Chapter 11

For months Jennifer had had visions of greeting Will as he got off the plane from the Persian Gulf, maybe in the company of some other military wives. She could imagine “welcome home” banners, perhaps a band playing, and tearful reunions around her as she took her long-gone husband in her arms and tried to kiss him to death. Seeing television reports of similar returns home of units who had done their time in the war had sharpened those fantasies.

It didn’t work out that way.

The big reason was that Will was in the sandbox on temporary duty, and not traveling as part of a unit. That meant he had to be slipped into the system when there was space available on a plane, and it took him a while with a couple of long and frustrating stops on the way back to the USA. Jennifer knew he was coming, but when and where he would show up neither he nor she knew.

In his last phone call to her he reported that he would be leaving soon, but he wasn’t sure when – and then four and a half days went by with no word at all. It wasn’t too bad for her for the first couple of days, but then the continuing lack of word started to get her nervous; by the fourth day she was monitoring news reports on the Internet, hoping against hope that there were no reports of plane crashes.

She got very little sleep the fifth night after he left, if she got any sleep at all, but a little after four in the morning the phone in her condo rang. She grabbed for it, frantically hoping it was good news. “Will, is that you?” she said into the phone as soon as she got it to her lips.

“Hi, Miz Hoffman,” she heard him say, giving her a vast sense of relief. “I’m back.”

“Oh, thank God. I was getting so worried. Will, where are you?”

“Back at Keesler,” he reported. “But I’ve done been all over the place gettin’ here. I tried to call you last night from Iceland, but I couldn’t get no connection.”

“Iceland? What were you doing in Iceland?”

“It’s a long story and it don’t matter none since it mostly involves bein’ able to find a plane to get on. The big thing is that I’m back on the ground at Keesler, an’ I’m gonna catch a ride over to the BEQ and try to sleep off the last few days. Then I need to get over to the shop and check in there to see if I can get a few days leave before I go back to work.”

“Will, I can have Skyhook in the air in an hour and be there three hours after that. I’ve missed you so bad!”

“Wouldn’t do you much good if you get here that quick since I’ll be sound asleep,” he said. “I’m flat bushed, Miz Hoffman. I don’t know how I’m stayin’ awake now but I ’spect I’ll be able to get that far. Besides, I don’t know if I can take off right away an’ I won’t know ’til I check in. It might be a few days.”

“Oh, God. That long?”

“This is still the Air Force, Miz Hoffman, so I got to do things their way. I know you want to see me and I want to see you about as bad, but there ain’t no point in tryin’ to rope the cow before you get the lariat off the saddle. The odds are it’ll be a few days before I can get loose an’ it might work better that way. I s’pose you could fly in for the weekend since I ain’t likely to be workin’ then no matter if they want to keep me around for a while or not.”

“Sure, I could do that. Oh, Will, it’s been so long I can hardly wait. If I come this weekend, do you think we could spend some time together?”

“It’ll have to be off base since it wouldn’t go over too well to have you with me in the BEQ, but I s’pose you could call up Claudia or Cindy and see if they can take us in like they did last fall.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

“Don’t be firmin’ nothin’ up until I get a chance to check in, and that won’t be ’til tomorrow sometime,” he told her. “They’s always the chance they’ll tell me to get outa there and go spend time with you, but I don’t know if that’s gonna happen.”

“All right, Will,” she sighed. “If it has to be that way, I guess it has to be that way. Let me know as soon as you know and I’ll be there when you need me to be. At least now that I know you’re back I may be able to get some sleep.”

“I know I need some sleep too, but I’ll be dreamin’ of you, Miz Hoffman. I cain’t wait ’til I have you in my arms again.”

“Same here, Will. Same here.”

After Jennifer hung up the phone, she rolled back over, and with relief that the long wait was nearly over, really did get back to sleep.

She felt pretty chipper when she got up in the morning; having Will back from the Persian Gulf had taken a load off of her mind. She had a lot to do today; most of it even involved Lambdatron but some of it involved Skyhook Aviation.

While flying her planes was fun indeed, even with the money she had there was no way she could afford to own them just for the hell of it; they had to pay their way, and charters through Skyhook Aviation was how they did it.

