Flight (55 page)

When Joe was rescued from the Hudson, there
was a blanket and fire. Here, he has neither. When Bob Tom towed
him from the barge to Manhattan, he dried off in a marina restroom
and half-dried his clothes with the hand dryer. That won’t bappen
here.

He needs shelter. Joe scans the shore and
sees where the wind has carved a shallow dip in a small mound of
sand above the wrack line. He trots over, collects handfuls of
dried seaweed, layers his nest, and curls up in the indentation. He
pulls more ribbons of grass on top of himself. His hidey-hole isn’t
comfortable and it isn’t warm, but it is warmer and more
comfortable than standing wet and naked in a strong March wind.
After awhile, the shivering stops.

As he waits for his clothes to dry, Joe
considers how accurate Blesonus and Bob Tom have been when each,
individually, told him he was naïve. As he huddles against the
elements, two ideas come to him. A boy with a bike on a beach
beyond the Pale with no blanket, no matches, little food, no extra
clothing and no water is beyond naïve. Prissi. A collage of Prissi
whispering about romantic love in the Waterville library, looping
the loop in a clear blue sky, prankish eyes, shadowed eyes, snorts
and snarls, and…kisses. Kisses that were there and then they
weren’t. Joe realizes that he has come a long way from home looking
for someone he doesn’t understand.

Joe is curled up tight in his hole thinking
about Prissi and what keeps him bound to her when a noise different
from the unceasing skirls of sea and wind intrudes. Rushing,
skittering, pounding, howling, squawking, and crying, grow and
subside as the winds gusts. Then, the skein of noise grows so loud
that the wind can’t suppress it. Finally, there is a blur rushing
from the woods, across the broken ground and under the laser. Pops,
hisses, other sounds that bring tears to Joe’s eyes. Moments later
the smell carries to him. He hides under the grass until he is sure
whatever has caused the death flight is gone. When he finally
emerges, the streaks of his tears are deeply outlined by the black
of ash.

After his clothes are dry, Joe gets dressed
and rides the bike along a path parallel to the laser’s beams. His
plans to go north until his mypod shows he is on the proper
latitude to turn back east. But, after two hours of slow progress,
Joe sees an opening in the woods with a beaten trail heading east
and, on an impatient whim, takes it.

The narrow path starts out winding through a
denseness of brush that grows to twice the boy’s height. He enters
the path walking alongside his bike, but with the trail being so
narrow, he keeps snagging the handle bars in the vines. After a few
minutes, he finds it is easier to ride than walk alongside the
bike. However, riding means that he needs to be constantly alert
for low hanging branches. In the first hour it seems he has to
portage across creeks and brooks every five minutes. That is the
bad part; the good part is that most of them are less than a half
meter deep and none is more than two meters wide. As frequent as
the streams are, so, too, are the numbers of junctions with other
paths. Those other paths seem to be much the same as the one which
he travels. Their frequency and similarity get Joe wondering what
has made and maintained these passages. He is crossing what might
be the seventh or eighth ribbon of water when he first notices the
hoof print, half again as big as his palm, in the mud of an
embankment. Once he sees the first ones, and he shifts some of his
attention from the branches overhead to what is beneath his tires,
he sees hundreds more. Although Joe knows little about horses, he
wonders how conducive the habitat he is crossing through can be for
horses. Ten minutes later, he stops the Schwinner so that he can
shut his eyes to help his memory. He had spent more than two hours
riding along the unbroken cairn of bones, but now he can’t remember
seeing a skeleton as big as that of a horse. He wonders what force
can keep a horse from making the same mistake as thousands of other
animals.

After awhile, the land rises, the brush thins
out and individual and small stands of trees, ten to twenty meters
high, appear. Despite the openness, the trail itself remains
obvious. Joe crosses through a meadow of knee-high grasses a
hundred meters wide. Fifteen minutes later, the land drops back
down. The rivulets of water increase, as does the density of
brush.

