"You what?" she said.
thirty-four
.LONG ABOUT two in the morning, discord forgotten, twined on our bed together in the midst of a talk about flowers, about inventions, about what a perfect life for us might be, I sighed.
"Remember my old definition?" I said. "That a soulmate is someone who meets all our needs, all of the time?"
"Yes."
"Then I don't guess we're soulmates."
"Why not?" she said.
"I don't have a need to argue," I said. "I don't have a need to fight."
"How do you know?" she said softly. "How do you know that's not the only way some lessons can get through to you? If you didn't need to fight in order to learn, you wouldn't create so many problems! There are times I don't understand you till you're angry . . . aren't there times you
don't know what I mean until I scream? Is there a rule that we can't learn except in sweet words and kisses?"
I blinked, startled. "I thought being soulmates was supposed to be every moment perfect, so how can soulmates fight? Are you saying, wookie, that it is perfect? Are you saying even when we clash, it's magic? When a clash materializes understanding between us that hasn't been there before?"
"Ah," she said in the golden dark, "life with a philosopher ..."
thirty-five
UR LAUNCH-time for the race next day put me twenty-third sailplane in line for takeoff, second from last. Full water-ballast in the wings, survival-kit aboard, canopy marked and turn-point cameras checked. Leslie handed me maps and radio codes, kissed me good luck, eased the canopy down. I locked it from the inside. I lay back in the contoured pilot's seat, checked the flight controls, nodded OK, blew her one last kiss, rocked the rudder-pedals side to side: Let's go, towplane, let's go.
Every launch is different, but every one is the same aircraft-carrier catapult-launch in slow motion. A great thrashing and roaring from the towplane out ahead on its towline, we creep forward for a few feet, then faster, faster. Speed gives power to the ailerons, to the rudder, to the elevators, and now we lift a foot off the ground and wait while the towplane finishes its takeoff and begins to climb.
Leslie had been mischievous this morning, generously cooling me with ice-water at moments I least expected. She was happy and so was I. What a spectacular mistake it would have been, to have insisted on leaving her!
Five minutes later, a climb on the end of the line, a dive to loosen the tension, and I pulled the handle for an easy release.
There was one good thermal near the airport, thick with sailplanes. I shivered in the heat of the cockpit. A cyclone of sailplanes, it was. But I was almost last one out and couldn't spend all day looking for lift. I was ginger on the stick, careful. Look around, I thought, watch out!
Tight turn. Fast turn. I caught the core of the lift, an express elevator on the way to the top . . . five hundred feet per minute, seven hundred. Look around.
My neck was sore from twisting fast left, fast right, looking, counting. A Schweizer slid in below me, turning hard.
She's right. I do create problems. We've had our bad times, but hasn't everybody? The good times are glorious, they just . . . LOOKOUT!
The Cirrus above tightened its turn too steeply, sank toward me thirty feet, its wing a giant's blade slashing toward my head. I jammed the stick forward, fell away, in the same instant dodging the glider below.
"You gonna fly like that," I choked, "you gonna get plenty room from me!"
I swung back into the cyclone, looked up the center of the half-mile cylinder of climbing aircraft. Not many pilots, I thought, ever see anything like this.
The moment I looked, an odd movement, way above. It was a sailplane, spinning/ down through the center of the other planes! I saw, and could not believe . . . what a stu-
pid, dangerous thing, to SPIN! in the midst of so many other airplanes!
I squinted against the sun. The glider was not spinning for sport, it was spinning because it had lost a wing.
Look! Not one plane spinning-two! Two sailplanes tumbling out of control, falling straight down toward my cockpit.
I snatched the stick to the left, floored the left rudder and shot away, out from under.
High behind my right wing whipped and tumbled the two broken aircraft. In their trails floated a cloud of broken pieces, lazy autumn leaves swirling down.
The radio, that had been quiet static for minutes, shouted, "MIDAIR! There's been a mid-air!"
"BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT!"
