Chapter XII

I dragged my butt into work on Monday.

I normally look forward to work.

With AOG you never know what you are going to be doing once you get there. We are like the Special Forces, and need to be ready to go anywhere in the world at any time day or night 365 days a year. At the moment we were retrofitting the lightplates on the P18 circuit Breaker panel for UPS package Freighter 757s.

What a fiasco that was.

We had delivered about 100 Package freighters to UPS, and then there was a gap in production of about 18 months.

UPS had a unique lighting system for the P18. The plastic in the lightplates was electroluminescent, that is, it glowed when you applied electricity to it. They were the only customer that used this syste, and there was only one supplier.

It seems that the buyer had failed to secure a long term contract with the supplier, and when we went to buy the lightplates from the vendor they said "Sorry, but we don’t make that product any more".

No amount of pressure or promises would enduce them to start up again. Production had been one endless stream of troubles, and they were delighted to get out of the business of producing lightplates. We could not find another vendor. Finally Bell Labs agreed to try to make them, no guarantees. We would cover any development costs and they would not be penalized if they failed.

The first production airplane of the new order was proceeding down the line as the vendor attempted to make the first set of plates.

We took a full size copy of the drawing and cut it out and scotch taped it in place so we could tell which circuit breaker controlled which circuit, and so we could do functional test.

At last the lighplates came in, and we came in on Saturday to put them in place.

We threw the Power Switch.

FZZZZ, Snap, crackle and pop. The new lightplates shorted out in rather spectacular fashion. Sparks jumped from one place to the other while the plastic started melting and dripping down on the mechanics and into the flight controls.

The upshot was that we had to retrofit the entire fleet of Package Freighters. UPS had had problems for years keeping the lightplates working, and I am sure that they were greatly relieved to have us foot the expense of replacing them on the entire fleet.

One by one they were bringing the aircraft back to Seattle where it took a full day for us to do the retrofit. It was not a real hard job or anything, I was just not used to doing the same thing over and over. They were always in a hurry to get the aircraft back in the air. I heard once that it costs the Airlines $10,000.00 an hour for the plane to sit on the ground.

It was probably one of the most stable times in my adult life. I knew what I would be doing for the next several weeks in a row. Star and I had a kind of understanding. It was not a full time thing, but neither one of us was seeing anyone else. We had not committed to exclusividity or anything, but there was an understood relationship. We were kinda waiting to see what would happen, because something always had. We had a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Drop it did.

I came home from work one day and the answering machine was blinking away. That in itself was not at all unusual. I had made it clear to Star that I didn’t want to be disturbed at work, unless it was a genuine emergency. I mean, the Company was paying me $35.00/hr. for my expertise, and I would feel guilty for taking pay if I was on the phone for personal reasons. So Star often left me little messages on the answering machine. Just "Miss you, see you tonight" or "You want to go to Jazz Alley this weekend?".

When I picked it up, it was Star all right, but it wasn’t good news. Her dad had not improved and she was going to stay in Spokane with her mom. She wanted me to call as soon as I got the message.

I called but there was no answer. That could either be good or bad. If it had been not bad, he would still be in the hospital for 24 hour observation. If it was bad he would be in intensive care. I had no real alternative but to keep calling.

The Hospital wouldn’t put me through or give me his condition because I wasn’t a relative. I mean, what was I going to say "I may be Stars boyfriend, but I’m not really sure."
I was sleeping fitfully when the phone rang.

I am used to getting calls at any time day or night. We members of the AOG team are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We had clearance to get the job done any way possible. We have been known to go into the factory and "Borrow" parts right off the airplane. It was all accepted, as long as we left documentation to show what we had taken and why.

"Hi Pat, this is John in dispatch. You have a flight to Grand Cayman leaving Sea-Tac in two hours. Shake a leg and be there. The other guys on the survey team will meet you there."

I had a kit all packed and ready to go. It sits in the closet by the front door on the top shelf. It contains everything I need for a three day stay anywhere in the world. Passport, clothes, camera and cash. I have pared it down over the years.

The lead Engineer brings the laptop. We are the first people on the ground following an incident. I don’t mean a "somebody flew a 757 into the side of a mountain" type of incident. Something less spectacular. We go in and take pictures, assess the damage, describe it and send the description back to Boeing.

They have a special crew that puts together all the parts, plan and drawings necessary to do the repair. When we get the OK from the carrier and Insurance Company, we head off wherever the Airplane is and do the repairs on the spot. It can be pretty primitive. Although the destination might be exotic, we are not there on vacation, we are there to work.

