The boy stood in the middle of the newspaper office with all his wide-faced earnestness. Snowmelt pooled around his boots. He waited as the steam banged about the radiators and settled. “I liked your stories,” he offered, his voice cautious. My mother sat across the room at her desk, bent under a small green office lamp, scratching words on a yellow legal pad, wholly uninterested in humoring a child. Galen was standing in a deep puddle when she finally looked up.
“They’re editorials. Not stories.” She pushed a dictionary across the desk.
“I know I’m not supposed to like you,” the boy said after a moment.
This caused her to pause. Like his father months before him, the boy had come to The Lowering Days during the middle of the week. At first she assumed he was there to right some perceived wrong to his family’s honor. Now she wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t even mentioned Lyman’s family by name in the articles. “That’s an odd thing to say,” she said. “It implies that you do like me.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. You haven’t done us any favors, though. You could have stopped all this. My mom could have too.”
“And what about you, Galen? What could you have done?”
“Me.” The boy looked confused. “We’re just children. People do things for us, not because of us. None of you would have listened.”
This boy was not what she had expected. She swallowed her ego, which was colossal, and started to really listen.
“When I saw your husband up there in that plane,” Galen said, “I didn’t just see some smug bully. I saw something I wanted to be. It’s not about being invincible or envied. Or being the center of attention. And it’s not about being free either.”
“Riddle me this, riddle me that.”
“You aren’t that nice for a grown-up.”
“I have a busy life. And no, no I suppose I’m not. So what is it that you want, dear Galen?”
“It was about control. When I saw your husband up there, I saw someone in complete control of himself. His machine, his environment. All those people. Even me too, I guess. They were all under his control.”
She saw now that, yes, she had misjudged this boy. There was more here to him. Some ambition, some hunger. “That can be a dangerous want.”
“What if I said I just want to be good enough at something to get the hell away from here someday?”
The comment stopped my mother. The verbal barbs she had sharpened dissolved on her lips. She remembered her own life, her own attempts to flee and be someone great somewhere else, the struggle between belonging and ego, before she drifted back home to the bay and met my father. “You still haven’t told me what you really want.”
The boy swallowed hard. He lifted his chin a little higher, hoped his voice would not crack. “I want your husband to teach me how to fly.”
The bay is quiet. It is a Friday afternoon. The moon is full, and though it is not quite dark, bits of light seem already to be falling through the sky, sprinkling the pines. Overhead the stars will soon emerge, moving in unison in a great sweep of time. Some are near death. Some are just being born. Their cosmic dust lives here on earth, coursing down the rivers, growing through the trees, vibrating in the bones of the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds. Deep in this cold season, the river around the Ames’s house has frozen solid. Bird, beast, and human all startle as the shift and whump of the river ice echoes everywhere. A giant is alive down there below the frozen surface. He pulls river water in through his great lungs and blows it out against the ice as though beating a drum. But no giant is as big as even the littlest river, and no matter how he beats and blows, he cannot get free. A boy walks cautiously up through the cold, covering his ears so the giant’s whumping won’t drive him back through the woods or to the realm of madness.
Flight itself was not an odd desire in a teenage boy, but Galen didn’t just want flight. Since seeing the Citabria streak across the sky below the Geminids, he had longed to do only that: to soar. That meant he must go to Arnoux. He knew no one else in the bay who possessed such magic.
Full of an eerie calm, Galen sat in the Ames’s kitchen with a cup of untouched hot chocolate and his hands patiently folded in his lap. He had been at the house waiting for Arnoux to come inside for nearly two hours. He had spoken barely five words.
Sound sometimes comes quicker than seeing. The river giant knows this. That is why he whumps against the ice instead of flashing his teeth. Now he stills and listens. A faint whistling comes first, brushing the frozen pines. Then boots crunch through the snowpack. Heels knock snow off against porch steps. A door sucks open.