Her charter flight company was actually pretty small and didn’t have any full-time employees. She flew some of the charters herself in Skyhook and sometimes Songbird when she had the opportunity, but that wasn’t very often. Mike Hanneman, a retired Air Force general who liked to get in some time in the sky, did the majority of the flying for the company but it wasn’t his true passion either. If he had to go somewhere with a layover of more than a few hours, his golf clubs were usually stashed in the luggage compartment since his main hobby was fleecing suckers on the golf course. If Mike couldn’t fly a charter somewhere, he could dip into his collection of retired military aviator friends around Phoenix, which was a popular place for them to live after they got out of uniform. Most often his backup was a retired Army colonel by the name of Joe Brockway, but there were others.

Skyhook Aviation did not have an office as such; scheduling and a lot of the paperwork was done by Mike’s wife Nancy on their kitchen table. So the first call Jennifer made was to her to see if Skyhook was going to be free in the next few days. The trip to Biloxi could be made in Songbird if necessary, but it would be a long haul that would require a fuel stop along the way, so Jennifer preferred to use the jet if it were available.

“We’ve got a charter for Skyhook on Friday,” Nancy reported. “But Mike should be back with it in the late afternoon. Then there’s another one on Monday, but Mike has a sucker lined up he thinks he can stick pretty hard out at Camelback, so Joe is going to take that one. It’ll be overnight, and back late Tuesday.”

Jennifer was a little relieved to hear that. If she’d taken off for Biloxi at four in the morning it could really have screwed up the schedule, so maybe it was just as well that she couldn’t see Will right away. “So I could blow out of here Friday night and not have to get back until Monday morning, right?”

“It would be all right if it was real early Monday morning, but they’re going to DC. That means the time zones are against them if they want to get there before the close of business. If you could get back late Sunday night it’ll be no problem.”

“OK, you can tentatively put me in for that time block,” Jennifer replied and explained the deal with Will. “I probably won’t know for sure until tomorrow sometime.”

“That ought to work out all right. I know you’ve missed Will, and I know what it’s like to have a husband overseas in a war zone. I had Mike over there in ’91 and it was no fun having him gone. He didn’t like it very much either, since he said the golf courses were really lousy.”

“Sounds just like Mike,” Jennifer laughed. “Assuming I have to make the trip this weekend there’ll probably be another one coming up in a few days.”

“We can probably work it in, but the schedule is already pretty full for next couple weeks for both Skyhook and Songbird. We’ll just have to see what’s available when you need it.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

After a little more discussion they ended the call. Nancy was a jewel, there was no doubt about it, and it would be nearly impossible to run Skyhook Aviation without her. She could do without Mike or Joe if it came right down to it since there were always more pilots available, but a good office administrator was priceless. Jennifer knew she was lucky to have Nancy, especially since she’d barely gotten Mike and then his wife onboard when she’d started the company in the first place. Nancy had just about had kittens when she discovered what her husband’s prospective new employer did on her part-time job back then, but they’d worked that out and had come to trust each other.

With that done Jennifer got dressed for work – and not in what she used to call “work clothes” either – and headed for Lambdatron, stopping at a drive-through for a breakfast sandwich and a cup of orange juice. Even though it would still be a while before she would see Will, the wait was almost over now.

As she drove on to the office, she thought about what Nancy had said, and all of a sudden came to an uncomfortable realization: while both her bigger planes weren’t scheduled tight, they were going to be busy for the foreseeable future. She had more or less planned to fly up to the cabin with Will in Songbird like she had done in the past, but it seemed likely that it wouldn’t be available, especially to leave it there for several days. On top of that she was very reluctant to take Skyhook into the dry lake even if she could keep it for long.

That only left Magic Carpet or a heck of a long drive – and the last twenty miles or so of it called for four-wheel drive and there were spots that were often impassable or nearly so even with that. At least that was what Will had told her; she’d never had the opportunity to try the drive and find out for herself. Magic Carpet was a great little plane, but it was a true toy – it was never put out for charter, so it would be available without even asking Nancy. But its load was limited; she and Will and full tanks would make it way overweight.

Well, she didn’t have to use the auxiliary tanks, but that would mean fuel stops along the way, not a huge deal since she’d had to do them when she’d been regularly flying the little plane up to the Redlite. They couldn’t take much with them either; but that was also all right; they could fly into Ely or somewhere if they really needed something. As far as luggage went, they didn’t need to take much, especially since she didn’t plan on wearing much while they were up there anyway and she didn’t plan on letting Will wear much, either. She had a lot of tensions and anxieties to work out and intended to spend a lot of time doing it.

