by Steven Gould
“So they won’t find out?”
Luis turned his attention to the passenger terminal on the other side of the airport. An American Eagle turboprop was whining up to speed. “They’ll find out…eventually. But then it’ll just point to him and he’s a lawyer acting for a client. They’ll have to involve the authorities and make some sort of claim at criminal activity to get the information out of him.” The ground crew pulled the chocks away from the turboprop’s wheels and it began to roll.
I said, “So, for a while, we’re safe.”
The plane reached the end of the taxiway and turned onto the active runway. Without stopping, the turbines increased to one hundred percent and it took off, climbing steeply, more steeply than any plane I’d ever flown.
“For a while,” said Luis.
On Monday, Marie and I went to Triangle Sporting Goods, a store that sold guns and hunting supplies but also specialized in “home security” products. They have a giant plastic moose on the roof that the university fraternities are always stealing.
Business was slow—deer and duck season didn’t start for months—but a man was browsing the fishing lures. We walked up to the gun counter.
“What can I do you for, today?” asked the clerk, a balding man with thick glasses whose Lacoste sports shirt covered a slight potbelly.
I took a list from my pocket. I’d prepared it after going through the gun magazines with Joey and Clara. “Do you have the Mossberg stainless steel twelve-gauge pump with the optional pistol grip?”
“Sure.” He turned and took a pump shotgun from the shelf behind him. Instead of a stock it had a black plastic pistol grip. “Eighteen-inch barrel. Uses three-inch or two-and-three-quarter-inch shells, adjustable choke—”
“Okay,” I said, before he got warmed up. “I’ll take five.”
“Five? Five shotguns?”
“To start with. You have them in stock?”
“Uh, yeah. We’ve got six in stock.”
“Great. I also need vehicle mounting clips for the shotguns, the vertical kind. Like those used in police cars.”
“Ah, the locking kind.”
I thought about it. “Do they hold the gun securely when they’re unlocked?” I didn’t want to have to fumble for a key when a sabertooth charged.
“Yeah, but anybody can grab them out of the car, then. Kids.”
“Ah. I understand.” No kids where we were going—very few cars, though I intended one of the clips for my truck. “I’ll need eight of the clips. I’ll also need shoulder straps for the shotguns.”
“Hold up, there. Let me start gathering this stuff together. How’re you going to pay?”
“When we have the total, I’ll go get a cashier’s check—how’s that?”
He blinked. “Fine. Just fine. What else do you need?”
I looked at the list. “Cap-Stun gas in the eight-ounce cans.”
“You’re not going hunting, are you? Not with this pepper Mace stuff.”
I shook my head. “Home security. I’ll take ten of those air horns and twenty replacement air cartridges.”
“The boating horns?”
“Yeah.” These were very loud compressed gas horns used on small power and sailboats. They were loud enough to hurt—I hoped animals would think so.
He began piling the merchandise behind the counter, running a tape on the adding machine as he went along. For a moment I looked down at the 9-mm semi-automatic handguns in the glass case, but you have to be over twenty-one in Texas to buy a handgun. To buy a shotgun or rifle you only had to be eighteen. I added ten pads of tear-off targets, five sets of hearing protectors, five sets of wraparound shooting glasses, a wall mount gun rack with ammo drawers, a case of shells with bird shot, a case of three-inch shotgun shells with number three buckshot, and a case of shotgun shells with rifled slugs.
“I think that’s it. What’s the damage?”
“With tax, it comes to twenty-three-sixteen and sixty-three cents.”
I wrote it down, went over to my bank, and came back with the check. I filled out the registration papers and we packed everything in the truck, stacking the ammo on the floor and the guns behind the seat. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave them in the pickup bed in back with everything else.
We installed the wall rack on the back wall of the wildside hangar, hung the guns, and stored the ammo.
On Tuesday morning, Marie and I rode over to the Texas Institute of Aviation with the rest of the gang to start an Airframe & Power course, i.e., how to be an aircraft mechanic. While the three of them were flying, the two of us had classroom in the morning and lab in the afternoon. We’d be doing it for six weeks, three days a week, and we’d finish up about the time they finished their flight courses.
We also signed Marie up on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule so that she’d finish up her IFR and commercial ratings at the same time.
On the way home that afternoon, I said, “There’s a skydiving class on Sunday. Four hours classroom and practice in the morning and two static line jumps in the afternoon.”
“Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” said Rick. He was driving, Clara beside him. I was also in the front seat—Joey and Marie were fondling each other in the back.
“Well, suppose you ended up in a plane that decided to stop working? However, my reasons have more to do with runway preparation. There’s a lot of flat land out there, but unless we walk over it, inspect it up close, we’re gonna miss some of the holes and rocks and logs. If we jump people in, before we land, they can inspect and mark a runway.”
“And if it’s totally unsuitable for a runway?”
I shrugged. “We walk to where the terrain is suitable.”
Joey leaned forward. “We’re moving the girls on Saturday. Aren’t we ever going to have a weekend off?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Everybody in for Sunday? I have to reserve space in the class.”