In the kitchen Galen watched Arnoux strip down. First the older man set his gloves on the floor. Pulled his boots free. Set them near the heat. Unwrapped a ragged brown wool scarf. Unzipped and shimmied out of his insulated coveralls, stained by years of use. Carefully hung them from a nail by the door. Slapped his hands against his face five times in furious succession, reddening his flesh, reawakening warmth.
Wearing only a pair of long black thermal underwear and a tattered green sweater, Arnoux finally sat down across from the boy. The river giant strained to hear.
“I’m not like my father.” Galen’s voice was rusty with disuse.
“I don’t know what that means. My hands hurt and my ears are screaming from running a table saw for three hours.”
“I’m saying I’m different from him.”
Arnoux seemed to take his time considering this. “Your father isn’t a bad man. It’s complicated.”
“He’s not me.”
“Of course he isn’t.”
“Or remotely like me.”
“That remains to be seen.” Arnoux stood then, and the river giant stomached a whump, afraid of being found listening. “The plane is in the woods down a mile or so in an old barn. Get snowshoes. You’ll need them. Don’t freeze to death getting there.”
“Is it magic,” the boy asked, “flight?”
“No.” The man squinted out the window at something the boy could not see. “It’s imagination.”
The lessons began Saturday and continued each Saturday after. They were carried out in secret, without Lyman’s knowledge, and I have often wondered how much of the deception was necessity and how much was simple cruelty. The flying lessons should not have happened how they did: covertly, stealthily, not with blatant or reckless lies but with a string of calculated omissions. Looking back, I’m often amazed that Lyman never found out.
On Saturday mornings Lyman fished or hunted, while Grace took Galen and Wren, who had both chosen music over the woods or the sea, to the Unitarian Universalist Church in town, where they sang in a community chorus. For hours they sang, unhinged and celebratory, old songs and new songs, hymns and spirituals, gospel pleas and torch songs, folk laments and ballads and calls to arms. On their way to sing, Grace now stopped and let Galen out at the end of our road. The boy waved to his mother and sister. Lifted the gate. Eyed the green curve of pines against the snow. Then he walked down the frozen two-track to the river, while Grace and Wren continued into town. Grace and Wren said nothing about anything being different. Grace and Wren sang, and I believe everyone else simply pretended that Galen was there singing too.
The river woods swallowed the boy. If not for the snowshoe trails, he might have become impossibly lost. After a while he heard the high, desperate wailing of an airplane engine. It was never a natural sound, but in winter the metallic screech rose from unnatural to ominous. A plane is a thing of intense beauty, but it’s impossible to consider a plane and not think of catastrophe. The troubling thing was how the sound of the plane didn’t move on those initial Saturday mornings. It just stayed there in the trees, whining like some monster hovering nearby. An airplane engine is a dynamic sound. It approaches, growing more alive with each escalating decibel, before it breaks into sight overhead, freeing the nightmare of devastation to come, and eventually, if one is lucky, passes uneventfully, permitting the grounded listener to shed terror and again bre
athe.
Arnoux led Galen through all the flight systems and safety checks—battery voltage okay, fuel gauge and fuel valve on, flaps down, seat belts functional, oil level registered, flaps operational and up, carb heat, throttle position, fuel mixture, master switch on, magnetos on, brakes engaged. He was meticulous, speaking slowly and reverently of both the power and responsibility of flight. It would be months perhaps before he let the boy fly the plane, but he could test him still, try to overwhelm him. Just when the boy broke, when he could no longer keep up with the avalanche of technical information, potential catastrophes, and lifesaving troubleshooting techniques, Arnoux pulled back and turned almost maternal. He ceased talking at the boy and comforted him, told him no one can know it all.
But Galen harbored a perfect blend of tenacity and fascination and wouldn’t let himself be overwhelmed. He kept up with everything Arnoux said. He took copious and detailed notes to later compare against flight-instruction manuals he sent away for. He entered into his obsession so fully that he closed out any space for doubt, let alone failure.
