Feedback

FEEDBACK FROM NONFICTION CLIENTS:

"Faith was very pleasant and professional. She was also very timely in her editing (she gave what she promised); which I don't see too much of anymore. She was very open to questions or concerns I might have after reading through her editing of my work and was quick in responding back to me." —Kim Gilliland

"Faith did a great job. She was efficient, organized and professional and delivered the project early. She made the material web friendly as I requested. I appreciated her honest recommendations." —(Contact information on request)

"Faith Brynie's writing and editing skills are of the highest caliber. She is a regular contributor to ODYSSEY magazine because she takes topics such as genetics and punctuated equilibrium and makes them fascinating and approachable for 10 to 16-year-olds. She is creative and resourceful, unflappable and cheerful regardless of how short a deadline might be. She works confidently with experts--from mathematicians to cosmologists--and her enjoyment in her work and determination to get it right set her apart from other highly competent writers and editors. Her research is amazing. The knowledge and experience that she brings to her own writing prompted me to ask her to edit a teacher's guide for ODYSSEY four years ago. The guide reaches the most important element of our buying audience. She dependably delivers it each month, often in addition to a heavy load of writing assignments from me. I definitely could use some Brynie clones!" —Elizabeth Lindstrom, ODYSSEY magazine, Senior Editor, Cobblestone Publishing

"Faith's award-winning books are nonfiction at its best. Reviewers always point out her astonishing ability to translate difficult, cutting edge science into language that is both clear and eloquent. Faith's skills as a writer, researcher, and editor have been well appreciated by Millbrook and 21st Century Books for many years now. She's a gem!" —Amy Shields, Editor-in-Chief, The Millbrook Press and 21st Century Books

"Faith Brynie helped guide my books to successful completion. Her feedback was wonderfully detailed. She told me where the manuscript was weak and explained how I might proceed. She wouldn't let me get away with mediocrity. It meant I had to rework sections I'd hoped to be done with, but the result was greater quality. Where my work was strong, her praise was just as specific. Her encouragement helped my confidence and kept me going." —Janet Parks Chahrour, author of Flash! Bang! Pop! Fizz!: Exciting Science for Curious Minds (Barron’s, 2000) and Zap! Blink! Taste! Think!: Exciting Life Science for Curious Minds (Barron’s, 2003).

"I am pleased to recommend Faith Brynie as a conscientious and creative writer. Faith is diligent in her research of a topic, innovative in her approach. and responsive to feedback in a timely fashion. I would personally seek her out for appropriate projects in the future." —Grace Freedson, Grace Freedson’s Publishing Network (formerly Acquisitions Editor at Barron’s Educational)

"Faith Hickman Brynie was hired by The Philip Lief Group to edit a manuscript for a commercial chemistry book. She was very knowledgeable about the subject matter, she was thorough, efficient, fast, independent, and reliable. Our author was less motivated than would have been ideal, and Faith took it upon herself to fix what needed fixing and delivered an acceptable manuscript. Overall, I think her work was exemplary, and I would hire her again tomorrow." —Jill Korot, project manager and associate editor, The Philip Lief Group, Inc.

"Faith helped us with editing our Operating Manual. She was very detailed in her work, which allowed us to use these changes as a standard for our future manuals. She was very easy to work with and also had a very fast turn around time. I am looking forward to working with her on future projects." —Rita J. Juan, Turner BioSystems, Inc., Marketing Services Manager

"In a word, Faith was great. Very professional yet personable to work with. I felt she was accessible and listened to my needs and the needs of my content. Very detail oriented. Very quick to respond to my requests and had a very quick turnaround time. Nothing was compromised in the experience. I would recommend or hire her again in a second." —Kristina Lamour, Professor, Graphic Design, The Art Institute of Boston

"The one quality that appeals to me the most about Faith, is her ability to pay close attention to details and to point out errors and possibilities. I had Faith look over a series of science related questions, and was impressed by the depth of her science background. She was able to scrutinize the type of questions, the difficulty level, the scope and nature of the topics involved with much ease. I feel very confident having had Faith review the sample science questions, and it makes me feel that this study guide will be a notch above my competitors given Faith’s impeccable work." —(Contact info on request)

"Faith did a great job, met all deadlines, author’s queries were spot on. I’ve worked with dozens of editors, and she’s first rate." —(Contact info on request)

"Faith Brynie is a superb editor, thinker, and professional. I was impressed with her ability to take a large amount of information and distill my research into a high quality cogent presentation. She not only evidenced exceptional skills at organizing and extracting the "hooks" and "tag lines", she did so without any alteration in my voice or message. She was a professional every step of the way. She was a joy to work with. I definitely recommend her to anyone who is serious about their writing and unafraid to roll their sleeves up and get the work done." —(Contact information on request)

FEEDBACK FROM FICTION CLIENTS:

"The help that I received was invaluable. In a professional, authoritative, but flexible manner, Ms. Brynie helped me edit my manuscript so that the story flowed better. She honored my writing style while providing an honest critique of the overall manuscript. Her insights and recommended edits made the manuscript far more vibrant. I highly recommend her services." —K. Reichert, Novelist

"Faith Brynie is a meticulous professional. I very much admire her understanding of craft and her diligence in providing me with an excellent analysis of my fiction manuscript. Her detailed notes reflect her thorough engagement in the editing process. Any writer who is serious about being published would be blessed to have the opportunity to work with her." —Geoffrey Holland, Novelist

"Thank you for your insightful critique of my work. The many suggestions that you made will enhance my book and make it more entertaining when complete. I begin the rewrite with great confidence and look forward to your continuing assistance." —Joyce McMaster, Young adult novelist

"I didn’t know what to expect from this service and I’m pleased to say that Faith over-delivered on every promise made. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with her again and would be happy to recommend her to anyone needing such a service. She was very patient with all of my questions and, even though she remained very professional throughout the process, I felt as though I were working with a trusted friend and advisor by the second or third email.  I was a week late delivering the MS to her and she still finished on time.  A wonderful experience!" —Susan Goodwin (manuscript critique)

"The work was finished early. She was very professional and easy to reach. Ms. Brynie said in the beginning that the critique would be between 10 and 15 pages and in the end it was a generous 32. What I liked most was how she gave specific examples of what needed to be changed, as opposed to sweeping generalities. I'm very satisfied and will continue working with her." —Michael Start, novelist

Published Stories

KINESTHESIA

by Faith Brynie

Ramona Ramirez nudged a wisp of coarse, gray hair away from her forehead and tripped the lever that popped the lid on her long-handled dustpan. With deliberate slowness, she wielded her broom with one hand and her dustpan with the other, trapping in the dustpan's dark vault yet another cigarette butt, one of the rare unfiltered breed this time. The butt left a meandering trail of black ash across the vinyl floor she had scrubbed and polished to a diamond shine only hours before.

Ramona let her dustpan close with a clank, then shuffled forward, her soft-soled slippers sliding soundlessly along the frictionless surface beneath her feet, the hem of her cotton skirt grazing the ground as she stooped to gather candy wrappers and cardboard cartons too large for her dustpan. Her thin, walnut shell of a face wrinkled in concentration on her task. As she bent, she nestled the palm of her left hand--still balancing the dustpan--into the small of her back where muscles scarred from years of bending and lifting protested yet another enactment of the offending posture.

