Black Helicopters

by Blythe Woolston

  The brothers walk to a brown leather couch and flop down, one at each end. There’s room for me in the middle, but some milk got splashed when they took their places. Eric looks at me standing there with my bowl in my hands, and then he looks at the spot on the couch. He leans over and wipes away the wet puddle with the tail of his T-shirt. The bowl in his other hand tips and milk sloshes out, carrying a raft of tiny cereal life preservers with it.

  A fat dog arrives to lick up the spilled food. It’s easy to see why he’s so fat.

  “Got the clicker,” says Corbin, and the TV is on.

  Eric reaches across me and snakes the remote control out of his brother’s lap and into his possession.

  “Hey, I’m watching that,” says Corbin.

  “You’ve seen that a bunch of times. The candle on the birthday cake is dynamite. The mouse always wins. The cat always loses. Anyway, the Beaver Trap blew up; it’s a pretty big deal. I bet we made the cable news,” says Eric.

  “News is dumb,” says Corbin, and he slurps the last milk out of his bowl before he heads for the kitchen.

  When the channel flips, Eric’s right about the cable news. A dark column of smoke boils into the sky from the place where the Beaver Trap used to be. Then the scene switches to a pale girl, wide-set blue eyes staring at the camera. She is wearing a black vest. There are bright messes of color behind her. Red, white, and blue. Red, white, and black. Yellow, black, and green.

  “. . . claiming responsibility for the incident,” says the news anchor.

  I look at Eric. He’s stopped chewing. There is a trickle of milk running down his chin. His glasses are smudged, but I guess they are clean enough that he can see the TV, and he knows what he’s seen. We made the cable news alright.

  “Please,” I say. “Eric, I’m in trouble. I need help. Help me. Please.”

  Bo brakes the bike fast. He’s teaching me another lesson in alert and ready. I don’t want my leg caught under there if he lays it down. He doesn’t. He just full stops and kills the motor. Then he points.

  There’s a clot of black smoke smearing away on the wind. Single-point origin, not a wildfire, at least not yet, nothing to fear. Except Bo’s back is tense, and he’s hissing at me, “We gotta get off the road.”

  Yes. Precaution. Sometimes they send out helicopters when there is a fire. Then I figure out it’s worse. Where that smoke is rising, that’s home.

  I want to hurry. I want to know. Bo doesn’t ask what I want; he just pushes the bike to the edge of the road and then down the steep bank into the brush under the trees. I trail after, slithering backward down the bank, covering up the tire tracks and the traces of my own footsteps. Those People might find our path if they are looking and they know what they want to see, but they are stupid. We are invisible to stupid people.

  Moving the dead-silent bike up and down the steep hills isn’t an option. Finding a place where nobody walks and nobody will see it is the best plan. It isn’t hard to do. We leave it under a deadfall deep in the ninebark brush. It’s only a few hundred yards from the road, but it passes the “what you can’t see can’t see you” test.

  Without the bike, we can move faster. We follow the deer paths when we can. Bo’s got the point. I follow his lead. It’s still a training day and asking questions is a violation. Bo can hit me if I ask questions. He’s authorized to do that when he has the com on training days.

  Bo gives me the belly-crawl gesture before we get to the top of the ridge behind the house. We aren’t going to stand up there, all obvious. Not until we know for sure what’s happening. So far, all we know for certain is there is black smoke rising. If the fire had moved into the trees we would have known. The smoke would have changed color and there would be more of it, but there is less smoke now and it is still black as a tire. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Da just built a tire fire as part of training day for me. I check behind me, all around me. If Da is sneaking up on me, I want to be looking. That would make him smile.

  Bo kicks me in the shoulder. I should have been looking at him. I should have been alert and ready, but looking at him. He points at his eyes and makes the sign for binos. I dig them out of the pack and hand them up to him. He gives me a stay sign and crawls forward to see what he needs to see.

  It takes a long time for him to see what he needs to see.

  “They’ve come,” Bo says. “Those People are here.”

  When I crawl forward on my elbows, I see for myself. The house is still burning, but they are pouring water on it. They are guys in yellow slickers. They are guys with uniforms and guns. They have fancy hats. They have rigs with stars on the doors. They have a big red truck that pumps water. I don’t see my Da anywhere, but maybe they have him trapped in one of those rigs. Maybe he is chained up with handcuffs. I know maybe they killed him. I know that maybe. He always told us this day might come.

  We know what to do.

  What we do now is wait.

  We have to wait.

  We have to be invisible.

  We are prepared. We have food and water and emergency blankets to stay warm. We have knives, and Bo has his hand weapon. We have those things because we always have those things on training days.