It is late in the afternoon and time is
sliding into shadow. Joe is hungry, but not yet so hungry that he
is willing to eat the last of his food. Although the traveler is
bone-tired, he is hyper-alert. The further he has moved along the
path, the thicker the hoof prints have become. Now, he is moving
along a path that is little more than churned mud. The trail,
though wider than before, has become so messy that he has stopped
riding and begun walking again. Part of Joe’s reason for
dismounting is because of how difficult it has become to ride, but
another motive is that if something happens, like a remuda
galloping down the trail, he wants to be able to leap aside
quickly. He is pushing his bike through a low spot filled with mud
the consistency of cookie dough, when he hears sounds. Birds,
thousands of birds, have been singing love songs and, like Eastern
Europeans, arguing over territory. This is different. More
speech-like. But, low and guttural. Rather than reassure the boy
that he is not alone in the woods, that safety and sustenance are
nearby, the sounds cause the skin on the back of Joe’s neck to
prickle. He moves forward as silently as he can while dividing his
attention between looking ahead and looking sideways for a gap in
the brush big enough to get himself and the STA off the path.

Before he has moved fifteen meters down the
trail, Joe spies a low break in the undergrowth. When he stoops,
the boy can see that it, too, is a well-kept path but one made by
and for an animal much smaller than a horse. Joe squats down and
makes his way five meters into the tunnel. It isn’t comfortable to
stoop down, as he must if he is to make his way, but seeing no hoof
prints acts as a great motivator. The boy turns around and retraces
his steps. While listening carefully, he lowers the seat and
handlebars of the bike; however when he tries to pull the bike down
the path, the handlebars catch. Joe backs out, loosens and twists
the bars so that they align with the bike’s frame and tries again.
This time the profile of the bike is slim enough that he and it
both can move along the trail.

Joe moves slowly. He stops frequently to
listen. An image of Huck Finn comes to him. Pirates. The boy has
been on the path for less than a quarter hour when it comes to him
that he is moving away from the voices. He squats down on the damp
ground to think. He is confused. The day before, as he rode his
bicycle along the cracked pavement, a feeling of adventure, of
derring-do, had been inside him, as well the feeling of loss that
Bob Tom had left him. The night in the woods had been scary, but
when the sun rose he had felt a return of courage. Following along
the fence to the ocean had given him a sense of accomplishment, but
that confidence began to shatter when he stumbled and the water
surged over his head. Hearing and smelling the death of the animals
being run out of the forest did more damage. Once he entered the
woods, each time the trail intersected with another trail, another
piece of his courage got left behind. The deeper he penetrated into
the woods, the less sure he became that he could ever make his way
back.

Now, Joe is feeling like a character in a
fairy tale, except that instead of marking his trail with kernels
of corn, he has been leaving behind dribs and drabs of courage. In
a fairy tale, when a path is longer than the bag of corn is deep,
problems, serious problems result. Joe thinks that that he might
have very few kernels of courage left. The sensation of being alone
and filled with fear, the same feeling he had had when hiking along
the ridge with Seka and Adrona and, far worse, when he was lost in
the bowels of the cave has a fierce grip on him. Joe shudders when
he gets the notion that, if he doesn’t get moving soon, he will
become too afraid to move.

To energize himself, Joe makes himself think
of what he and Bob Tom have been doing as an adventure. Other than
Prissi herself, there can’t be anyone else at Dutton having a…Joe
pauses his thinking to be sure that he chooses the most appropriate
word…more eventful spring vacation. He cottons onto that
thought—that he is having an interlude—and, too soon, will be back
in school.

Joe pushes the Schwinner off the low path and
into the woods. He hides it at the base of a half-dozen river birch
trees and covers it with a blanket of dried leaves. He marks the
tree next to the ones where he has hidden the bike by scraping away
a piece of bark near the base of the trunk. The teener looks around
to memorize his embarkation point as best he can before carefully
starting off in the direction of the voices.

As Joe crawls and crab-walks through the
brush, the point from where the voices come shifts around. The boy
hears what he supposes is the clopping of horse hooves. He
considers whether the horses might be domesticated and he is
listening to their owners. He wonders what kind of men would choose
to live in the Pale. He tries to imagine what the male equivalent
of the Greenlander women might be. The only idea that comes is a
woodsy equivalent of the subway zies.

