Chapter 42

“Well, we’re here,” Mark said to Jackie as he turned the rental car into the motel on the north side of Colorado Springs, almost a full four years later.

It wasn’t the first time the two of them had been there, but they hadn’t made the trip often. One time they’d even made the trip in Rocinante, taking it easy over two days as a partial re-enactment of their “honeymoon” in the same plane forty-five years before. Even though the antique Cessna had made the whole trip without problems, the trip had convinced them that they weren’t as young as they had been back then, and it had been a little tedious. They’d reverted to flying airlines after that, though sometimes Mark had his doubts over the wisdom of the decision.

Not this time; this trip was special, and they couldn’t have brought Becca along in the two-seater anyway. Strong and muscular and lean, she was sitting in the back seat of the car. It had been good to see her again; it didn’t happen anywhere near as much as they would have liked. “Yeah,” she replied. “I still don’t believe it.”

With the car parked, they got out and stretched a little. It wasn’t that long a trip down from the airport in Denver, but when the airline trip was added in it got a little tedious. It had taken them most of the day to get here from Spearfish Lake. “I wonder if everyone else is here,” Jackie said.

“If they’re not, they will be soon,” Mark replied. “Let’s get checked in.”

The three of them gathered their bags and went into the motel. Their room reservations were in order, and the process took only a couple minutes. They were just finishing up when the clerk added, “There’s a party waiting for you in the lounge.”

“Thanks,” Mark told her. “We might as well get our bags up to our room since I’m sure there’ll be some catching up to do.”

A few minutes later they walked into the relatively dim light of the lounge that had a great view of Pike’s Peak out the window. It only took a moment’s looking around before they saw the three people they’d been looking for sitting at a large table. They went over and sat down next to Howie Erikson, Autumn Trevetheck, and Jared Wooten.

“Good to see you made it in all right,” Howie told them.

“It pains me a little to say it,” Mark smiled, “but the old saw is true: ‘Time to spare, go by air.’ So how have you kids been? It’s been a while.”

“Oh, pretty much the same,” Jared said.

“Well, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you,” Becca smiled. “I’ve just had too many irons in the fire to make it home much. It must be a couple years.”

“Same here,” Jared said. “I was real sorry to hear what happened to you and Myleen in the Olympic Trials.”

“Don’t be,” Becca replied. “We pretty much knew it was going to be a long shot going in. Let me tell you, there were some real assassins at that meet. We were just thrilled to be invited. Going to Rio would have been nice but we knew it wasn’t going to happen.”

“Are you and Myleen still playing?”

“Not as much as we used to. Since I’m teaching English and coaching volleyball now, we don’t have quite the time we used to have. But we can still pick up a few bucks in the summer months.”

“Mark said you wound up in Decatur,” Autumn observed.

“I still don’t believe it,” Becca replied. “The same school I was going to before Mom died and Uncle Mark and Aunt Jackie took us in. I’ve sure covered a lot of ground since then. But what’s the deal with you guys? All done with college now?”

“Yes and no,” Autumn replied. “I’ve still got a while to go, but it should be worth it. I’ve been in the Physician’s Assistant program, and that’s going to take a few more years. The Donna Clark Foundation back in Spearfish Lake gave me a grant to do it, so that means that at some point in the future we’re going to be back in Spearfish Lake, probably working with Dr. McMahon for at least five years. No bets after that, but we might decide to stay anyway.”

“So what are you doing, Howie?”

“Mostly doing odds and ends, trying to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads,” he replied. “Tax preparation in the spring, I’ve been doing that in the spring for several years while I was in college. Beyond that, I’ve been refereeing kids’ games, baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, even football in the fall when I could get away from the team for an afternoon. It’s not a lot of money but fifty bucks a game adds up after a while.”

“I suppose,” Becca nodded. “It costs us to get our games refereed, too. But I’ll bet that’s not your long range plan.”

