by

Roo

Alice Greenway leaned against the railing of the screened-in verandah and fanned herself with her wide-brimmed hat. It was October, high spring, and the heat at Coolinga Station was malevolent. The house and grounds, enveloped in a profusion of wildflowers and spinifex, broiled beneath an eiderdown of iron-gray clouds.

With more force than was necessary, Alice smacked opened the screen door and plunked down on the last of seven steps, digging the toe of her chukkas into the dark, red earth. Salty droplets stung the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away with a leisurely pass of her hand. It was the first day of spring break and she was bored. Bored stiff. Bored to tears. But the four-legged remedy to her boredom stood grazing in the paddock, growing fat on Bahia hay. She launched herself from the steps and strode purposefully across the grounds. Minutes later, she emerged from the paddock astride a sturdy, though somewhat lethargic gray gelding. She pulled the brim of her father's old hat down about her eyes and gathered the reins and a clump of silver mane in her hands. Squinting into the midday sun, youthful eyes picked out an oft-visited destination: a cool blackwater billabong nestled in the shade of a cathedral of fifty-foot silver ghost gums. Alice dug her heels into the belly of the horse and spurred him across the salt pan at a gallop.

The cramped cockpit of the Lockheed Electra had none of the amenities usually associated with flying - no padded seats, no stewardess, no legroom - not that Janice Covington, at a mere five-feet-four-inches required a great deal of legroom. But the engine, for all its wear, ran smoothly and the controls were crisp and responded immediately to her touch. As she steered with her knee, she unstopped a water jug and drank deeply the last of her tepid water. She'd removed her trademark leather jacket upon takeoff, opting for shirt sleeves and now, three hours later, her thin cotton blouse was plastered uncomfortably to her back. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she was only a few short miles from her destination. Gazing out the dirty windscreen, as far as she could see, flat, russet-colored earth swelled to meet the horizon, its monotony broken only occasionally by small water holes and stands of gums, silver in the season. One mile looked very much like another, and yet she had referred to her map only once since leaving the airfield at Birrubi, relying instead on a combination of instinct and luck to bring her into close orbit around Coolinga Station and its current proprietress, Melinda Pappas. She and Janice had not seen one another or spoken in more than six months, a fact which both confounded and angered Janice. As she gazed at a cluster of pinpricks gleaming like quicksilver on the horizon, she determined that she would not leave Coolinga without answers.

* * * * * * * * * *

In the time it took to tether her horse to a low-hanging tree limb and cast off her boots, Alice was wading knee-deep in a cool, black velvet heaven, sharing the waters with a single bold finch whose kin decorated the branches of the gums like colorful buds. She sloshed across the pool, stirring the satiny silt to the surface and plopped down on the sandy bank, her feet still dangling in the water. Gazing into the pool, she idly appraised her reflection: broad face, wide-spaced eyes, aggressive auburn hair. She looked like her mother, which was not a bad thing. Her mother had been considered a beauty in her youth, after her marriage to Jack Greenway but before her exile to this island in the outback. Nine years of isolation and grinding drudgery, eking out a living in a land that would not willingly give up a green blade of grass, had taken a physical and emotional toll on the woman and the marriage. The ink had not dried upon the divorce papers when Peggy Greenway packed both her possessions and her child off to her mother's small home on the coast of New South Wales.

Alice had spent the last three years shuttling between the neat green cottages in her Adelaide suburb and her father's beloved patch of saw grass in the outback. The downside to spending holidays at the station was the almost perpetual isolation, the nearest neighbor being three hours by car. The town of Church Hill, population 605, situated at the foot of the Kakadu Escarpments was hardly a thriving metropolis. Even when she lived at the station year round, Alice could remember having visited Church Hill only a half dozen times. There had never been much there to interest a child - public houses, stockyards, a small grocery below a dilapidated boarding house - all populated by people her mother judiciously called sturdy colonial stock. Four-hundred miles west of Coolinga Station, in the heart of the outback, lay Birrubi -- slightly larger than Coolinga, it boasted yet more pubs and sturdy colonials, but also a small movie house, an airstrip and a school, which her mother refused to allow her to attend as it was populated almost exclusively with aborigine children. Thus, before the divorce, Alice's only contact with children her own age had been through the wireless school run by the government. What the faceless teacher did not offer in the way of stimulation, curriculum or companionship, Peggy Greenway sought to provide herself. The end result of such an insular upbringing among adults made for a quietly confident, eerily mature thirteen-year-old girl...who resembled her mother.

