Al Steiner
Intemperance #3
Different Circles
Chapter 1: A Visit Home
High above central California
July 3, 1991
The 1982 Cessna 414A Chancellor cruised placidly along in level flight 17,500 feet above sea level, its twin Ram VII turboprop engines driving it through the thin air at 220 nautical miles per hour. Inside the aircraft the pilot and his passengers sat comfortably in a cabin pressurized to eight thousand feet of altitude. Outside the windows they enjoyed a panoramic view of the cloudless summer sky and the foothills and peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains off to their right. To their left, the broad expanse of the Sacramento Valley stretched off to the west, framed by the low, rolling hills of the California coastal range. The city of Sacramento and its suburbs could be seen sprawling out beneath an ugly brown haze of summer smog. The aircraft flew more or less directly above the boundary between the valley floor and the foothills of the Sierras.
Jake Kingsley, former lead singer of the former rock band Intemperance, was sitting in the left-hand cockpit seat, his hands resting gently in his lap as the autopilot handled the mechanics of keeping the plane straight and level and on course. Jake had been a licensed private pilot for three years now. He carried an instrument rating, a multi-engine certification, and a pressurized aircraft operational certification. As of leaving the ground for this flight, his logbook showed 424 total hours of pilot time, including ninety-seven in the 414A Chancellor, which he had purchased two years before. If not for the months he had spent in self-imposed exile in New Zealand, he likely would have had another hundred hours or more in the log.
Jake was thirty-one years old on this day. His brown hair, which had been shoulder length, sometimes even longer, for his entire life past the age of thirteen, was now cut short, just barely falling over the tops of his ears. On his upper lip he now sported a carelessly trimmed mustache that extended just a tad beyond the corners of his mouth. Since his return to the western world from Oceania six months before, he had found that the short hair and mustache made for an almost foolproof camouflage. After all the years of trying to disguise who he was from adoring fans and committed haters by putting on hats and sunglasses and bulky clothing, the simple haircut and lack of shaving his upper lip had succeeded almost too well. Sometimes, these days, he had trouble convincing someone he really wanted to know he was Jake Kingsley that he was Jake Kingsley.
Jake’s body was looking a little better these days as well. Currently dressed in a simple pair of denim jeans and a button-up short-sleeved shirt, the blossoming beer belly he had recently sported was gone, replaced by the mostly flat and firm abdominal region that had marked much of his younger days. True, he was no longer skinny and gaunt as he had been back in his high school days, when his peer-assigned nickname had been “Bone Rack”, but he cut a respectable figure thanks to the morning runs he now habitually engaged in up in Griffith Park above his Los Angeles home, the thrice-weekly sessions on the weight machines in the downstairs of his home, and the relative reduction—though certainly not the elimination—of his alcoholic beverage intake.
Since the sky was clear with more than thirty miles of visibility, Jake was flying the plane under visual flight rules, or VFR, though he was only five hundred feet below the maximum altitude for such a thing. He did have his transponder squawking at Oakland Center for courtesy flight following, both so they would know that he existed and where he was if something went wrong, and so they would know where he was in relation to the commercial traffic flying above him. The plane passed a waypoint on the flight path—the VOR beacon located near Mather Air Force base outside of Sacramento—and turned gently to the right, settling on a new heading of 015 degrees—directly toward the small foothill town of Cypress, California thirty-six miles outside of the Heritage metropolitan region.
“We’re sixty miles out from Cypress muni now,” Jake told the woman in the copilot’s seat. She was not a licensed pilot, and was, in fact, never comfortable in the air at all, despite the fact that she had chosen both a profession and a marriage in which frequent air travel was pretty much mandatory.
“That means we start to descend now?” Celia Valdez, former lead singer of the former pop band La Diferencia asked, her white teeth nibbling a little on her lower lip. It was something she did when she was nervous, a habit Jake had learned to recognize over the past few months as they had spent an average of fifty hours a week together in a small, rented studio in Santa Clarita outside of Los Angeles.
“That’s right,” Jake said with a nod. He checked the frequency settings on his communications radio, confirming the primary channel was still set to the regional ATC frequency. It was. He keyed it up and spoke, his words picked up by the microphone on his headset. “Oakland Center, November-Tango Four-one-five.”
“This is Oakland Center,” a female voice replied. “Go ahead, Four-one-five.”
“Four-one-five is beginning descent toward KCCA, maintaining present course, will cancel flight following at four thousand feet.”
The air traffic controller repeated back his words, her voice calm, cool, professional. Jake suspected her voice would remain at that same tone and inflection even if a fully loaded 747 was reporting a catastrophe and declaring an emergency. I copy you’ve collided with another aircraft, your roof has peeled away, and you’ve lost three engines, she would chirp. Can I give you a vector to the nearest airport?
Jake punched the altitude he wanted to descend to—3000 feet—and the rate of descent he wanted to maintain—1200 feet per minute—into the autopilot panel. Upon hitting the enter key, the plane immediately began to nose down. His avionics package did not include an auto-throttle, so he had to manually pull back the two levers, his eyes tracking on the airspeed indicators to keep them at or about 220 knots indicated. The engine noise wound down and the altimeter began to spin downward.
“See?” Jake said to Celia with a smile. “Nothing to it.”
“As long as nothing goes wrong,” she said, giving her lip another chew.
“As long as nothing goes wrong,” he agreed. “Remember the first rule of flying with me though.”
“As long as you don’t look worried, then I have nothing to worry about,” she dutifully recited.
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the beauty of getting to sit in the cockpit.”
Celia gave him a weak smile, chewed her lip one more time, and then continued to grip the sides of her seat with her hands. She was just one of those people who was never going to be comfortable in the air.
Like Jake, Celia was looking a little better these days than she had in recent times. She too had had her entire musical career thrown into turmoil and uncertainty at about the same time as Jake and the rest of Intemperance had gone their separate ways. Type-cast as a teen pop singer despite one of the most beautiful contralto voices since Karen Carpenter, she had been unable to secure an acceptable contract for a solo album after Aristocrat Records refused to pick up La Diferencia for another album. Locked into depression and anxiety that was amplified by the problems her husband—actor Greg Oldfellow—was experiencing in his own career, she had put on thirty pounds and let herself go to some degree.
The challenge of going independent and producing her own solo album had had the same effect on Celia as it had on Jake. Hope and purpose were great healers. She had stopped the midnight snacking (and early afternoon snacking, and the late morning snacking) and had started hitting the gym once again. The effect was now apparent. As she sat in the right cockpit seat, dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a sleeveless cranberry colored blouse, she was back to her fighting weight of one hundred sixty-five pounds on her nearly six-foot tall, Amazonian frame. Her dark hair flowed majestically over her shoulders and her breasts pushed alluringly at the front of her blouse. Her hips and rear-end were back to their premium proportions—the curves of which made men ache with wanting when they saw them.