Ross came down almost gently, he put the plane down on the field in the darkness and they came running toward him and then the blackness came down over him again, he was a bundle, limp but living, as they lifted his body in the clumsy straps and trappings, the face battered and bloody. Nice work, they said to the unconscious form. Nothing like a little fresh air while you’re working, they said. A month later he was out of the hospital and flying another dainty silver and scarlet toy.

13

NOW THE REAL BATTLE for Christine began. She was seventeen; no longer a child, not yet a woman.

“Washington State University is the place for her,” Czar said. “I don’t want her to go east to school, the way my—the way her mother did. No good came of that, that’s sure. Seattle, I can keep an eye on her, I’ll go see her, she can come home holidays.”

“What’s wrong with Baranof College!” Thor argued. “We’ve got a course there in the humanities that Washington can’t touch. And political science and modern history and racial—–”

“That settles it! What am I supposed to do? Stand there while you make a long-faced Commie out of my Christine! She’s going to Seattle. She’s going to mix with her equals.”

Bridie, distracted as a hen whose lone chick is being swooped upon by hawks, now entered the fray. “Why don’t you let the child decide for herself? Seventeen years old, she’s got a mind of her own.”

“She hasn’t had the experience to decide a thing as important as this,” Czar said.

“But she’s experienced enough to live in Seattle alone?”

“She won’t be alone. Mrs. Husack and Dave and the Caswells and Kleet and that whole crowd will be looking after her.”

“I was afraid of that,” Thor said.

Bridie, fuming, burst into the battle again. “You two talk about Chris, you’d think she was a slave or idiot or something. I’ve always asked her opinion and let her try and decide—so have you, Thor, I’ll say that for you—about anything she could. I always said, which do you like, the pink or the blue. You two aren’t thinking of her, you’re thinking of yourselves.”

Czar turned his wintry gaze upon her. “You don’t understand, Bridie.”

“Understand! I’ve understood for seventeen years and more ever since I fed her with a medicine dropper. And I suppose Bridie Ballantyne hasn’t understood you these years and years, and Thor, too. I understand wolves trying to tear a lamb to pieces when I see ’em.”

Czar shook his head, gently. “Hysterical.” He turned away from her, he looked only at Thor, it was as though the two men were alone in the room, battle-locked. “Christine is going to the university in Seattle, by the time she’s finished there she’ll be twenty-one, a woman grown, she’ll know how to behave in decent society. Louise Husack will be more like a mother than a chaperone, she says her house will be Christine’s second home. You might as well know I sent Christine’s application to the university three years ago.”