Wildside

by Steven Gould

  Then I went back and handed the shotgun to Marie. She took it very carefully, respectfully, and, I think, fearfully.

  “This is the safety. If this little red thing is sticking out, it’s ready to fire. If it’s in, it can’t fire. You pump a shell into the chamber with that, just like the movies.” She worked the action, pointing the barrel in the air. “That’s right. That leaves three in the magazine.” I nodded at the target. “Go to it.”

  “Do I have to?” She didn’t look happy.

  “Let’s play it out. I crash out there in the tall grass and you get the tractor and come for me. On the way there, a sabertooth decides the noise from the tractor is more interesting than scary. Or, you get to the plane and I’m disabled and the wolves are pulling at my unconscious body. Or—you crash, are not unconscious, but before I can get to you, a sabertooth does?”

  “Isn’t this a little paranoid? Every predator we’ve encountered has avoided us.”

  I bit my lip. “I’ve thought about this a lot. Doesn’t mean I’m right, but consider the consequences of being underprepared, rather than overprepared. If we walk a little wary, ready for trouble, the worse that can happen is what we expect.” I used my most telling argument. “We don’t know what happened to Uncle Max.”

  “Ah, I see your point.” She pulled the gun to her shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger. The right fringe of the right target disintegrated and Marie jumped at the noise. She fired again, but flinched away in anticipation of the bang and the shot missed completely.

  “There were guns at the border when we left Vietnam,” she said, almost to herself. Then she aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The cardboard target on the right flopped to the ground, the pole cut in half. She shifted to the other target and put a burst into its top central portion.

  She turned back to me. “Satisfied?”

  “Yeah.” I showed her how to reload. “Fire in the air first. Loud noises are scary. You might not have to hit anything.”

  I offered to flip a coin to see who would go first, but she shook her head. “You discovered it, Charlie. You should go first.”

  I wasn’t going to argue. We preflighted the Coyote, strapping the thirty-ought-six in the right-hand seat. I put an extra clip in my pocket. Marie shut the doors, then took the shotgun up the hill at the back of the hangar, where she could climb up onto the roof. When she was on top, I climbed in, strapped in, squeezed the primer bulb, turned on the ignition, and hit the starter button.

  I did the run-up and magneto check while taxiing. If there was anything in the high grass waiting to pounce, the noise of the little Rotax engine probably scared the shit out of it. I reached the downwind end of zero-one-five, used the flap handle between the seats to extend full flaps, and pushed the throttle all the way to the instrument panel. Even in the soft grass, the wheels came off the ground in under 150 feet. I kept the plane down in the ground effect until it reached seventy miles per hour, then climbed at a thousand feet a minute until I was fifteen hundred feet above the field.

  I flew a basic rectangular traffic pattern, then, keeping clear of the Brazos and watching my wind drift so I stayed over the hangar.

  We’ve marked our planet, so much, we humans. I didn’t realize how much until I looked out over the wildside. No buildings, no roads, no telephone and power lines, no plowed or unplowed fields with nice straight lines. The hangar, below, looked alien, and even the Brazos, longtime aerial landmark, was different, smaller, with a slightly different path.

  From fifteen hundred feet I could see for fifty miles. Strange to see so far without seeing a trace of human activity. Saw a dust cloud to the east, so large I thought it might be a grass fire, but it was buffalo. In the reeds lining the river, I saw something larger even than buffalo, with a long, mobile nose that tore at the tree branches. I was tempted to buzz it, to get a closer look, but we’d agreed to stay away from the river. I did one more circuit, then drifted down under minimum power and full flaps to land safely in the grass.

  Marie met me in front of the hangar and traded places, taking the shotgun with her, instead of the rifle.

  “There’s a small group of mammoth in the river bottom,” I told her, and described what they were doing and where, then I backed away and took up a perch on the roof.

  She was up for thirty minutes and the only thing she said, after landing, was, “It makes me feel so small.“

  “Yeah.”

  We put the plane away in silence.

