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Loch
by Paul Zindel
Loch turned away from the plunging mountainside until he floated hundreds of feet above Lake Alban. He shifted his weight below the aluminum-and-canvas wings, turning the hang glider more sharply, circling. Even as the morning sun rose clear of the high ridges to the east, the lake below remained peat-laden black and grasped by the final, thin fingers of the dawn fog.
Lake Alban was profoundly cold, a sixteen-mile-long, narrow, and unspoiled lake in the rugged and sparsely populated highlands of Vermont. It had once been an arm of massive Lake Champlain to the west, carved to depths of over nine hundred feet by a mighty glacier knife. Lake Alban, like Loch Ness in Scotland, was abundant in salmon, eel, and other bottom feeders, food favorable in the eyes of a few scientists to the breeding of massive aquatic animals. But despite recent emotional TV interviews with eyewitnesses, other, more traditional scientists were only amused by tales of terrifying creatures imagined to live in remote waters.
Loch soared in his winged harness. He loved to lift the tip of the glider high above the horizon, let the glider stall, then free-fall until the wind rushed back under the wings to give him control again. He was fifteen now, a handsome, strong boy with shaggy, light-brown hair and deep-green eyes. He had changed a great deal in the years since Loch Ness, when he was the child who cried that he had seen a great water beast. Of course, his parents had smiled-somewhat nervously-and humored him about seeing the monster. It was the children from the town of Inverness who had giggled most and were the first to call him Loch.
The years had so clouded the memory of what had happened on that moonlit night that Loch himself spoke of it only as a childhood imagining. But there were two other events that made Loch's childhood seem many millions of light-years away. The first was the happy birth of his sister, Zaidee, who was now a handful and more than ready for the fifth grade. The second event was the sad and unthinkable death of his mother from leukemia only a year ago.
"She won't die," his father had assured him and Zaidee over and over again. "The chemotherapy is working, the marrow transplant is taking. No, your mother won't die."
But she did. On a snowy, chilling winter's day they had buried her in the family plot near a strip mine outside Star Lake, New York. Finally, now, they all accepted that she was gone forever.
The sky wind whipped Loch's shirt as he straightened out the flight of the glider high over the eastern tip of the lake. He started to raise the tip of the glider again but leveled out when he heard a plane approaching. The droning sound grew loud, then louder still, until it was earsplitting. Loch banked his glider in time to see the familiar Sea-B Amphibian burst from the towering white cloud above him. The sun exploded off the plane's fat, stainless-steel body and rear-drive propeller, blinding Loch for a moment. When he looked again, he saw his father's boss, Cavenger, at the controls. Cavenger's daughter, Sarah, was next to him, waving at Loch from the plane's outsized custom windows.
Loch had planned it like this, to be in the sky when Sarah arrived. He wanted her to see him soaring high, to show his pal how well he had learned to fly, and he was thrilled to see her smiling at him as the Sea-B circled. He quickly put his glider into a stall, then let it fall longer and faster than he had any right to.
The wind finally caught under Loch's wings again, as Cavenger dropped the Sea-B for an approach to the lake. The Amphibian came in low above the project's encampment, lording its roar over the heads of the hired crews readying the boats for the day's search. Loch knew the raucous maneuver was one more inspired gesture by Anthony Cavenger to remind all who worked for him: I pay you, I control you, I own you.
Gliding toward home base, Loch had judged the wind currents well. He scanned the desolate north shore of the lake, with its single dirt road to the old logging mill. He gave a last glance toward the massive blue basin to the west that was Lake Champlain, then glided down over the forest and smoking chimneys of the few homes that dotted the paved road south of Lake Alban. Several times in the past he had misjudged the morning convection drafts. He had fallen short and had to set his glider down on the little-traveled roadway. Today he knew he could easily make it to the field near his father's trailer. As he cleared the last patch of mist and a knoll of tall pines, he saw his sister waiting by the duck pond, waving him in.
Loch set the glider down and was out of its harness in time to catch Zaidee when she reached him. "You looked like a chicken hawk up there," she said, the strands of her bobbed hair bouncing up to her ears as she jumped. She locked her arms and swung from his neck. "When are you going to teach me to hang glide?" she asked, so wanting to be just like her big brother. "When?"
"How long have you worked for Cavenger?" the young man wanted to know as he helped move boxes of research equipment from the back of the U-Haul truck into Sam Perkins's 1978 Volvo.
"About seven years," Sam answered, just to be polite about it. Small talk with college graduates just starting to claw their way up the corporate ladder had never been his strong point.
(Copyright by Paul Zindel)
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