Flights

by Jim Shepard

  That Wednesday the report card came: they sat in their chairs, twenty-eight shining examples of self-control, while Sister called their names, one by one, alphabetically. And one by one, alphabetically, they went up to receive their card, thanked Sister, returned to their seats, took a breath, girded themselves, and opened it. Biddy, an “S,” was near the end. Every student, having watched others before him, tried to keep a poker face; every student failed. Teddy Bell had been one of the first, and after sitting down he’d given a stifled cry as if he’d been bitten.

  Biddy had taken Sister Theresa’s remarks to heart, studying diligently for the final math test, and had suffered through it nonetheless, having fallen too far behind. It was possible he got a good grade, he reminded himself, watching her. Nothing, in fact, would have surprised him more.

  “Eustace Siebert,” Sister said. He went up and took the card from her hand, murmuring his thanks. She looked directly at him and he was unable to read her face. He sat back down and unfolded the white card deliberately, his eyes slipping down the column of letter grades to Pre-Algebra at the bottom, across from which was printed, in blue pen, an F. It was gracefully done, the spine reinforced with a double line and the upper arm disappearing in a smooth wisp of a curve. His eyes roamed back up the column: B and B and B and B. For the first time, no A’s. For the first time, an F. He closed the card.

  Laura had received her grades. She was an exception to the class rule: he couldn’t tell with any assurance how good or bad they were, although he guessed good. He wouldn’t find out, because she wasn’t talking to him anymore, either.

  All the students were settled, flipping their cards open or closed in various stages of despair or relief. Sister sat forward, clasping her hands.

  “Let me say that I was not satisfied with the grades this year,” she said. “Some of you, I know, did very well—you know who you are—but even those who did could have done better. There’s always room for improvement. God knows you’ve heard me say that enough times. And some of you could have done much better.”

  While she spoke, the consequences of the card on his desk began to seep in like an oil stain slowly becoming visible through layers of fabric.

  “In many ways it’s been a good year, but in many ways some of you are letting yourselves down, not realizing your fullest potential. Next year you’ll have Mrs. Duffy and you’ll be in eighth grade. You won’t be able to get by with any more nonsense at that point. You all have great potential—remember this—and should never accept second best. Now keep in touch and have a good vacation.” The class jolted from their seats in a body, ready to bolt free of Our Lady of Peace for another year, but Sister held up her hands, freezing them more or less in their positions. “Wait, wait, wait. Don’t neglect the reading lists you’ve been given, and the Sisters and I hope we see you this summer.” She spoke louder, her voice ringing over the noise and scramble. “If there are any questions about the grades, I’ll be around this afternoon and tomorrow. But I think most of them are pretty straightforward.”

  The noise became overpowering, with students whooping and rushing to the doors, and while he felt in no rush he found himself in the middle of the pack, and as he was swept out the door he remembered Sister’s last words being “If your parents have any questions, they can call the convent.”

  His mother shrieked at the math grade. The noise startled him. He’d left the report card on the counter as he always did, as if in a daze, as if there were nothing unusual about it. She’d opened it expecting the same thing.

  “An F!” she exclaimed. “An F! Oh, my God, he got an F!” There was scuffling in the kitchen, Kristi apparently wanting to see and trying to grab the card from her mother. A pot fell over, cascading dirty dishes into the sink. Stupid ran back and forth, barking ecstatically.

  He shut the bathroom door and slumped on the toilet seat. This was even worse than he had expected.

  His mother pounded on the door, demanding he come out of there. It swung open violently when he didn’t respond.

  “Do you hear me?” she said. “What in God’s name have you done now?”

  He remained where he was, arms at his side. His sister peered cautiously into the bathroom, and the dog calmed somewhat, trotting from kitchen to hallway.

  His mother stood before him, the card wagging in her hand. She did not, they both realized, know how to deal with this.

  “Well?” she said. His response to all of this plainly disconcerted her and was beginning to frighten her as well. Her anger dissipated but the F remained in her hand, and she looked back and forth in the tiny space, frustrated, as though something in the room might help. Finally she turned, Kristi and Stupid moving quickly out of her way, and stalked into the kitchen.

