Flight (19 page)

Blesonus sniggers in disbelief, “For a smart
boy from a fancy school, your penmanship isn’t too good.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve left some t’s uncrossed and some i’s
undotted. Like the thumbprints. The pot of paint. Anyone lost in a
cave is going to follow passages that go up, not deeper. You told
me your school has prided itself on the honor of its students for
two hundred years. Why not just tell the truth and say that you
were trying to escape.”

“Do you have a light?”

Joe hears a rustling, then, Blesonus’ face
and a small section of the tunnel appear in the algae green glow of
a lumenaid.

“I wasn’t trying to escape. I was just trying
to explore enough so that if, or when, I do want to escape, I will
know how to get away.”

Blesonus tousles Joe’s hair in a way that
makes him feel very uncomfortable.

“From what I can see, you still have more to
learn. You should thank Mother I found you. While we Greenlanders
know the whole mountain, there are many tunnels where no one goes
for weeks. You could have died. The cold down here is patient. It
doesn’t kill you in hours like it might above if you were out in
bad weather, but in a day or two, without proper clothing, it will
slowly, but absolutely surely, drain your life away.”

By now, Joe is alert enough to know that his
best response is to be both meek and beholden.

“You’re right. I am lucky. You’re a good
friend. I’m lucky to have you watching over me. How did you happen
to come looking for me?”

“I was up. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking
about how delicate our lives are here. When I fell, it wasn’t just
tea and salt that was lost. I also lost my sense of belonging. You
go along day by day thinking things are the same, but everyday
things change, but, usually, a day’s change is too small to be
seen. It took that fall for me to understand that what we had here
for years and years was a true community. The threads that bound us
were of the tightest knit, the strongest mesh. Now, that’s gone. We
have no community, only a fiefdom, a little duchy run with fear and
shame by our mad duchess.”

Blesonus’ voice has dropped below a
whisper.

Joe Fflowers has lots of experience with the
power that a wedge can have when carefully placed and firmly
tapped. He often has practiced that art at the family dinner table.
And, certainly the rock walls around him give eloquent testimony to
the power of something small, but sharp, being able to destroy
something much larger than itself.

The boy touches the woman’s wrist. After a
moment, she covers her light. They sit shoulder to shoulder inside
their black blanket and whisper. More than an hour passes before
they rise and Blesonus leads her charge back to the Kin.

At dinner that night, a meal of chewy grain
and faded greens, Joe looks at the faces and torsos of the
twenty-eight women seated around the table. Despite Blesonus’
revelation that everyone in the room, with the exception of
himself, is female, he is having a very hard time accepting that.
There are seven at the table who, if he were asked to categorize,
he would have said were men. With their short hair, broad shoulders
and cheeks that look like they are darkened by more than just the
shadows cast by the flickering torches, what else could they
be?

From the care with which the portion of salt
that he saved is dispensed and the obvious enjoyment that it
brings, Joe guesses that it has been awhile since salt has been on
the table. As he methodically chews the half-cooked porridge until
it forms a paste soft enough to swallow, Joe wonders how long this
folly can endure.

It takes Joe several days to complete his
plan. When the time comes, he stuffs his pockets with a map
Blesonus has made for him and two lumenaids. He fills the small
canvas bag she has given him with with licorice and dried cherries.
He takes his pak and coat, and, just before dinner, stashes them in
a shallow alcove past the entrance of the fourth turn of his escape
route.

Near the end of the dinner, after he has
eaten his fill and more, Joe loudly interrupts Rholealy as she
tells a story to make a joke. The first time he does it, she turns
her head and stares. The second time, the old woman raises two
gnarled fingers, then, cuts a swath through the air. After the
third interruption, those sitting along the benches began to squirm
in anticipation of the reward for incurring Rholealy’s wrath. The
crone motions to Joe.

“You, boy, come here.”

Joe shakes his head in dismissal as he
reaches for another apple, not that much smaller nor more wizened
than the face of the woman who summons him.

“Now, boy.”

Joe slowly rises, then saunters around the
corner of the table. As he approaches, Rholealy takes the wisteria
vine staff she uses to walk and raises it as a weapon. In a
movement as fluid as lifting an opponent’s stick on the ice, Joe
grabs the staff, rips it from the old woman’s hand, and flings it
across the room. The sharp sucking noise of shock fills the room.
When Rholealy raises her thin arm to strike him, Joe pushes it
aside and forces the crone’s face down into her porridge.

