Wildside

  I went back to the Mooney and double-checked the switches and settings. Normally I’d roll it back into the hangar at this point, but I didn’t want to open the doors.

  My movement in the plane attracted Mrs. Bockrath and she came straight to the plane, arriving after I’d finished the checklist.

  “Hello, Charlie,” she said. Beads of sweat covered her forehead and made circles on her blouse under her arms. She was an attractive woman with heavy thighs and a lined forehead. She was a registered nurse and worked in geriatrics at St. Joseph’s. Her hair was dark, without a touch of gray. I wondered if it was dyed.

  I pretended to be surprised. “Mrs. Bockrath! Did you climb the gate? If we’d known you were coming, we would’ve unlocked it.”

  “Why do you lock it? Especially with y’all here?”

  “Insurance. This airplane costs over a hundred thousand dollars. That’s why the lock and the no trespassing signs.”

  She shrugged. “It didn’t hurt me to walk—I don’t get near enough exercise.” She nodded at Rick’s car. “I see Rick is here. Is he inside?”

  The front screen door slammed and we both turned to see Rick on the porch. He was barefooted, in jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and walked across the yard to him. He held the door for her and they entered the house.

  After looking at the sky for imminent disaster, I decided I could leave the plane alone. Imminent disaster was more likely to come from inside the house.

  They were talking in the kitchen, but their voices stopped when the screen door shut behind me.

  I walked down the hallway and paused in the kitchen door. Rick was pouring her a glass of tea as she sat at the table. He looked up at me with desperate eyes.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said. “Just passing through. Off to my room to hit the books.”

  Mrs. Bockrath looked up, a stiff smile on her face. I went on down the hall and into my room, shutting the door behind me. Normally, I’d turn on the A/C, but I left it off and stood against the door, listening, sweating.

  “Thank you,” she said, for the tea.

  Rick didn’t say anything. I imagined him shrugging.

  “How can you stand this heat?”

  Rick answered her, sounding defensive. “I’ve got A/C in my room. And the window unit in the living room will cool the kitchen if necessary.”

  “It’s not like central air, though.”

  “It’s fine,” Rick said, his voice tight.

  “I want you to come home,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I insist.” She sounded like she was talking to a child, firm, taking no nonsense.

  “Not relevant,” Rick said.

  “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me, young man! I didn’t carry you in my body for nine months, raise you for eighteen years, to have you behave that way with me! I’m your mother and you’ll do as I say!” Her voice got louder and louder.

  My heart was racing and I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, to shut her out. Poor Rick. I wouldn’t want to hear that from my mother.

  She went on. “I want you to go upstairs and start bringing your things down right now!”

  I was surprised at how quiet Rick’s voice was when he answered. “Time for you to leave, Mom. I’ll drive you back to the gate.”

  “Did you hear what I said, young man!”

  The dam broke and Rick shouted back. “Yes! I heard every stupid word.”

  The intake of air as Mrs. Bockrath gasped was audible. “Who do you think you’re talking t—”

  He cut her off, outshouting her. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not a child. I’m not your little boy anymore. I’m eighteen, and I’m not living with you, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.” I heard her chair scrape back and her feet scuff as she stood, then Rick said in a softer voice, “I’m sorry Dad left you, Mom, but he did, and I can’t be him. Get somebody else in your life.”

  He paused. “Get a life.”

  She started crying. “It’s that Prentice girl. You’re living with her, aren’t you?”

  “No, Mom. Clara is living at home, though she’s moving into an apartment soon.”

  “With you!”

  “No. With Marie Nguyen.”

  “But you still see her!”

  There was a creak from the stairway and Clara’s voice said, “Yes, Mrs. Bockrath. He still sees me.”

  Mrs. Bockrath’s tears turned back to rage. “What are you doing here?”

  Clara, with more accuracy than good sense, said, “I was invited.”

