Flight Risk

by Jennifer Fenn

  A raindrop spattered his shoulder. Thunder rumbled, and then rain pelted the sand. The pink scratches winding down his arms and legs stung. Suddenly he was cold in his dripping pants, hugging his chest and ducking his head. The beach left him without any cover, and he hadn’t actually brought what he’d need to camp in the forest. He hadn’t planned at all. He was only armed with his five white tees and two pairs of khakis. So much for survival training.

  For a moment, he considered tiptoeing back to the dormitory, slipping in the front door and under his sheets. Reporting to archery tomorrow smuggling a secret.

  But then what would he do? Bust his ass for Greens until they decided he was cured and shipped him back to Yannatok? Another island prison, just like Rikers, Alcatraz.

  He wouldn’t do it.

  Robert crept closer to the house at the row’s end, his feet sinking heavily in the sand. Only one neighbor. No cars in this driveway or the next three. He circled around to the street-side front door and waited beneath the deck, crouching against a plastic trash can. Rain beat against the planks over his head. A painted piece of driftwood hung from the front door. The Petersons’. Seashells and beach rocks bordered the house’s walkway. He left his shelter, an arm shielding his face.

  The key was under the first rock he turned over. Like they were inviting him in.

  He ducked again and broke for the door. He looked over his shoulder before sliding the key into the lock. Nothing following him but rain. A wave of stale air hit him as he opened the door. No one had been home for a while, maybe since the summer. Pine needles, sand, and dirt were caked onto his shoes, like a wild animal’s paws. His left heel bled. He wiped his feet on the welcome mat.

  Robert closed the door gently behind him, but his footsteps still rattled framed pictures on a table in the foyer. A tan boy and girl showed off boogie boards and squinted into the sun. In the next, the same pair posed, a little older, the boy’s sapling arms thickening, and the girl with a more complicated haircut. They toyed with the controls of a two-seater plane. Maybe these people were rich enough to have their own plane and flew from Seattle whenever they craved some sun and surf.

  The living room and the open kitchen could have swallowed his whole trailer. The kitchen had room for an island and a table. Another glass-topped table in the dining room. He couldn’t picture Deb sitting there, sipping her coffee, savoring her cigarette, but he could imagine Hulk curled up under the table. If Robert lived here, he’d take Hulk to the beach every day.

  His reflection shone in the microwave, ghostly in the dark. A twig was tangled in his hair. His forehead and nose were smudged with dirt.

  He didn’t belong here, either. The only way he could get into a house like this one was to break in.

  In the pantry, behind some Cap’n Crunch and a chip-clipped bag of Tostitos, Robert found a bulging plastic bag full of dime-store candy: Atomic FireBalls, jawbreakers, Now and Laters, Dum Dums. Easily three pounds’ worth. Robert tore open a fireball and let it burn the roof of his mouth and stain his tongue red. He tucked a few misshapen Now and Laters in his pocket and replaced the bag.

  The candy had probably been abandoned since last summer. Who’d ever miss it? Robert reopened the cabinet and swiped it all. Then he crept through each room. Couches and tables hulked in the moonlight. Three bedrooms, beds tightly made. Shelves of loose-spined, sun-faded paperbacks, Monopoly and Scrabble, decks of cards. Bikes and plastic beach toys in the garage.

  He was too keyed up to even think about sleep.

  He unwrapped a sour apple Dum Dum and popped it in his mouth.

  Robert ambled back to the kitchen and opened a cabinet. Rows of clean glasses winked back. He poured himself a tall glass of flat Coke, drank it in three gulps, and refilled his cup.

  No Law & Order. No Hulk padding around. No Dalton snoring. Robert had never heard such quiet.

  He knew what some of the guys from Sea Brook would do. Ransack the place for hidden cash, credit cards, jewelry, electronics. Soap up the mirrors. Shred the couch cushions, smash every window. Piss on the walls, take a shit on the bed. Run away laughing, the front door gaping like a broken jaw.

  Robert rinsed his glass in the sink and dried it with a seashell-embroidered dish towel. He might be staying awhile.

  In the garage he found three surfboards crusted with last summer’s salt.

