Chapter 10: Learning to Fly

Peter could tell by Lenna’s tightly closed eyes and trembling body that she was near exhaustion. Their bodies gleamed as the mid-morning light reflected off their sweaty skin. Her damp hair stuck to her face as she rode him, “Oh God! Baby,” she gasped urgently. “I can’t keep this up...”

In a well-choreographed motion, he raised his torso and embraced her before pulling her down onto his chest and rolling them over. After only the briefest interruption, he settled atop her and took over. He was close when he felt Kathy’s warm hand reach down and caress him. His breath became ragged as he exerted himself while Lenna’s passionate cries were reduced to heavy grunts. With the added sensation of Kathy’s intrusion, Peter hissed and surrendered to his primal nature.

“That’s it, baby!” Kathy urged him. “Oh my god!” she exclaimed. She could feel his convulsive spasms as he poured his seed into the Apache woman.

Their passionate cries filled the room as Lenna clung to his hips, pulling him tightly against her.

Kathy’s face was glowing as she moved aside for Peter to collapse beside his lover. “That was a baby maker!” She laughed delightedly, sweeping Lenna’s sweaty bangs from her face as the woman lay panting beside her.

“Oh ... Jesus!” she gasped with shuddering breaths. Kathy traced circles down the girl’s heaving chest and fondled her as she smiled at her exhausted husband.

Despite their intense lovemaking, Jacali and Abigail remained asleep in the next-door nursery. Charity had left for school hours earlier, leaving them to pursue their goal of impregnating the mother of the two sleeping girls. The four dogs sprawled out in their sunny spots beneath the kitchen and living room skylights.

“Do you think Terry heard us?” Lenna asked self-consciously. The security guard, on detail, lived in a black van parked less than 5 yards from her bedroom.

Kathy laughed. “I think Old Begay heard you two!” she mused. “Terry’s either working out by the cistern or playing Ultima IV with headphones on,” she added.

Peter rolled onto his back to recover for a minute before sitting up. He kissed his Lenna passionately before turning to his wife and doing the same. “You two are wearing me out!” he grumbled, climbing off the bed and stretching. Both women admired his gleaming, muscled body as he posed before stepping into her bathroom to shower. His new composite carbon fiber prosthetics were comfortable enough for him to wear almost continuously, even in the shower.

“God!” Lenna whispered breathlessly. “How did I get so lucky?”

“We, baby,” Kathy corrected. “How did ‘we’ get so lucky?”

Lenna and Kathy returned home later that afternoon to find the dining table covered with familiar posters, a large roll of butcher paper, and a pile of pens, pencils, markers, and various straight edges and rulers. Voices were coming from Charity’s room, so they put their grocery bags on the kitchen counter before investigating.

They found Charity behind her easel sketching rapidly while Felicity posed on her bed, holding an uncooperative Dotty. The younger girl’s hair was braided into ponytails, and feathers were woven into her braids.

“What’s all this then?” Kathy asked idly as she looked over Charity’s shoulder. The sketch was rough but incredible in capturing the other girl’s likeness.

“We’re taking a break because our brains hurt,” Felicity chirped, giving up on containing the excited pup. Dotty barked happily at the two adults and circled their tan legs in greeting.

“We ran out of Yoo-hoos,” Charity added, tongue sticking out as she sketched. Sighing, she stepped back from the easel and set her pencils down. “That’s good enough for now,” she stated. “I can finish it later.” Her room was decorated with her artwork, primarily sketches, but with random watercolors and an odd oil painting.

Kathy never tired of taking it all in. “That’ll be amazing when you finish,” she remarked, eyeing the rough sketch. The adolescent had given her a large portrait of her and Peter for her birthday. The image captured him gazing calmly off to the side while she held his head in her arms, her chin resting atop his head with its former unruly shoulder-length hair. She gazed at the viewer with brilliant steel-gray eyes full of peace and happiness. It was now framed and occupying the wall over their headboard.

Lenna pretended indifference as she returned to the kitchen. “Why don’t you get your cousins out of the truck and help bring in the groceries,” she suggested. “You might find another case of diabetes in the truck bed. Thanks, Terry!” she concluded as the broad-shouldered security man stepped inside carrying a load of groceries.

