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Skipper didn't sleep much. He never had, really. It had been five or six hours a night the year he rolled onto a runway for the first time, a vigilant warbird by construction; age and nightmares had brought that number down to three hours some nights, none at all on others.
That was no reason, if you asked Skipper, to keep Sparky awake at odd hours. The little tug would stay up to watch over him if he thought Skipper was unwell, physically or mentally, but would doze off comfortably if Skipper were merely engaged in some quiet and ordinary activity.
So Skipper had passed many a long night, for decades, still and quiet on his wheels, wings folded, reading by a low work light or just watching the moon and stars out of the small window on his side of the hangar. He hadn't taken to the internet the way Sparky had, so the SkyPad his hangar-mate would have happily loaned him sat black-screened in its charging cradle.
Tonight, Sparky was not-quite-snoring and the lights were off. The moon, waxing gibbous, was descending toward the rocky buttes to the west. The days were starting to grow noticeably shorter, yet the sky along the northern horizon glowed the subtle blue of summer night in a northern state. There was a brighter edge to the west, a suggestion of green and yellow that would be gone in half an hour, and replaced by its eastern counterpart in three. Intermittent clouds drifted across the sky, and haze hid the fainter stars.
Skipper knew those horizons well, and he knew that one small, silhouetted protrusion did not belong there. Sitting high, too. Skipper still wasn't used to the sight of Dusty with pontoons.
Skipper didn't sleep much, but Dusty did. He was hard to haul out of his hangar at dawn for practice, even though he loved the flight exercises and the challenge they presented. And while the ex-cropduster was a sociable creature, certainly capable of staying up well into the night to celebrate, or drown his sorrows, or, apparently, play matchmaker while stopped over in China... well, he didn't belong out on a cliff by himself. Skipper looked from Dusty to Sparky, back to Dusty, back to Sparky... He sighed, and made his decision.
The hangar door rolled open with a rattle that could wake the dead. Sparky startled awake, an incoherent question coming out more as a series of noises than words.
"Go back to sleep," Skipper soothed gently. "Don't wait up for me. You'll hear, trust me."
"Yeah, that I will," Sparky chuckled, settling back on his small wheels, tines down. "But what --?"
"I'm headed up to Starboard Stabilizer Plateau," Skipper told him, knowing without looking that Dusty wasn't visible from Sparky's position. "I might stay to watch the dawn. Would you mind cleaning my window tomorrow?"
"Oh, sure thing, Skip." Sparky yawned. "You want me to find a rag now?"
"No, in daylight."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure. Go back to sleep." He rolled across the threshold, and wheeled around to watch as Sparky drove sleepily over to start the door closing. Then, unhurried, he began to taxi across Propwash Junction.
Seventy years had made him such a good liar. Even to Sparky, who'd been a part of the original conspiracy. Sometimes, like tonight, he couldn't even have explained why he did it. There was just an instinct, deep inside him, to protect Dusty and Dusty's privacy. To keep certain interactions completely between the two of them.
At least he had a pretty good idea that Dusty wasn't about to fly off into the night, crash into Chug's fuel station and burn down half the town. Becoming a firefighter hadn't cured Dusty of his impulsivity -- far from it -- but it had, at least, driven home some common sense.
Propwash Junction wasn't a round-the-clock airport; it closed at sunset, but for exceptional circumstances. The local planes were supposed to stay grounded after dark, but Skipper and Dusty were far from the only ones to routinely disregard that particular regulation for local hops. He got in the air with no trouble, and landed easily on the rocky dirt of the plateau. Below, almost silent and almost invisible in the night, the upper Columbia curled a half-turn around the rocky rise, one of the landforms from which the founders of Propwash Junction had long ago seen the silhouette of an aircraft emerge. Longtime fans of crop art, they'd completed the picture.
Now, the fields were plain green, or gold, or brown: rectangles carved out by fertilizer passes, circles limited by irrigation. Skipper couldn't see Dusty putting in the effort to plant and maintain a "painted" field, let alone a plane as unimaginative as Leadbottom.
Unimaginative, and loopy. For two decades or so, Skipper had feared that the biplane's condition was what he himself had to expect from old age. When it had come up last summer, though, Dottie was firmly convinced otherwise. Sparky outright scoffed at the idea, and Mayday, in his gentle way, reminded Skipper who was actually the oldest resident of Propwash Junction.
"Hey, Skipper." Dusty didn't turn to face him.
"Little late for you to be up," Skipper said mildly.
"When I was at Piston Peak," Dusty said, "every night, after flight curfew, Blade used to sit out on this cliff near the base, and watch the thunderstorms roll through. I used to wonder why. Now I know. Every flash of lightning could be a spot fire by morning."
There was a thunderhead on the southern horizon, its clouds a knobby mountain edged pale in the moonlight, its lightning a silent flicker, its thunder lost in distance. Skipper eyed it for a moment before deciding it was passing by and would come no closer.
Anyway, Dusty's nose pointed west-southwest. Directly toward, with a plane's sense of direction, the last wildfire he'd helped contain; local crews were still at work as the last of it burned out.
Skipper took a guess rather than ask an open-ended question, one Dusty would most likely deflect. "Hard part's done, Dusty. They'll be fine."
Dusty sighed, sinking on his pontoons. "It's not that. And you're right... I'm not even watching the storm anymore. I was, but then I got to thinking. I'm here, and not in India, tonight."
