by Frank Hayes
“Hey, Jimmy.”
Virgil could tell immediately that he was an unpleasant surprise.
“Sheriff, where’s Dif?”
“I sent him home before Edna came looking for him. Don’t want her to get the notion that he’s tomcatting. Can’t afford to lose a trusted employee like Dif. Heard you had a little car trouble.”
Jimmy looked down at his hands, which were dirt covered and grease stained.
“Got a flat out on River Road. Had a hard time loosening some of the lug nuts. It was dark even with my spot.”
“Guess that wasn’t fun.”
“No, sir. No, it wasn’t.”
“Well, get yourself cleaned up, then you can go home. I’m staying over tonight, but before you take off, I think we need to clear the air.”
Jimmy didn’t say anything, but turned and went into the bathroom. He came out about ten minutes later. Virgil was still sitting at his desk looking over some incident reports concerning his cellmates on the other side of the door. The most serious infraction appeared to be the damage done to a car belonging to the new boyfriend of a girl by her previous boyfriend.
“Have a seat, Jimmy. Be with you in a second.”
Jimmy sat down while Virgil finished the last report. “Some people have a hard time with rejection.”
He placed the report on the stack on the side of his desk. Then he pushed his chair back.
“You want to tell me what the problem is?” Virgil said. “My take is you’ve got a burr under your saddle about something. Let’s have it.”
At first Jimmy didn’t say anything. It was obvious he was a little uncomfortable in the hot seat. Virgil was getting ready to prod him again when he blurted out one word.
“Virginia.”
“I don’t understand. What has Virginia got to do with this?”
“Is she your daughter?” Jimmy asked.
Virgil sat up in his chair, then stood up and walked around the room.
“So that’s it.” He stopped and looked at his young deputy. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I should have told you but, well, I guess you’d have to say I didn’t become a father in the traditional way.”
He walked over to his desk, pulled his chair around until it was next to Jimmy’s, then sat down. For the next ten minutes he explained the circumstances surrounding the revelation of his fatherhood.
“There it is. I guess it’s time for it to become public knowledge. Secrets are rarely kept. In this case obviously it has already caused a problem. I didn’t mean to leave you in the dark. Guess it just took time for me to grasp all the nuance.”
Virgil stood up, pushed his chair back to its place behind the desk. “Go home, Jimmy. I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow is probably going to be another long day.”
He walked over to the rollaway, sat down, and untied his shoes.
“Okay, Virgil. Glad we had this talk. I feel a lot better.”
“Me, too,” Virgil replied as Jimmy stood at the door.
“Oh, Virgil. There’s just one more thing.”
Virgil looked up from the edge of his bed. “Do you have any objection to me asking your daughter for a date?”
Virgil just stared at Jimmy, standing in the open doorway.
“Is this what being a father is all about?” he said.
Jimmy smiled and walked out the door, leaving Virgil sitting there in his new role.
* * *
Sunlight came streaming through the office window much too soon for Virgil.
“Paying the price for your night on the town, aren’t you?” Rosie was standing over him with a cup of orange juice in her hand. “Drink this—it’ll help.”
Virgil sat up, swung his legs over the side, resting his bare feet on the floor as he reached out and took the cup. He drained it in one gulp. “Dry mouth always follows a night of drinking.”
“I’m not even going to ask how you know,” Virgil said as he stood up. “I make no apologies. It was fun.”
“Okay, sport. Get cleaned up and I’ll get an extra breakfast for you and the other inmates.”
When Virgil emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later, a plate of sausage, eggs, and toast was on his desk alongside a cup of hot, black coffee.
“That was good, just what I needed to kick-start my day. By the way, you might like to know it wasn’t just about fun last night. I might have a prospect for that vacancy you want me to fill.”
Virgil went on to tell Rosie about Simon Levine. “Well, what about that?”
“You did good, Virgil. If he walks through that door and is fool enough to want to stay, I’m not letting him out till he’s in uniform and his name is on the contract. Sounds like what we need. A Jewish boy from New York. He’ll blend right in with a Baptist, a Catholic, and what are you again? . . . an agnostic. Now, if he fits, all you got to do is sell it to them born-again Christians on the town council. He ain’t by any chance gay, is he?”
“Never thought to ask the question, but we can live in hope. After all, we’re striving for diversity, right?”
Virgil spent the next few hours taking care of some paperwork, his least favorite part of the job. About ten minutes after eleven, Simon Levine came into the office, much to Virgil’s surprise.
“Simon, good to see you.”
“Chet dropped me off. Think he wants to get me out of the house.”
“That could be a good thing. Have a seat.”
Simon reached for a nearby chair.
“Let me ask you a quick question,” Virgil said. “If everything were to fall into place, could you see yourself working as a deputy in Hayward County? I’m about ready to hit them with a request for a new deputy and I’m not going to give them much wiggle room.”
Simon looked like someone had just thrown a bucket of water on him.
“You don’t waste much time, do you?”
“Only when I absolutely have to, but you haven’t answered my question.”
