Richard rubbed Jo's round little butt...
 

Green Sun
Chapter 3 - Spin Dizzy

by Donna Lamb

Jo Messenger ran her long fingers through her gingery-brown hair and bit her lip. Sometimes the music came like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky and sometimes it felt more like digging a badger out of a hole in a rainstorm with nothing but a dessert spoon. At least her hair had grown out to a decent length and she could stop wearing wigs on stage. Except taking her wig off in the middle of the next to last set had become something of a trademark--fans of I-NO-Y even referred to "blonde" songs and "redhead" songs, meaning whether she sang them with or without her wig.

After a year and a half since being shot in the shoulder, she still didn't have all the strength back in her right arm for extensive creative work on the keyboards. She found it easier to work out chords on a guitar where her right hand only had to strum. Hanging her Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar around her neck, she tried the lyric again:

"Tell me no secrets, I'll make no promises,
Let love's orphan in stillness die.
Tell me no secrets, Don't ask for promises,
And you know I won't need to lie."

"Bleah," she said. The second line still stunk like a big, wet dog lying on the dining room table. "This is going to be a 'b-blonde' song, I can tell." The cherry sunburst finish of the guitar matched the tones in her hair whether she wore her blonde wig or her natural locks but she generally played keyboards on stage. Only on slow ballads where Kylie Benjamin played trumpet did she pick up the rhythm guitar and play alongside Paul "Bugs" Benjamin, the band's authentic guitar-god and legendary sixties burn-out case.

Richard Alexander came into Jo's home studio from the hall with a caramel latte from Starbucks for her. He laughed. "Your problem is you're trying to write a cheatin' song. You don't have a disloyal bone in your body--it's no wonder you're having trouble." They kissed and Richard rubbed Jo's round little butt in her silken day shorts.

"Mmm," she said. "You think? M-maybe you should write it then." She grinned at him.

"Ouch," Richard said. "I think my, um, wandering days are over." He smiled at her, showing his dimples.

"Mmm, b-better be." She looked at him over the rim of her cup. Her slight stutter never affected her singing and had improved some over the months since she'd rejoined the band.

"Mmm," he said, still smiling. "You sure you want to wait till October to get married?" He sipped his own blueberry frappachino. Jo seldom drank icy drinks, preferring coffee, summer and winter, but a frozen fruity drink in July was Richard's idea of how to stay cool.

"We've got eight tour dates between now and Mom and Dad's anniversary; it's not that I want to wait, I just don't see how we've got time to get m-married any sooner. We've only got two more days here then we have to be in B-boston on Sunday." They'd planned on taking a week off from touring in late July when they'd drawn up the original schedule so Aron "Lemon-Eater" Jones, the band's bassist and hornman, could attend a family reunion in Cincinatti. But Jo's mom, Beverly Messenger, insisted on a month off from touring in order to plan a wedding. "We have to wait till October b-before we have time to do it."

Richard's dark eyes seemed to brim with tears like an anime character, "Wait till October? You mean.... We're not going to do it till October?" The pitch of his voice indicated just what he meant by it.

Jo giggled. She put her coffee down, swung her guitar out of the way and draped her arms around his neck. "Idiot," she said. Richard managed to set his own drink down while Jo enthusiastically nibbled on his lower lip. Then they kissed, long and deep. Jo ground her hips against his in the middle of the kiss, causing the guitar to thump him musically.

They came up for air. "So.... We're going to do it now?" Richard asked.

Jo picked up her coffee, "How about 'Let my love's orphan lonely die' for a second line?"

Richard closed one eye and peered at her. "You were thinking of songwriting while kissing me?"

She grinned. "It's only f-fair--I think about kissing you while I'm doing everything else."

* * *

An ultralite with half a wing gone still had plenty of lift but the impact with the hawk had wrecked or jammed all the controls except rudder and throttle and whatever attitude adjustment Carson could manage by shifting his weight. If he'd been flying "on the deck," under fifty feet, as he sometimes did, he'd have had no time to react or save himself. With only 300 feet below him and a cruising speed of thirty-five knots, he didn't have much time but he had some. Time enough but maybe not enough luck, he thought.

The severe yaw caused by the collision threatened to stall the plane so first he had to deal with that or fall sideways out of the air. He leaned his body weight into the yaw, steered the rudder out of it and goosed the throttle. The ailerons and elevators were not responding but the maneuver pulled the plane back into a mostly forward orientation, restoring lift. He eased the throttle back before the nose could pitch up.

Now the chaotic drag from the broken pieces flapping loosely on the left side of the little plane tried to pull him into a roll. He let the craft yaw again slightly, trying for a balance, but the unstable dynamics of the ruptured wing membrane and the missing elevator didn't allow for any sort of balance point--it took constant adjustment. Like juggling chainsaws and eggs at the same time, he thought.

One of the broken wire stays lashed him across the face, nearly blinding him--would have except for his goggles. He tasted blood running into his mouth from a cut across his nose. The lack of tension from the missing stays on the upright members of the plane's frame allowed a certain slackness in the lifting surfaces of the right wing, stealing lift and increasing drag. Nothing to worry about, he decided. I'll be dead before it matters.

He tried to look around for any sort of flat terrain without large rocks that he could aim for. The broken stay wire hit him in the mouth then struck the engine fairing and hung there, tangled somehow. Twenty-five feet from the desert floor, Carson over-corrected, starting a swift, irreversible clockwise yaw.

The little plane spun to the right, and simultaneously, rolled to the left. The right wing went through more than 270 degrees in two axes, struck the ground and pole-vaulted Carson and the engine, with the boom and tail assembly, over a pile of rocks and into a clump of prickly pear cactus. The plane landed boom-end first then toppled engine-down into the fat, beaver-tail leaves of the desert version of a fruit bush.

Not out of luck after all, thought Carson, just before he smelled gas.

* * *

Sophie Drake explained her plan to Bill C. Bubb again. "I'll serve my thousand years, Friday through Wednesday, every week for 1143 years. That makes a thousand years of days, none of which are Thursdays. The bet didn't specify when the thousand years began or ended or whether there were any gaps!"

Bill blinked. To his eyes, Sophie had green hair, orange eyes and palmate antlers like some sort of costumed elf. No, elk, not elf, he thought. "But Strangefellows Day only falls on Thursdays, and that only one to three times a year. It's exactly like not serving a thousand years at all."

Sophie nodded. "That's the beauty of it. Losing my bet won't interfere with my fun the least little bit."

The nodding antlers made Bill slightly apprehensive. He'd been gored by a moose once on a visit to the Upper Peninsula and thought that giant cervine ungulates should be confined to the walls above bar mirrors where they belonged, not roaming the wilds of Michigan without benefit of clergy or even a fishing license. "That's cheating," he said.

"Exactly!" agreed Sophie, looking pleased. "My premier especiality, even above tentacular dalliance with intent to engulf. Cheating is what I do best."

The shine off those antlers made Bill wince. "What are you going to do with all the extra Thursdays? The ones that aren't Strange? Fellows. Days?"

"Hadn't thought about it," said the Devil in Drag. She took out an assortment of fruit and began impaling peaches, pears and nectarines on the horny points of her antlers.

Bill decided that it presented him with a dilemma. One the one horn, his mouth was as dry as the Sonoran Desert and a juicy peach would go down very well. On the other antler, moose still gave him the willies. He licked his lips. "We could maybe look for more toads?" he suggested.

continued...