Flight (59 page)

Joe changes tactics, “Do you have a
boat?”

Prissi, whose strength is beginning to falter
and whose mind has decided to distance itself from what is going
on, begins drifting back to the door. Even though Joe is talking to
him, Fair follows behind Prissi, like a lamb with its dam.

Joe himself wants to follow, but doesn’t. He
stays with Bob Tom because he has to keep the flies from settling
on his friend. Even as the teener’s hands begin doing their job,
his mind is on a river’s current north of Albany. He is brought
back to beyond the Pale when Olewan kicks his foot.

“Who are you?”

“Joe…Joe. Prissi’s friend. We’re at school
together.”

“And him?”

“Bob Tom Damall. Another friend.”

“Why are you here?”

“To help Prissi. My…some people killed her
father and tried to hurt her. We wanted to help.”

“How?”

That question stymies Joe. In all the days
since he and Bob Tom were in Albany and found out that Prissi’s
life was threatened, Joe can’t remember asking himself that
question. He knows why he wants to help, or thinks he does, but how
to help is another matter. He realizes that somehow he and Bob Tom
just assumed that if they could find Prissi they could help her.
Now, he doesn’t know how his presence helps.

“How?”

Joe stammers, “I don’t really know. Prissi
thought…someone in my family was after her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think Prissi knew
either. She met my grandfather, got interested in a company….”

Olewan interrupts, “Your grandfather. Who’s
that?”

With a feeling that is part pride and part
shame, Joe quietly says, “Joshua Fflowers.”

The old woman’s stare doesn’t last two
seconds, but it contains more information than Joe can process.

Olewan puts a finger in Joe’s face.

“Leave.”

“Do you have a boat?”

“Leave.”

“I’m not leaving without my friends, and I
can’t take Bob Tom without a boat.”

The old woman wags her hand at Joe’s bike
which is lying where it landed after smashing into the wall.

“The girl stays. You leave. Use that.
Leave.”

The woman’s imperious and obviously insane
behavior reminds Joe of Rholealy. As soon as he makes the
connection, he wants to hit the woman before him, to rub her face
in a plate of food. To keep from doing either, Joe takes two steps
back. He stares at the woman, who has caused his friend to be
killed, and without disguising his loathing, shouts, “A boat!”

Joe kneels down, takes the tarp that Fair has
left and drapes it over Bob Tom. Once he has done the best he can
to keep the flies from his friend, Joe stands back up, gives the
old woman a challenging glare, and stalks off to the entrance of
the building.

“Don’t do that. Leave. You can’t go in
there.”

Joe keeps moving. When the door closes behind
him the woman’s tirade is cut off.

Compromise

When Prissi walks away from the dead winger,
Joe, and the wounded centaur, her only thought is to get back to
her bed in the quiet, dimly lighted room. She ignores Fair, who is
following close behind, in the hope that he will go away. Her hope
seems justified when she opens the door, passes through, closes it
and it remains closed. Prissi stands over the narrow hospital bed
and for the thousandth time ponders the Pandora’s Box she has
opened from which so much misery and sorrow has escaped. She can
not fathom how hard the darker Fates have had to scheme, finagle
and cajole to get Joe Fflowers out in the middle of nowhere so that
his friend can be killed by a catatonic centaur.

Prissi tells herself that when she is around
there is no sanctuary. None for her and none for those around her.
She might argue at the injustice, she might complain at her
unintended horrors, but she can not wriggle free of the fact that a
live Prissi means dead family, friends, and, perhaps worst of all,
strangers…like the one outside.

Prissi is planning what must be done when she
hears the door open. Fair comes up close to her before he asks,
“You stay?”

Prissi doesn’t know what to say.

“You go?”

Prissi takes a deep sigh.

“You go.”

Fair reaches into his left pocket, removes
his hand, opens it and shows Prissi the two lost crystal pendants
and offers them to her. Before she can reach out, Fair reaches into
his other pocket and draws out a closed fist. Despite her intention
to show no interest, Prissi leans forward. The girl is stunned when
Fair opens his hand and reveals a third crystal nestled in his
dirty palm. Whatever information the crystals contain, it is now
back together for the first time in sixty years.

