Flight Risk

by Jennifer Fenn

  The sheriff finished his drink and turned off the show before its conclusion. He stomped back into his shoes, his toe throbbing, and into his car, driving the streets of Yannatok in the dark, searching for a light, a shadow, a plume of smoke. His own personal bear, a kid who could not be caught.

  Travis Tennant was probably kicking up his feet at the Pine Tavern, celebrating his TV debut. Holt cruised past the airstrips once, twice, three times. Somebody at Tomkins, probably Walt, had smartened up and set up floodlights, white orbs beaming over the runway. Holt banged once on the steering wheel, hung a sharp right, circled around the airport’s parking lot. Thing was, those lights wouldn’t give Kelley a minute’s pause. The sun was peeking over the trees anyway, pink webbing the clouds.

  He headed for the Yannatok Bridge, and there, lit up in the sunrise, was new graffiti, sprayed again in the same spot the Parks Department had power washed. WWRF. The R seemed larger this time, rising above the other letters’ tips, its legs practically skimming the water. R for Robert, he was so sure of it. But then what about the Ws, the F? Bright red paint again.

  He was going to catch this kid, get that bridge cleaned up if he had to scale it his goddamn self, and then drive right over it and off this island.

  His phone rang. A number he didn’t know lit up the display.

  What could it be, at this hour? Nothing good. He prayed he wasn’t about to hear about a fourth wrecked plane. A teenage boy riddled with bullets.

  He answered. “Sheriff.”

  “What do you think he’ll get? If you catch him?”

  That voice. Scratched as an old record. The only person who’d ask him that question, who’d even thought to ask about what would happen to Robert Jackson Kelley if he was still alive when they’d all moved on to the next story.

  His mother, of course.

  “In terms of a sentence?” Holt paused and pulled the car over, clicking on the hazards. “I can’t say for sure. And I can’t make you any promises. But I will tell you this. Right now, nobody’s dead. Nobody’s hurt.” He weighed his words. “With your job you know how quickly that can change. Without anybody truly meaning for it to.”

  “I do know.”

  Silence. What did she know? Whatever it was, she was close to telling, if he played his cards right.

  “Ms. MacPherson? Deb? I saw you on television. I know you tried.”

  “Not enough.” Silence again. “He’s here. He’s outside. I’ll stall him if I have to.” Her voice caught. “Don’t hurt him. Please.”

  “I won’t. I won’t hurt him. I’m close by. I’ll be there in—”

  She hung up.

  The cruiser’s tires screeched as Holt hooked a left toward the trailer park.

  * * *

  The trailer rose before Robert like a mirage. He stumbled toward it, his feet so heavy he thought he must be leaving a trail of deep footprints.

  Was anybody home? The shades were drawn, as always. He didn’t know what time it was.

  Deb’s car was in the driveway.

  Robert’s head suddenly swam. He sank onto the porch step. Dark clouds eclipsed his vision.

  Hulk bounded around the trailer’s corner, trailing his leash. Why didn’t his mom tie him up or bring him inside? Robert didn’t think Hulk would run away, but still. The scrappy dog would lose a fight with a bear or a pissed-off raccoon. What if he got picked up by the wrong person? Deb shouldn’t let him run wild.

  “Good boy,” Robert murmured. He scratched the dog’s back, behind his ears, under his collar. Hulk licked his chin appreciatively. Robert could already picture them on Tijuana’s shore, Hulk’s fur blowing in the salty spray, his ears alert as he tracked the swooping gulls. Robert would buy them each a soft pretzel.

  “Stop! Put your hands up!”

  Robert didn’t turn around to see who it was. He started for the black thicket behind the trailer, but this time he was running through wet concrete, his clothes heavy as a suit of armor. Every breath a wound. He groaned, grunted as he pushed forward.

  Hulk followed him to the trees, but wouldn’t go any farther. The dog stood at the woods’ edge, barking and scratching at the ground. His tags jingled. He might as well have been pointing right at his owner.

