Chapter VII

It was never meant to be.
I needed the comfort of having a girl “back home”, and she needed someone to build her fantasies around. She claimed that she loved me, but I was skeptical after our last time around.
We got together when I got out, but my heart wasn’t in it. It turned out she had attempted suicide shortly after our breakup and ended up in the hospital for a couple of months while she got her head together. That was why she never returned my letters. When she finally got it back together, she went looking for me to patch things up. She had built up this entire fantast of how things were going to be when I got back. The only problem with it was that it didn’t really include me. It included someone with my name, but it wasn’t me.
Since we were engaged and of age, we decided we should live together for a while. It didn’t take long for the cracks to show in out relationship. She was constantly talking about everything that led up to her suicide attempt. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It wasn’t until much later in life that I learned I didn’t have to DO anything, just listen. But guys are fixers, and when you present them with a situation, they want to fix it, even if it is unfixable.
I was not really in any shape to build a relationship. I was just coming off of a couple of years of some pretty stressful living, and I couldn’t give Star what she needed. I sure wasn’t getting what I needed. I wasn’t even sure what that was, but I wasn’t getting it. I started staying away, and finally broke it off.
So I ended up back in the States, discharged, disengaged, and unemployed. Federal law says that when you are drafted out of a job, if a comparable job is available when you get out of the service, the company has to hire you back.
Boeing had gone through some tough times while I was away. When I went to the employment office, they told me that I was laid off. I told them that Federal Law required that they hire me back. So they did, and immediately laid me off. I told them that if they had rehired me, they owed me at least one days pay. After a lot of confrontation they agreed. I got a check for one days pay. I still have that check, uncashed and in a frame, at home. It was just the principle of the thing.
I was discharged in Oakland, and elated to be out of my forced servitude. I really do believe that people should give a couple of years of service to their country as a payment for the rights we receive under the Constitution. No one should get a free ride.
I went back to my old stompin' grounds in The Haight, but in the three years I had been away things had changed completely. What was party town was now pretty hard core. Before the drugs of choice had been Pot and acid and maybe some hash. Now it was all speed freaks and heroine addicts. I didn't waste a lot of time there.
As a Vet I was eligible for some Government paid schooling, so I went back and upgraded my A & P License. I ended up getting rehired at Boeing. Because of my experience in the Army, repairing airframes in primitive conditions, I ended up working in AOG. That stands for Airplane On Ground.
When somebody does something they shouldn't with an aircraft, the results can be nasty. I'm not talking about when you lose a Bird, just when you damage one. A typical scenario is when you land in a thunderstorm in Brazil; don't make the end of the runway and end up out in the jungle. What usually happens is that you fold up the front landing gear. This takes out the aft wall of the nose landing gear box, the "doghouse" and then folds back to take out the main E/E bay and all the racks and shelves of electronics. I recall a 737 that did just that, only worse. They wiped out all three landing gears, the front and both the main gear, and ended up in a wide ditch just off of the runway. They drug it out of the perimeter ditch, brought in two semis with lowboys and a bunch of pallets. They used the jacking points to get it up in the air, then brought up the trucks, stacked up the pallets on the lowboys, put one under each wing, lowered the plane onto the (well padded) pallets, and drove it very gingerly down the runway to the repair hanger. It was quite a sight. The cost of the repair was still less that a whole new Bird, so the Insurance Company paid us to repair the thing on site. The cost was almost as much as a new aircraft, but a million bucks is still a million bucks, and we could get it back in the air in a couple of months, as opposed to waiting a year for a new one.
The first job I worked on was in Cairo. Two Air Egypt employees had been taxying a 757 out to the maintenance hanger and lost control of it. They stabbed the nose section in to the side of an Airbus A320 clear up to the front passenger door. We had to replace everything from the Captains & First Officers forward structure (the dashboard) to the nose. I can’t say much for their piloting skills, but I do approve of their aim.
It became a matter of pride for us to get our bird repaired and in the air before the Airbus crew did. It took us a couple of months, but our bird was done and back in the air before they had even started on the A320.
When you are out in the field like that, you work twelve hours a day, seven days a week It is a grueling schedule, and not a lot of people can stick with it for long. When you volunteer for AOG, you have to stick with it for at least a year, or your career is effectively over. They were very up front about it, because the money is very good if you can survive the schedule. The first eight hours are at regular pay, the second four time-and-a-half for four days, They fifth day the extra hours go to double time. The weekend or sixth and seventh days are double time. Sure, you work 86 hours a week, but you get paid for 124. Usually there are breaks in between jobs, where you go out to the factory for repairs and mods, but I know people who had in a thousand hours in overtime in a year. With the average 40 hour a year worker working 2,088 hours a year, that is one hour of overtime for every two of regular. AOG are kinda the pick of the litter, skills wise, so it isn’t all that unusual for they guys to make well over six figures. Not too bad for a knuckle dragging wrench monkey. Every once in a while when I am in the back end of nowhere, I wish I had used my Government money for College, so I could be sitting in a nice heated and air conditioned office in an ivory tower somewhere, but most of the time I have no regrets, and being behind a desk all day would drive me nuts.