She jammed the trash into her pocket and trudged on, seemingly oblivious of the bustle of air travelers scurrying about her, though a careful observer might have noticed how her sharp, darting black eyes surveyed with studious attention every passenger who rushed past toward the spoils of business done or the battles of business undone.

Above the rumbles, hisses, groans and whispers of a hundred idle conversations, a hundred tearful farewells, a hundred joyous reunions, and a hundred protestations of late flights, poor service, and unimaginative food rose the whine of the airport's public address system. A disembodied female voice flowed clear as spring water, announcing, "Last call for PanSouthwest's commuter flight 1749 to Salt Lake with intermediate stops in Pueblo, Gunnison, Montrose, and Grand Junction. All passengers should now be aboard the aircraft in its final boarding from Gate E-11. Passengers are reminded that only one item of carry-on luggage may be taken aboard the aircraft."

Ramona grinned crookedly around some missing teeth and chuckled to herself at the image that gripped her mind: all those impatient men, harassed women, and fretful children clutching purses, shopping bags, baskets, briefcases, backpacks, sleeping bags, knitting totes, books, flowers, cakes, garment bags and computers--all boarding PanSouthwest's flight without question despite the announcement of carry-on limitations. The airline broadcasted the same warning every day for every flight. And every passenger and every smiling, solicitous flight attendant ignored that same warning every day on every flight. That's how things were. Day after day. Year after year.

Ramona should know. She'd cleaned Concourse E every day (except a few holidays) for the last six years and Concourse C every day (except a few holidays) for twenty-three years before that.

She knew what to expect.

She knew her job inside and out.

The airports public address system crackled to life. "Mrs. Sandringham, Mrs. Jennifer Sandringham, arriving passenger from Chicago, please go to the nearest white paging telephone. Mrs. Sandringham to a white paging telephone please. Final call."

There it was: the "final call" announcement Ramona had awaited. Mrs. Jennifer Sandringham had been paged twice before and, as Ramona had known she would, failed to answer either previous call. The third and final call meant it was very unlikely that Mrs. Sandringham was in the airport to hear her page. Ramona felt a growing certainty that Mrs. Sandringham was nowhere near the airport.

Ramona tucked her broom and dustpan into the corner behind the water fountain and made her way silently along the wall toward a nearly empty waiting area. Once out of the main flow of humanity through the concourse, she leaned her forehead against the cool tile of the wall and closed her eyes. She bent her elbows behind her back and clasped her hands at her waist. She pressed her eyelids tightly together and focused for seconds that stretched past a minute, though time had little meaning to her then. The handful of travelers straggling into the waiting area ignored the skinny, little cleaning woman in the thin, cream-colored cotton blouse that had once been white and the faded bandanna tied around her unruly iron-gray hair.

Ramona's awareness widened and she knew. Mrs. Sandringham was not in the airport. She is still in Chicago, Ramona realized. She missed her flight after a business meeting that ran too long. She is having trouble arranging another flight. May not make it home until tomorrow. May not call home for hours until she knows her plans.

Ramona turned away from the wall and let her focus return to her visual sense before she slipped noiselessly to the white telephone mounted on the wall only yards away. Her piercing black eyes darted from side to side, taking in all the details of activity on the concourse in one concentrated scan. No one noticed her pick up the phone and say, in a patrician tone quite unlike her own heavily-accented English, "This is Mrs. Sandringham, Jennifer Sandringham. You have a message for me?" Her tone was polite, business-like, cool, controlled, just as she knew Mrs. Sandringham would be.

"One moment, please," the airport message clerk answered mechanically from her perch in a glass-enclosed, eagle's nest of a control booth a half-mile away in the main terminal. The clerk left Ramona listening to Barry Manilow for a few seconds, then returned abruptly in mid-chorus with a staccato, "Hold the line please for a call."

The phone clicked and popped in Ramona's ear, then seemed to go dead before she heard yet another click and pop and--at last, as she knew she would--the sound of a tiny, wavering, scarcely audible voice whimpering "Mommy, Mommy, is that you, Mommy?"

Ramona could feel him completely now that the connection had been made. He was young, very young, no older than five. He was thin, almost fragile--especially for a boy--and ghostly pale. Very blond hair and eyes gray as storm clouds. He was vulnerable, confused, and paralyzed with fear.

Ramona could feel it all because she was part of him now.

The boy clutched the phone in that bright, clean, modern, safe living room, aglow with crystal vases brimming over with anemones and tasteful mirrors reflecting the muted illumination of shaded, peach-toned lamps and the sculptured forms of formal wing chairs upholstered in silver-flecked jacquard.

The boy clutched in one trembling hand a beige telephone--the portable variety with an antenna that must be raised. The phone was his lifeline. It was keeping him from sinking into panic. Ramona could feel his control slipping beneath the churning waves of terror. His fear had an atavistic taste of stagnant ponds and sea salt.

At the boy's feet lay a crumpled figure. She was scarcely middle-aged, her brown legs smooth-skinned and heavy-muscled, the pupils of her liquid, brown eyes dilated beneath lids fluttering against the pile of the plush beige carpet. The crimson stain was growing wider like a halo about her head as blood pumped rhythmically from the gaping wound at her temple.

It had happened when she tripped over the boy's toy truck. The silvery, polished chrome corner of the glass coffee table had ripped deep into the flesh just above her eye and severed an artery. The nanny's breath had been knocked from her lungs when she struck the floor, so she lay dazed, semiconscious, unable to move, while her life's force spurted from her in rhythm with her rapid, pounding heartbeat. The boy had comprehended little, but he could see bits of torn skin and drying blood marring the perfection of the table's shiny metal trim. He had stood staring, wordless, nearly breathless for minutes before he had punched the preprogrammed button on the telephone that automatically connected him with the paging service at the airport. His mommy and daddy traveled a lot. Mommy was at the airport. He knew it. Marta had said so only minutes before.

The picture came to Ramona not as a patchwork but as a piece of whole cloth. As her concentration increased, she could feel it all with perfect accuracy because she could feel everything the boy felt. Through every nerve, tendon, and muscle she could sense his position, his movement, his terror. His physical space was hers now, and his physical sensations were hers now also. No longer was she part of him as she had been moments before. Now she was him. With every cell and tissue and organ of his body and her body dividing and contracting and metabolizing and beating together, she lived his terror.

"Listen carefully," the woman who sounded like Mommy said, and the boy listened, never realizing he had given no description of his plight, never realizing he was himself and more.

The boy who was Ramona nodded and the woman at the airport who was Ramona understood the nod, though the boy never spoke.

"Mark, go get two big pillows off the couch. Put them under Marta's head and shoulders. Lift her head as high as you can. Get her sitting up as straight as you can. That will slow the bleeding."

Quadriceps and sartorius muscles within pale, skinny thighs tightened and released in perfect, alternating rhythm as the boy bounded for the sofa. Biceps in upper arms contracted to lift the pillows. Elbows and knees bent, and arches and toes pushed against the carpet as the boy gained enough leverage to wedge the pillows under the nanny's head and shoulders. The elevation had the desired effect. The pulsing of the blood continued, but the volume of each spurt diminished. Ramona and the boy felt pleasure at the result.

The boy cradled the phone against his ear once more. Fresh auditory impulses traveled along sensory neurons from the phone to the left side of his brain, where both he and Ramona heard the words that the woman at the airport spoke.