It was only a matter of time before the flying started. Teaching runs. Arnoux at the controls. Galen observing, chronicling every move from the copilot’s seat.
At school, Galen was lost now in aviation dreams. Flight books and engineering manuals were his constant companions. Teachers didn’t try to separate him from his obsession. Like Link, Galen had always been filled with rage, but unlike my brother, Galen despised the imprisonment of schools. While he was not following along in his biology textbook, he was at least engaged in something, not sailing off into fits of anger or disruption. He had become determined, and in his determination, manageable. He spoke to almost no one now, acknowledging only us. Nodded when I passed in the hall. Raised a hand in a strange fist of solidarity when he saw Link in the cafeteria. Lifted a chin at Simon in town. On these occasions his trance momentarily broke. His eyes cleared. His pupils narrowed, focusing, seeing. Then he was gone again.
That winter my father and I ran into Lyman and Galen once. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we had gone into town for the matinee at The Grand. The theater was an old renovated opera house. Great Georgian pillars supported the lobby ceiling. Gilded mirrors covered the walls. A thick and dusty red curtain hung in front of the screen. The radiators knocked so loudly and so viciously that they often eclipsed the sound of the film being shown. There was a balcony, and four elevated seat boxes. The owner, a German hunter who’d moved to the bay from Tunisia and mounted his kill from all over the world—silverback gorillas, wildebeests, Kodiak bears, Nile crocodiles, Sumatran tigers, diamondback rattlesnakes—about the theater, colossal and terrifying in death. It was impossible not to feel the eyes of the world’s most fearsome predators bearing down on you from above while the screen before you flashed combinations of moving light. What disturbed me about the theater’s grotesque collection was the randomness of its narratives. I’d seen complex dioramas in museums, with predator and prey and flora all arranged in a perfect encapsulation of stopped time, but the theater’s collection was entirely one-sided and without any context or supporting environment whatsoever—a Burmese python coiled about a railing, a shortfin mako shark splayed across five seats—so I could never tell who was the watcher and who was the watched. All that winter they were showing a rotation of the old Star Wars movies at The Grand. We were there to see A New Hope. When my father and I rounded the corner, we saw Lyman and Galen coming out of the auto parts store and heading for the theater as well.
The two men narrowed their eyes. Then Lyman noticed me beside my father, and the air between them softened. My father ran a hand through his hair, hooked a thumb in his back pocket. “Lyman,” he managed to say. “How are you?” When the civility of the greeting faded, he cast about for a conversational topic. “Your ravens,” my father said. “How are the birds taking all this snow?”
“Fine, fine,” Lyman said, stumbling a bit at first. “They enjoy it. They’re like children, really.” He looked at me and then at Galen. “Constantly playing, always up to some mischief. They’ve all decided to stay through the winter,” he said. “The young ones are roosting in the same woods as their parents.”
I saw my father catch Galen’s eye and look away.
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
“No,” Lyman said. The ease between us all was shocking. “Not unusual, but not common either. Sometimes the adolescent birds go off on their own. Sometimes they stay close to their birth sites for a couple years. It’s their variance, their complexity, really, that makes them so much fun.”
Lyman stopped then, hit by a wave of self-consciousness, and looked down at the sidewalk. I wanted desperately for him to go on, unburdened and at length, extolling all the fascinating behaviors of his birds, but he said no more.
“We’re going to The Grand,” my father said.
“I suppose we are as well,” said Lyman.
“Then it’s settled,” Galen added.
For two hours we sat together inside the theater, that chorus of death above us in the dark balcony, watching the powers of good and evil battle in a world of dreams. Then we walked out into a blinding orange sunset. The western edges of town smoldered. A deeper red frosted the rolling crests of the coastal mountains. Hardly anyone was in town. Lyman and my father looked at each other one more time. To the east, blue twilight bathed the brick buildings sloping down Main Street to the harbor. Soon the world would go black. For a moment I thought they might shake hands, but they did not, and we went our separate ways, my father and I walking westward into that fading red glare as if chasing more days, Lyman and Galen heading east down the hill, deeper into the cold, where their car waited among all that blue.
