Chapter 23

As it turned out, Bob Frankovich didn’t go out to the Pike Bar at all. He drove downtown to the Back Street Bar; it was a quiet place and the jukebox had been broken in there since sometime in the nineteen-eighties. It was a place where you could go and be alone to drink and think when it was needed.

He didn’t actually know much more about what happened to Rusty than he’d told Linda. In the past few months Rusty had hinted around that he was planning on getting out from under his mother’s and sister’s thumbs. Bob had more or less hinted that he thought it would be a good idea if he did, but had told him flat out he didn’t want to know the specifics. What he didn’t know couldn’t be weaseled out of him by Linda, after all.

Bob took a sip of his draft. He had no intention of asking around among Rusty’s friends about what had happened to him since he was pretty sure Rusty was smart enough to not tell any of them the truth, either. At least the kid had been smart enough to get away; there had been times Bob had wondered about it. In fact, Bob envied him the ability to do it. He was not unaware of the control Linda liked to keep on him, and the fact that she was teaching the same tricks to his daughters. There were good sides and bad sides to it, but in the last few years the bad had increasingly started to outweigh the good.

The hell of it was that he wasn’t in the same position that Rusty had been in. He couldn’t just pick up and leave, or Linda would be after him with every vulture of a lawyer she could come up with. There were a lot of responsibilities involved, and some he wasn’t too happy about. But he’d also come to realize that in a year and a half, when Misty turned eighteen, a lot of the threat that Linda held over his head without having to mention it would evaporate. Maybe some of the rest could be dealt with if he planned carefully, taking his time.

He was going to have to make some careful arrangements a little at a time, and keep them secret. He’d already made some, just in case they were necessary, but the time to use them wasn’t right and he didn’t have all the pieces in place, at least not yet. But the time was coming . . .

Good luck, Rusty, he thought to the reflection in the mirror on the back bar. I don’t know where you are, and I hope I don’t find out for a while, but I hope I’ll see you again sometime. And preferably somewhere far away from Spearfish Lake.

Bree’s getting her glider private pilot certificate, and the other things that went with it, actually overshadowed her getting her driver’s license a few days later.

Bree’s situation was more than a little weird. With Hammerstrom so far from home, she wouldn’t be able to have the normal instructor supervision for her private power rating. Jackie was a glider instructor, and had been able to oversee Bree’s flying out of the airstrip at home partly through an agreement with Hammerstrom. That wouldn’t work for Bree’s power instruction, since Jackie wasn’t a power instructor. That meant that for Bree to have official instruction she’d have to fly down to Mt. Vernon, and she would have to have Hammerstrom’s authorization for cross-country flights, which was a great deal of the power plane instruction she would need.

Realistically, except for the cross-country time and her age, she more or less met the requirements for her private power license already and could polish off the cross-country requirements in Rocinante in a matter of days. But given the fact she had a year to accomplish it she planned on getting in a lot of cross-country time in the Schweizer, at least over the course of the summer.

The problem with making cross-country flights in the glider out of Spearfish Lake was the same one she’d faced last fall: the countryside around home isn’t very friendly to sailplanes due to all the forestland. The only direction that offered possibilities for getting out of the forest country was to head southward; once she got south of Camden, sixty miles to the south, things improved considerably. For a long-distance flight it was preferable to go downwind, if for no more reason than to let the wind carry her at least part of the way. However, north winds rarely brought good soaring.

If they trailered the 1-26 down to Mt. Vernon and launch out of there the situation was much simpler – but it involved other factors, partly the distance, and partly having to be rather sure of the weather. The trips down there and the costs of the tows were also considerations, as well as the fact that Hammerstrom wasn’t going to be available to give her an aero tow every day. The upshot of all this was the decision to wait out conditions at home until they seemed perfect, then head out. Since it would be a one-way flight to somewhere, at least some of her friends could follow along with the trailer to make a retrieval.

