Emma walked to the back compartment of the plane and rummaged around in her toolbox. Mikey had more confidence in her preparedness than she did. She doubted she had any fuel line, or anything else she could substitute. She always kept her plane in perfect flying condition, and the fuel line was not something one expected to break.
“What’s the damage to the float?” she asked as she searched for anything resembling a hose.
“It looks like he took an ax to it just below the waterline. Any luck with the hose?”
“No, Mikey. I don’t have one.”
“Are you sure?”
She popped her head out and bent to look under the fuselage so she could frown at him. “The plane had its annual inspection just last month. Why would I need to carry around a bunch of spare parts?”
“Maybe because you have this thing about always being prepared? So what are we going to do?”
Emma looked around at the beaver flowage and the endless forest. “We walk.”
Mikey looked around also. “Right into an ambush?”
The sun chose that very moment to hide behind a cloud, adding its own warning.
“Then we fly out,” she said with more confidence than she was feeling.
“How?”
“We conjure up some Yankee ingenuity and make this lady flyable. Here,” she said, handing him the pieces of hose she had removed from the engine. “Find a way to splice this while I check for other damage.”
Mikey took the hose, they ducked into the back compartment and began to search for something useful. Emma looked at the engine again.
Ten minutes went by before she felt a tug on her shirt. “Here. This is the best I can do,” Mikey told her as he handed up the repaired fuel line.
Emma looked at it, then at her nephew. “Duct tape? What have you got stiffening it so it won’t collapse?”
“I pulled some conduit out of the tail section. It was tight, but I was able to slide the severed ends of the hose over it and tape them together.” He hesitated, giving her an uncertain look. “It should hold long enough to get home. But even if it works, we still can’t fly with that hole in the float,” he added, glancing at the sunken pontoon.
Emma smiled at him, nodding in approval and reassurance. The poor boy had been asked to do something that put both their lives on the line, and he didn’t like it. She worked the repaired hose back into place.
“We’ve restricted the flow somewhat, but if it can get us airborne, then you’ve worked a miracle, Mikey. Now let’s see about floating this plane. Grab that bicycle pump and truck tire tube from in back, would you?”
“But the float has a hole the size of a basketball, Nem. Duct tape won’t hold, and a rubber patch will never be strong enough to withstand the pressure.”
“We’re not going to patch it. We’re going to stick that tube in the float and pump it up,” she told him, smiling as his eyes widened in disbelief.
“What makes you think that will work?”
“Remember Jack Frost? The guy who was here last summer?”
He suddenly laughed. “Do I. He flew floatplanes in the Gulf of Mexico, didn’t he, servicing the oil rigs?”
“Yup. And Jack told me that most of the pilots down there always stick a deflated truck tube in each of their floats. If they get a bad leak or damage one of them, they can pump up the tube to displace enough of the water to take off and land.”
Her nephew looked more skeptical than impressed. “There’s got to be a lot of drag.”
“It’ll work.” Emma jumped down in the water, wincing at the cold. “I got us into this mess, and I’m going to get us out. By air.”
Michael hunkered down on the float above her and unscrewed one of the portals. “If anyone can do it, you can. And I’m sorry.”
She continued stuffing the giant tube through the portal. “For what?”
He took over the chore, not looking at her as he spoke. “For shutting you out this afternoon. For getting carried away by this whole idea of chasing down some drug runners. For being mad at you.” He finally looked up. “For forgetting that you love me, and that you were only worried about my welfare.”
“Heck, I remember what it’s like to be young and full of dreams and curiosity and adventure.”
“But you never got to fulfill any of your dreams, did you? You got me and Kelly to look after, a huge mortgage to pay, and a boatload of sports to babysit.”
She squeezed his leg. “I got something a whole lot better. I got you. As the song says, I thank God for unanswered prayers. I wouldn’t trade my life with you for any of my childish dreams. I love you, and I love the life we’ve had.”
“It’s not over, Nem. It’s just changing. For both of us.”
“That’s right. And if you don’t want to discover what’s under your father’s civilized veneer, we’d better get ourselves out of here and home before he calls.”
He quickly finished stuffing the tube in the float and pulled the stem up through the opening.
They took turns pumping, a long, tedious undertaking since the bicycle pump had to lift most of the weight of the plane. While Mikey pumped, Emma used the duct tape to cover the jagged edges the ax had made in the pontoon. It took nearly half an hour before they were satisfied the float was riding high enough to taxi on.
With a sigh of relief, Emma looked at her watch and then at the sky. “We’ll just make it home before dusk, thank God. I sure as heck don’t want to be landing this crippled bird in the dark. If we flip her, we’ll be fighting blindly.”
Wiping her hands on her jeans, Emma looked at her nephew, who was scanning the woods and looking more worried than a
