Bowman's heart sank. Whatever was coming would not be good. "Yes, sir, I am."

"This plane, I understand, is totally unsuitable for student use, is it not?"

"That's correct, sir."

"It is, in fact, so overpowered as to pose a safety risk to all but expert pilots, and it has no suitability whatsoever for air combat."

"No, sir."

"In that case, Lieutenant, I am placing you in charge of disposing of this aircraft in such a way that it can no longer endanger the lives of anyone on this base. Report back here Monday morning when you have completed that task."

"Dispose of it, sir? In exactly what manner do you want me to do that, Colonel?"

The man ignored the question. "Chief Jenkins has been making sure that the craft is airworthy. Go talk to him. You've got four days. That should be sufficient time to do the job. Dismissed, Lieutenant."

Walter Bowman left the colonel's office feeling miserable. He walked the half-mile to the maintenance hangar where his plane was usually stored. It wasn't there. Bowman caught one of the mechanics and asked him where Anvil Jenkins was.

"He said if you came looking for him, sir, to check hangar six."

"Thanks, Ensign." Why'd they move it to the paint shop? he wondered. He was still in a daze about the meeting with the base commander.

He met Jenkins as the mechanic was coming out of hangar six. "Where's my bird, Anvil? Colonel says you've been getting it ready for me to 'dispose' of it."

The older man's face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. "Figured it needed a few things if its days here were over, sir. Come on in and you can see for yourself." He held the door for the lieutenant. As Walter stepped through the doorway Jenkins flipped a row of switches and the inside of the hangar was lit up by a dozen floodlights. Lieutenant Bowman drew his breath in. Whatever he had imagined, he had never expected this.

There stood his Stearman, but he hardly could believe it was the same airplane he had flown only a week before. The prop hub was no longer exposed. It was now covered with an aluminum spinner polished to a mirror finish. The big radial engine was also covered with a beautiful cowling to further streamline the front of the airplane and duct cooling air over the cylinders. The entire aircraft gleamed as he had never seen before.

It was also no longer yellow. The clipped-wing Stearman had been thoroughly wet-sanded and repainted entirely. It was now white, with dark green sunburst stripes on the wings and two thick longitudinal stripes of the same color on each side of the fuselage. On the side of the fuselage behind the cowling was a rendition of a nude, voluptuous woman. She was contorted into an impossible position, with a startled look on her face. Beneath her figure was the caption Every Which Way!

Below the aft cockpit were the words Lieutenant Commander Walter Bowman, painted in black with a gold shadow line. On the engine cowling, and in much smaller lettering, was written Tuned by Jenkins Engineering.

"Had a harder time than I expected getting an exact match on the green," the mechanic said, deadpan. He had painted the biplane in the school colors of Bowman's alma mater, Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bowman was speechless. Finally he found his voice.

"The cowling..." he said, his voice trailing off.

"Now that took a while. Told you I was a hammer man, though. Took me a day or two to think it through, and my aluminum welding is a sight better now than it was when I cut the material for it. Those blister bumps over each knuckle on the rocker covers, made them by buildin' a fixture and a steel die I made on the mill, then rigged up a rubber diaphragm and forced grease into it under pressure. Pressure-formed 'em in that soft aluminum pretty as you please. The spinner, Jones made that for you. Told me he knew a girl back home with titties just the right shape, and almost as big, and he said he'd copy one from memory. He got so excited when he was done I half 'spected him to knock out another one so's he could have a pair. Harrison did the artwork and lettering. Seems he's a mite tired of using nothing but stencils, like on everything else around here, so I give him a free hand, sir. Hope you ain't offended."

Bowman just shook his head. "All that work..." Bowman was thinking of the tremendous effort the men in the maintenance shop had gone to just to let him fly the Stearman to some Navy boneyard for dismantling.

"Lieutenant, every man in the shop knows about the numbers the Colonel was askin' for. Hell, Colonel's aide got some of 'em from us. We did our own figurin', and come up with the fact that you saved this shop one major shitload a work with all the planes them kids had sideways an' you managed to get back on the ground with nothin' bent. This here extra work, weren't as much time as fixin' the mess made by just one groundloop."

