William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

In the basement, next to Radnor, the navigator was talking to his son. Reach for the sky, boy! Tyler’s fingers reached out toward the wide blue eyes, gently stroking the child’s pink cheek. The sky’s yours, Timmie. Daddy will take you there, where you can fly high, proud… Below the photograph, Tyler’s radar screen erupted in a frenzy of crazily jumbled signals and his temper erupted, too. Irresponsible, sonuvabitch!

“Dammit, Halupalai! Knock that horseshit off! You’ll screw up every civilian air controller from Edmonton to Juneau. They’ll roast our royal rears when we get back!”

Halupalai instinctively turned off the jammer. Then he wondered why he was taking orders from Tyler. Then he shrugged it off. No one offered a joke. No one said a word, and they flew on silently, northward.

Kazakhs rarely went into the woods again. He held tough in school, mainly to avoid being dragged off with his old man. In his spare time, he took to cruising the pinball emporiums, then the pool halls, then the back-room poker games. Pretty soon they said the kid could tune a flipper, palm an ace, too, the way his old man could read the woods. He came back to the weathered old house on the Coos late each night, long after Big Kazakhs was shaking the rafters with that Jim Beam snore. By the time the kid was sixteen they said he could hustle a fiver out of anyone in Coos Bay, just as he could hustle the shorts off anything female. Almost anything female.

Sarah Jean was a wisp of gossamer, her golden curls flouncing down over tight teenage breasts the way they did in those slow-motion shampoo commercials. She carried him into another world, as if she held the magic to draw him out of the murk of the Coos and into Clairol’s fantasy land where the sun always shone, the flowers always bloomed, and a soft wind always tousled the high grass of perfect meadows just as it tousled perfect curls. Sarah Jean was too flawless for poon—how his pa chortled at that—and the closest the captivated kid ever came to her shorts was the tender touch of hands, the tentative move of a sinewy arm over a cashmere sweater. Never had he held anyone—anything—in such awe.

For most of his last year at high school, Sarah Jean drew him out of the pool halls and the card rooms. He watched her at the football games, the princess of the Coos, a cheerleader, the tight breasts bouncing as she leaped— rah! rah! Then it was the basketball games, where she always leaped— rah! rah! —the slender thighs spreading exuberantly in a winter cheer. But she was too good and too pure for the usual spread, and the thought barely invaded his mind. He did not go with her to the proms and the sock hops. His pa’s old truck was not good enough for that and he understood, just as he understood when she went with others. That would change, just like the poon, when they finally left the sullen Coos. Together.

For months it went on, with I love you returned by I love you, with long unwatched drives in the rattletrap old Ford truck and longer walks down the majestic dunes where the mist always lifted for Sarah Jean. With her, he recaptured his vision of the future. At the shore they would walk to the highest dune and they would sit, amid the sand ripples and the rustling reeds, dreaming and staring far out to sea, into tomorrow, into the escape they both wanted. They would lie back and watch the jet contrails carry other dreamers to distant alabaster cities, knowing that they would be carried away too. Together.

It was the night before graduation that Sarah Jean told him. They stood on the dunes, the sun setting in a brilliant spring evening, and she said she was not going with him. She would make the trip into the world with the president of their class—a kid with glasses, for God’s sake; but a kid with a scholarship to Stanford, a sure ticket out—and they would be married the next week. Kazaklis stared into the falling sun and knew the reason was his pa’s old truck, no ticket that, but he turned toward her anyway with cow-brown eyes dying and disbelieving.

“Why, Sarah Jean?” he asked, his words strangled in pain.

“Nothing is forever,” she said simply, and the sun sank.

“Why not?” he begged, but the pain broke his voice and he couldn’t wait for an answer because the tears were welling and he couldn’t let her see them. He couldn’t let anyone see. So he ran. To the truck. He clattered up the river road, past the old moss-covered house to the trailhead, leaped out and raced into the woods, where it was raining. And he built a fire in the rain, using pitch as his pa had taught him—damn his pa—and he sat through the night, crying.

The next night he graduated, miracle everyone said that was, and took a hustled twenty down to the Sportsmen’s and laid it on the felt in front of Nikko. Her talons flicked the Bicycles at him, his fingernails deftly nicking a few edges, and the twenty turned to fifty. Which he pushed across the felt, knowing it was twice the price. The next morning, at the house on the Coos, the raven lady’s clinging black trousers were hanging from the antlers over the door. Pinned to the kid’s trophy was a note saying he was joining the Air Force because he didn’t want to get drafted and muck around in the woods in Nam the way he had mucked around in the woods of the Coos. The real reason was that he wanted to ride the jet contrails. It was a long while before Kazaklis learned that Sarah Jean’s first baby had been born just six months later. He never allowed himself to see wisps of gossamer again.

The radio silence became oppressive. For thirty minutes none of them spoke to each other, except for the occasional monotone course corrections from Tyler. And nothing had come in from the outside.

Moreau, even though she had been through this dozens of times before in long droning practice runs, felt fidgety. She squirmed in her seat, shifting against the discomfort of her parachute pack and finally relenting against the weight of her bulbous white helmet, lifting it off so her jet-black hair spilled over the fireproof green of her shoulders. She ran an ungloved hand through the hair, giving it a finger comb, and arched her back to loosen the taut muscles.

It was an inadvertently sensual show and Kazakhs cast a sidelong glance at her, surreptitiously, as if he had caught her in the shower. Without the helmet, she was a woman, all right, and a pretty one, he had to admit. Her face had a soft glow in the red light and the one blank eye gave her what Kazakhs suddenly saw as a mutated beauty, as if she had been transformed from moth to butterfly.

Shake your head, Kazakhs. Bitch to witch is more like it. Last-woman-in-the-world syndrome.

Moreau, pensive and restless, suddenly broke the silence. “We gonna make it?” she asked, not seeking confirmation as much as conversation.

Kazakhs chuckled. “Wull, uh, golly gee, I dunno, ma’am,” he mocked her. “You think we have time?”

Moreau’s face snapped left to glare at him; then she merely shook her head in despair. “Kazakhs, I think you’d go to the Last Supper with your fly open.”

“You shock me,” the pilot replied gravely. “There are limits.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“That was a menonly outfit, Moreau. The way it was meant to be.”

“Jesus.”

“You know your history.”

“Well, we’re making it now…” Moreau abruptly caught herself, trying to avoid that trap again. “History, Kazakhs, making history.”

Some of the bravado seemed to drain out of the pilot’s voice as he replied, “Making it or ending it.”

The plane bumped, a good solid whack of clear-air turbulence, and Moreau automatically reached forward to reset the flashing yellow Master Caution light. She sagged back, pulling at a strap that was pinching at her chest, and saw that Kazakhs didn’t notice this time. He seemed lost in thought.