  “It’s as though he did it on purpose,” she said, half to herself, as she opened the dishwasher. Spoons clattered and dishes clanked against each other. “You heard your father’s threat about taking you out of Our Lady of Peace. What am I supposed to tell him now? And you didn’t just go down a notch. No, sir. Not our Biddy. You dropped through the floor. An F. Your father’s going to go into shock.”

  He pushed by Kristi and went upstairs and sat on the bed, staring stupidly at the floor. Then he revived, crossing to the desk and pulling a folded Hefty trash-can liner out of the top drawer, his movements beginning to resemble those of well-drilled emergency personnel: mechanical, assured, swift. Things flew into the trash bag. Mr. Carver’s manual was swept up, and pages marked and ready were torn from The Lore of Flight and stapled together.

  He heard his mother at the foot of the stairs, still frustrated: “If I were you, I’d pack my things. I’d hate to be in your shoes when your father gets home.”

  He had planned on writing notes, and in fact began the first one, to Cindy, maintaining as best he could the fine line between speed and legibility, but he stopped, unable to communicate what he wanted to say in any adequate way, and, feeling time rush away from him like a spent wave on a beach, he thrust the paper aside. He had a list of people assembled: Cindy, Laura, Teddy, Simon, Louis, Kristi, Ronnie, and his parents, and he finally simply circled each name on the list, a single circle joining his parents’ names, as if that would communicate enough, or would have to do. With the list now a column of stacked ovals, he cleared his desk top of all other clutter so that it might be left centered and alone under the window.

  He left while his mother was in the den. His bicycle was piled along the wall in the garage behind some fencing and the lawn mower, and he pulled it out, new cobwebs drifting across his arms. He’d checked the bike three days before and had found that, beyond some grinding and rattling noises, everything worked as well as ever. He’d stopped using it more than a year ago because it was too small, a child’s bike with its long handlebars and banana seat, embarrassing in a neighborhood of statuesque racing frames, but now it was invaluable because of that very lack of size. He swung onto the seat and pushed off, pedaling out of the gloom into the sunlight, and stopped to pick up the Hefty bag he’d left near the door.

  Kristi appeared at the screen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He flinched, determined to look nonchalant. “Taking some stuff over Teddy’s.” She watched him tie the bag securely to the handle on the back of the banana seat, positioning it on top so that it would rest behind him.

  “Biddy’s running away, Mom,” she announced.

  He remained motionless.

  “I would too if I were him,” his mother said from the other room.

  He kept his eyes on Kristi, meeting her even gaze.

  “Where you gonna go?” she said.

  He gave his head a perceptible shake. “Don’t say anything.” His sister was a shadow on the sunlit screen, impossible to interpret. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Take care.” He pressed his hand to the screen.

  “You too,” she said.

  He surged forward on the pedals, building speed quickly down the dri
veway and out into the street. Sikorsky was four miles away. He had measured it. He had ridden it the previous week. He turned left onto Prospect Drive, and again, onto Stratford Road, grateful for the shade trees lining its edge. It was still very sunny, with patches of thick white clouds, and already sweat tickled his breastbone under his shirt. In the bag behind him on the banana seat, he carried extra pairs of underwear, shorts, and sneakers, a pair of jeans, an extra shirt, a lightweight poncho, his mess kit, tent, flashlight, compass, the pages from The Lore of Flight, the Cessna manual, and thirty-seven dollars in savings. He was going to steal Mr. Carver’s Cessna 152 and fly it to East Hampton, Long Island.

  He followed Stratford Road in a great lazy curve to the north around runway 29 and flew along the straightaway between Avco and the fenced-in hangars and planes on his left. Avco’s outbuildings and parking lots stretched for blocks as an irregular series of flat ugly buildings and pavement, which finally gave way to the shade of the heavy oaks and hemlocks of Ferry Boulevard, the air cooling him as it rushed past. He swooped by the entrance to the Shakespeare Theatre no longer noting landmarks, maintaining his speed despite the pressure that fatigue was building on his thigh muscles; he was on the final leg, Route 110, before he finally realized it. The road was a narrow blacktop twisting along the Housatonic, with the river on one side and a state park, a green hedge of young trees and aggressive understory, on the other. As he swept around curves he caught glimpses of the arched Merritt Parkway bridge spanning the river, cluttered and glittering in the sun, with Sikorsky Aircraft, A Division of United Technologies, right behind it.

