Flight (37 page)

Joe finds himself smiling and shaking his
head as he compares the man standing before him with his
father.

“I’m going to get in touch with a friend with
this,” Joe holds up the new mypod, “and have her get in touch with
my parents to keep the hawks out of it.”

Bob Tom looks longingly as his fishing pole
as he slides it back into its case, “Sounds dull. When’s the latest
you can fledge safely?”

“I can’t wait much longer. If I’m going to do
it, I need to go home now and get it done because I have to be back
to school in two weeks.”

“I could turn you into a passable riverman in
two weeks.”

Joe thinks hard before he answers, “Maybe
after school’s over. Let me talk to my mother and father….”

Bob Tom interrupts with a roar, and for a
second time, the dabbling buffleheads have to scatter.

“Mother. Father. Parents. Damall, Noby, ain’t
you got any folks? No mom or dad or a ma or pa? Jeezuz Crikey.”

“We’re not exactly on a first name basis in
my family. But, let me talk to my…folks…maybe I could hang out with
you for another week, then fledge and get back to school a few days
late.”

The surprise on Bob Tom’s face, and whatever
feelings are triggering it, causes him to turn away and cough a
couple of times.

“Damall, I’m so used to breathin pure, this
here city air’s got me goin.”

Joe is surprised when his screen tells him
that Prissi’s mypod is off-grid, but he is stunned when he calls
Nancy Sloan to track down Prissi and hears about what has happened.
He drops to his knees as he listens to Nancy say that Prissi thinks
his grandfather and Jack are responsible for the death of her
father and the attacks on Prissi herself. When Nancy finally stops
talking, it takes Joe almost a minute before he can gather himself
enough to ask Nancy where she thinks Prissi might be. Nancy says
that she doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, but that she does want
Joe to talk to his family and make sure that they know that the
Sloans are innocent and have had nothing to do with anything.

When Joe fills Bob Tom in on the details of
what he has already surmised from listening to one side of the
conversation, the riverman says, “I guess we’re gonna go on that
walk-about anyway.”

“What can we do?”

“Do? Well, Damall, Noby, we’re gonna find
this here Prissi. She ain’t, is she? I sorely dislike prissy. If a
woman ain’t got what it takes to worm a hook or gut a buck, what
good is she?”

Joe tries to allay Bob Tom’s fears with some
of Prissi’s exploits.

“Well sounds like she’s got gumption. But
gumption ain’t always enough, though it’ll take ya pretty far. We
better get goin.”

“And do what?”

“Noby, what do you expect the best hunter,
trapper and tracker you’re ever gonna meet gonna do? We’re gonna
find that girl and save her. Someone’s gonna regret this here
cavalry just got called in. Saddle up, young'n. Time’s
awastin.”

* * *

South of Albany, the Hudson River Valley
opens up. Farms replace forests. Small villages sit high on rolling
hills. The most noticeable difference to Joe is the river’s
traffic.

Hoverrafts carry passengers up and down the
Hudson from Albany to New York. Dozens of ag-barges, laden with the
harvest of the area’s famous mesclun and chard farms, make their
way south to feed the millions of mouths in the New
York-Newton-Screwton nexus.

As he tows Joe south, Bob Tom yells out the
sights like a tour director. Aqua farms holding acres upon acres of
bags filled with fresh water oysters. He tells Joe not to miss the
stationary barges that provided the platforms to grow cold water
hydroponic lettuces.

Joe takes some time to look at the changing
scene along the riverbank, but most of his attention is directed to
keeping the canoe out of trouble. Being in a hurry to rescue a girl
he doesn’t even know, Bob Tom is flying much faster than he had
before. The increased speed causes a surge as its bow which
continually threatens to swamp the canoe. As brown and green swells
of water roll up the sides of the canoe, Joe wonders how much
longer the riverman can keep up the pace. Less than an hour later,
Joe gets his answer. After ten minutes of jerks and sloughs as the
old man tires, Bob Tom pulls out of the center of the river. He
slows his speed as he angles toward a tied-up barge piled five
meters high with pallets filled with badboard crates. Joe lands the
canoe just down river from the barge. The boy notices the riverman
staggers when he lands. When he looks at Bob Tom’s face, Joe is
surprised at how florid it is. Purple veins bulge from the old
man’s forehead like a low mountain range. Instantly, Joe feels
guilty about how hard the Damall man is working for him and fearful
of the toll that effort might be taking.