The mechanic motioned Bowman over to the side of the Stearman and moved on to a different subject. "Now take a look at this, Lieutenant. You got a temporary ferry tank I rigged up in the front hole, should be good for two extra hours if you don't goose the throttle too often. And back here," he said, with a voice tinged with pride, "is a couple things this bird has needed ever since we got her finished. Did a little horsetrading to get 'em." He led the officer to the aft cockpit and pointed to the instrument panel. A new airspeed indicator had been installed, one which read all the way to three hundred knots. "I gave it the best calibration I could. When Anderson follows you in the SNJ, you can double-check it. Three hundred's a pipe dream, but let me know how fast my motor can pull this thing."

Next to the airspeed indicator was an instrument that was entirely new. It was a G-meter, and it was calibrated to +12 and -8. "Knowing you, you might peg this one, Lieutenant," Jenkins said, tapping its glass face, "but they won't make one that goes any higher. Probably don't have any equipment strong enough to calibrate it."

"A. ferry tank?...and a G-meter?...What the hell for. Anvil?" Walter Bowman's voice showed his absolute bewilderment. Jenkins finally realized what the young man had been thinking, and an exaggerated look of outrage came over his weathered face.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ, Lieutenant! You think you're going to take this screamer to some scrapyard out on the palmetto flats and let a bunch of friggin' lop-eared kids cut her apart with a Mexican speedwrench? Whole maintenance shop would mutiny, but not 'fore they cut your heart out an' took turns pissin' in the hole...uh, sir," he finished, his voice slightly more subdued.

"Then.....?" Bowman said, distracted by the older man's creative outburst.

"Sir, Anderson's all set to follow you up to St. Louis and play taxicab." "WHAT?"

"Damn right, sir. This bad girl was built just for you. You're taking her home."

January 1, 1951 Raymond Johnson stopped and listened to the wind in the Aspen trees. He liked using snowshoes. He had discovered that he could actually make slightly better time on snowshoes after a snowfall than he could in hiking boots on dry ground. The second semester of Eighth grade started in four days, and he intended to get in a lot of small game hunting before then.

Ray saw the unmistakable tracks leading to the base of a lodgepole pine, where needles and bits of bark darkened the snow around the trunk. He grinned involuntarily as he looked up and saw the fat porcupine thirty feet up the tree, munching contentedly on the side of the trunk. Ray never shot porcupines. They weren't any good to eat and there was no challenge to stalking them, but he loved to look at their spiky round bodies. He watched the porcupine for a few more minutes and then continued his trek up the south side of Aspen Mountain.

Aspen had been a booming mining town sixty years earlier, but the demonetization of silver in 1893 caused silver prices to collapse. Pitkin County's central industry became unprofitable overnight. For fifty years, the town had been quiet. Then, in the decade after the Second World War, a new business had emerged.

The Tenth Mountain Division had trained in Leadville, Colorado since 1936, and many of the troops had made the 82-mile trip to Aspen on weekends. After the war, several men from the Tenth returned to Aspen, determined to make it a world-class ski area.

In 1947, the Aspen Skiing Corporation had cleared trails and installed three lifts on the north face of the mountain that had once been worked by the Ajax Mining Company. In the four years since, the Johnson family had watched with interest as more people each winter came great distances to ski on Aspen Mountain. Some of them liked the area enough to return in the summer, and a percentage of those, usually the older and more affluent ones, ended up moving to Aspen permanently.

Ray's father Bud had seen his own business increase, and Bud and his brother Carl were getting to the point where they were going to have to hire more help and build new stables. There were more and more people who wanted to ride, and some of the new residents were buying horses and having them trained. The income from boarding fees had risen every year in the past five, and the Johnson brothers knew the market was far from saturated. They were in the fortunate position of having the largest tract of land in Pitkin County, and it was only two miles from the center of the town of Aspen. The brothers had resisted offers to sell off any of their property, recognizing early on that they were witnessing the beginning of a fundamental change in the area.

Ray continued up the snow-covered fire road on the back of the mountain, wondering if the skiers on the opposite side were having as good a time as he was. He judged that he was about two-thirds of the way to the top of the mountain, which had a vertical rise of about 3300 feet. The boy saw a fallen pine tree that lay at the proper height, and he clumped over and sat down on it. It was a little after noon, and he was hungry from his climb. Ray shrugged off his day pack and unbuckled it. He took out a ham and cheese sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a quart Thermos bottle of hot tea. He unwrapped the sandwich and eagerly bit into it. They taste so much better when you make them with toast instead of bread he thought with satisfaction.

Ray and his father both liked their sandwiches made with toast. Louise usually let the two of them fix their own lunches, but whenever she threw together a sandwich or fixed hamburgers for either of them, she made sure to toast the bread.

