Chapter 6

Haley’s turn:

Because after all it IS my story, okay?

Long list of people who I promised airplane rides in the last few months at college. Most of them are fellow engineering students.

“Applied physics,” I say. It’s fun. Lots of people fly. You buy a ticket, go get on an airplane, get off at the other end. I’ve never done that. Fly? Mom and Steve couldn’t afford that, and me and Deena and Bill never had a destination we couldn’t drive to. But this...

Garvey’s sitting in the right seat. “You sure you wanna do this?”

“Hell, yeah...”

Garvey’s a minority. Not that many black guys in engineering. He’s working hard for it, and I applaud his efforts. He and I have gotten together over a couple of lessons. One of the professors asked me if I minded. I don’t mind. Of course, I had Carlita there with me. Two of us, we’re intimidating.

He got the credits, though.

I popped open the window, hollered “CLEAR!” and hit the starter. Two hundred sixty horses woke up.

“This thang shakin’,” he said. “That okay?”

“Perfectly normal. Lots of engine. This thing doesn’t weigh half what your car weighs.”

“Oh, okay. You know this stuff,” he observed.

“Got to. Government-issued license. Tests and all that. Let me get us off the ground, then you get to try...”

“I’m just sittin’ here. You don’t give out peanuts or something?” Big grin. He thinks he’s hilarious.

“Had to cut out the peanuts. Too many people got allergies.”

We went through the run-up, took off, got a few thousand feet under us, and I let him fly, talking him through turns and climbs and glides.

“Dude could get into this,” he said.

“Dunno, Garvey,” I said. “Probably fewer black pilots than black engineers.”

“I don’t go where everybody else goes, Haley. You know that.”

“You’re right. If you’re interested, go for it. I can give you information...”

“Might do that. That big yellow plane. Two wings...”

“Stearman biplane. I fly that.”

“Yeah, saw you on the news.”

“Fun. Little bit airy in the winter, though.”

“I can see dat,” he said.

We made a big circle around the town, my standard tour.

Landed, got out, he drove off, I scratched another name off my list.

For ten o’clock, one of the engineering professors is visiting to talk with us about our hand. It’s our way to get credit for a lab course.

That means ... Yeah, there they are ... Carlita and Brindy walking across the runway. Sandy and Deena were there when I left.

I met Carlita and Brindy at the front step.

“Y’all coulda helped me push ‘er back in the hangar,” I said.

“No,” Carlita answered. “You’re not done flying yet.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“If you don’t mind,” Brindy said. “We’d just like to make a run to the coast and back. I love the marshes in winter.”

“You got it, then. Let’s go see what Doctor Panton has to say.”

Carlita’s eyes flashed. “We have this one assured.”

“I think so,” I said.

The professor showed up. It’s far from his first visit, as in, “You people have an actual place I want to visit. There is no way you’d get me to visit the student dorms.”

Brindy snickered at that one. “They probably have a very broad selection of bongs. We lack that.” Brindy pops out some good ones, but she looks so totally wallflowerish, so you’re lulled into a sense of security.

We delivered five different documents, one from each of us, on recent work on the hand. Deena and me, we did the sensors. Brindy handles physical configuration. Sandy did the removable interface devices and Carlita showed the data, in and out.

“You understand that we have to be just a little vague, Doctor Panton. This is a branch of 3Sigma Robotics’ R&D. Industrially sensitive, and some of it may go to the DOD or one of their designees.”

“Amazing,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “this morning I ran into another of my students working. He’s a barista at the Starbucks by the campus.”

“That’s temperature and pressure ... Applied chemistry and process control,” Carlita added, not very helpfully. That’s, uh, Holston Campbell, correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“He’s talked with us,” Carlita continued. “We’re gonna have him as a paid intern this summer. We have a substation project that’ll give him a good look at power technology at work.”

“Based on his coffee, no doubt,” Doctor Panton grinned.

“We can beat Starbucks coffee any day of the week,” Deena said.

He sipped his mug. It’s from OUR coffee room. “Yeah, you really do.”

“What about you?” he posed to our group. “Are any of you interning here?”

“Sorta,” I sighed. “But me ‘n Deena’re too young for field work. We’re waiting until summer and we’re going to do a couple of weeks at Auburn. Our robotics lab.”

“We can do field work, Brindy and I,” Carlita said, “But unless we can go with Dave, we do no overnights. Holston’s going to be out of town for most of that project.”

I don’t think that Doctor Panton knows the full range of the relationship between Dave and Carlita and Brindy.

