slack wind days, and had a witnessed-but-unofficial fourteen-minute
flight.
'Let's watch him. Maybe we'll learn something.'
She laughed.
'You will, for sure. I got style already.'
'You got mouth, is what you got. I'm gonna be pushing three minutes
here.' He waved his stopwatch at her.
'You're pushing a Dumpster full of horse pucky is what you are pushing.
You are probably gonna trip and fall into it.'
He laughed. She was funny.
There were several events at most boomerang competitions--accuracy,
distance, trick and fast catch, doubling, team throws. Like Tyrone,
Nadine's event was MTA-maximum time aloft--and the idea was to put a
lightweight boomerang into the air and keep it there for as long as
possible. There was no problem with judging this one--you put a
stopwatch on them, and the longest time up won. They had dicked around
with the rules for a while, trying different things in different
competitions-you got two throws but one didn't count, or you got three
and you could pick the best--but now it was different.
You got a practice throw once you were in the circle, but after that,
it was one throw, period. You had to catch it when it came back, and
you had to be inside the official circle for the catch, or the throw
didn't count. The record for somebody in Tyrone's age group was just
over three and a half minutes, but unofficially there were guys who had
thrown into freakish wind conditions and kept a bird twirling for a lot
longer. The longest unofficial time by anybody was more than eighteen
minutes, though that kind of time came out of the professional adult
ranks. It was hard to even imagine eighteen minutes aloft.
Tyrone himself had placed third in last year's contest with a time of
2:41, using the Moller Indian Ocean, an L-shaped lightweight made of
paxolin--layers of linen and rosin built up and then cut to shape. The
winner-Nadine, which is how they'd met--had beaten him by seven
seconds, using the same model boomerang as his, so he couldn't blame it
on better equipment. Some kid from Puerto Rico with a Bailey MTA
Classic had slipped in between his time and Nadine's to bump Tyrone out
of second place, but since it had been his first ever competition, he
had been happy to have third.
Not this year. This year, he wanted first. And Nadine was the
defending champion, and he had beaten her--in practice, anyway. Of
course, if he was gonna do that, he'd have to be better, 'cause they
were gonna use the same 'rang. The new Takahashi Silk Leaf he'd bought
had added ten or fifteen seconds to their best times, and the blue
beast was the way to go, no question. And she had beaten him as often
as he had her, so it was not a sure thing. And on any given day, the
wind could be hinky, the thermals might go weird, and you could get a
great throw or a bad one. No way to tell until the moment of truth.
Nadine put her pack down and started rolling her shoulders.
You couldn't throw without warming up and stretching, that was a good
way to injure a joint or tear a muscle.
