When She Flew (5 page)

Pater’s brother hadn’t even graduated from high school when he enlisted. Pater says it’s a crime for the military to be allowed on school grounds, twisting the minds of kids who don’t know what they want yet. He was worried the Marines wouldn’t take him because he was older than his brother and most of the other men enlisting, but they did. By that time, he said, they’d take just about anyone.

Pater’s brother’s name was Robert, but we don’t say it anymore. We visited his grave at Fort Logan when Pater first got back. I couldn’t tell it apart from all the other white markers, rows and rows of them, stretching over the snow-covered hill forever into the blue velvet sky, but Pater looked at his map from the office and walked right up to it. He wiped a crust of hard snow from the front so that we could read: PFC Robert Wiggs, United States Marine, 1986-2004. He was only ten years older than me, and Pater was ten years older than him. I liked that, the orderliness of those numbers, how I fit so neatly in the chain. I only met Robert once, right before they went off to Iraq, but I liked him. He laughed more than Pater, and he called me Lindy-Lou. I called him Robbie.

We came to Oregon for a job Pater got with a big construction company, one where he could drive around in a truck and not hurt his back more, but when we got here and they found out about his disability, they got mad and said no way would they give him a job. I was still very young, but I remember that day. I thought we might be in real trouble. He came back to the motel room and sat on the shiny brown bedspread and stared at the wall for a long time. Outside it was raining, and cars kept zooming by, big loud trucks, like nothing was wrong at all in the world. I’d never seen so much rain in my life, especially in the winter, and the gray made it seem even colder than Colorado.

When I got up my nerve, I asked Pater if I could watch cartoons and he nodded, but I kept the sound down, not really seeing the funny characters that had always made me laugh before. I never really watched cartoons after that because we couldn’t stay at the motel, and then we started camping, and then we built our place. Television became a memory, except for the ones we see inside restaurants when we walk through town, and those TVs are always playing football games and news shows. They don’t show cartoons in those kinds of places, but I don’t think I would like them anymore, anyway.

If we are walking at our normal pace, it takes Pater and me thirty-three minutes to get from our camp to the trail through the wildlife sanctuary property, and then sixteen more minutes behind the fancy houses down to where we pass more fancy houses, and then there are stores and restaurants. We have never eaten in a real restaurant, but once, for my tenth birthday, we walked all the way to the Jack in the Box near the highway. Pater seemed happier than me to eat a hamburger and french fries. We shared a vanilla milk shake, and I got sick afterward. I tried not to think about the money I was barfing into the bushes on our way home. Pater didn’t mention it either, just warmed up some chicken broth on the camp stove for me when we got back.

There is no easy way to get to our campsite. There are no trails to it, not even animal trails. We vary our route each time we go to town, stepping lightly, careful not to pack down dirt or break foliage. Pater walks the periphery every day, making sure we’re undetectable.

We are up a steep embankment. The easiest way to our camp is to walk up along our little creek, which we sometimes do, but then you get wet, especially in the rainy season when the creek is fuller than in summer. It joins with a bigger creek about a quarter mile away. Pater has worked hard to transplant sword and deer ferns and horsetail and sedge and all manner of thick bushy plants where the two creeks meet, then up toward our place. He plants them in such a way that the leaves and fronds hang over the edges of our little creek so that it doesn’t look much like a creek at all. We tend the plants like we tend our vegetable garden, and they thrive and grow and help us, because we take good care of them. The creek provides us with drinking water, which we boil, and cold water for food storage, and a bathing pool that Pater made by digging out a hole and a trench, then using rocks to line it and direct the water into it.

Pater does a lot of thinking. He thinks of everything.

Our little library is on Baneberry Street, so we usually go there on our Wednesday trips to town. Pater makes sure we’re always dressed nice so no one will think we’re homeless. We have a real library card, because we got it as soon as we arrived in Columbia, when we had an address. Nobody cared that it was a motel. Lots of people live in motels. Sometimes people who live in houses don’t know that, but the ladies at the library do. I think the ladies at the library like us because we always return our books in good condition and on time, every week.

When we want to find a book the little library doesn’t have, we take the bus to the central library, down where the big buildings are. The central library is my favorite building. It’s like going to a palace full of books. I feel like a princess or an important person when I walk up the steps toward that huge brick building with its pretty windows and a roof that looks like a steeple, and go inside the tall oak doors, and the man in the uniform smiles and says, “Good afternoon.” I feel even more like royalty when we glide across the shiny stone floor. Everything is so elegant that I want to just stand and look but Pater always says to hurry along. He says when we’re in town we need to act like the other people, who all seem to be rushing to somewhere else, even when they’re already where they’re going.

Everyone but the mean group of homeless people who hang out on the steps of the central library. They’re slow, and smelly, and not nice. They say mean things to Pater, like,
Think you’re better than me? Think you’re hot shit, asshole?
They use foul language, and they scare me. They don’t say anything mean to me anymore, not since Pater got in a fight with one and made his face bleed.

We are not homeless; we have a home. Pater says we’re citizens. Still, I don’t feel like the other people when we are in town, even though they must think they’re citizens, too.

At the central library, sometimes we go to the reference room, where there are books you can’t check out, but you can read when you’re there. That is where I first saw all twenty-two volumes of the
Encyclopedia of Science and Nature
. Every time we go to the reference room, I find where I left off the last time we were there and read as long as I can before Pater finishes on the computer and comes to get me. Right now I am on Volume IX. The last part I read was about igneous rock formations. The Cascade Mountain range is a string of dormant and active volcanoes, so we have a lot of igneous rock where we live: basalt, andesite, tuffs, and breccia. I can now identify them all.