That’s okay. I know. We know. Us. Our little community.

Doctor Panton left us, promising that he’d come out with his wife for our steak dinner on Saturday.

We picked at Sandy a bit. Matt’s working his day shift rotation and doesn’t get home until almost seven.

“I’m going to our apartment to pine away,” Sandy said.

“You’re so dramatic,” Deena giggled.

Sandy stuck a pose, nose in the air. “One day you’ll be in love and you’ll understand...” and she left.

After she left, I loaded me and Deena and Carlita and Brindy in the 185 and we flew down to the coastline, swinging wide over the winter-browned wetlands.

We maintained twenty-five hundred feet, still able to see the flocks of birds in the waters, high enough not to disturb the ones that were resting, also high enough to avoid most of those in flight, but you can bet I had my head on a swivel, looking. Hitting a waterbird would be disastrous for him, for sure, and could very likely damage us as well.

We’re chatting among ourselves as we return.

“We really need to get a better handle on this whole ‘dinner’ thing,” Brindy said. “We’re chaotic.”

I laughed. “I can make it easy. Just plan on having me ‘n Bill and my evil step-daughter over on any given evening. Otherwise I have to beat her until she cooks a proper meal.”

Brindy snickered. “You’re doing a much better job of hiding the strap marks from her beatings.”

“She is being properly submissive?” Carlita quipped.

“Just exactly the right amount,” I said.

“It is a very careful thing,” Carlita quipped. “You must retain some measure of spirit in the beast in order that she does not become dull.”

“Dave does not know which of us trained the other,” Brindy laughed. “And...”

“The reality is that we trained HIM,” Brindy stated. “Well-trained.”

“Regularly exercised,” Carlita tittered.

“Poor Dave,” Deena laughed.

“AH, yes, poor Dave,” Carlita echoed.

“And sometimes it is ‘poor Brindy’ or ‘poor Lita’.”

“Balance comes to life,” Carlita said.

“Did you ever imagine it would be this way?” I asked the gang.

“No,” Carlita said. “I had no idea.”

“Thought I’d end up with a buncha kids and shit for a husband. Saw too much of that,” Brindy said. “Didn’t see a way out of it. Women just tryin’ to get something out of that life. Hard.”

“I still don’t know,” Deena said with a giggle. “I’m too young to worry about that.”

“I knew it was gonna be Bill,” I said. “Sometime when I was twelve, when he first started helping me, being my friend. I knew it was gonna be Bill.”

“If that becomes your point of reference, I made a similar determination about a week after I met Dave,” Carlita said. “I did not know how, but I knew that if I wished Dave, then Dave would see, and I prayed that it would happen.”

Brindy’s voice... “I was convinced by Dave’s sister that we, she, me, and Dave would be a family. I didn’t even KNOW Dave, but Pat told me of the most wonderful man in the world. Pat was the first person that I can say was truly worthy of my trust. We planned.”

“I know this story,” Carlita said. “Dave brought me home, the plans went away. Came back, with me in the middle...”

“Then the Great Sadness. I could have been put aside. Left.”

“We couldn’t do that. Carlita also said that Dave was most wonderful. He became mine.” Wistful. “I am a believer.”

Deena perked things up. “My best friend married my Dad. It was perfect. I wanted something with a guy like my Dad. I wanted to see him look at me like he looks at my best friend. It took a miracle, but suddenly he wasn’t ‘Dad’, not genetically...”

“You still call him ‘Dad’, though.”

“Fifteen years of conditioning,” Deena said. “Besides, it’s a tiny little kink, okay?”

“Kinks’re good,” Brindy said, emerging from the darkness. “Lita’s toes...”

“Brindy!” Carlita squeaked.

“Toe freak? Wow, Brin!” Deena tittered.

“I dunno how she walked a thousand miles on those feet,” Brindy continued.

“Oh, Twinkle-toes,” I giggled at Carlita. “You’re doing the landing. Let’s do a regular pattern.”

She keyed the mike, telling our neighbors we were in the area, and what our intentions were.

“How many more hours?” I asked her.

“Two or three. Me and Brindy both.”

“You know what we SHOULD do for your private test, don’t you?”

“I’m sure it’s a great idea,” Brindy replied.

“What?!?” said Carlita.

“ONE of you fly the Stearman up there, the other flies the 152.”

“Or you could fly up with one of us in this thing and let the other fly the Stearman...” Carlita said.

“I dunno,” Brindy inserted. “You already broke the guy on that ‘Stearman’ thing...”

“Mister Mike thought it was great,” I said. “And seeing you two...”