Four times over the next month Becca or one of her friends launched Bree out of the home airstrip as she began her trek to the south. Twice she made it as far south as Meeker, but stable air coming off of Thunder Lake meant she couldn’t make it past there. Fortunately she recognized the problem. One time she was able to make it as far as Moffatt, but was so low when she got there that she had no choice but to land out on the town’s small airstrip and trailer the Schweizer back home. The other time she recognized the trap, turned back and was able to find enough lift to get her back to the home airstrip. A third time she didn’t even make it that far, and had to land out on the parking lot of the Blair High School football field; once again the 1-26 came ignominiously home on the trailer.

A few days after the Fourth of July they tried again. Becca was off playing volleyball somewhere with Myleen – possibly at the nudist camp, since Becca had been a little vague about where she was actually going. With her gone, as soon as it looked like there might be some lift out there, Jared drove Aunt Jackie’s pickup to launch the sailplane, and Bree got a good launch. The trailer was already hooked up to Howie’s Jeep, and once Bree was high enough to head south, they followed her from the ground, in contact by radio.

By this time Bree had gotten a little leery of Thunder Lake, so in spite of a slightly unfavorable wind she decided to give it a wide berth, more or less following the state road south southeast to Frontier. If she made it that far, she planned on turning back to the south southwest to rejoin her original planned route south of Camden, about seventy miles out.

She got off to a slow start. She might have started a little early, and it was a long time getting to enough altitude to head out from the airstrip. However, along the state road south from Spearfish Lake things perked up considerably; Bree wasn’t scratching for lift now, she was running, the speed-to-fly ring telling her to fly between sixty and seventy miles an hour between thermals, an almost unheard-of speed for the 1-26. Because of the need to stop and circle in lift, she was only managing about forty miles an hour over the ground – still pretty awesome for the little sailplane.

The Jeep, trailer, and her three friends were having trouble keeping up with her; about noon they made a fast stop in a drive-through on the ring road around Camden, and kept up their pursuit to the south. Three hours out she was a hundred miles to the south over considerably more open countryside, and the odds were that she had at least four more hours of lift remaining.

Bree had big hopes she could make a diamond distance flight – five hundred kilometers, three hundred and ten miles. Two hours later she had the three hundred kilometers she needed for the gold distance leg, but she was also aware of the fact the day was passing and it was becoming clear that five hundred kilometers was out of reach. Still, she kept moving south, the Jeep and her friends tagging along behind. South of Madison, Wisconsin it was clear the day was dying. Rather than keep pushing on with the possibility of having to land in some unscouted farmer’s field, she wound up landing out at an airport in southern Wisconsin, just short of Illinois as her three friends watched, just shy of four hundred kilometers out, approximately two hundred and forty miles. It was an immensely long flight for a 1-26.

For once, Bree was actually excited when she popped the canopy open. Just about everything had come together and she’d put together a landmark flight. While in some ways it had been simpler than her Silver Badge trifecta flight the year before, it was a real victory.

“Are you sorry you didn’t make the five hundred kilometers?” Jared asked as he held her in his arms for a celebratory kiss.

“Well, yeah, a little,” Bree said, “but not much. I don’t want to say that doing a diamond distance flight is impossible flying a 1-26 out of Spearfish Lake, but we’re rarely going to get conditions much better, including getting a long day. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it again. And that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try a diamond goal flight. I mean, I could have done it today if I’d declared a destination ahead of time.”

It was a long, long trip back to Spearfish Lake in the open Jeep, dragging the sailplane behind on its trailer. It was getting close to dark on the long summer’s day when they got back, and it was getting chilly; Jared and Bree were sitting in the back, cuddling together wrapped up in a blanket they’d thrown in as an afterthought.

Mark and Jackie were waiting for them when they returned, and of course, Bree had to give a detailed account of her long flight. “That was a heck of a flight,” Mark told her. “You’re still planning on flying the contest in a couple weeks, right?”

“Sure thing,” she replied. “Today was a good warm-up. I don’t know how I’m going to get the altitude gain legs for the gold and diamond badges around here, but maybe there’ll be a way sometime.”

“It might involve a trip to Colorado for a flight or two in the mountain waves,” Mark smiled. “You can get your altitude gain legs there. But you don’t have to be in a big rush about it since you want to go to Colorado in a couple years anyway.”