As he finished the last bite of the sandwich and started to unscrew the top of the vacuum bottle, he saw movement ten yards away in a clump of Aspen trees. A rabbit stared at him from behind one of the slender trees. Ray carefully set down the tea and reached into his coat. His hand closed around the grip of the Smith & Wesson .22 revolver carried in the crossdraw holster he wore in front of his left hip. It had been a Christmas present from his father, who had said Ray deserved it for getting yet another semester of straight 'A' grades. He had wasted no time becoming proficient with it. In the past week, Raymond had fired almost two full cartons of 500 rounds each through the gun.

He cocked the hammer while the revolver was still under his coat to muffle the metallic click and slowly withdrew the gun from the holster. Taking careful aim at a spot just behind the rabbit's left eye, he let half the air out of his lungs and gently squeezed the trigger. He had loaded the gun with .22 Short cartridges, which were less powerful than the normal .22 Long Rifle ammo he used on inanimate targets. The weaker round would damage less meat if his shot struck the rabbit's body instead of its brain.

Ray's precaution was unnecessary. The revolver cracked and the bullet struck the rabbit a quarter inch from where he had intended. The animal collapsed in the snow, killed instantly. The boy holstered the gun, took a long drink of tea from the Thermos as he stood up, and walked over to where the animal lay. He reached into his pocket as he clumped through the thick snow, and withdrew a small, two-bladed pocket knife. Unfolding the smaller blade, he picked up the rabbit and slit open its belly. In less than a minute the carcass was gutted and lying on top of an identical one in the game pouch belted around the boy's waist. His mother made a delicious rabbit stew, and he was already imagining how good it would taste after an entire day of snowshoeing.

Ray put his daypack back on and continued up the fire road. The cold air felt invigorating in his lungs, and he started whistling a song his father sometimes sang when he was shoeing the horses, 'Foggy, Foggy Dew'. Nineteen-fifty-one was shaping up to be another good year.

March 10, 1951 Harold Gaines looked at his newborn son and knew he should feel happy. He knew he should be grateful that both his wife and the baby were healthy, and there had been no complications. All he could see, though, as he stared at the tiny, wailing infant, was a mounting stack of bills. This was Harold and Linda's third child, and they had been pinched even before the eldest, Harold junior, had been conceived. Harold's latest job, as a shoe salesman, was not working out as well as he had hoped. St. Louis was known for its shoe industry, but that fact did not do entry-level salesmen like Harold much good.

Linda Gaines looked at the child lying on her chest, and her eyes brimmed over. "He's beautiful, Harold. Look, he has your jaw." Her husband smiled a smile he did not feel, and hoped his wife didn't see that it was forced.

He needn't have worried. Linda Gaines was exhausted from the ordeal of childbirth, and the part of her that remained alert was entirely focused on the tiny child that she was holding. They had agreed that if the baby was a boy, they would name him Richard, after Linda's late father. "Richard, do you see your Daddy?" Linda said softly.

The baby continued to wail.

October 14, 1951 "Four hundred thirty-six Trinity Street in University City," Irwin Mann said in clear though accented English. The cab driver nodded once at his lean, somber passenger and pulled away from the airport taxi stand. Irwin collapsed into the back seat of the taxi. His quest was coming to an end, and now he wondered for the hundredth time if he was making a mistake.

It had taken Irwin Mann a long time to decide to come to America. For four dismal years after the war had ended, he had searched for some clue as to what had become of his wife Magda. Not only was Irwin unable to find anyone who knew a single thing about what had happened to her, he could not find out anything about any of the rest of the Szczupak family, or any of his own blood relatives. It was as if none of them had ever existed.

Finally, he had decided to come to America to find the only other known living member of his or his wife's family, her older sister Zofia. Irwin's attempts to locate Zofia and her husband Max Collins in New York had been fruitless while Irwin was still in Europe. Three we eks ago, he had finally decided to make the journey to the United States.

New York City had been an education for Irwin Mann. He had never seen a place with such vitality. The buildings had been bigger than he ever would have believed. Everywhere you looked there were people with a purpose, working, traveling, getting something done. The level of energy was greater than he had ever seen. The hotels were clean and it seemed that anything a person could ever possibly imagine wanting was available at any number of stores. It was so different from the shortages and restrictions that had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember.

Most impressive to Irwin was the seemingly universal attitude Americans had that anything was possible. He had often found himself wishing, in his first days in America, that there had been more people like this with him in Warsaw eight years before.