"Good, Mark, now run to the kitchen and get a towel--a big one-and press it against the cut on Marta's head. Push it hard, Mark, as hard as you can so you stop the blood."

The woman did not ask if he understood. She knew he did, because every ligament, tendon, and muscle they shared possessed the knowledge that propelled the action.

Gastrocnemius and tibialis flexed for the journey, ligaments pulled over elbows and knees, and the joints of the bones of the boy's tiny hand hinged so he could pluck the towel from its rail high above him. More running. Then the sinews of his puny upper arms tensed with a strength he alone did not possess as he pushed with more force than he alone could exert against the scarlet stream jetting from Marta's head.

Minutes passed in the penthouse apartment. The same minutes passed at the airport as travelers moved by, heedless of the drab, little cleaning woman with unblinking eyes clutching the paging phone with such force that her knuckles pushed white against the nut-brown skin of her liver-spotted hands.

As quickly as it had begun, it ended. Ramona could see and feel through the boy's eyes and hands that the bleeding had stopped. As Ramona slid methodically away from him--fiber by fiber--she could feel his fear receding like the evening tide. His stomach leapt not with fear now but with relief as Marta's eyes fluttered and she spoke to the boy, "Mark."

Without listening to the woman at the airport again, the boy knew in some way he would never understand even in his years as a grown man what he must do next. Returning to the telephone, he broke the connection with the airport and pushed the instrument's programmed, rapid-dial button marked with the bright yellow sticker. It said "Ambulance." Mark knew his name and address. It was enough.

Ramona knew it was enough before she returned the telephone handset to its wall mount and trudged unsteadily back to the main concourse to retrieve her dustpan and broom. Another cigarette butt lay ground into the vinyl flooring just past the water fountain. This one had burned for a while before being trampled underfoot. It had left a tiny, acid yellow scorch mark on the shiny surface. She swept it up and shuffled ahead a few feet more to capture yet another like it. She tucked a strand of her wiry gray hair--very damp now after the exertions of her phone call--back under her bandanna. It refused to stay there and fell down across her forehead again in seconds.

Ramona didn't notice the errant hair this time, nor did she take steps to correct its wandering ways. Something else consumed her attention now, something faint and distant but powerful. Very strong. Compelling. More compelling even than the boy had been. With him, the knowledge had expanded gradually. The connection afforded by the telephone line had made his needs simple to discern, simpler still to meet.

This new union was different. Sudden. Complicated. Unsettling. Ramona had tasted the boy's fear, as she had tasted the fear of many others like him before. But this fear was new and somehow different. It was the terror of the one for the many.

Ramona hid her tools behind a large, potted plant and turned quickly toward the wall of Concourse E, locking her arms behind her as she had done before, pressing her forehead against the cool tiles as before, letting her focus spread and soften as before--but spreading a wider net now. Instinctively, she searched in ever-expanding concentric circles. Instinctively, she sought some essence distant and moving away, some hazardous reality growing in intensity, some fear so palpable it could invade her with waves of cold that caused her skinny body to shiver despite the heat of the concourse. Whatever it was, wherever it was, it was here. It was now. It was with Ramona, part of Ramona, becoming Ramona. She gave herself to it.

The first shared kinesthesia she experienced then was, remarkably, with the aircraft itself. Ramona had never felt at one with a machine before, but she found it a surprisingly pleasant experience. It was the PanSouthwest flight that had taken off moments before, the commuter flight scheduled to bounce its way over the Rockies and end up in Salt Lake City if all went according to the flight plan. Ramona sensed that the plane itself, a nineteen-seat Beechcraft 1900C Airliner, was not the source of the fear. All along the plane's length of nearly 60 feet and its wing-span only slightly less, Ramona perceived the steady hum of the Pratt & Whitney engines as effortlessly as she felt the steady pumping rhythm of her own heart. The plane was performing perfectly, its tabbed elevators and rudders trimmed precisely for level flight, its cabin pressurized, air-conditioned, heated, and ventilated for the total comfort of its one-man crew--the pilot--and the fifteen passengers aboard. Ramona pulled out of her union with the bonded construction, aluminum alloy airplane, but the sense of high velocity motion stayed with her as she shifted her focus, searching once again for the terror that she knew was near.

The jolt of shared kinesthesia--achieved this time not with a machine but with a man--was both sudden and forceful. There was no slipping in this time as there had been with Mark, no chance for host and symbiont to adjust to one another, no time for assessing situations and weighing options. The man at the controls of Flight 1749 had a plaque of cholesterol big as a black-eyed pea plugging one of his major coronary arteries. The tissues fed by arterioles and capillaries beyond that point were dying, suffocating for lack of oxygen. The pain in his chest was unbearable, and, now that Ramona was one with him, the two experienced the blinding, searing agony of it as one.

Except one of them clung to life and the other did not. His breath still rushing from his lungs, his skin still warm with blood that had ceased to flow, the pilot slumped against his shoulder harness, his hands motionless at the controls. The door between the cockpit and the cabin was closed, and Ramona could feel now, through the fading sensory apparatus of the pilot, a grave loneliness: solitude orchestrated against the steady drone of the engines. That and nothing more.

Ramona reached into the depths of her gift, reached as she had never reached before to achieve a fused kinesthesia so complete that more than just the senses of environment, motion, and position could be shared. She stretched past any limits she had known before in order to share life itself. For a little while. For long enough.

Ramona Ramirez could not fly a Beechcraft 1900C. Ramona Ramirez could not fly any plane. Ramona Ramirez had never taken a flying lesson in her life. If the truth be known, Ramona Ramirez had never even ridden in an airplane. The only thing Ramona had ever flown was kites, and those none too well if childhood memories could be trusted. Ramona Ramirez--both the woman in the airport and the woman in the cockpit--knew nothing about flying and landing any airplane.

But the pilot had known. He had known plenty. He had known enough to fly commuter flights for PanSouthwest four days a week. He had known in his brain, which had given up its functions now. But he had known also in his bones and in his muscles, in every sinew and tendon, every ligament and joint, in every axon and dendrite of every motor neuron that innervated every contractile cell in his ropey, sunburned arms and legs. Still stored in the memory of his muscles were the manipulations needed to turn and land an airplane. Still lingering in practiced contractions of his vocal chords were the words to say to the air traffic controllers. Still pulsing in the memory of his fingers was the knowledge needed of the correct buttons to push in the correct sequence. He knew in the balance centers of his inner ear and the retinas of his eyes the look and the feel of every tip, tilt, slip, and slide that little Beechcraft could make.

Flying an airplane is like pole vaulting or diving or riding a bicycle or playing the piano. The body learns and the brain goes along for the ride.

Ramona found herself taking that ride. She knew she must use what the pilot knew even when he no longer knew it. She knew she could do so only so long as she kept their union complete enough to let the memory in the pilot's muscles do its job, but not so complete that his still heart and emptied lungs became her own.

Ramona did not decide to accept such a risk. The risk simply became one with her as all else did when she fused. The risk was with her as all risks were when her kinesthetic sense merged with another being. Always before, however, she had shared life with life. The feel of the pilot's lifeless body was new to her, and producing movements in muscles not fed by rapidly flowing, oxygenated blood required effort beyond any she had exerted before. Despite the impedance of the pilot's uncooperating weight, Ramona pushed, letting memory flow from the man's body into knowledge of the required action and its execution.