Chapter XI

She was gone when I woke up the next morning. There was a note in the kitchen saying that she had to get home to retrieve her son, Brian from her friend’s. She didn’t say anything else. No sappy love note, no regrets, no apologies. I wasn’t sure whether to be miffed or relieved. A little bit of both I guess.
I have been accused of living more in my head than in the real world, and it was definitely that way now. It was Saturday, and I had my routine down to a science. Men don’t do shopping. We go out with a list, a plan and destination. I knew where I was going to go, what I was going to buy, and how much it would cost before I ever left the house. This was when I would normally be checking out the available females at the market, but today my head was in a different place. (Maybe we males do a little shopping after all.)
Today my head was a million miles away. Solly at the fish place asked me for the third time what I was looking for before I realized I was at the head of the line. In fact I really couldn’t remember any of my meander up to that point. I had been watching the movies and snapshots inside my head all morning.
" Sorry, Solly, I’m a little distracted this morning. Give me a couple of pounds of the Copper River Salmon, and a nice big Dungeness Crab. I feel like cooking tonight."
"I got some real nice shrimp here, just in fresh this morning, How’s about a couple of pound of those. I know you like to make Tempura, and they would be to die for."
"Yeah, go ahead and throw them in. If I’m going to go to the bother with the time and mess, I might as well make it worth while."
"Don’t forget to ice your batter, Pat" Solly chuckled.
I called Star and asked her over to dinner, told her I was in a mood to cook. The only thing required was her presence. She had only one condition, and that was that she bring her son along. While my plans for the evening didn’t include any kids, I still wanted to have her come over anyway. No sense in getting greedy. Besides, I enjoyed Star’s company even without the sex.
She showed up for dinner at about six, kid in tow. He was an agreeable kid. His hair was some darker than Stars, his eyes a little darker shade of blue, but you could definitely see whose kid he was. He enjoyed getting messy helping me dip the seafood in the Tempura batter and frying up dinner. He also enjoyed the food, although he was a little leery of some of the dipping sauces. Star ate everything with great gusto. He told me the Honey Ginger sauce "Tasted like dirt", and I of course asked him how he knew what dirt tasted like. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had cooked for her.
After supper, she offered to do the dishes, and I didn’t object, but I grabbed the dish towel and dried. Brian helped put things away.
It was such a domestic scene. It reminded me of growing up on the farm. I had never known a domestic life on my own. The closest thing was the brief time when Star and I lived together. That was all fire and ice and fireworks. This was mellow and smooth, and felt more like that was the way things were supposed to be. On one side of me it set me to asking if people really lived this way, and on the other it scared the hell out of me.
This could really suck a guy in. It was this big emotional black hole that once you entered its influence, there was no escape. Warning bells were going off inside my head "Warning, Will Smith, Danger!" But Will Smith never payed attention and neither did I.
It was getting late when we finished the dishes and got the kitchen squared away. The need to keep things organized was a trait I picked up in the Army. It is one of
the two things I learned in the Army that have proved invaluable in real life. The other is the ability to take a nap any time any where under just about any circumstances.
Star was living in a 1890’s converted mansion on Queen Anne Hill. The place had been cut up into a half a dozen apartments. Hers was in the Southwest corner, and contained a small kitchen, long skinny living room, tiny bedroom, and the original Master Bath. That bathroom was amazing. It was as big as the rest of the apartment put together. The whole thing was tiled, and had antique brass fixtures and an enormous built in tub. I can tell you from experience that the tub will handle two easily in lots of different positions.
Several weeks passed, and we were sorta drifting between the two places, ending up in one or the other. Everything at the time had this nice warm glow to it. Brian was a good kid, if a little introspective. He wasn’t real demanding, but we had a good time. I had never spent a lot of time with a five year old before, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed around him. Much to my delight, I found that I had a silly side that appealed to him, and we enjoyed each other’s company. It was a revelation to me. There was this whole other dimension to things that I had never experienced.
One Saturday we were lounging in the floor watching TV when the phone rang.
"Hello. Oh, hi mom, what’s up? Oh damn. How is he? I’ll be over tomorrow" It seens her dad had a heart attack, and was in intensive care, so Star was packing up in the morning and heading back to LaGrange to be there for him and her mom.
Her mom had never been any good in a crisis, usually ended up in a darkened room pumped full of chemicals. It created an awkward moment with Star and I. Our relationship was still forming in this new configuration. Her parents had never cared for me particularly, nor I for them. So we decided it was not the best time for her to show up on my arm. Her mom would have enough to deal with for the time being.
So I helped Star pack, loaded her in her old beater Volvo station wagon and kissed her goodbye the next morning.
I went home to my loft, and the place seemed very empty.
I had grown used to being alone, and was frankly, very comfortable being me and being alone whenever I chose to be. But my steps had a hollow ring to them and I caught myself expecting to go around a corner and find Star or Brian waiting. It was weird. We hadn’t been together all that long this time, but it was different.

Chapter X

I have always thought Star was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. The combination of flaming red hair and milk white skin just really does something to me. She had just a light dusting of freckles on the tops of her breasts and across her cheeks.
When she became aroused, a noticeable flush would spread on her cheeks.
My fumbling fingers found another button, and then another. I kissed my way down the side of her neck to the tops of her breasts. Her hands were in my hair at the back of my neck, something that always sent chills down my back and stood the
hair on end on my arms.
Blouse unbuttoned, I slid it over her shoulders and down her arms. She wore a plain white bra. A deft move with my right hand and a slight squeezing motion popped the fastening loose in the back. She rolled her shoulders forward, and the bra dropped free, exposing the most beautiful breasts in the world.
Her nipples were not large and the aureoles a light pink, as delicately colored as cherry blossoms, They hardened under the touch of my hands and lips as I caressed and kissed first one, then the other.
“Oh Pat” she purred “It has been so long, so long.”
My hands went to the belt of her jeans. I had help undoing the jeans. As she took them off, I tore my sweater and undershirt off, and it was a race to see who could get naked first. She won, but I got the prize.