An hour later, after Simon had left, with the prospect of a new deputy looking a lot more favorable, Virgil got up from his desk, ready to leave the office. “What did you think of Simon?”
“I liked him,” Rosie said. “He looks you straight in the eye when he talks to you. Easy to look at and he isn’t afraid to speak up. I think he’s a keeper. I got a good vibe.”
Virgil picked up his hat. “Me, too.” Then he started for the door.
“Where are you heading, Virgil?”
“Going down to Sky High to see a man about a helicopter ride.”
“This about Velma and Charlie?”
“We’ll see.”
“Say hello to Margaret and Eustace for me.”
“Will do.”
“Any closer, Virgil?”
“Well, I’m thinking if I can find out the why, then there’s a chance I can find out the who. Maybe this pilot can give me something in that direction, because I’m afraid if the who is desperate enough, he or they might not just stop with Velma and Charlie.”
28
Virgil hadn’t been down to the real desert part of the county, south of Redbud, since they had found two headless murder victims, a brother and a sister, the previous summer. The farther south you traveled, the more barren the landscape, the more scattered the inhabitants. It was a region of earth tones and right angles. Any green areas were mostly the result of irrigation. The growing season here was well over four-fifths of the year, but the problem was water. The area had become drought stricken the last four or five years. Water had become an expensive commodity. The Southwest had become a mecca for many escaping from cold and snow. Their refusal to recognize that much of it was desert and their reluctance to leave green lawns behind contributed heavily to the stress on the water table. Serious farmers had to go deep to tap into an aquifer. They could no longer depend on nature to meet their
needs. Virgil saw the desert beauty, but knew it could be unforgiving. People who lived here also knew to respect the desert. People who didn’t could lose their lives. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room.
Virgil’s destination, Sky High Airfield, was a bit of an anachronism. On one level it could be considered something of an aeronautical dinosaur, but that hadn’t always been the case. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, it was in the mainstream, even cutting-edge. This was the age of wing walkers and flying acrobats. A time when the people were enthralled by airmen. Curtiss, Lindbergh, Wiley Post: they were the names in the headlines, the heroes of the day. Sky High got its name then. Everybody looked to the sky. As with all innovations since the discovery of the wheel, when flying became routine, the awe and wonder faded away. It became a casualty of commerce and business. Places like Sky High faded from the landscape in the wake of huge metro airports.
Coming down off a ridge, Virgil could see the airfield in the valley below. As if to draw attention to itself, one small, private plane was doing circles in the sky overhead. As he reached level ground and got closer, he could see ten or twelve similar planes sitting in the grass facing the runway. The runway was nothing more than hardpan. A desert airport like this didn’t need the expense of a paved runway when dirt that had been rolled over for decades became as hard as concrete. Unlike the ribbons of interlaced tracks at the airport in Phoenix, it never had to be hosed down when the temperature climbed above one hundred to keep the runway from buckling. There were four separate buildings that served as hangars. In the first of these was what amounted to an office. Virgil pulled up to it, noting as he stepped out of his car the sign above, which indicated its purpose. Like everything else it did not seem to wear its age lightly. The name SKY HIGH, along with any other information it offered, was so faded as to be unreadable by anyone with anything less than 20/20 vision and farther than ten feet away. Virgil, squinting in the glare of midday, barely fit the first category. It was another of those imperfections of aging he was trying to ignore. When he walked to the door, he saw peeking out from this building and its nearest companion the drooping rotor blades of a helicopter. The door of the office was slightly ajar, so he walked right in without knocking.
Everything inside, matching the sign, provided ample evidence that Sky High was stuck in a time warp of long ago. There was what could be loosely referred to as a reception area. Assorted chairs lined the walls, separated by similarly mismatched tables on which sat piles of indiscriminate magazines for waiting customers. Most showed heavy wear, with ripped covers or dog-eared pages. The majority of them were related to flying. Virgil had a suspicion that none of them had been published within the current year. At the far end of the room opposite the door was a desk that sat outside of a windowed, closed-off area that served as an inner office. In contrast to everything else about the room, the top of the desk held a neat assortment of papers stacked to one side on a desk-set pad. On the other side stood a computer. Between them both sat a woman.
“Hello, Margaret.”
On hearing her name, the woman looked up from a paper she had been reading. She sat ramrod straight, had piercing blue eyes, not a hair out of place, and a smile that spread a continuous web of wrinkles across her face.
“Virgil.” She jumped from her chair, came around the desk, then fell into Virgil’s arms. “Oh, my,” was all she could muster.
Virgil could feel her thinness through her dress. It had always been that way. He knew he could have lifted her off her feet with one arm. The lightness of a hummingbird. “Eustace!” She shouted “Eustace” in a voice belying both her age and her size.
On the other side of the glass in back of her desk, a man of similar chronology looked up from a desk that was the antithesis of hers. Piles of papers stacked randomly on top, held in place by some invisible cousin of gravity. Only his face showed above the mound nearest to him. With his bald head and smiling eyes, Virgil thought of the moon coming over a mountain. With great effort, he got to his feet, then came stumbling out into the outer room, where Virgil still stood wrapped in the clutches of Margaret.
