By Air Mail Ch.01

He didn't relish the thought of the ride into Fairfield, since a lot of it would be over rough mountain trails until he got within a few miles of the place. With any luck, the gas in his motorcycle's tank would last all the way there. If that didn't happen, he'd pour the last of his little gas can into the tank and fill it up once he was in town for the long haul that he couldn't wait to start out on.

He wanted to wake up early so that he could get a good start into town and then ... oh, then, he had a long, one hundred and eighty mile haul back home, some of it over forestry roads with a hopefully short stopover in Boise to hand in his logbooks, keys and all to get paid off.

With a bit of luck, he planned to be home and walking into his mother's café before this time tomorrow.

There were a few people who he now absolutely needed to see.

The two that he ached to see the most were also the causes of some slight pain to his heart all the same, but he yearned to at least see them as soon as possible.

He saw the big sketchpad that he'd brought with him in the spring, now almost raggedy-looking with some loose pages due to long use. He picked it up and sat down before the hearth to look at his drawings once more. There were a lot of his drawings that he wanted to keep; landscapes, still-lifes and such drawn in a place with a stupendous view almost everywhere that you looked.

There were also some that he'd drawn out of his memories and with a fair bit of longing.

Those were the ones which had to perish right here in the flames.

He looked at each one for a moment and smiled to himself a lot of the time before he tossed them into the fire. Prominent among the nude figure studies was one woman as well as one man. There were also some that had nudes involved in some rather sexual ...

Ok, he thought, VERY sexual situations and those ones, especially the good ones, were the hardest to feed the fire with. They were nothing more than his sexual fantasies and he appeared in a few of them as well, some even with that man.

Well, nobody ever said that a fire lookout's life wasn't lonely.

He looked through once more before remembering that there had originally been two men and a woman used as subjects, but he'd given Chance the ones with him in them.

With one more careful look through to be sure that none of the naughty ones had escaped the blaze, Craig banked the fire a little to last over the night, since lately, he'd seen plenty of signs of frost at his present elevation of almost 9700 feet above sea level. With that done, he moved the lantern to another nail, closer to his bed and he unzipped his heavy sleeping bag and shook it out in case any of the mice had held thoughts about staking their claim while he'd been up the tower at his job during the day.

You only need to feel them scurrying around in your bed while you're in it one time to make this precautionary exercise a nightly habit.

Satisfied, he looked at his watch once more and listened to the wind moaning while deciding that it was a sound that he wouldn't miss if he never heard it again in his life. It was time to move on and hopefully start some kind of career.

His watch said twenty to nine. Time to hit the hay, if he was going to get a move on early in the morning.

He got undressed, turned out the lantern, and crawled into his sleeping bag, telling himself that tomorrow night, he was going to be sleeping in clean crisply-ironed sheets for the first time in over four months.

But sleep wouldn't come right away. Though he was able to keep his thoughts of Chance away ... now ...

Craig was thinking about Amelia.

She was Rebecca's daughter and they'd been kids together. For almost as long as he could remember, he'd loved her from afar. The trouble was that she thought of him as almost a brother and he doubted that he would ever be able to get her to take him seriously.

The war had been an unsettling thing - even as far out of the mainstream as Cascade, Idaho. Amelia had always liked his cousin Tad. She never said it, but you only had to see her light up whenever he was nearby. But that hadn't been the worst of it. Tad was handsome - even as a boy, and he'd grown up to be the kind of man that women cast longing gazes at as he walked past on the street.

Seriously.

Tad was an all-around wizard at many things. He'd been an actual cowboy - and he looked better doing it than anybody that Hollywood had ever trotted out on the silver screen - and he actually knew how to be one, too.

Tad could make anything look disgustingly easy.

But the war had taken him away years ago and he hadn't been back since. He'd gone to be a pilot and Craig knew that you had to shoot down five enemy planes to be called an ace. Well, true to form for him, Tad had shot down seven - and he'd done it at night as he'd hunted Japanese aircraft.