Chapter IX

It tugged at my insides to hear that life had not been all that kind to her, but her story was the same as thousands of others. Seems like half of the kids nowadays are being raised by single parents.
I am not really in any position to pass judgement on them, since I lack the commitment to get as far as the married-with-kids part. It’s not that I don’t want the house in the suburbs with the Japanese Maple in the front yard, just that that intentional long term commitment scares me half to death.
We talked about our families, and the folks back home and what was going on it town. Just general conversation. It is good to talk to someone who you don’t have to maintain a façade with. We had seen the best and worst of each other. There was no need to pretend we were anything other than we were. It was a nice comfortable way to spend an evening. I don’t think either one of us had intentions of it going any farther that it did, which was just a couple of drinks and dinner.
Towards the end of the evening she asked “You ever do anything with the Rainbow Room?”
There were only two people in the world, as far as I know that knew about the Rainbow Room, and that was Star and me.
My family had kept the cabin and claim up in the hills all these years. Probably because it wasn’t worth much, partly for sentimental reasons, since it was in a lot of ways the Genesis of our family. We used it partly as a hunting cabin, partly as a place to get away from everything when the pressures of life got to be too much.
When I was growing up, I would disappear up to the claim. Usually I would spend some time hacking away at the back of the tunnel in the hopes that I would stumble upon the continuation of the gold. It was a good way to gather my thoughts. When I was up there at the claim picking away at the tunnel face, it was a kind of mindless physical state that allowed your mind to float free, and there was no telling where your thoughts might lead. Some of my clearest thinking has come when half of me was engaged in some physical activity and the other half was gnawing away at some problem.
For some time I had been following a vein of quartz into the mountain. It showed no evidence of gold, but once in a while would hit a pocket of Quartz crystals, which I would carefully extract and sell to the local rock shop for a few bucks. Some of then were pretty good and I could get $20 or more for them. Once I had run across a vug of sceptered crystals that brought me $80. In terms of wages it paid a lot less than bagging groceries, but I wouldn’t have traded it, because the “office” was so much nicer, and I didn’t have to put up with the people.
I was working on the face when my pick broke through into a larger room. I could tell it was fairly large because the sound of the pick echoed a little as I worked the opening wider. When I got it big enough, I stuck a flashlight through the opening, and could just make out a “room” about ten feet long maybe six feet tall. The entire inner surface sparkled with quartz crystals. The sight was spectacular.
I spent the next couple of days making a opening to the rooms that was easy to get in and out of.. When I first could get enough of me inside to take a good look at it, I saw that there was a streak of color around the middle of the room. It was amethyst, and the crystals were sceptered!
Sceptered quartz is not all that uncommon. The quartz crystals are deposited in the inside of a hollow spot in the rock by volcanic action. Mineral rich hot water bubbles up through the rock, and deposits the mineral content on any hollow spot or crack it comes on. When the hollow is large enough it will form crystals. Silicone is one of the most abundant minerals on the face of the Earth. It is what we make glass out of, as well as all of the computer chips that are so commonplace now. Combined with other elements and certain impurities, it can form all sorts of different colored stones, rubies and emeralds to mention a couple.
In this case, there had been a couple of different times and levels of volcanic activity. It was beautiful, but not really all that valuable. I really didn’t want to disturb it, so the only person I ever told about it was Star.
We used the claim as a spot to meet and play house, so of course I took her down to the diggings and showed her the big vug with the crystals. Because of the stripe of amethyst she dubbed it “The Rainbow Room”. I thought it sounded kinda hokey, like a slimy lounge in some third rate hotel “Now appearing in The Rainbow Room………”
It became something that was uniquely ours, and I suppose that was one reason I had never done anything with it. Harvesting the crystals would be like selling The Mona Lisa so someone could salvage the pigments.
After a couple of drinks, the conversation smoothed out, the knots dissolved and things were feeling pretty comfortable. We had done a quite a bit of “Do you remember the time…..?”
We weren’t blitzed or anything. Well one thing led to another, and we ended up at my flat looking at the view of the Market and Elliot Bay. She moved so easily into my arms and felt so natural there. She arched her neck as I kissed my way down to the top of her blouse. And stopped.
“Star, do you think we ought to be doing this? I mean given our history, every time we get together, one or both of us get hurt.”
“Hell, Pat, we both know where we are, where we’ve been, but nobody knows where we might end up.”
I unbuttoned the top of her blouse.