One afternoon a week or so after Bree’s gold distance flight, the four of them were sitting around in the Jeep at the Frostee Freeze, just kicking things around in the shade of the canopy and figuring out what to do next. It was late enough that they couldn’t really start anything; Howie and Jared to go to a football skills practice session pretty soon anyway.

“Looks like tomorrow might be a good day to make another attempt,” Bree commented. “But I guess we can’t, since we’re going down to Mt. Vernon for the regionals the day after.”

After she’d had a chance to think about it Bree was a little frustrated about her failure to not declare a destination perhaps two hundred miles out. It would have sufficed for her diamond goal flight as well as her gold distance flight, but she was reaching for her diamond distance flight, and had failed at that. On the other hand, there would be more chances coming, and the regional contest might prove to be one of them.

“Yeah, it’d be tough if we had to bring you back from somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then rush around to get ready to go,” Jared said.

“That’s what I think,” she said. “But I could set a goal about thirty miles past Mt. Vernon the day after tomorrow, and if I can’t make it, we might at least be able to get close. That would kill two birds with one stone.”

“I’m up for it if everyone else is,” Jared replied. “We’ve got skills sessions tomorrow night, and I need to work on my kicking some more. Coach said I’m going to be the kicker, but whether he’ll want to try field goals and extra points is still up in the air.”

“We may not know about that till we get under the gun,” Howie agreed. “But we already knew we were going to miss the Thursday and Friday night sessions, and that’s all been squared away with the coaches. So as far as trying a flight out of here the day after tomorrow, it works for me.”

“Me, too,” Autumn agreed. “Mom wasn’t real thrilled about me going out camping with the rest of you guys, but when she found out Bree’s Uncle Mark was going along she caved in without too much trouble. So, as far as I’m concerned, I guess it’s up to you and your folks, Bree.”

“Well, I’ll talk it over with them,” Bree said. “I don’t think they’re going to mind. I’ll tell you what, though, I’m real doubtful we’re going to get a lot of flying in this weekend. The weather report doesn’t look very favorable. The day after tomorrow still ought to be all right, though.”

“Oh, shit,” Jared piped up. “Here comes trouble.”

The four of them looked up, to see Walt Lethbridge coming their way. “Oh, shit,” Howie said in a low voice. “Here we go again.”

Lethbridge came right up to the Jeep. “Hey, Erikson,” he said in a threatening voice. “You seen Misty around anywhere?”

Howie frowned for a second. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t,” he said. “I’ve only seen her two or three times since school got out and they’ve all been when she’s here with you.”

“I better not catch you fucking around with her,” he said ominously. “I know goddamn well she’d be all over you if she got the chance, and I ain’t gonna have my girl doing no shit like that. If I catch her with you I’m going to kick both your asses so hard you’ll have to shit through your noses.”

“Honestly, I haven’t seen her,” Howie said. “Not even walking down the street. I don’t want anything to do with her. She’s trouble, and you ought to know that by now.”

“She ain’t no damn trouble for me,” he said. “She steps out of line with me and I’ll kick her ass.”

“I heard she went to stay with her sister for a while,” Autumn said, mostly to try to head Lethbridge off.

“Yeah, I’ve heard a couple people say that,” he replied. “I think it’s a crock of shit. She’s ducking me, and if she is I’m still going to kick the shit out of her. She does what I fucking tell her to do. And Erikson, I told you before, don’t be getting any bright ideas about playing quarterback this year. You may have that hotshot arm, but you’re a fucking junior and I’m a senior.”

“I’ll play where the coaches want me to,” Howie said defiantly.

“Well, it’s like this. If the coaches want you to play quarterback you better be fucking quitting the team, because I’ll kick your fucking ass so hard you won’t be playing football anyway. You just fucking remember that.” He turned and walked away.

“Asshole,” Howie snorted. “If I have to fight him, I will, but damn, I don’t want to have to fight him and two or three of his friends at the same time.”

“Yeah, that’s how the bullies in this town seem to work,” Jared agreed. “At least we’ve got a while to work something out about how to handle him.”

“Nothing is likely happen till practice gets under way,” Howie agreed. “And shit, I doubt if he’s going to make it through the first day of practice. I’ve never seen him at a skills session, and as far as I know he’s not doing anything to get in shape for the season.”

