Flight Risk

by Jennifer Fenn

  The bottle winked against the mailbox’s stake. Robert bent the label’s corner, picked at it like an itchy scab. He almost expected to find a letter scrawled on the back. Instead the paper crumbled between his fingers.

  Two days later, he spotted a plume of smoke dancing over the trees like a charmed snake.

  Could his dad be hiding in those trees? Was the bottle a sign? He’d seen TV shows with castaways hurling bottles with rolled-up messages into the sea, hoping they’d wash up on the shore. Of course, the bottle he’d found had been empty. But still. Maybe his father just didn’t have a pencil and was counting on Robert understanding anyway.

  Robert watched the twisting gray trail of smoke until it fused with a few threatening thunderheads and the storm drove him inside. The trailer’s roof had started springing leaks. Water plinked onto the kitchen floor, smearing bright streaks of yellow linoleum through the room’s coat of grime. Robert stood beneath the biggest hole and tried to catch drops on his tongue. Hulk’s paws slipped, and his feet slid out from under him. A damp chill invaded the rooms.

  Deb finally recruited a neighbor, a man, to climb up onto the roof and secure a blue tarp over the trailer. He covered the part over Robert’s bedroom, too, which was lucky, because new gaps poked through the ceiling soon enough.

  On nights when Deb was home, when Robert couldn’t sleep and couldn’t escape into the yard, he piled on blankets and studied the holes and thought about the signals his father sent from the woods. He tried to fit them together, decipher his dad’s coded messages.

  When Hulk barked at night, Robert knew his dog could see Robert Senior, too.

  Sometimes, as his eyelids finally fell, the blue pinpoints melted into falling, streaking stars. Sometimes, he wished that he could stretch his arms high enough to push away the tarp and peel the trailer’s roof away like the top of a tin can, and let in the sky.

  * * *

  Officer Holt visited Yannatok Elementary one Wednesday afternoon. He brought two obedient German shepherds, whose ears pricked with attention as Officer Holt talked about stranger danger and saying no to drugs.

  Robert sat up straight and tried to ignore the whispering classmates around him. He wondered if Officer Holt recognized him. He wondered if he’d be able to ask him if he’d caught the bear.

  The kids behind him were talking in hushed tones about a video game Robert didn’t have, one where the player pretended to steal cars and lead the cops on a wild chase down a crowded highway.

  “Half the time, you crash,” one kid said.

  “Not me,” bragged the other.

  Robert turned around, caught himself, and swiveled forward again before the teachers noticed.

  “I made it to the city level,” the kid replied. “You get to jump the car onto the sidewalk in that one.”

  They swapped tips and dubious tales of video game glory, and Robert found himself picking at his shoelace, jiggling his knees, and sneaking glances over his shoulder until he caught a teacher in the aisle glaring at him. He straightened and tried to pin his stare to the front of the auditorium.

  When Officer Holt started passing out pamphlets and lollipops, Robert suddenly realized the assembly was over. He reddened, embarrassed he’d missed important crime-solving tips and a possible update on the wild bears behind his house.

  “Hi there, young man,” Officer Holt said when he got to Robert. He shook Robert’s hand. Officer Holt’s jaw was pink and freshly shaven. His brow furrowed for just a moment, and he kept hold of Robert’s hand when he asked, “Is your last name Kelley?”

  “Yeah,” Robert replied, grinning. Officer Holt remembered him. He scrambled to stand up, pumping Officer Holt’s arm. He hoped all his classmates were paying attention.

  Holt nodded slowly. Robert felt like he’d been called on and for once answered a question correctly. Holt released his hand and asked, “How’s that dog of yours?”

  “Good,” Robert answered. “Did you catch the bear?”

  Officer Holt chuckled. “You know, we never did. He ate donuts right out of my trap and ran off.” He handed Robert a sour apple Dum Dum. “But don’t worry. We’ll get ’im.”

