Flight (53 page)

Joe sits without insight until he decides to
stop thinking like Joe and start thinking like Bob Tom. As soon as
he shifts his focal point, he can envision the old man using his
fly rod to test whether the fence itself presents a problem.
Moments later, Joe has removed his belt, made a noose to secure a
wrench from the bike’s repair kit and is swinging it toward the
fence.

Satisfied that the fence isn’t electrified,
Joe tries to work his fingers into the fence’s fine mesh, but with
no success. The boy backtracks to the woods where he scours around
until he finds a dead sapling. He works the small tree loose from
the earth’s hold, balances it across the bike’s handlebars and
rides back to the barrier. Joe uses his belt to strap the bicycle
to one end of the tree. He wedges that end into the ground before
leaning the other end against the top of the fence. After testing
his improvised ladder, Joe begins to shinny his way up the sapling.
When he gets to the top, he straddles the fence before he pulls the
tree free from the ground and begins hauling. When the bottom of
the bike’s wheels clear the top of the fence, Joe carefully
reverses his position and that of the sapling so that the bike now
is suspended over the ground between the fence and the laser field.
Joe’s butt, the same butt that has held Prissi’s attention during a
class period, is beginning to ache from the pressure of the wire
fence poking into it. When Joe hurries to lower the bike, he loses
his grip on the sapling. The STA crashes to the ground with the
sapling cudgeling it a split second later.

Joe’s bitter swearing continues even as he
flips around, dangles his feet and drops to the ground. Either the
STA is an exceedingly well-made bike or there is power in Joe’s
words because, when the teener inspects it, the bike is unharmed.
Joe swings his leg over the frame and ignores the cracking sounds
as his tires crush bird bones. He rides south looking for some
weakness in the laser curtain.

Reparation

Even though her eyes are closed and the room
is quiet, Prissi knows she isn’t alone. She imagines opening her
lids to find Jiffy Apithy smiling down on her, but in her heart,
she knows that’s not who she will see. The thought of Jiffy reminds
the girl of her feverish time underground and the nightmarish
feeling of having the zie’s bite cleaned and stitched. Now, for a
second time, that same dark presence is hovering near. Prissi
slightly flexes her muscles, starting with the arch of her feet and
working her way up her legs to her torso. Each time she changes her
focus, the type of pain and intensity change, but nothing is
without its hurt. When the teener tries to move her wings, she
realizes that they are immobilized. She tries to lift a shoulder,
but that, too, seems to be pinned down. An image of a butterfly, in
a glass-faced case, wings spread, thorax riding on a silver pin
wells over Prissi and causes her to mewl. She thrashes harder to
move her wings and when she cannot, that sense of being pinioned
elides into the desperation of her last seconds in the air before
the crash. Her mewls turn to screams, which continue even after
cool skin, as soft and smooth as chamois, brushes across her
forehead and a raspy whisper tells her a dozen times, and then a
dozen more, that she is safe.

Prissi knows that even if the whisper tells a
truth and she is safe, that she is not sound. The thought slams her
like a sledgehammer when it comes to her that she only thinks her
wings are bound when, in fact, they are paralyzed.

Sitting across the room, two burning eyes
looking out from a frazzle of white hair and a frumple of gray
cloth, Olewan has watched her daughter come back to earth. Olewan
has been expecting the girl to return—but not so much as a traveler
certain to arrive on the landing strip at a specific time, but more
as a 18th century trans-Atlantic voyager who has a modest chance of
arriving within a certain span of weeks. The girl is tenacious.
Olewan has spent hours looking at her daughter’s face and she is
sure the girl is not only tenacious, but also bright, competitive,
cynical, teachable and impatient, very impatient. As Olewan sits
through the hours and lets her body rock in rhythm with the
increasingly steadier rise and fall of the girl’s chest, she thinks
of how that litany of words had been used to praise and contemn her
so many years before.