But as far as almost anyone knew, Tad was gone. The war had ended and no one had heard from Tad in almost a year, since his squadron had been moved to Hawaii and then returned to fly in defense of occupied Japan herself.

Somewhere in there - sometime during Tad's long absence, Amelia had met and married someone.

That had almost crushed shy and unassuming Craig when he'd come back that fall.

What was worse was that while Craig had been gone with his ass high up on Iron Mountain that summer, the boy that Amelia had married treated her terribly and no one knew anything of it.

By the time that Craig had gone again and gotten back in the fall the next year, Amelia was a widow, her husband killed the very first time that his unit had gone into action after training and shipment overseas. Amelia was free of her ogre but the damage had been done.

There was almost none of that sparkle left in Amelia's eyes anymore. Craig spent many evenings sitting with Amelia as she poured her heart out to him while she wept. But she had gotten a little better very slowly. Too bad that no one - especially Amelia - knew that Craig still loved her and would have done anything to see her smile again like before.

But he was going home the next day, he reminded himself and he had hopes again, because he had to. He hoped to see Amelia and maybe this time, he'd have enough of a spine to be able to tell her how he felt about her - how he'd always felt about her.

And just maybe ...

She might listen.

Craig tried to think about her the way that he always saw her in his mind, in little scenes from his life. Amelia had been the little hellion who'd completed their trio, the impulsive, impetuous, high-speed moppet who seemed to obey the laws of physics only out of courtesy because she was absolutely fearless in all things. As far as anyone knew, Amelia hadn't learned to ride her bicycle in the more usual way where one learned to balance as they maneuvered. It was more like the bike had given up and just acquiesced, since allowing the girl to ride might result in fewer crashes - which Amelia only stomped away from with a scowl anyway.

It had been Amelia who had taught Craig how to climb trees. Years later, she'd come to admire the way that he could shoot a .22 very accurately, though she pointed out that he couldn't hit a barn if there was little time to aim. Amelia could, with no trouble at all.

At thirteen years of age.

There wasn't a rabbit who was safe anywhere if he was within her sight.

Amelia and Craig used to hunt together sometimes after Tad had gone off to the army. By then, her father and mother had gotten her a .22/410 over-under single shot. She used the shotgun barrel when she was after rabbits for the café sometimes because at certain times of the year, Marjorie offered things like that on the menu as limited specials.

Craig noticed once that she sometimes used the .22, but only for two or three rabbits. "Are you out of shells?" he asked her.

"Nope," she'd smiled, "These ones are for us and our mothers. With just one bullet, you don't have to worry about biting into a pellet that got missed when it was cleaned."

As a little girl, she'd always idolized Tad, though she'd always been closer to Craig, since they were only a year apart in age and they did everything together.

The way that she'd grown up had given her the body of a goddess to his eyes. She wasn't tall or stacked in the ridiculous way that a lot of the guys he'd known in school liked to fantasize about.

Craig's fantasies were much milder. They involved actually making love to Amelia.

He sighed as that old feeling rose in him and he reached down to masturbate. When he thought of her all grown up, he did it slowly. This time, as always when Amelia was in his mind, it went on for a long time.

But over that time, he also began to think about someone else and in a slightly different way.

From the moment that Craig had arrived - and promptly suffered his first asthma attack in Cascade after finding out that he was going to be left in with a pack of strangers all alone in some awful strange-looking country, Tad had been there for him, stepping up to offer him quiet assurance and a helping hand.

Craig had only been six when he'd been handed over to Marjorie, but after a little while, once the attack was over, Tad took him out for a walk and they went out back.

Tad asked what was wrong with Craig's breathing and the younger boy already knew the name of his personal curse. Tad nodded and dropped the issue, but he quietly asked his mother later on. Some years later, he surprised Craig with what he knew of it and when Craig had asked, Tad had just shrugged and said that he'd looked it up in the encyclopedia at school, since he'd wanted to learn what he could because it was what Craig lived with. Tad had astounded Craig when he said that Teddy Roosevelt had suffered from it from when he was a young boy too.

