High Risk 5.4

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[Continuing chapter five]

He spent much more time in downtown Los Angeles and Beverley Hills than he did in Hollywood. Downtown, he window-shopped clothes in the hope that the coming week would give him enough free time to actually buy something decent to wear. He wanted a proper hat, too, something snappier than the old cloth cap that was all he had right now. In Beverley Hills he mostly fantasized about the houses—which was, he supposed, a form of window-shopping too. If he could make a go of it this time, as a stunt flyer—or even a contract player for Monarch, if it came to that—maybe one day he'd be able to afford a house of his own. No more rented rooms; no more cold suppers from a tin by the light of a single bare bulb. How would that feel?



Casey tried to remember what it had been like, as a boy before the war. In a detached, abstract way, he could remember his family's house near Toronto: the rust-colored brick, the dark shingles on the roof, the turret at the front and the big porch. How it had felt to live in that house he was no longer so sure of: it was as if the war had burned a part of him and the scar tissue covered those memories.

Of course, the scar tissue also covered the memories of what it had felt like to eat stringy boiled beef and flavorless vegetables, to endure beatings from his father, and a host of other childhood horrors. Most people who dwelt in the past, he eventually decided, were just fooling themselves.

He still wanted a house of his own, though.

Preferably one with orange and palm trees. That was another childhood memory he didn't much miss: the weight of snow and the awful bite of damp cold. Los Angeles was as near to heaven as Casey had ever been, and an afternoon spent bouncing in the Model T from sunlit place to sunlit place, marveling in the scents of citrus and pepper and the fact that there was so much green in mid-October, only confirmed to him that this was where he wanted to be.

On the strength of his joy after what had been his best day in years, Casey took himself out for supper at a diner in Glendale before driving back to the airfield and settling in for another night sleeping under the stars.

Next     Prologue    Chapter One    Chapter Two    Chapter Three    Chapter Four    Chapter Five