It had taken two days of blundering about, running into dead ends, and feeling ineffectual before Irwin Mann explained his entire story to a young man in the city records division who was about to go on lunch break. The man had immediately decided it was a matter of pride to track down Irwin's sister-in-law's husband. It had taken the young city clerk less than two hours to find the firm for which Max Collins had worked before joining the Army.

After that, it had taken another day before Irwin had found a former co-worker in New York who knew that when Max had joined the Army, his wife and children had moved to St. Louis to live with Max's family while her husband was overseas.

His phone call to the Collins house in St. Louis County had brought about immediate insistence that he come there immediately. And so, Irwin had taken a flight from New York to Lambert Field in St. Louis, and now he sat in the back of the cab, wondering if this had been a good idea after all. They may insist I stay with them, but the husband may not truly wish it. I hope this does not end up a disaster.

The cab pulled into the driveway of a small two-story house in the middle-class neighborhood of University City, a suburb of St. Louis. Almost all the streets there were named after colleges, which explained the area's name. Irwin paid the driver and lifted his suitcase out of the back of the taxi.

Before Irwi n Mann had even started up the steps to the brick residence, the front door opened and Max and Zofia Collins stood in the doorway. Irwin's first impression of his sister-in-law as he climbed the steps was that she was excited and embarrassed at the same time. Zofia was a trim woman in her mid-forties, with light brown hair just starting to show traces of grey. She wore a pale blue cotton dress that showed the effects of many washings, and Irwin could see a resemblance to his dead wife. Her husband stood with his arm around her shoulders, grinning broadly.

As Irwin climbed the steps, he could not help but smile. Before he was close enough to shake Max's hand, he felt the man's overwhelming presence. His sister-in-law's husband was a big man, almost two meters tall, and he radiated good cheer and genuine welcome. He liked the man instantly, and just as quickly realized that the effect would be even more pronounced on women. Max reached out to take Irwin's hand in both of his.

"Czesc," he said, greeting Irwin in perfect Polish. "Or perhaps I should say, "Guten Tag." Zofia beamed.

"My English improves since the few days in this country. I am very glad to meet you also. I am ashamed it has taken so long."

"Not at all. I'm the one who snatched Zofia away from her family and took her to the other side of the world. Here, give me that suitcase." He ushered his guest into the house, and his wife followed Irwin closely. Having him come was the most exciting thing that had happened in her life for a very long time.

The woman fussed over him and took his coat, and Irwin felt awkward for a moment. She's not at all like Magda was he thought. I'm the one who should be nervous. Suddenly she started talking to him in rapid Polish.

"When you telephoned it was like a thunderbolt out of the sky. We had no idea that my sister's husband might still be alive. The rest of the family, as you know..." she trailed off and then brushed her hands together as if to wipe away the memory. "Come, come! You must be tired and thirsty. I have iced tea, hot coffee, juice, soft drinks, beer, liquor... What will you have?"

"Iced tea, please," Irwin replied in English. Max caught his look and realized what was worrying his guest.

"Please feel free to use Polish," Max said in his wife's native tongue. "Z ofia has been jumping up and down waiting for you to get here. She's been dying to have someone else to talk to." Irwin smiled and nodded. The two men sat down in the living room while Zofia went to the kitchen to get refreshments.

"Your call was a very pleasant surprise," Max said easily. "Zofia has talked of little else since you phoned. We both thought that all of her family and relatives had been lost."

"I spent several years searching in Poland and Germany after the war. I am afraid her blood relatives were all killed. As were my own. It took a long time before I was able to believe...no, that is not the right word...accept that."

Zofia Collins returned with a tray. On it were two tall glasses of tea and a short glass with bourbon on ice. She served their guest first, then her husband, and then sat down next to Irwin on the couch. Her face was alive, and her eyes brimmed over with tears. Abruptly, she took Irwin's glass from him, put it down with her own on the coffee table, and threw her arms around her dead sister's husband.

"You cannot know what this means to me," she said as she hugged her brother-in-law to her. What came next was an impassioned outpouring in Polish of love and despair about the fate of her sister, and guilt that she had been safe and happy in the United States with two wonderful children, while Magda was left to the barbaric Nazis.

Irwin was stunned. He had feared that Zofia would blame him for her family's fate. If Magda had not married a Jew, she and the rest of the Szczupaks might still be alive. He stammered a reply, but it came out as gibberish.

