Free This Given Sky by James Grady Page B

Jake offered to help the man with his repairs and then roll the plane into the hangar. Jake gave Thel his keys to drive herself home, asked her to call his folks, tell them he’d grab a burger after he got his car back from her.
    Jake heard Thel drive away. Bent to help the boxer fix a wheel.
    “Could fly without it,” said the boxer who loved and fathered three daughters, “but taking off and landing would be a bitch.”
    As they finished, the boxer noted that Jake had sure earned a twenty-dollar tip.
    Don’t pay me , insisted Jake.
    The boxer gave him a nod like maybe he’d been looking for that answer. Turned toward the sun burning above the horizon fifty miles away.
    “Got some daylight left,” he said. “This plane’s lighter to push into the hangar when it’s about outta fuel. It’s got half a tank now.”
    The fighter plane was a Mustang P-51 two-seat trainer. The boxer put Jake in the back seat and strapped him into a parachute.

    Gene Mallette
    Taking off felt like rocketing backward and forward at the same time— whoosh! Floating. Soaring. Aware that the tiny box you’re in is hot as an oven. Smells like fuel, your own baking body. The propeller shimmered beyond the radio headset-clasped skull of the boxer/pilot. The engine roared so loud Jake could only hear him talk through his own set of earphones.
    And, like that , Jake found himself beyond any fear of knowing he was no fooling dead if something went wrong. Forget the parachute, he’d choose to ride this warbird 185 miles per hour straight into the ground. If the engine stalled. Caught fire. If they lost the air beneath their wings in an acrobatic maneuver. If a freak downdraft hit them. If . But there were no ifs : only is . He was here . Untouchable and touching nothing but a fragile plane and the truths of physics. And the boxer/pilot, the man with sure hands and feet on the controls, risked this given sky with wondrous freedom.
    For the last few weeks of that junior year, Jake hit schoolwork big time , upped that effort in his senior year—at least until he won an Air Force ROTC scholarship to the state university at Missoula.
    Thel wanted to go there, too, because Missoula was the biggest state university, in a mountain valley 233 miles away from Shelby, more exotic, had more classes— obviously there were lots of reasons to go where Jake went, but with what she and her dad could scrape up plus needing to come home weekends to help him, she settled for the smaller teacher and vo/tech/business training Northern University only 103 miles east of Shelby in Havre, a flat landscape burg barely three times Shelby’s size.
    Steve’s mom finally took Bear Man to court, got a divorce and a lump of cash before he skipped out of alimony collection jurisdiction, so Steve figured he could student-loan and sweat-labor his way through Havre U, too. Figured on being a teacher: “Figure kids can learn from my mistakes.”
    After high school graduation, Jake landed a summer job as a sledge-swinging gandy dancer for the trains that had birthed Shelby when railroad tycoons lobbied homesteading laws through Congress. The railroads got free land plus mineral, timber, and water rights so they could service dreamers who went west to homestead earth that the railroads’ ads claimed could be worked to flow milk, honey, and freedom. Homesteaders found windblown prairie, scant rain, forty-degree blizzards, and rattlesnakes.

    Grady
    Steve landed a summer job as a laborer for the city road crew.
    And because of a new Equal Employment Opportunity Act, so did Thel, where she became the first “girl” to shovel and jackhammer Shelby’s streets. Then she’d spend an hour or so after dinner working in her dad’s closed store before the posse picked her up to cruise through velvet summer nights, get stoned, listen to Bruce Springsteen, and talk about escaping from their Montana hometown to someplace cool like New Jersey.
    Second day on their city job, Thel and Steve