doing.”

The tall couple headed to where the glider was sitting; Howie and the Wootens just stood there watching. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Mr. Wooten said. “That was impressive.”

As the tall couple got near the glider, the canopy opened, swinging to one side. They couldn’t see the pilot clearly, but they could see the straps of a shoulder harness being tossed to the side as the pilot got out in some hurry. In a few seconds they could see her.

“Holy shit!” Jared exclaimed. “That’s Bree Gravengood!”

“Holy crap!” Howie agreed. He knew Bree, of course, not well – but as far as he knew, nobody knew her well. She was quiet and tended to stay to herself, without much to say. She’d only been at Spearfish Lake as a classmate of theirs for three years, and in spite of her good grades, nobody really paid much attention to her. Who would have ever dreamed she was a pilot? But she had to be – there was only one seat in that glider!

“Great going, Bree,” Howie heard the tall woman say. “You got your trifecta. Did you have trouble?”

“I had to scratch around out by Turtle Hill for close to an hour,” they heard her familiar voice say. “I’ll tell you about it in a minute, but right now I’ve got to pee so bad it isn’t funny!”

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