Flight Risk

by Jennifer Fenn

  Because I was always failing everything and never got a physical and couldn’t listen to the announcements long enough to hear when tryouts were. “Sports are stupid.”

  Next Mr. Drew showed them how to construct basic water filters out of spare T-shirts and sand, and they all trudged through the firs to a murky creek to test them out. Robert drank greedily from his and wiped cold drops from his chin, amazed it worked.

  “Never, ever drink your own urine,” Mr. Drew told them as they gulped their sand-filtered water, and the guys busted up, Robert doubling over. Mr. Drew held up a hand and waited for them to collect themselves. “Seriously. Enough time alone in the wilderness and you get desperate. Dehydration and fatigue can even make you hallucinate. But urine will dehydrate you. Don’t try to filter anything but water. You should always keep an energy bar or trail mix on your person while hiking or camping, too.”

  Robert raised his hand. He screwed his face up into an approximation of studiousness. “Excuse me, Mr. Drew. You said your own urine. But what about someone else’s piss?”

  They all whooped again.

  Mr. Drew glared and continued. “Even candy will keep you alive and give your body some calories to burn. But something with a little protein is a better choice, and no piss.”

  DECEMBER 2009

  Robert had never had a friend like Dalton. They talked, after lights-out, Dalton game to discuss any random topic flitting through Robert’s head. The merits of the X-Men versus the Avengers. What ink they would tattoo on their calves and forearms. Whose ass they could kick if they ever felt like it (everyone’s). They’d play the band name game until Dalton’s snores floated through the dark.

  “Metallica.”

  “AC/DC.”

  “Coldplay.”

  “I’m going to have to tell Mr. Drew how you’re secretly a girl.”

  When Robert was stumped on a letter, he’d try to slide a made-up name in, but Dalton called bullshit every time:

  “What the hell band is Roadkill?”

  “The Apaches are Indians, dumbass, not a band.”

  “If Killer Bees are a real band, sing one of their songs.”

  One night after Dalton had regaled him with a point-by-point summary of the plot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Robert told Dalton all about the last time he’d seen his dad. The rapping on his window. The way his dad had said the cops were coming for him. How his mom had claimed Robert’s father was a murderer.

  “Don’t you think he could have outrun them, though? The cops?” Robert asked. He picked at the wall, splintering his thumbnail. No answer. Robert added, “I don’t know. I mean, he’s probably not running around the woods, not after all this time. He probably had to settle down somewhere.”

  And then he realized his roommate was asleep.

  * * *

  Christmas Eve was marked by visits from a pastor and a priest, who conducted sparsely attended voluntary services. On Christmas Day, the guys in Maple were corralled in the cafeteria for a screening of District 9, a gift from Sea Brook to its inmates. Robert sat in a folding chair and watched aliens go berserk on Earth. He and Dalton cheered on the Prawns as they spat and hissed. By the next day, Robert couldn’t have said what the movie’s plot was, just that the aliens looked like shrimp. Afterward, the counselors passed out snowflake-patterned gift bags that held a fun-size Snickers bar, a pair of white socks, and a Green. Robert’s was carved with antlers, and this time he didn’t lose it.

  Robert,

  I wish you’d write me back, since I take the time to write to you. Hulk is doing good, but he misses you. I’m almost finished with my real estate law class. I think I’ll get an A, do you believe that? Soon I will be able to visit, and I have a few Christmas presents for you.

  Love,

  Mom

  * * *

  A counselor from Sea Brook contacted Deb and recommended that she also attend counseling, or perhaps a parenting class, to prepare her for Robert’s eventual return home. They could establish new patterns, the counselor said, and she could learn new strategies to manage Robert’s behavior and motivate him in school. When Robert was released, they might benefit from a few joint counseling sessions. Deb wrote down a local psychologist’s phone number and even made a call to her insurance company. But with her minimal benefits, she’d need to kick in a fifty-dollar co-pay per session, and only three total visits would be covered. She was referred to some other program for low-income families seeking mental health care in Seattle. She’d have to apply, and between her late shifts and classes and wherever Robert would end up going to school, she couldn’t imagine schlepping to Seattle three times a week to be told, she was sure, everything she’d ever done wrong as a mother by some psychologist who thought the degrees on his wall meant he knew all about her. She’d apply anyway, she swore, and she’d squeeze it all in, and no one would be able to say she hadn’t tried. But days passed and she still hadn’t found time to log on to the organization’s website and find the forms. Eventually she lost the psychologist’s phone number.