Chapter VIII

I had just come back from Khartoum where we had done a damage estimate on a 707. That was a nasty job for a couple of reasons. This was in the mid eighties, the government of Sudan had just been overthrown, and the State Department would not grant us papers until the new Government could guarantee our safety. We couldn't get in country for a couple of months, until things had stabilized a little.
It was another instance of the front landing gear folding up.
When we flew in, the plane was immediately surrounded by about 50 men armed with AK-47s. It made me more than a little nervous, seeing as the last time I saw little brown people with AK-47’s they were doing their best to make holes in me.
Turns out they were what passed for the good guys that week. They formed a ring around us and stayed with us everywhere we went. They even slept in the hallway outside our rooms. Somehow it didn’t make me feel any better. Nobody ever took a shot at us, but it was just the thought that if they needed that tight of security, what the heck was I doing there?
The second half wasn’t any better than the first. The 707 had been used as a cattle carrier for several years. When an aircraft gets old and down on its luck, they convert them into cattle carriers. This is after they have used up their life as regular cargo carriers.
This particular plane had been not been well maintained. Cows being what they are, they do what cows do when they are nervous, which is piss and crap all over everything. It all drains down into the cargo bay. The acid in the urine eats up the aluminum. Pretty soon the skin panels are full of holes. Since they never fly at high altitudes, they don’t have to pressurize the hull, so it doesn’t really matter as long as the structure holds together and the flight surfaces are functional. This plane was in its last stages. The lower skins barely hung on to the stringers, and the stringers weren’t in the best of condition.
When we examined the front gear, the main hydraulic cylinder had rust streaks dripping down about half its length. There were rust stains about halfway through the metal itself. It was a wonder it hadn’t snapped off long before. Our report to the insurance carrier stated the fault of the accident was neglected maintenance. Didn’t make us any points with the new Sudanese Government, which was trying to extort a couple of million dollars out of the Insurance Company. I don’t believe I’ll ever go there for a vacation.
After flying in to Sea-Tac, I was about ready to kiss the ground just to be back in the USA. After sleeping for almost 24 hours, I just wanted to go into downtown Seattle and wander around and see people that weren’t carrying guns (at least not visibly), and hear the American language spoken as a primary language.
I was wandering down Fourth Avenue, and took a left, slightly uphill. I looked in the window, and there was Star. She had looked up at the exact second I had looked in, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree. She jumped out of her desk and ran out the door.
“Is that really you, Pat?” she asked “I haven’t seen you in what, five or six years?”
Given how things had ended between us, I was surprised she even wanted to talk to me. But one thing I know for sure is that we forget the pain over time, or rather we forget just how bad it was. We remember the good stuff and push out the other.
“How you doing, Star? Five years, ten months, not that I keep track. It just happens that we broke up two weeks before my mom’s birthday, and that is rolling around again. Being the genius that I am, I deduce you work here, huh?”
“An astute observation, my dear Watson! What detective school did you say you went to? Oh yes, Elementary my dear Watson.” She chimed back.
It was good to see her. I wasn’t ready for her or any one else before. Maybe this time. So I got her number and promised to call. My first impulse was to drop her number in the first trashcan I passed. For some reason I stuffed it in my pocket. The thing we learn from experience is that we don’t learn from experience.
I was not dating anyone in particular at the time. Since I never knew from one week to the next where I was going to be, it didn’t exactly condone building a long-term relationship.
I think that is just OK with me. The times I have hung my heart out there on a string, the sharks came along and chewed it up. Don’t get me wrong. I love being in love. There is nothing in this world like the times when you wander around in the daze of love, more or less oblivious. Colors are brighter, food tastes better, the sun shines brighter, music is sweeter, and the sex can’t be beat. But that state is sort of self-limiting. After a couple of months, you wake up and it is time to start thinking about the future, that part scares the crap out of me.
If I can’t tell you where in the world I might be next Tuesday, how can I commit for the rest of my life. Usually about the time I start getting cold feet, an assignment will come along out in Bumfuque Egypt, and I will be gone for a couple of months. It makes the transition back to no commitment a lot easier. I mean it’s not like she can show up on the job site and make a scene.
I rent a fair-sized two bedroom above The Pike Place Market. I like being able to go down and immerse myself in humanity. I know most of the vendors and sales people, and hear most of the gossip. It is like having a huge extended family, but one that I can walk away from at any time. It is also one of the best places in the Pacific Northwest to pick up women.
If one of the Tour Boats is in town, there are always a good percentage of women on vacation looking for a little fling to remember their stay. There is a lot of traffic of young professionals who work downtown and come by to pick up a few things on the way to someplace else, and looking for something else. Bored Housewives. College students. With the STDs around today, you have to be careful, and always, always, always wear a condom, no matter how clean they look. I sure as hell don’t want to end up dead over a piece of ass.
A couple of drinks at a watering hole, and bundle them off to my place for a well-rounded evening’s entertainment. Mind you my success rate isn’t 100% or anything, but it is sufficient to keep me away from the hired kind.
No adventure there. Sex as a commodity just isn’t for me, although a long enough dry spell might convince me otherwise. There’s only so much you can do by yourself, and it just isn’t all that satisfying. Whacking off is OK, but it is like an appetizer with no meal to follow.
This being November, the traffic in The Market was pretty slim, so I ended up going back to my place alone. The view is great, but it is always a lot more enjoyable showing it to someone else than enjoying it alone. A lot like sex.
When it is one of those soggy Seattle Fall days, I prefer Rum drinks. Meyers Dark Rum on the rocks. I figure that if you HAVE to put mixer with it, it probably isn’t worth drinking. Some things are better with a mixer, but if you can’t drink it straight, it probably isn’t much better mixed with something else. There are some things that are naturals together; Tanquaray and tonic is one of those. Every once in a while I get a craving for a Gin and Tonic. Not now though. That is more of a hot weather drink. On a soggy day like today, Hot Buttered Rum is one of the greatest liquid comforters that there is.
The trouble with liquor is it screws up your impulse control. Almost every time I have gotten in trouble there was alcohol involved in it somewhere. I’m not an alcoholic or anything, I just like the stuff. When I am out on a job I will go for months without a drink, and not miss it at all. It is just that there is a time and place for everything, and there is no place for alcohol when you are working 12-hour days. A lot of the hard working/hard playing AOG crowd disagrees with me, but I have seen what they look like after a couple of long days and long nights strung together. I just don’t like the idea of making a critical repair on an aircraft with impaired faculties. I mean we aren’t doing a tune-up on a Plymouth Voyager. If you screw up, it can come out of the sky and everyone on board dies.
So I found myself on the phone, and the only number on my screen was Star's. After all I wasn't making a commitment or anything, just connecting with someone I knew.
So I made the call. Lonely will make you do things you never would consider, rational.
"Hey Birdie. It's Pat. I thought it would be nice if we got together and compared lifelines or something."
"I have to get a babysitter, but Mary down the hall owes me one. Where?"
"The Alexis at 9:00 sound good to you?"
So we met at the Alexis for drinks. What was this stuff about a babysitter? She had a three-year-old son by a previous relationship. Married and everything. Had I taken the plunge? No.
"What are you doing now?"
I could go on about AOG for a couple of hours, but this was not the time. "I repair airplanes"
"You are so good with your hands, I knew you would end up doing something special with mechanical stuff"
"So, you have a kid?"
"You know how it is, you just have to get out. I hated that pisswater little town so bad, I would do anything to get out, so I did anything. Married a jackass from the Coast, just to get out of town. Turned out he had a lot of ideas, but no idea how to turn them into money. We existed for a couple of years, but never got anywhere. There was always some get rich quick scheme. Of course none of them ever paid off."
"So I got left with the kid and the bills and the debts. I hear he is over there in Idaho, selling used farm equipment or some such, but with the economy being what it is, who buys that stuff anymore?"
"I get no child support, I get no help. But I go my own way and pay my own bills, I don't need that asshole anyway."

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.