"Ishani probably misses you," Skipper agreed mildly. "Of course, it's not night in India."
"Right, she's in the air over the Himalayas by now. I called her up to wish her luck a few hours ago. She was joking about having to do it the hard way, because she wasn't willing to clip her wings to fit inside a railroad tunnel."
"I really hope you weren't planning to do that again. ...And this is coming from a guy with folding wings."
Dusty huffed a laugh, a real one, but brief and bittersweet. "This was supposed to be my big comeback year." He'd won the rally two years ago, on his first entry, and followed it up with a series of smaller racing successes, but then he'd lost much of the last summer to gearbox failure and firefighter training. This year... well.
The worst fire year the state has ever seen, said the news. Mayday's haggard expression said more, as he sent Dusty out to some neighboring county yet again, to help put lines around a fire that threatened a town.
Even still, Dusty had been able to keep up with the smaller races well enough to satisfy him, and to keep his name in the racing press. Nearly anything west of the Rockies, he could reach by air the day before the race, which allowed him to decide at the last minute whether to pull out. Mayday, with his years of experience, was confident enough to forecast three days of fire danger at a time, and willing to risk being wrong on occasion. The week-long Wings Around the Globe Rally, however, was different.
Dusty had announced his withdrawal from the Rally in a brief press conference, which had turned into a thirty-second video clip that RSN had replayed ad nauseum. He'd spoken briefly, explaining that every firefighter was needed, and that meant him too, before wishing the remaining competitors luck. But by accident or design, he'd given his statement at an evacuation center, and the background for the clip was a Red Cross aid station, serving gas and oil and minor repairs to a line of tired cars, many of them towing their most treasured belongings or herding exhausted children, too small to be street-legal but rolling anyway.
According to Sparky, the local unit was reporting that out-of-state donations had quadrupled the next day and had yet to descend.
"As far as the fans are concerned, you are back," Skipper said. "It's all a part of your legend."
Dusty thought that over -- perhaps pleased, perhaps skeptical. Finally, he spoke again, quietly. "I'm sorry."
"You're ...what?" Skipper wheeled around to put Dusty at his eleven o'clock, so best to stare at him.
"I'm sorry. I did what I felt like I had to do, for Mayday, for Propwash Junction, to make up for my own mistakes. I did the same thing at Piston Peak: made mistakes, made up for them. And now ... there's people who are still alive because I stayed behind."
Piston Peak had called, not long after that clip had started repeating on RSN, to offer their support the only way they could, in the midst of their own fire season. The whole air base was on the line, if Skipper remembered their headcount correctly. Dusty's biggest fan there, Dipper, had drowned most of them out, most of the time, with a somewhat incoherent but clearly encouraging message. But then the Chief had said something not unlike Dusty's last comment. Think of all the lives you're saving. Skipper had thought it sounded like a coded message. So much so, actually, that he'd wondered briefly if he'd confused the voices of the smaller chopper and the big C-119 -- who he'd spent more time avoiding than getting acquainted with last summer. At any rate, he'd known at the time that it resonated with Dusty. Now, hearing it again, he wasn't surprised.
"But I feel like in doing that, I've failed you. And the team," Dusty said, the last phrase an obvious afterthought. Skipper disregarded it.
"Me," Skipper repeated, giving Dusty one of those looks that inevitably made students squirm. It still worked. "You think that by not letting people die on your watch, you failed me."
"Um." Dusty rolled back, turning slightly toward Skipper. "When you put it like that, um, no."
Skipper held his gaze, long enough to be certain Dusty knew that yes, he was referring to The Thing They Didn't Talk About. The ones he hadn't been able to save.
"Sparky's the racing nut, Dusty," he said softly. "I'm in this to keep you from getting yourself killed. To let you be the best you can be, without ending up shrapnel somewhere. And if what you want to do, what you need to do, is fight fires -- then I'm proud of you, Dusty."
"You don't want me doing what you trained me to do? --I mean, I do use your training. It helps me fight fires, too. Remember those two old RVs you met at the Cornfest? I flew through an obstacle course, after dark, in the middle of a forest fire to get to them. I was looking for a place to scoop water, and there wasn't one. But I didn't think about the flying. I just did it."
That didn't come as much of a surprise to Skipper, who'd supervised all of his racing aerobatics -- practice and competition alike. "Good," he commented simply.
"But..."
He hadn't expected Dusty to fight fires with his racing skills. He also hadn't expected Dusty to see combat, and look how well that had worked out!
"I taught you to fly. I'm proud of you," Skipper repeated. Dusty gave him a small, melting smile before turning back toward the thunderhead, which chose that moment to send a bright flash of lightning snapping toward the ground. Dusty sighed.
"Dusty," Skipper recalled him gently. "What do you need, right now, to be able to rest?"
"I can't... Once it's light, I'll survey for spot fires. --Except that I can't, because we train then."
"Tell me what to look for, and I'll help you search," Skipper said. Although, really, fire was probably obvious enough.
Dusty boggled at him. "Really?"
There are still lives to save. You taught me that.
"Don't you think it's time you taught me something?" he said aloud.
"Um. Okay."
Skipper rolled around on his wheels, putting the riverbank to his back, facing out toward the lightening horizon. For a moment he thought of Sparky, and what he'd told him, and what he hadn't. Sparky would be expecting to see him at first light, here, or back at the hangar. But Sparky would understand, he thought.
Wherever you go, Dusty, I'll follow. You taught me that, too.