Black Helicopters

by Blythe Woolston

  We learn how to use light switches and flush the toilet at the motel. We learn about TV there too. TV is like a window. Push the button: see another window, but sometimes the window changes even if you don’t push the button. A shark is banging against a cage, trying to eat the man inside. That’s interesting, but then the window changes.

  “I want the shark!” I slap the TV with my hand.

  “Stop that!” says Da. “TV isn’t like books. It has commercials. Wait a minute and the shark and the man will be back. See, there it is.”

  And the shark is back, and it’s biting the bars of the cage just like before, but the story doesn’t get more interesting. The shark never gets the man. And the commercials keep interrupting it at the good parts. I don’t like TV much.

  Bo has his new book, and I try to peek at the story, but he can read faster than me and he turns the page before I’m ready. I pick up a book I found when I was looking in the drawers. The drawers were all empty, except for that one book.

  “No, Valley,” says Da. “Not that one. That book’s all full of what you oughta do and what you can’t do. It’s not a book for free people, Valley. A motel nightstand book is not for us. You shoulda brought your own book. You do that next time.”

  I don’t feel very much like a free people. I’m not supposed to play with the light switches. I’m not supposed to duck under the curtains and look out. I can’t make the TV do what I want. I’m in a room that smells like other people with a book I shouldn’t read. I don’t feel free, not one bit at all.

  We are at a playground. Bo’s mission is to go and play. My mission is to need Da.

  He hardly looks like my Da. He shaved off his whiskers. That is part of the mission, too.

  Da puts me on the swing and gives me an underdog push. I am high up in the sky. I wish I had my valkyrie hat, but Da says that’s for home. Here, on the playground, I need to wear this pink dress that flutters. The valkyries wear dresses, I think, but not like this one. Da says never mind about what valkyries wear; little girls wear this kind of clothes, and I need you to be a little girl on this mission.

  Then it’s time for us to eat lunch. We sit on the bench and Da gives us food to eat from a paper bag. We have practiced eating this food before. I think it is good. Bo thinks the green food is disgusting, so Da has to say, “No lettuce. No pickle.”

  Da points to a woman on a bench. She is talking to another woman. They call to their children: “Be careful! Come here! That’s great!”

  Da says, “Watch her. See what she does.”

  She calls to her children, “Time to go!”

  She walks across the playground to them. They aren’t listening to her. She picks up an empty bottle. She picks up a paper bag. “Come on! Time to go! I’m going home!” She puts the garbage in a trash can.

  “What do you see?” asks Da.

  “A woman. She is going home,” says Bo.

  “She picks things up,” I say.

  “Yes! That’s it, Valley! You saw it,” says Da. “That lady is a judge. My customers are angry with her because she legislates from the bench. They want to send her a message, but she doesn’t open unexpected mail anymore. But we know how to make sure she gets the message, don’t we, Valley? We know how to put it into her hands.”

  I’m not sure I do understand, but I pretend I do. “Bo, you should eat lettuce. Then your eyes would work better,” I say.

  “Be nice, Valley!” says Da. “We all have our expertise. Bo will help me build the message for the lady. Bo is very good with his hands. You are good with your eyes, Valley. You notice how people are. Both are good. Together, great.”

  A judge was severely injured Thursday morning when a bomb exploded in a parking garage adjacent to the courthouse.

  Using a robot, authorities searched for a possible second device, but by midafternoon had not found another bomb.

  Investigators from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were dispatched to investigate the blast and determine if it might be linked to a series of bombings during the last three years.

  In the wake of Thursday’s bombing, local authorities have increased security for public buildings. The National Terrorism Advisory has not issued an elevated or imminent threat alert at this time but encourages citizens to maintain a heightened level of vigilance.

  I need to find a mailbox so I can take my letter, my last message, out of my pocket and slide it into the slot. It will be postmarked from this place, and that matters. My blood connects the past and today. It connects all Da’s work with my moment. Today is a very important day. It is exactly one year since I went home and it wasn’t there anymore. It is exactly one year since the last time I saw my Da.

  I need a mailbox, and I need water.

  As long as I’m not dead, there are going to be problems like this.

  I’m going to need to drink and eat and sleep.

  And I’m going to need to get rid of these stupid silver shoes. Whatever the purpose of shoes like this, walking is not part of it. I had blisters before I made it halfway to town. Now the blisters are broken and turned into little, bloody patches of hurt. So I have to ignore that. It’s important not to limp, because limping is something people notice. It’s important not to visit convenience stores — not even to use the toilet. Those People have surveillance cameras. And it’s really important to find water.

  There’s a school, and little kids are streaming out of it like chickens out of a pen. Schools have bathrooms. Schools are not quite as surveillance-oriented as convenience stores. I wait until the playground is nearly empty before I go forward and test a door. It is locked. But there are still children leaving, the slow ones. I just catch the door before it closes and I’m inside. I could blow this place up. There are probably still teachers in here. And slow kids. It’s an opportunity worth considering, but first I’m going to find water.