“No, that’s still up in the air a little. I’ve got my degree, but I’m going to try to finish up my CPA certificate a little at a time. I’ve talked with John Archer, there’s a chance I might be working with him at the Archer Agency when we do finally make it back to town.”

“So how was your football team there at Meriwether?”

“So-so,” he shrugged. “It sure wasn’t the Marlins of the last two years we were in high school, that was for sure. I mean, we did all right, but we always seemed to lose two or three each year. At least it was better than before I got there.”

“Well, Jared,” Becca asked, “how are things in your world?”

“In good shape,” he told her. “I just graduated, of course, and as soon as I get back I’m going to work for Midwest Bridge in Chicago. It’ll be bridge engineering and I’ll probably be out in the field a lot.”

“I thought you were headed back to Clark Construction.”

“It might happen someday. They do some small bridge work, after all, but I wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountain, so to speak. As much as I might have liked the place, the world seems a little narrow when you see it from Spearfish Lake.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Becca sighed. “I wouldn’t mind going back there myself someday if things happened to work out right. I mean, the school in Decatur is all right, but I can’t see myself making a life out of it. But I’ll tell you what, when Uncle Mark and Aunt Jackie picked Bree and me up in Decatur years ago, I never figured we’d wind up going through this place.”

Two days later they had a guide to get them to their seats in the stadium. It wasn’t huge, like Ford Field in Detroit most of them remembered, but it was a lot larger than the one at Meriwether College. There was a block of seats reserved for them, and they knew they weren’t going to be using all of them so they spread out a little for comfort.

A few minutes later, three men they’d been expecting came up and joined them; one was in an Air Force uniform, with a single star on each shoulder. “E.J.!” Mark exclaimed. “Glad you could make it!”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world, Mister Mark,” General Seasprunk replied. “I haven’t been able to keep a close eye on her, but that girl of yours sure cut a swath through this place, didn’t she?”

“We’re still a little amazed and I’m sure we don’t know the half of it.”

“Third in her class and Cadet Wing Vice-Commander is nothing to sneeze at,” he smiled. “But I know Harry here has been keeping a little closer eye on her than I have.”

“I’ve tried to,” the retired general in civilian clothes replied. “I’ve tried to keep my fingers out of the pie but I do have a few friends inside who tell me things from time to time. I suppose you know she’s headed for flight training right away, but she ought to blow through that in good shape.”

“We know,” Jackie replied. “It would have been nice to have had her home for a while but that was an opportunity she had to grab right now.”

“Yeah, first things first,” Mark added, “that’s always the way it’s been with her. Hey, while I’m thinking about it, thanks for helping her out with that sailplane last summer.”

“That wasn’t my work, it was George’s,” General Bankston replied. While Bree and her Air Force Academy team had won the Collegiate Soaring Association’s trophy the previous three summers, for some reason she hadn’t been able to use one of the academy’s gliders for an individual entry in the Soaring Society of America’s regional meet the year before. Bankston had managed a “friend of a friend” deal.

“It wasn’t any big deal,” the retired colonel said. “I just happened to know a guy who wasn’t using it much and was willing to loan it out. A Cirrus isn’t the greatest ship out there these days, but she did pretty well with it at the regionals down in Hobbs, with a couple of her classmates for crew.”

“Winning standard class counts as pretty well in my book,” Mark agreed. “I suppose you’ve been looking after her, too.”

“Like Harry, I’ve tried to keep my fingers off,” Colonel Flusser replied. “Not that she needed a whole lot of help.”

The ceremonies got under way, and part of them was the landing of a glider in the stadium. Last year Bree had been selected to do the ceremonial glider landing as part of the graduation ceremonies; Mark and Jackie had been there to look on proudly.

A band started playing while the group talked a little bit more, but as soon as the ceremonies started they settled down, and the group from Spearfish Lake, currently or in the past, settled down to watch. After all, this would be the only time they’d see their friend – and in Mark and Jackie’s case, their daughter – graduate from the US Air Force Academy. E.J. had to leave them early, as he had been selected by Bree to pin on her new rank, and of course he was happy to do the honor before he rejoined his friends.

