Flight (60 page)

When Joe twists to free his shoulders from
the rope harness, he catches a glimmer of silver and red and
instantly knows its Prissi. The fatigue he has been feeling in his
shoulders from pulling the boat begins to lift. If Prissi has run
away from the old woman, then, he must be quick. He calls her name
and tells her to hurry as he unbolts the bicycle wheels from the
boat. The bicycle’s wheels are off and stowed in the boat and Joe
is wrestling Bob Tom’s weight from the stern to the bow when he
looks around for Prissi to get her help. It’s the twisting of his
body that causes the blow to fall on his shoulder rather than its
intended target. Before Prissi can even think what to do next, Joe,
recovering with the speed of a hockey player with a put back shot,
springs up, and knocks the rock from her hand.

“What are you doing? Are you frutz? Help me
get this thing in the water.”

In a response that stuns both Joe and Prissi,
the girl actually does as she is told.

Three minutes pass before the boat is in the
water and Joe and Prissi are in the boat. The boat strains to be
free in the turbulent water. It takes both of Prissi’s hands and
Joe’s right hand to steady the boat. While holding to a cluster of
slippery roots jutting from the bank, Joe uses his left hand to
start the motor. The ancient piece of equipment keeps starting,
whining and stopping. Joe guesses it might have a short. He is
considering what Bob Tom might do when Prissi screams. Joe looks up
to see Fair pounding down the path with his ancient jack knife
opened in his hand. A freeze frame image of a berserk skateboreder
fills Joe’s mind.

“Go! Go!”

When Prissi lets go an instant before Joe,
the bow immediately swings away from the bank. Despite having
swamped on the Hudson from a boat turned sideways to the current,
Joe only hesitates for a split second before he, too, lets go. The
bass boat, caught crosswise in the stream, hurtles away. Joe is
distracted as Fair runs up to the bank and, without any hesitation,
starts crashing through the brush alongside the stream bank after
them. Joe narrows his focus so that the threat of Fair and the
threat of the boat capsizing are left behind. All of his attention
is on getting the motor running. He flicks the starter switch a
half-dozen times, bangs the cowling and then rattles the frame up
and down. Finally, he feels, more than hears over the water’s roar,
the motor engage. Joe throttles down figuring that it is safer to
correct the boat’s course slowly. After a few seconds, the stern of
the boat begins to come round. As the boat responds, Joe increases
the power.

“Duck!” Prissi yells.

Joe doesn’t even look up to see what the
threat is. All of his attention is on bringing the bow of the boat
into alignment with the current. The rock Fair has hurled smashes
into his shoulder in exactly the same place where Prissi has hit
him.

Over the noise of the rampaging water,
Prissi’s incensed screams, and the scrambled noise from the pain in
his shoulder, Joe can hear Fair shouting, “Stay. Stay. You said
stay.”

Within two minutes the figure of Fair running
along the bank is no more than a small pulse of mottled browns.
Once they are free of Fair and the boat is running smoothly with
the current, Joe throttles back to conserve energy and shifts his
attention to interrogating Prissi.

He asks question after question. Prissi only
answers a few, and, of those, many are answered with just a word or
two. Joe learns that Jack was involved in Prissi’s father’s death,
and that the reason Prissi is in danger has to do with some science
done by the old woman a long time ago. When Joe asks how the
centaur’s figure into the story, Prissi only shrugs. It is more
than an hour later and Joe is wondering why Bob Tom had to die when
his attention shifts back to the water to understand what he is
seeing.

Because of the overhanging branches and the
brush-edged banks, the water of the stream is mottled with the
greens and browns of growth and blues, greens and blacks of
growth’s shadows. What he has seen downstream and thought was just
a darker band of shadow resolves itself into a natural dam made
from a couple of fallen trees and a snarl of driftwood. Joe needs
either to turn upstream or beach the boat. The likelihood of
accomplishing the first option, given the speed of the current, the
narrowness of the stream and the limited power of the motor is not
good. Joe reverses speed and runs the motor as fast as it will go.
The bass boat slows, but not by much. Joe scans the bank, picks his
spot and tells Prissi to hold on tight. As the boy runs the boat up
on the steep bank, the bow bucks upward and Bob Tom, wings tightly
cocooned in plastic, takes a final flight. The riverman’s body hits
the bank, rolls down into the water and heads down stream buoyed by
air pockets in the tarp. Within seconds the body smashes into the
dam, wriggles back and forth like a skunk getting under a fence,
and disappears from view.