Chapter IV

It all came to an end a week before Christmas, when he awoke in his room in the Hotel. He vaguely recognized the young lady in his bed as Bernadette something-or-the-other from the General Store, where she worked as a clerk. She was not the usual sort he found in his bed. Much more proper and churchy. He wondered how he had managed to maneuver her into his bed.
“Wake up lass” he said as he nudged her “And what is it you are doing in me bed?”
She rolled over and looked at him and said, “Do you not remember any of it Seamus? As to what I am doing, I am saving you from yourself. Say hello to your new missus”
As she said this, she held up her left hand and showed him the ring on her third finger. This was going to take some thinking through. But first he needed a drink. He headed for the nightstand, and was shocked to see that there was not a bottle there. He always kept a bottle on the nightstand for mornings like this.
A voice behind him said “You’ll not be finding a bottle on the nightstand, not this morning or any other, now that you are a properly married man. I’m not saying you can never have a drink, just that if you overindulge you will not be using the bottle as a way to avoid the consequences. And you’ll be getting no sympathy from me. I saw me own Da’ drink himself into an early grave, and won’t see any husband of mine do the same.”
And that was the first conversation he remembered with my great-grandmother. This story was related to me by my grandmother, as told by her father-in-law, as he was apt to do after having a few drinks on an evening. The details might change from time to time, but the essence of the story always remained the same.
He awoke to find himself broke and down to three possessions: a defunct mine a brand new bride, and a section of land a couple of miles outside town. He was pretty hazy about how he had come into possession of items two and three.
The Hanson brothers were long gone. They had given up on finding an ore deposit, had been paid off and went to strike it rich on their own. So Seamus and his new bride moved into the cabin over the claim. Bernie didn’t like the arrangement, as sitting the cabin over a hole in the ground made it cold and drafty, although it would make for a dandy root cellar. And so it was for the first couple of years of their marriage. Bernie kept her job in town, and Seamus went back to the mines. In his spare time, he worked at sinking the shaft towards what he was certain would be the mother lode. He never did find it, but his relationship with Bernadette did indeed prove to be the saving of him.
The section of land he had accepted as collateral on a loan that went bad. Although he hadn’t really thought about it as an investment (in fact he had no recollection of it at all), it turned out to be the soundest thing he had done in his life. The railroad came through headed for the west coast soon after he came into possession of the land, and although they didn’t want his land, it held a good bit of fine old timber, a mix of pine and cedar that would be just the thing for trestles and train depots. He contracted with the Northern Pacific Railroad to supply them with timbers and boards. He had some up-front money from the railroad, and bought a steam donkey engine and the makings for a small sawmill. If you ever visit La Grange, you can still see his timber, in the trestle over the slough just north of town. This was an exceptional opportunity for a couple of different reasons. Of course there was the immediate influx of money into the family coffers, but it also provided the impetus to develop a road to haul the timber on, and since he intended to stay in La Grange, was the means of clearing the land in preparation for farming. There were three different streams running through the property, which was almost perfectly flat. That in itself made for many hours of speculation on the local’s part. There were the hills, which were pretty much straight up and down, and in between the hills were the flats. The soil was extraordinarily rich, and thank the Good Lord, practically free of rocks. In a land mostly dominated by rocks, why was such a large area practically rock free? Seamus really didn’t care, he was just grateful to be the beneficiary of whatever circumstances had brought it about.
Seamus made out pretty well on the timber. With the money from the Railroad, he was able to build big farmhouse with a veranda and lots of Gingerbread. That house stands today. I suppose it was in a way because of that old house I ended up in this pondering mood. Although none of the family has lived on the place for years, the family lawyer, Rod Green, had called to ask if we were interested in selling the place and the quarter section it sits on. We had been renting it out to the Beauchene boys for several years. They grew hay on the flats and ran a few cow critters, raised pigs, did whatever it took to get by. They figured that between the two of them they should be able to buy the place in partnership rather than give my sister (Elizabeth Jones nee O’Neal) and me all that hard earned money. It had set up a family tussle over whether to sell or not.
“Patrick Frances O’Neal, you know mom and pop would roll over in their graves if you even contemplated such a thing” she shrilled. “Besides just what the Hell is wrong with the current situation? Ron runs things. We each get a monthly check. The land keeps going up in value. They are talking about putting the farmhouse on the National Historical Register, which will up the value even more.”
“Lizard Breath,” I shot back “You know the place needs a new roof, and there’s some dry rot in the underpinnings, and the taxes keep going up. If we do the maintenance, it is going to cost a bundle and we won’t make a cent profit for a bunch of years. If we sell out now, all those headaches go away. We could take the money and invest in something that could actually return some money for our trouble. Besides, you aren’t using your head; you are using your emotions.”
No one knows how to push each other’s buttons like family. We have learned exactly where and how hard to push to get just the result we are looking for. Liz likes to think of herself as the ultimate rational person, and I had just effectively hit below the belt. It worked. She spluttered and hissed for a few seconds before she strangled out “The answer’s still NO!” and hung up the phone with enough enthusiasm to keep my ear ringing for several minutes.
All this fuss and tussle had gotten the farm and family on my mind, and dumped me out at the end of a train of thought that led to Star.

