Flight (58 page)

After two minutes, Joe’s breathing is much
slower. So, too, is the bear’s. Like Joe, it seems to have decided
that its best option is to wait to see what the other, larger,
animal will do. As Joe waits, he studies the bear while being sure
not to catch its gaze. He thinks that is right. A direct stare will
be seen as a challenge. A moment later, he is second guessing
himself. Failure to look the bear in the eyes could be interpreted
as fear and cowardice. As Joe watches, the bear starts shrinking.
Its spine, which has been rigid, begins to slump. Its fur, which
has been puffed out as if the bear had electrocuted itself, begins
to droop. As the bear shrinks, Joe realizes that the animal before
him probably is not an adult. He doesn’t know whether that is good
or bad news. A young bear should be less vicious. A young bear’s
mother, if she were to be close by, could be more so.

Joe’s thinking is drawn sharply back to the
creature itself when the yearling opens its mouth wide and displays
an impressive array of teeth before making a disturbingly loud
noise, but, fortunately, a noise that doesn’t quite sound like a
growl. The bear raises a paw to its face and vigorously rubs its
snout. Two things come to Joe simultaneously. The first is that the
bear has no claws on the paw rubbing its face. The second is that
the bear has just yawned. Within moments, the bear is starting to
look less like a life-threatening danger and more like something a
lower-mid girl would bring to Dutton to decorate her bed and keep
homesickness at bay. Joe lets his hand creep toward his pak. As the
hand crawls across the leaf-covered ground, the bear cocks its
head, seemingly in anticipation. Even before Joe’s hand makes
contact, the bear begins weaving its head back and forth as it
sniffs the air. By the time Joe has the pak open and the wrapper
off of the last Nougie Nugget, foam is dripping from ursine jaws.
Joe breaks the bar into four pieces. The first he tosses so that it
lands just behind the bear. A lightning fast snuffle, and even
faster jaw snap, and the treat is gone. Joe tosses the second piece
five meters behind the bear and the next even farther away. Joe
throws the last piece as far as he can, then quickly reaches down,
grabs his pak and picks up three rocks. Twenty meters away in the
woods, after devouring the last piece, the bear whirls around with
a black lab’s anticipation for the next throw of its stick. Joe
throws all three rocks as far as he can. He aims the first behind
the bear, the second he throws to the left and the third even
farther to the left. As the bear lumbers toward the nearest rock,
Joe uncovers his bike and hurries away as fast as he can.

In a scene that might be from an inane kid
vid, Joe is squatted down trying to see through the window into the
stall where Bob Tom was being held, when the bear bounds up like
the never-can-quit-playing-fetch family dog. When its snout nudges
Joe’s shoulder, the startled teener catches a complicated whiff of
peanuts, rotten fruit, fish, and nougat. As soon as the boy reaches
into his pak, which is strapped around his waist to see what might
be left to give to his new-found friend, the bear begins tugging at
the pouch with its teeth. Even though far from full-grown, the
animal has a bear’s legendary strength. Joe is pulled over. The
bear begins walking backwards and dragging Joe with him. Trying to
remain calm given his ludicrous position and the noise being made,
Joe feels along the right side of the bear’s slobbering jaw, finds
the buckle, releases it and rolls away. The bear makes a noise like
a fat man’s chortle and lumbers back into the woods with its
prize.

It takes Joe less than a minute to realize
that the stable is empty. He creeps to its front edge expecting to
witness some surreal bucolic scene of centaurs tending their crops,
but the open space of interlaced meadow and gardens is empty. In
front of the door from which he had seen the angry centaurs gallop
the previous night, Joe stares at the ground until he finds what
look to be footprints among the hoof prints. Having found what he
was looking for, Joe races around to the back of the stable, grabs
his bike and begins to follow the trail. As he gets further away
from the building, where the earth is less churned, Joe finds Bob
Tom’s prints easier to see. It takes him several minutes before he
solves the puzzle of the small hole that accompanies the old man’s
prints. As soon as he understands that Bob Tom is using a walking
stick, Joe sees that one foot, the right one, is making a much
lighter print in the dust than the left. Joe wonders if his friend
is too injured to be able to fly away when Joe rescues him.