  The control tower was really the “Richardson Prefab Deluxe Deer Blind,” a thirty-foot bolt-together galvanized steel tower with a small shack at the top. “Comes complete with icebox, gun stand, lightning rod, and bench seats for four hunters.” A truck dropped it off in bundles and boxes late Friday, and Marie and I moved it into the wildside hangar with the tractor.

  It was designed to set up out in the woods, on unprepared, uneven ground. After some discussion with Joey, I decided to mount it at the back of the hangar, with two of its legs shortened and mounted on the roof, and its other two legs resting on the hill behind, four feet lower.

  Joey cut and framed a square hole with a raised lip in the roof, then built a ladder inside, against the back wall, so the hole opened beneath the tower. While the rest of us were assembling the tower, he built a tar paper-covered hatch.

  When we were done, we covered the outside framework of the tower with hardware cloth, heavy wire mesh with half-inch-square holes. This let us climb from inside the hangar to inside the control shack without exposing ourselves to predation.

  “Think this stuff would really stop one of those sabertooths?” Clara asked.

  “It’d slow ‘em down,” I said.

  When we were done, late Saturday, we crowded into the top, opened all four upward-swinging panels that were the “windows,” and watched the sun go down. Joey, last through the hatch in the middle of the floor, handed up a small cooler.

  “Anybody want a beer?” he asked.

  I looked at my watch—it was eight-thirty. “If you want to fly tomorrow morning, no beer after midnight.”

  “Good grief, don’t be such a prick, Charlie. Didn’t I bust my ass all day? Don’t I deserve to relax now?”

  I held up my hands. “Sure. Relax away. Just don’t drink past midnight, okay?”

  He shook his head. “I know the drill. They go over it in ground school several times and we’ve even been tested on it.”

  I thought, but didn’t say, and they told you about DWI in Driver’s Ed. “Sorry. I’ll take one.”

  He blinked. “A beer? You?”

  “Sure. We all worked hard today. The trapdoor is great.”

  “I’ll take one,” said Rick.

  “Me, too,” said Clara.

  Joey looked at Marie and she said, “Oh, what the hell.”

  “Wow, two firsts.” Joey handed out the cans.

  “Where’d you get the beer, Joey?” asked Marie.

  Texas drinking age was twenty-one. We were all still eighteen. Marie, in fact, had only just turned eighteen.

  “Rick got it,” Joey said. “He’s so tall, nobody cards him.”

  I sipped slowly at the beer. I didn’t like it. Neither, apparently, did Marie. When Joey reached for another, she said, “Here—I’m not going to finish this one.”

  Joey crunched the can he was holding into a compact clump and started to pitch it out of the tower.

  “Don’t! Uh, please.” I held out my hand for it. “We don’t leave trash around. That’s what people do on the other side. This place is clean—let’s keep it that way.”

  He shrugged and handed it to me.

  “Besides, if we leave trash around—food trash—we’ll attract scavengers. Let’s keep the animals from associating this place—or us—with supper.”

  The sun went down and a million stars shone like diamonds. We closed up the tower and went back to the tame side.

  Early Sunday morning I went over to the airport pilot’s store and dropped a thousan
d dollars on a portable intercom station powered by a nine-volt battery, and two handheld aviation transceivers. On the way back I picked up Marie. Clara drove out on her motorcycle and was cooking breakfast for Rick when we got back.

  I went over to the wildside and mounted the intercom box and the handheld radio between the seats, behind the flap handle. Later, I’d add an external antenna to improve range, but the two radios would handle anything we did today and the intercom set would let us plug in two command sets and talk normally over the noise of the Rotax engine.

  Clara and Rick showed up, next, so I sent Clara up into the control tower with one transceiver, and Rick and I preflighted the Coyote.

  “You take the left-hand seat,” I said. “I’ll probably land it—the Cessnas you’ve been flying are a lot heavier, but you can take it off, if you promise to let go of the controls if I tell you to.”

