Flight (10 page)

His uncle, Adaman, had been the one who first
suggested that there might be a way to put off fledging until
later. Jack’s dad had insinuated to Joe that the labs at Cygnetics
were close to solving the half-century old problem of delayed
fledging. Even though Joe distrusted his uncle, he had listened.
The idea had gotten into his head that he could play hockey for
another dozen years, represent Noramica in the Olympics, play
professionally, and, then, get his wings. Despite ogling every site
he could think of to find support for what his uncle had told him,
Joe didn’t find much beyond weak hints and wishful thinking.
However, he reassured himself that any knowledge of a late fledging
would be a tightly guarded Cygnetics secret. Still unsure, Joe had
held off making a decision until Prissi told him that she had gone
to Bissell to see Jack and meet his grandfather. Although Joe knew
that it should have had nothing to do with his decision, it did. It
was her betrayal which had tipped the scales.

Even now, sitting in the snowy dark, a part
of Joe is titillated with thoughts of how badly Prissi will feel if
he dies in an abandoned mine pit. When that anguished joy quickly
dies out, the aching boy thinks that if, somehow, he could turn
back and return to school right this moment, he would be able to
shift some of his father’s rage away from himself and toward Uncle
Adaman. The problem, of course, is how to reverse course. He is in
a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, and, in more ways than one,
in the dark.

Joe tries to fight back against the feelings
of despair that are nipping and biting him like rats on a dying
dog. He reaches down between his shoes, brushes away the snow,
picks up a handful of stones and, swearing with each toss, begins
chucking them into the black void. The snow is so thick that he can
barely hear them land. He hates this place. Plunk. He hates Jack.
Plink. He hates Prissi. Plonk. He hates his uncle. Plunk.

The stones are almost gone, but his anger is
still with him when a stone hits him on his sore knee. Although it
startles him and hurts, he suppresses his outrage.

Let them come to him. He isn’t going to
grovel.

He pitches another stone in the general
direction from where he thinks the attack has come. He waits, but
doesn’t hear a sound except for the wind flinging itself over the
mine pit’s rim high above. Another rock hits Joe’s knee in exactly
the same place as the first one. This time his anger over-rules his
judgment. He swears loudly as he leans forward to pick up more
ammunition. He flings a stone, hears nothing, waits, hurls another,
silence, pitches a third, and, then, is rewarded with a third
strike to his knee. As soon as he is hit, he leaps up and throws
the handful of stones he has left with as much force as he can
muster.

Neither sound, nor stone, emerge from the
darkness.

Joe is lying on his side, knees drawn up
tight to his chin, shivering such that all of his bones hurt, when
he is tapped upon his head. Not a light tap. Not heavy enough to
harm, but definitely heavy enough to say, with insistence, pay
attention.

“Rich, but weak. If you can obey in all
things, then, get up. If not, lie there like an old dog and
die.”

Behind Joe’s closed lids, he can see an
immense pendulum, an ancient pendulum with a shaft of shining,
honey-colored wood and a gleaming brass compass rose, slowly swing
back and forth…from pride to hate and back again. Pride says take
nothing. Stay and die. Hate says crawl, snivel, rise, do whatever
to survive so that there can be revenge. The pendulum swings back
and forth in smooth silence as Joe weighs his options.

Pride…hate…pride…hate.

“Decide. Now.”

But Joe can’t decide. He is mesmerized by the
pendulum’s swing. He has never seen fate so clearly. Two choices,
one path. He holds his breath and wavers until three more taps to
his head, each harder than the one before, doubles, trebles, then
quadruples his hate.

He rolls onto his knees, muffles the
involuntary groans pulled from his throat, and pushes himself
erect.

Seka strikes Joe’s forearm.

“Here. Hold this.”

Joe fumbles in the darkness until he feels
the smooth knots of his guide’s staff. As soon as he grasps the
wood, he is jerked forward as Seka sets off into the black with the
same assurance as if it had been high noon.

After a few minutes of being dragged along in
the black, Joe senses that they have passed through some kind of
opening and now are underground. The black is black as it has been,
but the sound from his feet is different. The air is as cold, but
absolutely still. In another minute, Joe’s steps ring out like
rimshots on a snare drum, then echo back from the walls. The
syncopation brings Joe some small comfort because he can pretend
someone, someone like himself, is walking alongside. Since it feels
as though their path is pitched downward, Joe decides they are in a
tunnel. The pace Seka sets is fast. The tunnel floor is rough and
the darkness hides both dips and chunks of stone so that Joe often
stumbles. Each time he does, he can feel his guide’s disdain for
his clumsy feet travel down the length of the staff.

