The Happy Bottom Riding Club – Excerpt
The morning was bright and clear. Ben took the little plane up to a thousand feet, then banked it sharply to the right, dipping the wing straight down. The horizon disappeared; the earth tilted to meet them. Pancho felt her body being pulled, its weight straining against the seat straps. Ben straightened it out, but before Pancho could get her bearings, he pointed the nose up and looped the plane in a long, slow outside circle, turning the world upside down. They flew belly up for a long moment. When they came out of it, Ben rolled the plane, wing over wing, first to the right, then to the until Pancho didn’t know what was earth and what was sky any more. He climbed again, put the plane into a stall and spun it straight down in a tight spiral. The earth came at them, spinning like a platter. In a few hundred feet, the nose of the plane would bore a hole in the ground. At what looked like the last possible moment, Ben pulled out of it, straightened out and landed on the little airstrip.
When they had taxied to a stop, he yelled up to her, grinning. “Still want to learn how to fly?” He had, in aviation parlance, “wrung her out good.” He expected to see her pale and shaken, queasy, finished with flying. But there she sat, grinning back, her face flushed, her eyes a little wild, riding the last wave of an adrenaline rush so exquisite that it was almost painful to feel it ebb away.