Due to the time differential she had to wait until after nine to call Claudia and Cindy at their restaurant. The pair were old friends she had worked with at both Bettye’s and during the early days at the Redlite, but they were older and had been looking to get out of the business by the time she had known them. They had disappeared for years, until Will had seen a story about them and their Cajun restaurant in the Biloxi paper; he’d known them through his grandmother at both of the houses, contacted them, and got reacquainted. The two revealed to him that they’d been saving the money they’d earned in the Nevada houses for years in order to buy the restaurant, which had already built a reputation as one of the best in town.

But Will had been sneaky and hadn’t breathed a word about the two to her until after the hijacking; he’d been keeping it as a surprise. As it was, their restaurant and their home had proved to be an ideal place to hide when he had to sneak her off base to keep the media from harassing her. Since then, on the occasions when she and Will could get together in Biloxi they had stayed with the pair in the rambling old house they were slowly restoring to use as a bed and breakfast.

Cindy answered the phone at the restaurant, where she did most of the management and oversaw the staff. Claudia was cooking as usual; her cooking had always been great even though there were often some aftereffects. In the days Jennifer had spent at Bettye’s, Claudia had done a lot of the cooking since there had been no regular cook. Sometimes she received an express package of frozen food from someplace deep in the Louisiana bayous, and when that happened, the family-style meals at the old-fashioned parlor house became memorable indeed. After the earliest days at the Redlite there had been a cook on staff, but Claudia had still done some of the cooking.

“Hi, this is Jennlynn,” Jennifer introduced herself, reasoning that Cindy wouldn’t know about her attempt to change her name. “I’m not sure it’s going to happen, but is there any chance that Will and I could stay with you this weekend?”

“Jennlynn!” Cindy replied excitedly. “Does that mean he’s back?”

“He got back in the wee small. As far as I know he’s asleep now.” She went on to explain about how he didn’t know when he was going to be able to get leave, but that she wanted to see him as soon as possible.

“Sure, we can always find room for the two of you! I’ll have Claudia make something really special to celebrate!”

Right at the moment, that sounded just about as good to Jennifer as welcoming home Will with a brass band. They would be among friends, and that was what counted.

Jennifer’s long-awaited reunion with Will turned out to be almost the reverse of what she had dreamed about for months. Instead of the vision of her standing on the tarmac waiting for him to get off the plane, it was him waiting with both Cindy and Claudia watching her arrive after dark on Friday evening at Gulfport-Biloxi Regional as she brought Skyhook to a stop. She wasn’t any less excited at the prospect as she quickly ran through the shutdown checklist.

Skyhook’s cabin was small and the ceiling was low, so Jennifer had to be very bent over to get out of the pilot’s seat and move to crack the hatch. As soon as she did she felt a burst of humidity hit her in the face. It was actually a little cooler in Biloxi than the normal days in Phoenix this time of year, but the air was so humid it almost knocked her back into the plane. But that didn’t stop her from gathering Will up in her arms in seconds as their mouths locked on each other. It had been much too long.

When they finally took a brief break from using their mouths for kissing, Jennifer managed to whisper in his ear, “God, Will, I missed you more than I could ever have believed.”

“I missed you too, Miz Hoffman,” he said. “T’weren’t like it used to be when we only saw each other now and then. Things’ve changed more than I thought they could.”

It took a while for the four of them to pile into Cindy and Claudia’s minivan for the trip to their restaurant, C&C’s Cajun, which featured both traditional Creole and Cajun cooking. It turned out that Claudia had put together an exceptional jambalaya which, while plenty spicy, tasted incredibly good. “Claudia, I almost hate to ask,” Will grinned. “In the Air Force dining facility where I was we often had mystery meat, but this is more of a mystery than most.”

“I doubt if you’d ever see this in an Air Force mess hall,” Claudia grinned. “It’s a mixture of crawdad, alligator tail, and turtle meat.”

Although it had been a while back, Jennifer had more experience than Will with some of the exotic things that found their way into Claudia’s kitchen. “Where do you find this stuff?” she asked.

“You have to know some of the old boys back in the bayou country on the other side of New Orleans where I grew up. Sometimes I don’t even know what’s coming. I have some shirttail relatives who show up at the back door with some of the damnedest things. That’s part of the reason the specials change each day.”

“As much as I’ve eaten her cooking over the years,” Cindy added, “Sometimes I don’t even want to know what it is, where it came from, or how it got here.”

