Flight (2 page)

“I guess,” I said.

I could tell he was getting mad. And if I were a smarter kid or a diplomat, I would have let him win the next race. But I couldn’t do that. Who wants to lose?

“There must be something wrong with my plane,” Edgar said.

“You want to switch?” I said.

“Yeah.”

So we switched planes and I beat him two more times, landing my plane in the grass more quickly and smoothly than he ever would.

“There’s something wrong with this plane, too,” Edgar said.

“Yeah, the pilot,” I said.

Edgar took my remote control out of my hands, taxied my plane down the runway, lifted it into the air, and flew it full speed into a tree.

Crash.

I ran over to the plane, picked it up, and stared at the damage. One wing was broken; the rudder was bent; the miniature pilot was missing his head. I was scared and sad. But I couldn’t show it. I’d always been punished for showing emotion. It’s best to stay as remote as those airplanes.

“What do you think of that?” Edgar asked, and lip-pointed at the wreck in my hands.

“This is
your
plane,” I said.

Yes, Edgar had forgotten we’d switched planes. But I suppose it didn’t matter because he flew the other plane into a tree, too.

Crash.

He didn’t yell or cuss or get all crazy. Edgar calmly destroyed six hundred dollars’ worth of model airplane.

Crash, crash.

If we’d had twenty airplanes, Edgar would have crashed all of them, too.

So who cares if Edgar was an Indian or not? His Indian identity was completely secondary to his primary identity as a plane-crashing asshole.

Yes, that’s my life, a series of cruel bastards and airplane crashes. Twenty little airplane crashes. I am a flaming jet, crashing into each new foster family.

And here I am, for the twenty-first time, crashing into a strange pink bathroom in a strange house in a strange world, and all I can do is count my zits. How lame. The only positive thing I can do is change their name. Maybe I’ll start calling them spots, like the British do. That almost makes zits sound harmless, doesn’t it?

I can hear my new foster family. I don’t want to see them. I wish I could stay in this room forever. I wish I had a television in my bedroom. I’ve never met any person who is as interesting as a good TV show.

I never understood the people who think that TV is bad for you. I guess they’ve never seen the Discovery Channel. You can learn science, history, geography, and politics from TV. If you want to find some faith in human beings, just watch one episode of
Storm Stories
on the Weather Channel, and you’ll see heroic people risk their lives to save strangers.

I don’t understand human beings. I don’t understand the people who risk their lives to save strangers. I wish I knew people like that.

Everything I know about Indians (and I could easily beat 99 percent of the world in a Native American version of Trivial Pursuit) I’ve learned from television.

I know about famous chiefs, broken treaties, the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Indian wars of the nineteenth century.

I know all this stuff because it makes me feel more like a real Indian. Maybe I can’t live like an Indian, but I can learn how real Indians used to live and how they’re supposed to live now.

Jesus, I’m pathetic. I make it sound like I’m just a television addict. But I’m also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.

But there are no books in this bathroom or in my bedroom, and I’ve already read the books in my backpack a hundred times each. So I’m living a new life without new books.

I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

I give up counting my spots, walk into the kitchen, and look at a room full of strangers.

“Good morning,” the foster mother says. “Do you want a bowl of cornflakes?”

She’s a short fat woman. If this were a fairy tale, she’d be the evil stepmother who eats children. This isn’t a fairy tale, so she’s just a loser who gorges on food like alcoholics drink booze.

The foster father grunts from behind his newspaper. Foster fathers like to grunt and read newspapers. If I had to describe this guy to a police sketch artist, I’d say he looks like the sports section with a bad haircut.

“Excuse me,” the foster mother says to me. “I said good morning.”

I don’t say anything.

“Hey, young man,” the foster mother says. “We have rules around here. And rule number one is be nice.”

“Whatever,” I say.

The foster father puts down his paper and stares at me like I was a news story about a killer tsunami. He’s got one eyebrow and a thick forehead like a caveman.

He’s eating cereal flakes, but his breath smells like beer and onions.

“Good morning,” he says.

