Medusa's Child

TWO

Scott McKay replaced the telephone and sat in silence for a few seconds, a spontaneous smile spreading across his broad, almost squarish face. The call had been a godsend, and he felt overwhelming relief pour over him like a sparkling waterfall, dissolving the monstrous tensions that had been building for weeks as his tiny company careened toward bankruptcy.

But now, armed with a new government contract, the one-airplane cargo airline he'd named ScotAir could stay afloat.

Scott jumped to his feet and grabbed his windbreaker. It was time to celebrate, and exactly where didn't matter. There were more than enough bars in the mountain town, and he was tired of sitting alone and feeling depressed.

The sun had come out, reflecting his rapidly recovering optimism. He paused by the door to the second-story deck of the century-old house, vaguely remembering that the sunlight had come bursting through a shroud of thunderclouds precisely as he got the good news. He let his eyes focus on the main street of Central City, Colorado, the late-season tourists flowing like colorful leaves from shop to shop in an endless stream through the commercial trough of the almost treeless valley—a visage he'd always found dreary.

Suddenly it didn't seem so bad. Suddenly he almost understood why his father had loved the old house—and the town—so much.

A familiar wave of sadness rolled over him at the thought of his dad and the massive unheralded heart attack that had taken the veteran corporate executive two years before. Scott had been at sea flying F-14 fighters, two weeks away from leaving the Navy and returning to Colorado. He'd had to delay the funeral nearly a week in order to get back from the Mediterranean.

But it still felt like last week. The pain of an only child losing his mother to a car crash ten years before, when they lived near Wichita, Kansas, had been devastating, but his father's death had been even worse. Suddenly he was truly alone in the world.

Scott glanced at the painting of his father hanging over the stone fireplace. The senior McKay had saved up hundreds of thousands of dollars in hopes of joining his Annapolis graduate son in business and starting a new company when he left the Navy. It had been fun, keeping up a blizzard of correspondence with his dad, niggling over a thousand ideas for all sorts of enterprises, always hiding his true desire to be an airline pilot instead of an empire builder.

Scott left the second-story den and descended the stairs two at a time to open the front door, pausing for a second to let the cool air slap him gently in the face and ruffle his sandy hair. The pleasant fragrance of an old ponderosa in the front yard reached his nose, actively competing with the aroma of garlic-laden Italian fare from a restaurant a block away.

He was forgetting something, and the struggle to recall what it was held him in the doorway in thought. There were overdue tax forms and reports to the Department of Transportation to complete, and maybe he should just close the door and get back to work. All the previous week he'd been too depressed to get anything done.

A little girl passed on the sidewalk, skipping happily, a bright metallic balloon festooned with happy birthday wishes following her. It made him think of his own birthday rapidly approaching, his thirty-first.

And what, he thought, have I accomplished?

He didn't like to admit to himself that he'd established ScotAir because the airline hiring boom had ended just as he'd left the Navy. Suddenly the only way to get an airline job had been to create his own airline, and he'd done exactly that.

He could have waited, of course. He could have held out, flying for smaller commuter and regional lines, until the Uniteds and Americans started hiring again.

But instead he invested the bulk of his father's estate to start the tiny cargo carrier without even one contract, an act which in the glaring light of hindsight seemed less than smart—especially since there were two loyal employees dependent on him…

Oh jeez, Jerry and Doc are both waiting by the phone!

Scott flew back into the house and grabbed the telephone on the entryway table to relay the good news to his copilot and flight engineer. He triggered the automatic dialer for Doc Hazzard's number in Colorado Springs, and then toggled on a second line and dialed Jerry Christian's number in Dallas. One more push of a button connected the two lines together, and within seconds both voices were in his ear.

"We got the contract, guys. We're gonna make it!"

"Wonderful!" Doc exclaimed from his end. Scott could hear the sound of a jetliner passing over the former Pan Am captain's apartment south of the Colorado Springs airport, almost drowning out the classical music in the background, a violin concerto that could easily be one of Doc's own recordings with the local symphony. Doc had long been a world-class violinist. It was his passion, but never his profession.

"Thank God, Scott!" Jerry said from Dallas with obvious relief. "When do we start this new contract?"

"Thursday," Scott told them. "We leave for Miami on Thursday, empty. We fly the first load out Friday morning. It's high-priority scientific cargo coming to Miami from somewhere in the south of… southern South America."

"That's redundant," Doc needled, still chuckling from the relief of knowing that a year of hard work for a boss thirty years his junior still had a chance to pay off.

"Okay, Southern Chile," Scott replied, aware that the sound of a single cello had replaced the concerto in the background, leaving him to wonder if Doc was alone. "Anyway, it's stuff coming back from an Antarctic expedition that was canceled early. We fly the loads to Denver over the next two months, and in November…"

"In November we go to work for Nissan, right?" Jerry asked. "That contract is still intact, isn't it?"

"You bet," Scott replied. For weeks the struggle had been to pay the bills until November, when the new three-year contract hauling high-value, just-in-time auto assembly components would start. By December, they'd have enough money to lease a second plane and hire a second crew.

Jerry's voice came through the receiver with a subdued, almost traumatized timbre. "How close did we come, Scott?"

"What do you mean?"

"To oblivion. To running out of cash."

There was silence as Scott considered what to say to a man whose finances were as perilous as his employer's. Having three children and a diffident wife who demanded an expensive house in North Dallas, good times or bad, had taken its toll on the flight engineer. Jerry couldn't spare a penny, and, financially, he couldn't survive another job loss.

