Born to Fly

by Michael Ferrari

“At first, when it knocked our boat over, we thought it was the Genny,” I blabbered excitedly. “But then Kenji and I saw it. A submarine!”

  “What?” Deputy Steyer seemed genuinely concerned.

  I gave Kenji an I-told-you-so look.

  But Mom wasn’t buying it. “That’s the last straw, young lady. To your room.”

  “But Mom—”

  “Get!”

  I clutched the deputy’s sleeve. “Deputy Steyer, you’ve got to believe us.”

  “Bird!” Mom hollered. Then she turned to the deputy to explain. “She makes up these stories because she misses her father.”

  “I understand,” the deputy said.

  Kenji shook his head, and now it was his turn to give me the I-told-you-so look.

  “I think I’d better take your little friend home,” said the deputy.

  Little friend? What made him think Kenji was my friend?

  “Kenji?” I said. Kenji looked at me kind of funny. “Go on. Tell him.”

  But Kenji just stood there, silent as one of those monks who take a vow of silence for God. The deputy tugged Kenji’s wet shirtsleeve toward the door.

  “That’s the first time you’ve called me by my name,” Kenji said to me before he was led out the door.

  Later on, after Margaret and I had gone to bed, I got up and opened the window to search the night sky. Even the full moon couldn’t brighten how dark the world looked to me right then. The night air creeping in chilled Margaret, and she rolled over, half asleep.

  “For gosh sakes, Bird. Close the stupid window.”

  I closed it and climbed back into my bed.

  Kenji. Ken-ji. Kenj-i? Kenji. I guess it wasn’t such a weird name after you said it enough. I mean, if you thought about it, Bird might have seemed like a pretty silly name to some people. From my nightstand, I took a framed photo of me and Dad standing next to Mr. Watson’s airplane. Friend. That was kind of a funny word, too. What was the i doing in there? But like Dad used to say, some things don’t make sense, you just accept them the way they are. I held the picture close, shut my eyes, and tried to get some sleep.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? It was a submarine!” I told them.

  Minnie and Libby were fussing with their hair in the bathroom mirror. I fidgeted nervously as Susan considered what to do with my Amelia Earhart hairdo.

  “It was right here,” I insisted. “In Geneseo Bay.” But they just laughed, ignoring me.

  “It’s too short for ribbons or barrettes.” Susan was running out of ideas. “How do you usually wear it?”

  “Under my hat,” I said, giving up.

  “Did you guys start your reports yet?” Minnie said.

  “No,” snapped Libby. She knew Minnie was only asking so she could brag.

  “Well, I’m done with mine on President Roosevelt,” said Minnie. “My dad let me use some of his district attorney’s stationery to write it.”

  “Yeah, well, my dad said Roosevelt’s a Communist,” Libby retorted.

  “He is not,” I protested loudly. Then I asked, “What’s a Communist?”

  The other girls looked at each other, thinking.

  “Uh, you know,” said Libby, “like a pianist. Only with communes.”

  “Oh,” I said, still confused.

  All at once we were interrupted by a ruckus outside in the hall. There was a loud slam, and then someone came flying through the girls’ bathroom door. A boy.

  “Eeeek!” Susan screamed.

  I turned to see that it was Kenji—with his pants yanked to his ankles—suffering more of the same humiliating Farley Peck stuff that used to be reserved for me.

  “Get out of here, you Peeping Tom!” Minnie demanded.

  “Sorry,” Kenji said. He struggled with his pants and tried the door—which, of course, was being held shut by Farley and Raymond.

  “Now!” Minnie ordered. “Or we’ll get Mrs. Simmons and you’ll really be in trouble.”

  Kenji yanked the door with all his might. Only by this time, Farley and Raymond had let go and it cracked him pretty good in the face. Farley, Raymond, and everybody else started laughing—everybody, that is, except me. Kenji gathered up what was left of his dignity and bolted away. I followed the girls as they tumbled out into the hallway.

  “What’s so funny?” I protested over their laughter.

  “You have to ask?” Libby snapped.