  Interview with Joey Kovach, Gold’s Gym, Seattle, October 10, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “He was in my class in second grade, I think. At least that’s what I remember. One day, early on in the year, it was pouring outside and we had indoor recess, which everybody knows is the worst. But Kelley especially couldn’t handle it. He was like a fly stuck indoors, buzzing around, crashing into the windows, trying to get free. Meanwhile, I’d been bothering everybody, knocking down blocks, interrupting card games, messing with the girls. Finally, the teacher plunks us both down in the corner and gets out Risk. You know, that old board game that takes like five days to play? Teacher says, ‘Play this. Don’t get up until somebody wins.’

  “Well, that game had about ten too many rules for us to deal with, so we just made up our own games. We would set up armies and then just roll the dice at them, try to knock them over. Or we’d set up all the armies, real precise, and then we’d yell, ‘Earthquake!’ and just shake the shit out of the board. Or we’d set it up on the floor and pretend to stomp all over the world. Kept us busy, anyway. That teacher was cool. He let us play that game sometimes on regular recess days, too, when the rest of the boys were playing basketball or football and we were just standing around, not getting picked.

  “Risk. We never did learn to play that game the right way.”

  SEPTEMBER 2001

  On September 11, Robert hunched in a desk with the rest of the fourth graders and watched the second plane hit the second tower on the small television in the classroom’s corner. As it dawned on both the teacher and the news anchors that something more sinister than an aviation accident was in progress, the teacher directed the kids to open their readers and scrambled to turn off the broadcast.

  All the kids on Yannatok grew up around planes, as much a part of the scenery as the ocean and the forests. Every day Robert’s school bus lurched past Yannatok County Airport, one of the island’s two airfields. Tomkins, a few miles beyond the bus route, catered to tourists looking for private island tours and tandem sky diving. Commuters and locals made up most of Yannatok County Airport’s traffic. A private plane could shorten the commute to Seattle from a three-hour ferry ride to a twenty-minute blue-sky jaunt, skipping over the spiraling, tourist-filled lines. The island was full of amateur airmen, retirees whose private planes were like an old dude’s convertible. Geese waddled on the runways in the weak morning light, honking and pecking. Anxious pilots fired their rifles into the air to scare them off, the shots booming and echoing while Robert was at the bus stop, the frantic Vs scissoring above him.

  As his teacher whispered into her classroom phone, Robert read and reread the same paragraph in his reader, words scattering like those startled birds. Before he’d ever heard of terrorists and radical Islam and jihad, all Robert could think was, How stupid do you have to be to crash a plane into a giant skyscraper?

  * * *

  On September 11, Sheriff Holt met with a frantic coast guard and visited the island’s airstrips. In his three years as sheriff, he’d never had a busier day. He spoke with the owners about security and ID checks. The importance of reporting anything amiss, no matter how minor. Yes, he admitted, the terrorists in this horrible case were swarthy and dark, but danger could come in any guise. A white tourist, he had to go so far as to say while stopping at Tomkins Airstrip, should be treated with the same scrutiny as one who looked Middle Eastern.

  He flew the flag outside the sheriff’s department at half-mast for the rest of the month.

  At one a.m., after an endless, grueling day, he drove to the beach, took off his shoes, and let the waves wash against the cuffs of his pants. He watched the sky.

  JUNE 2003

  When he was eleven, Robert tired of his patch of grass and dirt outside the trailer and decide
d he would learn to surf. Yannatok Island’s small but pretty beach was only a few minutes away. Vacation homes sprouting decks and grills and umbrellas hugged the shore. All summer Deb dropped him off on her way to the dispatch center and picked him up when the sun’s last rays sparkled on the water. He wore his only pair of swim trunks, ragged ones with a ripped lining, printed with a salt-faded, hinge-jawed shark.

  Deb gave him five bucks to rent a board. Island’s cheapest babysitter, she’d chuckle. Hulk tagged along, barking at the waves and licking salt off Robert’s feet. Robert staked out a patch of sand away from the castle-building kids and the tanning teenage girls and laid out his towel and T-shirt. The current tugged and sucked at his ankles; the sand and sun and the ocean’s brine toughened his skin. Robert paddled out on a chewed-up board and let the waves toss him like a piece of beach glass. Time and again he fell under the churning water and washed up after his board. He’d scramble to catch it, give Hulk a quick scratch behind the ears, and run back into the waves.