The pilot's hand lifted the microphone from its slot, simultaneously pressing the button for transmission. His low-pitched, trained voice intoned conversationally, after the requisite pause, "Denver Tower, this is Pan Southwest one-seven-four-niner. Medical emergency aboard. Request precautionary forced landing, east-west runway. Over."

Tiny bones deep within the pilot's unhearing ears vibrated in harmony with the reply from the Denver tower, which acknowledged the transmission and granted permission as requested. Ramona understood little from the instructions that followed, but she didn't need too, nor could she have spared the energy even if she had. All her concentration was focused on the memories stored through the pilot's kinesthetic learning from times past. His hands and feet knew what to do. Ramona's only task was to keep those memories operational in those hands and feet for the time...how long? five minutes?... it would take to turn and land the plane.

The plane had taken off toward the east but had not yet turned south for the first leg of its journey when the pilot's heart muscle had ceased its contractions. The pilots first task then--Ramona's first task, she knew without words or explanations--was to turn the plane back toward the west and place the plane into a normal glide toward the runway. Ramona felt the flawless coordination of the pilot's hands and feet as he applied the left aileron and the left rudder together, smoothly and gradually effecting a steep bank. As the bank increased, his muscular forearms tensed to exert steady back pressure on the wheel until the bank became even steeper. Then his practiced arms and legs neutralized the ailerons and rudder, holding the back pressure steady for as long as the plane was in the bank. Having turned the aircraft a full 180 degrees, the pilot's bones, muscles, and tendons continued to work in flawless cooperation applying the right aileron and right rudder. As his plane's bank decreased, the man's contractile tissues eased off the back pressure only slightly, exerting just enough to keep the nose of the plane slightly up for a long, shallow glide. His hands and fingers, arms, feet and legs all moved in the proper sequence, performing the proper moves. Ramona lived each motion. The pilot did not.

Following a prelanding checklist performed so many times that the skeletal, muscular and peripheral nervous systems held the memories, Ramona saw through the pilot's visual cones and rods the fuel selector valve, which indicated that the plane was using fuel from its nearly-full left tank. The pilot's hands reflexively dropped the landing gear and adjusted the fuel mixture, while his functioning optic nerve sent a message to his unresponsive brain that the propeller speed registered adequately high on the RPM gauge. Nearing the airport, deft hands depressed the flap control to extend the flaps. At the same time tutored arms and legs lowered the airplane's nose to maintain both airspeed and a shallow landing trajectory. Ramona felt tense arms trim the plane until the wheel force against pressure receptors in the pilot's hand registered zero, the position that kinesthetic memory told Ramona was perfect for a landing straight and true. When only feet above the runway, the pilot's limbs manipulated the controls to break the glide by gradually easing the wheel back to stall the airplane. The timing was faultless. The plane achieved a perfect power-off stall just as the rear wheels of the tricycle landing gear touched down. Within seconds, the natural friction of the air against the plane slowed the aircraft's speed and the nosewheel dipped silent as a whisper to kiss the asphalt runway.

In the passenger cabin, fourteen impatient men, harassed women and fretful children clutched purses, shopping bags, baskets, briefcases, backpacks, sleeping bags, knitting totes, books, flowers, cakes, garment bags, and computers. They queried and they cursed. Why, oh why, they asked, had their journey ended before it had scarcely begun. It was some time before they got their answers.

All along Concourse E rumors spread like brush fires fanned by what one had heard, another seen, another only guessed at. As speculation mounted and excitement bubbled through airline employees and passengers alike, the miraculous story of the brave pilot who hung on to life just long enough to land PanSouthwest Flight 1749 was told and retold. It grew from gossip to folk tale to legend within the hour. Within the week, it would be forgotten, not having been carved into the shared memory of a people who paint the names of their heroes not upon cave walls but upon slates of liquid crystals.

Chattering passengers hurrying by never noticed Ramona Ramirez shake her frail body damp with perspiration away from the cool tiles of the walls of Concourse E, take up her broom and dustpan, and resume her trek down the length of that seemingly interminable tunnel. They took no heed as she nudged a wisp of coarse, gray hair away from her forehead and tripped the lever that lifted the cover on her long-handled dustpan. With deliberate slowness, she wielded her broom with one hand and her dustpan with the other, trapping in the dustpan's dark vault yet another cigarette butt, one of the common filtered variety this time.

THE END

Grizzle-pa's Garden

by Faith Brynie

"The old fart wants something again," Mary Estelle announced, accepting the rumpled, gray envelope from the postman. She let the screen door slam as she turned back into the kitchen.

"Watch your mouth!" Mama wiped her floured hands on her feedsack apron and nodded curtly in my sister's direction. "Bring that here," she said.

Suzanne and I watched, wide-eyed and silent, as Mama ripped open the envelope. Mary Estelle was right. Grizzle-pa never sent one of his notes unless he wanted something. The old man lived alone, in a tumbledown farmhouse out past the quarry. It was a good three miles from our house in town and too far for Grizzle-pa to walk with his arthritic knees, no matter how hard he leaned on his blackened, knobbly cane. As for telephones, he didn't believe in them. If they caught on, he said, their jangling would soon deafen everyone in whole state of Kentucky.

"Whatever it is, I'm not doing it," Suzanne said with a little stamp of her foot. At eleven, she was the youngest and got by with a lot. Mary Estelle, now that she was in high school, flounced and sighed and snipped enough to command center stage most of the time. Stuck in the middle, I went mostly unnoticed. I liked it that way.

Mama dropped the envelope onto her dough board and unfolded the sheet of lined, tablet paper she found inside.

"I've a mind to put in a garden," Mama read aloud. "Send a girl,"

That was it. No "Dear Nellie." No "Yours, George." Not a "please..." or a "thank you..." or even an "I'd be grateful...." Chin lowered, Mama eyed her three daughters, her left eyebrow arched.

"I won't do it. You can't make me. I have cheerleading practice," Mary Estelle let out, all in one breath. School had been out a week. Her "cheerleading practice" was her daily hangout with the other "popular girls" from Randolph High. They rolled their hair and listened to Perry Como records.

"I'm too little. I can't be digging and hoeing and..." Suzanne rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, as if searching there for more excuses.

I kept quiet. I figured that if Mama didn't hear me, she might not see me either, and then one of my sisters would have to go.

"If Grizzle-pa needs help, we send it, and that's that," Mama said, folding her arms across her chest.

"I don't see why we have to go running every time he hollers," Mary Estelle said and pushed out her lower lip. "He's not even real kin."

It was true. Grizzle-pa had been our grandma's second husband after our real grandpa had died. That made him family for a while, but after Grandma died, he wasn't officially kin anymore. Why we kept on treating him like family was a mystery to us girls. Besides, he wasn't even nice. We called him Grizzle-pa because he was as crusty and spiky and irritable as a wounded grizzly bear. Even he knew the name suited him. He never objected to it.

"I'll not say which of you goes, but I'll have no bickering," Mama said, returning to the bread she was kneading. "You decide however you want, but one of you goes out to George's place first thing after lunch."

"My bike has a flat?" Suzanne said in her poor-me voice. Mama cast her a withering look.

Mary Estelle, Suzanne, and I were on our own. We looked at each other. "On the porch!" Mary Estelle commanded. The screen door slapped behind us.