Finally the ceremonies drew to a close with hats thrown in the air and a flyby by the Thunderbirds, and people started to get up and leave. Mark just stayed in his seat, looking out at the field. It caught General Seasprunk’s attention. “You all right, Mark?” he asked gently.

“I was just thinking that if things had gone even a little bit differently, that might have been me down there almost fifty years ago, but my damn glasses got in the way. Oh, well.”

“Things worked out pretty well for you, though, didn’t they?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I still would have liked to have gone down that road, but I couldn’t. But I don’t have any complaints about the way things turned out for me on the road I wound up taking.”

Almost two years later, on a bright, clear April morning, Mark and Jackie were working out in the shop. Jackie was working on a sign as usual, but after many years she’d taken on an assistant to learn the business and to carry it on when she and Mark and some friends were planning on making a long boat journey. It might be that Marilyn would wind up taking the business over at some point in the future, but Jackie wasn’t quite ready to retire all the way yet.

Jackie was looking over Marilyn’s shoulder, helping her with a problem, when the phone rang. She walked the few steps to answer it: “Spearfish Signs.”

“Ma’am,” she heard. “Are you Jackie Gravengood?”

“Yes.”

“Ma’am, this is Sergeant Frankovich in Air Ops at Minot Air Force Base,” he replied. “I have a message I was asked to pass to you.”

“What is it?”

“The message is, ‘Finish gate at 10:20 AM local time.’ It’s signed, ‘Gravedigger.’ I’m sorry ma’am, but I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Jackie said. “I do. Thanks for letting us know.”

She managed to get the phone hung up before excitement got to her. She ran through the door into Mark’s shop, just about bubbling to pass along the news.

Mark was over seventy now, and trying to slow down a little. He still worked as a consultant for Clark Plywood when needed, but that wasn’t very often. Since Mark was the kind of man who liked to be doing something and enjoyed working with his hands, he still built dogsleds, but right now he was in the middle of putting new fabric on an antique Aeronca Champion owned by a guy who lived down in Camden.

“Ten-twenty?” he said, excited himself at what Jackie told him. “We’ve got a few minutes.”

Unable to contain their excitement, they hustled outside into the warm spring day. There wasn’t a cloud in the bright blue sky, and they could see for miles. “Jackie,” he suggested, “let’s roll out Rocinante.”

“The 1-26, too,” she agreed.

It only took a moment to open the hanger door; soon they were pushing the antique Cessna they’d owned for all their married lives out onto the winter-stunted grass in front of the hanger. If someone looked closely, on the cowling there was an Air Force logo, with two names on it: E.J. Seasprunk and Bree Gravengood.

They still had a few minutes so they went for the 1-26, and dragged it outside by the wingtips. It sat on the grass, one wing down, still with the painting of the diamond badge on the nose.

By then they knew time was getting short. Both of them turned their eyes to scanning the skies. It was Mark who saw the tiny speck off to the west, heading toward them. He called Jackie’s attention to this, and by the time she picked it out it was considerably closer, coming at them without a sound they could hear – it was coming so fast that it wasn’t far behind the leading edge of the sound it was making.

It got rapidly bigger; now they could see it was a plane, and coming fast. All of a sudden it shot past them, perhaps only a hundred feet up, and now in a huge blast of sound. They followed it with their eyes, watching the F-16 pull up, straight up, and do a four-point roll before it leveled out, waggled its wings, and turned away.

It had all happened in a few seconds, and then it was gone, leaving them standing there in awe. “Wow,” Jackie finally managed to say. She turned to look at her husband and noticed a tear running down his cheek. “Mark, is there something wrong?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I was just remembering something John F. Kennedy said, a long time ago. ‘Let the word go forth to all the world that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.’”

“Yes it has,” she agreed. “It has indeed.”

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