As the old woman thinks of who and what she
had been three-quarters of a century before and of the links
between that long ago girl and the girl on the narrow hospital bed
across the room, parts of her begin to fissure. In between the
cracks, like a precious mold worming its way through cheese, grow
feelings long suppressed. Loss. And love. And loss. And love. Like
the double click of a metronome, love and loss kept a beat in
Olewan’s head, a beat so insistent that the beat of her own heart
increases and over the hours becomes ever less steady even as the
girl’s grows more so.

Pride and anger have been Olewan’s
sustenance, her daily gruel for so long that the possibility of a
menu change has been beyond consideration for decades. Until now,
when, with the suddenness of the cherry blossoms’ arrival, loss and
love appear and with them the possibility of driving pride and
anger aside.

The girl across the room, of her but not from
her, of her but not hers, is destroying what had been inviolate for
a half-century. From the sharp shards and bitter ashes of Elena
Howe’s life is arising a phoenix-like desire to love. To love so
truly, to love with such abandon and determination that love’s
ever-present companion, loss—the loss of that love or the one
loved—would make death seem a welcome dream. With twisted fingers
twitching and withered arms forming a formidable X across a part of
her that she now finds frightening, Olewan sits still while her
insides fracture like tempered glass.

Holding a crippled hand to her heart, as if
that frail claw could contain what is exploding within, Olewan
shuffles across the room. She bends over the girl, bends deeper
until pain jolts up and down her spine, bends even further so that
the tendons at the back of her knees pulse with a white burn, bends
more, touches the girl’s wrist with the dry point of her finger tip
and, then, touches her lips, lips that resemble earthworms trapped
on hot concrete, to the lips of the girl.

Olewan has only backed off three steps before
her kiss breaks the spell and the girl’s eyes flutter, her own lips
quiver, and she begins to thrash and scream.

Love’s black magic at work.

Standing stock still, as if afraid of drawing
closer, Olewan hushes the girl. She spins lariats of comforting
words in the hope that words can heal, but her efforts have no
effect. It isn’t until a long minute of watching the girl’s
thrashing and listening to her tortured wails that Olewan realizes
that her palliative words have been thought and not spoken. Olewan
sucks air into her lungs and forces her feet to shuffle forward
until she stands over the screaming girl. She rubs the scorched
brow with the back of a walnut-sized knuckle and speaks her
crackly, grinding words of comfort. The louder the girl screams and
the more violently she fights to be free of her bonds, the surer
the old woman grows in the knowledge that she is having her best
day in more than a half-century.

Resisting a Rest

The building where Bob Tom is imprisoned is a
long, narrow, high-ceilinged concrete block structure with four
massive overhead doors. He guesses that it might have started its
life as a maintenance garage for a highway department. Bob Tom is
tethered to his stall by a length of chain which circles his neck
and passes under his wings before being padlocked to a stanchion.
The shock of what, or who, his captors are is beginning to wear
off, even as the shock of being captured keeps growing. Although
there is enough slack in his tether to sit or lie down, the winger
mostly stands so that his wings aren’t harmed.

So far, he has counted six different
centaurs. The one who first emerged from the thick foliage
alongside the river after lassoing the old man seems to be the
leader. He and Bob Tom have had several conversations; however
despite hearing strings of sounds that seem like they could be
English, Bob Tom has understood very little of what the centaur has
said. When he asked if the centaurs had seen a girl with wings,
they had become so agitated that he assumed that they had and,
somehow, that is important to them. When he tried to describe Joe
to find out about his friend, the response is much more
subdued.

Most of Bob Tom’s attention has been taken up
with keeping panic at bay. He has been free for so long. Free to
fly. Free to fish. Free to do neither. Free to sleep in his cabin
or under a tree. Free to start the day with the idea of hunting,
change his mind to gathering hickory nuts and change it again to
riding the thermals high above Mt. Marcy. Now, he has the freedom
to stand or lie down, to walk two meters to the left side of the
stall or two meters to the right. Panic sits in the corner of the
stall like a rabid badger, all feral teeth and claws, prepared to
launch itself at any second. To keep that savagery at bay, the old
man has sung everything from the first six stanzas of Yankee Doodle
Dandy to eight of the Green Party’s Hymns and Herms of Life. He
repeats the sixty-three states of the union and the fifty-six
capitals he can remember. He makes himself frantic with the
capitals he cannot remember—like Alberta, Manitoba and North
Dakota—but figures that frantic is better than panic. He takes
hundreds of pieces of dried grass from his stall and begins to
weave a mat. He looks at the moles and scars on his hands and tries
to see shapes as if they were constellations in the sky. He
smoothes the hairs on his arms, takes a thousand even-sized
breathes while ignoring the fire-eyed watcher in the corner. Night
is the worst because there is an eternity between the dark of the
stall and the darkness of sleep. To sleep he must relax, but if he
relaxes, the badger will sense it and spring.