When Prissi told Olewan her story, the old
woman had not said a word about possessing the final crystal. As
soon as Prissi sees what Fair holds, and knows whose it must be and
how it came to be in Fair’s hand, the feelings of trust that had
begun to bud in her as the geri nursed her back to health
immediately disappear.

In an oblique, meandering way that reminded
Prissi of her father, Olewan had suggested that Trinity had
discovered a way to increase longevity. It didn’t take someone of
Prissi’s intelligence and cynicism to understand the lengths people
would go to get their hands on that information. However, knowing
that people would want what they thought she might have still did
not tell her who was after her. From the information the African
women had been able to extract, Prissi knew that those attackers
had been sent by a man named Schecty; however, those two wingers
had endured much pain without ever admitting to knowing who Schecty
was, or who he might be working for.

Since the captured wingers had no idea about
the attack on the West Side levee, Prissi had decided that she had
two enemies rather than one. That conclusion had led her to infer
that Dicky Baudgew was one enemy and Joshua Fflowers was the other.
Olewan had told Prissi that she was sure the blue jays had to have
been sent by Joshua Fflowers, and from all that Olewan had told her
of Fflowers, the teener could see how Olewan herself would be so
sure it was her megalomaniac husband. However, she also wasn’t sure
whether it even made any difference. The critical fact was that she
was the target, but, so far, it was other people who were paying
the price.

Fair commands, “You stay!”

When Prissi hesitates, Fair jabs his hand
with the third crystal toward her.

“Stay.”

Prissi only hesitates for a split second
before she nods, forces a smile and whispers, as if speaking softly
will mitigate her lie, “Stay. I’ll stay.”

Escape and Capture

The third time Joe asks Fair if he has a boat
the feral boy slowly nods. Once Fair figures out that a boat might
mean that Bird Bob’s ferend, who he doesn’t like, will leave and
the girl will stay, Fair nods vigorously.

The boat is an eighty-year old bass boat with
solar seats to recharge its 40 amp motor. For decades it had been
kept tied up on the shore of a tributary of the Carman’s River for
decades to be used when Olewan made her infrequent trips to the
outer villages of Long Island for supplies.; however when the
centaurs started to become hostile, Olewan had Fair drag the boat
all the way to the Bury to keep it safe.

Since the boat hasn’t been used for months,
the charge on the motor is low. Joe’s inclination is to start the
next stage of his journey right away; but after his problems on the
Hudson, the teener is more attuned to the things that can go wrong
with boats. Rather than relying on the accuracy of the charge
indicator and hoping that the solar seat panels work, Joe drags the
boat out of its shed into the sun to begin its recharge.

Prissi had been with Fair when Joe tracked
the wild-haired boy down to find out about the boat. As soon as he
started to talk about leaving, she had cut him off. Joe thought
that she would follow him to find the boat, but she stayed behind.
Although the teener is angry at Prissi’s behavior, he focuses on
what some new and unfamiliar part of him is telling him is his
first duty—to get the remains of Bob Tom Damall off the ground and
onto the waters of the world.

As the boat panels collect energy, Joe makes
a shroud out of the large blue tarp. He folds edges and tucks in
the ends in a way that has him thinking of assembling a huge
burrito. The incongruous thought makes him laugh. That outlandish
noise first horrifies him and, then, makes him wonder if he is
going insane. Joe finds a coil of line in the boat which he uses to
tie up the package. Once his friend’s remains are encapsulated in
blue plastic, Joe finds it easier to use the force necessary to get
his friend’s body into in the boat without worrying about doing
further damage. Joe arranges the body so that Bob Tom’s head is
held in place by the vee of the bow and his legs hang over the
first of the boat’s three thwarts. By angling the old man’s body,
more than half of the solar panel seat remains uncovered. Joe
figures that if he has Prissi sit on the middle thwart with her
weight opposite to Bob Tom’s, and if he himself sits in the middle
of the stern, then the boat should be well-balanced.

Having Bob Tom draped the way he has may work
once they are on the water, but, when Joe tries to pull the boat
across the clearing, he can’t do it. Changing tactics, he wrestles
the riverman’s body to the stern, but concludes, even with the
weight shift, that he wouldn’t be able to pull the boat as far as
he must. The doubts about his sanity and, now, his physical
weaknesses, paralyze Joe. He stands motionless in the dappled light
of the late morning sun, which is wriggling its way through the
canopy, like maggots in meat.