  At the outer guardhouse, a security officer was gazing into the middle distance and seemed not to see or care that he went by. He cruised down the long ramp to the visitors’ parking area, finally resting, his feet light on the pedals. At the front doors he got off, took a breath, let down his kickstand, and went inside, soaked with sweat.

  A uniformed guard waited opposite the door at a desk. He smiled. “Well. Just swim over?” he said.

  Biddy swallowed, trying to subdue his panting and chilled by the air conditioner. “I’m Biddy Siebert,” he said. “Mr. Siebert’s son. Could I see my father a minute?”

  The guard made a mock serious face. “I think we could arrange that,” he said. He punched three buttons on the phone before him. “Who’s this? Shirley?” he said suddenly. “Shirley, is Walt Siebert in? Where is he?”

  He was at lunch, Biddy knew. He ate lunch early, almost always in the cafeteria.

  The guard hung up. “Out of luck, guy. She says he’s at lunch.”

  “I think I know where he might be,” Biddy said. “I could go get him.”

  “I can’t let you wander around alone, sport. You’re welcome to wait, though. If it’s an emergency maybe we can page him.”

  Biddy assured him it was no emergency.

  “Well, here, I can give you your security badge while you’re waiting.” He held out a yellow-and-white plastic card, with a clip on the end of it, that read GUEST—SIKORSKY AIRCRAFT. Biddy hung it from the neck of his T-shirt.

  “And you can fill out this visitor’s card, too.”

  He filled in the information hurriedly. Under “Reason for Visit” he wrote “Social,” and sat back in the chair, fidgeting, while the guard returned to the skimpy paperwork in front of him. The lobby was very plain: a few chairs, a table with some worn magazines, a plant in the corner. Spaced along the room evenly were framed 8″ x 10″ photographs of Sikorsky helicopters in action, carrying logs over fir forests, recovering astronauts, ferrying infantry and jeeps. In one a man remarkably like his father stepped from a smallish corporate S-76 with elegant red and black stripes running its length.

  Biddy tapped his foot and wiped his head with his hands. Every so often men in short-sleeved shirts with jackets over their arms came by in groups of twos or threes, laughing and heading to lunch. He stood and wandered to the interior door to the plant.

  “Oh, there he is,” he said, and opened it. “I see him,” and he glanced back and saw the guard’s startled face before slipping through. He turned an immediate corner, rushed up the stairs lightly on the balls of his feet to keep the noise down, and followed the hallway to Marketing, opening the door to find himself face to face with a woman, blonde and pretty, her hair pulled away from her face.

  “What’re you looking for, honey?” she said. “Lose your way?”

  “No, my father’s right over here,” he said, maneuvering past and gesturing down the corridor vaguely. He didn’t look back. The rooms to his left were all part of one great room, which had been divided into smaller units by high beige partitions, and he passed offices on his right, his eyes skimming the nameplates on the doors. He turned in to the fifth office and knocked as he entered.

  “Mr. Carver?” he said.

  Carver glanced up from his desk, surprised. “Biddy. How are you. What’s up?”

  “Nothing much,” he said, trying not to rush. “Just visiting my father.” He held his breath. “He asked me to ask you if he could borrow your keys to the IFA file. He can’t find his or something.”

  “What the hell is the IFA file?” he said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Biddy hesitated. “I don’t know either, but he said you had them. He said they were the same key as something else.”

  Carver made a disgusted noise, pulled out his key ring, and began to search through it. Biddy froze.

  “Here, take the whole thing,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. So much stuff comes and goes around here—And tell your father not to hang on to them all day. I’m going to lunch soon and my car keys are on there.”

  Biddy thanked him and backed swiftly out the door, mentioning as well that it was nice to see him again, and swept back down the corridor and through the Marketing door, fearing the return of the blonde woman. He rounded a corner and ran head on into his father.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said. “Something wrong?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong.” Biddy smiled as though he’d just stepped in manure. “I just came to visit.”

  “You just came to visit?”

  “I rode over to Roosevelt Forest. I was right nearby.”

  His father took his arm. “Well, wait. Where are you going now?”

  “I’m gonna go back, I guess.”

  “Well, what happened to your visit? How’d you get in here, anyway? Where’d you get the tag?”

  He leaned against the staircase railing. He knew he couldn’t rush now, but he also knew Carver wouldn’t stay in his office forever. “The guard gave it to me. And I thought I saw you, so I came to look.”