The immediate outcry at this unthinkable
outrage is followed by sudden and complete silence.

A dozen of the Greenlanders trade glances
with one another before six women rise up to come to the aid of
their leader.

Joe dismisses their efforts with a wave of
his hand.

“Why protect this old witch? She’s weak.”

When Rholealy attempts to lift her head, Joe
holds it down and pushes it back and forth on the plate as if it
were a piece of bread mopping up gravy.

“Weak. And insane. Your poor mad queen. She’s
ruined your Kin, your lair, your beliefs, your best hopes.
Look.”

Joe takes Rholealy’s glass of cider and pours
it on her head.

“This is whom you fear? Depose this fraud.
Get yourself a real leader.”

As she and Joe have rehearsed, Blesonus jumps
up from her place, hurries across the room, grabs Rholealy’s staff
and runs at Joe with the stick raised high in the air, “How dare
you! Leave! Now!”

Joe backs away from the threat, pushes
through the door and hears the hoped-for cheers as he races down
the gloomy tunnel toward his gear.

It takes Joe more than two hours to make his
way to the opening which leaves him closest to the Hudson River.
During those long minutes, he battles his doubts that Blesonus
actually has helped him to escape rather than wander lost until he
weakens and dies far beneath his world.

When he finally crawls out of the needle-eyed
opening and slides around the rocks and through the brush that hide
the mouth of the tunnel, Joe is overwhelmingly relieved to be free
and glad to see that the night sky is as clear as it had been
during the day when he and Blesonus had decided that the time was
right. With clear skies and clean air, the half-moon throws enough
light that Joe can keep moving. The bolt-hole he has exited is at
the top of a steep grade of rough-edged rock with a scattering of
spindly scrub eking out a life from the soil trapped in the clefts
of the rocks. As Blesonus had explained, to conceal its presence,
there is no path leading from the tunnel’s opening. Joe catches his
breath as he studies the terrain before him and tries to pick a way
which will lead him safely down the mountain.

To the south, the proud youth can see a
sinuous break in the forest, which he assumes is the logging road
Blesonus has advised he use as his escape route. Even though the
abandoned road is overgrown, supposedly, it will lead him to a
county road, which, after eight kliks, will bring him close enough
to the river that he will be able to hear it.

It is after midnight, and all the licorice
and cherries have been eaten, before Joe comes to the edge of the
Hudson. The kayak which he steals from under the porch of a
ramshackle cabin is ancient. Cocooned in cobwebs, its cockpit
filled with rotted pine needles, the green polypropylene of its
surface cracked and checked like a Renaissance painting, it does
not reassure Joe with its seaworthiness. But, within an hour after
launching it into the Hudson, Joe is confident enough that he
tightens the skirt and steers the quirky boat away from the
shoreline he has been cautiously hugging. He veers toward
mid-stream to catch more of the silvery current hurrying on its way
south.

Long hours later, as the sun awakes with a
long pale yellow yawn, Joe shouts with joy at the warmth that
yellow promises. His body is violently shivering from the mist and
spray which has been coming off the river and burrowing its way
inside his coat. Throughout the night’s slow hours, the colder the
stripling got, the more spastic his paddling became and,
consequently, the more river water bounced off the skirt and onto
his coat. However, even as Joe’s body grew colder, his thoughts
became more feverish.

The old Joe Fflowers is gone…and he can’t be
found now because his i-tag is gone, too. The old Joe is gone and
this new, unnamed, boy is free. Truly free. He can go anywhere. He
will need more money than what he brought from school, but there
are ways to get that. Easy ways. He is alone, but not lonely. He
never wants to see his family again. He is tired of being hidden
and protected from the world, like a miser’s hoard, because of his
family’s wealth. He is tired of being told what and how he must be.
He is free…except for his looks. With all the Fflowers money, there
will lots of people looking for him. He will need to do things to
his face and hair so that he won’t be recognized. But, like the
money, that can be easily done. He recalls the Greenlander women
who he thought were men. First, he will change his looks and, after
that, he will change himself. He will become someone else. Someone
who makes his way in the world because of what he does and not
because of who he is.

