It was hard, sure. But it was a different time. You didn’t cry. Not in front of anyone.

The trip wasn’t so bad. We brought Mom. We went to her sister’s in Indianapolis.

Mom’s sister had ‘done good.’ Back then, it meant she’d married seriously up. Well, as up as anyone got in 1930s Indiana. Her man owned a nice brick house on ten acres of land, just outside the city. He’d made his money… well, no one ever made that exactly clear, but when I asked I always got a different answer. Stock speculation, real-estate, liquor and movies were all various reasons they gave.

We drove through the day, and I guess we surprised her sister that evening. A servant opened the door and showed us in. Aunt Rose had a drink in her hand, and was looking at us kind’ve funny, with eyes that just didn’t quite wanna see right, it seemed. When she recognized Mom she threw her arms wide with the kind of long, almost howling squeal that rich women make when they see someone they haven’t seen for a very, very long time, whether they’re happy to see them or not.

Pop and I stood there, feeling a little awkward, not wanting to touch anything for fear of breaking it and thus owing Aunt Rose and her husband forever.

We heard Mom talking to Aunt Rose in the next room. Hushed whispers and all that. Then when they came out, Aunt Rose was smiling wide at me. A smile with lots of teeth.

“Of course you’re welcome here, dear boy,” she said, “for as long as you need to be here. I warn you, though, I’m rather busy and my husband’s always working and out of the house. But we’ll get along just fine.”

Pop said I’d need to be here maybe six months before things cooled down. On the plus side, Aunt Rose said there was a good school nearby she could get me into for my last semester that’d look much better on a college application. I’d lost the friends I’d made pretty quick back at Fort Orlan High thanks to the Reicharts, so leaving the little Podunk High School didn’t bother me half so much as I guessed it bothered Mom and Pop.

Mom cried a bit as she hugged me and said goodbye. Pop shook my hand. I know to a lot of folks it seems like that’s on the cold side, but my folks grew up during the war- the first one, not the second- and they saw friends go away and never come back, buried in fields without any names thousands of miles away. And the ones who did come back were missing arms, legs, or even faces- eyeballs glaring out from little metal frames that held the rest of their heads together. Besides that, it was the tail-end of the Depression. The Second World War hadn’t kicked the economy into high gear yet, and there were a lot of us who either remembered or knew families who’d had kids die on them from everything from farm accidents to strep to the flu, and then hadda bury them in the ground within a day to cut down on the bugs and the smell. So, dropping your kid off in a rich house for a few months? Pshaw, easy as pie. Tell ya, when I see the wimpy parents who cry ‘cause their kids are goin’ away to summer camp? Fer just two weeks? You gotta be joshin’ me. Really.

Well, things started out alright. But the rich kids at the new school figured out pretty quick I wasn’t one’a them. Like kids everywhere, they got ways to see if you’re in or out. Me? Never been to Europe, didn’t know one end of a tennis racket from the other, or how to hold a golf club to save my life? Yeah, they sized me up pretty damn quick and I was at the bottom of the totem pole again PDQ by the end of the first day.

Still, I didn’t care. You know why? I had to be there just twelve weeks, and I was done. And every weekend, guess what?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe didn’t just have money. They were filthy, filthy rich. I mean, had-a-bored-driver-on-call-every-weekend rich. The kind of driver who loved to have the chance to drive the non-spoiled little nephew from the country into town, and have someone actually talk to him, instead of treating him like a piece of furniture. And . . .

Yep, Jane, you guessed it! When the comic book guys decided to write me up as the arch-enemy of the American Airman, saying I was this rich, bored recluse living in a mansion with a thousand criminal henchmen at my beck and call? Planning my latest scheme from the back of my limo while ‘my’ driver (those putzes even had the limo driver wearing a mask as he drove through the city. Really? Really? Buncha morons, them.) took me into the city? That’s where it came from.

I actually got in good with all the folks in the house- the servants were pretty fun to talk to, all-in-all. I developed a teen-boy crush on one of the maids who was only a year or two older than me, and, well…

Okay, honey. I can see from your face, you don’t wanna hear about that side of things. That didn’t last too long, anyways; it turns out Uncle Joe had staked her out for himself on the rare occasions he was home. But the other folks I met were great, too. There was Michael, the driver I tolja about. There was Frankie, the gardener, swore like a sailor ‘cause that’s what he’d been in doublya-doublya-one before he’d gotten hit by something that gave him a game leg. But best of all for me (next to Anna the maid, of course) was Demetrius Edouárdos Alleous, the mechanic. He always introduced himself with all three names, but once he liked you he let you call him 'Meetri. Aftr his shift ended at 8pm, sometimes I'd find him workin’ on my wings for me. They always needed tightening, restringing, the whole thing. He actually asked me if he could work on them for me, and when I said yes you’da thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He went nuts, checking out the pulleys, the plates, the engine, the works. He tweaked and futzed, and in a week or two he’d made adjustments to the thing that doubled the thrust, the reach, even increased the height I could fly safe without the things shuddering like it was gonna fall apart. He was like a dad helping his boy be the best athlete he could be…or maybe trying to do his kid’s homework for him. Whatever it was, when I first decided to go for a spin in the big city, I knew where to go.

I probably couldn’t find the place today without a map and a seeing eyedog. But thanks to ‘Metri’s quick weekend driving, I managed to get into a nice, huge building that Michael had friends in the security department with. A skyscraper, Jane, a place in Manhattan called The Majestic. Standard building to a New Yorker, but to a kid like me, comin’ from where I did? Might as well have been the Emerald City, Disneyland and El Dorado all rolled into one. It was huge, tall, and I remember standing on the edge of the roof with my arms holding the handles of my wings (another little addition thanks to Meetri- now instead of strapping my wings to my arms like some kid playing he was a birdie, I could make the wings go, let ‘em fly themselves for a sec while I zipped up my fly or whatever else I hadda do, then go back to the handgrip on the wing again. You bet it made life easier, especially if I did go out there with my fly down, which happens more than most of us like to admit, doesn't it?) like I had a hundred times before on hilltops and little two-story housetops. The sun came up that morning, and I felt my feet just stepping over the lip of the edge of the building.

I was just stretching out my arms like something out of the storybooks when a blast of wind suddenly came out of wherever and made me lose my balance. One hand started pinwheeling on its own, trying to get my balance. The other arm did its job, holding onto the wing and trying to get me to fly, muscle memory trying to do its best to keep me from turning into street pizza- owitch!

Well, I got control. Spun myself out a little ways, but I swooped real nice, real fast. I wish it hadn’t been so early on a Sunday morning, but of course, that’s why I’d gone up there then, just in case I made a fool of myself, you know?

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TO BE CONTINUED...