While the runaway ties up, Bob Tom tromps off
toward the gangplank and crane where a handful of workers are
darting back and forth. Less than ten minutes later, Bob Tom flopes
his way through back toward Joe. “Hop lively, Noby, we got us a
ride.”

When Joe looks back at the canoe, Bob Tom
shakes his head, “Forget that old thing. She’s hardly sea-worthy.
And I never liked her anyway cuz she was stolen. There’s plenty of
boats worth stealin, but any boat worth takin ain’t all that easy
to steal and this here boat come awful easy. C’mon, shake a leg.
We’re on easy street.”

The adventurers haven’t been on the barge for
more than twenty minutes before a tug, towing three barges behind
it, sweeps in and grabs them. Within ten minutes, they are floating
down the middle of the river. Within an hour after they begin their
ride, the riverman is antsy. He paces around the deck of the barge
testing lines and strapping to see if they meet his standards. When
that job is done, he assembles his pole and starts casting into the
river even though, as he tells Joe, the wake of the convoy is bound
to scare off anything smarter than a flat worm. After a quarter
hour of fishing, a disgusted Bob Tom puts his pole in its case and
flies off to the tug to talk to the captain.

Joe takes advantage of the respite to think
about what Nancy has told him. He can imagine his grandfather or
even his uncle taking some gray-area actions, but certainly not
murder, to get something they wanted. The same is true for Jack.
Joe has thought his cousin was a Sleek Wheedly ever since he can
remember. But, that is a far cry from doing anything to harm
Prissi. Joe knows his family can’t be involved. He knows it. But….
Joe isn’t sure what the but is, but something keeps his fingers off
the mypod screen. Instead of k-necting with his parents or uncle or
cousin, Joe sits atop a mesa of mesclun crates and thinks about
how, or if, he might be able to find and help Prissi.

Down and Dirty

Despite the disasters of the day before, the
sun had been up an hour before Prissi Langue’s gray-green eyes, as
secure behind their lids as her arms tucked beneath the worn,
mothballed blankets, took notice. Even after her raggedy lashed
lids flickered, it was a long moment before the mind behind them
was willing to stir.

As she became conscious, Prissi’s first
complete thought was of Gregor Samsa. His metamorphosis had been a
fiction, a conceit by Kafka, but hers was real. Even with her eyes
closed, she could tell that her weight had tripled overnight and
half her brain cells had died.

Too big to fly. Too dumb to care.

Carpe diem?

No.

Please, no.

In a way that took her back to a memories of
floating in a muddy African watering hole, Prissi relaxed deep into
the musty smelling mattress. The drone of insects, the haze of
humidity and dust, the inertial force of an equatorial sun.

Paralyzed in paradise.

The reverie was broken when a growl, like a
madmetal guitar riff, heralded Prissi’s hunger. A groan of mental
protest surpassed her belly’s growl before she surrendered her
torpidity to the next chapter of her fate. She scootched her belly
at an angle until her legs dropped over the edge of the bed.
However, once there, she lost courage and, rather than standing,
the fifteen-year old flared her wings enough so that she could
kneel on the floor, where she stayed until the tears welling
against her lids receded.

When she finally was upright, Prissi was as
wobbly as if she was standing was for the very first time. Seconds
later, like a precocious baby, the slight, oval-faced, almond-eyed,
mousy-haired girl took her first steps. As she went downstairs to
scrounge the kitchen, Prissi admonished herself not to give up.

Today had to be better.

After looking through the refrigerator, the
famished teener had regrets about how cavalierly she had cremated
the contents of the freezer the night before searching for a clue
to why her father had been murdered and her life was in danger. It
wasn’t that the refrigerator held no food; it just was difficult to
determine the phyla and genera of what was in the various little
containers. Snapping open a couple of lids to see and smell,
Prissi, while willing to concede that the contents might be edible,
was hard-pressed to say what they might be. The idea of flying with
a case of diarrhea overcame her normal sense of culinary
adventure.