“You’re welcome, ma’am,” the giant Irishman replied softly. Terrance Gallagher was a Boston-born former cop who left his job for the private sector after a bitter divorce. He was the epitome of a mercenary for hire, minus the dour complexion and sinister vibe. Despite his gentle demeanor, he was one of two operators in the Shipley protective detail who had killed in the line of duty. He was dressed in tight tactical shorts over his heavily muscled hips and thighs and a loose cotton tank that stuck to his sweaty chest. A self-proclaimed gym rat, he was forced to ‘make do’ on the Rez with limited training equipment. It hardly stopped him from working out three times per day.

As he turned to exit the side door, Felicity gawked at his robust frame and turned back to the other women with wide eyes, fanning herself dramatically.

“Down, girl,” Kathy laughed as she brought up the rear. “Where is my husband?”

Terry pointed into the sky before grabbing grocery bags and handing them to her while the teenagers collected the infant and toddler from the crew cab’s back seat. She turned and glanced into the blue sky, squinting as she scanned the air over the valley bowl. Finally, her eyes caught the glint of an object far overhead, high above the basin. It was an older model Grob twin Acro sailplane that Paul Money used to teach Peter the art of gliding.

“Where did they launch from this time?” she asked, shading her eyes with her free hand.

The man grunted and pointed to the new road carved into the plateau’s north side. The wider route was necessary to get the large drilling rigs to the lakebed and provide access to Peter and Kathy’s new home site. “Crazy fool prefers to pull it behind that rattle trap truck,” the bodyguard grumbled.

Paul had arrived with the disassembled glider on a trailer behind his 1986 Dodge Ram the day before. Peter assumed they’d launch from the bottom of the lakebed, but the old pilot nixed the idea.

“Too squirrely down there,” he remarked softly. “Better to launch up here where we can hit the thermals immediately and stay up. He pointed out the occasional bird soaring overhead.

The hard-packed track was wide and smooth, offering an ideal towing track that ran straight and parallel with the plateau ridge for over 500 yards. They only needed half the distance to gain sufficient airspeed. The launching maneuver was tricky but seemed effortless with the skilled pilot and his quiet driver. Once the glider detached, the tow cable fell back to earth under a small drogue chute. The pilot banked off the rim and captured the first updraft from the heated valley floor. His driver was an old chain-smoking Hualapai Indian who spoke little.

Communication with the glider was limited to two-way radio for hands-free operation. They kept a hand-held unit in the kitchen so the fliers could contact them for a ride whenever they landed—provided the launch vehicle was unavailable.

“How long have they been up?” Lenna asked when she came back out for another load of groceries.

“Over an hour now,” the Irishman replied. “Must be some good soaring conditions.”

After helping to put away all the food and putting Jacali in her highchair with markers and paper, the two teenagers returned to their chore of transferring all of the family park doodles and notes onto the oversized sheet that Charity made from the butcher’s paper. Lenna and Kathy looked over their shoulders with thoughtful expressions. They were carefully compiling a 3-D conceptual drawing that featured an expansive layout over a red-lined boundary that matched the plot where the old leach field had once been. The woman found her lines very similar to the architectural drawings of the four-corners project that decorated the trading post.

“This is incredible, Char,” Kathy remarked in wonder. “How did you get the map of the leach field?”

Charity didn’t look up from her work as she slowly shaded in one of the cross-shaped ‘jacks’ in the middle of the skate park. “I traced it off Dad’s big blueprint in the shop and then blew it up by hand,” she replied as she worked. The overall picture showed the concept that Kathy and Trink had brainstormed with the kids. She recognized a large parking lot next to the north road and a lightly sketched pavilion and children’s park with rough images of swing sets, teeter-totters, a climbing wall, and a cargo net ‘web.’

“This looks just like how the architect did the plans for the Four Corners,” Lenna gawked, noting the corner scales and legends. “Girl, I think you have found your calling!”

Charity shrugged nonchalantly while secretly relishing the praise. “It’s kinda fun,” she remarked. “And it’ll be awesome if we can make it happen.”

“Oh, it’s gonna happen,” Kathy retorted confidently. She remembered approaching Peter about it and how nervous she felt as she practically begged him to consider the relevance and importance of the family-oriented project. He had looked up from the drawings with the same look of bewilderment and turmoil that she had felt when she first saw the haphazard constructions behind Trink’s studio.

“How could we have missed this?” he lamented as he pulled her into his arms. “I am so proud of you, babe,” he murmured into her hair, “Do whatever it takes.”

“How soon can you have this done?” she asked the girl as she stooped over the drawing.

“Jeez, mama-san,” the girl muttered back. “I just got started. Gimme a day or three.”

“Can you make it colorful?”

Charity snorted. “Anything else? Little birds flitting around? Kids puking on the merry-go-round?”