A stunned Joe just sits in the boat after Bob
Tom’s body disappears. It is Prissi who clambers out first and
starts pushing aside the brush along the bank so that she can get
to the dam. She is already using a long pole to prod for weak spots
in the tangle of branches and broken trees by the time Joe joins
her. Her exertions are causing her to pant and her sentences are
broken as she tries to catch her breath.

“Let’s push…the center. If we can…weaken it
there…the whole thing might…wash away.”

When Joe reaches for Prissi’s pole, she
knocks his hand away and tells him to get his own. The teener digs
around until he finds a stout, fairly straight branch. He crawls
out onto the dam and works the end of the pole into the knot of
branches before pushing down with all of his might. When he manages
to lever up the center of the knot, Prissi uses her pole to push
part of the top layer of the dam outward. After a dozen attempts,
small parts of the dam untangle. Within ten minutes, they have made
a boat-wide breach in the interwoven branches, but the interlocked
fallen trees have not budged.

“Freezing geezers, this isn’t working”

Prissi would have thrown her pole away in
frustration, but she is far too exhausted.

“Let’s just stop, get in the boat and somehow
work it over the trees.”

Joe shakes his head in disagreement, “If we
try that, we’re going to end up in the water. This current is
moving too fast.”

“Yeah, well, if we stay here much longer, my
strange friend is going to show up and something bad is going to
happen.”

Despite his misgivings, Joe follows Prissi as
she works her way off the dam.

“He’s long gone.”

“As a pubescent female, I have a sixth sense
about when a male is going to appear or disappear. I can assure you
that if we’re here much longer, I’m going to have a date to a
woodsy spring fling with someone who probably doesn’t own a tux.
Move.”

Although Prissi’s manner angers him, Joe is
both happy that she seems to have regained some of an attitude with
which he is very familiar as well as happy that he is too tired to
argue. He follows the girl as she scrambles her way back to the
boat. She is about ten meters shy of her goal, fighting her way
through the brush which grows to the edge of the bank, when her
wing gets caught in a patch of bullbrier. Rather than take the time
to work her wing free from the handful of thorns which claim it,
Prissi’s frustration, her fear of Fair, and her anger at not
getting free from Joe boil over. She gives her wing an impetuous
yank which both lets loose a flurry of feathers and sets the thorns
even deeper.

Prissi’s reason vacates her. She screams and
thrashes until Joe pinions her tightly in his arms. His first
thought is to talk to her to try to calm her down, but a wiser part
of him guesses that he himself is a big part of what is setting
Prissi off. The walker shuts his mouth as tightly as his grip. Once
Prissi becomes still, Joe loosens his arms and begins to prize the
thorns from her wing. By the time the wing is free, there are
dozens of feathers, both pinions and remiges, strewn around the
brush. As Joe leads his now docile friend to the boat, he remembers
how he felt as Adrona and Seka led him through the mountain after
he had had his tantrum.

The boy ends up completely wet but he manages
to get Prissi in the stern of the boat before he uses his pole to
push the boat back into the water. He tells her how to start the
motor and where to steer. When they get close to the dam, Joe tells
Prissi to flip the propeller out of the water before he uses his
pole to push the boat over the obstruction. The boat rocks
precariously and water slops over the gunwales, but finally slides
across to the other side. Prissi aims the boat back toward the
bank. As soon as she and Joe switch seats, Joe takes the helm and
pushes the motor to its maximum speed. As the newly minted captain
careers downstream, slopping in and out of the shifting currents,
he keeps his eyes peeled for a blotch of blue. He hasn’t gone far
before a series of bends and switchbacks force him to slow down.
When the stream finally straightens, Joe looks as far downstream as
he can but he sees nothing blue. When the stream joins up with a
much larger body of water, which Joe assumes is the Carman’s River,
the boy is convinced that he has somehow missed his friend. He
slows the boat as he tries to decide whether to turn back. Joe is
chilled by the idea that Bob Tom‘s body might be hung up on a snag
or trapped underwater between a pair of rocks. It is too easy for
him to imagine a blue bundle caught in a similar puzzle of limbs
and logs as what he and Prissi have just gotten past. He can see
how the bundle will become undone and what will happen to the old
man’s remains when the carnivorous animals of the woods find it. If
he doesn’t go back, he understands how the question of “what if”
could bother him long years into his future. Joe begins to swing
the boat upstream when he remembers to ask himself the same
question that has guided him since his friend left.