“He thinks that’s how it’s still done,” Autumn pointed out. “He was one of those guys who got caught up in the beer bust last year and doesn’t know of the changes the coaches made.”

“Yeah, he thinks things are the way they always used to be. As far as I know his only training has been for the pre-practice beer bust that better not happen.”

“Howie,” Jared said, “I know you don’t want to say anything to Coach Kulwicki about it, but maybe I’d better.”

“God, I hate to do that,” Howie said. “It’s not going to solve anything but just get him more pissed off with me. God, I can’t stand the thought of what we’ve built over the past year getting fucked up with his half-assed quarterbacking. He was no damn good at it when we both played on JVs, and he hasn’t done anything to improve since.”

“There ought to be something we could do,” Bree said.

“Yeah, but what?” Howie said, then grinned. “Shit, I can’t even turn Misty loose on him. She’s already got him, and the best of luck to the both of them.”

“Maybe not,” Autumn said. “The word around town is that she went to stay with her sister so she could get away from him for a while.”

“Well, much though I don’t want to have anything to do with Misty, I can’t say as I blame her,” Howie agreed. “At least if she’s not around she’s not bugging me, and the same goes if she’s hanging around with him. I mean, too bad for her, but at least he’s keeping her out of my hair when she is here.”

The weather looked fairly promising on Thursday, but only fairly; there was a warm front moving in from the south that made it seem likely that the thermal activity was going to be shut down as soon as it moved through.

“I’m not real happy about it,” Bree said in a strategy session on Thursday morning. “I ought to be able to get a good start, but if that warm front keeps moving this way, I’m going to get shot down, just as sure as can be.”

“Well, there’s a chance you could get it in,” Mark pointed out. “At least if that front doesn’t come as fast as predicted.”

“Oh, what the heck,” Bree said. “The odds are against it but at least it’s flying and I can probably get some miles on. Let’s figure on launching as soon as it looks like there’s enough activity to stay up.”

“You kids go ahead and chase her,” Mark said. “I’ve got a couple things to do at the plant, but I’ll come on down with the truck and the camping gear early this afternoon.”

It took a while to get everything organized, but in half an hour or so Howie and Autumn were driving the pickup to launch Bree while Jared ran the wing. As always, the launch was good, but they noticed Bree was drifting around overhead without doing much thermalling. “Pretty dead up here,” she reported. “I think I can hang on for a while but I don’t think I’m going to try to get going until it perks up a little.”

“Roger that,” Jared radioed up to her. “We’ll sit tight.” He turned to Howie. “Well, we might as well toss a football around or something.”

“Glad we have one with us,” Howie agreed.

An hour later Bree was still floating around overhead, after finding one weak thermal after another that weren’t taking her anywhere. “It may perk up,” she radioed down to the group on the ground, “but there’s no way I’m going to be able to make it to Clydeston today, especially if that warm front moves in.”

Autumn picked up the microphone. “Roger that,” she replied. “You’re thinking about bringing it in, right?”

“Might as well,” Bree said. “If I don’t it’s going to be an outlanding for sure and there’s no point in risking it if I don’t have to.”

“All right, I’ll bring the guys in off the field.”

A few minutes later Bree landed the Schweizer and let it roll up to the trailer, where her friends were waiting. “Oh, well, it was worth a try,” she said as the canopy opened. “I guess that means there’s no point in trusting weathermen too far. At least I got a little practice in.”

“Well, better here than in some cow pasture with a large and belligerent bull getting in the way while we’re trying to get the wings off,” Mark said. “At least we’re early enough to drive down to Mt. Vernon in good order. Once we get the 1-26 on the trailer I’m going to load some poles on it. I got a feeling it’s going to get wet and we might as well rig a tarp to keep us from getting too soaked.”

Before too long they were loaded up and heading toward Mt. Vernon, with Mark leading the way in his pickup, and the kids following along behind in the Jeep towing the Schweizer on the trailer.