  Robert stood on the deck until the rising sun stained the ocean orangey pink, a sour apple Now and Later melting on his tongue. Then he crunched down on another fireball and snuck a board from the garage. The sand cooled his bare feet as he crept down the deserted beach. Waves hushed the shore with their frilly spray. The insides of his cheeks burned. He left his khakis and tee on and waded into the water. Icy spray soaked his pants. His skin stung.

  He stepped back onto the sand, cold as wet cement, and propped the board beside him. He so wanted to paddle out, watch the house shrink behind him. But the foam alone numbed his blotchy, purple feet. He withstood the pins and needles as long as he could, until the sun hovered over the water, before he turned back to the house.

  Robert hung his wet pants from the shower curtain rod and borrowed gray shorts and a hooded navy sweatshirt from his hosts. He wiped sand from the board, returned it carefully to its spot in the garage. He napped restlessly on the deck, a gritty lawn chair cushion for a bed.

  Interview with Mira Wohl, Willamette University cafeteria, October 2, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “School was just chugging along like normal. I was getting ready for play auditions, trying to pick a monologue, and rereading Twelve Angry Men. The play’s kind of a big thing here, since sports are such a hassle. We don’t have a football or baseball field, and even for basketball or volleyball you have to go across the bridge to play another school, and it takes all night. So like a lot of us, I was trying to decide which juror I wanted to be.

  “At first no one cared whether or not Robert had disappeared, because there was other breaking news: Mira Wohl and Alex Winters broke up! And then she cut all her hair off because she was so depressed! She’s tweeting all these, like, Taylor Swift lyrics and he’s already hooking up with Olivia Donovan! Girl’s ready to jump off Yannatok Bridge! Which, like, yeah, right. Everyone just couldn’t stop talking about it, everywhere I went, and there were, like, a couple people saying Robert had run away from juvie, but it was mostly coming from Joey Kovach, who had gotten expelled but was still hanging around, showing up at basketball games, being pathetic. No one listens to him anyway.”

  FEBRUARY 4, 2010

  A honey-voiced woman named Gloria Whalen, apparently Sea Brook’s assistant director, phoned Deb, waking her in the early afternoon, after a long night shift. Deb’s first question was the obvious one: “What did he do?”

  But as she listened to Ms. Whalen’s euphemisms, her heart quickened and her hands shook. Gloria told her that Robert was very likely still on Sea Brook’s grounds, that he certainly had not crossed back over the Yannatok Bridge, that between the Seattle police and Sea Brook’s staff, he would certainly be located swiftly, dirty and hungry but otherwise with only his pride injured. Perhaps then, Gloria had allowed, they should discuss another facility more appropriate for Robert’s rehabilitation.

  But Deb knew better. Her son wasn’t going to be found anywhere near Sea Brook. He’d end up retreating home, to the island he’d lived on since he was a small boy, if for nothing else than his dog. Deb cut Gloria off in midsentence. “I knew it. I goddamn knew it.”

  Then Deb hung up the phone, grabbed her cigarettes, and drove circles around the island. The Sea Brook staff and the police could keep wasting time looking for her son on their side of the bridge. Deb would find him herself.

  But where would Robert go? Who were his friends? And why didn’t she know?

  Joey Kovach. The only name she had, but Lord knew she wouldn’t be welcomed at that house.

  As she drove, she rewound a memory of her son, before the t
errible grades and the discipline problems and the prescriptions and the expulsion. A boy running circles around the flagpole, chasing his dog, throwing a tennis ball. A little boy in race car pajamas.

  * * *

  After a day cooped up in the house, Robert’s nerves were cranked as tightly as a jack-in-the-box. He’d peeked into every bureau drawer, every kitchen cabinet, every closet. He’d messed around with some sort of weather station, which displayed the temperature and the humidity and the times for high and low tides, but its batteries quickly drained, and Robert couldn’t find a power cord. He paged through a few creased magazines from last summer, with their expired coupons for free slices of pizza and discount board rentals.

  No computer.

  He started itching to get outside. Why did his life seem like a giant game of hopscotch, with him leaping pointlessly from box to box?

  He peeked through the blinds’ slats at the frothing waves, at the slash where the water darkened the sand.

  A trash truck clattered down the street, not making a single stop. Did that mean nobody was home?