“Whatever it is, you always seem to make it taste so good.”

After eating their fill they settled back with cups of very tasty and exotically spiced coffee, something Will appreciated after the often stale coffee to be found around his office in the Persian Gulf. It was a time for reminiscences of the old days, the early days of the Redlite and Bettye’s before it. A lot of the people they had mutually known had dropped out of sight, not surprising in a business where many of the people involved were transients or only used work names. Although Will knew about Jennifer’s acquisition of a portion of the Redlite, it was still not public knowledge and they didn’t mention it around Cindy and Claudia. That was just one among a number of things that Jennifer needed to talk with him about.

Jennifer and Will had something else they wanted to do, so after a while they took their leave and went over to Claudia and Cindy’s house in Will’s old Chevy Citation. It was newer than Jennifer’s Monza, but it was in very little better shape from having been passed from airman to airman around Keesler for who knew how many years. Will was perfectly happy with it, since he mostly drove it around base, or occasionally into town. Even though Will had to drive the car, it was about all he could do to keep his mind on the road, and within minutes of their arrival at the house they were up in their room, in bed.

In her ten years as a part-time prostitute at Bettye’s and the Redlite, Jennifer had been to bed with hundreds and perhaps thousands of men, and for the most part they had been enjoyable, sometimes even memorable experiences, and she’d always tried to give her clients a good time. But going to bed with her husband was on a much higher level, making love as opposed to having sex, and her professional experience palled by comparison to being with Will. On top of that it had been over six months since she’d been with him and her desires had come close to being unbearable, so she was a long but wonderful time being even partially sated.

Their afternoon delight was well on the way to being an evening delight before they felt the need to take a minor break to have some wonderfully sweet Southern-style sweet tea to hydrate, and just to relax for a bit. Only now did Jennifer get around to asking, “So when are you going to be able to take some leave?”

“I needed to check with you to make sure it’s gonna work out, Miz Hoffman, but I can take off after work next Friday and can take all the next week off. I’m thinkin’ you want us to go home for most of it, right?”

“That would work just fine, although a week is going to hardly be long enough.”

“Probably not long enough for you to fuck me to death, especially after we’ve knocked the edge off this weekend,” he grinned. “Believe me, Miz Hoffman, I think I’ve been lookin’ forward to it about as much as you have. I cain’t tell much after that, but it’ll probably be a while before I’ll be able to get off that long again, maybe along in the fall. We’ve been short staffed for a while, and some other people want to get some leave time in, too.”

“I guess I can’t blame them,” she shrugged. “Will, are you going to have to go back to the Persian Gulf again?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised but if it’s comin’ down I don’t know of any plans for it. To tell the truth, Miz Hoffman, most everybody expected it was gonna be like the last time, in and out quick and have it done with. There ain’t no way that’s gonna happen now, but the Air Force ain’t probably going to be a big part of it. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.”

“Is there going to be any problem with my flying in and seeing you for the weekend?”

“Not that I can tell. It ought to be more or less like before I left. This is a trainin’ base, after all, so it’s pretty much a Monday-through-Friday thing. Because of things being a little shorthanded, I’m probably gonna have to stay on base some weekends, but I’ll know about that ahead of time.” He laughed and went on, “I mean, someone has to stay around in case someone wants to land a hijacked airliner here. I ’spect you know all about that.”

“Yeah, I guess I learned about it the hard way too. All right, if we have to do it that way, I guess that’s how we’ll have to do it. A lot is going to depend on when Skyhook and Songbird have charters, and I may not know much ahead of time. But damn, Will, I wish I could take you back to Phoenix and keep you there.”

“A part of me agrees with you a whole lot about that,” Will agreed. “I mean it’s been harder to be gone the last six months than it has any other of my overseas tours combined. The hell of it is that if I was to get out of the Air Force when my enlistment runs out, I want to go back to the ranch almost as much as I want to be with you. It ain’t nowhere near as far from Phoenix to the Bar H Bar as it is from Phoenix to here, but it’s still a pain in the ass, ’specially since I know you ain’t at all anxious to give up workin’ at Lambdatron.”

“You’re suggesting I give up Lambdatron and move up to the ranch with you? I don’t know, Will. I really hadn’t thought of it that way. I mean, I sort of figured that it’d happen sometime, but I never figured the decision would come this soon.”

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