After what might have been a half-hour, the
air begins to carry a tinge of smoke, like burning leaves. A few
minutes after that, Joe notices that he can make out the silhouette
of Seka’s shoulder swaying two meters in front of him. Another
couple of minutes and the tunnel opens onto a large cavern. The
room is dimly lighted with two torches wedged into fissures in the
rock walls. The perimeter of the space has benches cut into the
stone. A shadowy figure, Joe guesses it is Adrona, sits on the
nearest bench. In the center of the room, which is more than twenty
meters across and easily ten meters high, is a rough circle of
rocks whose darkened edge indicates it use as a fire pit. On the
far side of the room are three low doorways, which pulse in the
flickering torch-lights as if they are alive.

Despite the illumination from the torches,
Joe holds onto Seka’s stick as they traverse the room and enter the
archway on the right. When the teener passes through, he notices a
framework of stout timbers lining the corridor. Joe glances up and
sees that the wooden posts support a mat woven of thick saplings.
He can see sharp corners of large blocks of rock jutting through
gaps in the mat. As he hurries after Seka, Joe decides that he has
just seen a device which can be triggered to block off the
tunnel.

After a few more minutes, Seka pushes through
a heavy wooden door into another torch-lit room. This space,
smaller than the first, has a dozen low narrow doors framed into
its shadowy perimeter. Against the far side of the room, almost
directly under a guttering torch, four people are sitting at a
large trestle table playing cards.

As Joe and Seka approach, a small wizened
woman with a hawk’s nose, vertiginous cheekbones and a hawser thick
braid of gray hair that reaches past her waist, cackles, “Gin, “
and carefully puts down her cards. She taps her well-worn cards
before pointing two knobby fingers at Joe and, in a voice that
rises and falls like a religious chant, says, “See, I told you that
he would bring us good luck. We share our protection with him and
he will share his good fortune with us.”

The abbess, which is how Joe guesses the old
woman sees herself, beckons him. He hesitates until he feels a prod
from behind. When he turns, he is surprised to find the flat-eyed
Adrona. If the younger guide has been following him, Joe has heard
nothing.

The tetchy hag snaps her hand impatiently. In
the instant before he steps forward, Joe guesses that abbess may
not be the right word. The crone shows her half dozen teeth in a
smile.

“You liked your walk?”

Joe makes himself smile and nod.

“My name is Rholealy.”

She slowly swings her head to indicate the
room.

“Welcome to Greenland. You are safe within
this place. It has been many suns and moons since the heathens and
their hawks have bothered us.”

Again, a slight twist of her head indicates
their surroundings.

“Here, you will walk in peace.”

Joe feels like he has stepped out of the
Dutton School and into Middle Earth. He half-expects a
nine-fingered hobbit and his loyal friends to burst from one of the
doors singing a lusty song about the power of One Ring. Although
his knee is on fire, his body is exhausted and his stomach is
empty, Joe has to bite back a smile as he says, “Your hospitality,
Madam Rholealy, is most welcome.”

After deciding that Joe’s use of “Madam”
isn’t meant to mock, the old woman nods her head in condescending
grace.

Joe hears Adrona snicker behind him.
Rholealy’s hands drop back to the table to gather the cards.
Assuming that he has been dismissed, Joe turns back toward Adrona.
The guide points the walking stick at an opening.

In less than an hour, Joe has been fed a meal
of walnut meats, dried apples, and a hot drink that has pieces of
bark floating in it. When he finishes, his stomach is full, but he
feels famished. Adrona shows Joe to a bench in an alcove carved
into the wall, hands him two thick oft-darned blankets and leaves
behind a small sputtering pine brand.

As soon as the guide leaves him, Joe allows
himself a second bout of being overwhelmed. He lies rolled up in
the surprisingly warm, smoky smelling blankets, looking at the
tortured shadows the guttering torch casts, and imagines the Mullen
dining hall with its chandeliers shining down on one hundred
polished tables, six hundred chairs, the pungent smells of coffee,
roast meat and chocolate. He flexes his ankles as he imagines
flinging himself around Evenen Rink on scimitar sharp blades. He
substitutes the sounds of his favorite pap music by the Kotanbawls
coming to his ears rather than the arrhythmic plink of a drop of
water that he keeps hearing reverberate along the tunnel. He
imagines flying high above the playing fields tossing a FRZ-B back
and forth to …Prissi.