By the time they got close to Mt. Vernon the four kids in the Jeep were beginning to have some doubts about the wisdom of taking the open vehicle, at least without stopping to put the top back on it. The skies were dark and ugly, and it looked like rain. As was often the case, Howie was driving, with Bree and Jared sitting close together in the back trying to talk over the wind noise. “Too bad Howie didn’t swap Jack out of the Cherokee for the weekend,” Jared said at one point. “It looks like it’s going to get wet.”

“Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be a great weekend for soaring,” Bree agreed. “I’d just about bet we’re already wiped out for tomorrow, but it might be a go for Saturday, and Sunday looks better. At least I’ll get to hang around with some other sailplane pilots, and maybe I can learn something.”

The skies looked even worse when they pulled into Mt. Vernon and the area designated for camping. “No point in trying to get the wings on it right now,” Mark told them. “I think we’d better get the tents and the tarp up before we get wet, and I don’t think it’s going to be very long.”

It was well they did. They didn’t have the big tarp up for more than twenty minutes when the dark skies opened up a little and it began to rain – lightly at first, then heavier. There were several people around with motor homes and the like, but the group from Spearfish Lake was the only one with tents, and it got a little wet and miserable out there, in spite of Mark bringing an old charcoal grill and some firewood.

Friday wasn’t much better. It was still overcast and raining; Mark and Bree put on raincoats and hiked over to race headquarters to check weather. “No race today,” Fred Hammerstrom told them. “Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Mark and Bree hiked back over to the campsite with the bad news. “Guess there’s not much we can do about it but hang around and wait to see if the weather clears. With the weather report what it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow gets wiped out, too. I’d be tempted to say to just head for home, but you kids in the Jeep would be a bunch of drowned rats by the time we got there.”

The day wasn’t a total loss, at least not for Bree – she hung around race headquarters most of the day talking with some of the other pilots, and she learned a lot, but it wasn’t as good as actually being out flying.

At least the rain quit on Saturday, although low clouds hung overhead all day and it was clear there was going to be no soaring. The 1-26 stayed on the trailer, and the weather report didn’t look a lot more promising for the next day.

Sunday, the last scheduled day of the meet, at least dawned with broken clouds, and for the first time there was actually an official race meeting held. “It doesn’t look good,” Hammerstrom told them. “The weather report isn’t favorable, but if we can hold out for a while there might be some lift. Since it doesn’t look strong, we’ll keep this one short, with turn points at Clydeston and Northville. That works out to a fifty-two-mile triangle and I don’t think we want to try to draw one much tighter than that.”

Takeoff times were chosen by the pilots, in an order selected by a drawing. Bree was the tenth of eighteen pilots to choose a launch time, and she selected one of the last ones, in hopes the sky would perk up by then. It was probably a wise move; as the start times approached, the pilots kept shoving theirs back. Finally, when Bree was able to take an aero tow, there were half a dozen sleek fiberglass sailplanes drifting around overhead, waiting for things to actually perk up before making a start. When she released three thousand feet over the field, she instantly realized it made her attempted flight on Thursday look pretty good. Finally, several pilots of the fiberglass ships decided they might as well see what it was like out there and headed for the starting gate. Bree was tempted to just put the 1-26 back on the ground but decided it was worth the effort to at least go take a look; it might be better out on the course.

As it turned out, it wasn’t. Some of the field made it to the first turn point, but only a couple made it to the second and nobody made it back to Mt. Vernon. By desperate scratching of every available patch of lift that reminded her of her desperate struggle over the nudist camp the year before, Bree managed to make the Clydeston turn point, but had to land out halfway to the second, managing a total of only thirty-one miles. There would be no victorious pass through the finish gate, not this year. Quite amazingly, her outlanding gave her an eighth-place finish, in the top half of the field, and better than several of the fiberglass contingent and the other two 1-26s that showed up. It may have been something of a victory, but if so, it was a minor one.

At least it was dry enough that the four of them weren’t soaked to the skin as they drove home. “I’d have to call that pretty close to a wasted weekend,” she told her friends. “But I learned a few things, and I’m glad my friends were there to stick with me.”

“Are you going to try it again next year?” Jared asked.

“Probably,” she sighed. “But not if the weather report is as lousy as it was this time.”

“Oh, well,” Jared smiled. “It’s not that long till football season.”

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