The Cannibal Queen Read Free Page A

we know that these farming communities on the prairie are dying as the families leave one by one for better jobs and better schools in the big cities, even though we know life here is as hard as it is anyplace else, or even a little harder.
    The houses have porches and people sitting on them visiting with their neighbors on this gorgeous early-summer evening. When was the last time a developer in California or Colorado built a house with a porch on it?
    So we walk along, this fourteen-year-old boy and I, looking at the houses and talking of what these people do to earn a living. David is curious about what kids his age do in a town this size “for fun” on a Saturday night.
    I tell him they get in the family car or pickup and drag Main Street, like they did in Longmont, Colorado, in the summer of 1977 when I was on the police force there. And as they still do in every town in Colorado, including Denver. The kids drive up and down the street all evening, seeing who is in the other cars, occasionally stopping in a parking lot and sitting on the hood as the parade goes by. And they throw beer and pop cans. The whole scene infuriates the merchants, who still complain to the police as vigorously now as they did in 1977, and 1967, and 1957. Why the merchants get no wiser I don’t know.
    In the park a wheat farmer who barbecues commercially is cleaning up. He is finished cooking—all the meat is in large pots ready for serving. As he cleans his grill—a large boilerlike contraption that he tows behind a pickup—he tells a story about a woman in a bikini (from out of town, probably wicked Denver) who attended the fly-in two years ago. Right before his very eyes there on the sidewalk in the heart of St. Francis she skinned out of the bikini she had worn all day and quickly donned shorts and tank top. “That recharged my batteries,” he tells his listeners as he stones the grill clean of grease.
    At last we line up to heap disposable plates full of barbecued beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and home-style green beans. It is a feast. The evening sun is still above the horizon when the master of ceremonies thanks everyone for coming to the ninth fly-in and promises a bigger whing-ding for the tenth fly-in next year.
    Then we are entertained by a barbershop quartet from Sterling, Colorado, a town on the high plains very similar to this one. The baritone is the Stearman owner who organized the first St. Francis fly-in, so he gets a round of applause. And when the singing is over we applaud the couple who got engaged today when a Stearman flew by towing a banner with the proposal LUELLEN MARRY ME JOHN . After we applaud the couple who were married at last year’s fly-in, David and I walk the perfect streets back to our motel.
    It has been a great day. We are on our way. The whole country is out there, the Cannibal Queen is ready and willing.
    I am still glowing when David attacks me in the motel for our usual evening roughhouse. It’s a congenital defect; he has to be tickled before he can sleep. I conk before he does. Later I wake up and find he has turned out the lights and is in bed asleep.
    It’s going to be a good summer.

2
    W E LIFT OFF THE GRASS RUNWAY AT S T. F RANCIS ON SUNDAY morning with more roar and vigor than I thought the Lycoming R-680 engine capable of. I glance at the gauges. Glory hallelujah, the manifold pressure reads 26 inches. Aha, St. Francis is 3,000 feet above sea level, and I have been flying out of Boulder, Colorado, which is at 5,300 feet. So this is what happens when you get a little closer to sea level.
    A 70-mile-per-hour climb speed works out to about 12 degrees nose up. We soar skyward. Yee-haaa!
    After we level out I turn the stick over to David. He ignores the rudders, as he has done on flights in the past when he tried this piloting gig. I keep him generally headed in the right direction, southeast toward Colby.
    We are on our way again, probably the first Stearman to leave the fly-in. We had