  He decided to sleep inside, on the living room carpet, and tossed and turned through a too-quiet night, the ceiling above him smooth and white as the lid of a closed coffin. He woke at four, as suddenly as if he’d set an alarm. Outside the house was a curtain of black, pierced only by the low moon.

  This time Robert scurried low around the other side, away from the shore and toward the road. He crouched and ducked behind trash cans and cars, like a raccoon foraging for scraps, like a bear lurking at the trees’ edge.

  The summer homes were hollow skulls, their windows darkened eye sockets. The street was so empty a blowing tumbleweed wouldn’t have been out of place. Robert stuck to the evergreens’ shadows for a while, then pulled his hood over his head and walked along the road’s shoulder. A car approached. Headlights loomed. Robert kept walking, hunched, not too slow and not too fast, until it whizzed by him.

  He kept walking, straight, so he could find his way back easily. Sunlight trickled into the sky, and Robert was about to turn back and hunker down when he saw the sign.

  A yellow triangle. Black letters. LOW-FLYING PLANES.

  He was that close to an airstrip. Maybe he could find a spot nearby and watch the early morning commuters take off. All the years he lived on Yannatok with its airstrips lacing the island, he’d never actually seen a plane rise from the ground. He walked a bit farther.

  The boxy building was topped with a gently sloping roof. The hangar so resembled a warehouse that Robert wouldn’t have been surprised to find stacked cardboard boxes inside instead of planes, if it weren’t for the sign in the front office window. Come fly with us! Ask about our lessons! Take the controls on your first flight!

  The building was fenced in by loosely knit wire diamonds, maybe eight feet high. No barbs.

  How hard could it be to climb over?

  He shimmied up easily, rattling the metal, and landed feetfirst on the other side. His hood had fallen away, and Robert ducked back beneath it. Spider-Man couldn’t have done it better.

  He lapped the building. Five doors, wide like a garage, the runway stretching and looping in front. Traffic cone–orange windsocks flapped and snapped with each wind gust. On the far side from the road was a Dumpster and a back door. A few parked planes in various states of disrepair, a tethered and tarped flock. He threaded between their metal shells, beneath their contoured wings. He peered into an open hatch, ran a thumb over some greasy, coiled parts. Thick oil coated his fingertip, nothing virtual about the way it seeped into his fingerprints’ every crack and spiral.

  Robert wouldn’t have been able to say how, but before he even tried the cold metal handle, before he even gave it a tentative tug, he knew the back door would open for him. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t locked, because it was, in fact, locked, but it hadn’t been shut properly. Someone in a hurry hadn’t checked, had let the door slam shut behind him, and Robert Jackson Kelley slipped right inside.

  Dalton had said it. Sometimes it seemed like people wanted to get their shit stolen.

  Robert turned on the buzzing, flickering overhead lights and discovered a storage area with boxes stacked six feet high. Scratched metal lockers lined one wall, their doors hanging open like stunned mouths.

  One more door, and then he found what he had come for.

  Five Cessnas hunkered down, each before an exit to the airstrip. Robert circled the dormant machines as though they were sleeping beasts. The planes were snub-nosed, sleek, each about thirty feet long from nose to tail. A ton or more of metal that could defy gravity. He tentatively stretched to touch one, his fingertips brushing the wing above his head. He lapped the hangar again, and then a third time, peering in the oval windows, standing on tiptoe to spy a pilot’s seat, a hibernating control panel.

  A darkened computer sat atop the front desk. A wall calendar full of bright skies and shining wings hung behind it. Robert opened each desk drawer quickly. Rubber bands, pens, thumbtacks. A battered beige tackle box sat beside a stack of tattered flight manuals. Robert flipped through the diagrams and instructions. He picked up the tackle box and its contents jingled. Keys, labeled. Cessna imprinted on the silver, a slim plane wing gliding above the letters.

  He slunk around the hangar, matching each key to the proper plane. N71387S. N97681H. N2008SC.

  More than a dozen keys hung from another heavy ring. Some were labeled with pieces of tape; others were unadorned. A brass key was labeled Master. Robert slid it from the ring, used his fingernails to scrape off the tape, and then wrapped it around another brass key. He slid the master key into his pocket.

  He took two manuals, too, and locked the hangar behind him.