  When I look up from the water fountain, there is another straggler trying to figure out how to get out the door. This one has his jacket in his teeth and a backpack drooping down to his butt. I could probably stuff the kid into his own pack and zip him up, safe as a turtle. But the burden preventing his escape is the thing he’s cradling in his arms. It looks like a dolphin with a circular saw blade stuck in its jaw. Standing on its tail, it’s a couple of inches taller than the kid. Since his hands are full, the kid is trying to push the door open with his forehead. It isn’t a good plan.

  “Need help with that?” I say.

  “Yeah, kinda,” says the kid.

  “It can’t be easy to carry a monster like that around.”

  “It’s not a monster. It’s a Hee-lee-o-koe-pry-on. It’s a real thing.”

  “Sorry. I just never saw one before. It looks like a fish eating a circular saw blade.”

  “It’s not eating a saw. Those are its own teeth. They grow like that.”

  I reach out and touch the teeth, which are pointy triangles of plastic — maybe from a milk jug. “You made this? You’ve got a good imagination.”

  “I made it. But it’s real.”

  “I haven’t seen any around. Where do they live?”

  “It’s extinct. Like a dinosaur.”

  “It’s a dolphin dinosaur?”

  “Not a dolphin. Not a dinosaur. A shark. A prehistoric shark.”

  “Can I help you with it? Your helicopter shark?”

  “Hee-lee-o-koe-pry-on,” says the kid, and he lets me take it. It isn’t heavy. It’s hollow, nothing but air covered up with paper and glue and paint. It has marbles for eyes, shiny and black as the eyes of a frozen mouse. “My brother is going to pick me up in the parking lot. So I just have to get that far.”

  “Do you think your brother could give me a ride, too?”

  “Eric likes to drive,” says the kid.

  “Works for me,” I say, and then I follow him, carrying his real shark thing in my arms like an ugly baby. I can read my new friend’s name on his backpack. He’s Corbin.

  “Hi, Corbin,”
I say. “I’m Valley.”

  Tarzan is just a little boy, little as us, but he discovers how to open the door to the cabin. He’s the strange white ape, the only one smart enough to understand, the only one curious enough to try. Tarzan proves you can be little and still be strong. He doesn’t care about the dead bones, not even the baby ones in the cradle. Dead bones just don’t matter to Tarzan.

  He finds books and he studies the bugs — he calls letters “bugs”— they do look like bugs — until he can read.

  He finds a knife, and that changes everything.

  He is Tarzan. He is a great killer. None is mighty as Tarzan.

  We are Tarzan, too.

  Bo and I learn to speak Tarzan Talk.

  When we wrestle, I say, “Kagoda?” Do you surrender? while I bend Bo’s little finger back.

  “Kagoda!” I surrender! says Bo.

  Our den is zukat, a cave.

  Our den is wala, our nest, our home. Wala sounds like Valhalla.

  When we go to sleep, I say, “Abalu, gree-ah.” Brother, love.

  Bo says, “Zabalu, gree-ah,” Sister, love.

  Authorities are investigating after berry pickers found human remains in the remote Thimble Creek drainage in western Montana.

  “At first they thought it was just a deer, but then they saw part of a human skull,” said Sheriff’s Detective Miles McKinley. According to McKinley, the bones had been scattered, probably by predators. Police search of the area recovered a shoe and a clothing label that indicate that the remains were those of a female. Remnants of a sleeping bag were also discovered on the hillside.

  The county sheriff’s office says the group found the remains on Saturday. No identification was found at the scene, and the cause of death has not been determined.

  “It is possible that this is just somebody who went out camping and ran into trouble. At this point, we just want to figure out who it was. We don’t have any missing persons linked to the area. We are hoping for a DNA match, but those bones have been out there for years by the look of them, and animals have chewed them up some. Still, DNA, that’s pretty much all we got to go on right now,” said McKinley.

  The County Sheriff’s Office now has a DNA sample from human remains discovered last summer, but the sample did not match anyone listed in the national missing persons registry.

  A family picking huckleberries found the bones in the Thimble Creek drainage last August.

  McKinley says that the sheriff’s office is asking the public for help. “She was an adult woman, age 25 to 40, a little over five feet tall. There’s someone out there who can help us,” McKinley said. “We just need to have them give us some additional information. We’ve got pieces of clothing and the sleeping bag. We’ve got the bones and the DNA. Now we are waiting for a call. Somebody out there knew this woman. She has a family somewhere.”

  According to McKinley, authorities handle more than one thousand cases involving unidentified human remains each year. “People think DNA means case closed, but it doesn’t. The DNA needs to be matched with something. We didn’t get a hit in the missing persons. There’s another 3 million profiles in the joint FBI/state database, but there’s a backlog of two years for ongoing priority cases. A cold case like this one, it could be a lot of years before it gets run. Even then, she might not be in there, either.”

  In the next ten minutes I learn that Corbin is in second grade, he’s going to be a scientist — a pay-lee-on-tol-ee-jist — and his mom doesn’t get off work until seven tonight. When the brother shows up, he gets out of the car to help load the helicopter shark into the back seat, and Corbin says, “This is Valley. She helped me.”

