It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the end of a perfect early autumn day on the west side of Louisville.
Had he still been employed by Harvey Rexroth’s Horse Racing Journal, Red Marchik would have been complaining bitterly about being required to work so late on such a beautiful afternoon, especially with the Kentucky Wildcats football team playing at home. “Love them ’Cats,” was a Marchik family mantra, mostly during basketball seasons when the teams were usually excellent, but in football season, too. Red was a fan who “bled Kentucky blue.”
But now, still out of work and with more time on his hands than he’d ever had to deal with before in his life, Red gave no thought to the state university’s football fortunes as he emerged, blinking, from his basement bunker and started slowly raking the leaves that carpeted his backyard.
The ESZT-3 sports network had just finished its fourth consecutive hour of auto racing, all of which Red had tuned to; the channel was now offering a fifteen minute infomercial on oil-changing. Red was confident he knew all there was to know about oil-changing, so he had turned off the TV.
He then switched on the radio. It was Reverend Roland Ruland’s re-run of his early morning show. “Raisin’ the bar…Raisin’ the bar…” Red heard the Sports Preacher thunder. “We hear that so off-ten these days. Comes from your track and field, the high jump or maybe the pole vault…whatever….We know they’re talkin’ about a higher level.
“You want to talk about really raisin’ the bar? Then, brothers and sisters, let’s talk about RAISIN’-when JEEEEEZUS high-jumped over the top of death, when he pole vaulted way, way, way, way over the top of death, and raised old LAZARUS from the dead. JEEEEEZUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY DID THAT, PRAISE GOD.”
Red knew Wanda would have listened to more, but she was out shopping. So Red had turned off the Sports Preacher and headed for his backyard, where he continued to wrestle with the problem of how to deal with his yet unsatisfied lust for revenge against Harvey Rexroth.
Wanda kept urging Red to “let it go, honey,” but Red just couldn’t bring himself to do so. The Marchiks never took insults lying down, he told Wanda, “never have, never will.” Hearing this for the umpteenth time, Wanda usually interrupted the cleaning of her handgun arsenal to light a joint. Eyes slitted against the smoke, she would regard her husband and try to figure how long it would take him to get to the point in his life where he could turn to other concerns.
In the years Wanda had known and loved him, Red had entertained a number of obsessions-video poker, the self-improvement guru Diplok Shewphat, bait worm farming on a share-cropping basis by mail-but they eventually evaporated. She was sure this one, too, would pass. The question was when.
Red, with two failed revenge attempts against Rexroth behind him, felt stymied, and he didn’t like it. So far, he had succeeded only in killing his former employer’s bulldog Winston. The mystery surrounding that incident (“What Had This Dog Done to Deserve to Die?” was a question posed by Rexroth in an uncommonly personal Letter From the Publisher) had caused a furor, the publicity serving to make Red lie low for weeks, considering options. Now, Rexroth had trumpeted his plan to win the upcoming Heartland Derby with “my rejuvenated horse Lancaster Lad.”
“You’re right about me being out of the assassination business,” Red said one night to Wanda. “That man is not worth a murder charge in case something went wrong.”
His options now, Red thought, pushing the leaves into a pile at the back corner of the yard, were either to somehow put this whole matter behind him, and lose face with Wanda, or come up with a new idea. It was at that moment, just as Wanda pulled up to the carport and began unloading groceries, that the lead squadron of the South Louisville Hot Air Balloon Club hove into view in the sky over the Marchiks’ yard, brilliant in its monthly flight on this clear day. Soon, the first four balloons were joined by several dozen others.
As the richly colored balloons sailed south over the gawking Red, he put down his rake and began waving at the figures gliding past, some of whom waved back. Red thought he’d never seen a more beautiful sight than these vehicles of the air smoothly traveling across the vivid, blue sky.
“Damn, that looks like fun,” Red said to himself. He waved some more, and more pilots and passengers waved back, much to his further delight.
Then a thought came to Red. He bounced it around for a few more minutes as he watched the tail-end of the airborne procession. Why not? he concluded. Then he yelled, “Wanda, come on out here. And bring a bunch of Pabsts along with you.”
What had just occurred to Red was that his friend Oscar Belliard, commandant of the Underground Militia, was an avid balloonist. Often at Militia meetings General Belliard had invited Red and Wanda to “come on out some day and we’ll give you all a ride. You haven’t seen anything till you’ve been up there in the azure blue.”
As the empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans piled up in the nearby garbage can, the possibilities multiplied in the mind of Red Marchik.