Tad didn't know Craig from Adam that first day, but he found that he liked the quiet boy and once Craig found that Tad was genuine and never played him for a fool or used him, he began to trust him implicitly almost right away.

They were talking, sitting on a very low bough of an old twisted pine tree out there and Tad slid off and helped Craig down before he went to a hidden place and pulled out a slingshot that he wasn't supposed to have. They spent the afternoon walking in the thin woods not far from the train station, shooting at boxcars as they went past slowly.

When they came back, everyone was in an uproar, especially Marjorie, who fussed over Craig and asked if he was alright or if he was hurt or anything. Craig had been amazed as he'd shaken his head and said that he was fine and that they'd just been having lots of fun. Marjorie was about to get a little uncharacteristically wound up, since the governess hadn't been gone for twenty minutes and look what had happened.

Rebecca had interceded then and she pointed out that nothing had happened but two boys being boys and she pointed at the two of them, both a little dirty, but otherwise unharmed. "Look into their eyes, Marjorie," she whispered, "What I see is the best thing that you could ever see there. They left as strangers. Let them be like brothers. That is what I can see already."

Marjorie looked and nodded before she told Tad to show Craig where to wash up for dinner. As they left to go upstairs, Marjorie had the strangest moment as she watched them climbing the steps side by side, still talking.

She chuckled to Rebecca, "I almost feel like I've got two sons now, the way they're getting on. We'll have to see how long this lasts."

At dinner, Craig didn't see one thing that he really even knew, never mind liked. The only familiar things were the potatoes and they weren't mashed in butter the way that he'd always had them served to him. They weren't even mashed at all.

"I don't like any of this," he'd whispered to Tad, "I don't see anything that I like here."

Tad shrugged, "Better get used to it. This is what we eat here. You ought to just try it."

Marjorie had overheard and she smiled at Craig, "This isn't where you used to live. There are no paid servants here. I don't have the money to make anything special for just one person."

Marjorie, Deke, and Rebecca came to Tad's room that night to try to comfort Craig as best they could. It was a traumatic thing to him, but he still remembered Marjorie sitting on the edge of the bed stroking his back and shoulder, "The letters that I got said that you needed to grow up in better air," she smiled. "You'll get used to things here, Craig. You'll see, in few months when they come to get you, you'll be breathing much better - and you've already made one friend, I can see that."

He'd nodded, not out of his feeling much better, but out of his wanting to feel better, because it was something that he'd never had. This beautiful stranger - the mother of his new friend Tad, who sat with him, sometimes running her fingers through his light blonde hair a little bit. He did actually feel a little bit better when she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.

That was what he'd seen her do to her own son and he began to wonder if that was what mothers do here, since he'd seldom gotten much of anything like that from his own mother.

The thing of it was that they never came for him or ever would, though Marjorie hadn't known that then, or she'd never have agreed to help by taking Craig in. She'd thought that the money which she was to draw from the bank was only to cover any costs to her over the interim. She'd only learned from the bank years later that it was to run until he was eighteen.

By the time that he was ten and Marjorie realized that they didn't want or expect him back, she was surprised at herself. She thought that she should have gotten angry over it, but then she found that she couldn't. If there were losers in this, it had been his callous parents. By then, Craig was her son in about everything and she'd fallen in love with him from almost the first. Deke was happy to have Craig as a son and he belonged to them as much as they belonged to him. When she'd asked them, while thinking with Deke about formally adopting him, she'd expected caution out of her husband, but it had been Craig who had told her something strange.

"I don't remember them much anymore," he'd said, "I feel like I belong here. But I know that Tad's name is what yours used to be when you had him. That's my name too. Tad tells anybody who asks that I'm his brother. That's the way that everybody knows me here. I want to keep it because of that."

Back on that first night, Craig was having a bit of a tough time coming to grips with everything, but he already knew that Marjorie looked as though she cared about him and she was trying to make him feel as at home as she could.

He was a little shocked to see the other woman again. Rebecca had gone home to feed her own family, but now she was back and she'd brought someone to meet him.