"Same way as usual?" I asked, and my sisters nodded. Whenever we had a tough choice to make, we played the stone-paper-scissors game. Sometimes, one of us was the clear loser the first time around. Sometimes, we narrowed to two losers for a second or third round. But no matter how many rounds it took, we always reached a decision, and there was no complaining after the fact. That was the rule.

We huddled in a circle, each with our right hand inside the ring. Suzanne took a deep breath. "One-two...three!" We raised and lowered our clenched fists as she counted. On the last count, I flattened my hand into a sheet of paper. So did Mary Estelle, but Suzanne's hand extended two fingers. One winner, two losers. Suzanne let out a whoop and stepped from the circle.

"I'll count for you again," she said, her round face beaming with joy and feigned charity.

I knew that look in Mary Estelle's eye. It was a steely determination that unnerved me, but I faced her with a confidence I didn't feel. I squared my shoulders and prepared for the showdown.

"One, two...three!" said Suzanne.

On the last count, Mary Estelle's hand clenched into the shape of a stone. My fingers extended as scissors.

"You lose!" exclaimed Mary Estelle, doing a little dance across the creaking floorboards.

Mary Estelle always was one to gloat.

* * *

On my long bike ride out from town, all I could think about was what I was missing. I was in the middle of a mystery book I had checked out from the library, but there'd be no reading this afternoon. Also abandoned was the game of Monopoly Suzanne and I had started as soon as school had let out and would keep going until it started again. (Mary Estelle no longer played with us. She said it was a kid's game.) I'd had plans to cut out a dress from a new sewing pattern and maybe even skate to the Dairy Queen for a milkshake. All that would have to wait now.

When I squeezed my hand brake and slid to a stop by Grizzle-pa's weathered, picket fence, his place looked deserted. Red dust rose around my bike wheels, settling quickly in the still, hot air onto the choke of weeds tangled by his gate. In the distance, jar flies chittered. The air smelled of old hay and dried manure. The farm hadn't been worked since Grandma died.

I called "Grizzle-pa" loud as I could, reluctant to venture too close for fear of snakes, skunks, and who knew what else might be lurking in the pokeweed or under the sagging porch. Getting no response, I called again. Maybe I could pedal back to town and satisfy Mama with some excuse about Grizzle-pa not being home.

No such luck. Mumbling breathy secrets to himself and his dog, a mongrel he called Ralph, Grizzle-pa emerged from behind his springhouse. In its cool, fresh dampness, he kept milk, cheese, and the occasional cut of pork tenderloin some generous neighbor gifted on him.

Grizzle-pa had once been a massive man, but it appeared now that he had lost weight, and his shoulders stooped a little more than I remembered. His cheekbones pushed hard against the leather of his face, and a steely stubble peppered his chin. He wore a straw hat that Ralph had chewed around the rim. Though faded, his overalls were clean and pressed. His boots were old, but polished.

Grizzle-pa lifted his hat and wiped sweat from his brow onto the sleeve. He spat at the wild honeysuckles that twined around his porch rails and looked me over. "I reckon you're the middle girl, Gail," he said. "Nellie says you're the quiet one."

"I haven't seen you since last fall," I answered, searching my mind for a polite reply and coming up with nothing better.

"And I reckon now's the time I'm obliged to say something about how you've grown," he said, his voice all gravel and growl.

"I grew three inches last school year," I said, feeling suddenly gangly. At thirteen, I was taller and leaner than I had been when last I saw Grizzle-pa—at somebody's funeral, I thought, though I could not remember whose. I had worn my best dress then. Grizzle-pa had worn his bib overalls.

"Your ma told you I've a mind to put in a garden," he said. It was not a question.

I nodded without protest. When you lose at stone-paper-scissors, you lose. There's no going back.

"No point in standing around jawing all day. Let's get at it," he said, and Ralph barked in agreement.

Grizzle-pa led me to the side of the house where Grandma's kitchen garden had once grown. Its outlines still shone pale and dry in the bumpy earth. Weathered stakes, strings, and dried corn stalks abandoned in years past dotted the plot. From the shed, Grizzle-pa pulled shovels, picks, two hoes, and twisted rakes of several sizes and shapes. In wooden flats on the ground by the house grew tiny tomato, bean, and pepper plants. I guessed Grizzle-pa must have started them from seed in his kitchen window sometime in April. Beside them, I saw a shoebox spilling over with seed packets—beets, cucumbers, cabbages, acorn and summer squash, and leaf lettuce of several varieties.

We set to work without comment. First, Grizzle-pa loosened the packed earth with his pick. Then he turned it with a shovel. I followed behind on my hands and knees, pulling out woody stems and fibrous taproots until my arms ached. I skinned my knuckles sifting out rocks with my fingers, one by one. After the plot gleamed bare and brown in the dazzling sun of afternoon, we began raking the ground smooth and staking out precise, parallel rows. My back hurt, and the muscles of my legs screamed in protest as I stooped and rose again and again. Sweat ran down my chest in rivulets. Grizzle-pa sweated, too, but Ralph just dozed and watched from the porch.

We worked without stopping, except for occasional dippers full of water pumped into an oaken bucket that stood in the yard. The water tasted cool and earthy and metallic. We worked without conversation, except for Grizzle-pa's barked orders.

"Put the corn on the south end," he said, "where it'll get the most sun."

And later: "Stake out rows for carrots east to west. That's the way the almanac says to plant them."

And later still: "More space between those tomatoes, girl. Too close and they'll not bear."

And after an hour of sweaty silence, "You're planting the spinach too deep. Them seeds need air to sprout."

Outside I worked, but inside I fumed. I hated taking orders, especially from a gruff old bear like Grizzle-pa. If I hadn't lost stone-paper-scissors fair and square, I would have walked away then, but there was no turning back. Trying to remember some of the curse words Mary Estelle knew, I labored in silence.

We worked side-by-side until the sun dipped low over the farmhouse roof. By the time twilight came, I thought we had finished. Neat lines of string marked the rows, and colorful seed packets stapled to popsicle sticks sprouted at their ends. Grizzle-pa's vegetable plants stood in formation like brave, tiny soldiers. They cast long shadows in the failing light. Grizzle-pa's face was lined with sweat and mud, as I realized my own must be. His overalls were rumpled, sweat-streaked, and stained red at the knees. So were my jeans. The crickets had started chirping and the bullfrogs croaking when I said, surprising myself, "It's a good garden."

"We're not done," he replied and plodded off toward the shed, returning with a packet of snapdragon seeds clenched between gnarled fingers.

"Come August, we'll need a little color," he said and turned toward the house. Along the south side, close to the foundation, we dug shallow holes and inserted the tiny, black seeds. We watered them with buckets of water carried from the pump.

Appearing satisfied at last, Grizzle-pa nodded vaguely in my direction, crossed the yard, and entered his house, shutting the door behind him. He left me standing with a hoe in my hand. I picked up the tools we had strewn on the ground and put them back in the shed before settling onto my bike seat and pedaling back to town.

Without so much as a good-bye from Grizzle-pa, I had only the thin shaft of my bike light to warm me as evening's chill descended.

* * * 

As the summer budded in warmth, then blossomed into its full heat, Grizzle-pa's notes arrived predictably every Friday morning, sometimes more often. Week after week, the sheets of lined tablet paper stuffed inside rumpled gray envelopes bore the same command: "Garden needs tending. Send Gail." Since Grizzle-pa was now asking for me instead of just "a girl," any hope that the stone-paper-scissors game would get me off the hook was lost.