Chapter III

Seamus went back down into town and wandered through the saloons looking for a couple of hard rock miners in need of a job. After visiting several places and having a drink in each, he heard of a couple of Swedes that were currently residing in the jail for disorderly conduct. It seems they had a disagreement with a couple of gamblers about a possible fifth ace in a poker game and had busted up a saloon, the gamblers, and anyone who took an interest in the situation. It had taken the Marshal, a couple of deputies and a quite a few of the bars patrons to subdue them. His inquiries told him that they were good miners and hard workers; they just took their card playing real seriously.
He used the little money he had set aside to bail them out of jail. They turned out to be brothers, Jon and Ron Hansen. As alike as two peas in a pod, they had thick Scandahoovian accents, and a whole lot of bruises and contusions. He proposed that they come to work for him. They needed to build a cabin at the mine site and then could live at the site for free, and he would pay them ten percent of the taking from the mine. They had heard about the ore sample he had used to finance his little toot the night before, and it sounded like a good deal to them. When Jon asked if that was 10% each, Seamus replied he was the boss and owner, not a charity. The brothers talked it over and decided it sounded like a good deal. Free housing and a share in the profits was good. The only real drawback was they had to build their own accommodations.
They liked it a little less when he showed them where he wanted to build the cabin. He wanted it built right smack dab over a hole in the ground up next to a cliff. He explained that the hole was where they would be working after they got done building the cabin. He had never told anyone exactly where on the claim he had found the gold, and if he could get the hole covered up before the curious came calling, hopefully nobody would know except for himself and the Swedes. Nobody could raid a claim they couldn’t find. They got to work with the axes and the two man misery whip, and in a couple of days had the walls built up I took a little longer than they had figured, because Seamus insisted on making the only entrance to the hole through a trap door in the floor of the cabin. Seamus was a handy man with tools, and not afraid of a little hard work, so they set up a sawpit and made flooring. Seamus fashioned the trap door himself, and when it was done, you could hardly tell it was there. An appropriately placed knothole was used to lift the trap. He had counterweighted the trap so it could be lifted with ease and placed it against a wall to keep it out of the main traffic flow. Stairs went down into the hole. Using an old ratchet mechanism and the hand off an old clock, he made a primitive counter and tied it to the trap door. If the trap door was opened, it would move the clock hand a couple of teeth forward. He marked the intervals and mounted it on a round of wood. He would now know if anyone had entered or left the mine. Unless you knew where the hand was and how many turns it took to complete a revolution, you couldn’t reset the counter.
He had thought about just giving the brothers some money and sending them down the road when they were through building the cabin, but decided he would do better if he kept them on and kept his part of the bargain, but maybe not exactly as it was originally proposed.
The brothers were confused when he explained their new duties. They were to go up on top of the slab and start sinking a shaft along the face of the cliff to see if they could find where the slab had originally mated with the cliff face. He would handle the work down in the hole. They were not to ever enter the hole unless it was with him, or on his specific instructions. The top of the slab they were working was a couple of hundred feet tall, and the deposit was maybe forty feet from the bottom of it. It may have made more sense to start from the bottom and go up, but for right now, Seamus just didn’t want anyone down in that hole but himself.
The crumbly rock and quartz could be easily worked by one careful man, and Seamus was being as careful as he knew how. His life had never been anything about careful, so this was new territory for him, and all the thinking gave him a headache worse than a hangover. He was a doer not a thinker.
The next month was pretty uneventful. They all three lived in the cabin. In the morning after their morning coffee, the brothers would go up the slope and Seamus would go down the hole. They would meet up again for supper. After supper they would rough refine the gold Seamus had brought up from the hole. Seamus had a piece of railroad rail that had been cut off about a foot long, and a single jack. He would hammer the ore down, pick out the gold, and pan what was left. There were a couple of reasons for doing this. One was to make it easier to pack in to town; the other was to eliminate as much speculation about his claim as he could. Anyone bringing gold into a mining town is going to be the object of considerable speculation. He figured that the less they knew, the better off he was going to be. Friday he would take the ten to fifteen pounds of semi-refined gold into LaGrange to the mill and have it refined. The results were a net profit of around $4,000.00 a week. Giving the brothers their 10% left him $3600.00, which he mostly banked. The brothers were pulling in $40.00 a week which was good money, and if the Irishman was crazy enough to pay them to drill holes in ordinary rock, they weren’t going to complain.
Saturdays they took the day off and went in to town to buy supplies and let off a little steam. It seemed like everyone around them was sitting with their heads tilted, trying to catch their conversation so they could figure out what was going on. The Hansen boys were of no help, because they knew very little, and for once in his life Seamus was keeping his mouth shut. Each week, there was a little more interest, until finally it got to the point that none of them could have a drink in peace and quiet. Some people wanted a loan. Some people wanted a piece of the action. Some wanted to take it away from him, and some wanted to buy him out. But nobody but Seamus knew what he had, how big it was, or anything about it. They knew the Swedes were sinking a shaft, and someone had snuck up in the dark of night and grabbed some rock from the tailings, Not only were there no traces of gold, it wasn’t even the kind of rock in which you would expect to find gold. The gold was coming from somewhere, but they couldn’t figure exactly where.
After six weeks the quantity tapered off some. Seamus had taken the easiest and best ore and now was working out towards the edges of the deposit. The quality of the ore fell off pretty quickly at the edges. The take each week started going down.
After twelve weeks, the pocket was mined out. There was enough left to make wages, but Seamus had over $40,000.00 in the bank and he was tired of keeping everything so tightly under control. Rob and Jon had sunk their shaft almost a hundred feet along the interface of the slab and the mountain, and hadn’t found a thing. The damn deposit had to continue on somewhere, but they were having no luck finding it.
They finally cane to Seamus, hats in their hands and scuffing their toes. “Seamus” said Jon, “Ten percent of nothing is nothing, and we need to make a living. We need to rearrange the terms of the deal, or we will have to leave you. You’ve been a fair man to work for, although sometimes you see boogers in the night when there ain’t none.”
Seamus asked to have a couple of days to think things over, and that he would pay them $20.00 a week out of his own pocket until he decided what to do. They allowed that they could tolerate that for now, but if they continued to sink the shaft and came across the rest of the deposit, things would go back to the original agreement. They shook on the deal.
Now that the ore pocket had been mined out, there was nothing for Seamus to do. He would just be in the Swedes way sinking the shaft, and there was nothing worth doing down in the hole. He moved into the Hotel in town. So he began to hang around in the saloons. He played atrocious poker, drank outrageously expensive wines, ate the best food. After a while it all became a blur, and still the Hansons had not found a thing. The pressure was getting to him, and he began to drink more and more heavily. He loaned money on questionable mining ventures, made personal loans to individuals of questionable character.