What possible good can it do, I thought, to tell them on the radio to bail out? When your airplane is reduced to pieces, doesn't the idea of a parachute come right quickly to mind?
One of the glider-parts in the midst of the cloud was a man's body, tumbling. It fell for a long time, then nylon streamed behind it, into the wind. He was alive; he had pulled the ripcord. Good work, fella!
The chute opened and drifted without a sound toward the rocks.
"There's two parachutes!" said the radio. "Contest Ground, there's two parachutes! Going down three miles north. Can you get a jeep out there?"
I couldn't see the other chute. The one I watched collapsed as the pilot hit the ground.
Still fluttered the parts of the demolished gliders, one sec-
tion with half a wing attached, pinwheeling slow-motion round and round and round.
Never had I seen a midair collision. At a distance, it was gentle and silent. It could have been a new sport invented by a bored pilot, except for the shreds of airplane sparkling down. No pilot would invent a sport that shredded airplanes for fun.
The radio crackled on. "Anyone have the pilots in sight?"
"Affirmative. Got 'em both in sight."
"How are they? Can you tell if they're OK?"
"Yeah. They're both OK, seem to be. Both on the ground, waving."
'Thank God!"
"OK, chaps, let's look alive up here. We got a lot of airplanes in a little space. . . ."
Four of the pilots in this race, I thought, are women. How would it feel to be a woman, flying up here, and be called a "chap"?
All at once I froze in the heat. / saw this yesterday! What are the odds against it ... the only mid-air I've ever seen, coming the day after I lay on the floor of the trailer and watched it in advance!
No, I hadn't watched, it had been me, hit by the wing! It might have been me, down there in the desert, and not so lucky as the two climbing into the jeep with exciting stories to tell.
Had Leslie left me last night, had I been tired and sad today instead of rested and cool before the race, it could have been me.
I turned on course, in a sky oddly deserted. Once they get started, contest sailplanes don't stay much in clumps if the leaders can help it.
Nose down, my quiet racer hushed top-speed toward a mountain ridge. Rocks close below, we burst into a new thermal, spiralled steeply up in the lift.
The vision, I thought, had it saved me?
I'm being protected now, for a reason.
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
thirty-six
JL T WAS coiled in the sand of the jeep-trail, coiled and ready to strike at the pickup truck bumping toward it ten miles per hour. I stopped the truck short and reached for the CB microphone.
"Hi, wook, can you hear me?"
There was a moment's silence, and she answered from the radio in the trailer.
"Yes. Why are you stopped?"
"There's a snake, blocking the way. Could you get the snake books? I'll give you a description."
"Just a minute, sweetie."
I eased the truck ahead, turned to draw alongside the creature. It licked the air with its black tongue, frowning. When I ran the engine up, it blurred the rattles of its tail, a dry-gourd hiss: I'm warning you . . .
What a brave snake! If I had that courage, I'd stand with
my fists against a tank three blocks tall six blocks wide, frown Don't you roll ahead, I'm warning you . . .
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"Got the snake books," she said on the radio. "Be careful, now. Stay inside and don't open the door, OK?"
Yeah, the snake said. You listen to her and you be careful. This is my desert. You mess around with me, I'll kill your truck. I don't want to do it, but if you force me, I got no choice. The yellow eyes looked at me unblinking, the tongue tasted the air again.
Leslie couldn't contain her curiosity. "I'm coming out to see."
"No! Better you stay right there. Might be a whole nest of these in the sand. OK?"
Silence.
"Leslie?"
Silence.
In the rear-view mirror I saw a figure step from the trailer and start toward me. One thing you don't get with these modern man-woman relationships, I thought, is obedience.
"Excuse me," I said to the snake. "We'll be right back."
I reversed down the road, stopped for her. She got in the right side with the books: A Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians and A Sierra Club Naturalist's Guide-The Desert Southwest.
"Where's the snake?"
"Waiting for us," I said. "Now, I want you to stay inside. I don't want you popping out of the truck, do you hear?"