After a motionless while, Joe notices the
Schwinner and feels its tug. A voice tells him to get on the bike.
Go home. A quest with a fifteen-year old hero is a farce, a tragic
comedy, a pitiable delusion. Joe stares at the bike and can see
himself pedaling across the Queensboro Bridge while miniature
distorted images of the rising buildings of Manhattan reflect off
the handlebars. A second later all Joe can see are the bike’s
wheels. He runs to find Fair. Within an hour, the bike had been
disassembled and its wheels attached to a long pole and the pole
attached underneath the stern of the boat. Joe fashions a harness
from the boat’s painter and finds that with the weight of Bob Tom
in the stern above the wheels he can easily pull the boat
along.

Joe can understand why someone with the
seemingly limited intelligence of Fair would be willing to let him
have the boat, but he is less sure why the old woman hasn’t tried
to stop his preparations. As Joe is putting the bicycle wheel
carrier together, he gets the idea that the old woman might want to
have the boat gone to remove a means of escape from Prissi. He
pushes back against that thought since it leads him to another. In
all the time since he and Bob Tom began their quest, one thought
that never had been asked was whether Prissi would want their help.
They had just assumed that Prissi would come with them. Now, he
realizes that they never any real reason for thinking that. When
Joe had demanded that Prissi leave with him, she had refused even
to talk about it. In fact, within seconds, she had disappeared. Joe
decides he must make a second plea, but immediately wonders whether
she isn’t right to stay. She may be safer in the middle of nowhere
with a crazy lady and slow-witted boy than she would be with
him.

When the boat is fully charged and both Bob
Tom and the Schwinner’s frame secured, Joe studies Fair and the
crone who stands protectively in front of the door that leads to
Prissi. Joe says that he must see Prissi before he will leave. The
old woman shakes her head gleefully and says that Prissi refuses to
say goodbye. Joe wants to believe that the old woman is lying, but
whether she is or not, the teener decides not to argue. He makes a
decision. He will go. He will send Bob Tom on his journey and then
come back for Prissi.

Joe listens to the old woman’s directions of
how to get to the stream as he slips the harness over his
shoulders. As he begins making his way to the water, Joe shakes his
head at how ludicrous everything he has done over the last two
weeks has become.

From her hiding place in the woods, Prissi
watches Joe get on his way. It hurts to walk. She can only imagine
how much worse the pain will be if she has to run… or fly. She has
taken a vial of painkillers from the operatory, but she desperately
hopes her plan succeeds in a way so that she doesn’t have to fly.
She estimates that she has something between fifteen and thirty
minutes before Olewan or Fair realizes that she isn’t behind the
door she has locked. She knows without a doubt that when Fair finds
out that she is gone that he will come after her. But, how fast he
can make up for lost time and whether it will be rage or sadness at
her betrayal that will motivate him, Prissi doesn’t know. She tells
herself that the only thing she can do to end the harm she has been
bringing to those who cross her path is follow the plan she has
devised.

After Joe disappears into the woods dragging
the boat behind, Prissi waits two minutes before following him. As
she walks, she looks to find some weapon she can use to get the
boat away from Joe. It’s her intention to steal the boat, leave Joe
the bicycle, take the boat down the Carman to the Atlantic, allow
the old winger to find his grave and, then, to end the story.

She passes on a rock shaped like the head of
a croquet mallet because it seems too big. She grabs a dead branch
from the low crotch of a hickory tree, but decides that it isn’t
sturdy enough. She spies a second stick that looks stout enough,
but finds it’s half rotten. Finally, Prissi picks up a
baseball-sized rock even though she can’t conjure up a plan to use
it that doesn’t frighten her. Throwing the rock and missing her
target will leave her weaponless. Throwing and hitting Joe, but in
the wrong place, could cause to happen what she is trying to
prevent. The winger is so caught up in the inadequacies of her
plans that she is around a curve and within Joe’s view before she
knows it. He is stopped by the bank of a fast moving stream that is
less than ten seven meters across. A half-skinned log acts as a
bridge across the water. Prissi backs away, but it is too late. Joe
has seen her.