"Did you think it was your fault, what they did?" Max was speaking softly. Irwin nodded, almost imperceptibly. "No, son," Max said heavily, and Irwin Mann was struck with how right the term felt in the present setting, even though he was only seven years younger than the American.

"You weren't the reason," Max continued, "You were the excuse. If they hadn't used you for the excuse, they would have come up with another one. Those kind always have an excuse for what they do."

Zofia excused herself to go to the washroom and compose herself. The guest felt relieved but awkward, and knew that his host could see his discomfort. Max Collins sat back in his armchair with the glass of whiskey held loosely in his large hands. "There's no need to talk about it right now, not unless you want to. There's all kinds of time for that."

Irwin nodded and looked absentmindedly around the room. The house, while modest by American standards, was finer than any Irwin had ever lived in himself. The floors were oak and covered with handsome rugs. On the walls were a number of oil paintings. Some were portraits and others were landscapes, but there was a similarity to the brush strokes, and they appeared to have been created with the same hand.

As Irwin looked across the living room, he saw an open doorway to what he realized had to be Max Collins' study. The wall that he could see was dark wood, and the chair visible was heavy leather. Above the chair was a painting of a man in a bell tower. He had a look of concentration on his face, was smoking a cigarette, and cradled a rifle that carried a telescopic sight. Irwin rose from his chair and walked to the door to the study. Max was saying something to him, but he did not hear him.

A heavy mahogany desk filled the corner of the room. Next to it was a gun cabinet with glass doors which held eight or ten rifles and shotguns. The walls of the study were covered with more paintings. All of them depicted scenes of graphic violence, and Irwin was at once repulsed and fascinated. There was a scene of a lynching in the old west, and another of a shapely young woman in tight '30s garb tied to a chair and about to be tortured, while a man dressed in black hid behind a bookcase, evidently prepared to rescue her.

When Irwin noticed the signature in the corner of this second work, he realized with a start that all of them had been painted by his host. Then he chastised himself for forgetting the reason Max and Zofia had been in New York. Max had been a cover artist for Street and Smith, the publishing house Irwin had tracked down in New York City. They published pulp fiction and other short stories, mostly aimed at a male audience. He continued to look around the study.

Irwin Mann's eyes fell on a painting of a scene that commanded his attention. It showed a dirty, thuggishlooking man with an ugly grin on his face who was pressing a large revolver into the back of a uniformed policeman. The policeman was slender, with a slight potbelly that looked inappropriate. He was offbalance, his knees were buckling, and there was a slackness to the officer's features. He looked as if he had been overwhelmed by having this criminal gain the advantage on him. The detail in the painting was exceptional.

Then Irwin looked at the gun in the criminal's hand. The hammer of the revolver was in the forward position, but the thug's finger was holding the trigger to the rear. Looking closely, he could see that there was a dull orange glow around the back of the barrel. Irwin felt the hair on his back stand on end as he realized the painting depicted the gun being fired and the policeman dying.

'That's one of my favorite ones that got rejected." Max Collins stood next to his guest and slightly behind him, holding his drink in his hand and gazing at the canvas. Irwin had not heard him come into the room. 'The lead story that month was about a crooked cop who got greedy with the rackets boys he was shaking down." Max saw his guest's puzzled reaction to the slang and explained. "The policeman in the story was demanding money from the criminals. He was sharing in their illegal business. He wanted more and more of their money, and finally they killed him."

"Your publishers did not like the quality of your work?" Irwin asked in amazement.

Max Collins laughed softly but with genuine amusement. "Quite the opposite, I believe. Selling a magazine with a story about a cop getting killed is apparently acceptable, but putting a picture of it happening on the cover is not. They wanted me to redo it to make it look like the cop might kill the other guy. That was never in the story-the whole point of the cover was to show the cop getting killed."

'The bulging stomach on the policeman..." Irwin Mann had an idea what Max was about to say, and he felt slightly queasy.

"They bitched about that, too. Thought my eye for perspective was off." He snorted. "I told old man Curtiss that when you put the muzzle of a gun against somebody and pull the trigger, all those expanding gases go into the body right behind the bullet. I said I had wanted to show the guy's guts all being blown out the front of his body by that big .45 slug, but that might be a little too vivid for the editors, so instead I captured the instant before the bullet exited his body. Curtiss just about had a stroke when I told him that."

Irwin Mann felt lightheaded. "Could not the bullet have remained inside the man's body?" he said finally. This is quite an amazing conversation he found himself thinking.