  “Gee, I left my logbook in my room.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not an instructor—you can’t log it as instruction time and you can’t log it as solo time. And even if you could—we’re not in Texas anymore, Toto.”

  We started it up and I showed him how to do S-turns as he taxied, to avoid buffalo and other obstacles. He got the hang of it after a few wild swings back and forth. Luckily, we didn’t have to worry about other aircraft or running off the runways—we’d mowed them very wide.

  At the end of the runway, he lingered over the checklist, spending a lot of time trying to get the feel of the stick. The Cessna he’d been taking instruction on had a steering wheel-like control yoke. We did the engine run-up, checked both magnetos, then set flaps and pushed the throttle all the way in.

  In just the two days since we’d flown it, the grass had grown enough to add another fifty feet to the takeoff run. I watched Rick carefully, ready to shove the stick forward if he pulled it back far enough to stall the plane, but he got it right, letting just a little stick lift the nose and start us on up.

  “Climb at seventy,” I told him. “A little more back stick. Level off at fifteen hundred—you can take the engine back to 1800 rpm. That should give you about ninety miles per hour of indicated airspeed.”

  He left it a little late, leveling off initially at 1570, then yo-yoing between 1575 and 1450. “We’re getting too far from the field. Leave it for a second and do a standard left one-eighty.”

  He complied, managing to trim it at fifteen hundred. Back over the field we did a spiral climb to five thousand, where I took him through low-speed stalls and standard left and right turns.

  “It’s quicker than the Cessna,” Rick said. “To respond, I mean.”

  “It’s a thousand pounds lighter.”

  I left him in control all the way to the base leg and took over at five hundred feet. He’d been training with a tricycle landing gear and I didn’t want to confuse him with a different landing technique.

  Clara was next. She really seemed to have a knack for flying, getting the feel of the controls almost immediately. Rick’s turns, while competent, had been slightly uncoordinated, the stick moving before or after the rudder. Clara’s turns were precise and when I told her to level off at fifteen hundred, she hit 1495 and smoothly edged up the last few feet. I saw why she soloed after only ten hours. We went through the same turns, climbs, and stalls before Joey’s voice came on the radio. “Hey! There are people waiting, you know.”

  “Asshole,” Clara said on the intercom.

  “Hold your water, Joey,” I transmitted. “You’ll get your turn.”

  We stayed up another fifteen minutes. Clara took it all the way to final approach before I took over.

  The tanks, two nine-gallon tanks in the wings, were down a third, so we topped off with a jerry can and I turned it over to Marie and Joey after describing what we’d done.

  Joey started to climb into the left-hand seat but Marie hooked his collar and said, “Hold it, Hotshot.”

  “He turned, annoyed. “What? You want the left-hand seat?”

  “Preflight, Joey. Preflight.”

  He looked at me. “Didn’t you guys preflight?”

  “Sure,” I said. “So?”

  “They’re not going up in it,” Marie said. “We are. And, even if things were perfect when it was checked over, it’s been through two landings since then.”

  Joey grumbled, but involved himself in the preflight, looking at the oil level and draining gas into a jar to check for water. Clara and I climbed into the tower to join Rick.

  “Joey taxis too fast in the Cessna, too,” Rick was saying as I followed Clara up through the hatch. I stood up in time to see the Coyote turn too fast at the end of the runway and spin sideways 270 degrees. The tail wheel plowed a furrow in the grass.

  I picked up the radio and transmitted, “Having a little trouble out there?”

  Marie’s voice came back. “Just practicing a few S-turns.” Her voice was tight.

  “Are those printed esses or cursive?” I said, but I kept my thumb off the transmit button.

  The Coyote, at a more sedate pace, straightened, then accelerated down the field, lifting off sharply.

  Too sharply.

  “He’s gonna stall,” said Clara, but the nose dropped abruptly, before too much airspeed was lost, and the plane settled into a shallow climb to build up airspeed. When it turned, the bank was clean and sharp and I knew that Marie was at the controls.