Chapter II

We were from the same small town, LaGrange Idaho. LaGrange was settled in the late 1800's as a part of the mineral explorations of that time. There were deposits of all kinds of minerals in the area, some all mixed together. The major discoveries had happened in the 1860's with occasional small discoveries later. Mostly silver, but occasionally mixed with gold, or very rarely deposits of gold. Some placer mining was done in the streams around town, and a few men made enough to move into town and settle down but for the most part it was hard rock mining, a difficult and dangerous profession. I hear that the population during the boom years was over 10,000, but after the inevitable bust, the population stabilized at about 2,500. It never has wandered very far from that number. People come, people go, but that part of the country just seems to have a natural level of population it can support. People come into the area for the skiing, the fishing, the hunting and the hiking. They take a deep breath of that crisp mountain air and tell themselves: This is where I want to spend the rest of my life, or retire, or raise my kids, or start my business. They sell their house in the suburbs, and buy a little place in town, completely unprepared for what living out here really means. Mostly it means fixing what you have, jerry rigging equipment, and doing it yourself. They last about five years, go broke, sell their little Boutique or Shoppe and go back where they came from. If you haven't been here for ten years, you are still the new guy in town. If you don't quite click, it could take a lifetime. People are slow to trust, and loyal to the end.
The town got its name from a mountain just outside town known locally as "Old Baldy". When viewed at a certain time of day someone thought it resembled New Grange, in Ireland, one of the oldest buildings in the world. Older even than the pyramids and Stonehenge.
My great- grandfather, Seamus O'Neal, came into this country a little behind the main wave of immigration out of Ireland. A Paddy in the company of a band of Cousin Jacks, he hired on at the largest mining operation in town, glad to have steady work. By all accounts he was a loud, opinionated, fiery little Irishman who never met a man or a bottle he didn't like. He worked hard in the mines, played hard in the taverns and cribs.
When he had a day off, he would occasionally head off into the hills prospecting. It had been a couple of years since anyone had found anything of significance, so people didn't take his prospecting very seriously. The area he was going over seemed pretty barren, and the formations didn't quite "look right". But Seamus had noticed a fold in the rock that was only visible from across the valley at one particular spot. Although he had noticed the fold from afar, finding it was another thing when you were up on the mountain fighting the buckbrush.
Finally, one day as he rounded a corner on a ridge, Seamus saw the formation he had been looking for. The area here millions of years a go had been the bottom of a vast sea. The current mountains had pushed their way up through the deposits left by that ancient sea, cracking them and pushing them aside, where they weathered away. Very rarely the sedimentary formations remained intact in small blocks. The volcanic activity percolated up through the porous and fractured stone, depositing whatever minerals were in the magma into the holes in the stone. Usually they deposited quartz (some in a beautiful purple color, some a nice smoky tone) mixed with pyrites. Occasionally, gold would percolate up and form spiderweb traces in the crumbly rock. Here on the back corner of the ridge, a portion of and old sedimentary chimney had slumped off from the cliff behind. Right at the base of the cliff where it had separated was a hole in the rock, but a very likely looking hole. It went straight down, and it was impossible to tell how far it was straight down. He dropped a rock, and it almost immediately hit stone, although it rolled downhill for a quite a while after that. It couldn't be more than ten feet to whatever solid rock was down there.
Like most prospectors, he carried a hunk of rope with him. There wasn't a handy tree anywhere close to tie off to, so he took his pick and jammed it sideways in a crack in the rock, then beat on it with a rock until it was wedged. Tying off to the rope, he lowered himself down the hole. He landed on a sharply sloping pile of scree, which went down and forward for about sixty feet. From there he couldn't tell if it continued. Throwing rocks down the slope wasn't real conclusive. It was just too dark to really see and the echoes made it just about impossible to determine the extent of the hole. He decided to go back to town and get his miner's lamp and return.
He climbed up the rope and out into the daylight. As he dusted himself off, he caught a slight glimmer on his pants where he wiped his hands. On closer examination it appeared to be flakes of gold.
Seamus went in to town and very quietly filed a hard rock claim on the area he had been prospecting. Understanding his own proclivity for drink, he wanted to nail things down as quickly as possible, just in case he had a few and just had to tell someone. Besides he really didn't know anything at this point. That didn't keep him from sharing with his friends that he "had something going" on a hot new prospect. Since Seamus was known for telling creative versions of the truth, in which he figured prominently, people didn't take him very seriously.
The next time he had a day off, Seamus loaded up his mining gear and headed up into the hills. He took an indirect way to his claim, checking his back trail occasionally just to make sure no one was following him. Two years before a couple of unsavory characters had attempted to hijack a claim by shanghaiing the owner and trying to file on top of his existing claim. He thought they were maybe remnants of the old Plummer Gang. You had to be careful when it came to gold. People got crazy around the stuff.
When he arrived at his claim, he carefully marked the "corners" and put a rock pile close to the hole with a brief description of the claim with the registration information on it in a can in the middle of the pile. He wanted to make sure things were all up to snuff.
When he was done marking his claim, he lit up his miner's light and went down in the hole. It seemed to be about sixty feet long, sloping sharply to the north. It was not a cave as such, just a big crack between the rocks. He very carefully climbed down the slope to see how far it extended. It pinched out at the North end and there was no indication there was anything more to it. As he turned to climb back up the slope, the beam from his miner's light splayed across the east face of the rock. It returned a gleam of golden wires across a large section of the wall. In a vein of quartz, the wires of gold were easy to spot. In a game where gold content was measures in ounces per ton of ore, this was unbelievably rich. But since this was a chunk broken off of the hillside, it couldn't be more than a couple of feet through. Maybe the piece of what it had broken off of was above somewhere. There would be enough time to figure that out later. Using a single jack and a drill, he loosened a piece out of the cliff face about the size of two big fists, put it in his pack, collected up his tools, and climbed out of the hole.
When he got to town he headed straight for the Assay Office to get his sample assayed. It was, indeed gold, and the one chunk he had in his hand was worth about $150.00. It was some of the richest ore he had ever heard of. Given that the area of the face of rock he had seen was a bout 10 feet square he figured a little math in his head and thought that he should be able to take about $25,000.00 out of there, and that was a conservative estimate.
Jack Langston was tending bar at the Passtime Saloon like usual when Seamus walked in. Seamus walked up to the barkeep and said "Jack I've done a lot of business with you, these last couple of years, and I've always thought of you as an honest man. Well tonight I am going to test that honesty a little." With that he plunked his chunk of rock on the bar and said, "First off, I'd like to buy a drink for the house. Then I want the best beefsteak you can stir up, and the best bottle you have behind the bar. Not the stuff on the shelf, but the stuff I see you bring out from under the bar when the rich folk are visiting. I'll be wanting a room for the night and a companionable lass. I want to drink until I've had me fill, and I expect someone to take me up to my room. You can keep a reasonable fee for yourself, but tomorrow I'd like to know what I paid for.”
The next morning he woke up with a big head, and it felt like his nerves were more or less on the outside of his skin. It hurt to think. There was a bottle of the good stuff on the night stand, and a couple of stiff shots took the edges off of the morning.
He went up to the Glory Hole mine where he had been working and told the foreman he was quitting, and they could keep his pay. He was now a self-employed man with his own business concerns to take care of.