  “You slut! How dare you try to sink your claws into my—”

  “Mother, that’s enough!” Rick was very loud. “Get out of this house!”

  “Well, I never!”

  “Now! Out! Out! Out!” He kept repeating it, louder and louder.

  I opened the door to see him backing her into the hallway, past Clara, to the front door. “OUT!”

  He didn’t touch her, but his voice and expression kept her moving backward. “OUT!” He backed her through the screen door. “Get out of my life!” he finished, and slammed the door and locked it.

  He turned, a horrible lost look on his face, and stood for a moment, his back to the door. Then, with an angry shrug, he walked woodenly up the stairs. Clara looked from me to his retreating back with wide eyes, then followed him up the stairs.

  I unlocked the door and went through it—Rick’s mother was walking stiffly across the yard. I didn’t call to her, but instead got in my pickup, started it up, and drove up beside her.

  She looked at me, through the passenger side window, as if she didn’t know what or who I was. Twin streaks of water cut her cheeks. I leaned across and pushed the door open.

  “I’ll give you a ride to the gate.”

  She bit her lip, then climbed in. “His room was empty. I came home and it was empty, like he’d never been there.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She went on. “His father did the same thing. I came home and his things were gone, packed. It was the same.”

  She didn’t say anything else until we got to the gate and I unlocked it for her, then waited until she started her car and drove away.

  She thanked me, but her face was frozen and her eyes were dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “HE’S GONNA STALL.”

  As soon as I got back to the house, I called my mom.

  “What’cha doing?”

  “Cataloging my journals. I’m thinking of putting some shelves in your room—is that okay?” She sounded anxious.

  “It makes sense, Mom. They’re overflowing the living room, after all. Make it into a library. It’d be nice to walk around the house without knocking a pile over.” Then I told her the entire saga of Rick and his mother.

  “That must have been very distressing,” she said. “Did you know he hadn’t told his mother that he was moving in?”

  “Not when we arranged it. Besides, Mom, he’s eighteen. He’s already said he’d get an apartment rather than live at home. Better he should live here with me and Joey.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “What’ll I do if she calls me?”

  “Why do you think I’m telling you this?”

  “Oh. Your father handles this sort of thing much better than I. He doesn’t seem to be as disturbed by irrational behavior. Perhaps it was all that time in the military. I wish he was home.”

  I didn’t.

  She sighed. “I suppose it will work out okay. Time will tell.”

  The next morning Marie and I hung the hangar doors, using the tractor and a pulley to lift them into place. Pulled shut, the interior of the hangar was cavelike, lit by a thin slit of light coming between the doors.

  I pounded two four-foot lengths of two-inch pipe into the dirt until they were flush with the surface of the ground, then mounted drop bolts to the doors above them. With the bolts dropped into place, we could set our guns down for once and work insi
de without fear of cats and wolves.

  The rental company delivered the Mini-Cat, the miniature bulldozer, at noon. The driver went over the controls, fuel, and lubrication with us, then drove away. We secured the gate behind him and drove back to the house.

  Marie didn’t even wait for the pickup to roll to a stop before she was out and into the Mini-Cat.

  “Hey!” I said, smiling. “You don’t even drive!”

  She fastened the safety belt and started it up. “I’m learning,” she shouted over the engine.

  After driving it around the yard until she got the hang of steering, she learned how to use the blade by cleaning up the dirt road that led out to the gate, filling holes and scraping bumps.

  I spent the time rigging the wildside hangar with fluorescent shop lights, stringing extension cords along the rafters from a power strip near the tunnel door. I hoped we wouldn’t blow a fuse. The barn was on a hefty 30-amp breaker because of Uncle Max’s power tools, but I could see using more than that before we were done.

  I switched on the power strip and the lights flickered before brightening to a steady light. The new lumber and the steel roof beams contrasted strangely with the grass-covered, uneven ground below.