  Interview with Dalton White, Seattle Community College, October 15, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “He straight bounced. They couldn’t keep him locked up! We were on the second floor, and Robert just jumped out the damn window like he was friggin’ Spider-Man. I didn’t hear a thing. I woke up and he’d just vanished, ninja-style.

  “They didn’t know he was gone until morning, and by that time he was long gone. Cops came around with his picture, asking if anybody had any information. Said all kinds of bad things can happen to teenage runaways, and if we knew anything, we better speak up. But nobody knew anything then. Anybody who said anything else was lying. He was gone. No trace. Until he stole that first plane.”

  JANUARY 2010

  He squirreled away a stack of Greens. On days Robert remembered to make his bed, one would be waiting on his pillow like a hotel chocolate bar. The first time he raised his hand in algebra, the teacher slipped him one on his way out the door. He thanked a lunch lady for a steaming scoop of mac ’n’ cheese, and she plonked one on his tray. Sea Brook’s staff ignored his screw-ups and quickly recognized anything he did right. At first Robert thought the whole thing was corny and embarrassing, and he wanted to give this system the finger the way some of the other guys did, clogging the bathrooms’ sinks with the discs and whipping them at each other between classes. But racking up points made each day like a video game, and he couldn’t help but want to score as many as he could.

  The counselors knew how much each guy had earned, but it was up to the students to hold on to them. Robert collected tokens imprinted with rhino horns, sharp antlers, elephant tusks, claws and paws of all kinds. He emptied his pockets at lights-out and dumped them into his sock drawer every night.

  He cashed in tokens here and there for little rewards: a math homework pass, an extra twenty minutes of archery practice, a cold can of Mountain Dew, the best Snickers bar he’d ever tasted. But mostly he was saving them for a trip into the woods, though he’d never have admitted it to Dalton or any of the others.

  In the woods, he wouldn’t be able to see a single wall. He might not even sleep in the tent, if Mr. Drew would let him.

  Robert had been at Sea Brook for eight weeks when a sign-up sheet appeared in the dormitory hallway, Scotch-taped to the wall. Overnight Wilderness Encounter. 50 Greens. Counselor: Mr. Drew. Five lines stretched across the page. One name had already been scrawled in red crayon, bumpy like the cinder block beneath it.

  Robert rushed to his room to count up his loot. He thought he had enough.

  He flung open his bureau’s top drawer.

  His Greens were gone.

  He rifled through the drawer, tossing the dingy socks and thin T-shirts to the floor. He sifted through the piles of paper on his desk. He pulled out the bureau drawer, dumped it onto the tile, and peered into the cavity behind it. Dust, a computer-printed porno picture, an empty baggie. The used
-up contraband of residents past.

  He eyed Dalton’s bureau, wondering. If Dalton caught him snooping through his stuff, Robert would confront an unpleasant living situation at best, an ass-kicking at worst. He whirled around the room, as out of hiding places as in an open field.

  Finally Robert marched to the common area, where Mr. Drew was playing cards with Dalton and a few others. They bet M&M’s, sliding them across the pockmarked table. Dalton gloated over a growing rainbow-hued pile.

  “Yo, Mr. Drew, somebody jacked my tokens.” Robert’s voice seemed too loud.

  Mr. Drew put down his cards and held up his palms like a traffic cop. “Robert, we don’t make accusations.”

  “I’ve been putting all my tokens—”

  “Greens.”

  “Greens. Whatever. I was stashing them with my socks and now they’re gone. Somebody stole them.”