In the same way as had happened the day
before, Joe hears the angry guttural voices of the centaurs long
before he can see them. He has been on the centaurs’ trail for
almost an hour. Even though he is no woodsman, the imprint of his
friend’s shoes on the damp trail has been so obvious that Joe has
been able to pedal with few interruptions other than creek
crossings. The path itself has snaked around a dozen bogs and
swamps and smooth-surfaced ponds.

Standing at the end of the trail, Joe can
look across a clearing and see a large centaur, whom he doesn’t
recognize, rearing up and smashing its hooves into the rusty metal
door of an immense low-lying vine-covered building. The centaur’s
attack resounds across the clearing. Bob Tom is roped to a second,
still centaur. Even though the two centaurs seem fully engaged with
the doorway of the building and his friend is less than a fifty
meters away, Joe drifts back into the deeper shadows of the woods.
When the hoof gets caught, Joe’s sympathy moves him forward, but no
more than a couple of meters before caution again stays him. Even
when Bob Tom begins to rescue the centaur, Joe stays put. It is not
until the man-horse finally struggles free, staggers and half falls
onto Bob Tom, that Joe explodes from the woods pedaling the
Schwinner as fast as he can. The wounded centaur is struggling to
get back up, but can’t manage it. Bob Tom, who is on his hands and
knees, also is trying to scramble back onto his feet, but because
his wings are splayed and the rope which tethers him to the
toothless centaur has been shortened so much it is hard for the old
man to get his balance. Joe is less than ten meters from the
riverman when the injured centaur makes a violent effort to rise
and its blood-covered hoof strikes Bob Tom in the head. The old man
makes a sound that reminds Joe of kicking a half-deflated soccer
ball and collapses, belly down, onto the ground. Joe screams, “No!”
as he leaps from the bike. The bike outruns him and smashes into
the buildings’ viny walls before the boy can get himself to the
riverman’s side. Bob Tom has a massive curved wound on the back of
his head, which, despite bleeding profusely, isn’t bleeding enough
to keep Joe from seeing crushed white bone.

Joe barely has his hands on Bob Tom’s skull
before the door to the building bursts open and he sees a small
ancient, frazzled-haired woman scuttle out faster than the boy can
imagine any geri moving. Her mobility is explained when a tall,
wild-haired, raggedy boy follows right behind with one arm pushing
the old woman forward. Joe’s hands snap back from the old man’s s
head when a third figure, a smaller, bleached out version of
Prissi, totters out the door walking with the care of a woman who
has broken off a heel on her best dress shoes. Something black
passes before Joe’s eyes which causes him to think he might be
fainting, but an instant later, the teener realizes that he himself
has just missed being struck by the panicked flailing of the
injured centaur.

Joe starts up from his knees, but a noise
from Bob Tom, more like a gargle than a groan, holds him in place.
Before Joe can decide which friend should be his focus, he hears
the geri groaning as she kneels down next to him. Joe looks up to
see the wild-haired boy and Prissi trying to get close enough to
the writhing centaur to help him without endangering themselves.
For no reason that Joe can fathom, the second centaur continues to
stand in a motionless stoicism that reminds Joe of geri wingers,
too old to fly, waiting for a bi-bus.

The old woman’s crippled fingers fly over and
around Bob Tom’s wound like a butterfly over a patch of flowering
cosmos before settling down on the riverman’s skull just past the
edges of the wound,

“Boy, leave Mortos. Help me get him
inside.”

The boy looks from the man-horse thrashing on
the ground to Olewan and then back to Prissi. He still hasn’t moved
when Olewan barks her command a second time. Joe has just finished
carefully folding Bob Tom’s wings against his body when the raggedy
boy drops down into a crouch and helps him carefully roll the old
man over onto his back so they can carry him. Olewan tells them how
she wants the old man lifted when all three of the rescuers realize
Bob Tom is still connected to the immobile centaur by the rope
tether.

“Hurry. Free him.”

Joe realizes that the knot must be centered
on the old man’s back between his wing joints. Since he has just
gotten the old man onto his back, the teener decides that it will
be easier to untie the rope from the centaur’s neck. Before he has
gone two steps, the wild-haired boy pulls an ancient jack knife
from a pants’ pocket and begins hacking at the rope. Joe steals a
glance and sees that Prissi has an arm on the wounded centaur’s
shoulder and seems to be telling him something. The man-horse isn’t
thrashing, but his leg looks horrible with the poultice of blood
and mud it has acquired from crashing about.