“Virgil . . . Virgil.” Like his wife, it was all he could say. Bent almost in half from a long-ago flying accident, he barely reached above Virgil’s waist. Finally, Margaret disentangled them one from the other, then led them through the inner office on to their living quarters.
It was a different world. Margaret’s hand showed everywhere. The room was large enough to hold a biplane, which in fact it had, as it was the first hangar built at Sky High almost a hundred years earlier. Margaret and Eustace had converted it to living quarters over sixty years before when they had come to Sky High as newlyweds. At one end of the large, open room was a modern kitchen. A long harvest table separated that from a living area with comfortable furnishings placed strategically about to create an intimate atmosphere. Margaret led Virgil by the hand to one of the groupings. After placing him in a center chair she and Eustace sat on either side of him. A low, octagonal table with a vase full of fresh flowers sat in front of Virgil. He glanced about the room. Nothing had changed. The walls were literally covered with aviation history. He wondered if someday it would all end up in a museum. Photographs of flying Jennys, some with wing walkers, were interspersed with head shots, many of them autographed, showing the likes of Rickenbacker, Earhart, and Jacqueline Cochran, along with a host of other aviators who had challenged the skies as their domain. Some were unknowns or lost in the history of the spectacular achievements of a few others, but were nevertheless important.
“Virgil, why don’t you come down more often?” Eustace asked. “It must be over a year.”
Virgil immediately felt the weight of guilt, especially since he knew he had not come merely for a social visit, but instead had an ulterior motive.
“I apologize. A weak excuse, but I’ve had, let’s say, an unusually busy year.”
Margaret reached over and patted his hand. “We know we’re just being selfish, but you are just about all the family we have left.”
Virgil knew there was no blood relationship to back up that comment, but something just as strong, maybe even stronger. Aunt Margaret and Uncle Eustace had been in Virgil’s life well before he drew his first breath. They, so to speak, came with the furniture that is the flowering of long, intimate relationships. He was probably in his late teens before he figured out that they shared no blood relationship. Margaret was his aunt Clara’s closest and dearest friend. When Eustace signed on for a future with her, he eventually introduced Clara to his closest friend, Clyde. Then nature took its course. They had become then and forever his aunt Margaret and uncle Eustace. When Virgil’s parents were killed and Clara down in El Paso was so far away, it was Margaret who moved into the house and helped Virgil with all of the arrangements. It was Eustace who suggested Virgil to other members of the town council as the likely candidate to take over the job as sheriff, replacing his father in that role. Truth be told, it was easier convincing them than it was Virgil, who had set his sights on parts unknown and new adventures that had little to do with the sleepy outpost of Hayward in the Southwest. This coming on the heels of his own personal tragedy in the loss of Rusty, for whom he would have stayed in Hayward until the last tooth fell out of his head. Once she was lost to him, so also, he thought, was Hayward. He was ready to pack his bags. Eustace somehow held sway. Convinced him to take the job for a year, catch his breath after the devastation of two personal tragedies. It was good advice. All these years later, it was impossible, sitting in a room with these two, not to wonder how he got here or what his life would have been if he had not listened to Uncle Eustace.
“How’s Clara?” Margaret said, interrupting his fleeting reverie. “She told me you spent some time with her after you got out of the hospital.”
“Good. She’s good.”
“Still making her special lemonade?”
“Oh, yeah. Maybe more po
tent than ever.”
“Good for her,” Eustace said. “Always look forward to our visits down there. Margaret gets mad at me when I try to duplicate her recipe.”
“That’s because he never knows when to stop pouring the tequila. The last batch he made had me seeing double for a couple of hours.”
“That’s just because you forgot to put on your glasses.”
Virgil smiled at the light banter. “Anyhow, I’ve got to fess up to an ulterior motive for this visit.”
Margaret and Eustace leaned forward a little.
“I need to talk to the guy who runs the helicopter service.”
“That’s no problem,” Eustace said. “They’re both out in one of the hangars now.”
“Both?”
“Well, they’re brothers. Nice fellas. Jake and Cory Lassiter. One of them is always on call, but they work on maintenance together when they have downtime. That’s why they are both here today. C’mon, Virgil. I’ll walk you over, introduce you.” Eustace got up from his chair. Virgil did the same.
“When you boys come back lunch will be sitting on the table waiting for you.”
While Eustace and Virgil walked toward the hangar, Eustace told Virgil how pleased he and Margaret were with the success of the helicopter operation.
“Guess this is the good fallout from growth,” Eustace said. “These boys are pretty busy. Beside the contract with Hayward Memorial and a couple of other clients, they do private flights, even sightseers. Don’t mind telling you, Virgil, they came along at just the right time for Sky High. Margaret and I were wondering if we could stay afloat with just the private planes that stay here. Matter of fact, down the line maybe Hayward ought to consider an arrangement with them as a supplement to EMT services and other policing. Those birds can cover a lot of ground faster than cruisers or horseback. They can also get to country that you can only get to on mule or horse. Look how they got Charlie Thompson out.”