  “Did someone steal them, Robert, or did you lose them?” Mr. Drew asked. He rose from the sagging couch, suddenly towering over Robert. “One of the biggest lessons to learn here is to take responsibility for yourself.”

  “I didn’t lose them!” Robert threw up his hands. But was he positive? He thought of his old locker, the mountain of crumpled papers inside it. Had he lost them? Could he prove someone took them?

  “Who stole them, then? Are you accusing Dalton?” Dalton had put his cards facedown on the table. He stared at his roommate.

  Robert’s yelling had attracted an audience. Guys paused on their way to their rooms, their mouths twitching with stifled smiles. For the first time Robert wondered if he’d acted too proud of scaling the rock wall, of every bull’s-eye his arrows had hit. Could someone have decided to teach him a lesson? Were his fellow inmates tired of him showing them up?

  Or had he just lost them?

  Even if Dalton had taken them, Robert wasn’t going to be a snitch like Joey Kovach. “I’m not saying it was Dalton. I don’t think Dalton even cares enough to take them.”

  “So who else had access to your room, then?” Mr. Drew’s face softened and Robert felt the squirmy embarrassment of his pity. “Could you have moved them and forgotten?”

  “Somebody took them!” Robert insisted. “You guys know how many I had. Why can’t you just give me back what I had?”

  “Dude, I swear I didn’t take your Greens,” Dalton said. He lowered his voice. “You stay here long enough, they make you go on the camping trips. You ain’t really gotta buy them.”

  “I don’t care about a camping trip,” Robert lied. “What I care about is somebody coming into my room and stealing my shit!”

  Mr. Drew just looked at him. Dalton picked up his cards again. The small crowd began to disperse. Robert hated to think about what they’d say about him later. Kelley’s a baby, whining about his stupid Greens.

  “Forget it,” Robert said loudly. “I probably lost them. Who gives a shit.”

  Mr. Drew patted his shoulder. Robert stiffened. “You’ll have plenty of chances to earn more. I bet you get some this afternoon.”

  “Whatever,” Robert replied.

  By the time he made it back to his room, four names filled the sign-up sheet.

  That afternoon, while Mr. Drew demonstrated how to use a compass to find north, Robert looked out toward the rumbling highway, the roar like waves.

  * * *

  Dalton was to be released and shipped back to Seattle in ten days, and just as he’d predicted, Mr. Drew was making him go on the excursion. His name appeared on the sign-up sheet, at the very bottom, in someone else’s handwriting.

  * * *

  The trailer was awfully quiet without Robert. She’d thought she’d at least be able to concentrate on her homework, but instead Deb found herself talking to Hulk.

  “Should we clean his room?” she asked the dog. “He’ll be mad if we do. But it smells like a locker room in there.”

  Hulk barked.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  The dog tilted his head at her.

  She sighed and turned up the television to keep her company. She was supposed to be reading about tenant rights, but her mind kept wandering to Robert’s eventual homecoming.

  He’d be eighteen by the time he returned.

  He’d be a man.

  She had already sent one man into the woods. And she never saw him again.

  Why had she let Rob Kelley talk her into dubbing her son a junior? At the time, she’d hoped that Rob’s insistence on passing on his name meant he’d intended on turning himself around. On being a real father. Now the name seemed like a curse.

  Of course she hadn’t really thrown away her computer’s power cord, like she’d told Robert. They weren’t giving those damn things away like perfume samples. Deb left the kitchen table and booted up the desktop. Its hum filled the trailer. She googled local vocational training programs, flipped to a back page in her real estate notebook, and started writing down phone numbers and email addresses. She searched used car listings. She jotted down the next three GED testing dates.

  She toggled between an ad for a 2000 Honda Civic and the course listings at Shoreline Community College. Her son was always on the computer. Maybe graphic design would spark his interest.

  She darted from window to window until a misaimed click opened the shortcut for the flight simulator. For a second the monitor darkened, and the ghostly shadows of her nose and eyes emerged.

