Flight (64 page)

Fair points across the woods and begins
moving down the path. Prissi wants to follow, but she isn’t sure
she trusts the boy. After all, he has no reason to trust her. She
took Olewan’s crystal, lied to him and then ran away. Fair turns
after taking a few steps, sees Prissi standing still, makes a face
which seems more grimace than smile, and beckons her forward,

They walk for hours in the dark. Despite the
medication she has taken, Prissi’s ribs ache. Her legs ache. Her
heart aches. As she walks, the girl manages to ignore the first
two, but not the third.

They change paths at least a dozen times.
Each time they switch from one path to another, Prissi feels more
out of control. To allay her fears, she begins to flex the muscles
in her wings. She tells herself that she can, and, if she must, she
will fly. Moving through the night’s soggy murk, the winger spends
as much time looking above as she does looking ahead. She wants to
be prepared so that if the need arises, she will know which way to
fly. Most of the girl’s scouting is not reassuring. The woods on
both sides seem dense and dark. As nearly as she can tell in the
darkness, if she were to launch, she would crash into a tree in
seconds. So, she plots and plods and is enervated by both. The only
distraction from her thoughts comes when Fair talks. Prissi has a
hard time understanding what he is saying, but she makes herself
pay attention because she thinks it may help her later on. From
Fair’s telling of the day’s events, it seems obvious to Prissi that
life in the Bury is the same in its fundamentals as life beyond it.
Anger, revenge, self-centered desire and love are what wind the
clock.

Prissi’s feet, which have been tromping along
without her mind’s guidance, are the first part of her to notice
when the path changes. Walking is harder because the path is softer
and the path is softer because it is sandier. It is not until she
stumbles and throws her hands forward into Fair’s back that
Prissi’s mind recognizes that they are getting close to the shore.
Once recognition comes, all of Prissi’s senses become alert to the
changes. There is a briny smell to the air. The oaks and maples,
pecans, and river birches have changed over to pines. The brush is
thinner. There is a thump, as steady as a fool’s heartbeat,
pounding in the distance. They are still embowered when Prissi
shouts as she looks down the path to where the woods tight clutch
gives way to open horizon. The sight of featureless spectral gray
works a chemistry in the teener that causes her to cry. She can not
say why. Her tears are profuse, but her feelings, as they have been
throughout the long walk, though intense, remain diffuse.

Two minutes later Prissi and Fair are
standing on the high landward side of a wrack-littered beach.
Driftwood and netting, bubblebottles, seaweed and shells, a shoe,
scraps of badboard, another shoe, a deeply gouged buoy and a
million smooth rocks are strewn in that part of the wind-sculpted
shore which rises higher than the most recent tides. Below the belt
of refuse is a band of smooth wet sand. The pale light from the
sliver of a defeated moon mottles the beach in taupe, black and
gray. The ocean beyond is simpler—just black and grays except far
to the east where someone has drawn a pencil line of molten
pink.

Prissi stares at the horizon and is
mesmerized by all of the open empty space. All that unendingness
makes her realize just how cloistered her last days have been. She
watches the pink line’s inexorable growing. She knows that as the
dawn grows, the possibility that she can carry out her plan
shrinks. She swivels her head so that she can look to the south and
west. She sees nothing, but her years in Africa staring out at the
vastness of Lake Tanganyika have taught her that bodies of water
are slow to give up their secrets. Even though she is impatient,
she forces herself to slowly study the darkness before her. Still,
she sees nothing. She runs down the dune and across the surf swept
sand to the water’s edge.

Prissi’s movements trigger a heightened
wariness in Fair. He follows a step behind her with his hands
poised in front of him like a shortstop with a good bunter at the
plate. Prissi flares her wings to keep them dry as she carefully
walks into the frothy gray surf. The water is so cold her ankles
immediately burn. Despite the pain, she takes her time to carefully
scan the horizon first and, then, the water in between. As she
watches, a veil of fog far to the west shreds and she sees the
faintest glow of lights. Without diverting her eyes, Prissi reaches
behind her with an outstretched hand.

“It’s so beautiful. Let’s walk.”