"If Grizzle-pa wants Gail, then Gail goes," Mama said, and there was no arguing with Mama.

My plans for hot dogs at the Kresge's lunch counter, matinees at the Spangler, and lazy afternoons at the town pool evaporated. In losing one game of stone-paper-scissors, I had lost a summer's worth. What I gained was sympathy from my sisters. "How do you stand it?" Suzanne wondered.

"I keep my mouth shut," I answered.

I didn't want to, but I went, week after week, pedaling three miles out and three miles back, working without stopping through afternoons hot enough to bubble rubber. My legs grew taut as ropes and tan as apple butter. The sun streaked my hair with red, and my knees were callused as thick and rough as bark.

"Doesn't he just creep you out?" Mary Estelle whispered, as we shared a Nehi in the porch shade one evening. "He never talks."

"He talks," I said, surprising myself in defending him. Truth was, he didn't talk much, just that the corn needed hoeing and the pole beans staked. "He says what needs to be said," I added.

In early June, some things needed saying. When the seeds germinated, they required constant watering, for the tiny seedlings could wilt and die within hours in the hot, Kentucky sun. We watered not with a hose (Grizzle-pa had no running water), but with buckets filled from the pump, lugged to the garden, and water sprinkled from cupped palms around the fragile plants.

The seedlings needed thinning, too, which had to be done with equal care, using manicure scissors to cut the stems of the smallest and leaving the largest to flourish. "Don't pull the runts out of the ground," Grizzle-pa warned. "You'll damage the roots of the ones you leave." I pulled a few out just for spite when he wasn't looking.

In late June, the squash bugs hit Grizzle-pa's cucumbers with a vengeance. They were as long and fat as the tip of my little finger, dark brown and hard shelled. Step on one and the foul scent would hang in your nostrils for days. Grizzle-pa said we could control them by picking them from the plants and dropping them into coffee cans that contained water and a little cooking oil. The rest we would trap by placing wooden boards down the row. Overnight, the bugs would congregate on the boards, and we could gather and destroy them the next morning.

The sight of the disgusting creatures turned my stomach, and handling them was unthinkable. But Grizzle-pa wouldn't take "no" for an answer. At his side, I worked my way down the rows, plucking the gruesome bugs and drowning them one by one. Soon, the wilting cucumber plants revived, and small thumbs of green began to form on the vines.

By late July, the corn was taller than I was, and the ears were setting hard and green all down the row. The tomatoes grew heavy with fruit, and the summer squash began to form at the flower bases, lengthening and thickening like sausages. Bunches of snap beans elongated on the stems of both the bush and pole varieties, and the lettuce and spinach has already yielded first one crop, then a second—some of which I had taken home to Mama. Best of all were the snapdragons. They grew stout and proud along the foundation of the house and soon bloomed a blood red that blazed in the sunlight.

Grizzle-pa smiled when he looked at them, and I realized I had never seen him smile before. "Buttermilk?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he walked to the springhouse and returned with the cold, creamy drink in two, tin cups. We sat on the porch to drink it.

Then, with Ralph curled and napping at his feet, Grizzle-pa started talking, spilling out what was, for him, a deluge of words. He told me about coming to Macomb County as a young boy, about square dances and ice cream socials and softball games that started before noon and lasted until after dark. He told about working the wires and the rails, driving coal truck and hauling freight—whatever it took to make it through the hard times of the thirties. He told me about his ma and pa, long dead, and three brothers all gone before him. "To their reward," he said. He told me about meeting and marrying his first wife and their sorrow in having no children. Haltingly, he described the even deeper sorrow of losing her. He talked about meeting and marrying a second time—my grandma this time—and about the good times they had together before she, too, was lost to him.

In early August, the plentiful harvest from Grizzle-pa's garden began. Unexpectedly, the postman delivered no notes from Grizzle-pa, but instead grocery bags heavy with fat, round squash and plump, green beans. I continued to pedal out to Grizzle-pa's place every Friday, helping him keep up with the weeding and hoeing and returning home with the first of the yellow tomatoes, as big across as dinner plates and tart as apples.

In mid-August, the heat that had gripped us all summer broke, and a storm blew down from the Smokies with a fury. Winds whipped limbs from the hackberry trees and downed power lines. Rain lashed roads and houses with a black, frigid torrent that flooded streets and sidewalks and choked the creeks with silt.

For three days, the storm raged. Trapped indoors, Mary Estelle, Suzanne, and I filled the hours with tales and half-truths about loves lost, slights perceived, seventh grade injustices, and what was playing at the Midway Drive-In. Mary Estelle hinted at the delights to be experienced in getting a boy to take you there, especially for a Judy Holliday movie, but hers was a world apart now, it seemed, out of sight and out of reach for Suzanne and me. We played Monopoly for hours on end, and even Mary Estelle joined the game, making us promise we wouldn't tell the other cheerleaders. As I built hotels on Broadway and Park Place, I wondered about Grizzle-pa's garden.

The next morning, the storm blew itself out, and the sun rose harsher and hotter than ever. The humidity hung like a weight on the backs of the men who cleared basswood branches from the streets and shored up the east-end bridge that lurched precariously, threatening collapse into the raging creek.

No note came from Grizzle-pa, but Mama knew what needed doing. She called us to the kitchen. "Grizzle-pa's garden has likely seen a lot of damage," she said, "and one of you needs to go help him."

"Not me," protested Suzanne. "I twisted my ankle playing stick ball and my head hurts from all this rain and...."

She was just warming up when Mary Estelle interrupted, "Gail can go. She's been going all summer. She's the one Grizzle-pa asks for."

"Maybe all the more reason why it might be somebody else's turn," Mama said, "but I won't say who goes. You decide however you want, but one of you goes out to Grizzle-pa's place first thing after lunch."

We had heard those words before, and we took the same action as before. Mary Estelle and I followed Suzanne onto the porch and circled into a huddle. We put our right hands into the center and bent over them. "One, two...three!" Suzanne counted.

Lagging behind by half a beat, I watched my sisters' hands assume a familiar form. As both extended their fingers flat into rigid sheets of paper, I quickly retracted my scissors fingers, forming the hard, round fist of a stone.

* * * 

Grizzle-pa died that winter--of a cancer that he'd known about for over a year, they said —and I thought he looked stronger and sleeker in his coffin than he had in the last summer of his life. Because we were the only family Grizzle-pa had, his dog Ralph came to live with us. Mama said it was just as well that she didn't inherit the worthless, old farmhouse, which, it turned out, Grizzle-pa didn't even own. The place was a long-forgotten sharecropper's allotment, abandoned during the Depression by its true owner who had settled, some said, in Detroit. Before the house and land could be auctioned for back taxes, the task of sorting through Grizzle-pa's possessions fell to us, his only kin. Mama said we would keep anything worth keeping and send the rest to the Salvation Army. It was too big a job for Mama to handle alone. She'd need help from all three of us girls.

No stone-paper-scissors this time.

