"Steven Gould - Wildside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

a party or something, I can take the commuter."

I was surprised. I had over 360 hours, but I didn't think Dad trusted my flying. In fact, when I'd
gotten my Instrument Flight Rules ticket two months before, he'd acted more surprised than pleased.

"What's the weather?" I asked cautiously.

"Marginal VFR here—ceiling at fourteen hundred. It's socked in at Dallas—nine-hundred-foot
ceiling. No cells." No thunderstorms, he meant. "Supposed to get better, not worse."

"Okay." I paused. "Uh, we should get going. The Mooney's empty."

"You didn't fill it last time?" Irritation.

"She was still hot. You can get more in her if you fill her cold."

He shrugged. "True, but you could've waited for her to cool down."

I looked down. You could get water condensation in the tanks if you left it empty. "Sorry," I
mumbled.

Mom drove us home and we changed and Dad packed an overnight. I drove us in my truck, a
used and battered Mazda, to Easterwood and left it. I'd be coming back. Dad filed an IFR flight plan
into DFW while I got the Mooney fueled and did the preflight. Then Dad came over to the plane and
did it all over again.

The flight was tense. I fumbled my response to the Fort Worth Traffic Control Center and
received Dad's standard lecture on keeping radio communications short and to the point, there's a lot
of people up in the air gotta use the same frequency, don't you know? Then I had thirteen-knot
crosswind component on the landing and bounced the plane, something I haven't done in months, not
even for the IFR examiner who'd made me pretty nervous.

I offered to pick Dad up when he was done with the next series of flights but he said, "No.
That's okay. I'll take the commuter down."

On the way back everything went right. I handled my clearance, ground control, tower, and
departure communications with brevity and clarity, my radio navigation brought me right into the
landing pattern for Easterwood, and the landing was smooth as silk, one faint "chirp" from the tires as
they spun up to speed.

Of course Dad wasn't there to see it.

I put the plane in the hangar, cleaned the bugs off, and went home.

The Monday after graduation, Joey, Rick, and I drove down to Houston in my pickup and
shipped four male passenger pigeons to four different addresses. We used a freight company that
routinely handled live animals. I paid cash for the freight and I lied about my name, address, and
phone number.

One week later, we drove back to Houston, bought twenty dollars in quarters from a bank, and