With canine enthusiasm, Fair takes Prissi’s
proffered hand. She squeezes his callused fingers in affirmation of
her good intentions and begins walking fast along the shore. As
they hurry along the smooth, hard, canted strip of sand, Prissi
works to solve the most important math equation of her life. If
object A traveling at x meters a minute….

Ten minutes later, although the sun itself
still remains hidden, its bloody rays have leaked deeper into the
gauze of the pale gray sky. The air is calm. Prissi is not. She is
sure that all of Fair’s feral senses are keenly aware of her
agitation. Seeing the dark shadow of a massive boulder jutting from
the sand far down the beach, Prissi picks up the pace.

When they get close to the rock, Prissi drops
Fair’s hand and in her most enthusiastic voice says, “Let’s climb
it so we can see the sun come up. C’mon hurry!”

Prissi half flares her wings to keep them
safe from the rock’s rough surface as she looks for a foothold. The
boulder is more than two meters high, but less than that across. As
Prissi begins to climb, a worried Fair circles the rock to find his
own way up. By the time the girl summits and gets back up on her
feet, she is disappointed to find that Fair is already there with a
big smile on his face. She gives him her brightest most disarming
smile and turns to the east as if to welcome the sun. As Fair turns
with her, Prissi shoves his shoulder as hard as she can. Fair
fights for his balance, but loses the battle. As the boy tumbles
from the rock, Prissi flaps her wings. Before her victim can
scramble to his feet, Prissi is five meters in the air. She circles
Fair as she reaches into her kanga for the beat-up mypod she had
bought what seems so long ago in Spicetown. She keys the mypod
before throws it to the ground.

“I’m sorry. Sorry for everything.”

This part of Prissi’s plan depends on two
things she can’t control. The first is that Fair will keep the
pulsing instrument, a memento of her deceit, and that he will start
back to the Bury. She is hoping the thick canopy of the woods will
keep the solar cell from recharging. If her enemies, the other
ones, the shadowy ones who want to kill her, pick up the signal,
she is counting that the mypod will have lost its signal by the
time they arrive. The evidence will be that Prissi came ashore and
walked north into the woods where something happened and she and
her signal were lost.

As Prissi climbs to thirty meters above the
ocean, she pinpoints the lights which are her goal. She knows that
she must not lose sight of those tiny beacons, but as the sun
rises, she also knows that it will be harder and harder to keep her
course. It is this part of her plan that is either mortally stupid
or brilliantly audacious. No one would expect a fifteen-year old
girl to voluntarily give up her mypod with its GPS function to fly
across open water in the dark.

Prissi knows it is audacious. She also knows
that it is stupid. But, it is the only plan she could come up with
that might let her be free. In the same way that Roan Winslow
became free to become Nora Langue. Life from death. A shadow
phoenix rising.

As she beats her wings, Prissi’s thoughts
shift from how painful it is to move her wings—she thinks she can
actually hear the crack in her clavicle scrape back and forth—to
what jubilation it is to be back in the air again. As she has
counted on, the early morning winds are calm. The salt-soaked air
is as joltingly invigorating as a meta-espresso. The sound of those
light breezes sliding over the swells is like a lullaby.

When her fatigue increases and her pains grow
sharper, Prissi tries to ignore that part of her mind which wants
to calculate how far out from shore she can go before she would not
have the energy to return. She pushes back the nattering voice that
wants to relive her exhausted crash. She tries to escape the
finicky monitor who wants to recount the number of times her wing
has popped free of its socket in the days since she has left
Dutton. She shakes her head to distract herself from the moral
auditor who wants to tote up the damage—her father, the drowned
zie, Bob Tom, Hortos, Olewan, Mortos, even Fair—and discuss
payment.

Lull. Lull. Calm lullaby. Come, lullaby.

Since Prissi’s mouth is too busy sucking in
the damp sea air, her mind sings to itself. The song may help to
keep her calm, but it doesn’t hold back the dawn. When the girl
looks over her left shoulder, she sees that an arc of yolk has
risen above the horizon and the pre-dawn’s red lava line is
morphing into a sweep of orange. Prissi is hit with a jolt of pure
panic when she turns back and, for a moment and, then, another,
and, then, two more, she can not find her guiding lights. A deep
relief, like the medicine that surged through her veins at Columbia
Unitarian Hospital, sweeps through her when those guides finally,
but very weakly, reappear from the endless murk.