  “Say, whose side are you on, anyway?” Minnie added.

  Farley flashed his crooked yellow-toothed grin and poked his grimy finger in my chest. “Yeah, traitor. Whose side?”

  I yanked Susan’s stupid barrettes out of my hair and tossed them right in Minnie’s face. “Not yours,” I told them.

  I caught up with Kenji outside, in the schoolyard. He was slumped down behind a tree.

  “Hey.”

  He didn’t answer. Just turned away and finished buckling his belt.

  “Why don’t you tell Principal Hartwig?” I said, trying to offer some sort of solution.

  “Would it make any difference?”

  I thought about it. Then I shook my head. “Naw.”

  He rose to his feet and started walking away.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “What?”

  “How come you didn’t back me up and tell the deputy about the sub?” I asked.

  “If that flatfoot didn’t buy it from a smart egg like you, why would he believe me?” he said.

  “Smart? You think I’m smart?”

  “Sure. You know all that stuff about airplanes, don’t you?”

  I felt funny inside. No one except Dad ever made me feel like it was a good thing to know stuff about airplanes.

  “Face it, nobody would ever believe the two of us,” he said.

  He said us.

  For some reason, I liked the sound of that. It meant we were kind of the same. Maybe if you were weird like me, it was best to be friends with someone else who was kind of weird, too. Or maybe it just meant I wasn’t so weird after all.

  “Say, what if we could prove it?” I said. “About the spies, I mean.”

  “Spies? What makes you think it was spies? How do you know it wasn’t an American sub?”

  “Because it had a three-blade propeller, remember?” I told him matter-of-factly “Our subs have four blades.”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. “How do you know this stuff?”

  I hung my head. Maybe we weren’t the same. “I’m just weird, I guess.”

  “Naw. You’re not.” He nudged me with his shoulder. “No more than anyone else, anyway.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what? You’re okay, Kenji,” I told him.

  “You mean, for a Jap?”

  “No.” I nudged him back. “I mean, for a boy.”

  This made both of us crack a smile.

  “Friends?” I asked.

  Kenji nodded. “Friends,” he said. Then his eyes lit up. “You know, if we could prove there were spies in the bay, we’d be heroes.”

  “You think? Heroes?”

  “Sure. I bet they’d give us anything we wanted.” His eyes seemed to inflate with the possibilities.

  I thought for a split second about the one thing I wanted most in the whole world right then. It was easy. “Maybe they’d send my dad home?”

  “I’m sure they would,” he said.

  “All right. Let’s do it,” I told him. “Let’s go catch us a spy submarine.” I stuck out my hand and we spit-shook on it.

  “It was a coil of copper radio wire or something, right here, I swear,” I told Kenji. We had traveled most of the way along the south bay shore with no luck. I got the sense he was starting to doubt me. “One of these days I’m gonna take a picture, and then people will have to believe me.”

  “I believe you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  He got a mischievous look on his face, like after he hit the home run against Farley. “You know, I’ve
got a camera.”

  “That’s great. Let’s set it up.”

  But then Kenji shook his head. “What am I thinking? That sub’s not gonna show up in the daytime. Too easy to spot.”

  “But it might at night,” I pointed out.

  “Sure. But the only way to get a picture at night is with a bright flash, like lightning or something.”

  “Wait.” I stopped us in our tracks. “There.” In the mud about three yards ahead of us there was a trail of man-sized footprints leading into the woods. I didn’t know who or what had made them, but there was nothing back there but old tree forts. We nodded to each other, then followed them.

  We were marching through the woods tracking the footprints when Kenji kicked something.

  I knelt down and found it. “I guess our spy got hungry.”

  It was an empty baked beans can, raggedly cut open with a knife. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved that whoever we were tracking was human and liked beans, or scared ’cause he had a knife and we didn’t.

  Then we heard rustling in the woods and I quickly dragged Kenji by the shirt into the weeds, where we lay flat. We peeked through the weeds and saw someone stooped low, carrying a knapsack. I couldn’t make out his face, but I would have recognized those muddy, patched-together overalls anywhere.