What would Bob Tom do?

Although the answer is not without shades of
gray, Joe is pretty sure that if it were his body upstream and Bob
Tom in the boat with Prissi that the boat would be traveling
downstream.

Joe completes a circle so that he is heading
back toward the ocean.

Prissi twirls her hand as she asks, “What was
that about?”

“I wanted to go back to find my friend, but
then I decided that he wouldn’t want that.”

“Why not?”

“A live Prissi is more important than a dead
Bob Tom Damall.”

Rather than deal with the implications of
that, Prissi snorts, “Bob Tom Damall? A woodsy kind of guy with a
name like that? Is that for real? He sounds like the long lost
cousin of the woodsman in Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil.”

Joe is silent for a moment before he says, “I
just assumed that was his name. I never thought about it.”

“Did you ever read Tolkien?’

“Of course, everybody has to.”

“And you never made that connection?”

Prissi’s question is asked with so much
disdain that Joe decides to keep his mouth shut.

“Where’d you meet him?”

As Joe tells the story of running away,
staying with the Greenlanders and Blesonus, capsizing on the
Hudson, being rescued by Bob Tom and the days since, Prissi doesn’t
say a single word. It may be the way that Joe tells his tale, in
how he dismisses the danger and disguises his fears, or it may be
that her experience has scarred her, but the longer she listens,
the more it seems to Prissi that, even though Joe’s life has been
in real danger, some part of him also seems to think that the past
days have been a lark, some kind of merit badge quest. She twists
her head around so that she can look at Joe. She is looking for her
NQB, a special friend, someone who has made both her lips and her
brain tingle, but she has a hard time seeing anything other than a
deluded rich boy on a Spring Break safari. Prissi’s hands and feet
begin jiggling and tapping in frustration that getting to where she
has to go is taking so long.

Both adolescents are shocked when a
rubberized launch of camo green sweeps around a curve and comes
hurtling up the river. Joe doesn’t slow his speed, but he does move
the bass boat close to the western bank. His action gives the other
boat plenty of room to pass by, but when the launch’s path veers to
intersect with theirs, Joe guesses that the two orange-feathered
wingers standing up in the speeding craft are coming for Prissi.
Her swearing, so filled with rage and despair that the words
themselves are slurred, confirms Joe’s guess.

“What do we do?”

“Get out of the boat. There’s no way this
will outrun them.”

As a frantic Joe looks for a place to land on
the high banked brush-covered shore, he yells, “Can you fly?”

Prissi’s arms fly up like they have exploded
from a Jack-in-the-Box.

“Probably not. And not against them.
Freeieekin mimi, just land.”

Joe is so slow to make a decision about where
to run the boat up on shore that Prissi gets the same eerie feeling
she had with Jack after her father was killed. With the same kind
of data density that those near death supposedly get, Prissi’s mind
flashes on myriad images of all the people she’s met since the
whole disaster began. Except for Allan Burgey, the only people who
have been helpful and trustworthy have been Africans.

Making the same kind of ululating wail she’d
heard so many times in Africa, Prissi snaps her body back,
dislodges Joe, grabs the handle of the motor, yanks it as hard as
she can, and pushes herself up into a half-crouch. Just as the bow
crashes into the bank and begins to climb its root thick muddy
side, Prissi flaps her wings twice, stretches her arms up and grabs
hold of a thick branch overhanging the water. The pain that brings
to her cracked and broken ribs triggers a jet of slurry from her
stomach.