Flight: A Novel

by Sherman Alexie

  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.

  Two

  MY 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’v
e 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.

  His complexion is so clear that it’s translucent. I can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. I have to admit, he’s a good-looking guy. In fact, he’s pretty like a girl.

  Damn, maybe I’m a fag.

  “How come you don’t get zits?” I ask him.

  “Because I pray,” he says.

  I laugh hard.

  “What’s so funny?” he asks.

  “You’re one of them fucking Christians, aren’t you?” I ask. Those bastards are always trying to save me, a poor Injun heathen. “Are you going to give me a ticket to Heaven?” I ask.

  And now this pretty white boy laughs hard. “Beware of the man whose God is in the skies,” he says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “George Bernard Shaw wrote it.”

  “So what?”

  “So it means I’m not Christian,” he says. “I hate Christians. I hate Muslims and Jews and Buddhists. I hate all organized religions and all disorganized ones, too.”

  “That’s a lot of hate,” I say.

  “I suppose. But hate can be empowering.”

  “That’s a big word.”

  “You don’t know what it means, do you.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  This guy probably thinks I’m just another stupid street kid. A dyslexic drone in the social welfare system. But I’m smart. Really smart.

  Well, okay, maybe not that smart. I am currently sitting in a jail cell.

  People go to jail for a reason. Well, for a couple of reasons. They’re in jail because they’re stupid enough to commit crimes. And because they’re stupid enough to get caught. And so, yeah, maybe I’m smart but I’m also double-stuff stupid. Adults are always telling me I don’t live up to my potential.

  I say, fuck potential and anybody who says that fucking word to me.

  “You sound like a teacher,” I say to the pretty white boy. “Or a preacher.”

  “And you sound like a child,” he says.

  “What are you, my grandfather?”

  “I’m wise for my age,” he says, and laughs, like he’s making fun of himself, like people have described him that way before and he thinks it’s goofy.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Seventeen. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “All right, Mr. Fifteen,” he says. “Tell me what it means to be empowered.”

  All of a sudden, I feel the need to impress this kid. I want him to like me. More than that, I want him to admire me.

  “Empowered means you feel powerful,” I say.

  “Well, yes, that’s obvious,” he says. “But how do you obtain that feeling of power? And what do you do with your power after you’ve found it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He smiles. I can see all thirty-two of his teeth.

  “I can show you,” he says.

  Three

  SUDDENLY, THE PRETTY WHITE boy is my best friend. Maybe the only real friend of my life.

  We talk for hours. He understands me. He’s only two years older, but it seems like he’s lived for two thousand years.

  I fall in love with him. Not romantically; it’s not about sex or anything physical like that. No, this kid is some kind of Jesus. I know it’s silly. And I know this kid doesn’t even like or respect Jesus—or Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God. But I really get the feeling this white kid could save me from being lonely. I bet he could save the whole world from being lonely.

  When I tell him my mother is dead and my father is invisible, the white kid says, “Santayana says there is no cure for birth and death so you better enjoy the interval.”

  When I tell him I’m an Indian, he says, “I’m sorry that my people nearly destroyed your people. This country, the so-called United States, is evil. And you Indians were the only people who fought against that white evil. Everybody else thinks we live in a democracy. Everybody else thinks we’re free.”

  “Indians have never been free,” I say.

  “Exactly,” he says. “Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said about Indians? He said, ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’ How can it be a democracy when presidents talk like that?”

  When I tell him I like to start fires, he says, “It’s wrong to burn good things. If you want to set fires, you must burn down bad things. Remember, revolution is not about spontaneous combustion. The true revolutionary must set himself aflame.”

  When I tell him that I get lonely, he says, “The individual has always had to work hard to avoid being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Nietzsche.”

  He amazes me. I’ve never known anybody, especially a kid, who can talk like him.

  “You’re so damn smart,” I say. “How many books have you read?”

  “All of them,” he says.

  We laugh.

  And he hugs me. I’m not afraid of him. I’m not afraid that the cops might see us hugging. I’m not afraid of myself for hugging him. I’m a fatherless kid who wants another teenager to be my father.

  This pretty boy gets out of jail before I do, but he promises me he’ll come rescue me from wherever they send me.

  I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don’t share their shit. They’re like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.

  I get so angry sometimes that I want to hurt people. I dream about hurting people. About killing them. I’ve always had those kind of dreams.

  I have this recurring dream where I’m attacked by this gang of black men. They’re punching and kicking me, and I think I’m going to die. But somehow I get to my feet and turn into a raving maniac. I tear those black guys apart. I kill them and go cannibal. I rip open those black guys’ bellies and chests and eat their livers and lungs. I break open their skulls and eat their brains.

  Sounds racist, right?

  But I don’t think I’m a racist. I measure men by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and I find all of them are assholes.

  A couple years back, this kid psychiatrist told me I have violent dreams and fantasies because I’ve seen so much violence in my life.

  “You dream about killing and eating black guys,” he said, “because, in American society, black men are the metaphoric embodiment of rage and fear and pain.”

  What the hell is a metaphoric embodiment? And why do I want to eat it?

  The kid shrink told me I was programmed for violence.

  “You can get better,” he said. “But your first response will always be to fight. To hurt. To cause pain and fear.”

  Doesn’t that just give you hope for me?

/>   The shrink also told me I have attachment issues. “All you know about is absence,” he said. “And you’re always looking to fill that absence.”

  And do you know what I said to him? “You can stick your head up your hairy puss-filled absence.”

  Ha, ha, ha, ha. Isn’t that funny? I threw a pun in his face. Of course, it was a violent pun, so maybe that doctor was right about me. Maybe I’m doomed to fill my empty life with fires and fists. Maybe I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life in jail cells like this one.

  So I’m mulling these things, feeling double-dip-doomed, when Officer Dave visits me.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Aren’t you getting tired of spending all your time in jail?”

  “Jail here, jail there, it’s all the same.”

  “You’re too young to be talking like that,” he says.

  “Whatever,” I say.

  Dave shakes his head. He looks disappointed. Depressed, even. I figure he’s going to walk away and never return.

  “You’re running out of chances,” he says.

  “What chances?” I ask.

  “The chance to change your life.”

  “Whatever,” I say.

  “Well, listen up, Mr. Whatever,” Dave says. “I got you one more chance. Instead of more jail, I talked the judge into sending you to a halfway house.”

  “Halfway to where?” I ask.

  Officer Dave laughs and leaves me to my jailers. And those dang bullies take me out of my cell and ship me to a halfway house for juvenile offenders. I hate group homes even more than I hate foster homes.

  I’ve had some nasty counselors and supervisors in group homes. Mean people, ugly people, and those sick bastards, those Uncle Creepy types, who try to stick their hands down your pants. I got sent to jail once because I punched one of those pedophiles in the crotch. I wanted to break his dick in half.

  So I’m lying awake in a ground-floor bedroom of this juvie halfway house, where all the counselors are Uncle Creepy types who want to give you candy, and I’m thinking about running away when there’s a knock on the window.

  I pull back the curtains and see him, the beautiful white kid, my new best friend.

  I don’t know how he found me. But there he is. My hero.