Weather to Fly. Christopher LeGras

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Weather to Fly - Christopher LeGras

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      This is a Genuine Vireo Book

      A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books

      453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

      Los Angeles, CA 90013

      rarebirdbooks.com

      Copyright © 2015 by Christopher LeGras

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

      A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

      453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

      Set in Minion

      For the purposes of clarity, the editor and the author have taken style liberties to depict dialog in italics, and planes and flight numbers when they are mentioned in dialog.

      ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-35-0

      Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

      Names: LeGras, Christopher, author.

      Title: Weather to fly : a novel in stories / by Christopher LeGras.

      Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Vireo Book | Los Angeles [California] ; New York [New York] : Rare Bird Books, 2016.

      Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-18-3.

      Subjects: Airplanes—Fiction. | Flight—Fiction. | Family—Fiction. | Short stories, American. | Adventure—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Tall tales.

      Classification: LCC PS3612.E353 W43 2016 | DCC 813.6—dc23.

      To W. Dean LeGras (1937-2006)

      7,872 hours

      Never trust the teller; trust the tale.

      —D. H. Lawrence

      One thing you don’t do, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

      —Chuck Yeager

      Itinerary

       Pre-Flight

       The Ballad of Kandy Kim, Part 1

       Riding the ’Cane

       Sea-Tac

       A Jumbo Jet’s Soul

       Clouds of Men

       The Orange (with a Kandy Kim fly-by)

       Emergency Landing

       The Ballad of Kandy Kim, Part 2

       Dora’s Adventure

       Water Bombers

       Betty Pilgrim

       The Devil at the Runway’s End

       Canvas and Cables

       The Ballad of Kandy Kim, Part 3

       Acknowledgments

      Pre-Flight

      This little volume contains some flying stories. Some of them are true and others are made up. The rest, which is to say most of them, fall somewhere in between. The majority are about airplanes and pilots, but a couple are about birds, and there’s one that’s mostly about an airport terminal but is also a love story. They’re all adventure tales in their own way.

      We should mention there are also a couple three in which flying is a metaphor for something else and airplanes only appear in the periphery. These stories are a little different and you’ll recognize them by what the great American philosopher Mack called hooptedoodle. They have a little more décor than the others and like old Mack said, they try to sing a song or two, maybe paint a pretty picture. That’s just the storyteller opening it up a bit, like a pilot who throws a few barrel rolls and loop-the-loops into a flight. As any aerobat will tell you, even when she’s carrying paying customers experiencing the thrill of an open cockpit and inverted flight for the first time, those loop-the-loops and barrel rolls are still mostly hers. We’ll readily admit it can be downright selfish on the part of the pilot or the writer, which is maybe why not every passenger likes to loop-the-loop and not every reader likes hooptedoodle. And so out of deference to differences in taste those stories make themselves known pretty quickly so that the reader can take them or leave them as she pleases.

      Not that we’re suggesting the regular stories are straight-and-level the whole way. There’s one about an Air Force fighter jock who acquires a mysterious wingman, another is about a broken heart, and there are a couple about a World War II warbird that may or may not have a soul and a conscience. There are honest-to-goodness war stories, ghost stories, tall tales, and stories that pilots will swear are true even though they aren’t in any history books or old news accounts. The true stories have been stretched and embellished by retelling so that they might sound more fabulous than the made-up ones, but don’t let that fool you. A man or woman who lives a story only lives a fraction of it, especially if the experience involves subjects like love, life, death, or an emergency landing. That kind of story happens so fast that after it’s all over and the man or woman sits down in the tavern years later and tells it he or she usually discovers there’s not much to tell at all. Even worse, the part there is to tell is so scrambled it lands on its audience with a thud and hardly merits a glass of beer on the house.

      Of course there are exceptions, but in our experience this is a dependable generalization. It’s only in the retelling and the re-retelling and so forth that the details emerge like the constellations in a twilight sky and the story gains its fullest expression. Pilots nurture stories like children: each teller contributes

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