Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sticks and Stones

  Two hundred kilometers to the north, in an unending, unbroken Adirondack Mountain forest, fifteen-year old Joe Fflowers swears as he slips and falls in the new snow. Rubbing his arm where it has struck an up-thrust of rock hidden alongside the overgrown path, he takes advantage of the moment to take a deep breath. He is still on his knees when, from ten meters feet ahead, his guide, Seka, imperiously barks, “C’mon. Hurry up. I don’t want to use the lumenaids.”

  In the growing gloam, Joe pats his aching hands together to remove the snow and catch his breath. Adrona, his other guide, coming up the trail behind him, taps his hip with a walking stick.

  “Hurry, hurry. We want to be undercover before hawks fly.”

  “How much farther?”

  “Wishing for wings?”

  Despite the twelve hours a week that Joe spends training with the hockey team, his chest aches from the pace they have been keeping. His knee has grown much worse.

  As planned, Joe walks away from The Dutton School just before lunch. His rendezvous with his railroader in a little used parking lot behind the Waterville Fire Department building goes smoothly. The railroader puts him inside a kafir board tool box that takes up most of the bed of what Jack guesses is a 2050 vintage truclet. The vehicle whines and groans as its tiny electric motor climbs through the hills of northwest Connecticut, then screams in outraged protest as it fights its way through the higher elevations of the New York mountains. Since the truclet has almost no springs left and his railroader hasn’t thought to put anything soft in the box, Joe bounces around throughout the trip. The farther north they go, the worse the roads become. Joe is twisting around trying to make himself more comfortable when the driver hits a huge rut. Joe flies through the air and smashes his head against a corner of the box. When he comes back down, his left leg twists under him. His knee pops.

  After four hours, a cold, bruised Joe, with a throbbing knee, is helped from his hiding place. Two people dressed in well-worn green Microx are waiting in the shadows of an enormous fir tree. Joe guesses the older of the two, whom the truclet driver calls Seka, to be over two meters tall and weigh upward of eighty kilograms. A small head with red leather cheeks, jewel-like blue eyes and an osprey’s nest of white hair, nods at the introduction. The second guide, Adrona, is less man than boy. Joe thinks that he might be no more than two or three years older than Joe himself—certainly no more than twenty. His hair is as unkempt as Seka’s, but it is reddish gold. The piercing blue eyes are the same.

  Joe’s driver points, “Seka will take you from here, “ He extends his knuckles as he says solemnly, “Stars aligned.”

  An embarrassed Joe taps the outstretched knuckles with his own and mutters, “Stars benign.”

  The railroader leaps toward the truclet as the runaway hurriedly settles his pak on his shoulders before running under the protection of the thick boughs of the forest.

  Seka hands Joe a satin-smooth, knobbed walking stick before jogging up a steep hill through a dense forest of tall, scarred white pine and hemlock. The thick layer of pine needles beneath their feet muffles the sounds of their passing. At first, the cushion of needles seems to lessen the pain pulsing in Joe’s knee; however as they continue to climb through the clean-smelling woods, the flagging boy realizes that the give of the needles is wearing him out just like a walk in deep snow.

  Near the crest of the hill, the trees begin to thin. Seka stays ten meters below the ridgeline and begins to move laterally. Within minutes, the added pressure from running along the canted land causes Joe to slow and, finally, to stop. As the escapee leans over to rub his kneecap, which feels like it’s been put on upside down, Adrona taps his spine.

  “Jump.”

  An angry Joe pushes the stick away.

  “What?”

  “Jump the pain. People think pain is a wall. It’s not. It’s a fence. Jump it.”

  From a few paces ahead, the sound of Seka’s walking stick being quickly rapped on a tree reminds Joe of the way Coach Deirken pounds his hockey stick to get the team to skate faster in the ice rink. Despite the incentive, Joe doesn’t move.

  Adrona makes a sound of disgust and moves off.

  Joe kneels on his good knee as he watches them hurrying away through the woods. For a moment, his anger and defiance convince him to let them go, but, as soon as his guides’ backs disappear from view, the satisfaction fades and the fear of being lost in the woods forces Joe to his feet. As he begins limping after his keepers, the boy thinks of how, if he had wings, he could fly out of the forest to safety. That thought confuses him.

  Twenty minutes later, the wind picks up. It tries to free itself of the snow it is carrying by darting left and right, up and down, swirling around. It teases the fearful boy. It reminds Joe of the twists, turns, spins, jukes and dekes he does on the ice to confuse his opponents. Despite his efforts, when he looks ahead, he can’t see Seka or Adrona but only the line of their tracks quickly disappearing as the wind fills them with new snow. With his knee pounding, his chest heaving and his mouth whispering, “Jump,” the boy pursues his rescuers.

  When Joe finally catches up, the snow has stopped, the wind has died and the light is all but gone. His guides are standing at the edge of a precipice. Joe carefully approaches and looks down into a pit whose bottom is lost in shadow. Seka nods, “Stay on the path.”

  With their knees bent and sticks planted, Joe’s guides begin their descent. As Joe tries to follow the spot where he wedges his walking stick gives way. As he begins to slide down the cliff, Joe rolls onto his stomach and throws out a hand as his toes try to dig into the scree. When he finally stops, he twists his head to stare down the cliffside to where Seka and Adrona, black ghosts against a near-black background, hover.

  “The path. Of course.”

  With his heart still pounding, Joe carefully gets up, and, poking his walking stick before him like a blind man’s cane, begins a barely controlled slide toward the black maw below.

  Shaking from fear and fatigue, Joe’s relief at making it to the bottom of the immense pit disappears as soon as he looks around and neither sees nor hears his guides. He turns a full circle trying to pull a shape or two from the darkness. Looking up, outlined against the rough black edge of the cliff far overhead, he sees a flattened oval scattering of faint new stars shining against the blue-black mussel shell sky. He shifts his attention from the distant sky to the immediacy of his wounds. His feet are bruised and his hands are raw. The pain in his knee is worse. The weight of his pak seems to have doubled.

  Joe tilts his head again to stare at the stars above. He takes a tentative first step, groans, takes a second, wails at the pain, and, then, stops. In a knot of emotion that he can’t untie, he beats his arms at his side like the wings he hasn’t wanted. Beats them in anger, beats them to forestall any more pain, beats them in hope and despair, beats them in frustration. After a minute, he stops to catch his breath. As he drags cold air into his hot lungs, Joe reconsiders the elements of the decision that has brought him to this point: Knife-edged blades slicing ice in a cold, frictionless world. Crowds roaring in muffled applause behind the rink’s thick plastic walls. Prissi, chastised, teary, sorry for how she has treated him.