Cold Winter Rain (22 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I’d meant what I’d said to Bev Adams.  No other means of harming myself other than one of those guns would ever occur to me.  Aircraft, for example, should not serve as anyone’s instrument of personal destruction.  Disliking my life enough to harbor thoughts of ending it was no reason to destroy a machine as fine as the Albatros.

Flying lore teaches that in addition to preflighting your aircraft, you should preflight yourself.  No doubt every flight instructor in the world would have advised me against flying back to the coast.  But they weren’t me, and they wouldn’t understand.  I needed to spend the night on the
Anna Grace
, not in some hotel.  I had a perfectly fine airplane sitting on the ramp, and that airplane would get me back to Gulf Shores in thirty minutes.  Once the preflight started, the pilot -- I -- would become a technical-minded stranger with my hands.  Detachment.  Compartmentalization.  These brothers would serve as my co-pilots for this flight.

I walked back to First Avenue North, retrieved the car I’d borrowed at the FBO, drove to the airport, preflighted, taxied out and took off.

I was sitting at my desk in the Lost Lagoon Lounge with a tumbler full of ice and Maker’s Mark, my first but probably not my last.  I wasn’t quite ready to head back to the marina and begin this solitary night.

The days were lengthening in lower Alabama.  Reds and purples streaked across the western sky out past the Fort Morgan peninsula and Mobile Bay to the west, the sun a point or two below the horizon but still providing enough light to see out past the sandbar to the open Gulf. 

A late-fishing pelican skimmed the surf, its head swiveling in a desultory search for supper, the coming evening darkening the water underneath the pelican’s wings, the wind blowing the water white and black.  Sandpipers made their usual mad rushes at the foamy edge of the surf.  Over across the jetty on the lighted stage at the Pink Pony Pub, a couple of blonde girl singers in flowing white dresses appeared to be warming up, but the wind snatched away the sound.  I did not think that they would sing to me.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my family:  Janet Hill Gregory, my wife, reader, editor, and supporter; and Sam Gregory, my son, reader, assistant editor, and cover designer.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously-published material:

Everett Eaves, author, AAPG Special Volumes, Volume M 24: North American Oil and Gas Fields, AAPG (1976).  Reprinted by permission of the AAPG, whose permission is required for further use.

About the Author

Steven P. Gregory earned B.A., M.F.A., and J.D. degrees from the University of Alabama.  Gregory has practiced law since 1991, concentrating on complex litigation and alternative dispute resolution.  He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he is working on
Spring Thaw
, the sequel to
Cold Winter Rain
.