  Jeeploads of teenagers tumbled onto the sand midafternoon, the girls in bikini tops and cutoff shorts and the boys carrying gleaming boards. When he saw them with their boards tethered to their wrists, Robert realized the rental boards were missing leashes. The older guys didn’t waste the time board-chasing that Robert did.

  All day they tracked between the shore houses and their towels, dripping six-packs dangling from their fingers. He knew none of them had a sticker fixed to their school ID to let the lunch ladies know they qualified for free lunch. He knew that if their boards got shredded on rough sands, they’d buy new ones.

  They ignored Robert, but, sitting on his board, he sometimes took a breather and watched them. The guys sailed to the sand on wave after wave. They’d still be there when orange streaked the sky and Deb pulled up and honked, engine running. The summer sun didn’t set until nine o’clock, and even when she wasn’t working, Deb let him stay out until then.

  July and its bright heat had arrived before Robert managed to ride a wave straight to shore. The ocean was whirling and gray green, and he liked standing above it, as if he were its master, as if at any moment he could take off and skim its glassy surface, soaring and dipping like a gull. He landed on the shore, coasting to a sandy stop, and he and Hulk danced and whooped on the beach.

  This kid is unstoppable! Ladies and gentlemen, the legendary surf champion!

  The water never warmed past sixty degrees, even on the hottest summer days. Robert tried swimming with his T-shirt on, but he shivered in the thin material. Goose bumps prickled over his skin. Robert was still flailing through his victory dance when someone tapped him on the shoulder. One of the teenage boys held out a ratty rash guard, the stitching loose around the edge of its long sleeves.

  “You’re gonna freeze to death,” the older boy said. “Take it.”

  Robert slipped the rash guard over his head, the collar hanging loose like a secondhand turtleneck. He struck scrawny muscle poses and kicked up sand. The teenagers laughed. Then he splashed back into the surf.

  Sometimes while he waited for a wave, paddling on his board and staring out over the horizon at the glittering water, he spotted a plane, getting ready to land at one of the island’s two runways. And he would imagine Robert Senior’s tour in Iraq, and he eventually decided that the most likely place for his dad to be by now was Canada. He’d have hiked his way through the forests all the way up to the border. He would have grown a thick, furry beard and crossed Canada’s invisible line under the cover of night, crawling on his belly, calling on his stealth military training. From there he could have worked all kinds of odd jobs: fixing engines, painting houses, cutting down trees. But Robert figured his father had probably chosen to keep hiding out. Hunting. Drinking and fishing from the clear, crisp streams, maybe even grabbing trout with his bare hands.

  * * *

  One of the best parts of Holt’s job was helping out the local kids. When he was elected sheriff, shortly after Brad O’Shay resigned in disgrace after pictures of his stolen cruiser appeared on the front of the Tide, Holt had aimed his first public initiative at the island’s youth. As far as Holt could see, Yannatok parents had two major concerns: drugs and water safety. The two were often connected. Boredom led to drinking and drugs; drinking and getting high near the beach led to unsafe swimming. So Holt had worked with the Parks Department to sponsor low-cost surfing and swimming lessons. At least one lesson each session addressed emergency first aid basics and the dangers of participating in water activities while intoxicated. Holt had ridden out to the beach during the first day of lessons, and though he was instantly sweating in his full uniform, hat and all, seeing the smaller kids splash around and the older ones wobble to a stand atop their surfboards had put a smile on his face. He had squinted at the water, lucky to have been entrusted with these kids’ safety. He had been as proud as a father.

  * * *

  Once he’d returned his board to the rental shack and headed home, Robert spent his evenings engrossed in his other new hobby: flight simulators.

  Zonked from the sun and the waves, Robert zoned out in front of the computer. Deb had made a big deal out of the Internet being for school only, something she hoped he’d use to raise his increasingly mediocre grades. “No excuses now,” she crowed. “Don’t have to rely on the library.”