Craig was still trying to fathom Rebecca's appearance, since he'd never seen anyone like her. Back then, Rebecca's English was pretty good, but she hadn't finished smoothing it out yet.

"I learned at the school where I lived," she said, "Never wanted to know it when I was a girl. Too hard and for what?

Now?"

She laughed a little, "I need it here every day, all the time. I met Marjorie. Have to speak English good. She can't speak Paiute. How can you fight if you don't speak the same thing? Can't argue, nothing."

Craig thought that he would have smiled a little, if he wasn't so homesick. "I will try fix your chest," Rebecca nodded with a friendly smile and a finger against him over his heart, "Don't worry, it's not something I gotta break to fix."

He saw a motion near the door and a little girl came to him slowly. Rebecca tisked, "Come meet Craig, Amelia.

Well, come on ..."

Craig got his first look at her and he remembered a mop of wild, deep brown hair and such big eyes. "He doesn't look like he's from far away," she said a little suspiciously. She pointed here and there, "No dust."

Seeing that no one made any answer, Amelia thought that she must have said something a little wrong and she whipped up the hand which had been behind her back. It held a slightly worn teddy bear.

"For you," she said, "He needs somebody too. I have another one."

Craig looked up, blinking through his cooling tears and he saw Tad looking back. Tad said nothing, he just moved his chin in Amelia's direction slightly, but Craig got the hint and reached for the bear.

Amelia looked pleased and he thanked her.

While Craig cried and cried in the room that he shared with Tad after everyone else had gone while coming to grips with being sent away without anyone, Tad had been there. That first night as Craig wept because he couldn't understand why his parents had sent him away was the first night that Tad sat on the bed with Craig to try to comfort him.

"I don't know much about it," he said, "All's I know is that Momma says we're both related to a pretty strange bunch out there in Portland. My Momma isn't one of them, but my Dad was - not Deke, I mean the man that Momma married who got sick and died. When we got here, I was still just little, but Momma wrote to them to tell them what happened and they just thanked her in a pretty cool way, like it was nothing much. I've never seen my grandparents on that side, and I never even knew that I even had an uncle or that he was married with three kids."

"My brother and sister are older than me," Craig told him, "They'd always tell me that I'm the runt of the litter. I don't know what that means and Mother wouldn't ever tell me."

"But she'd tell you that they were just being mean and not to worry about it, right?" Tad asked over.

Craig had looked up and later on, Tad came to see it as some kind of moment for him when Craig had just said, "No ... She didn't say anything."

As they grew to know each other, the older boy never once rolled his eyes at being told to run an errand while taking Craig along and they were always together back then, a nine year-old walking everywhere with a spindly six year-old who needed clean air.

Deke took Craig flying with him when he could sometimes and while Craig knelt in the other front seat and looked at the mountains and forests sliding past underneath him, Deke took the time to get to know his sort-of son, though that was only how he'd have said it if he had to explain it to anyone.

Between them, he regarded the boy as his son and Deke remembered needing to wipe away a tear the first time that Craig had called him Dad without thinking. There were only two things that Deke felt regret over; that the boy hadn't come to them sooner, and that he could only take Craig along on routes where he knew that he could fly at lower altitudes out of consideration for the boy's asthma, though it got Craig a lot of incredible scenery a lot of the time.

To go higher on the trips that needed that meant that Craig had to go on bottled oxygen and a mask long before Deke and Tad had to and though he never said anything to Craig, Deke felt that the boy had been a little cheated by life in some ways.

It didn't change anything for Deke, it was just something that he had to be aware of.

Craig eventually got to like most of the food that landed on the table at suppertime as the years passed and he grew. Going hungry didn't work for him for very long. Clean mountain air just does that to you.

There were times when other boys would try to lean on Craig, but Tad made sure that it stayed fair. Whenever he'd heard enough of the stupid talk about him fighting Craig's battles, he'd just grin and say that it hadn't happened yet, but if any of the other boys hanging around wanted to find out about it, all they had to do was step up.

Walking home with Craig a little scuffed up later on one time, Tad put his arm around Craig's shoulders to tell him a few things.