  He’s a taller version of little Corbin, scrawny and spindly. His hair flops down in front and hides the world from his eyes. When he brushes it away, I can see smudges and smears on his glasses. He might as well be blind.

  “Hey, ’m Eric,” says the driver, and he sticks his hand out to me. It’s not the worst handshake. It’s not pathetic, but I notice his hand is softer than mine — it feels like there is only gristle where the bones ought to be. I could twist his fingers until they broke, but I don’t think I will need to do that.

  “Maybe I can just borrow your phone? I need to call my uncle and tell him where I am.”

  He fishes a phone out of his pocket and hands it over.

  “I haven’t used one like this. What should I do?”

  He takes the phone back and touches the screen. Nothing happens.

  “Forgot to charge it,” he says.

  “Mom is going to kill you, Eric,” says Corbin. “He’s always not charging his phone. And not taking out the garbage. And he sleeps in his jeans. He’s a total hobknocker. . . .”

  “Shut up, Corbin,” says Eric, and he wraps a skinny arm around his brother and claps a hand over the noisy mouth. It’s an automatic reflex. He’s had a lot of practice with that maneuver.

  “Can we go to your house?” I say. “I need to call — and use a bathroom.”

  “I guess.”

  Things are coming together. I’ve got a ride I can control. And I’ve got some time to think. And I can always break his bones if I need to.

  Kerosene casts a warm, yellow bubble of light around the three of us. The nights are growing longer, as they always do when the air grows colder. Bo and I know about the seasons, just like we know how to balance the equations. Da explained it all to us long ago, on a night like this. He drove a screwdriver through an apple, which he said was like the Earth. Some things, he said, are difficult to see because of where you are. One thing that is difficult to see is that the Earth is unimaginably big and the sun is much bigger than that. This apple, he said, is like the Earth, and the lamp there is like the sun. Every day the Earth spins around like an apple on a screwdriver; every year it walks in a big circle around the sun. Sometimes the apple is farther away from the lamp, and that is when it is winter. There is some wobbling, too, that the apple does as it spins, and that makes the days shorter and longer. And then Da peeled the apple with his knife and fed each of us slices off the point of the blade.

  We were silly little kids then, Bo and me, and after we ate the apple, we turned around yelling, “Day! Night! Day! Night!” until we got dizzy and wobbled. Da said that was enough of that. “Be quiet or I’ll knock you quiet.”

  When we were quiet, we could hear the coyotes talking outside in the cold.

  I remember that night, because this one feels the same way.

  We sit at the table eating smoked salmon and dried cherries.

  Da has covered the table with paper, a clean surface, and the pieces of a clock are all spread out there. The light of the kerosene lamp shines and catches on the inward turning of the flat spring, on the tiny fingers of the cogs and gears.

  Da says, “While I was working, a voice came to me and talked to me, and what the voice said, it was true. The customers I work for, they are each a piece of the works. That’s not how they see it, though; far as they know or care, they are the whole story. But the voice talked me through it and I can see it. I know they are each like a part of the windup. It is my job to put them together so it ticks, so the alarm goes off.

  “I haven’t been doing that. I just sold them what they wanted so they could send messages about abortion or bad laws or whatever their corner of truth is. I never gave two hoots and a damn about any of their ideas. I just took their money and gave them my expertise. It works out pretty good for everybody concerned. Nothing about that has to change. I will still make their messages. The customer will still get the satisfaction of making their point. But I can make sure those messages speak for us, too. From now on, the messages will all be part of the windup. I will make sure Those People know that.”

  Da picks up the clock’s spring and turns it over in his hand. He holds it out to me, I reach out, and he drops it on my palm.

  “From now on, we will send letters, plain paper letters, after each customer’s message. The letters will go through the regu
lar mail. We will tell Those People things nobody but us knows about how the messages were built. We will make sure they talk to each other. Hell, we’ll give them a list of people they should be talking to. And even with all that, especially with all that, they won’t know who we are, because the customers don’t even know who we are. And the beauty of it? Those People will be afraid. We will be showing them exactly how to be afraid. We will wind them right up.

  “Valley will write the letter, because she writes beautifully. She will be the only one who touches the paper or the envelope. She will put a spot of her own blood on the message each time. That will be the signature. They can test that blood and know for damn sure that all the letters come from us. And they still won’t know who we are. Then, once we get Those People all wound up, we will sound the alarm. People will wake up.

  “There is one sad thing about this. It means Valley can’t come out with us into the world anymore. The voice said there can’t be any trace of her where they can find it. Not one hair from her head, not one speck of blood. So from now on, Bo will help in the outside, and Valley must stay here, at the den.”

  I look at the flat spring in my hand.

  The flat spring is part of the windup.

  The flat spring holds the tension.

  Is the flat spring lonely?

  If it is, it doesn’t say.

  I am quiet too.

  Corbin opens the cupboard and puts two bowls on the counter.

  Eric whacks him on the back of the head with a spoon, then he drops it into one of the bowls. “We have a guest.”

  Corbin gets a third bowl.

  “You want something to eat?” Eric pulls a box out of the cupboard and shakes it. It’s Honey Nut Cheerios.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”