Chapter VI

After the incident of the skating party, I started taking closer notice of Star. I don’t know if she wanted anything more than just to rile me up, but if that was the case, she got more than she bargained for.
On our first date we went to see Eugene O’Neal’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in Spokane. I chose it just because of the playwright’s last name. Star really got off on the dark nature of the play. I thought it was well done, but depressing as hell. It became a part of our history together. Whenever one of us would sneeze or cough the other would remark “It’s only a slight summer cold.” I was in love for the first time in my life. The contrast of her pale skin and brilliant hair, paired with her dark side made such an irresistible combination. Kinda like Wednesday Adams meets Julie Andrews. We went everywhere together and did everything together.
In August, my parents and uncle had gone to the coast for the day and left me in charge of the place for the weekend. Being the sensible and responsible person I was, I threw a party. Not just A party but THE party. People came from all over the county. My parents claimed that they were digging beer bottles out of the bushes for years afterwards. No one got hurt, no permanent damage was done and a good time was had by all. I brought Star. I wondered why she wanted to see my parent’s bed room. She had been around the house before, but never been in there. I was showing her the big old brass bed with the pineapples on the four corners when I heard a whishing sound behind me.
It was the sound of Star’s skirts dropping. It was followed by a lesser repeat of the same sound as her panties hit the floor. And the rest. I could do nothing at first but stand there with my mouth hanging open. I know this because she remarked “Pat, you’ll be catching flies, with your mouth open like that.” We had made out and indulged in some petting, but this was the first time I had seen her in the nude. It was everything I had fantasized about, and more. The whole of the parts was greater than the sum, as the saying goes. I have a very rich imagination, but here was one of the few times that the reality was greater than the dream. It was the first time for both of us, but there wasn’t a whole lot of awkwardness. We just let our bodies do what they were made for, and while I know a lot more now than I did then, what I knew then was sufficient to the task at hand.
When I graduated from High School, I headed out to the Coast to go to work for Boeing. I have loved aircraft since I saw my first one, and have been known to go on for hours about the SR71 Blackbird, The A-10 Warthog, or the P-38 Lockheed Lightning. Actually earning a living by building them was my dream job. I hated to be parted from Star, so I did something stupid and asked her to marry me.
She said yes, and so we were engaged for the first time. I have to say it was one of the happiest times of my life, that summer. The colors were brighter, the air smelled fresher, and everything was a new adventure. Star still had to complete her senior year, but that was OK. I could go out to the Coast and get established, get a place to live and get everything ready for her to join me when she graduated. I could come back every other weekend. If I left Seattle after work on Friday, I could be back in La Grange by midnight. That would give us all day Saturday and part of the day Sunday together. I got to know that stretch of road real well.
Then on November 18th an unexpected letter came. It didn’t start with the words “Dear John” but it might as well have. It was nothing I had done, there was no one else. She just needed to work some stuff out. She would drop the ring off with my parents. Would I please not hate her? I felt like my heart had fallen down into the pit of my stomach. I really felt I didn’t have a damn thing in this world to live for. My job meant nothing, my possessions were worthless, my friends clueless.
I quit my job and wandered. It didn’t matter too much where I was or what I did because it was all pointless anyway. I ended up in Haight-Ashbury living the life of a Hippy. I really don’t remember much about the next year. Between the drugs and the gloom I don’t care to spend much time remembering it. Just living was to be in pain. I partied a lot, but I was trying to fill up a hole inside me.
I got drafted into the Army, and I suppose it probably saved my life. After I sobered up and straightened up, I found myself a half a world away from home. There is nothing to get your attention like other people trying to kill you. It would have been easy enough to just stand up in the middle of a firefight, but I came to the startling realization that I didn’t want to die. Now all I had to do was get out of there alive. This is another part of my life I really don’t care to remember or talk about. I saw some things that remain little terrible snapshots stored in a special place in my head. I try to keep a lid on them, but sometimes they pop out and catch me by surprise. Some of them can break me out in a sweat. Others bring goosebumps. Suffice it to say that survive I did, more or less whole.