Standing in Grizzle-pa's yard in the gray light of February, we viewed the remnants of last summer's garden. The storm damage had been less than expected, and I had needed to work only a single afternoon to help him restake his tomatoes, pull out the worst of the battered corn stalks, and clear the plot of debris. His yield had continued through September, feeding us and half our neighbors. It had been more than enough for him, too, it seemed, for we found his kitchen shelves laden with jar after jar of canned beans, homemade pickles, and beets as red and sparkling as jewels. Each jar was neatly dated and labeled: "Gail's Garden, 1955."

On his kitchen table stood a vase stuffed with flowers. They had faded and dried months before, but they were still recognizable as the blood red snapdragons Grizzle-pa and I had grown from seed.

Suzanne and Mary Estelle and I stopped playing stone-paper-scissors after that. It wasn't that there were no longer chores to divide up, but rather that each of us seemed to know what our kinship required of us. Now, years later, Suzanne keeps the family scrapbook, and Mary Estelle hosts our family reunions. Me, I keep Grizzle-pa's grave neat and well-tended, planting there each spring the seeds that will grow into stout, proud snapdragons. They bloom every August, the blazing red of blood.

END

COOP DURRELL AND THE CHINOOK STEER

by Faith Brynie

Stringy Spangler took a deep drag on his roll-your-own, while Coop Durrell ran his lasso through brown, callused fingers, methodically coaxing the kinks out of the ancient rope and looping it into a tight coil. To steady his balance on the fence top against the growing force of the wind, Coop jammed the heels of his scuffed, leather boots more firmly into the rail below. Coop ran a leathery hand through his three-day growth of grizzled beard. Today, Coop's knee ached with the vengeance of the devil. Must be the wind, Coop thought.

Stringy shifted closer to Coop on the fence and hitched up his chaps. "Another chinook," Stringy said, as if Coop didn't know.

Coop nodded and turned watchful eyes southward. Maybe up in Denver chinooks blew down the eastern slope of the Rockies, but across the flats of Huerfano County, they came from the south. The hot, dry chinook winds collected their load of red dust and stinging sand somewhere south of the border and hurled it across New Mexico, picking up filth and heat and evil as they blew. By the time they got to southern Colorado, they could turn a field of wheat to straw in an hour and bury a heifer alive in two. The chinooks set the sage brush afire with red dust and turned the trickles that sprung up in dry arroyos to rivulets of blood.

People got sick when the chinooks blew.

People got crazy when the chinooks blew.

"Not gonna get much brandin' done today," Coop said, feeling the grit of Juarez coat his tongue and grate between his teeth.

"Could work in the barn. Wax some of the saddles, shine up some of the tack," Stringy said, not meaning it.

"Don't know that I'm even up to that." Coop patted his bad leg, and Stringy nodded understanding.

"Always gets you when the chinooks blow, don't it?"

"Just like the first time," Coop said and remembered.

It had been a chinook then, too, a gully-gorger the same as this one threatened to be. Funnel clouds of ochre dust had skittered like mischievous tornadoes across the prairie, and the air was so dry, it had turned Coop's eyes to sandpaper and his mouth to parchment.

He hadn't been called Coop then. He'd been Beau, the name his mother had given him. French for "handsome," she said, and Beau had thought--without admitting it to anyone-- that he deserved such a name. He rode tall and proud in the saddle, and the girls in their bright, calico dresses and swingy, lace petticoats eyed him admiringly at the Saturday night square dances.

That was before the steer.

The steer had been a Texas longhorn, tall and tan and rangy--all bones and leather and willfulness. The animal looked no different from the others in the herd, but in some fundamental way, he was different. Later, Beau realized there was something in the eyes of that beast--some kind of fire that spelled trouble. He should have expected trouble even without the animal's glance of warning. The chinooks always brought trouble.

Beau had readied himself for the maneuver he had performed a thousand times before. In those days, there were no electric prods and trapping pens to guide and restrain the animals. The herd roamed free, and the cowboys practiced the ancient art of steer wrestling, now banned even from the rodeos for cruelty to the animals. Cruelty to the cowboys was more like it from Beau's view. Stringy was his partner then as now.

"I'll trap him for you," Stringy called above the roar of the wind and the gallop of the herd, "and you take him down."

Beau nodded agreement and guided his Appaloosa mare toward the unbranded steer. Stringy took his position opposite and punched his buckskin gelding to a gallop just as the steer sensed the danger of entrapment. The animal ran headlong into rough sagebrush, treacherous territory where gopher holes broke the legs of good horses and desolation broke the spirit of good men.

Not to be outdone, Stringy raced after the steer, with Beau close beside. In seconds, Stringy had the steer level with his horse's flanks and angling to the right---the perfect position for Beau to leap from the saddle gripping the steer by the horns. After that came the strength and the skill. A cowboy like Beau could plant his heels in the earth and wrench the steer's neck to the ground in a single, sharp thrust. Where the animal's head went, his body followed. The steer would be down in seconds, pinned to the ground and ready for branding.

With the steer perfectly positioned, Stringy shouted "Go!" and Beau sprang from his saddle. Good little mare that she was, the Appaloosa veered to the right, out of harm's way. Stringy cut to the left and swung his horse in a wide arc, racing back to snatch the hot branding iron from the fire now a hundred yards away before returning to burn the steer's flesh and retrieve his partner. Stringy would do the actual branding without ever descending from his horse, like a figure in a Charles Russell painting.

This steer had no appreciation for art. When Beau grasped the horns and planted his heels before him, the steer gave a mighty twist directly opposite to the force Beau was exerting on his neck. The steer was a powerful animal, stronger than most, and he tossed Beau over his back like a sack of manure. Beau landed in the sagebrush yards from the steer with his ankle rammed into a gopher hole. His heel and spur stuck in the hole while his body continued to propel forward, forcing his right leg back under him at an unnatural angle. Even above the wind, Coop could hear the shredding of ligaments and the snap of bones in his knee and lower leg.

Doc said it was the worst compound fracture he'd ever seen. But then that doctor hadn't seen many fractures--that is, if his skill in setting Beau's leg was any indication. The leg never healed properly, and Beau endured constant agony. The pain never eased, never retreated, only changed its form from a searing fire at some times to a stomach-churning ache at others.

That steer had trotted away, leaving Beau in the dust with a shattered limb and a shattered soul. That day he'd earned his new nickname: "Chicken Coop." Too chicken to wrestle a steer and too cooped up in his own fear to try again. Kindly, the old wranglers had dropped the first word of the nickname as the years went by, and the new boys didn't know why he was called Coop and didn't ask. Kindly, too, there were plenty of jobs around the ranch that didn't require wrestling steers, and Coop did them all. But he never rode quite so tall in the saddle after that, and the girls didn't flirt at the square dances anymore.

All Coop ended up with was the name and the fear. The nickname he could stand. The fear still consumed him, as undiminished by time as the pain in his leg. Peering into the dust devils stirred up by the chinook, Coop thought he could see that steer again, stepping lean and red-eyed from behind the corral gate.

When he looked again, he saw the impossible was true.

He blinked the dust from his eyes and turned to Stringy for confirmation, but Stringy had already descended from the fence and was halfway across the paddock toward the barn. Coop looked again and knew his eyes were not deceived. This was no ordinary steer. It was the same steer that had robbed Coop of his leg and his courage thirty-seven years before.

Coop drew back from that same red-eyed warning he had failed to heed decades ago. As the longhorn moved nearer, Coop shrank back from the radiating heat of the steer and nearly choked on the animal's musty, untamed odor.