They all agreed, though Clara seemed less enthusiastic about it. “Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t tell my parents. The flying thing is freaking them out as it is. My mom’d have a cow.”
“Um. Perhaps you shouldn’t tell my father, either,” said Marie.
Rick, with a wooden expression, said, “Well, you can tell my mom. I don’t care if she has a cow.”
Rick’s mom called him every evening. Rick no longer answered the phone at the ranch, either screening it with the answering machine or making us get it. As I was tired of lying to his mother, I also screened calls. Joey didn’t care, though. Even if Rick was sitting right in front of him, Joey cheerfully told her, “Rick’s not in, Mrs. Bockrath, can I take a message?”
My mom received a call from Mrs. Bockrath, as well. She reported the conversation to me.
“I was very distressed when Charlie moved out, too. It’s hard to let go, isn’t it?”
“He’s too young!”
“This culture doesn’t handle teens very well, does it? Young or not, he’s legally an adult. What do you expect me to do?”
I’d spent an anxious week worrying about what my father would think, but last week, when I’d had supper with my parents, Mom told Dad about it. He’d shaken his head and said, “Woman has a screw loose. Keep the gate locked.” Sometimes Dad is okay.
Anyway, Clara said, “No need to tell your mother anything. She’s called my mother several times and said horrible things about me. Last time my mother hung up on her.”
Rick’s wooden expression became a grimace, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“Let’s not talk about her, okay?”
Clara glanced sideways at him. “Sorry.”
I set up a target range on the wildside, using bales of hay for the targets and the hill by the hangar as a backstop, but it was Clara who taught everyone how to shoot.
“Look,” she said. “Without the stock it’s not really designed to fire like a rifle. You don’t hold it up to your cheek and sight down
the barrel. Instead, hold it like this.” She held her right hand, gripping the pistol grip, to her side just below the ribs. Her left hand was on the pump, supporting the barrel. “Be consistent. Pivot at the waist to adjust your aim right and left. Raise and lower your left hand, uh, that is your non-trigger hand, to raise or lower your aim.”
We all put our ear protectors on and then she turned abruptly to fire, not at the target before her, but the one on the end. Then she shot at each target in turn, as fast as she could work the pump.
Five shots and five targets. We were shooting at thirty feet with bird shot and the targets were large enough that the grouping was visible. She was slightly high and slightly to the left of dead center, but it was the same on each target.
She turned back to us. “Not too bad. I’m used to a twenty-gauge.” She looked at the sun—it was after seven. “We got another half hour. Let’s make some noise.”
We set up group target practice for twice a week, after that, with individuals practicing whenever they wanted.
Whenever we were carrying the shotguns for protection, we loaded them with buckshot and rifled slugs, alternating every shell. We were also carrying the Cap-Stun gas, the air horns, and extra ammo hung on a nylon harness.
“Charlie’s Rangers,” Joey said.
“Give me a break,” I said. “More like a street gang.” But I wasn’t unhappy with the thought.
Money drained out of the account at an alarming rate. Sure, there was still more than three hundred thousand dollars, but the insurance payments and the withholding and Luis’s cut and the bookkeeper’s fees and the instruction fees and our weekly salaries steadily pulled the balance down.
And I bought things.
I bought a ground station for Wildside Base, several thousand dollars’ worth of radios and antennas. One transceiver for voice traffic, one transmitter to broadcast a continuous AM homing signal (Morse “W” for wildside), and a transmitter for ATIS. ATIS stands for Automatic Terminal Information Service, a continuous loop broadcast of local weather and airport procedures.
Normally a human would record this info every half hour or so onto a tape loop, but we were not exactly overstaffed. My next purchase was a PC-based automated weather station which took input from externally mounted sensors and logged it and used a voice board to transmit the information on the ATIS transmitter, using a clear but mechanical tenor voice. It sounded something like the voices used by the phone company’s directory information. “Time One Zero Four Five. Temperature Seven Five. Wind One Two Knots at Three Zero Five. Barometric Pressure Two Nine Point Three. Precipitation Zero.” Pause. “Time One Zero Four Six. Temp—” You get the idea.
By the time I finished mounting antennas, rain gauge, wind vane, and anemometer on the roof of our control tower, it looked more like some scientific outpost than a deer blind. I ended up mounting the wind sock on the front edge of the hangar roof, to keep it from fouling on the antennas.
More money—I had another phone line run to the house with an extension to the barn. The phone company charged me twelve hundred dollars to run the extra line from the road. When they were done, we ran phone line through the tunnel and put extensions in the hangar and control tower.
Had an electrician run a 220 line from the meter at the house to a new breaker box in the barn.
When he was done, Joey and Marie replaced the extension cord with fixed wiring, replacing the power strips with permanent outlets. More money.
Bought a voice-activated recorder for the tower to record incoming transmissions when there wasn’t anyone to hear them. More money.
Had a security firm install an electric eye across the dirt road on the inside of the gate. If anybody drove or walked across it, it set off a buzzer in the house, barn, and (after we wired it) the wildside hangar. More money.
