Like a Fox on the Run

he buzzed those assholes, broke their dishes and cracked their sheetrock, it was a futile, juvenile endeavor. It wasn’t going to bring his uncle back. It wasn’t going to change the fact the two siblings never reconciled. In fact, it wasn’t going to change a goddamned thing in this dismal world. The wealthy and powerful still lived in their mansions on the hill while the rest of the world, in the valley below, made do with pollution, unemployment, crime and government subsidies.
He caught himself. Look at you! Gettin' your blood up like some redneck Don Quixote fightin’ windmills! He couldn’t help but let out a cynical chuckle as he chastised himself mentally. Relax, goob! You’re here for a vacation, remember? Nobody waitin’ to whip your ass ... at least nobody you know of … You ain’t carryin’ anything illegal … this time. Ain’t no sense in gettin’ all worked up! Get those engines back out of the red, spacer!
And so, he reluctantly behaved himself and allowed Jenny Lou to maintain her flawless trajectory. They passed non-eventfully over the fancy ultra-modern mansions with manicured, green lawns punctured by sparkling, blue pools so big you could sink a Charger in them. Even though he did no damage today, the resentments of old still bubbled on the surface, in spite of his best efforts; a pot that was going to simmer every time it passed over that historic mesa.
Before he even realized what he was doing, he was giving the mountain the finger.
Jenny now skirted the southern end of the city and followed the Tennessee River west toward the spaceport and his mood improved quite remarkably. Good Ol’ Jenny! He felt pride well up in him. As dependable as an old porch hound, she really was one hell of a ship. Built locally with Southern pride, right here in the Rocket City, she’d seen him through a lot … good and bad. She’d hauled his sorry carcass over millions of miles of deep space and probably would carry him many millions more.
Jenny had been a major upgrade from the original Charger he’d been issued when he’d graduated from the Pilot’s Guild Trainee program and had gone to work for NASA. Where his dear old Kentucky Belle had just two Star*Burst engines originally, later on he added aftermarket Javelin 3 add-on boosters for deep space duty, the Supers had four of the huge new Super Nova XTR units. They were far, far faster and much more fuel efficient. Jenny carried far more payload and were much more user-friendly. She had all the latest bells and whistles. Built to the specs of the Integrated Freight System, the entire cargo hold was missing. In its stead, interchangeable modular pods could be attached or detached from the ship in minutes, allowing for a Super Charger to have an incoming shipment offloaded and an outbound cargo ready to blast off in less than thirty minutes.
Tiger hated to admit it, but more than anything else, the Jenny Lou was just so much more comfortable. He still felt guilty, but the moment he sank into the overstuffed pilot’s seat, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Not to mention the sleeper pod actually had a real mattress, not just a foam-filled pad. And the galley had a coffee maker and infrared stove, making the luxury of a hot meal wonderfully feasible.
Still, as good a ship as she was, she was in serious need of some major down time. She was way overdue for dry dock time and an overhaul.
“You know, luv,” she had told him, as they were leaving the belt. “You’re really going to have to spend some points on me soon.” She then commenced to naming off a very lengthy list of things that needed fixing or attending to.
He’d promised her he would speak with Dee about it when they landed. The thought of having to stay rockside for a couple of weeks while they did the tune-up still made him queasy, but might as well bite the bullet and get it over with.
He shook the unpleasant thoughts from his brain and turned his attention to the panoramic view out his window. It was early afternoon and a beautiful spring day was on display in the former great State of Alabama, and it didn’t take long for him to put the bitterness of childhood resentments behind him. Below him, wild cherry, dogwoods, and Bradford pears bloomed, vibrant dots of color against the still-brown winter landscape. The South didn’t have springs anymore. Their pink and white petals merely heralded the end of winter and the brief respite before the sweltering humidity and scorching temperatures of full-on summer arrived.
Moreover, those little pink blossoms were the color of hope, a sign that man hadn’t done Mother Nature in yet. After hundreds of years of ass-raping, she was still hanging in there.
You sound like Ol’ Mud! He smiled at the thought of it.
“I don’t need any sandal-wearing hippie from California showing me a bunch of charts and graphs to know we’re killing the land,” he used to grumble to Tiger. “I gotta pair of eyes! I may not have book learning, but I got common sense.”
How could you argue with him, when you had alligators now swimming the Tennessee River as far north as Chattanooga. Burmese pythons now infested the Okefenokee and Louisiana bayous. Fruit orchards, just south of Birmingham, that once grew peaches were now growing bumper crops of oranges. It didn’t take a genius to figure out something had changed. Maybe it wasn’t what everybody thought it was, but it was damned sure something. Who really knew for sure? Ok, so maybe it wasn’t global warming. Maybe it was just what all the corporate scientists were paid to say it was. Maybe it was just the earth going through a million-year cycle. But the big difference between now and a million years, or however long