Death on the High Lonesome (21 page)

V
irgil hadn't been down to the real desert part of the county, south of Redbud, since they had found two headless murder victims, a brother and a sister, the previous summer. The farther south you traveled, the more barren the landscape, the more scattered the inhabitants. It was a region of earth tones and right angles. Any green areas were mostly the result of irrigation. The growing season here was well over four-fifths of the year, but the problem was water. The area had become drought stricken the last four or five years. Water had become an expensive commodity. The Southwest had become a mecca for many escaping from cold and snow. Their refusal to recognize that much of it was desert and their reluctance to leave green lawns behind contributed heavily to the stress on the water table. Serious farmers had to go deep to tap into an aquifer. They could no longer depend on nature to meet their needs. Virgil saw the desert beauty, but knew it could be unforgiving. People who lived here
also knew to respect the desert. People who didn't could lose their lives. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room.

Virgil's destination, Sky High Airfield, was a bit of an anachronism. On one level it could be considered something of an aeronautical dinosaur, but that hadn't always been the case. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, it was in the mainstream, even cutting-edge. This was the age of wing walkers and flying acrobats. A time when the people were enthralled by airmen. Curtiss, Lindbergh, Wiley Post: they were the names in the headlines, the heroes of the day. Sky High got its name then. Everybody looked to the sky. As with all innovations since the discovery of the wheel, when flying became routine, the awe and wonder faded away. It became a casualty of commerce and business. Places like Sky High faded from the landscape in the wake of huge metro airports.

Coming down off a ridge, Virgil could see the airfield in the valley below. As if to draw attention to itself, one small, private plane was doing circles in the sky overhead. As he reached level ground and got closer, he could see ten or twelve similar planes sitting in the grass facing the runway. The runway was nothing more than hardpan. A desert airport like this didn't need the expense of a paved runway when dirt that had been rolled over for decades became as hard as concrete. Unlike the ribbons of interlaced tracks at the airport in Phoenix, it never had to be hosed down when the temperature climbed above one hundred to keep the runway from buckling. There were four separate buildings that served as hangars. In the first of these was what amounted to an office. Virgil pulled up to it, noting as he stepped out of his car the sign above, which indicated its purpose. Like everything else it did not seem to wear its age lightly. The name
SKY HIGH
, along with any other information it offered, was so faded as to be unreadable by anyone with anything less than 20/20 vision and farther than ten feet away. Virgil, squinting in the glare of midday, barely fit the first category. It was another of those imperfections of aging he was trying to ignore. When he walked to the door, he saw peeking out from this building and its nearest companion the drooping rotor blades of a helicopter. The door of the office was slightly ajar, so he walked right in without knocking.

Everything inside, matching the sign, provided ample evidence that Sky High was stuck in a time warp of long ago. There was what could be loosely referred to as a reception area. Assorted chairs lined the walls, separated by similarly mismatched tables on which sat piles of indiscriminate magazines for waiting customers. Most showed heavy wear, with ripped covers or dog-eared pages. The majority of them were related to flying. Virgil had a suspicion that none of them had been published within the current year. At the far end of the room opposite the door was a desk that sat outside of a windowed, closed-off area that served as an inner office. In contrast to everything else about the room, the top of the desk held a neat assortment of papers stacked to one side on a desk-set pad. On the other side stood a computer. Between them both sat a woman.

“Hello, Margaret.”

On hearing her name, the woman looked up from a paper she had been reading. She sat ramrod straight, had piercing blue eyes, not a hair out of place, and a smile that spread a continuous web of wrinkles across her face.

“Virgil.” She jumped from her chair, came around the desk, then fell into Virgil's arms. “Oh, my,” was all she could muster.

Virgil could feel her thinness through her dress. It had always
been that way. He knew he could have lifted her off her feet with one arm. The lightness of a hummingbird. “Eustace!” She shouted “Eustace” in a voice belying both her age and her size.

On the other side of the glass in back of her desk, a man of similar chronology looked up from a desk that was the antithesis of hers. Piles of papers stacked randomly on top, held in place by some invisible cousin of gravity. Only his face showed above the mound nearest to him. With his bald head and smiling eyes, Virgil thought of the moon coming over a mountain. With great effort, he got to his feet, then came stumbling out into the outer room, where Virgil still stood wrapped in the clutches of Margaret.

“Virgil . . . Virgil.” Like his wife, it was all he could say. Bent almost in half from a long-ago flying accident, he barely reached above Virgil's waist. Finally, Margaret disentangled them one from the other, then led them through the inner office on to their living quarters.

It was a different world. Margaret's hand showed everywhere. The room was large enough to hold a biplane, which in fact it had, as it was the first hangar built at Sky High almost a hundred years earlier. Margaret and Eustace had converted it to living quarters over sixty years before when they had come to Sky High as newlyweds. At one end of the large, open room was a modern kitchen. A long harvest table separated that from a living area with comfortable furnishings placed strategically about to create an intimate atmosphere. Margaret led Virgil by the hand to one of the groupings. After placing him in a center chair she and Eustace sat on either side of him. A low, octagonal table with a vase full of fresh flowers sat in front of Virgil. He glanced about the room. Nothing had changed. The walls were literally covered with aviation history. He wondered if someday it would all end up in a museum. Photographs of flying Jennys, some
with wing walkers, were interspersed with head shots, many of them autographed, showing the likes of Rickenbacker, Earhart, and Jacqueline Cochran, along with a host of other aviators who had challenged the skies as their domain. Some were unknowns or lost in the history of the spectacular achievements of a few others, but were nevertheless important.