  “And now you’re going.”

  “I have to. I left Teddy in the forest.”

  “Nice visit.”

  “Bye.”

  But his father said he’d come down with him. At the lobby the guard looked visibly relieved. “Jesus, son, don’t do that to me again,” he said.

  “I won’t,” Biddy said. “Sorry.”

  His father held the outside door for him. “Okay, good luck. What’s all that shit on the bike?”

  Biddy put a hand over it. “Gloves and stuff. We may throw the ball around.” He got on the bike and started to pedal away.

  “Whoa, whoa,” his father said. Biddy stopped and looked back over his shoulder, fighting the urge to make a break for it.

  “You get your report card today?”

  He nodded.

  “Was it up to your expectations?”

  He nodded again.

  “All right,” his father said. “We’ll see it when I get home. Go ahead, I won’t keep you.”

  Biddy was off like a shot, cresting the hill onto Route 110 with an excess of momentum and bearing down and pedaling with rhythmic fury back the way he’d come.

  His idea had been buttressed month after month with information from The Lore of Flight, the Cessna manual, from the public library, from conversations with Carver,
from hours spent hanging around the airport, and from the Rand McNally road map of Long Island. The working out of its details and problems had completely taken the place and function of dice baseball, growing in intensity as it became less and less of a game, as his other alternatives fell away and lost their power or potential. Whether it was cause or effect of the death of his Oriole and Viking visions, he didn’t know. He had watched Mr. Carver take off. He had discussed the process with him. He had absorbed the manual. He had never successfully driven a car before, but was convinced he could fly the plane. He could take off, he could maintain level flight, and he was willing to bet—although it was the chanciest part by far—that he could land as well. The Cessna 152 was, as both The Lore of Flight and the Cessna manual had assured him, an exceedingly simple aircraft, a trainer of sorts, a beginner’s machine. He’d gone over and over the procedures in his head night after night, imagining and remembering the plane’s responses, the pictures in his head allowing flights from his desk chair. He’d taken all questions to Mr. Carver or the library and had been satisfied with the answers.

  The weather was ideal and he’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, so his radio contact with the tower would be minimal and voice identification impossible. He could bluff his way onto the runway with only the few phrases Carver had used. His bike with the front wheel turned around would fit in the front passenger’s seat. According to the specifications in the Cessna manual, there was room. He’d checked his bike with a tape measure.

  He was already on Ferry Boulevard, sweeping from shadow to sun to shadow as he flew past the widely spaced trees. He wasn’t sure how much time he had or when the alarm would be sounded. And he wasn’t sure—he forced the thought from his mind as he pedaled, ducking and leaning forward and pumping furiously—if he could even go through with it, sitting in the cockpit with the engine roaring and the runway stretching flat and terrifying before him.

  He would fly to East Hampton. If all went as expected, there would be no notice taken of his flight until too late, nothing considered unusual. Once in the air he would simply cross the Sound and Long Island and bear east along its southern coast. If he appeared from the south, with the wind the usual prevailing westerly, they would tell him to land on runway 28, at the end of which was the dirt path to the road he had glimpsed on his earlier trip. Rand McNally had identified it as Wainscott Road, which after 1.3 miles turned into the East Hampton Turnpike, which passed through Sag Harbor going north 3.3 miles later. He would set the plane down, run the entire length of tarmac to the tree line, engage the parking brake, leave the engine running, and disembark with his bike on the side away from the Hamptons’ service building. There was no tower there and he would not be visible behind the fuselage. He’d take the bike and bag and leave the plane where it was, unharmed, a decoy, a ghost ship. He’d ride to Sag Harbor and then North Haven, take the ferry to Shelter Island, ride to the docks along Ram Island Drive, wait until dark, and take one of the rowboats he had seen so casually tethered to Long Beach Point across less than a mile of bay. At night it would be north-northwest on the compass. It was over a mile long and would be hard to miss. He’s never rowed a boat before for any distance; but, then, he’d never flown a plane before, either, he’d reasoned when that part of the plan had been taking shape. From there he’d go to Plum Island, northeast, and from there if possible due east across another mile or so of Sound—lonely, wild water—to Great Gull Island, devoid of any civilizing symbols and marks on the Rand McNally map and distant and alone out beyond the jaws of eastern Long Island’s north and south peninsulas.