"It was far too close, Jere. We have a lease payment due in ten days for thirty thousand, and I didn't have it."

"You didn't tell me," Jerry said quietly.

"Because I fully expected to get this contract, and now we have. It's gonna work, guys. By January, you'll be the senior of two crews."

When the call ended, John T. "Doc" Hazzard replaced the handset with a broad smile and absently scratched his barrel chest as he stood by the window facing the Colorado Springs airport, where ScotAir's 727 was based.

Life is good, he concluded, maybe even better since Pan Am collapsed. At sixty-three he wouldn't be able to fly captain for a passenger airline now anyway.

"You always parade around buck naked in front of the window, Doc?" The feminine voice reached his ears from the vicinity of the couch, and Doc turned to flash an even broader smile at the beautiful blonde, herself clothed only in a small pearl necklace. She had leaned her cello against the wall, and he glanced at the desk to make sure his violin was in no danger of falling. Sheet music spilled off a stand as he brushed it while moving toward her, but Doc ignored it.

"Always." He aped a weight lifter's pose. "This body's too great to keep hidden. You said so yourself!"

She shook her head as he came back to her. "I'll ignore the raging ego. Besides, those fingers are far more enticing than your body, buster."

He smiled. "You mean, what I can do with a fiddle?"

She nodded slowly. "That too." A sultry smile spread across her face. "The phone call was good news, I take it?"

He told her of the reprieve.

"So when are you going to quit, Doc?"

"Quit what? Teaching eager young women about love-making?"

"When are you going to quit flying? When are you going to quit being in constant motion? Among your other talents"—she winked at him—"and physical attributes, you're a great violinist, far beyond amateur."

"And you're a great cellist. That's how we met, if I recall. Passion in the orchestra pit."

"No, seriously." She pushed away slightly. "When are you going to settle down and work on your music? Maybe join the symphony full-time? Maybe spend more time with me?"

He kissed her and caressed her blonde hair. "I can't afford to settle down, Karen. I'm still happily divorced to three wives, and they need their money."

"You're the strangest divorce I've ever encountered, you know. You seem to enjoy it!"

"I still love them all."

"But someday, Doc, you're going to have to slow down."

He gently took her shoulders and rocked her back to look her in the eye. "Honey, I plan to die in motion. I always have. Right now, I'm really enjoying flying with a fine young man who desperately wants to succeed, but who really doesn't have enough background flying big jets. He needs my experience more than he realizes. It's not just the money, it's the challenge—and, I'll admit, it's also the rush of getting on my horse and riding off in all directions, as the old saying goes."

"You're an encyclopedia of old sayings, Hazzard."

"Well, here's a new one." He smiled and cocked his head, his eyes still locked on hers. "When I drop in my tracks, I want the body to skid for a week."

The plain white envelope was waiting under a stack of overdue bills as Vivian Henry emptied her apartment mailbox, the words UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS instantly twisting her stomach into a knot.

It had to be the verdict—the last chance to restore the annuity the government had refused to pay after Rogers Henry's suicide—the monthly payments she had depended on to support her the rest of her life.

If the piece of paper in the envelope reversed the earlier denials, the bills could be paid, and perhaps she could find a nicer place to live.

But if she lost…

Feeling weak—her legs wobbly, her head spinning— Vivian climbed the stairs to her tiny second-floor apartment with gloomy memories of the Washington, D.C., hearing filling her mind.

It had been a nightmare, sitting in silence in the courtroom as her young lawyer fell apart, unable to answer the questions of three stern federal judges who wanted to know why the government should repair the mistake made by her divorce attorney years before. One poorly worded sentence stood between her and poverty—one botched sentence which clearly awarded half the retirement payments while Rogers Henry lived, but failed to clearly order the government to pay the same amount after he died.

One month after the funeral, her checks had stopped coming, and two years of rejected appeals and dwindling accounts had followed. There was one small savings account left, and a monthly check from Social Security for three hundred dollars, and that was it.

Vivian entered her joyless apartment, turned on the light, and sat down at the kitchen table. She arranged the bills on one side and the U.S. Court of Appeals envelope on the other, not daring to hope.

What do I do if I've lost? she wondered. In another two years she would gain title to the house, but she'd never last that long financially. And the thought of caving in and doing Rogers' bidding in order to get the three hundred thousand dollars was more repugnant than moving to a smaller apartment and using her savings. Even when a heart attack had felled her friend and part-time employer, closing the florist shop, Vivian had told herself she was just bridging a tough time until the pension was restored.

The words of the idiot lawyer she'd hired were still echoing in her mind: "There's no appeal this time, Vivian. Whatever the U.S. Court of Appeals decides is the end of the line."

The envelope lay before her like stairs to a gallows, but since there was no point in delaying it further, she pulled it to her suddenly and ripped it open, unfolding the pages inside and dropping her eyes to the word she had hoped against hope she would not see: AFFIRMED.

Vivian slowly placed the papers back on the table. Twenty-five hundred dollars per month for life was now gone forever, and there were other truths she had no choice but to face: She had no job. She had no savings.

She had no choice.

Vivian stood up and moved to the small kitchen counter and flipped through her small address book to a particular listing. She dialed the number and sat back down at the table, holding her forehead in one hand, the receiver in the other, as the voice of her ex-husband's attorney came on the line.