“Whatever,” I say again.

The other kids, the real and the fake ones, all stare at me. It’s a riot of cold blue eyes. Those kids know what I’m doing. Some of them already hate me for being a jerk. The rest of them are bored. They’ve seen it all before.

“Good morning,” the foster father says again.

He’s challenging me. He thinks he’s stronger than I am. He’s bigger and taller and older, sure, and has a million more muscles than I do, but I am stronger. I am stronger than all of my fathers.

“What…ever,” I say, for the third time.

And I say it slow and hard and mean, like each letter was a cussword. And I don’t mean the little cusswords like
dick
and
shit.
I mean the big ones like
cock
and
cunt
and
motherfucker.
I think it’s strange how curse words frighten and disgust some people. Yes, there are people afraid of certain combinations of vowels and consonants. Isn’t that hilarious? Don’t those wimps realize that each and every word only has the power and meaning you assign to it? If I decided that
plop
was a dirty word, and started using it to curse people, and convinced enough people to use it as a curse word also, it would eventually become an obscenity.

“Hey,” the foster father says. “Look at me.”

He’s one hundred and eighty-five pounds of blood, and I want to punch him in the carotid artery.

“Don’t you look at me that way,” he says. “Don’t try to stare me down.”

Of course, I keep staring at him.

“Stop staring at me,” he says.

“Plop,” I say.

“What did you say?”

“Plopping plop.”

Jesus, I sound like a pissed-off Dr. Seuss character. That thought makes me laugh.

“Are you laughing at me?” he asks.

“You bet your plopping ass I’m laughing at you,” I say.

I know he wants to punch me.

“I’m going to say good morning one more time,” he says. “And if you don’t return the favor, you don’t get to eat breakfast.”

Yeah, like that’s a real threat. Yeah, like I haven’t been hungry before. Yeah, like I care.

“Good morning,” the foster father says.

“Fuck you,” I say.

M
Y ZITS GIVE ME
superpowers.

After I cuss out my new foster father, I put on my cape and fly right through the roof of the house.

I am Zit Man, master of the Universe!

Okay, I don’t fly. I dodge the foster father’s angry slap at my head, shove my foster mother against the wall, and run out the front door.

I run the city streets, randomly turning left and right and left and right, because it just feels good to run. I used to dream that I could run fast enough to burn up like a meteor and drop little pieces of me all over the world.

I run (and burn) until a police car pulls up in front of me. I’m an absolute genius, so I turn around and run the other way.

Come on, fuzz boys, you can’t catch me. I’m an orphan meteor.

Two cops jump out of their cruiser. It takes them only thirty-five seconds to catch me.

They crash into me and send me sprawling to the sidewalk.

They try to grab my arms, but I punch one of them in the ear, and I bite the other cop on the hand. They hold me down and handcuff me.

I’m fighting and kicking because that’s what I do. It’s how I’m wired. It’s my programming. I read once that if a kid has enough bad things happen to him before he turns five, he’s screwed for the rest of his life. So that’s me, a screwed half-breed who can’t do anything but spit and kick and bite and punch.

“Zits! Zits!” one of the cops yells. “Calm down! Calm down! It’s me! It’s me!”

I recognize his voice. I know this guy. He’s arrested me a few dozen times. He’s always been pretty cool. I trust him not to hurt me, so I calm down a little.

“Officer Dave,” I say. “It’s good to see you again.”

The cops laugh. I’m a funny kid, even in handcuffs.

“Zits, why you think you’re so bad?” Officer Dave asks me. “How come you always punch the moms and never the dads?”

“I just punched your partner in the ear,” I say. “And he’s a dude, I think.”

“You punch like a girl,” that cop says.

“Fuck you,” I say. “I didn’t punch that foster mom. I pushed her. Look in the dictionary. There’s a big difference between punch and push.”

“Tell that to Judge Ireland,” Officer Dave says. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate the vocabulary lesson.”