Alice's hand shot out, scooping the frowning visage up and across the pool in a sheet of water where it disbursed, landing in drops and dribbles upon the sandy bank, a fractured reflection. Before the water could calm and resolve itself into her likeness again, she withdrew her legs and trudged across the sand to a paperbark stump where she used her socks to brush the sand from the bottoms of her feet. She shook out her boots in the event some scorpion had taken up squatter's rights and slipped them on, all the while squinting at the outbuildings of Coolinga Station. The latest in a long line of potential stepmothers, house-sitting while Jack was in service to his country, was hard at work in the hangar on a project in which Alice didn't care to feign interest. Owing to Jack Greenway's weakness for younger women, Melinda Pappas was fifteen years his junior, a noted archeologist, and nothing less than striking. She was also kind and funny. In all honesty, the worst that could be said of Melinda was that she was American, a shortcoming Mel could do nothing to remedy.

Alice was startled out of her reverie by the distinct droning of a twin engine aircraft; she raised a hand to shield her eyes and caught the glint of sunlight on an aluminum fuselage substantial enough to be a DC-3. She wondered briefly if it were her father, home on leave early. The plane banked and whined, its engine running hot. Having logged a hundred hours at her father's side in the family Cessna, she recognized the telltale signs of a too-rich fuel mixture. As the aircraft aimed for the white windsock on the hangar roof, she knotted her boots and swung gracefully into the saddle.

* * * * * * * * * *

Janice popped open the wedge of glass at her left shoulder, but the rush of hot fresh air did nothing to relieve the stifling heat inside the cockpit. Again she observed the windsock above the hangar, drooping, airless and impotent. She throttled back, aiming the nose of the plane at a grassless patch roughly fifty feet wide and two thousand feet long. She throttled back again, cutting her speed by half, and the aircraft seemed to hang, suspended and weightless above the makeshift runway before touching down hard on all three wheels. It bounced once, kicking up a cloud of red dust, wavered and touched down again, the tires finding the neat groove worn into the track. She coasted there, comfortable in that niche, applying the brakes evenly, toying with the flaps. At the runway's end she used just enough throttle and hard rudder to pivot the aircraft 180 degrees. As it turned facing into the sun, she cut the engine, blinking as the decelerating props sliced segments of sunlight. "Another textbook landing," she muttered, sliding her sweaty palms against her slacks. Somewhat self-consciously, she observed the adolescent face of rebuttal through the windscreen and though the smile on the child's face was pleasant enough, her posture - arms folded, weight on one hip - was clearly judgmental. Acknowledging the girl with a smiling nod, Janice threw her jacket over her arm and ran her fingers haphazardly through her honey-colored hair, gave up and slapped a battered brown fedora atop her head. At the rear of the cockpit, she reached above her head to pop the hatch. With the ease of a gymnast, she climbed through the hatch and onto the expansive left wing of the aircraft. The rubber grip tiles along the valley between fuselage and wing were soft and clingy from the heat, yielding the leather soles of her boots only when adequately persuaded. Janice's first impulse was to curse. "Son-of-a-bitch," she muttered under her breath.

Alice's disappointment at not finding her father behind the controls of the aircraft vanished upon sight of the first female pilot in her experience. "G'day!" she hailed enthusiastically.

Janice looked up to find the teenager regarding her with undisguised bemusement from her place beside one of the stilled props. "Afternoon," she replied, even as the girl possessively stroked the worn metal prop. "You like her, eh?" Janice encouraged with a wink as she jumped down from the wing.

Alice nodded and smiled broadly. "She's beaut! A Lockheed Electra 10E, nine cylinder, air-cooled, eleven hundred horsepower. I suppose you know your fuel mixture is a bit off."

Janice lay the flat of her hand against the fuselage; her fingertips were touching Alice's and they were eye to eye. "I don't pretend to know the mechanics of flying, sweetheart...lift plus thrust equals my butt in the air." Janice turned and walked towards the tail of the aircraft, the curious girl on her heels. "I intend to fly this baby until it drops from the sky."

Alice cocked an eyebrow. "Then what?"

