Born to Fly (9 page)

“Yeah,” Kenji said. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” I said, not really telling the truth. It wasn’t exactly what I’d call a home, but I guess it was probably the only place in town where he and his uncle could stay. I mean, they were Japanese, after all.

“I guess I’ll see ya.” Kenji started to head in.

“Hey. What about the camera?” I said.

“Do you really want to see it?”

“Sure,” I said.

He hesitated. “Okay, come on in.” He led me around to the back door.

We walked down a long hall. A lot of the doors were open. It was dark and it smelled kind of funny, from all the weird food cooking in the different rooms. We went past the bathroom and several rooms, one with a Negro family, several with old people speaking like Mr. Ramponi, and then one with people speaking another language that I couldn’t understand.

When we finally got to the set of rooms where Kenji lived
with his uncle, I was surprised because it was much nicer inside. It wasn’t very big, but there were a lot of fancy decorations and stuff. Kenji set down his jacket over a small photo on the shelf and closed the door.

“I’ll get the camera,” he said, and he went into the bedroom. While he was gone I looked around. I couldn’t resist going to the shelf to uncover the photo. It was of a Japanese man and woman, pretending to smile as they stood in front of a military-style hut in the desert. Next to it was a stack of letters. The envelopes were all cut open and stamped
INSPECTED BY U.S. GOVERNMENT
. The return address included a strange word:
Manzanar
. I put the letters back, covered the picture back up, and wandered around.

In the kitchen I saw a stack of cardboard cylinders next to some colored paper and a jar of black powder, like pepper.

“What are you making, dynamite?” I asked.

Kenji called out from the other room, “My uncle makes fireworks for the Fourth of July.”

On the wall there was a cool movie poster for a sailor picture called
The Long Voyage Home
. Looking closer, I noticed that the poster was actually signed by John Wayne.

“Say, do you know John Wayne?” I asked.

I heard Kenji digging in a box in the other room. “Sort of. I mean, I met him once. He was filming a movie where my dad’s boat was docked.”

“So you’re from California?”

He called out, “Um, yeah. San Pedro—I mean, Hollywood.”

“My mom calls it ‘the place where dreams come true,’” I said.

“For some people, I guess.” He walked in and handed me a shiny new Graflex camera, the kind newspaper reporters used. “Here it is.”

I took a look through the viewfinder. “Wow. I saw one of these in
Life
magazine.”

“You like it?” he said.

“Who wouldn’t?”

“It’s got a high-speed shutter and universal focus, so all your shots come out sharp.” I got the feeling he was showing off a bit. “But even with a flashbulb at night it’s probably still too dark to work,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t think about that.” I glanced at the cardboard tubes on the table and it came to me. “Say, what if you shot off some of your uncle’s fireworks? You know, like a giant flashbulb?”

“Hey. That might actually work.”

I spotted something through the viewfinder, across the room. “Is that your uncle’s phonograph?”

“Nope. It’s mine.”

“No way. Your very own?” I didn’t get it. If his family could afford to give him all this stuff, what was he doing living in this place?

“Sure. What do you want to hear? Some bebop or some boogie-woogie?”

“I don’t know. Anything,” I told him.

He started fanning through a bookshelf of records.

“We hardly ever listen to records anymore since my dad left,” I said. “Mom said our phonograph needs a new needle, but I think it’s because the music makes her too sad.”

Kenji held up an old record. He dusted off the cover and said “Yeah,” like he knew exactly what I meant. The cover had a really goofy drawing of a man and woman riding a bicycle and looking like they were about to kiss. It made me think of those corny old love songs from when my dad and mom were young.

“You worry about your dad?” Kenji asked.

“All the time.” Just thinking about him then made me worried. Gosh, if I didn’t watch it I was gonna start bawling right in front of Kenji. I ducked my head away, just in case.

Kenji squeezed my shoulder softly. Kind of the way Dad would. “Hey,” he said, “if he’s anything like you, he’ll be okay.”

“Thanks.”

Kenji went back to his records, pausing now and then to consider an especially jazzy-looking one. But something still didn’t make sense to me. How would a kid like Kenji get all this stuff? Finally I figured it out.

“This stuff was your parents’, wasn’t it?”

“No.” He stopped fanning through the records. Then, reluctantly: “Yeah.”

It got real quiet all of a sudden. And seeing how me and
quiet don’t exactly get along, I was just about to ask something stupid about his parents when Kenji quickly plucked out a record.

“You ever hear this one?” he asked.

He wound the crank on the phonograph and lowered the needle. A rousing jitterbug number blared out. Kenji started to dance a little, doing a few fancy steps, and I had to admit, he was pretty darn good.

“Want me to show you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’s easy. My mom taught me.”

He grabbed my hand and started slow, stepping back and forth. Dipping down. Left. Right. Left. Right. At first it was strange to be holding hands and I kept stepping on his feet, but after a minute or two I started to get the rhythm of the music. Then Kenji worked up to spinning me and I ducked under his arm. We did it just like grown-ups in the movies! I was surprised at myself. It was kind of easy. We did it again. Boy! I was dancing. I wished my dumb sister Margaret could have seen this.
She
had to take lessons all summer just to learn to square dance. Before long we were twirling like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. And for the first time, I saw Kenji break into a real smile.

“Now for the big finish,” he said.

The music started to build. Kenji got ambitious and tried to pick me up by my waist. But his hand got caught in the bib of my overalls, and instead we slipped and collapsed all over each other like Laurel and Hardy. After a second, we
looked at each other and burst out laughing—just as Uncle Tomo walked in, home from working at the factory.

“Kenji!” he said. Then he hollered something in Japanese.

Kenji hopped to attention and yanked up the record needle. “Nothing, Uncle.”