Coop dropped from the fence onto his good leg and limped to the far end of the corral where his bay mare stood saddled. He did not take his eyes off the steer. The animal paced the length of the enclosure. It pawed the ground and puffed clouds of dust from flared nostrils like a bull. Coop rose to the saddle with a practiced swing and turned his mount toward the steer. The steer turned toward the gate and headed at a trot out to the open range. Coop followed.

For a moment, Coop lost sight of the steer in the swirls of fiery dust that scampered across the scrubland like puma kittens. The curved, ivory horns disappeared into the maelstrom and with them, the lanky, skeletal, loose-strung haunches of the steer. That steer was nearly as tall as Coop's horse and probably weighed more, Coop thought, before drawing up his mare, lifting his ancient felt ten-gallon from his head, and wiping his sleeve across his sweat-soaked brow.

Coop had left his days as a dreamer behind with his youth. He reasoned now with all the common sense his growing burden of dread would allow that this could not be the same steer. That was thirty-seven years ago, Coop tried to convince himself, and the Texas longhorn who had left him a cripple had been dog food and leather purses for so long that the dogs who ate him died of dyspepsia and the women who bought the purses threw them away in disdain when the fashions changed. With all the force of his reason, Coop tried to deny the truth that the churning in his gut insisted he accept. It was the same steer, all right, the same one that had made him less of a man than he had intended to be. The same steer, blown again--as before---out of the dust of the chinook. The aching in Coop's leg confirmed what his common sense strove to reject.

Everyone knows chinooks bring trouble.

Is it possible that chinooks bring second chances?

Hot and confused but inexplicably resolute, Coop kicked his little mare to action and plunged forward into the thick of the storm. The whipping, biting dust ringed him now like a cocoon--flexible, but skin-tight, breathless, confining to the point of claustrophobia. Coop's mount sensed her rider's fear and multiplied it by her own, slowing from the trot to a walk and picking gingerly through the banks of creosote bushes and stunted ocotillo that lashed at her legs.

Coop gripped his bay mare tight between his knees and shook the reins sharply, spurring her forward into a gallop. The horse responded hesitantly, but Coop dug in harder. The mare's heavily-muscled legs answered his commands with ground-eating bounds that cut the distance between Coop and the steer to ten yards in only a few seconds. The steer, alerted by the crunching of hooves against loose sand, turned his head and snorted over his shoulder.

The pursuit began.

The steer bounded headlong into vertical shafts of dust that looked as solid as Greek columns. The mare instinctively plotted a zigzag path through the obstacles, but Coop hauled at her neck and kept her on a course straight through the thick of it. The horse obeyed the signals of Coop's hands and knees and bent her head toward the retreating steer, her stride extending with each beat. Clouds of steam rose from her nostrils, and lather dappled her neck. Coop spurred her on, the reins loose now, giving the animal her head as horse and rider closed the gap.

Coop drew up behind the steer rapidly, but the steer ground to a halt, pivoted left, and loped off in a new direction. By the time the mare got her legs under her and corrected her course, the steer was twenty or thirty yards ahead again and gaining. Coop knew that his mare was fading, knew that the brave, little animal could not long keep up the pace he was setting for her. Nevertheless, Coop applied the spurs again, and the mare stretched for all she was worth. Coop leaned forward in the saddle, his head so close to the mare's neck that the reek of her sweat choked him nearly as much as the dust. They galloped on, closing on the steer when, once again, the longhorn executed his slide, stop, and pivot maneuver.

Coop and his mare slid, turned, and galloped once more, but Coop had grown wise to the steer's strategy and braced himself for the next encounter. Horse and rider bore down on the steer's flanks, the little mare growing more breathless with each beat of her hooves. Coop held her back a little, focusing on precise timing, trying to predict with pinpoint accuracy when the steer would pivot and whether to right or to left. A split second before the steer's turn, Coop pulled his mare hard left. The steer, having already committed to his pivot, circled left as well, directly into the path of horse and rider.

Here was the opportunity Coop had hoped to create. He propelled himself upward and out the saddle with a sharp, knee-wrenching thrust of his feet against the stirrups. For seconds suspended in time, Coop hung in the air like a gliding squirrel, his hands extended toward the steer's horns and his feet flying behind him through dust-clogged space.

Contact.

Coop's gnarled fingers curled around the horns of the steer an instant before his feet hit the ground behind him. The steer plunged wildly forward at the same time as Coop's mare cut away to the east and disappeared into a whirlwind. Alone now, Coop tasted fear. The animal was dragging him through the sand and sagebrush, his good leg and his bad one trailing behind, both equally limp and useless. Coop tightened his grip on the horns. He had only one chance.

With the agility of a man a third his age, Coop flexed his abdominal muscles and lifted his knees tight against his chest. Then, in one urgent swing, he thrust his feet before him and leaned back hard. The keels of his boots plowed furrows into the soft earth, and the steer's horns threatened to slip loose from Coop's sweaty grip, but Coop held on. Shafts of pain sank from his back into his hips, thighs, knees, and calves, and his arms cramped with the fire of a thousand branding irons. Still, Coop held on. The steer tossed his head and kicked blindly at his tormentor. One hoof cut a burrow deep enough for a gopher into Coop's good leg, but still the cowboy held on. Sweat streamed from his head long ago separated from his hat, and blood soaked Coop's jeans and flowed into his boot. Still, Coop hung on.

The last moments were the hardest. The wind filled Coop's mouth with Mexican grime and peppered his eyes with sand so he could not see. The bellow of the wind was so intense Coop could scarcely make out the puffing of the tiring, but still powerful, animal he fought.

It ended in seconds. The steer pitched his head left one last time, a move that gave Coop a chance to tighten his grip and improve his leverage. Not much but enough. Enough to bring the animal to the ground, pinned on his side, snorting and exhausted beneath the yahooing cowboy who crouched astride the captive steer and punched the drooling jowls of the fallen giant with a playful, back-hand slap.

Stringy showed up then. He rode out of the dust just as he had thirty-seven years ago, but this time he did not have a fire-heated brand at his side.

"What the Jim Knickers you think you're doin', rollin' around out here in the dust all by yourself?" Stringy asked, circling his partner warily. "I saw you ride out in the storm. You losin' your marbles, Coop, or is it just the chinook crazies again?"

Coop lifted himself off the steer. The subdued animal shook violently and rolled over in the dust twice before finding its feet and limping off into the prairie. Coop stood frozen for long minutes, memorizing every step of the animal's retreat.

"For Pete's sake, Coop, quit starin' and let's get goin'. There's nothin' but dust and sagebrush out here, and that wind's gettin' meaner. Let's get back to the barn before this chinook drives me as loco as you are," Stringy shouted.

Coop strode even and strong on two painless legs toward Stringy, gesturing his intent to mount behind Stringy and ride back to the barn. Gripping Stringy's arm and swinging gracefully onto the horse's rump, Coop spoke. His voice was so clear and low, it silenced the wind. "I ain't Coop no more. I mean to be called Beau from now on. Beau's the name my maw give me, and it's the name I reckon I'll keep."

Stringy shrugged his shoulders and turned his gelding toward the corral in a smooth, wide arc. He punched his mount into a gallop, kicking up a cloud of red dust that rolled slowly away to be lost in the prairie behind them. 

THE END