Arms folded, grinning, he nodded. “You’re good, kuh, cadet.”
“You were going to say ‘kid,’ ” she accused, seeing him wipe the new stubble on his chin and knowing it was to hide his needless chagrin. “I don’t care, now that I know you know better.” She leaned her head back, feeling the tightness of sunburn on her face, perfectly at peace as the great orb of light sank into the Texas plains. “You can take it back now. There is no way I can possibly thank you, Kyle. Whatever happens for the rest of my days, I have flown Black Stealth One down a Texas-sized island on a warm summer evening.” She paused a long moment. “That’s FUN, “she said.
“That’s fun,” he agreed and, after another pause, added, “You were right, some kinds of fun are worth whatever risk it takes. Wup, see those lights on the horizon? Rockport, I think. That’s a risk we don’t have to take,” he added, and swung the hellbug’s nose inland to the north of the township, ignoring an airport nearby. “Paint us like a big-assed bird,” he suggested. “That should work from above or below.”
As she complied, Petra said, “I think you’ve been without much fun for so long, you want to call it something else.”
“Something more dignified,” he said, almost comically defensive, “at least when you’re risking your buns for it.”
Staring into the sliver of remaining sun as they drifted over a bay toward land, Petra murmured, “My mother’s tombstone should have ‘dignity’ on it. My father’s too, but with a little parenthesis below that says, ‘fun.’ How about yours?”
“I’d have to dieand I have other plans,” he chuckled.
“Play the game,” she urged. “Mine will say ‘fun’ in big letters, and maybe ‘usefulness’ below. Now you.”
After a long silence, ghosting across a clean beach toward another expanse of water, he said, “Vengeance. Maybe ‘fun’ below, maybe not.”
“Wonderful,” she muttered. “You’ve really picked my spirits up, Kyle. I’ve cast my lot with a man who wants to be remembered for his most negative quality.”
“Sorry. I might have a different answer next week, or next month.”
She gazed at him earnestly. “Will I be able to ask you then?”
“Probably not,” he admitted, then returned her gaze and smiled. “But anything’s possible. You never know when I might need a copilot.”
She decided then that whatever his motives, he did not intend to relinquish Black Stealth One. Unless, of course, he was carefully laying down a network of lies as he had lied previously, using her as he had tried to use her before, as an agent of misdirection. “Well, you’ll know where to find me,” she said, jiggling her eyebrows, flicking an imaginary cigar in her best Groucho imitation.
“Yeah, in a federal hoosegow if you’re not careful.” He had guided Black Stealth One higher with the gradual rise of the land, revealing a solid coastline beyond the bay with a forest of oil pumps that spread for miles, some of the pumps bobbing slowly like the heads of great birds. A few miles off, an acre-wide cylindrical tank squatted, growing monstrously large as Corbett approached it. “Nobody on the ground could spot us up there,” he chuckled, swinging wide as he approached the storage tank. Petra noticed lights both to the north and south, defining two more townships. Headlights gleamed in gathering dusk on a highway between the towns.
They saw no lingering workers, no headlights in their immediate area, and Corbett lowered the hellbug gently until it touched down in a gauze of dust atop the curve of the tank dome. The tank, she saw, was truly awesome in size; so vast that a craft with much greater wingspread than Black Stealth One could have perched there without protruding. He checked the fuel readout one last time before snapping off the electrical power. “A little more than a gallonand the battery reads full-charge, in case you’re interested.”
“And we’re a hundred feet in the air,” Petra reminded him. “Don’t tell me the engine will take crude oil straight from this tank.”
“I made sure there’s a ladder and no, it won’t take Texas crude or ordinary fuel either, and I’ve used up most of my additive. What I need is green,” he sighed. “One hundred, one-thirty octane avgas.” He unfolded one of his maps, holding it up at arm’s length in the dusk. “Shit,” he muttered, and produced his tiny Maglite, adjusting its beam-spread to study the map.
“You’ve still got a whole bottle of additive,” she reminded him, “and we could siphon gas from cars with your gadget.”
“Gotta keep that for later,” he replied without elaborating, still studying the map. “We’re between Refugio and Woodsboro, and there’s an airport a half hour’s walk away, right aboutthere,” he finished, pointing midway between the nearby towns.
“No beacon?”
“Some do, some don’t,” he said, clearly preoccupied now, and grunted as he climbed out of the cockpit taking the fuel bladder with him.
Petra scrambled out onto the metal dome, stretching, learning to walk softly because she did not enjoy the low, ghostly echoes of her footfalls from the tank below her. “God, this feels weird,” she said, laughing at her own discomfort.
The curl of a steel ladder stood in the dusk, fifty feet away. They walked to it and grasped its rails, scanning the ground several stories below. The distance to the nearest pump unit was hundreds of yards, she noted. He must have been thinking about those wide-open spaces too. “Long walk, ma’am, but you’re not coming anyhow. Does this height make you woozy?”
“Not anymore,” she said, laughing, and ran her arms around the barrel of his rib cage before she lost her nerve for it. She felt him start to pull back, hesitate, then clasp her roughly in a hug. He kissed the top of her head. “On the scalp doesn’t count,” she murmured, looking up at him. “Give me a real smack before you go.” I know you wouldn’t if I called it a kiss, she thought.
He kissed her with the tender diffidence of a boy but held her as if he meant it, then gave her shoulder a squeeze and turned, tossing the fuel bladder over the side of the tank. “Gotta go fuel up,” he muttered, and climbed over the edge.
“I’ve still got good ole Bobby’s money,” she said. “And how are you going to get twenty gallons in that plastic thing?”
“One thing I have is money,” he said, starting down. “And I’m going to improvise like hell. I’m a crop duster who’s out of gas like a damn fool; half of those guys are nuts anyhow. I’ll think of something,” he added, his voice diminishing in the faint pungent breeze.
She watched him as far as she could see him in the deepening night, reluctant to move, still savoring the kiss they had shared, even if she’d had to demand it and absorb the tingle of whiskers in the process. I’ve known freshmen who understood more about romance, she told herself, feeling the flush of sunburn on her cheeks as she smiled into the breeze. But I don’t love him with that dizzy kind of rapture I felt for the others. In fact, do I love him at all?
She noticed her first star of the evening and, feeling foolish as she did it, whispered an old formula. “…wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. I wishthat Kyle would get beyond vengeance and find me waiting. Okay, star, that’s two wishes; if I get the first, maybe the second will follow. And as for you, Corbett, you old bastard, don’t screw up and make me waste the first unselfish wish I’ve had in years.”
It was that unselfishness that pricked her intuition. Oh yes, I’m in love with him, twit that I am, and maybe I should not be dissecting it like a problem in stress analysis. But why not? Maybe because I’ll have to admit that it isn’t all unselfish. Uncle Dar used to laugh and say that Kyle Corbett led a wild life, and he said it with plain envy, which seemed strange to me at the time because my uncle is the most sober-sided responsible man in the world. But he envied Kyle; maybe enough to kill him? I can’t accept that. And the one thing I’ll never learn from Brown University is how to live with Corbett’s kind of decisive abandon. Could I become a pro in my field and still find his kind of damn-your-eyes freedom? Could anybody?