“Virgil, why don't you come down more often?” Eustace asked. “It must be over a year.”

Virgil immediately felt the weight of guilt, especially since he knew he had not come merely for a social visit, but instead had an ulterior motive.

“I apologize. A weak excuse, but I've had, let's say, an unusually busy year.”

Margaret reached over and patted his hand. “We know we're just being selfish, but you are just about all the family we have left.”

Virgil knew there was no blood relationship to back up that comment, but something just as strong, maybe even stronger. Aunt Margaret and Uncle Eustace had been in Virgil's life well before he drew his first breath. They, so to speak, came with the furniture that is the flowering of long, intimate relationships. He was probably in his late teens before he figured out that they shared no blood relationship. Margaret was his aunt Clara's closest and dearest friend. When Eustace signed on for a future with her, he eventually introduced Clara to his closest friend, Clyde. Then nature took its course. They had become then and forever his aunt Margaret and uncle Eustace. When Virgil's parents were killed and Clara down in El Paso was so far away, it was Margaret who moved into the house and helped Virgil with all of the arrangements. It was Eustace who suggested Virgil to other members of the town council as the
likely candidate to take over the job as sheriff, replacing his father in that role. Truth be told, it was easier convincing them than it was Virgil, who had set his sights on parts unknown and new adventures that had little to do with the sleepy outpost of Hayward in the Southwest. This coming on the heels of his own personal tragedy in the loss of Rusty, for whom he would have stayed in Hayward until the last tooth fell out of his head. Once she was lost to him, so also, he thought, was Hayward. He was ready to pack his bags. Eustace somehow held sway. Convinced him to take the job for a year, catch his breath after the devastation of two personal tragedies. It was good advice. All these years later, it was impossible, sitting in a room with these two, not to wonder how he got here or what his life would have been if he had not listened to Uncle Eustace.

“How's Clara?” Margaret said, interrupting his fleeting reverie. “She told me you spent some time with her after you got out of the hospital.”

“Good. She's good.”

“Still making her special lemonade?”

“Oh, yeah. Maybe more potent than ever.”

“Good for her,” Eustace said. “Always look forward to our visits down there. Margaret gets mad at me when I try to duplicate her recipe.”

“That's because he never knows when to stop pouring the tequila. The last batch he made had me seeing double for a couple of hours.”

“That's just because you forgot to put on your glasses.”

Virgil smiled at the light banter. “Anyhow, I've got to fess up to an ulterior motive for this visit.”

Margaret and Eustace leaned forward a little.

“I need to talk to the guy who runs the helicopter service.”

“That's no problem,” Eustace said. “They're both out in one of the hangars now.”

“Both?”

“Well, they're brothers. Nice fellas. Jake and Cory Lassiter. One of them is always on call, but they work on maintenance together when they have downtime. That's why they are both here today. C'mon, Virgil. I'll walk you over, introduce you.” Eustace got up from his chair. Virgil did the same.

“When you boys come back lunch will be sitting on the table waiting for you.”

While Eustace and Virgil walked toward the hangar, Eustace told Virgil how pleased he and Margaret were with the success of the helicopter operation.

“Guess this is the good fallout from growth,” Eustace said. “These boys are pretty busy. Beside the contract with Hayward Memorial and a couple of other clients, they do private flights, even sightseers. Don't mind telling you, Virgil, they came along at just the right time for Sky High. Margaret and I were wondering if we could stay afloat with just the private planes that stay here. Matter of fact, down the line maybe Hayward ought to consider an arrangement with them as a supplement to EMT services and other policing. Those birds can cover a lot of ground faster than cruisers or horseback. They can also get to country that you can only get to on mule or horse. Look how they got Charlie Thompson out.”

“No argument, Eustace. Anything that helps. They saved Charlie's life.”

*   *   *

Virgil stayed longer with Margaret and Eustace than he had planned. That was initially the result of his guilt, but in the
final analysis it was because he plain just enjoyed their company. He loved their stories. There was always a new one. He belly laughed for the first time in a long time when Eustace told the story of the lady wing walker who went up on a brutally hot day dressed in shorts and a halter. She became the victim of a sudden drop in altitude and some unpredictable air currents. As the pilot did the last loop, she lost her halter. Needless to say, for the male audience, she became the hit of the afternoon. Eustace said that for years after, whenever it was announced that act was performing, they always had sellout crowds. Margaret insisted that the wardrobe misstep was no accident.

Virgil decided to bypass Hayward when he left Sky High and take a different route to the ranch. He didn't want to go to Velma's wake in his uniform. It wasn't as late as it looked. The sky showed leaden and gray. There was a distinctive bite to the air. Mile after mile of desert sameness had a kind of numbing effect. The occasional vehicle, the only thing to break up the monotony. One flew by in the opposite direction at least twenty-five miles over the limit. Virgil just wasn't in the mood. Out here, speed wasn't much of an issue. If a driver went off the road on either side, the biggest obstacle in his path might be a barrel cactus. The terrain was flat and endless. Rarely was anyone seriously hurt from one of these incidents. Usually the biggest complaint from a driver if they had a blowout or got mired in loose sand was that cell phone service was at best spotty. The country was so remote that they could wait an hour or more, depending on the time of day, for a car to come along. For Virgil, it was the perfect ride to reflect on what the Lassiter brothers had told him.