This is why I don’t need to go to a regular school, Pater says. My school is books. My school is the forest. My school is Pater.

When we first came here, all the night sounds—the whis pery, crackly ones, the screeches and scratching noises of the nocturnals—they’d keep me awake all night long. That was before we built the tree house and we slept in an old smelly tent. I would try to sneak onto Pater’s mat, not even into his sleeping bag, just to lie next to him. He’d wake up and make me go back to my own pad, which was much nicer and more comfortable, but it didn’t feel safe, not at first.

Now I feel safer sleeping here than I ever did in a city, in a town, where there are bad people and all the things that make them that way: drugs and liquor and stress and jobs and useless jerk doctors and places where they try to keep certain people locked up. Pater shows me places like that when we walk in for supplies on Monday, or the library on Wednesday, or the park on Friday. The church on Sunday. Sometimes we walk by the redbrick building for sick people, the hospital. Pater doesn’t like hospitals. They steal your dignity, he says, and people just get sicker there. People die there, he says.

Sometimes we walk by the tall, skinny buildings where businesspeople have to go every day to work at desks and make money so they can keep paying for all the stuff they don’t need, the big houses where rooms sit empty for most of the day, or all the time, even. Pater says some people have rooms in their houses with lots of fancy furniture for when company comes over, only company doesn’t come over much, so dust gets all over the furniture and then they pay someone to come clean it all up, just in case someone comes over. He says they had a room like that in his house when he was growing up.

We don’t have any extra rooms now, not by definition of a room in Webster’s, which is “a part of a building enclosed by walls, a floor, and a ceiling.” However, if you use the second definition, “space that can be occupied where something can be done, especially viewed in terms of whether there is enough,” then we do.

I lived in the other kind of rooms, in buildings, in towns, but we all lived in just one room, no matter what that building was: a motel, an apartment, sometimes a small house that might have a separate room for sleeping. There were always lots of others there with Crystal and me, when Pater was in the war. I knew even then, even though I was too young to know it, that the people were doing bad things—the things that make them crazy and dangerous and have to go live in shelters and hospitals, like the ones we walk by. I knew then and I know now, I don’t ever want to be a person like that. That’s the gift of your beginning, Pater says, that right there: knowing that.

5

A
t 16:19, Jess stood on the hot asphalt of the North Station House parking lot. The sun fried the top of her dark head and her feet baked in her boots as she talked with her old partner Ellis Jenkins and their fellow officer Steven Takei. The three made the perfect poster for diversity in the workplace, she thought: one black man, one Asian man, and one half-breed Hispanic woman.

Sweat already pooled in the small of her back beneath the heavy flak vest. They’d changed into their black tactical uniforms, which were somewhat looser and cooler than regulation uniforms, but it was closing in on ninety degrees. She fanned herself with her cap. They were expecting a K9 unit and another patrol officer from the South Station House, and Sergeant Everett had already ordered the search helicopter up. Now he was over by the garage, hands on hips, talking with Darryl, the station’s transportation wrangler.

“What about the ATVs?” Jess asked the others.

“Already tried that right after the call came in,” Jenkins said, sticking a piece of Juicy Fruit into his mouth. “They couldn’t even get close. Too steep. Almost rolled them when they tried to go off-road.” He chuckled and offered Jess and Takei gum from the pack. Takei shook his head once and adjusted the AR-15 in its sling on his shoulder. Jess hadn’t yet gone for certification on the semiautomatic weapon, but she’d be lugging a shotgun, like everyone else, meaning she’d need ice on her neck before bed. She reached for a piece of gum, slipped it from its powdery enclosure, and stuck it into her mouth. The sticky-sweet taste reminded her of a time when she didn’t have to worry about things like icing her neck from carrying a heavy shotgun and the possibility of having to shoot someone.

“Why all the gear?” Jess asked.

Takei grunted—he was just happy to have his AR-15 strapped on—and Jenkins shrugged.

Sergeant Everett strode over in his stiff-gaited way and Jess wondered how he was going to get up an incline an ATV couldn’t. He shouldn’t even be going out—he was the sergeant on duty but he’d reassigned that job immediately. He constantly nursed a bad case of sciatica and was probably over sixty, but he was stubborn. Stubborn like her dad had been. Maybe that would be enough to help him keep up with the younger officers.

She knew why he picked Officer Takei. He was the best shooter they had. Jenkins was fit and levelheaded. She was female, and while not exactly fit, Jess knew she was a far better choice than Madison. Everett knew it, too, but he’d been pissed off that she was late.

“Takei wants to know why all the gear, Sarge.” Jess knew she shouldn’t tease her fellow officer, but she couldn’t help it. He was so easy.

“I didn’t say that, sir. She did.” Takei kept his eyes forward, standing at attention.

Everett ignored them. “I’ll brief you when everyone’s here.”

They waited in uncomfortable silence until the squad car from South pulled up at the curb a few minutes later. The passenger door opened and Everett muttered, “Shit.”

Jess felt the same. She’d worked at South years before with Officer David Greiner, and he was a pain in the ass, a short guy with a complex. It was rumored that he’d leaked information to the press on a rash of internal investigation cases, resulting in more than a few firings. Jess guessed he made up for his lack of height by thinking he was some kind of secret vigilante, not that she or anyone could prove it. Sure, he was certified to use an AR-15, which she guessed was the reason he’d been included on the search team, but Jess couldn’t think of anyone she’d less like to see attached to an automatic weapon.