"Then," replied Janice, inserting her hand into a half-moon hollow on the cargo door, "I'll walk." She put her right shoulder into the door and pulled on the handle, lifting as she did so -- a combination that worked in lieu of a key. Without lowering the portable steps, she groped inside the door. "You mind?" she asked, holding a pair of chock blocks by the ropes connecting them. "Thanks."

"Aw, no problem," Alice replied, trotting forward to wedge the chock blocks, one beneath each balding tire. "That left tire's low," she said as she re-appeared at Janice's elbow. "We've got a portable pump in the hangar. I could -- "

Closing the cargo door, Janice quipped, "A good pilot doesn't need three tires." The girl smiled and laughed, a trio of warm staccato chuckles that rang with sincerity. Yep...like her already."You seem to know a little something about airplanes."

Alice shuffled. "My dad's a pilot in the Australian Air Force, and we have a Cessna in the hangar over there. When it's working, it's a sweet craft, but this -" again, she stroked the metal skin of the Electra. "-this is just like the one flown by Miss Amelia Earhart on her round the world flight. Strewth, you even dress alike," she concluded breathlessly as she gestured at Janice's jodhpurs and tall boots.

"One difference," quipped Janice. "We know where I am."

"Too right! Very good," said Alice, giving the stranger's hand a friendly pat. "I'm Alice Greenway." She extended her hand, expecting neither the iron grip or the enthusiastic pump that followed.

"Pleasure to meet you, Alice. Janice Covington."

Alice went wide-eyed and let her grip slacken until she felt Janice's fingers slip from her own. "Doctor Janice Covington."

For a brief moment Janice wondered what Mel had told her potential new family about their relationship. "Hardly a household name."

"I read your book, The Xena Scrolls: Myth or History."

Janice fanned the black flies away from her face. "Fanny Hill it ain't."

"I thought it was fascinating," Alice reiterated. "What're you doing in Australia?"

"Currently, I'm standing here feeding the flies," she retorted, grinning good-naturedly. "More specifically, I'm heading an aboriginal dig at Kakadu."

Alice seemed to perk up at the mention of the dig. "Then you must be here for Mel, right?"

Janice plucked the sweat-damp cotton blouse away from the small of her back. "I didn't know anyone but me called her Mel." Her eyes moved across the paddock to the sprawling white house beyond. Under the verandah was an aviary of twittering budgerigars, but no Mel. "Is she here?"

"In the hangar last time I looked," replied Alice, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. She fell into step beside Janice as they walked towards the hangar.

They passed a horse, lathered with sweat, lungs working like a bellows. Janice said, "Kinda dangerous, isn't it? To run a horse in this heat?"

"I thought you were my dad, coming home. I wasn't thinking about the horse particularly," the teen admitted without a hint of remorse.

A reproof knocked at the back of Janice's teeth; as the adult, she thought she ought to make some stern remark, but standing eye to eye, chatting with this mature teen, it was easy to forget, even briefly, that Alice was not a contemporary. In the end, she held her tongue, reasoning that it was not her place to reprimand or discipline another's child.

"You are here to take Mel back with you...right?"

Janice thought it was an odd question...prophetic, but odd. "I don't know, kid. I'd love to have her on the dig, naturally." She shrugged. "But she has a life here to consider."

"Did she really play such a large part in the discovery of the scrolls?"

"Well, you read my book. She was instrumental. I couldn't have done it without her."

Alice merely nodded, conversation closed. As they entered the hangar, Janice focused upon the green and white twin engine Cessna and the island of light puddled around the form with her back to them. She was painting, with infinite care and patience, the words ‘Greenway Charters' across the fuselage in a bold, no-nonsense script.

Alice called out experimentally, testing the waters. "Hey...Mel?"

Without looking up, Mel replied in the accent that Janice had once quipped made Scarlett O'Hara sound like a carpetbagger. "I thought I heard you thunder up." She dipped the brush into the quart can at her feet and, steadying one hand upon the other, resumed her tedious work. "How many times have I told you not to run the horses in this heat?"

Alice muttered her stock reply, "Too many times."

To her credit, Mel changed the subject. "Was that the mail plane?"

Ignoring her better instincts, Janice took her hat in her hand and slid neatly into the segue with, "Would you be terribly disappointed if it wasn't?"