Four Wheat-a-bix and water and a small bite
of something she was almost positive was cheese, or, at least, a
cousin to cheese, ended the stomach rumbling. In an act, which she
couldn’t decide was charitable or cruel, Prissi opened several of
the refrigerator containers and left them on the back stoop for the
world’s scraggliest cat.

Minutes later, after brushing her teeth with
her fingers and salt and after a long tense moment of not crying,
Prissi was in the air and flying east across New Jersey toward the
Hudson River.

As soon as she was high enough to allow it,
Prissi made herself do a double barrel roll. The physical
exuberance wasn’t matched by anything emotional, but she felt
better about being able to make a long flight after having tested
her suspect wing joint.

What to do first?

Get money from Burgey’s bank accounts and use
it to make an escape? Tell the Manhattan hawks what was happeneing
and let them find her enemies? Confront Baudgew, the elfin man who
made her skin crawl?

Prissi was pretty sure that the numbers
besides the PIN number she had found hidden in Burgey’s spinach
were coordinates. Although she had only been in Noramica for three
years and had only been flying for less than a year, Prissi was
pretty sure the coordinates pinpointed some place out on Long
Island. Given her recent bad luck, Prissi guessed that wherever
Burgey wanted her to go was probably deep in the trackless forest
beyond the Pale. She knew that if she keyed the coordinates into
her mypod, it would only take a split second for a map to display
her destination. However, the worried teener was afraid to do that.
Despite the cautions she had taken after escaping the blue jays who
had killed her father, Prissi wasn’t positive that she was off the
grid. The man in Spicetown had assured her that the mypod she
bought from him could not be tracked, but, after the events of the
last few days, trusting anyone seemed impossible.

Prissi wondered what could be out on Long
Island. As far as the recent immigrant knew, most of western Long
Island was sparsely populated and the entire eastern end was
totally uninhabited and had been since the fires in
20…something…2047?...2048, when the island had been burned as the
unanticipated climax of the Ticklish Situation.

Although Prissi was somewhat reassured by the
fact that the ridiculously vulnerable fortress she had constructed
in Burgey’s upstairs bedroom had not been attacked during the
night, she wasn’t confident that changing her clothes and
substituting mypods were enough to keep her in the shadows and
safe. It was those doubts about her safety which kept the fifteen
year old from wanting to go back on the grid to do any research. As
an alternative, Prissi considered how dangerous it might be to make
a quick stop at NYPD. She thought that if she went to the NYPD, she
could look at a map of Long Island, use the coordinates to figure
out the location, make a plan and, simultaneously, stay off the
grid. Although there was a chance someone might be watching to see
if a certain small, red and silver winged girl climbed the steps
between the two worn lions, the NYPD certainly had to be safer than
going back to the Gramercy Park apartment to look through her
father’s old atlas.

Prissi closed her eyes and let the brisk
March wind tug the tears from their edges. Old atlas or not, the
idea of walking into their apartment, a place she never had liked,
was too painful even to consider. And there wasn’t any compelling
reason to go back. Her mother’s cryptic notebook already was
missing. The things her father had taken from the apartment, except
for his wallet, had been lost at the KaffeeKiosK during the
attack.

Prissi’s wings skipped a beat as she realized
that she had been assuming that those things were lost. As she
resumed her flapping, she considered what the chances might be that
her assailants, caught up in the injuries they had sustained
attacking her could have forgotten to collect the gear she and her
father had taken with them. After a moment’s consideration, Prissi
concluded that, even if those precious possessions were sitting in
a heap in the back room of the KaffeeKiosK, it was just too risky
for her to go herself—someone could be thinking the same way she
was. But, she might be able to call to see if…no, calling might
only forewarn her enemies. But, Prissi thought, maybe her friend
Jiffy Apithy could go. He might be willing to go check for her…but,
if he went, he also might end up like her father, with a broken
neck and eyes staring into a distance too far for Prissi to
understand.