True-Life Adventure

mucky-muck at a Fortune 500 company, so I guess he sees dirtier stuff all the time. Anyway, he sure took it calmly. He had only one question: “Think Lindsay and the kid’ll come back with you?”
    “Who knows?”
    “Because if they do, I can’t give you a ride back. Plane only holds four,” he said apologetically. “But if it’s just the two of you, or maybe three, I could go to Fall River Mills and wait for you.”
    “Great. We’ll phone you there.”
    The hammering stopped after an hour or two and we were feeling relatively calm when we began circling the area of the forest where Crusher thought we could land.
    It was dawn then, or just beginning to be, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so pretty. The first pink streaks, the redwoods, your regulation dawn— but somehow, after that flight, the freshness of it was plain moving. No other word for it.
    On the third circle, we found a great little landing strip, or so Crusher seemed to think. It looked to me like a tiny band of asphalt between two rows of giant redwoods. If you’ve ever flown into the Hong Kong airport, you know the thrill of squeezing between two rows of skyscrapers to land. This was a lot like that, as far as the thrills went, only it was eerily beautiful.
    The amazing thing about redwoods is how still they can seem. They don’t have leaves that flutter in the wind or branches that stick out at this angle or that. They just stand there, tall and conical and green and primeval. If you’ve ever been to Wall Street on a weekend, when it’s uninhabited, you have an idea how eerie extremely tall things can get. When they are beautiful tall things, you just naturally get an eerily beautiful effect.
    Crusher made what I called a perfect landing, and what he called an “A-minus” one. I thanked him, heaped praise all over him, and asked him the troubling question that had nagged at me for the last couple of hours: “What do we do now?”
    “Almost forgot. Here’s a map for you.” And he taxied down the runway, or what passed for it.
    It looked to be about a five-mile hike to Little Valley. Sardis said it was another seven miles to the Lazy C Ranch, which is what Ms. Carroll called her establishment. If we wanted to take the ranch by surprise— which we did— we could hardly ask them to send a car. So we started walking, thinking maybe we could reassess things once we got to Little Valley.
    We’d gone about a mile and a half, I’d say, when a man in a truck stopped us. He was a ranger, and feeling macho: “What do you folks think you’re doing here?”
    I did the talking. “Walking to Little Valley. Are we going the right way?”
    “How’d y’all get here?”
    “Friend dropped us off.”
    “Friend dropped you off. Do tell.”
    I didn’t really understand why a forest ranger was harassing two harmless citizens on a public road, and I said as much.
    “Don’t get smart with me, buddy,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in that bag.”
    “What? Are you crazy?” I didn’t get it at all.
    But Sardis apparently did. “You think it’s dope of some sort, don’t you? Here, let me show you.”
    And she opened it up, something I wouldn’t have done in a million years. It was the right thing to do.
    “Oh, listen, I apologize. I mean, you see a private plane land on one of these roads this time in the morning, you got to figure something funny’s going on. Private planes mean dope, you know what I mean?”
    Now that he mentioned it, I did. He kept on talking: “But now that I think of it, they’d be picking something up or taking it away, and they’d have cars and every kind of thing. It’d never just be two people walking along with a backpack. No way that fits in.”
    He paused a moment. “It was a wonderful thing to see, that plane. Just went down right between the redwoods and landed. I mean, I didn’t see the part when it actually touched down because the trees were in the way, but it’s gone now so it didn’t crash. You folks didn’t happen to see it, did you?”
    “Not exactly,” said Sardis. “We were in it at the time.”
    “No shit! That was you folks?”
    Of course he’d known all the time that it was. Now that he’d decided we weren’t dope distributors, he was curious as hell about who we were and what we were up to. So I didn’t see why we shouldn’t tell him. Maybe he’d be so grateful he’d be willing to do us a favor in return.
    “Sardis,” I said, “I think we should tell him