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“How cute, little Maibee’s got herself a boyfriend!”

“Ask me, the kid’s a demento. I mean, Jesus, he’s practically my age. What’s he want with a squirt like her? If he was baby-sitting,
sure, but I don’t
think
Gramma was paying him.”

“Leave it alone!” Gramma Lou said, coming out on the porch to say good night. “Johnny’s a fine boy. If you don’t like him,
Henry, that’s all right, but Maibelle can choose her own friends.”

She tucked me in and patted my hair. I pretended to be asleep.

“But I just don’t get it,” said Henry.

“And that’s just my point,” said my grandmother. “You don’t need to.”

Say what they would, Johnny Madison was a good friend. That summer and the next, while Henry learned to drive and my mother
and Anna went off touring antique stores or into the city, Johnny showed me the sights of the country—the spring that gushed
icy water deep in my grandparents’ woods, the swimming holes and hidden nests you couldn’t find by road.

Johnny knew the land’s magic. He made soap by rubbing flowers between his palms. He pulled Indian arrowheads out of tree stumps
and lured spiders from cyclone webs. He guided me into thickets where we feasted on wild raspberries and smeared our faces
red. Although my mother had warned me never, ever to eat a wild mushroom, I believed that Johnny could tell the poisonous
from the safe ones and, sure enough, I survived when he dared me into eating one of his “champonions"—though it tasted like
dirty socks smell.

“You have to know these things if your plane crashes somewhere far away from towns or people,” he said. “Trouble is, I feel
like I know everything there is to know around here. It’s getting too easy.”

But there were a
few
mysteries Johnny hadn’t quite mastered. Over my grandparents’ back hill lay a secret hollow cut through by a creek where
he claimed fairies hid their treasure. Three little bald-headed men they were, dressed in robes made of cast-off snake skins.
Johnny had fallen asleep beside that creek late one afternoon and woke at midnight to see the men turning the stones to make
the water run true. When they finished, they joined hands and jumped together into the deepest pool. Johnny searched for the
men by moonlight, and when the sun came up, he dove to the bottom of the pool. All he found was a kingfisher’s feather, bright
blue-green and perfectly clean, floating on the water.

“And,” he said in a hush-hush voice, “it has real gold in it.”

I refused to believe this story unless he produced the feather, so one day as we spread our toes in the creek’s muddy bottom
he pulled it from his back pocket. And it was, as he’d said, truly beautiful, with silken colors and a shaft as hard as ivory.
I couldn’t tell if the dazzle of gold laced across the tip was real metal, but when I tapped it on a rock, it certainly sounded
like it.

“You painted it on,” I decided. But it didn’t feel like paint. There was no seam and the gold wouldn’t peel off.

“Jeweler in Milwaukee said he’d give me a hundred bucks for it.”

“No. Why didn’t you take it, then?”

“Hundred bucks won’t buy a plane. Besides,
if
the fairies come back, I might be able to trade this for somethin’ else.”

“What something?”

He licked a finger and held it up to test the wind. “Something no money I know of can buy.”

He looked at me hard. Serious. “Wings.”

The one place Johnny refused to go was Glabber’s woods. Just north of my grandparents’ farm, this stretch of giant elms and
beeches contained nothing more sinister than a few Swiss Jerseys and some scattered bee boxes. No one ever saw Mr. Glabber
himself, except when he visited his hives, and then he was all suited up like an astronaut. But that was just it, said Johnny.

“Inside that hood of his, he’s all deformed. Warts, scars. Hands are like meat hooks.”

We were sitting on the old stone wall that snaked along the ridge overlooking the woods. No Trespassing signs marked every
third tree. Johnny said, “My dad told me if old Glabber sees you on his land he’ll shoot to kill.”

“If he’s as ugly as you say, maybe he’s just afraid people will make fun of him.”

“Dad says he was a pilot. Flew bombing missions over Japan. His plane got hit and caught fire. He parachuted out, but his
whole body got burnt. That’s why he looks so disgusting. Dad says when Glabber saw himself in the mirror he went nuts. Started
screaming for his plane, and said he was going to get the bastards that did it to him. After they let him out of the hospital,
he did go back up, but instead of going after the Japs, he started firing at the other American planes, and then he crashed.
Dad says he was trying to kill himself, but they got him out of the wreck okay. Had to spend years in a insane asylum, and
they never let him go up again. I bet that made him even crazier.”

Johnny picked up a flat rock from the wall and skimmed it out into space. It passed over the barbed-wire fence and disappeared
into the darkness between the trees. Mosquitoes swarmed in its wake. And then
came a deep rumbling echo, the sound a large animal would make if trapped at the bottom of a well.

It grew louder, closer. There was a flash of white between the trees and Johnny yanked me to my feet.

“It’s Glabber!”