  They caught him just past the tree line.

  A dozen guys with masks and vests and guns, shades of black and gray from head to toe. A shield emblazoned with white letters. Police. Only one he recognized. The sheriff. Out of breath. Running.

  “Holt!” Robert yelled. “What’s good?”

  The squad drew their guns. “Homeland Security! Put your hands up! Now!”

  Robert spread his arms wide.

  “Get down on the ground!”

  Robert took a few steps back. “I don’t have anything! Holt, I don’t have anything!”

  “He doesn’t have anything,” Holt told the other officers. “Let him surrender!”

  Travis Tennant crashed through brush, trailed by a guy shouldering a camera. “Step back! He’s a terrorist! He could have a bomb!”

  “A terrorist?” Robert said. He laughed and choked, coughing. A bomb-wielding terrorist? He’d never been near a bomb in his life.

  “Step back,” one of the soldiers yelled, and Robert wasn’t sure if he was ordering him or Tennant. One of the guys tried to pull Tennant back, and Robert instinctively leaned away and dropped his hands.

  They charged him. A knee in Robert’s back, blows raining on his neck, his shoulders. His chest ignited. His knees were hamburger. He couldn’t tell if one guy was on him or twenty. He heard Holt repeat himself: “He doesn’t have anything! He’s not going to shoot!”

  The biggest guy knelt on his chest, held his flailing arms. Robert struggled like a fish dropped on a boat’s deck. Pine needles scratched his neck, his elbows. After all this, to be caught on the ground, pinned down like a wriggling insect. He wished he could have at least been shot down out of the sky.

  Tennant’s camera lens was only a few inches from his face. The footage might be on the news. CNN. The Internet. Embedded in a link Mira Wohl would click on, sparking to life on her pink phone. Beamed into his mom’s living room, the bar his dad had hunkered down in so many nights so long ago. The waves carrying it would ride into the sky, out into space, where they’d bounce around forever.

  He had one chance before they wrote the ending for him.

  Robert grinned, his lip a fat, split worm. He winked at the camera, a bruise already shadowing his eye. “Want a lollipop?”

  They yanked him up and walked him past the trailers. He wobbled, lurched.

  “Mom!” Robert yelled out. His throat was shredded, his voice cracking. The handcuffs scraped his wrists raw as he struggled. Blood dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt. “Mom!”

  “Shut up!” Tennant screamed.

  “Mr. Tennant, one more outburst and I’m going to arrest you myself,” Sheriff Holt yelled. He and Tennant lagged behind, arguing.

  “Can I talk to my mom? Can I make sure my dog gets tied up? He’s gonna run away!” Robert swung around, left and right, trying to see the sheriff. He stopped walking, dragging his feet as the men pushed him along. Had he just seen the curtains move? Was his mom home? “Shit! Dude, can I just talk to my mom for a minute?”

  His shoe’s sole split open. He dropped to his knees and refused to go any farther. “Mom! I’m sorry!”

  The guys laughed as they pushed him toward the police car.

  * * *

  When Robert’s father had vanished, Deb had looked away before he’d dived into the forest. This time she made herself watch. She told herself that a fraction of her penance would be to see her son in cuffs and hauled away.

  Deb pulled back the curtain just in time to see Robert being marched through the yard. She crouched, peeking over the sill, not wanting to be seen herself. Not wanting to answer any questions. Not knowing if she could even speak through the stone in her throat.

  She gasped at his bloody lip, his blackened eye, the scr
atches that vined up his forearms. The grime smeared all over his sweatshirt, his pants, his skin. The pine needles in his hair. She saw his shirt ride up as he struggled and caught a glimpse of his too-skinny chest, the ladder of his ribs.

  He looked so small, the officers so enormous. Did they have to push him? Did they have to have grab his arms, his shoulders, so roughly? She could practically feel each new bruise. Holt had promised her they wouldn’t hurt her son, but she couldn’t find him through her narrow slice of window.