“Ooh!” Felicity burst excitedly. “Can you draw Toby bleeding to death in the ‘butt-hole,’ with his head split open?”

The two girls began giggling, and Kathy snorted as she returned to the kitchen.

“Why can’t we be so forgiving as adults?” she asked as she helped Lenna prepare dinner.

“The older we get, the more we lose sight of the importance of love.”

The architect Peter hired to design their new home was 26-year-old Gilbert Reynolds, a recent graduate of Cornell University and an ardent proponent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style of architecture. He answered Peter’s advertisement from his hotel room in Scottsdale, where he was staying as part of a year-long traveling sabbatical. He was currently immersed in the famous architect’s winter home at Taliesin.

On a whim, he called and invited Peter and Kathy to join him for a guided tour of the landmark heritage structure and spent the entire afternoon lauding the man’s talents and vision. Over dinner, Peter described the landscape and features of the valley and the area he wanted to develop. While he talked, the young artist doodled a rough sketch onto a napkin that took their breath away. They could instantly see how he captured the surrounding landmarks (as yet unseen except for the image in his mind’s eye from Peter’s description) and incorporated a futuristic-looking structure that struck Peter initially as a flying saucer half buried in the face of the plateau. Several levels seemed almost casually stacked atop each other like a cake but were tapered in a natural contour.

Kathy was speechless by the simple yet elegant lines on the napkin. “How did you come up with this concept?” she asked.

The man shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied offhandedly. “Listening to Peter’s description and having FLW’s winter home stuck in my head ... the way he incorporated all of the lines to capture the very essence of the Sonoran Desert...” he stared into space.

“Yeah, but the circles and rounded structure,” she replied. “That’s nothing like Taliesin.”

The man glanced back at his drawing as if seeing it for the first time and giggled like a child. “Oh damn,” he laughed. “When I was in school in Ithaca, I made almost weekly trips to the Guggenheim Museum near Central Park,” he said, smiling distantly. Peter knew without a doubt that they had found their architect—hiring him on the spot over coffee and dessert.

Several days later, he visited with a camera and sketch pads. The road to the site was still under construction, but they avoided the dust and noise by skirting the route on horseback. Charity took him since neither Peter nor Kathy felt comfortable riding. Later, over dinner, he showed them his basic concept drawings, and neither could find fault with his budding design. They began calling the site ‘Kowah’ after Charity’s margin note on one of her sketches. She claimed it was the Apache term for ‘home.’

As April progressed, so did their travel plans. Maggy arranged their itinerary for visiting the Quinten twins in the U.K. the following month after the Kentucky Derby. Charity obtained her passport and her father’s permission to accompany them on their transatlantic adventure.

For her part, the young woman doubled down on her efforts to complete the detailed concept drawing of the Apache Fun Zone. She hovered over Gil’s every movement whenever he attended the build-site, listening to his reasoning and tips for how and why he designed things a certain way. She also adopted many of his suggestions into her designs for the expansive park, and he commended her for her attention to detail. On Sunday, the 26th of April, she completed her plans and drawings, using nearly half of the huge roll of butcher paper.

Kathy arranged the prints for presentation and contacted Bradly for an appointment to make her pitch before the Whiteriver Council. She was granted her audience the very next day, and with Trink’s help, she corralled 16 tribal youths to join her in the old Hall. Peter remained absent at her insistence, and he fully supported her decision to tackle it on her own, knowing deep down that she commanded as much respect from the elders as he did.

With Sue’s help, the two women set up a casual presentation with easels displaying different concepts from Charity’s drawings for the playground. She even prepared a birds-eye concept rendered in full color to give everyone a general understanding of just how big the park would be. They spent an hour setting up the floor before the council table and even put out a table full of treats, with cookies, snack cakes, candies, soda pop, and a coffee service. When Bradly led the other nine elders into the chamber, they were taken aback to find the area staged in a way that allowed them to wander from one station to another where a group of children would explain the virtues of their particular interest—be it the skatepark, picnic area, sports complex, playground or the pavilion. Before the individual presentations, though, Kathy had to give her spiel and convince the group of the relevance and validity of offering such a venue to the community. Even Bradly was hesitant to endorse a program that presented a significant capital outlay with no promise of any return on investment.

“Who will pay for this?” he asked uncertainly, “And how much will it cost?”

“I will,” she declared flatly. “I will cover the initial construction, including the land survey and any necessary cleanup required to make the former leach field safe once more for people.”