He turned and began to run, but I kept looking over my shoulder to see what we were running from. Would this monster really
rise from the forest? Was he going to eat us or burn us or steal us away?

The looking turned my feet to stone. Johnny had to practically drag me down the ridge, and because of his dragging, I never
saw more than that single flash of Glabber’s light.

Johnny yelled at me and his voice was strong, but all of a sudden those blue eyes were floating, and then his whole face was
awash and I had this stab of worry that maybe he’d drown from the fear and effort of pulling me, and that worry set my feet
to working again.

We raced across my grandfather’s pasture to the skeleton of a hay shed that had been struck by lightning years before. We
hid behind its widest rib and listened hard, our hearts beating as if Glabber’s ghost were right on us. Finally the echo faded,
and all we could hear were the sough of tall grain and the distant mutter of Grampa’s tractor.

“I told you"—Johnny was still catching his breath—"he doesn’t want anybody to mess with him.”

“You don’t know that was Glabber. It could have been anything.”

“I know. It was a warning… God, how stupid!” He kicked the base of the upright and a chunk of its blackened shell flew off.

There was a glint in the dirt where the burned wood landed. I ran my fingers underneath and came up with a child’s gold locket.
A fine chain and a tiny heart-shaped case, empty.

This random find, like another mystical gift from the fairies, had a calming effect on Johnny. He polished the necklace with
ash until it glistened. “Like a phoenix.” He fastened it around my neck and told the story of the mythical bird that set itself
on fire only to rise from the ashes reborn. He took a scrap of shiny carbon and enclosed it in the heart. I felt the metal
grow warm against my skin.

“When you have your plane, where will you go?” I asked. “Where will you fly to?”

He got that dreamy look again. “Places so different I can’t hardly imagine. Jungles and islands and deserts and mountains.
Maybe even the moon or something. You hear about that astronaut Ed White walking out there in space? Yeah, I wouldn’t mind
that.”

“Think you’ll ever come to New York?”

He scowled at the notion. “I seen pictures. There’s too many buildings, no good place to land.”

“Helicopters can land on top of buildings.”

“Helicopters don’t have wings.” As if that settled that.

“How about China, then?”

“What’s in China?”

“My dad’s from there. But it’s communist now. Grampa calls them Pink Chinks. Says they kill white people. Mum says Grampa’s
prejudiced. That’s why Dad never comes with us to the farm.”

“Well,” Johnny said, warming to the challenge. “I could be like a peace ambassador, flying in to say hello and tell them about
America.”

“You could find some beautiful Chinese girl and marry her.”

Johnny tipped his head back and squinted at me. “Your Dad’s Chinese, what’s that make you?”

“Only a fourth, doesn’t count.”

He shrugged. “Whoever I marry, she’s gotta be willing to fly.”

I fingered the locket. “Well, before I get married, I’ll have to go far away, maybe all around the world.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s just logical, silly. I mean, with all the millions of boys in the world, you think I’d meet the perfect one right in
my own neighborhood?”

Johnny picked up a stick and drew a circle in the dirt.

“Here you are in New York.” He made an X at one side of the circle. Then he made another X on the opposite side. “Here I am.
I’ve flown to China. I’m living on rice and eating with chopsticks. Now you start
your
big trip and come around like this, and we run into each other along about here.”

“That’d be fun.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Would you marry me then?”

I was smiling. “You’ve got to have somebody who’ll fly.”

“Oh, you’ll fly. You already have. From the Statue of Liberty, remember?”

“That was just a dream.”

“Same difference.”

I thought about that for a minute. “No. Not for me. I can do lots of things in dreams I’ll never really do.”

“Like what?”

“Like marry you.”

Now I look back on those days with amazement, and a kind of dread. I remember the sensations, beautiful snapshots, but in
the gaps between frames I sense the presence of something hideous. A demon crouching in the dark. Like Glabber.

One night soon after I started flying I awoke convinced that my internal organs had been shoved into my mouth. The next day
I compared mileage logs with my flying partners, women with more seniority than I would ever have, and tallied up their crashes,
near misses, and unscheduled landings until I was finally persuaded that the odds were in my favor. Still, with each takeoff
I’d clutch my seat, and around my two hundredth trip, a plane went down with three new hires working their first flight. Not
long after that I had my near miss in Pensacola.

The numbers would never have protected me. I was just killing time. I would not find what I was looking for in the sky, on
the road, at the far end of the world. He was already long dead and gone.

W
hen we lived in Chinatown, I would often play dolls on the window seat in my father’s workshop while he puttered. That was
my mother’s word, and though I knew it was disrespectful, it also seemed an accurate description of how he spent his time.
Puttering.

He had piles of drawings on graph paper for gizmos he never would make. Piles more of trade journals and patent bulletins
which he inspected daily for new or competing ideas. The shelves that lined the room were filled with models made of everything
from Erector sets and Lincoln Logs to tungsten and stainless steel.