The only injury I sustained was right before I was to be sent home. I had been out celebrating my eminent return to the real world and tripped over a tent line while scurrying for cover while we were under a mortar attack. I broke my ankle. Because we were in a combat situation when it happened, I was awarded the Purple Heart. I got a couple of pins in my ankle and it aches when the weather is changing, but I fared better than a lot of people that got sent to that hell hole. As a result of the injury, I receive a small Government pension as a Disabled Vet. To me it has always been "car money", which enabled me to drive a slightly better car than I would have otherwise.
My family sent me "care packages" while I was over there. There was a local butcher shop in LaGrange that made beef jerky, and I have never had better beef jerky, although I have tried every brand on the market. They would send a couple of pounds with every package. As we are all big readers, there were always some paperback books. And cookies and stuff. Whenever I got a package, the guys in the unit would just happen to be hanging around.
One time right after I had gotten a package from home, they brought in the drug-sniffing dogs to our unit. The Army was very serious about the "drug problem", and I was suspect because I had lived in Haight-Ashbury. When the dogs got to my locker, they went nuts. I was at work fixing the hydraulics on a Huey when I got the call to report back to the unit. They told me that the drug-sniffin-dogs had gone nuts at my wall locker. The only thing I had to say was "I just got a package from home, and it contained two pounds of the best beef jerky in the world. When I get there, if those dogs so much as drool on it, there will be hell to pay”.
I went back to the unit and opened my wall locker. There just in front of the vents were two one pound packages of beef jerky. Although they were apologetic, they still searched the wall locker. At the time I was smoking a pipe, and they confiscated it. I think more because they were pissed off than anything else. It was a hand carved Mercham pipe that had cost me quite a bit, and had been aged over the whole of my tour. They returned it ground up into powder in a plastic bag. The good Lord preserve me from small minded people.
One of the surprises was a letter from Star. Could she please go over to my parent's place and recover the engagement ring? As lonely and disassociated as I was, I said yes. I was engaged again. It gave me some comfort that there was someone back home that cared about me. She had sent a picture, and she looked mighty good.
So, here I was engaged to Star for the second time.

Chapter V

Starling Albright Parker was her full name. She hated her name, always had.
Her mother had named her Starling because she liked the chattery social birds. They came out with the most unusual noises! They seemed so pert and full of life. She didn’t know or care that they were not native to this continent, were disease carriers, drove out the local songbirds, and did millions of dollars worth of damage to crops every year. The bad things about being named Starling didn’t stop there. The other kids tease her unmercifully about being named after a bird, especially one that was an alien pest.
“Hey Star, I hear they named you after a bird because your brain is the same size as a bird’s, Bird brain!” “I heard it was because they don’t belong in this part of the world, and neither do you!”
She shortened it to Star to avoid that line of teasing, but it just sent things off in another direction. Well if they thought she wanted to be called Star because she thought she was better than them, at least it was better than being called a birdbrain.
Albright was her mother’s family name. Supposedly the name meant a lot on the East Coast. Old New England money. In the first place, the West had been settled by people who had the personal fortitude to gather up their belongings and travel across the country to get where they were. They made their way on their own, and respected people who had done the same. Anyone whose claim to fame is that their family stayed back East and squatted over their roost like some old hen with a single egg was not their kind of people. And Delia Albright Parker did little to endear herself to the people of La Grange. When she participated in social events, she seemed to have a “How quaint” sort of attitude, as if the people around her were not quite of the same social status as her. For Star it generated “Not-at-Albright”
Parker. Nothing really wrong with that. Good solid old west name: Quanah Parker the Comanche Chief. Judge Isaac Parker, the Hanging judge. Her dad, Wes Parker claimed to be descended from the famous Judge, but the ties must have been weak, for the genes were definitely watered down. Wes Parker got squeamish at having to gut his own fish. His was a case of someone who, no matter how long they were in La Grange would never be accepted. In a world where everyone did for themselves and made do with what they had, he hired people to do his oil changes even before Jiffy-Lube came into town.
The Parkers had come into town in the fifties. The Parker Family owned a chain of Drugstores, and Wes opened and ran a new store in La Grange. This got them off on the wrong foot to start off with the locals. The Kelly’s had run Kelly’s Drugs for almost as long as there had been a town. Sure they were getting on in years, and had no kids to take over the store, but that was no reason to just drive them out of business. The Parkers had been flayed and hung out to dry before anyone had even gotten to know them. It was rumored that Delia was expecting before they were married, and that the family had married her off to the first available man who wasn’t a criminal, wife beater, or wastrel. Wes’s part was the financial backing to start his very own Drug store. Indeed if one were to look at the dates of their marriage license and Star’s birth certificate, one would come to the conclusion that either Star was a very healthy premature, or something else had been premature.