“Oh, we have company,” Uncle Tomo said, recognizing me. He bowed. “Hello, Miss McGill.”

“Hello.” I clumsily tried to bow back to him the same way he had to me.

Uncle Tomo asked Kenji, “Now you want to be Ginger Roger?”

“It’s Fred Astaire, Uncle. Ginger’s the girl,” Kenji said, embarrassed.

Uncle Tomo winked at me knowingly. “What happened to wishing you were John Wayne?”

“Uncle!”

“All right, all right. Miss McGill, you stay for dinner?”

“Thank you, sir, but I should be getting home,” I told him.

Kenji walked me out into the hall.

“Do you think you could sneak us some of your uncle’s fireworks?” I asked.

He fidgeted. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You know, you’ve never told me what you want if this crazy scheme works and they make us heroes,” I said.

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Haven’t thought about it? How could you think about anything else? I can barely pay attention in school.”

“Who can, with that blabbering Mrs. Simmons teaching?”

We shared a laugh at that one.

“Do you think you’d go back to Hollywood?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t seem so sure.

“What about your uncle? I mean, if you went back to California, who would you live with?”

“I haven’t thought about it, okay?” Kenji dropped his head.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I guess I was talking too much. “So we’ll meet by the south shore, Friday night?”

He nodded.

“And bring the camera,” I reminded him.

I was a little ways down the hall when he called after me. “Say, Bird?”

“Yeah?”

He hesitated, then asked, “What’s your real name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I shrugged. “It’s stupid.”

“Okay. Forget it,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s just … Everybody laughs at it,” I said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Yeah? Well, maybe someday I’ll tell you.”

W
hen I walked into our kitchen, Mom was cutting up turnips and carrots for dinner. I twirled past her, practicing one of the dance steps Kenji had been teaching me. She looked at me and I raced back to wipe my feet. “Sorry,” I said.

“What, sweetheart?” she said.

Sweetheart?
She had never called me that before. Then I spotted a torn-open envelope on the table—and it had a Georgia postmark.

“A letter from Dad?”

Mom nodded, beaming, and I grabbed it.

“Your father’s getting leave in July,” Mom said. And then, out of the blue, she hugged me.

“That’s great,” I told her. I caught my reflection in the refrigerator door handle. My hair was hanging in my eyes. I fussed with it. “Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“Am I pretty?” I asked.

She paused. “Doesn’t your father always say so?”

“Yeah. But that’s just Dad.”

Mom feathered my bangs away from my eyes. She smiled. “Yes. You’re pretty.”

It felt weird, hearing Mom say it. Sort of like if Farley had said something like “Nice catch, Bird.” Satisfied, I snatched a carrot to nibble on.

“By the way, that Lieutenant Peppel called for you,” Mom said.

“Who?”

“The pilot who flour-bombed you. He joked that he needed to talk to you about a ‘secret mission.’”

Then I remembered. He was talking about our deal!

“Bird. What are you up to?”

“Nothing,” I told her.

Mom cocked her head at me and squinted her eyes. Uh-oh. When Mom got that look, she was tougher than Humphrey Bogart. She could practically x-ray through the best fibs you could ever think of.

“I’m just trying to get Margaret a date,” I explained.

She wasn’t buying it. I was sunk.

“Gosh. Can’t I do something nice for my big sister?” I pleaded.

“I’m going to regret this, but you caught me in a good mood. All right.”

“Thanks, Mom. How long until dinner?”

“About an hour—”

But I was already flying out the door.

Inside the airplane hangar, Lieutenant Peppel struggled to walk toward the wing of his P-40. It was like his parachute pack was way too heavy. And it was—because I was inside it. He checked the area and tried to climb onto the wing, bumping my head on the aileron.

“Ow!” I yelped.

“Shhh!”
he scolded me.

Suddenly I heard another voice, that of the gruff old mechanic who worked on the planes there. The mechanic asked, “Taking her up again already, Lieutenant?”

“Uh, yeah. I wanted to flight-test that oil leak.”

The mechanic must have noticed the trouble Lieutenant Peppel was having climbing onto the wing, because he got behind him and gave me a shove.

I yelped again.

“Was that you squawking?” the mechanic asked Lieutenant Peppel.

“Yeah, sorry,” the lieutenant said. “I’ve got a … a weak kidney.”

“That’s ’cause you’re bent over all wrong.” The mechanic
shoved his knee into my butt and I had to clench my teeth to keep from hollering. “Here.” He lifted the chute and rocked Lieutenant Peppel forward onto the wing. “I guess they forgot to teach you how to carry a chute in
college
, huh, flyboy?”

“Yeah, I reckon so,” Lieutenant Peppel grumbled back. Then he whispered to me, “This better be worth it, Peach-pit.”

The mechanic helped shove me down into the cramped cockpit. I was crumpled in a ball now and Lieutenant Peppel was basically sitting on my head.

“Thanks,” the lieutenant said. “I got it from here.”

“Okay,” the mechanic said. He climbed down off the wing and pulled out the wheel chucks. I could hear him mutter as he walked away, “College boys.”

As soon as he was gone, the lieutenant called out, “Okay, now.”

I spilled out of the bottom of his chute pack and squeezed in behind the control stick, just in front of him. He strapped us both in while I stared reverently at the instruments sticking out on the control panel like jewels in a diamond mine. Beautiful.

“You’re sure your sister will go out with me?”

I gave him a thumbs-up. “Affirmative.”

I strapped on my helmet and watched carefully as Lieutenant Peppel checked his instruments.

“Mags on. Flaps set. Throttle set. Engine primed. Ready?”

I pulled down my goggles and squeezed my eyes shut.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve never flown without my dad,” I confessed. I couldn’t believe it, but it had been almost six months since Dad and I had flown on my birthday.

“Don’t you worry none. I’m first in my class.”