  FEBRUARY 5, 2010

  As morning dulled into afternoon, Robert sat at the kitchen table and read the manuals, even the penciled-in notes some novice pilot had scrawled in the margin, studying like his classmates must have for their school tests. For the SATs. He dog-eared the first pages of two chapters. Taking Off. Landing.

  He ate his way through the box of stale Cap’n Crunch, three DiGiorno pizzas, two gooey paper cups of watermelon Italian ice with splintering wooden spoons. He poked a straw through the pouch of a Capri Sun and sucked down the juice in one gulp. He left his dirty dishes and ringed glasses on the table, and he spent his third night sleeping again on the deck. He actually felt more comfortable on the patio chair than inside. He shook sand from his hair when he woke up, the sky still dark, the leftovers of someone else’s summer embedded in the cushion.

  FEBRUARY 6, 2010

  The four a.m. sky was bleached by clouds. Most commuters were still cocooned in their beds. Robert went back to the airstrip and, emboldened by his study session, filched N2008SC’s corresponding key. The door opened with a whispered mechanical click. He slid behind the controls, leaning forward in the tan leather seat, running his hands over the levers and switches. His slick forehead and dirty hair and nose were ghostly in the dark Garmin screen. He caught himself exhaling, pushing air between his teeth and imitating the whir of the engine.

  He had to forcefully stop himself from acting like an elementary schooler dropped off at the arcade. Planes weren’t toys, at least not to him. For the rich people who owned them, maybe it was different.

  Still, he stayed behind the controls, and through the windshield he saw not the gray hangar walls, but the blue, pixelated, simulated sky.

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

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “The sheriff only goes after local people. Everyone knows it. Summer people spend their money and are allowed to do whatever they want. Drink on the beach, set off fireworks, park wherever they want. Speedin’ down Dunes Road to get to the highway, jammin’ up the bridge every Sunday night with their giant minivans, leanin’ on their horns, beepin’ at nothing, like they expect traffic to part just for them, so they can get back to their important shit on
the mainland. So sunburned they can barely move! Meanwhile, I get caught with twenty Addies and it’s ‘Lock ’im up!’

  “Yeah, you pass the sheriff’s cruiser out there, lights spinnin’, and he’s got somebody pulled over, fumbling for their registration or trying to touch their finger to their nose or slammed up against the hood of the car, well, you know that’s not a summer person.”

  FEBRUARY 6, 2010

  Deb called in sick and then drove down each and every winding island road. She didn’t sleep, nicotine and coffee fueling her next workday. She brought Hulk on her drives, both for company and the hope the mutt could pick up Robert’s scent, chase him down and tree him if that’s what it took. She thought about using the copy machine at work to make flyers, but then was mortified to realize she’d only captured a few blurry snapshots of her son since he’d shed boyhood like a too-tight skin.

  Every search ended at the beach, where she took off her shoes and surrendered to the shadowy scenarios she otherwise fought off. Her son’s broken body washing up on the shore. Mangled by the side of the road. Hanging from a beam in some abandoned Seattle building.

  She never should have told him about his father. Who knew what crazy ideas that had put in his head? When he came back, she decided, brushing sand off her toes, she was going to sell the trailer and anything else she had to and move them off the island. To somewhere with open fields instead of thick forest, grass instead of sand.

  * * *

  Robert tried to study by the television’s blue light, afraid to draw attention to himself by turning on a lamp. Quick pencil strokes next to a diagram of an altitude meter. Chapter after chapter after chapter about flying at night, flying in bad weather, in high winds, with glare in the pilot’s eyes and thick, churning clouds. So much to know, but his thoughts scattered as easily as those geese back at the airfields, his own brain firing shot after shot. One word sent his attention flapping away. Altitude needle reminded him of getting a shot at the doctor’s and the doctor’s office reminded him of Barry Lancaster’s office, which reminded him of the Adderall he was supposed to be on and his mother and getting kicked out of school and what was he reading about again? Robert tried to will himself to stop tapping his pencil, stop bouncing his trampoline knee, and read. Were the kids whose names were printed in the paper when they made honor roll, report card after report card, the kids with their homework finished and their permission slips signed and their binders tabbed and divided, were they really that much smarter than him? Could he truly not read a manual?