Add to that the fact that Star’s mother’s hair was dishwater blond, and her Dad’s was dark brown, while her own was flaming red-gold, and you had the makin’s of a real down home scandal. Not that anyone in La Grange gave a rip, but evidently it meant a great deal to Delia’s people. Or so speculation had it.
Star was a little spoiled. When she was in the pre-teen horse years she was much too sophisticated for a pony. She had an Arabian Gelding that was dressage trained, and she had the English saddle and riding outfit, complete with riding crop. But the stuff wasn’t what she needed. Her parents tolerated each other, but there was no love in their relationship. They accommodated each other. He needed the money her family provided; she needed a husband and father for Star. They stayed together “For Star”, but I always felt it was inertia more than anything else. The used Star as a vehicle for scoring points on each other. When Star came downstairs for breakfast, more often than not it was “Oh there you are dear. Your father is having bacon and eggs, and I am having toast and cereal. Which one do you want?” Of course if she chose either one, she was choosing that parent over the other. Also more often than not, she would skip breakfast, No occasion came that couldn’t be used by her parents to score points on each other. Who’s present did she like better? Where did she want to go on vacation? All very thinly disguised jabs in each other’s direction. Star suffered through it all, but it gave her a little different perspective on things. She was always questioning everyone’s motives, never took anything at face value. The times when we were together, she was always picking around at the edges of things, trying to see if there was anything behind the things I did. I happen to be a very straightforward open and honest person. What you see is what you get. Saves me from having to try to remember what lies I told to which person.
The first time I noticed Star, I must have been about ten. She was in my little sister Elizabeth’s class at school. She had come over to play, but ended up landing right in the middle of chicken slaughter day.
We had a farm, and raised all kinds of things. We always had two batches of chickens, one batch of laying hens, one batch of fryers. One of the kid’s jobs was to go out to the hen house in the morning and gather the eggs and feed the chickens. It was always a little like a treasure hunt, because you never knew what you were going to find, Taking the eggs away from the hens could be an adventure too, as some of them took objection to us removing their eggs. After all it wasn't easy producing them.The fryers life was short and pretty good. They were fed and watered and didn't have to produce anything to earn their keep, just put on weight. The down side was that before things froze up in the fall, would come slaughter day. Everyone hates slaughter day. It is nasty, smelly work, but it puts food in the freezer for all winter. The little kids were chicken catchers. Grandfather was the headsman. Uncle Fred and Dad were the gutting crew, and everyone else were Chicken Pluckers. It was our own little assembly line. My job was Chicken Hypnotizer. After the little kids caught a chicken, they would bring it to me. I would stick it's head underneath it's wing and then pump it (the whole bird) up and down for about 30 seconds. Then you could set it down on the ground and it would stay where you set it. Eventually it would sort of shudder, pull it's head out and look around like "Where the hell am I?", but on slaughter day, they generally never came around. If they started to, I would just grab them before they got any ideas about running off, and rehypnotize them. It always caused me to wonder "How did someone figure this out? It would seem logical that it would be someone who wanted to transport chickens quietly and easily. Like maybe a Chicken Thief? How did my grandfather who taught me the fine art of chicken hypnotizing happen to be in possession of this particular bit of information?"I never did get around to asking him this. I'll bet he learned if from his grandfather, too.
I have always wanted to put this on my resume'. Chicken Hypnotizer. That alone should be good for a first interview, and once you get your foot in the door anything is possible.I have never found a use for this very rare skill in the modern world. I mean you can't exactly pick up a newspaper, and there on page 13 of the classified ads you find "Wanted: Chicken Hypnotizer. Full time. Full benefits. Must be experienced. Top Wages."
Star didn’t do well with Chicken Slaughter day. It was OK when she was helping catch the chickens, and when I was hypnotizing them, but when Grandfather started chopping heads, she gained a new perspective on the expression “Heads will roll.” Grandfather had a system. First of all we rolled out an old set of tractor tires and stacked them next to the chopping block. He would reach under the hypnotized chicken and grab them by the feet. And flip them over so that the neck lay out on the chopping block.
Whack.
Throw the chicken into the hole in the tires so that they couldn’t run around the yard and get everything bloody. Go get next chicken.
Somewhere in the middle of the chore, he missed the hole in the tires, and the chicken started running around the front yard, a squirt of blood going up every time it’s heart beat. It ran right by Star, and shortly thereafter, ran out of gas, and fell over. I looked at her and she turned white as a ghost, and ran over behind the raspberry bushes where she deposited her breakfast. I learned later that she was unable to eat chicken for several years after that. She spent the rest of the afternoon crying in Lizardbreath’s room.
She didn’t come back to play so much after that.