The winger shifts her heading more to the
west southwest to give herself plenty of leeway. She restarts the
lull, lull, lullaby litany, but suddenly a geyser of youthful
defiance explodes in her. She won’t spend any more energy diverting
fear. Instead, she imagines herself as the lead bird of a flock.
She is out front, leading the others to a good place, a place of
safety, a place of joy. She flies first, but in her flock her
father follows. She turns her head and sees how happy he is to be
with her, traveling along her path. As is Olewan. And….

Something drops from Prissi. Lightened, she
rises in the air. The sense of her new lightness is so strong that
she looks down to see if her kanga is still on her chest. The pak
is there, but, somehow, a huge weight is gone. The winger climbs
higher and higher, and, as she does, she feels ever lighter. She
feels that, like an albatross, she could fly across the ocean to
Africa.

Staring ahead, Prissi sees the ship’s lights
wink out as dawn spreads across the Atlantic, but as those pin
points disappear, the blocky shape they outline begins to emerge
from the gray.

As the foundering teener draws closer, she
can see that the hulk emerging from the mist is a freighter, a
beat-up scabrous freighter. Heaven in a hulk. Prissi is instantly
positive that the ship she is flying toward is the same one whose
crew offered her sanctuary on the Hudson. She knows beyond any
doubt that when she lands that a rail-thin, hard-muscled Liberian
woman will wrap her in her arms.

Now, Prissi is truly amazed. She has found a
point, or a plane, a place between life and death, where will is
all. Beating her wings is effortless. She can fly through the
gloaming skies with no more than thought. Because it is so easy,
and because she is so eager to see her freighter friends, to touch
their smooth black skin, to smell the pungency of harissa on their
breaths and the macassar oil in their hair, to be rocked in the
cradle of their care, Prissi beats her wings faster. But, in a
sharp and amazing display of the interconnectedness of the world
and will, as she flies faster, the boat goes slower.

But that can’t be. She and the boat, she and
the crew, the African crew are meant for one another. She and
Africa.

The freighter wallows, which will prove to be
bad for the boat, but good for Prissi, because the exhilaration she
is feeling is no more substantial than the fanciful bones and
feathers of the Chimera. In actuality, the thrice-wounded teener is
beyond exhaustion. She should have crashed and died minutes before.
It is only an aberrant northeast wind, presaging a spring storm,
lifting her wings and pushing her southwest, and the compromised
speed of the disabled ship, that allow the girl and her goal to
intersect.

A failing, wildly flapping, deliriously
ecstatic Prissi approaches the Liberian freighter on its portside
just behind the bridge. She clears the railings and makes such a
poor landing that she bangs her shoulder and then her head against
the rusty steel of that ancient tower.

A beaten heap of wet wings and worn will
rises and falls as the freighter wallows in the low seas until a
woman, an African woman, an African woman with thin hard-muscled
arms, lifts the unconscious girl and carries her below deck to the
relative safety of the crew’s small quarters.

When Prissi finally regains consciousness,
her ears listen to the drum-laden music pounding from a banged up
speaker, then, her nose smells the mahlebi, bird pepper and nigella
and finally she opens her eyes to see a rainbow of brightly colored
clothes hanging around the small room like Fifth World flags.

Africa. Oh, Africa. She beckoned and Prissi
couldn’t wait. To go to her feverish, loving deadly bosom. Home.
Where millions lived for the most basic of reasons. And millions
died for no reason. Africa. Home. Prissi craved to be back in the
land where she was born and raised, the land where cause and effect
had disconnected dozens of decades before. Africa. Oh, Africa.

As Prissi sings her feverish hymn, the crew
of the J.J. Roberts works to bring life back into a ship that is
supposed to take them back the ten thousand kilometers to their
war-torn home.

When they sailed into New York five days
before to unload a cargo of coffee, no one had any doubts that the
Roberts needed to undergo major repairs. The crew of West Africans
contained a number of good mechanics, machinists, jerry-riggers and
makers-do. The skills to make do were requisite for those sailing
ships under Fifth World flags, but, the Roberts was in need of more
than baling wire and ingenuity. She required money.