Bought a small tank-trailer, four feet around and six and a half feet long which held six hundred gallons of aviation gasoline. The company that serviced Easterwood and Coulter field agreed to come by and fill it as needed. If we lowered it four inches by letting air out of its tires, we could pull it through the tunnel with the tractor.
Bought parachutes (parasails, actually), bought four more portable aviation transceivers, bought wilderness survival kits, bought a thousand-dollar celestial sextant. More money.
The account dropped below three hundred thousand.
Joey jumped but admitted later that he didn’t particularly like it. Marie jumped without hesitation, landing with a huge grin on her face. Clara wanted to go again, right now. Rick froze in the doorway.
“You don’t have to,” I shouted into his ear over the noise of the engine and the wind in our faces.
“Nobody will blame you for good sense.” Then, with a twinge of guilt, I added, “Your mother would probably prefer it.”
That did it. His clenched hands released the doorframe and he thrust himself convulsively out into the void.
I’d been so worried about who would jump and who wouldn’t that I hadn’t realized how terrified I was. I had to close my eyes to jump and didn’t open them until after the chute opened.
At that point it was fine. After all, it was just another aircraft, right? Steerable, with excellent stalling characteristics. I turned into the wind and ended up bringing the chute down twenty feet away from Clara, flaring as much as I could and falling in the fashion we’d practiced all morning. It was a halfhearted effort, though. My downward speed was almost nil.
The second jump was better all around. Knowing what was going to happen eliminated most of Rick’s fear. Joey still didn’t like it, but expected he could do it. Marie and Clara wanted more free fall, and I was able to keep my eyes open.
We signed up for tandem free fall sessions the following Sunday, weather permitting.
The fourth week of my A&P course, I took delivery on a two-year-old Maule M-7-235 Super Rocket. Contrary to its name, it wasn’t a rocket, but an airplane—a STOL single-engine tail dragger that, with the optional jump seat in the baggage area, could seat five. This particular plane had been used by a West Texas rancher and flown off of dirt strips on his ranch. It cost us eighty thousand and had minimum IFR avionics.
Once insurance had been arranged, we used it to commute to T.I.A. for classes, all five of us jammed in, Marie stuck in the jump seat because she was lightest and Rick in the right-hand seat because he was longest.
On days of the week when I wasn’t along, Marie was Pilot-In-Command and the others took turns in the right-hand seat. We also received a significant reduction in the T.I.A. course fees by providing the Maule as a teaching aircraft. Marie, Joey, Rick, and Clara took some of their instruction and solo practice time in it, once they’d been type certified.
“It makes you lazy,” said Clara. “I go back to the Cessna Skylane and my rudder work suffers.”
In most planes, a turn is executed by banking with the control yoke while giving an appropriate amount of right or left rudder with the rudder pedals. On the Maule, the ailerons were spring linked to the rudder servo tab, making normal balanced turns possible even if one’s feet were completely off the rudder pedals.
Of course you still had to use rudder for slipping sideways on crosswind landings, or spin recovery, and other maneuvers. Still, the Maule was a pleasant and forgiving plane to fly as well as being tough as nails.
We also did the periodic maintenance in our A&P lab, having it signed off by our instructor, who was not only A&P certified, but also an Aircraft Inspector, the next level up.
Later, we went back to driving, while the Maule sat in the A&P hangar and, under our instructor’s guidance, Marie and I removed and refastened the wings, did rivet work, and completely overhauled the engine, even though it wasn’t due for another two hundred hours. We also added Maule Air’s optional auxiliary fuel tanks in the outer wing to extend the range.
By the time we finished the course, I was confident of our ability to do scheduled maintenance ourselves, and, most importantly, get the Maule t
hrough the tunnel and flying on the other side.
It was easy to arrange the surprise—after all, I had three more days a week out of class. We were flying the Maule home from T.I.A., having completed written and practical exams. We were done, carrying certificates, licenses, and in general, good feelings.
Marie had the jump seat in back, while Clara and I sat in the middle. Joey and Rick were at the controls, with Rick calling the shots.
Scary. It was the first time that we’d flown with them when neither Marie nor I were within reach of the controls.
They did fine. If they flew by the numbers more than by feel, they at least knew the numbers.
This pitch attitude at this power setting results in this rate of climb. An approach speed of 1.3 times full-flap-stall speed results from this power setting and this pitch attitude. V sub x, best angle of climb, is achieved at this airspeed. V sub y, best rate of climb, is achieved at that airspeed.
Joey put the Maule down on the grass at a slightly higher speed than I would’ve, but I didn’t feel in danger, and the grass stopped the plane without undue wear on the brakes.
“Pretty good,” I said, when they finished the engine shutdown.
Marie hit my arm from behind. “Pretty good? It was great! You guys are good pilots and don’t let anybody tell you differently!”
Everybody piled out. Unlike the Mooney, the Maule had plenty of doors—pilots’ doors port and starboard and a double door starboard rear that let large loads be stowed.
“Well,” Joey asked, “how do we celebrate?”
It was the first time we talked about it. By common consent we’d avoided the subject since it was possible that one of us could fail our exams at first attempt.
However, I’d talked privately to their instructors and they’d been confident.