  His gaping shoe. Deb’s heart practically stopped. His dingy socks. They looked so exposed, so vulnerable. A tattered white flag, signaling Robert’s surrender.

  She saw him yelling, his mouth wide, but she couldn’t make out the words. She pressed a hand to her own mouth, fearing he had howled in pain.

  But when Deb realized he was saying he was sorry, that he was apologizing to her, that was when she finally had to turn away.

  From the Seattle Times’s website, in the comments section for the Times’s article “‘Lollipop Kid’ Apprehended by Homeland Security,” February 15, 2010

  Posted by AJ_Parton93 at 9:48 a.m., February 15, 2010

  They can go ahead and put him in jail he’ll get out anyway

  Posted by AmericanIron2020 at 11:43 a.m., February 15, 2010

  How’s he ever gonna pay back all the people he’s stolen from? Vandalism, theft, destroying other people’s property—it’s not a joke.

  Posted by Nitro_Shootout at 4:14 p.m., February 15, 2010

  He should run for sheriff of Yannatok. He’d win. And he’d probably do a better job.

  FEBRUARY 16, 2010

  Three counts of piloting an aircraft without a valid airman’s certificate. Three counts of aviation theft, a felony. Two counts of breaking and entering. Foreign transport of a stolen aircraft. Smashing that camera at Tomkins earned him destruction of property. The public defender had gotten any charges associated with violating his diversion agreement dropped.

  The judge denied Robert bail, not that Deb would have been able to pay it. They were going to keep Robert in a Seattle prison until the trial. The judge didn’t trust that the cell in Yannatok, or Sheriff Holt, could hold him. And he certainly couldn’t go back to the trailer with Deb.

  He was a flight risk.

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

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “So here’s what really happened.

  “He gave them total hell when they finally took him down. Took a whole bunch of cops and soldiers to get the job done, and Robert went down swingin’. He wasn’t a fighter, everybody knew that, but they cornered him, and he wasn’t gonna go easy. Gave Travis Tennant the business end of his own camera, right in the face. Pow! And the sheriff? He had scratches all over him, his ear half torn off, like a bear had ripped him up.”

  MARCH 2010

  In prison Robert’s goal was to not look at or speak to a single person. No Dalton in this bunch. The only person who didn’t scare the shit out of him was his cellmate, Stan, an older guy and pretty quiet. Stan was in for assault and robbery. He’d been in and out of prison for decades.

  “I got a son, too.” He nodded at Robert. “Probably about your age now. Probably gettin’ into all kinds of trouble, too. Hasn’t been around to visit in a long time.” He laughed, a veteran smoker’s hoarse, phlegmy rumble. His teeth were yellow and sparse. “Next time I see him will probably be out there in the yard. We’ll bump into each other.”

  Robert wished he had some tattoos.

  He knew what happened in prison. He tried to plan for what he’d do if Stan came on to him, or if a bunch of guys jumped him in the cafeteria. His plans had always involved running before. Now he didn’t know what to do.

  The prison doctor who treated his two broken toes and his split lip and his sprained ankle and his bruised ribs and his burns and his concussion and his whiplash said there was an old Adderall prescription in his medical file, and asked him if he wanted it filled. Robert agreed. He tongued the pills for a week at a time, then sold them cheap to his cellmate, who in turn resold them to some younger guys. He used the money to buy paper and a pen. Robert sketched out potential tats, ones he thought he could give himself with the pen, but all his ideas seemed too goofy to permanently etch on his skin. Spider-Man. The Incredible Hulk. Wings.

  * * *

  He pled guilty. No other choice. The public defender’s strategy was focused on proving Robert could be molded into an asset to society, and winning him the lightest sentence possible. The judge, she explained, would have a lot of leeway with his sentence. He might get away with time served, probation, and community service. After all, he was a nonviolent offender. She told Robert to work on a letter to the community, a statement about how sorry he was and the lessons he’d learned from his irresponsible behavior. About how he would make restitution and amends.