  Marie brought the Mini-Cat in and started to change all of that. Shortly after she started, we had to open the doors to let out exhaust fumes, so I stood guard outside the door with the shotgun. She piled the excess dirt outside, along the walls. Later, after covering the lower walls in heavy plastic, we pushed it against the walls and packed it down.

  I hoped the torn up buffalo grass would take and decided to water the dirt banks regularly.

  The promised electronic fund transfers (including the Nature Conservancy’s extra twenty-five thousand) came in and, rather than make three different flights to different locations, Marie and I drove my pickup up to Waco and shipped pigeon brides off to their lovelorn future grooms.

  I was nervous—it would be a lot of trouble for them, but I was afraid the “customers” might be watching all the shipping outfits in Texas that handled live freight. Because of this, I stopped short of the freight office and pulled into a coin-op car wash.

  “What are you doing?” asked Marie.

  “Cammo.”

  I reached for a bucket from the back of the truck. The pigeons were cooing and some fluttered in the cages as I scraped the bucket across the truck bed.

  “I wondered what that was for,” said Marie.

  The bucket had four inches of mud in it with a gardening trowel sticking up. I crouched at the front and back of the truck and plastered the license plates, careful to leave bare spots and parts of numbers uncovered. I added more to the bumpers and to the fenders behind the wheels to make it look plausible. There’d been thunderstorms off and on all week.

  When we unloaded the birds at the freight office, we both wore baseball caps and sunglasses.

  The clerk followed us out, after I paid, making small talk, but I just said “Thank you,” got into the car, and drove away, as if he wasn’t saying a thing. He stared after us in the rearview mirror until we turned the corner.

  I took side roads out of town, washing the mud off with a gas station hose in Mexia.

  “Am I crazy, or was he suspicious?”

  Marie bought pop from the machine. “You’re crazy—but he was acting weird. I’m glad we don’t have to ship any more birds.”

  I watched the rearview mirror but it was clear all the way home.

  One Wednesday, Marie and I bought a small plane, accent on “small.”

  It was a Rans Coyote S6, a homebuilt two-seater, practically an ultralight, with a little sixty-five-horsepower engine—no electronics, no radio, no nav except for a magnetic compass. The wings and fuselage were covered with dacron sailcloth and, empty, the plane only weighed 435 pounds. It didn’t have the range we needed, but it was a good start since it cruised at 100 mph, climbed at a respectable thousand feet a minute, became airborne in less than 150 feet, and, most important, the wings folded back so it would just fit through the tunnel.

  During the demo, the owner and builder, a local flight instructor I knew slightly, turned the engine off at five thousand feet, glided east to a freshly plowed field, and actually gained altitude over the next several minutes, circling slowly in the thermals. I drove into town and returned with a cashier’s check for twelve thousand dollars.

  Marie and I spent the afternoon getting tail dragger and type qualified, making several takeoff and landings apiece.

  We weren’t used to taxiing in a tail dragger. Since the third wheel is in the very back, the plane tilts up on the ground, making it impossible to see directly forward when all three wheels are on the ground. So you do serpentine S-turns as you taxi, to get some sense of what’s ahead. Takeoff and landing were different, too, a tail dragger requiring more of a three-point landing.

  At the end of the afternoon, though, we’d had the additional type sign-offs added to our logbooks and, because Marie didn’t drive, she got to fly the plane back to my place, while I drove the truck home.

  Also, that day, both Rick and Joey soloed, to the relief of Clara. “Thought they’d never do it,” she said.

  She was spritzed with ice tea for her comment.

  The new plane, wings folded demurely and resting out of sight in the barn, was admired.

  “We should take it out this weekend,” said Joey.

  “Oh?” I said. “You have your private license all ready? And you’ve been type certified for this aircraft?”

  “Hey, I can fly a plane,” said Joey. “Just did.” He stuck his head in the cockpit. “Hey, somebody stole the steering yokes.”