Fifteen
The haunted feeling that had begun to hound Lyman that night under the Geminids seemed to grow with the cold. A group of Penobscot kids had been staring at him as they all waited for the meteors. He wondered if any of them were related to the kid in the river. How could he go over to them and say “I don’t hate you”? He had been too near the bonfire. He couldn’t breathe. The sound of the plane engine came first, before the actual aircraft broke into view, and he hated how everyone had experienced that flight, that glory. The little red-and-white Citabria rose above a wall of white pines. When it reached a perilous height, it seemed to stall and float for a moment, this small metal speck no more than a black feather now, could have been a whisper, could have been a dream. Then it was plummeting, diving, but with control, nose down, its wings pivoting around like a top. When it fell behind the trees into the ravine, a gasp shook the mountain. Then the roaring plane shot up again and burned a low pass over their heads. Lyman had staggered, covered his face, almost falling on his wrecked knee.
Steadying himself, he had searched for his family. Grace and Galen were staring at the sky. Wren was slowly moving away from him. Lyman wanted to yell out to them. But it was as if the plane had erased his ability to call his family back. Searching for relief, his eyes fell on his son, who momentarily met his gaze. Then the boy’s eyes traveled right through Lyman, swinging back into the sky, where they widened in a desperate search for the plane.
When the plane had roared overheard again, emergent, Lyman heard music, a piano. It was as if the notes were being drawn through the sky. He was losing his mind. Then the ground was coming up to meet him, and he didn’t understand how an entire mountain could tip over. This time he had gone down. His knee struck the earth, pain like a howl he had never dared dream. No one turned away from the sky. No one saw him at all.
And Lyman’s fall had gone on and on.
Since then, he had kept half his traps in the water, fished deep into winter. He was trying to outwork this dread, this thing—that was how he had taken to thinking about it, as a living and potentially parasitic object that was festering somewhere in the tissues of his body—that was drawing down his energy and his mood, his courage really. Some days he was short of breath and dizzy. Other days his body was
so rigid and sore, he felt as though his spine had been packed with cement. He tried to outsmart it by reading books on trauma and rage and how pain can linger in the body. Instead of answers, he found only frustration, divining knowledge of what was perhaps happening to him but no clear solution. He would be miles offshore, trawling through rolling black waters that kicked freezing sea-foam up over the gunwales, when without warning his mouth filled with the pungent tang of metal. The memory was everywhere: the pliers being forced between his teeth, steel cracking and scraping off enamel. He would double over, short of breath. The ocean would disappear, his sternman too, leaving him alone again with the awful, helpless panic of being violated. He spat, scrubbed his tongue with seawater he’d palmed up from the deck, clenched his fists as tightly as he could and counted backward from one hundred. The memory always broke, but it always came back too, triggered by forces he had not been able to exactly identify.
Back home, he turned to his ravens instead of his family for comfort. At the kitchen window now he studied the woods, watched dark shapes flit and dart about the branches. The three juvenile ravens foraged about the river woods. At night they roosted in a stand of tall, shaggy white pines behind the house. They all seemed quite content here. Not domesticated, but not exactly wild either. Acclimated—he and the birds had acclimated to one another and entered a mutually beneficial partnership. He built pecking stands around the woods. He left more food out than he had in the birds’ infancy, supplementing their foraging. At night he fell asleep thinking of ways to keep the birds close for longer. Grace asked him where he was, and he answered, “Right here, silly, like always.” Obsession was only interesting to the obsessed. Obsession cut the strings to the rest of the world: where I am going, you cannot follow. In the wild the ravens would have fled the area by now, flocking up in their own teenage gang and soaring about the woods and cliffs to get a taste of the world before pairing off. When he thought of them leaving him, he came close to crying.
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