Her rescue from the mountaintops of western Montana only enhanced Beatrix’s eagerness and appetite for Armed Forces Day which she had decided to celebrate a few days early. It was just easier that way. The members of the Air National Guard refueling squadron she had chosen to join her at the fete were otherwise tied up for the real event. So Thursday was a good choice all the way around.
In Wallace, Page had thanked Dryan and Cosmo for saving them from starvation in the mountains and this was the sort of talk that could really whet Beatrix’s appetite. Was it genetic or conditional? Nature or nurture? It wouldn’t be like her to ponder such questions. She was just really damn hungry for something with more than a subtle hint of the wild. Sushi would be perfect, so she quickly shifted the venue from the Longhorn Barbecue to the Shogun restaurant in east Spokane, where the City’s best sushi bar hid somewhere in the dark beyond the wall waterfall.
As the young men in their flight suits (she’d requested this) filed in, she was already sampling from the smoke eel roll and the rainbow roll, with its luminous flying fish roe glistening in the dark like jewelry.
“Oh dear God it’s so good to be a survivor!,” she exclaimed.
It was the rather typical Beatrix commotional. The hibachi chefs easily agreed to drunken shouts to duel, and raw flames burst so frantically that some of the airmen got a little nervous. Just to show that the Blue Angels had nothing on them, the chefs flipped portions of grilled steak and egg back and forth between the two tables, catching the descending chunks on spatulas the way Ken Griffey, Jr., catches lazy fly balls in the outfield.
“Bonzai!” everybody shouted.
Roger the boom operator mistook a blossom-shaped pile of wasabe for mint sherbet and loaded it on a spoon. His co-pilot could have filled him in. But what would be the fun in that?
“Fire in the hole!” the co-pilot shouted as the wasabe disappeared into Roger’s mouth. Serious injury was extinguished by streams of Sapporo beer, which Beatrix herself orchestrated with impressive fire suppression skill.
Roger to boom operator would live to tell the story.
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