  Then Deb blinked at the screen’s sudden brightness. She tapped on the keyboard, but the view from the cockpit stayed spread before her. She clicked and clicked, and then suddenly the gray runway and the grass that framed it were whooshing by. A buzzer blared as she piloted straight into the field, never getting aloft. Her plane ground to a halt and then sat for a few minutes, the grass emitting a radioactive glow.

  Try again? the program asked her.

  “No,” she said, but then a menu popped up. Favorite destinations.

  Deb scanned the list. Barely a continent left out.

  Robert’s virtual alter ego had crisscrossed the globe, his path carving the world into jagged pieces. Such sweeping arcs compared to the well-worn trails he’d actually been traveling. School to the trailer. Trailer to school. Back and forth, back and forth.

  Like if he could have, he’d have vanished into thin air himself. Jetted away to New York. Egypt. Paris. Alaska. Afghanistan.

  “I’m sure he’s on lockdown,” she told Hulk. “He can’t go anywhere. Where would he go, anyway?”

  She’d call, though, on Monday. Ask to talk to him. Just to make sure.

  FEBRUARY 3, 2010

  He went to his classes and his therapy sessions and shuffled down the corridors and stared out the window and stood around outside and plodded through each afternoon’s survival training, and finally one night when Dalton offered him a joint, Robert took a long drag and choked and coughed and hit it again. And they passed the joint back and forth, not talking, the paper getting sticky, his throat dry and clotted.

  He got angrier and angrier about losing the Greens. How could he have lost anything in a room this tiny? He was banned from the excursion, just like he’d been banned from the library and then banned from his whole school. And what had been his crime, exactly?

  How big was this room? Bigger than six by eight? Did it matter? A cell was a cell.

  Dalton laughed and coughed. “You need to slow up, dude. Your eyes look like you’re trippin’.”

  “When are they gonna have another camping trip?” Robert croaked.

  Dalton shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not for a while. It’s gonna get too cold.”

  “I’m not waiting,” he said, and the second he heard his words, he knew he meant them.

  While Dalton snored, he stuffed his khakis and white shirts back into the crumpled grocery bag he’d brought from home and slid into his sneakers. He wouldn’t go back to Yannatok and that cramped trailer, splitting at the seams with his and his mother’s frustrations, like their pent-up anger and secrets were gouging the
leaking, rotting roof, searching for skyward escape. He’d disappear into California, where he’d trade Yannatok’s waves for some real surf. Or maybe he’d camp out in the woods for a while. His dad had pulled it off, a Houdini in camo. Why couldn’t Robert?

  His mom would worry. Served her right.

  About eight feet stretched from the windowsill to the ground. The thorny bushes tangled around the building were meant to discourage the jump, but Sea Brook wasn’t alarmed, wasn’t guarded. The reason only now occurred to him: there wasn’t anywhere to go. Beach on one side and timber on the other. Prisons didn’t always need bars.

  He slung his bag over his shoulder and took a deep breath. Then Robert swung out the window, feet first, landing in the prickly brush below. The branches broke and brambles tore at his calves and arms, but the night air cleared his lungs, refreshing as a cool drink of water. He looked back up at his window, where he’d launched himself from, half expecting to see Dalton gaping in amazement. But just like every time he’d surfed a giant wave, every time he’d landed a simulated plane, Robert celebrated this victory alone.

  He kicked his shoes off, crammed them into the bag, and let the wet grass stick to his feet. Quieter that way, as he sprinted for the trees. When he reached them he didn’t hesitate before crashing into the woods. Beneath a woven cover of branches, Robert paused to catch his breath, resting his hands on his knees and waiting for a siren, a police car’s revolving lights, a barking K-9 unit, but only the full moon and a scattering of stars beamed down on him. Waves crashed beyond the boughs. He wriggled his shoes back on and headed that way, pushing aside branches like curtains.

  He had expected the woods to wrap miles along the coast, a pointy maze to Canada, but the beach unspooled through the thinning trees only a few minutes later. The shore was deserted. Rows of beach houses hibernated, dark and quiet. Robert ran for the ocean, kicking up the spray, punching the air, miming a watery victory dance.