Dave is a big white dude. But he’s got one of those gentle voices like he’s talking you down from the ledge of a tall building. Most cops are pretty cool, I guess. It’s a tough job. And most of them just keep quiet and do the work.

I don’t like cops, okay? I just have respect for them. A tiny bit of respect. I think a lot of them had drunk, shitty, or missing fathers, just like I did. I think many of them endured chaotic and brutal childhoods, so they become cops because they want to create order in the world. And those cops, forever reminded of their troubled youth, often try to rescue kids like me. Good cops are lifeguards on the shores of Lake Fucked.

Like Officer Dave. He’s never said much about his life, but I can tell he’s scarred. And he knows I’m scarred, too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.

“You and me aren’t so different,” Officer Dave has said more than once. “We’re like the sun and moon, kid. Different bodies, but we’re orbiting in the same sky.”

Yes, Officer Dave is a poet. He even formed a police officer poetry slam team and metaphorically battled against teams of firefighters, judges, defense attorneys, and homeless kids.

Dave is okay.

Of course, plenty of cops just like to be assholes, and having a badge means you get to be a professional asshole.

“You think you’ll get Russell as your lawyer?” Officer Dave asks me.

Russell is a public defender, the tallest, skinniest, whitest lawyer in Seattle. And man, oh, man, does he talk fast. I maybe catch every third or fourth word. He’s crazy good, I guess, but I wonder why he doesn’t go make tons of money at some corporation or something. I guess he’s yet another lifeguard who likes to save drowners like me. I bet you anything that Russell has about twenty-nine stray cats stinking up his house.

“I’m an Indian,” I say to Officer Dave, “and we
hate
lawyers.”

The cops laugh. They keep laughing as they drive me to kid jail in Seattle’s Central District. The CD used to be a black folks’ neighborhood. Now it’s filled with rich white people who like to pretend it’s still a black folks’ neighborhood. But the kid jail is still here, right across the street from a fancy coffee shop.

Starbucks can kiss my shiny red ass.

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We’re the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.

“Where you from?” the black kid asks me, because he wants to know what gang I run with and if he should fight me or not.

“I’m from a little town called Eat Me,” I say.

The white kid and the Chinese kid laugh. The black kid doesn’t do anything. He’s already beaten by my words and doesn’t want to get beaten by my fists. I can tell he isn’t a gangbanger. He’s just an ordinary sad black kid. I could steal his basketball shoes right off his feet if I wanted to, but I don’t. I’m a nice guy. And those fancy shoes might be the only valuable thing the kid owns.

“What’s your name?” the white kid asks me.

“Zits,” I say.

“I’ve heard of you,” he says.

“What you hear?”

“I hear you’re tough.”

“Tougher than you,” I say.

There’s no reason to talk after that. Why would we talk? We’re boys. Boys aren’t supposed to talk. So we sit there in our boy silence.

Pretty soon, the Chinese kid’s parents pick him up and spank him like he was five years old, and the black kid gets transferred to another cell.

And then it’s the white kid and me.

He sits on the floor at one end of the cell. I sit on the floor at the other end. He stares at me for a long time. He’s
studying
me.

“What are you looking at?” I ask.

“Your face,” he says.

“What about my face?”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he says. “They got all sorts of medicine now. I see it on TV. They got miracle zit stuff. Clear your face right up.”

I’ve seen those commercials too. The ones where famous people like P. Diddy and Jessica Simpson and Brooke Shields talk about their zits and how they got cured by this miracle face cream made from sacred Mexican mud and the sweet spit of a prom queen. And, yeah, I’d love to buy that stuff, but it costs fifty bucks a jar. These days, you see a kid with bad acne, and you know he’s poor. Rich kids don’t get acne anymore. Not really. They just get a few spots now and again.

“Why do you care so much about my face?” I ask the white kid. “You some kind of fag?”

I don’t care if he’s a fag. I just know that fag is a powerful insult.

“Just talking,” he says. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

And the thing is, I can tell he’s not looking for a fight. He stares at me with
kindness.
Real kindness. I just met the guy, and I feel like he cares about my skin and me.