When the sky is just shy of full light, Joe
falls off the current and heads toward the shoreline. Although
there is almost no possibility that anyone can know where he is, he
doesn’t want to take a chance that Blesonus has betrayed him or
that another of the Greenlanders has signaled someone to look for
him. He hugs the edge of the ever widening Hudson until he spies a
rough-shingled cottage nestled in a small opening carved out of the
woods. After landing, dragging the kayak out of the water, and
stashing it behind a rat’s nest of debris left behind by a past
flood, Joe holds to the shadows of the woods as he makes a
horseshoe reconnoiter of the cabin. Not until he is certain that
the cabin is uninhabited does Joe draw close and peek into the
windows. A minute later, he uses a rock to break a small pane and
unlock the window. Ten minutes after that Joe is asleep in a
glorious cold, damp, sagging, musty smelling bed.

As Joe’s legs spark and quiver, as his arm
muscles tighten from the paddles’ pull, Joe’s mind dives ever
deeper into a dark, safe place.

When the escapee finally awakes, slowly and
reluctantly letting go of a color-saturated image of an immense
piece of cake, cake with an aroma of vanilla so intense that he can
still smell it after waking, the sun is far along on its journey to
the west. Joe wakes relieved, but ravenous and with arms that weigh
too much to move. Finally hunger exceeds enervation. Taking his
time as he rolls his shoulders and flexes his aching hands, Joe
pokes through the sagging cupboards. Next to the sink, he finds
chain saw oil, mosquito repellent, mouse traps, and candle stubs in
a cookie tin. In a shallow cupboard meant to hold guns, back when
guns were legal, he discovers jars of sesame butter and grape jelly
and three vacpacs of quinoa and curry soup. Not sure of how to
safely open the gas line to the stove, Joe eats the soups cold.
Even cold, he thinks they taste better than anything he has eaten
with the Greenlanders.

The sun still has a way to fall but the
western shore already is in shadow when Joe puts the kayak back in.
In the same way as he had paddled the night before, he begins with
caution, but as the sky turns to slate and shale and the forest’s
shadows lengthen, Joe follows their progress away from shore.

The runaway gives a hoot of satisfaction when
the moon rises and he can see that it is bigger than the night
before. It excites him that already he is enough of a riverman that
he can recognize the day’s difference—he doubts than anyone else at
Dutton could do it. He also is comforted with the knowledge that as
he makes his way south and the river grows in size and strength
that the moon, too, will grow with it. He begins to sing as he
skims his way along—the same songs that would get mangled coming
home from a hockey win. For the next few minutes Joe’s thoughts
switch from wanting an audience to watch his adventure, to wanting
teammates to share it, to being happy that he is the kind of man
who can make his own solo way.

The runaway has been paddling for several
hours when he notices that he is having trouble keeping the kayak
on course. The Hudson’s ever broadening rolling surface is
fractured into a million watery moonlit hills, rills and valleys. A
current of warm southerly air is buffeting the prow of the kayak as
the wind fights its way across the current. Twenty minutes later,
clouds, looking like sideways clusters of the darkest grapes,
hurtle across the sky. Joe is so busy keeping the kayak pointing
south that the clouds almost reach the moon before he realizes that
he is about to lose his light. That tardy insight comes when he is
hundreds of meters from shore. He pulls hard to angle his way back
to the western bank and safety, but that angle puts the freshening
winds right on his prow.

After a minute of slow progress, Joe decides
that the safer course is to paddle across the wind rather than
directly into it. He digs in on his port side until the kayak
points toward a bump of land far down river on the eastern shore.
When Joe tries to cross through the middle of the river, he can
feel the current grow stronger through the thin skin of his boat. A
powerful stream of water within the river itself takes hold of the
kayak and shoots it downstream. When Joe redoubles his efforts to
push through the current, the kayak slips sideways. In a split
second, a well of water builds up behind the kayak’s port side. Joe
leans against the rising gunwale. He digs in his paddle but it is
too late. The kayak rises up, hovers, and flips over. Although Joe
is already cold from his hours in the river, that cold is nothing
compared to what he feels when his head and torso plunge into the
Hudson’s black swirling waters.