The second night of his capture, the old man
is half-sitting on a mound of straw he has shoved into a corner of
the stall. His wings are spread. His head is resting against the
concrete wall. His eyes are closed. He can see Blesonus combing out
her shiny black hair while sitting on a boulder by the Bureas
River. Her fingers are strong. The back of her neck where the hair
has been pushed aside is very white. He starts to step from the
shadow of the woods where he has been watching when she reaches
down, picks up a shoreline rock that is as big as a baked potato,
and holds it in the air above her head. Bob Tom waits for her to
throw it into the rippling water. Suddenly, there is a scream, an
earth shattering scream and his daughter smashes the rock into her
face. Bob Tom bolts from the woods, bolts from his dream, tears at
his tether and smashes his wings against the walls of his prison.
He cannot see the badger, but he can feel the wounds the animal
makes as it slashes at his legs with its claws and teeth. He
smashes back to free his legs from the attack.

When the spectral attack finally stops, Bob
Tom’s spirit and two bones in his right foot are broken.

Maternal Instincts

A surprised Prissi reached out with both
hands to take the soup from the boy.

Each of the teenerz nodded, but neither
spoke.

For Prissi, everything still hurt. Even
lifting the mug to her lips involved more damaged parts than she
could imagine. Prissi sipped and looked into the small coal black
eyes and smiled at the boy whose hair reminded her of an osprey’s
nest. The boy did something back with his face. Prissi guessed that
it might be a smile, too. Prissi paused between sips to say, “This
is good. Thank you.” After several seconds, the boy said something
back. It took some effort on Prissi’s part to understand that the
boy also has said, “Thank you.”

“Where am I?’

“Bury.”

To be sure that she had understood, Prissi
repeated, “Bury?”

The boy nodded and Prissi muttered to her
soup, “That’s reassuring.”

Twenty minutes later Prissi was unsure
whether to blame the fluids dripping into her, the language barrier
between herself and the boy, or just to accept what she thinks she
has been told. A woman who doesn’t talk. Horses that do. A woman
who is a mother, but doesn’t mother. A boy who barely can say his
name, but wants to know hers. A place called a bury, but with no
prefix like Simsbury or Shrewsbury.

To give herself time to make some sense of
what she had heard, Prissi yawned and yawned, then, closed her eyes
and evened out her breath until the boy shuffled off.

Prissi was adrift in Africa when moist rough
fingers caressing her wrist woke her. As soon as the girl opened
her eyes, the boy said, “Your friend is here.”

A startled Prissi blurted, “My friend?
Jiffy?”

“Bob.”

“Bob? Who’s Bob?”

“Old Bob. Bird Bob.”

“I don’t know a bird Bob.”

“Bird Bob your friend. You can have him.
Mortos said. Olewan fix Mortos. You get Bird Bob.”

Prissi drifted back to an afternoon at the
family’s camp in the highlands of eastern Burundi. The winds were
blowing so hard the trees were talking. She had a fever. Not
malaria. Something else. Her mother cooled her wrists with alcohol.
That slightly nauseating smell, the jabber of the trees, the heat
burning her cheeks like a sunbeam she couldn’t escape, her mother’s
worried sighs sounding like an oscillating fan all floated through
her mind, which tried, and failed, to make sense of those disparate
threads. Her brain had panicked when it could not bring order to
what was going on around and within her. She had felt like the
world was fracturing. Her mother sighing like trees. The trees
talking like the village elders. Cold wrists. Hot face. Nothing
making sense. Not then…and, not now.