  We went down to meet them when they landed, thirty minutes later. Joey jumped out of the Coyote before it stopped rolling and walked past us, stiff-legged. Marie leaned out the engine fuel mixture, then, when it died, switched off the magnetos and went through the rest of the engine shutdown checklist.

  I walked up to her door and swung it up.

  She was crying.

  I stood there frozen, helpless, then Clara pushed the rifle into my hands and shoved me aside.

  She unbuckled Marie’s restraining harness, helped her out of the Coyote, and walked her past Rick and me, into the hangar.

  I looked at Rick and he shook his head, a distant expression on his face.

  “Shit,” I said.

  We refueled the plane and put the control locks in place. When we rolled it back into the hangar, Marie and Clara were sitting by the control tower ladder. Marie wasn’t crying anymore, but the corners of her mouth turned down sharply.

  I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. I wanted to fire Joey, to kick him off the project, but doubted very much that the secret would stay a secret if I did. Maybe they’d break up and I’d have my chance with Marie. Maybe I should give him a raise.

  “You okay?” I asked Marie.

  She shrugged.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh.” I stood there awkwardly for a moment, then went through the tunnel to the tame side. I found Joey sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer.

  He didn’t look happy.

  I tried again. “What happened?”

  “I fucked up. I wanted to show Marie what a great pilot I am and I screwed up. Didn’t taxi right, nearly stalled us on takeoff—she took over until we were at altitude—and she didn’t say anything about it, just ‘I have control’ when she took the stick.” He lifted the beer again and drank in large swallows. “I shouted at her—I’ve never shouted at her before. She didn’t deserve that.”

  I leaned against the doorway, my arms crossed. “Well, I don’t think so. It’s not her fault that she does something better than you do. She’s been at it longer, after all.”

  He looked down at the tabletop. “I know I was wrong—give me a break.”

  “Don’t tell me. She was crying when she got out of the Coyote.”

  He winced. “Oh, shit.”

  I stood aside for him as he got up and went out, heading for the front door. He left his beer can on the kitchen table. I hefted it—it was almost empty. I drained what was left into the sink and then stomped it repeatedly until it was flat—and then some.

 
CHAPTER SEVEN

  “DO YOU HAVE THE MOSSBERG STAINLESS STEEL TWELVE-GAUGE PUMP WITH THE OPTIONAL PISTOL GRIP?”

  Luis Cervantes called me Monday morning. “Let’s go flying.”

  “Okay.”

  It was our code phrase for “let’s talk and not on the phone.” I met him at Easterwood airport, in the pilots’ lounge. He took coffee and I took tea in paper cups, dropped our money into the can, and walked outside to stand in the shade.

  “There are inquiries,” he said.

  “Who is asking who?”

  “The public account in Austin has had inquiries about the account ownership. They didn’t find out—but Richard did arrange to be told if it happened.”

  I turned my head to watch a twin-engine plane do its takeoff run. “Who did the asking?”

  “The San Diego Commercial Bank and the People’s Bank of San Francisco.”

  I licked my lips. “The San Diego Zoo and the Sierra Club.”

  “Well, those are the banks their payments came from.”

  The plane rose off the pavement smoothly. The landing gear came up. “What’s their next step?”

  Luis was watching the plane also. “Um. They’ll probably check the Austin city records to see who’s doing business as ‘The Lazarus Company.’”

  “What will that show?”

  “Nothing—we didn’t file a D.B.A. So, they’ll go back to the bank and try again, more subtly this time. The information is private, but you’d be amazed how easy it is to get. If you pose as an IRS agent, for instance, and phone in and say something like ‘I need to send a copy of their paperwork to the company but all we have is their account number—could you give me that address?’”

  “Will that work?” I asked, worried.

  “Usually. But we arranged for extra care on this account. If the IRS calls, the bank will wait for a subpoena and identification before they release any information. Ditto any other inquiries, no matter who they pose as.” He shrugged. “We used the bank most of the Texas legislature uses. They’re used to spotting unauthorized inquiries—the press is after that stuff all the time.”