  “It’s Farley,” I whispered.

  “Farley? What’s he doing?”

  “Shhh.” I shook my head. We waited a few seconds for Farley to pass by, and decided to follow him.

  A short ways into the woods, Farley stopped below an old tree house, now overgrown with oak leaves. It was the one Jack Smithers and Toby Kucharski had built five years before. But I knew they hadn’t used it in a while and wouldn’t be using it anytime soon. They were both in the Army now. We watched Farley climb up, carrying the knapsack. But he wasn’t alone. The wood-plank door opened and he was greeted by a skinny, bearded man, who emerged slowly from inside the tree house. Farley handed his black-handled hunting knife to the man.

  Kenji and I hid ourselves behind a tree.

  “Farley? A spy?” Kenji whispered.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. That’s his father.”

  Kenji took another look. Mr. Peck kept his head bowed, like he was ashamed to look Farley in the eye while he stuffed his mouth with some bread.

  “What’s he doing up in a tree?” Kenji asked.

  “I don’t know. I heard he got called by the draft board last month, and then disappeared.”

  “Whaddya know, the big bully’s dad is a yellow-bellied draft dodger,” Kenji whispered with a certain glee. “It figures.”

  Draft dodger. That made me think about my dad, probably far away on some ship at sea, and I was suddenly mad as heck. “It’s not fair,” I blurted out. “My dad had to go.”

  Thanks to my big mouth, Farley heard me. He scanned the woods … and spotted us. Farley scrambled down from the tree house, and Kenji and I took off.

  “Go that way!” I told Kenji. We split up, going on opposite sides of a big weeping willow tree, and of course Farley stuck with me.

  I was pretty quick and all, but Farley was still a year older. He tackled me at the woods’ edge. “Where do you think you’re going, Jap lover?” He got hold of my collar and throttled me.

  “To the police, draft dodger,” I spit back at him.

  He shrank back a little. “You d-d-do and I’ll pound you.”

  Suddenly Kenji pounced on Farley’s back. “You ‘d-d-do’ and we’ll tell the cops you helped your dad escape.”

  “You rat fink.” Farley swatted him off like a fly and then let me go. “I ought to pound you right now.”

  Kenji helped me up. “Come on, Bird.”

  “Wait! Listen. If you keep quiet, I won’t take your lunch money for a month.” Farley actually looked scared.

  “You’re nuts,” Kenji told him. He grabbed me and we kept walking.

  Farley ran and stopped in front of us. “Two months.”

  “Forget it. Your dad’s a draft dodger,” I told him, poking my finger in his chest.

  “Shut up,” Farley said. “It’s not his fault. He just isn’t a killer.”

  “My dad went, and he’s not a killer,” I said.

  “Of course he is, Birdbrain. Killing is what soldiers do,” Farley said.

  That caught me off guard. I guess I had never really thought about what my father would have to do in the war.

  “My d-d-dad’s not hurting anybody,” Farley went on.

  “He’s hurting everybody, stupid,” Kenji informed him. “Especially you. You’re ashamed of him.”

  The truth of what Kenji said hit Farley worse than if he had been socked in the gut. I mean, he almost looked like he was about to cry, for Pete’s sake.

  “Leave him alone, Kenji.” I don’t know why I said it. Then I told Farley, “We’ll think about it.”

  “What?” said Kenji.

  “In the meantime, Farley, you promise to leave us alone,” I said. “And make sure everyone else does, too.”

  Farley thought it over.

  “Promise,” I said.

  Then he nodded, even though I could tell he didn’t want to. “All right.”

  “What the heck did you do that for?” Kenji demanded as we walked side by side. I hadn’t been paying attention to how far we had walked, and now I noticed we were on the dingier side of town.

  “I don’t know. It was the first time I ever felt sorry for him,” I said with a shrug.

  “I don’t. If my big brother had deserted, they’d have shot him,” Kenji said.

  “You have a brother?” I said, surprised.

  Kenji bit his lip, like the truth had just slipped out. “Uh, yeah. His name’s Kiyo. He joined the army the day after the war broke out.”