  Deb talked about installing blocks and monitoring his searches, but she never got around to it. She set up the computer, a refurbished Dell, in the cramped living room, where she could peek over her son’s shoulder. Robert clicked away, hopping from one page to the next. TV had never kept him entertained, but the computer could follow his every twitching, scattered thought. Videos of heinous surf wipeouts! Pictures of the inside of a shark’s stomach, a surfer’s hand buried in the gleaming pink guts! A gnarly toothy shark tattooed on a guy’s arm! The world’s most tattooed man, his skin a grimy blue gray, inked over every inch.

  Other kids he knew liked Myspace and shooting games and even videos of people having sex. He watched some sex videos, too, ferreting out the free ones, the ones with two girls, the ones with two girls and one man. Joey, for example, had a list of the free sites folded into the back pocket of his bookbag, for easy reference when his mom thought he was using their computer for homework.

  One evening, one click led to another to another, and on a page filled with diagrams of WWII fighter jets, a link promised a “historical flight simulator.” Robert tried to download it and gave up several error messages later. But then he found and downloaded another free flight simulator, billed as “the most realistic free flight sim on the web!” His screen transformed into a plane’s dashboard. He’d later come to recognize the Cessna’s round meters and long, rectangular center panel. He pounded the space bar, tapped at the arrows, and for flight after imaginary flight didn’t make it into the air at all before veering off the runway or petering to a disappointing stop. The simulator offered another point of view: from outside the plane, like a passing bird. He tried the alternate perspective, then switched back to cockpit mode. Easier to concentrate that way.

  As he played, the trailer and his mother fell away; he shed them like a snake sloughing off skin. Deb complained that the game’s noise—engines revving and firing, static bursting with control tower inquiries—bothered her, and she brought home a busted pair of headphones from the dispatch center. The set was mended with a cocoon of Scotch tape, wound over the left earpiece, but Robert didn’t care. Now his focus was impenetrable, a force field against the outside he’d never experienced before. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen until he flopped into bed, Hulk curled up at his feet, waves and sky dancing on his eyelids.

  FEBRUARY 2004

  For his twelfth birthday, Deb bought him a refurbished surfboard. She’d stuck a ribbon on its chewed-up tip and propped it against the kitchen table, where it was waiting when Robert emerged from his bedroom in his boxers and a T-shirt.

  “It’s secondhand,” she said, puffing on a cigarette,
“but they waxed it up for you. I got a great deal buying off season.”

  Robert ran his hand over the board’s smooth white surface. Three bold yellow stripes raced across the board’s deck. Its nose was pocked like aged skin, but otherwise the board could have been new.

  Deb stuck a candle in a chocolate chip–speckled Eggo, and they sang “Happy Birthday.” Hulk howled along.

  The February water was frigid, so he would have to wait a few months before he could try it out, but in the meantime he stood atop the board on the porch, cresting imaginary waves. Robert couldn’t remember a better birthday.

  * * *

  Winter chugged by, and Robert got antsier and antsier. School had gotten so boring. Instead of going from activity to activity like he had in first and even third grade, he was crammed into his desk, his knees bumping against its metal bar. He lost his third library book and wasn’t allowed to check out any more until Deb paid for all three. He crumpled up the fine notice and never gave it to her. His teachers moved his seat again and again: away from the window, away from Joey Kovach, away from the girls, into the front row, closest to the teachers’ desks. His work grew sloppier and less accurate no matter where he was stuck. Suddenly the bottom of his backpack was a nest of papers marked with red Fs and orders to See me.

  The short days left him with precious little time before dark. He logged on to his flight simulator every night and only reluctantly left the computer to slump at the dinner table, squinting, his vision fuzzy, pixelated.

  “Are you smoking pot?” his mother asked him.

  Half his simulator runs still ended in flameouts. He always seemed to neglect part of the necessary procedures for a successful flight. Too little throttle. Nose too low or too high. Brake still on and engine stalled.

  As the weather warmed, the school suffocated him, as if he were a wilting hothouse plant. After a day spent running down the halls and fidgeting in his seat, his chin bumped against his chest through last period, his eyes heavy with boredom.