Joe becomes so involved with the voices that
he forgets to blaze his progress. When he does remember, he is
overwhelmed by a tangle of feelings whose strands include fear,
shame, and being out of his depth. It seems impossible, so soon
after getting lost in the Greenlander’s mountain maze, that for a
second time he has forgotten to mark his path. The chagrined boy
whirls around and studies the woods until he spies his last mark.
He quickly retraces his steps and adds two more blazes. When he is
satisfied the trail is well-marked, the teener moves back to where
he left off.

As he progresses, the land rises and, as it
had before when he came across the meadow, the brush thins and the
trees seem to grow taller. As Joe approaches the summit of the
rise, the voices grow louder but no more intelligible. Just shy of
the crest, the cautious adventurer slides down on his belly and
stretches forward with his chin bobbing just above the ground. He
slinks forward a meter and, then, another.

Poking his head over the ridge, Joe spies a
ring of woods, mostly free of underbrush, surrounding an open area
that he guesses to be a half-kilometer wide and twice that long.
Joe’s first thought is that it is another meadow, but a second look
tells him that, although there are patches of tall weeds, there
also are irregular plats of land which appear to be planted with
spring crops. With the growing shadows, it takes Joe a moment to
pick out the long low building tucked under the trees off to his
left. A second later it is obvious that the voices he has been
hearing are coming from there. The nervous boy decides that his
best plan is to withdraw further into the woods and make his way
around to the backside of the building. Joe has gone no more than a
quarter of the way when he hears a metallic rattle and then a
scrape. Carefully raising his head, Joe watches a garage door roll
up. Even when the door is fully open, the lowering sun makes it
hard to see into the gaping darkness. Several voices are talking at
once. The voices grow louder and a few seconds later, louder again.
Suddenly, two men on horseback gallop from the building.

Joe’s breath disappears in shock when he
understands that he is seeing something very different from men on
horseback. The two centaurs’ rear and their front hooves claw at
the air. The larger centaur, whose head is totally bald, reaches
down, picks up a large rock and hurls it at the building. With a
resounding boom the rock smashes a metal door and ricochets to the
ground. When the thrower reaches down for a second stone, the other
centaur, a smaller, gray-haired man with a huge belly atop a
dappled gray pony-sized body, grabs his arm. Joe thinks the words
they are shouting at each other might be, “Not now,” and, “Then,
never.”

After a few more seconds, the shouting slows
and the decibels drop as suddenly as the rock from the bald
centaur’s hand. The two man-horses trot off to the far side of the
meadow and disappear into the woods. Joe remains paralyzed by what
he has witnessed. He is doubly shocked. The bigger shock comes from
seeing a live man-horse. Something intriguing and attractive as a
mythic creature is almost unimaginable in the flesh. Even though he
has heard geris talk about how flabbergasted their parents or
grandparents were when people first began to fledge, Joe can’t
imagine that their amazement could have been of a magnitude equal
to his own at what he has just seen. Winging makes sense. Most
humans revere freedom more than any god. Wings solved so many
ecologic and demographic problems. Winging was mutation for a
greater good. As far as Joe can comprehend, a centaur is a mutation
strictly for mutation’s sake. To the dazed teener, it seems an
abomination. What causes his second shock and makes the first worse
is the age and individuality of the centaurs. Joe has seen many
imaginings of the mythical creatures. In those renderings, clean,
good looking men with curly hair, rigid spines, golden skin and
muscled chests did whatever they did. The creatures Joe has
seen—fat, bald, wearing raggedy shirts, displaying the normal
attributes of being human—are less mythic than just insanely
bizarre.

As Joe lies on the ground recovering from his
shock, he realizes that he is still hearing voices. Keeping so low
that he chances a sneeze from his nose being tickled by fallen
leaves, Joe begins making his way toward the shadows of the
dusk-wrapped building.