Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Death

  Joe’s startled, convulsive response to its inveigling paws causes the bear to be as afraid as the boy. Each stares at the other through the dawn’s pink mist with hearts racing and limbs more prepared for flight than fight. Joe’s lungs are grabbing great gouts of the misty dawn air trying to keep up with his body’s demands for oxygen. He can hear the bear’s ragged breathing as well as his own. That sound reminds him of Doormat Doorley after doing a dozen sprints down and back on the ice. Except for his heaving chest, Joe stays stock still. Although his mind is drowning in adrenaline and epinephrine, he calms a tiny piece of it to try to figure out his next moves. Can he outrun the bear? No. Not unless he can get on the larger path with the Schwinner. Can he out-climb it? No. Out-think it? At the moment, he even doubts that. His only option seems to be to out-wait it.

  After two minutes, Joe’s breathing is much slower. So, too, is the bear’s. Like Joe, it seems to have decided that its best option is to wait to see what the other, larger, animal will do. As Joe waits, he studies the bear while being sure not to catch its gaze. He thinks that is right. A direct stare will be seen as a challenge. A moment later, he is second guessing himself. Failure to look the bear in the eyes could be interpreted as fear and cowardice. As Joe watches, the bear starts shrinking. Its spine, which has been rigid, begins to slump. Its fur, which has been puffed out as if the bear had electrocuted itself, begins to droop. As the bear shrinks, Joe realizes that the animal before him probably is not an adult. He doesn’t know whether that is good or bad news. A young bear should be less vicious. A young bear’s mother, if she were to be close by, could be more so.

  Joe’s thinking is drawn sharply back to the creature itself when the yearling opens its mouth wide and displays an impressive array of teeth before making a disturbingly loud noise, but, fortunately, a noise that doesn’t quite sound like a growl. The bear raises a paw to its face and vigorously rubs its snout. Two things come to Joe simultaneously. The first is that the bear has no claws on the paw rubbing its face. The second is that the bear has just yawned. Within moments, the bear is starting to look less like a life-threatening danger and more like something a lower-mid girl would bring to Dutton to decorate her bed and keep homesickness at bay. Joe lets his hand creep toward his pak. As the hand crawls across the leaf-covered ground, the bear cocks its head, seemingly in anticipation. Even before Joe’s hand makes contact, the bear begins weaving its head back and forth as it sniffs the air. By the time Joe has the pak open and the wrapper off of the last Nougie Nugget, foam is dripping from ursine jaws. Joe breaks the bar into four pieces. The first he tosses so that it lands just behind the bear. A lightning fast snuffle, and even faster jaw snap, and the treat is gone. Joe tosses the second piece five meters behind the bear and the next even farther away. Joe throws the last piece as far as he can, then quickly reaches down, grabs his pak and picks up three rocks. Twenty meters away in the woods, after devouring the last piece, the bear whirls around with a black lab’s anticipation for the next throw of its stick. Joe throws all three rocks as far as he can. He aims the first behind the bear, the second he throws to the left and the third even farther to the left. As the bear lumbers toward the nearest rock, Joe uncovers his bike and hurries away as fast as he can.

  In a scene that might be from an inane kid vid, Joe is squatted down trying to see through the window into the stall where Bob Tom was being held, when the bear bounds up like the never-can-quit-playing-fetch family dog. When its snout nudges Joe’s shoulder, the startled teener catches a complicated whiff of peanuts, rotten fruit, fish, and nougat. As soon as the boy reaches into his pak, which is strapped around his waist to see what might be left to give to his new-found friend, the bear begins tugging at the pouch with its teeth. Even though far from full-grown, the animal has a bear’s legendary strength. Joe is pulled over. The bear begins walking backwards and dragging Joe with him. Trying to remain calm given his ludicrous position and the noise being made, Joe feels along the right side of the bear’s slobbering jaw, finds the buckle, releases it and rolls away. The bear makes a noise like a fat man’s chortle and lumbers back into the woods with its prize.

  It takes Joe less than a minute to realize that the stable is empty. He creeps to its front edge expecting to witness some surreal bucolic scene of centaurs tending their crops, but the open space of interlaced meadow and gardens is empty. In front of the door from which he had seen the angry centaurs gallop the previous night, Joe stares at the ground until he finds what look to be footprints among the hoof prints. Having found what he was looking for, Joe races around to the back of the stable, grabs his bike and begins to follow the trail. As he gets further away from the building, where the earth is less churned, Joe finds Bob Tom’s prints easier to see. It takes him several minutes before he solves the puzzle of the small hole that accompanies the old man’s prints. As soon as he understands that Bob Tom is using a walking stick, Joe sees that one foot, the right one, is making a much lighter print in the dust than the left. Joe wonders if his friend is too injured to be able to fly away when Joe rescues him.

  In the same way as had happened the day before, Joe hears the angry guttural voices of the centaurs long before he can see them. He has been on the centaurs’ trail for almost an hour. Even though he is no woodsman, the imprint of his friend’s shoes on the damp trail has been so obvious that Joe has been able to pedal with few interruptions other than creek crossings. The path itself has snaked around a dozen bogs and swamps and smooth-surfaced ponds.