The rope is cut and the two boys are lifting
the old man when the catatonic centaur comes out of its fugue
state.

“Help Mortos,” he rumbles.

Olewan says that she’ll care for the centaur,
but not until she tends to the old man. His wound is worse.

“No. Fix Mortos.”

“Not now. Later. I have to try to help the
old man.”

“No! Mortos first. Fix him!”

Olewan signals the boys with nervous
hands.

“Pick him up carefully. I’ll get the
door.”

Before he has taken two steps, Joe’s hands
are so slippery with his friend’s blood that isn’t sure he is going
to be able to maintain his grip.

“Help us!” bellows the centaur.

“Hurry!”

Joe loses his grip. So does the wild-haired
boy. But, it isn’t from hands made slippery from blood. In fury at
Olewan’s rejection, the second centaur has bolted forward three
steps, reared up and brought in forelegs down on Bob Tom’s torso.
Both boys fall back and the maddened centaur rises up and crashes
down on the riverman over and over again until the ground grows so
wet that the centaur slips. It catches itself before falling,
pauses to take in what it has done, then, emitting a noise like a
hurricane’s moan, it lumbers across the clearing and disappears
into the woods.

Losses

The old woman plunges a needle into the
centaur’s wounded leg while Prissi holds his head. As soon as the
painkiller begins doing its work, Olewan cuts away the shredded
skin and debrades destroyed flesh. She cauterizes what she can to
stop the bleeding. She stitches flesh and tendons where she can,
but Mortos’ enraged thrashing has done so much damage that much of
it is irreparable. As she cuts and sews, the old woman and the
centaur mumble words back and forth. Joe is not so far away that he
couldn’t have heard enough to get the gist of the conversation, but
the presence of the live Prissi and the dead riverman leave little
room in his confused mind for anything else. Every time Joe looks
at Bob Tom’s broken body, he feels like he weighs a thousand kilos.
Yet, a second later, when he turns to watch Prissi, his spirits
rebound.

Joe stays beside Bob Tom, looks from one
friend to the other, silently communes with what is left of the old
man but says nothing to Prissi until she gently places the
centaur’s head back on the ground. Even then, after having had the
time to think of what he wants to say, Joe’s words to Prissi are
halting. His throat is choked with grief. His mind keeps wishing it
had its own wings to fly away.

Prissi herself is tongue-tied. The wild
screams, the rosaries of blood as the horse-man thrashed, the
sudden inexplicable death of the old man remind her of Africa.
Dramatic, tragic, incoherent Africa. She pines for it. The surprise
of seeing Joe Fflowers, not quite boyfriend, obviously steadfast
friend, is replaced by revulsion as she looks at the gore around
her. She can’t understand why everyone who tries to help her winds
up hurt or killed. Prissi stares at the gray-haired mess in the mud
beneath her and wants to bay at the moon, the sun, and all the mad
stars that had to align to fate such a thing. But, instead of
making the loud confused sounds that might slightly reflect what is
going on inside her, Prissi looks at Joe, makes a slight sad smile,
and shrugs.

Joe isn’t even aware that the other boy has
left until he returns with a wrinkled roll of blue tarp and two
rusty shovels. Joe looks at the boy’s tools and then at his
friend’s remains. He tries, but can’t imagine Bob Tom’s battered
body moldering underneath a plot of weeds. Somewhere in the air,
somewhere in water is conceivable. Buried in darkness beneath a
thick blanket of mud is not.

When Joe looks back up at the boy, the boy is
staring at Prissi.

“What’s his name?”

Prissi raises both her eyebrows and voice in
doubt as she says. ”Fair?”

Joe spells out what he thinks she has said,
“F. A. I. R?”

“I think so.”

By now the boy’s head is shifting back and
forth as Prissi and Joe talk.

Joe catches his eye and asks, “Fair, how far
is the ocean?”

The boy shifts from foot to foot before
spreading his arms until his hands are about a half-meter
apart.