"I won't if you won't." There was adventure in the air.
The snake hadn't moved, hissed the truck to a stop.
Back again? Well, that's as far as you're going, not one inch farther than last time.
Leslie leaned over against me to see. "Hel-lo!" she said, bright and vivacious, "hello, snakey! How are you today?"
No answer. What do you say when you are a rugged wily tough poison desert rattler and a sweet pretty little-girl voice asks you a question like that: "How are you today?" You don't know what to say. You blink your eyes, but you say nothing.
Leslie sat back and opened the first book. "What color, would you say?"
"OK," I said. "He's a green sand color, dusty pale olive. Black jelly-bean ovals down his back, darker olive inside the jelly-beans, almost white just outside them. He's got a wide flat triangle head, short nose."
Pages turned. "My, there are some tough customers in here!" she said. "How big is she?"
I smiled. Either one of us turned sexist, these days, the other corrected, subtly or not, as required. She was being subtle.
"She isn't a little snake," I said. "If she were all stretched out . . . four feet, maybe?"
"Would you say oval markings tend to narrow into inconspicuous crossbands near tail?"
"Sort of. No. Black and white bands around the tail. Narrow black, wide white."
The snake uncoiled, moved to the sage at the side of the road. I touched the accelerator to race the engine and immediately she sprang back into her coil, eyes blazing, tail blurred. I warned you and I was not kidding! You want a dead truck you're going to get one! Stand back, stand clear or so help me ...
"Scales keeled, in twenty-five rows?" asked Leslie. "Ah!
Black and white rings encircle tail! Try this: Light stripe behind eye extends backward above angle of mouth."
See this light stripe behind eye? the snake said. What more do I have to tell you? Just leave your hands where I can see 'em and back away slow. . . .
"Right you are!" I said. "That's her! What is she?"
"Mojave Rattlesnake," she read. "Crotalus scutellatus. See her picture?"
The snake in the photograph was not smiling.
She opened the Naturalist's Guide, turned pages. "Dr. Lowe states that the Mojave has a 'unique' venom with neuro-toxic elements for which no specific antivenin has been developed and that the bite of the Mojave is potentially much more serious than that of a Western Diamondback, a species with which it is sometimes confused."
Silence. There being no Western Diamondbacks near, this snake was not confused.
We looked at each other, Leslie and me. "Maybe we'd better stay in the truck," she said.
"I have not been feeling too strong an urge to get out, if that's what you're worried about."
Yeah, hissed the Mojave, proud and fierce. You don't want to do nothin' fast. . . .
Leslie peeked again. "What's she doing?"
"She's telling me I don't want to do nothin' fast."
After a time the snake uncoiled, watching our eyes, ready for any tricks from us. There were none.
If it bit me, I thought, would I die? Of course not. I could pull psychic shields down, turn venom to water or root-beer, not give power to a world's belief-system that snakes kill. I could do it, I thought. But there's no need to test myself right now.
We watched the snake, admiring it.
Yes, I sighed to myself, I had felt the stupid boring predictable response: kill it. What if it breaks into the trailer and starts biting everybody; better take a shovel now and smash it fiat before that can happen it's the most deadly snake in the desert get the gun and blast it before it kills Leslie!
Oh, Richard, what a disappointment that there's part of you thinks so ugly, so cruel. Kill. When will you advance to a level that is not somehow afraid?
I accuse me wrong! The kill-thought was a stray scared ignorant insane suggestion. I'm not responsible for the suggestion, only for my action, my final choice. My final choice is to value this snake. She's an expression of life just as true and just as false as this one that sees itself a two-legged tool-using truck-driving semiviolent learning creature. In that moment, I would have turned a shovel against anyone dared attack our brave Mojave Rattlesnake.
"Let's play her some music on the radio." Leslie touched the switch, found a classical-music station hi the midst of something Rachmaninevsque and turned the volume as far as the knob would go. "SNAKES AREN'T SUPPOSED TO HEAR TOO WELL," she explained.