  “They’re control sticks,” said Marie. “Another reason why you’re not flying this plane until you get more hours in. Besides, we’re building the control tower this weekend, remember?”

  “Work, work, work. If it’s not school it’s build, build, build. Don’t we ever get a break?”

  I patted the side of the plane. “If we get the tower done, Marie and I can take turns flying with you guys on Sunday.”

  “All right!” Joey said.

  “If.”

  Thursday morning, Marie and I flew the Coyote, running through basic and emergency procedures, drilling with simulated forced landings. After four hours of this, including a stop to refill—the plane only held eighteen gallons—we landed back at the grass strip, taxied into the barnyard, and shut down. While Marie topped off the tanks, I folded the wings back, then we started to push it through the tunnel.

  “Damn! Hold it!” I’d been steering from behind, by lifting the tail end of the plane by the tail wheel assembly. Marie was pulling from the front. The prop had to be turned forty-five degrees to clear the top of the door, but the folded wings cleared both sides of the door just fine. However, the tail section was too wide.

  Marie squeezed back past the plane and I set the tail down.

  “What’s the prob—oh. Shit.”

  Fortunately, the tail spar was not one piece. It took us an hour to take one half of the horizontal stabilizer off, which let us get the thing all the way into the wildside hangar. I could’ve pulled it off in less than fifteen minutes, but I wanted it to go back on exactly like it came off, so we labeled all the fasteners and Marie did a sketch. Working under the fluorescents, we reassembled and double-checked the tail assembly and unfolded the wings.

  If the grass hadn’t grown too fast on our wildside runways, we could just open the doors and go.

  We peeked out into the wildside. A gentle breeze blew from the north and the sky had scattered cumulus about ten thousand feet.

  “What do you say? Shall we take it up?” Marie had a wistful expression on her face.

  I licked my lips, seriously tempted. If we were right about the wildside, no human had ever flown there. I’d been limited to the distance I could walk or drive the tractor.

  “I don’t think we should,” I said.

  She said, “Ah, come on, Charlie. What
’s all this for, if not that?” She took my arm. “Pretty please?”

  I winced and pulled away from her. “Save it for Joey.” Even I was appalled by the bitterness in my voice.

  She frowned and turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “No, Charlie. I knew how you felt about me. I just didn’t realize you still did.”

  She turned back toward me, but I couldn’t face her. I re-examined the fasteners on the horizontal stabilizer. In a lighter tone, she asked, “So, why do you think it’s a bad idea to go flying?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. “Who you going to file our flight plan with?”

  “We go flying from the grass strip all the time without filing.”

  I smiled without humor. “Sure, on the tame side. If we go down in Brazos County, don’t you think somebody’s going to see us? Especially when we land in their pasture or parking lot? If we go down in Brazos County on the tame side, do you think something’s going to eat us?”

  “Oh.”

  “We need radios and somebody here who can come after us. Christ, I almost think we need another plane.”

  “Why?”

  I walked to the crack between the hangar doors and peered through. “You want to drive my truck across the river? There aren’t any bridges. I don’t think it’d get past that stream at the end of the runway.”

  “So we don’t go over the river. We stay right here, over the field. And only one of us flies it, so the other can come get them if they’re forced down.”

  I thought about it.

  “Okay, I want to get the wind sock from the other strip.”

  We went back to the other side and got the wind sock and guns. In addition, I hooked our makeshift sledge to the tractor and drove it through the tunnel.

  “Why?” asked Marie.

  “If I have to come get you, because you crashed, I don’t want to carry you back. Also, I’m pretty sure,” I said, patting my belly, “that you couldn’t carry me back, but you can drive the tractor.”

  We had to do one more thing before I’d consider flying. We opened the hangar doors cautiously, Marie doing the pushing, while I stood by with the rifle. Then I took two old broom handles and some cardboard out across to the other side of the runway and pounded the broomsticks into the ground and, by poking holes in the cardboard, mounted the cardboard vertically.