Chapter One

There are certain smells and sounds that become hardwired in our brains, associated with a certain time or place. The smell and sound of bacon cooking hits me that way. No matter where I am or what I am doing, the splatter and hiss and the smell transport me back to The Farm. It brings along with it a tumble of associated memories.
The day always started the same. Winter, Summer, Spring or Fall. It made no difference. The mornings on a dairy farm proceed with an almost metonymic regularity. Uncle Fred was a little hard of hearing, so he had one of those old Big Ben alarm clocks that ticked so loud you could hear it clear upstairs when things were quiet. The alarm was sufficient to awake everyone in the old two-story farmhouse. The first business of the morning was to get the old wood stove fired up, and the coffee on. The sound of the opening and closing of the firebox of the old cast iron kitchen stove is so distinct, I can hear in my head just by thinking about it. When I was young, it was such a comforting series of events. I would be tucked away in my portion of the upstairs, knowing that I had another half an hour of so to lie there and drowse. Once again it was morning, and all was right with the world. Later in life things did not always start so comfortably, but I always had those memories as a kind of stable base around which the currents of everyday life flowed.
There were times when I cursed the sameness of it all. Life done to a metronome, everyone knowing the dance and keeping perfect time, but under the frustration was unshakeable belief that there would be a tomorrow, and it would be pretty much the same as today, and it wasn't such a bad thing.
Once that tumble and roll of memories start, you have to just ride along with it, not knowing exactly where you are going to end up. Sometimes it might be picking Huckleberries up on Grouse Creek, the next it might be bucking bales in the gawdawful hot tin-roofed whore of a barn, or when that same barn finally fell over on the bull, a couple of calves and a couple of suckling pigs.
I don't often eat bacon any more. The grease is hard on my digestion, and it is likely to give me heartburn for half the day. I don't order it in Restaurants because there is so much that I like better. But this morning had found me in front of the stove with a fork in my hand, listening to the sizzle and spit while I took a tumble through my memories.
This morning they landed right smack in the middle of Star Parker. That was a subject that covered a considerable amount of territory. Living in the country, you get to know everyone, or at least get to know ABOUT everyone. If you don’t know what you’ve been up to lately, just go up the road a piece and ask the neighbors. They’ll be able to tell you things about yourself that you never even knew. I had known of Star, then known Star, then didn’t know her at all. We have been in and out and crossways of each other’s paths for most of out lives. Sometimes we were on the same path, sometimes we were in collision. The ride could be as smooth as the glide of a canoe on a quiet mountain lake, or it could be a real trainwreck. Our relationship had been both. At least we never had the lack of good sense it would require to go and get married or anything. One or the other of us would always gain our senses before things went that far, although there were times when it was a close thing. I’m not saying we were never Lovers. I’m not saying we were never in love. It just always seemed that when she was in love with me, I was in love with someone else. And when I was in love with her, she could look right at me and never even see me. An Astrologer would probably say that our stars were not in alignment or something.
Star was in the grade behind me at school, so although I knew who she was, I didn't pay much attention to her. She was just another part of the landscape, until a bunch of us went ice-skating out on the slough one night. I suspect that she had arranged the order of loading into J.B.s old Buick so that she could end up in my lap. Anyway, that is where she ended up. I had never really noticed how nicely rounded her backside was, nor how well she had filled out upstairs. I had plenty of opportunity that night. She found so many reasons to twist and turn and put parts if her anatomy in my face that I was in quite a state by the time we got to the slough. A teenage boy is in a constant state of turmoil anyway, and after the provocation I had, I had to get myself under control just to get out of the car. I can't swear for sure, but it sure looked to me like she checked to make sure she had the effect on me that she wanted. I may have been under control, more or less, but it was still evident that I wasn't entirely under control. I could almost swear I caught sight of just a little "I did that ' in her grin.