  Standing at the end of the trail, Joe can look across a clearing and see a large centaur, whom he doesn’t recognize, rearing up and smashing its hooves into the rusty metal door of an immense low-lying vine-covered building. The centaur’s attack resounds across the clearing. Bob Tom is roped to a second, still centaur. Even though the two centaurs seem fully engaged with the doorway of the building and his friend is less than a fifty meters away, Joe drifts back into the deeper shadows of the woods. When the hoof gets caught, Joe’s sympathy moves him forward, but no more than a couple of meters before caution again stays him. Even when Bob Tom begins to rescue the centaur, Joe stays put. It is not until the man-horse finally struggles free, staggers and half falls onto Bob Tom, that Joe explodes from the woods pedaling the Schwinner as fast as he can. The wounded centaur is struggling to get back up, but can’t manage it. Bob Tom, who is on his hands and knees, also is trying to scramble back onto his feet, but because his wings are splayed and the rope which tethers him to the toothless centaur has been shortened so much it is hard for the old man to get his balance. Joe is less than ten meters from the riverman when the injured centaur makes a violent effort to rise and its blood-covered hoof strikes Bob Tom in the head. The old man makes a sound that reminds Joe of kicking a half-deflated soccer ball and collapses, belly down, onto the ground. Joe screams, “No!” as he leaps from the bike. The bike outruns him and smashes into the buildings’ viny walls before the boy can get himself to the riverman’s side. Bob Tom has a massive curved wound on the back of his head, which, despite bleeding profusely, isn’t bleeding enough to keep Joe from seeing crushed white bone.

  Joe barely has his hands on Bob Tom’s skull before the door to the building bursts open and he sees a small ancient, frazzled-haired woman scuttle out faster than the boy can imagine any geri moving. Her mobility is explained when a tall, wild-haired, raggedy boy follows right behind with one arm pushing the old woman forward. Joe’s hands snap back from the old man’s s head when a third figure, a smaller, bleached out version of Prissi, totters out the door walking with the care of a woman who has broken off a heel on her best dress shoes. Something black passes before Joe’s eyes which causes him to think he might be fainting, but an instant later, the teener realizes that he himself has just missed being struck by the panicked flailing of the injured centaur.

  Joe starts up from his knees, but a noise from Bob Tom, more like a gargle than a groan, holds him in place. Before J
oe can decide which friend should be his focus, he hears the geri groaning as she kneels down next to him. Joe looks up to see the wild-haired boy and Prissi trying to get close enough to the writhing centaur to help him without endangering themselves. For no reason that Joe can fathom, the second centaur continues to stand in a motionless stoicism that reminds Joe of geri wingers, too old to fly, waiting for a bi-bus.

  The old woman’s crippled fingers fly over and around Bob Tom’s wound like a butterfly over a patch of flowering cosmos before settling down on the riverman’s skull just past the edges of the wound,

  “Boy, leave Mortos. Help me get him inside.”

  The boy looks from the man-horse thrashing on the ground to Olewan and then back to Prissi. He still hasn’t moved when Olewan barks her command a second time. Joe has just finished carefully folding Bob Tom’s wings against his body when the raggedy boy drops down into a crouch and helps him carefully roll the old man over onto his back so they can carry him. Olewan tells them how she wants the old man lifted when all three of the rescuers realize Bob Tom is still connected to the immobile centaur by the rope tether.

  “Hurry. Free him.”

  Joe realizes that the knot must be centered on the old man’s back between his wing joints. Since he has just gotten the old man onto his back, the teener decides that it will be easier to untie the rope from the centaur’s neck. Before he has gone two steps, the wild-haired boy pulls an ancient jack knife from a pants’ pocket and begins hacking at the rope. Joe steals a glance and sees that Prissi has an arm on the wounded centaur’s shoulder and seems to be telling him something. The man-horse isn’t thrashing, but his leg looks horrible with the poultice of blood and mud it has acquired from crashing about.

  The rope is cut and the two boys are lifting the old man when the catatonic centaur comes out of its fugue state.

  “Help Mortos,” he rumbles.

  Olewan says that she’ll care for the centaur, but not until she tends to the old man. His wound is worse.

  “No. Fix Mortos.”

  “Not now. Later. I have to try to help the old man.”

  “No! Mortos first. Fix him!”

  Olewan signals the boys with nervous hands.

  “Pick him up carefully. I’ll get the door.”

  Before he has taken two steps, Joe’s hands are so slippery with his friend’s blood that isn’t sure he is going to be able to maintain his grip.

  “Help us!” bellows the centaur.

  “Hurry!”

  Joe loses his grip. So does the wild-haired boy. But, it isn’t from hands made slippery from blood. In fury at Olewan’s rejection, the second centaur has bolted forward three steps, reared up and brought in forelegs down on Bob Tom’s torso. Both boys fall back and the maddened centaur rises up and crashes down on the riverman over and over again until the ground grows so wet that the centaur slips. It catches itself before falling, pauses to take in what it has done, then, emitting a noise like a hurricane’s moan, it lumbers across the clearing and disappears into the woods.