Redwood Bend

either. She’d been a megastar all her adult life and knew all about asshole child stars. And then he also realized she fed him bean soup every day until he finally thanked her for it.
“This is probably the best soup I’ve ever had,” Dylan told Jack.
“I know. When someone around here caps a pig, or any other livestock for that matter, a lot of it goes to the clinic where my wife, the town midwife, works. We have a doc over there, too, but Mel, my wife, she usually brings her share to Preacher, since she can’t cook worth crap and I feed my family here. It’s usually a patient fee or an advance on a future patient fee—we have an interesting insurance system around here. People who need the doc and Mel—they make sure to share the wealth regularly. So Preacher, the second he sees something come into the bar, he starts thinking about how he can stretch it, what he can do with it. He has a lot of people he wants to take care of. He doesn’t sleep at night until he has the best result imaginable. Mel might be the best thing that ever happened to me, but Preacher’s gotta run a close second. He’s the guy who makes this work.”
“Is this your hometown?” Dylan asked.
“Nah, I’m a city boy, more or less. I needed something quiet after twenty in the Marines.”
“You go to war?”
“Almost habitually,” Jack said. “A few of the men I served with decided to settle here. You from Sacramento?”
Dylan shook his head. “Little town up north—Payne, Montana.”
“How’d you hook up with Walt?” Jack wanted to know.
“Walt came through Montana and we met there. He was on some kind of solitary road trip, touring the U.S., and Montana is one of the most beautiful parts, so I took him into the mountains. We outran a moose once.”
“Don’t ever get the idea a moose is cute,” Walt said. “That sucker didn’t like me. Then Dylan took me into the air in his little plane,” Walt said. “I’ve been promising to show ’em my state ever since.”
“We were looking for someone to put together a road trip that would take us some interesting places we hadn’t seen, and by interesting I mean, off the grid. With some views.”
“Well, you got views, interesting and off the grid,” Jack confirmed. “So, what does a man do in Payne, Montana?”
That brought an automatic smile as he remembered Adele on the phone to a Realtor when she was hauling his messed up fifteen-year-old ass to Payne. She said, “Find me something with built-in chores.”
“Small charter flying business,” Dylan answered. “Little, bitty airport.”
Jack lifted an eyebrow. “Is there a big call for that sort of thing in Payne?”
“Some, but business is down like the rest of the world. When business is good we not only shuttle to larger airports, we pick up passengers all over the place and take them just about anywhere they want to go. We do a lot of corporate retreats, group trips, act like a real small regional sometimes, you name it. We’ve been known to fly hunters, rock bands and basketball teams. We’re flexible.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“Among other things. Stu’s head of maintenance, and Lang also flies and runs the instruction arm of the business—we give flying lessons, instrument instruction, et cetera. There are a few others attached to the company. Seems like we all have other things to do besides be on the road all the time.”
“Sounds like it could be fun,” Jack said. “If it makes a living.”
“We live in Payne, Montana, man,” Dylan said. “Population fifteen hundred. If we can pay for fuel for the planes, hay for the horses and oil for the furnaces in our houses, we don’t need that much of a living.”
“How do the wives feel about that?”
“Lang is the only married one and not only does his wife stay involved in the company, she tries to double up his schedule, keep him out of town more. Five kids, and she isn’t interested in six.”
Lang leaned forward on the bar and grinned. “What can I say? It just doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”
Dylan gave a chuckle. Not many people knew how much Dylan envied Lang’s ability to do that, to make a happy home and have normal, civilized kids with a good, solid woman at his side. But, having come from a crazy, mismatched Hollywood family, he had long ago accepted that his genetic makeup probably prevented that possibility. Adele was the only sane and stable one. “Takes even less to make me happy,” Dylan said.
“I’d think a