  He spread out in his top bunk and tapped the pen against the paper. He scratched out opening after opening. Dear everybody. Dear community. Dear island. To whoever ends up reading this stupid thing.

  Dear Mom.

  He pushed his pen into the wall’s cinder-block crags and reminisced about his old high school ISS room’s cardboard cubicles.

  JUNE 2010

  The. Hearings. Were. So. Slow.

  He’d pled guilty, so he wasn’t sure why this whole thing was dragging on and on. Not since school had Robert had to sit still in one room for so long and try to listen to someone talk. That he was the subject of the droning and lecturing did not make it any easier.

  Robert tried to guess the judge’s age. Sixty? Seventy? A hundred and thirty? His red bulbous nose matched his equally red and shiny bald head. His eyes bored into Robert if he so much as breathed loudly.

  The public defender had to prod him to sit up, look at the witness, stop spinning in his chair, stop tapping the pen, stop cracking his knuckles, stop jiggling his knee. One day he was chewing a piece of gum, a prison commissary purchase, and his lawyer had demanded he spit the wad into her hand. She held it for a while, tucked under her fingers; right before recess, she stuck it under the table.

  She leaned in and hissed, “You’re annoying the judge.”

  Robert shrugged. “I’m pretty sure the judge hates me no matter what.”

  The public defender threw up her hands and walked away. Robert wasn’t sure what to do, so he stayed in his chair, spinning back and forth, for the entire recess.

  Photos from the crash sites were a highlight. Robert sat up for those. Holy shit, were those planes wrecked! And the fire! Action movie flames! These photos were the best look he’d ever had at it. He’d been there, of course, but as the sentencing went on and the witnesses paraded forward, Robert started to feel like they were talking about someone else entirely. There’d been a bandit on the loose, a menace stalking the streets and the beaches. Some dude who could cause all this destruction and walk away.

  The Lollipop Kid.

  He only wished someone had filmed it.

  * * *

  Holt came to visit him. He wore his uniform, his badge. His walkie-talkie crackled.

  Robert hadn’t been to the visiting area before. Holt was the first person who’d come to see him. He approached an empty booth, his orange jumpsuit swishing as he walked.

  In every cubicle, guys leaned forward, noses practically fogging the glass between them and their visitors. Some whispered. Some laughed. One cried.

  On the other side, a little girl in a ponytail and tap shoes danced as her mother angled the phone toward the floor and the father stood so he could see her clacking feet.

  Robert sat in the booth. He and Holt both picked up their phones.

  Holt spoke first. “How are you? Health-wise?”

  Robert decided to smile. “Good. Except for the brain damage. Who are you again?”

  Holt didn’t laugh, but Robert swore he was wrestling a grin. “Is there anything you need?”


  Robert couldn’t resist. “A saw. A shovel.”

  “I meant socks. Soap. Access to a shrink.” Holt sighed. “I don’t know if anyone has talked to you about this, but people get their GEDs in prison. Some leave with a college diploma. Some end up reading more books than I ever have.” Holt leaned forward. “In a way, you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever come across. I bet you haven’t heard that very often. Would you be interested in starting off with your GED?”

  “I guess. Yes,” Robert revised quickly. He paused. “But don’t you think I’m getting out? Not right away, obviously, but I mean, you don’t think I’ll have time to earn a whole college degree, do you?”

  Holt dodged his eyes. They didn’t speak. Across the room the kid in the tap shoes finished her dance, arms spread wide. Her father set down his phone to applaud. Then the girl started the routine all over again.

  Robert’s throat hurt when he asked, “Is my mom, like, not allowed to come see me or something?”

  Holt leaned back in his seat. “She hasn’t come?”

  Robert shook his head. He couldn’t answer. A boulder was lodged in his throat.

  “I can only guess that she feels very badly about how everything’s turned out, and she doesn’t know what to say about it,” Holt finally said. His gaze was on the girl as she jumped and twirled. “Maybe she needs more time.”

  Robert laughed. He wiped at his eyes and hoped Holt didn’t notice. “Well, I guess I have that.”