It seems impossible that he can be where he
is. That he has left behind so many important things. Yet, somehow,
he is and he has.

Several times in the first weeks of hockey
practice, Joe had noticed a man staring at him from the Evenen
bleachers with the intensity of a coach or competitor. At first,
Joe thought that it must be the father of one of his teammates.
Later, he guessed that the burly man might be a scout. Maybe from
the Islanders or Bruins. Joe began to look for the man when he had
done something he thought was outstanding. Occasionally, he was
rewarded with a quick nod of approval. He saw the man at a game at
Loomis. Joe’s eyes sought him out after he scored a break-away goal
late in the third period. The man gave him a quick grin. Finally,
after running across one another at the Akwautown Deli, the man,
who told Joe his name was Nathn, had taken a quarter hour to tell
the Duttonian how good he was and how much better he could become.
Nathn asked Joe if he were going to fledge. When Joe said he didn’t
want to, but would, Nathn had said what a shame it was that someone
so gifted at hockey should give that gift away.

Joe twisted around on the rock ledge trying
to make himself more comfortable.

It might have been three conversations later
that Nathn told Joe that if he ever wanted to go to a place of
safety until his window for fledging closed that Nathn could help
with that. He had done so with other gifted aletes whose
participation in those sports would end with fledging. Joe had
laughed and said the idea was ridiculous, and it was…until he was
speeding along a sheet of perfect ice, or on the verge of sleep in
his dorm-room. Finally, when Joe had asked Nathn if he was a scout,
the man just smiled enigmatically.

Even though he is utterly exhausted, Joe
cannot fall asleep. He keeps going over the steps he has taken, the
thinking behind those steps and the consequences of his actions. He
lies still, his eyes closed while the colors on his lids shift from
yellow to gray to red and back to yellow as the pine brand
sputters. Even after the torch burns itself out, the flickering on
Joe’s lids continues until he opens his eyes to stare at the
blackest black he ever has experienced.

As the minutes ooze by, the black around Joe
and especially the black over his head—perhaps a hundred meters of
dark earth pressing down upon him, changing him in the same way
that the earth’s weight makes diamonds from coal and coal from
sun-dappled leaves and grass—grows heavier and heavier. The minutes
ooze, but there is a faster flow inside him. Joe’s bladder fills,
then, over-fills, but the novice guest doesn’t know what to do. If
he gets up, he can’t see where he is going, nor does he even know
where he is supposed to go. And if he just gets up and moves away
and empties himself somewhere, he is afraid something will happen
so he won’t be able to find his way back.

The minutes ooze. His bladder pulses. His
hate bubbles up like volcanic mud. Druids. Deluded Druids hiding
under the earth, hiding from their supposed enemies, but, it seems
to Joe, mostly hiding from the present world. How can his hosts be
so self-absorbed that they couldn’t be bothered to tell a guest
where the bathroom was? Or, he suddenly wonders, is this some kind
of test? Or, worse, a joke?

Joe’s fear of getting lost wanes and the
anger at his maltreatment waxes. Finally, his body can take no
more. He gets up from the bench, turns to face the place where he
has been, and, fingers trailing the wall, takes a careful step to
the left. Joe repeats that eight times. When he is through, he
carefully paces back the way he has come. Within a few minutes of
finding his bed, he falls into a deep sleep.

When he wakes, his torch has been replaced.
Leaning against the edge of the alcove is a long stick with rags
tied to its end. The mop is sitting in a scarred wooden bucket
half-filled with water. Looking at the mop, Joe suffers the heat of
his shame as it flows up out of his chest and onto his cheeks,
where it pulses and glows like last night’s torch. He pushes the
bucket down the floor with a foot and begins the clean-up. When he
finishes, he picks up the bucket, grabs the torch and starts down
the corridor. He hasn’t gone far before he spies a faint glow on
the tunnel floor. A low, narrow door is carved into a slight recess
in the stone. He hears murmurs and rolling laughter. The angry boy
wedges his torch into a slight crack in the hewn wall. His fist
draws back to pound the door, but stops when he decides that
knocking is too timid. He yanks down on the carved wooden handle
and slams open the plank door. He strides into a long,
low-ceilinged room dominated by an immense stone pedestal table
framed with long plank benches. Two dozen Greenlanders in varying
shades of green and brown rough-sewn clothes are crowded together
eating breakfast.