After a moment the rattler mellowed and relaxed; a single loop of the coiled wall remained. In a few minutes she licked one last time toward us. Well done. You passed your test. Congratulations. Your music is too loud.
"There she goes, wook! See?"
Goodbye.
And away poured Ms. M. R. Snake, rippling smooth to disappear in the sage.
" 'Bye!" called Leslie, and waved, almost sadly.
I released the brake, backed the truck to the trailer again, disembarked my dear passenger and her snake-books.
"What do you think?" I said. "Did we imagine everything she said? Think she could have been a passing spirit, took the form of a snake for an hour to find what control we had over our fear, to kill or not to kill? An angel in a snake costume, there in the road, checking up on us?"
"I'm not going to say no," said Leslie, "but in case not,, from now on let's make a lot of noise when we come out of the trailer so we don't surprise her, OK?"
thirty-seven
'RANGE OUR thought, and the world around us changes. Arizona in summer turned a little on the warm side for us, it was time for a different view. Better something northward, cooler? How about Nevada, take the trailer and the sailplane to Nevada?
It was cooler, sure enough. Instead of 115 degrees outside, it was 110. Instead of small mountains on the horizon, big ones.
The generator failed, in the trailer . . . three days of constant troubleshooting, tinkering, and it ran again. Soon as the generator was fixed, the water-pumps failed. Luckily the prospect of living waterless in the middle of a million acres of sand and cattle-bones helped us rebuild the pumps with a pocketknife and cardboard.
Back from a sixty-mile drive for water and mail, she stood in the kitchen and read aloud the letter from Los Angeles.
Living in the wilderness, our senses had changed. Megalopolis had grown so unreal that it was difficult for us to imagine it still there, people still living in cities. The letter reminded us.
"Dear Richard: I am sorry that I must tell you that the Internal Revenue Service has rejected your offer, and it is demanding payment of the one million dollars at once. As you know, it has a lien on all of your property and has legal right to seize whenever it wishes. I suggest we meet at the earliest possible time. Sincerely, John Marquart."
&
nbsp; "Why did they reject the offer?" I said. "I offered to pay them in full!"
"There's a misunderstanding somewhere," Leslie said. "We'd better go find out what it is."
We drove across the desert to a gas-station pay-phone, set a meeting for nine the next morning, threw some clothes in the Meyers, blazed high-speed crosscountry, landed in Los Angeles by sundown.
"The offer is not the problem," said Marquart, next morning. "The problem is, you're famous."
"What? The problem is what?"
"This will be hard for you to believe, and I've never heard it before, myself. The IRS now has a policy not to accept Offers in Compromise from famous people."
"What . . . makes them think I'm famous?"
He swiveled his chair. "I asked that, too. The agent told me he went down the corridor outside his office, asked people at random if they had heard of Richard Bach. More of them had, than hadn't."
Total silence in the room. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
- "Let me get this straight," Leslie said at last. "The Internal Revenue Service; won't accept Richard's offer; because people in some hallway; have heard of him. Are you serious?"
The attorney spread his hands, helpless to change what had happened. "They'll accept a single payment in full. They won't accept a payout over time from a famous person."
"If he were Barry Businessman they'd accept the offer," she said, "but since he's Richard Bach they won't?"
"That's right," he said.
"But that's discrimination!"
"You could charge that, in court. You'd probably win. It would take about ten years."
"Come on! Who's this guy's boss?" I said. "There has got to be somebody there . . ."
"The fellow who's handling your case at the moment, he is the boss. He's the one who wrote the Famous rule."
I looked at Leslie.
"What can we do now?" she said to Marquart. "Richard's got all this money to give them, we've sold nearly everything he owns to make the down payment! He could write them a check for nearly half of it today, if they'd accept it without seizing what's left. I think he could pay the balance in a year, especially if he could get back to work. But he can't go ahead on the film, he can't even write if these people are going to swoop down and seize the work off his desk. ..."