  “How come you never told me about him?”

  “I don’t know,” Kenji said. “I haven’t seen him in a year.”

  “I guess you must miss him.”

  “Yeah,” Kenji said, turning away.

  He stopped out front of a run-down building with a broken porch. I remembered it now. My mom said it used to be some kind of a saloon for ladies, until Minnie’s grandma got it closed down. Now it was called Francine’s Rooming House.

  “You live here?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Kenji said. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said, not really telling the truth. It wasn’t exactly what I’d call a home, but I guess it was probably the only place in town where he and his uncle could stay. I mean, they were Japanese, after all.

  “I guess I’ll see ya.” Kenji started to head in.

  “Hey. What about the camera?” I said.

  “Do you really want to see it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He hesitated. “Okay, come on in.” He led me around to the back door.

  We walked down a long hall. A lot of the doors were open. It was dark and it smelled kind of funny, from all the weird food cooking in the different rooms. We went past the bathroom and several rooms, one with a Negro family, several with old people speaking like Mr. Ramponi, and then one with people speaking another language that I couldn’t understand.

  When we finally got to the set of rooms where Kenji lived with his uncle, I was surprised because it was much nicer inside. It wasn’t very big, but there were a lot of fancy decorations and stuff. Kenji set down his jacket over a small photo on the shelf and closed the door.

  “I’ll get the camera,” he said, and he went into the bedroom. While he was gone I looked around. I couldn’t resist going to the shelf to uncover the photo. It was of a Japanese man and woman, pretending to smile as they stood in front of a military-style hut in the desert. Next to it was a stack of letters. The envelopes were all cut open and stamped INSPECTED BY U.S. GOVERNMENT. The return address included a strange word: Manzanar. I put the letters back, covered the picture back up, and wandered around.

  In the kitchen I saw a stack of cardboard cylinders
next to some colored paper and a jar of black powder, like pepper.

  “What are you making, dynamite?” I asked.

  Kenji called out from the other room, “My uncle makes fireworks for the Fourth of July.”

  On the wall there was a cool movie poster for a sailor picture called The Long Voyage Home. Looking closer, I noticed that the poster was actually signed by John Wayne.

  “Say, do you know John Wayne?” I asked.

  I heard Kenji digging in a box in the other room. “Sort of. I mean, I met him once. He was filming a movie where my dad’s boat was docked.”

  “So you’re from California?”

  He called out, “Um, yeah. San Pedro—I mean, Hollywood.”

  “My mom calls it ‘the place where dreams come true,’” I said.

  “For some people, I guess.” He walked in and handed me a shiny new Graflex camera, the kind newspaper reporters used. “Here it is.”

  I took a look through the viewfinder. “Wow. I saw one of these in Life magazine.”

  “You like it?” he said.

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “It’s got a high-speed shutter and universal focus, so all your shots come out sharp.” I got the feeling he was showing off a bit. “But even with a flashbulb at night it’s probably still too dark to work,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess I didn’t think about that.” I glanced at the cardboard tubes on the table and it came to me. “Say, what if you shot off some of your uncle’s fireworks? You know, like a giant flashbulb?”

  “Hey. That might actually work.”

  I spotted something through the viewfinder, across the room. “Is that your uncle’s phonograph?”

  “Nope. It’s mine.”

  “No way. Your very own?” I didn’t get it. If his family could afford to give him all this stuff, what was he doing living in this place?

  “Sure. What do you want to hear? Some bebop or some boogie-woogie?”

  “I don’t know. Anything,” I told him.

  He started fanning through a bookshelf of records.

  “We hardly ever listen to records anymore since my dad left,” I said. “Mom said our phonograph needs a new needle, but I think it’s because the music makes her too sad.”

  Kenji held up an old record. He dusted off the cover and said “Yeah,” like he knew exactly what I meant. The cover had a really goofy drawing of a man and woman riding a bicycle and looking like they were about to kiss. It made me think of those corny old love songs from when my dad and mom were young.