  Da told us this day was coming.

  “We can take you to the police. The police can help.” Eric keeps his voice soft and quiet so Corbin won’t hear.

  “No. Not the police. They won’t help me. Trust me. I just need a ride. You can help me,” I answer in my own secret-sharing voice. When I look at his face, I can see he will do it. He will help me. He wants to help me. I just need to give him one more little nudge. “My brother is depending on me,” I say. “My brother . . .” That’s when Eric takes a deep breath and nods yes.

  “Corbin,” I say, loud enough that the little one can hear me in the kitchen. “Your brother is going to give me a ride now. . . .”

  “Hey, yeah, I want to come! Eric, you can’t leave me. You know. Mom says you got to stay with me.”

  “Sure. That works, right, Eric?” I don’t wait for Eric to say anything. “But, before we go, you should to go to the bathroom and get us some snacks for the road. OK?”

  When the little brother trails down the hall, I turn to Eric and say quietly, “It will be OK. It’s fine if he comes. We just don’t want him to get scared and confused. It’s just a ride. Nobody knows I’m with you. Nobody knows where I am. It’s just a ride. Right?”

  Corbin is back in the kitchen now, rustling around in the cupboards.

  “I like snacks. Get us lots and lots of snacks. And something to drink, too,” I tell Corbin. I turn to Eric and say, “Do you have gas? I can give you money for gas if you need it.” His answer will tell me if I’ve got him under my finger, if he’s ready for me to push him where I need him to go.

  “I have gas,” says Eric. “And anyway the gas station was by the Beaver Trap. It blew up.” It is a very normal thing to say. He’s keeping our secret. He’s protecting his brother. That’s very good.

  “Oh, yeah. Wow,” I say. “Gas tanks blew up like crazy. Blew up like a bomb. Well, good thing your car is ready to go then. But I still want to give you money for your trouble.”

  I notice a chessboard on a little table by a window. The board is dusty. This game has been sitting a while. I reach out to put my finger on the queen nearest me.

  “Don’t touch that!” says Eric. I pull my hand back. What is happening in my pawn’s little round head?

  “Whose game?” I ask.

  “I’m playing my dad.”

  “Are you white or black?

  “Black. I’m black.”

  “You win on the next move. You know that?”

  “There is no next move.”

  “You want me to show you how?”

  He says nothing. He looks away from the game to where his brother is banging cupboard doors, getting ready for an adventure.

  “Got what we need? ’Cause let’s hit the road.” I say it loud, to Corbin in the kitchen.

 
Corbin grins and shows me the grocery bag he’s filled with junk food. I walk over and look in like I’m interested. Calories are calories. A drink is a drink. I choose a knife from the knife block in the kitchen. It’s short, a paring knife. The blade is a tapering triangle, dull edged, but strong. It wouldn’t be great for peeling apples, but it will be great for jabbing. The point will go in fast and hard. I won’t be peeling apples.

  Even though we know the hillside, it’s dead dark and hard to see, hard to put a foot exactly right every time. Sometimes there’s junk on the trail. Junk that wasn’t there when we left yesterday morning. Bedsprings, those are bedsprings, from a bed that used to be in our house. Something rolls out from under my foot and I fall until I catch myself. Something jabs my hand. It’s glass. Just a little piece of glass. I’m hardly cut at all, but, now I know it’s there. I notice the crunch of broken glass under my boots. It used to be a window. Now it’s just pointy teeth scattered on the hillside. Nobody will ever look out that window to see if trouble is coming ever again. Trouble came.

  If Bo and I were home, there would have been three of us. More eyes to see. More hands to fight. I wonder what that would have meant. Then I hear words in my head that sound like Da: “You were following orders.” The words in my head are right. We were following orders.

  We still have orders to follow. We are at the bottom of the hill. Two days ago we would have been standing beside the back porch. Tonight we are walking past a stinking black place crowded with burnt things and nothing.

  The root cellar is cut into the bank of the hill over there. In daylight it looks like a woodpile with a tarp over it from most directions. You can only see the plank door if you go behind the stacks of split wood. If you do go back there and open the door, all you see is a hole in the ground, some board shelves with cans of food and some jars of things Mabby canned before she died. We never ate that food. It’s too old to eat now. We don’t put food in the root cellar anymore.

  When Bo pulls the door of the root cellar open, it smells like dirt and wet. It doesn’t smell like smoke. We pull the door closed behind us. Bo finds the flashlight hanging on the back of the door. He cranks it up and the light shoots out onto the dirt floor. He hands it to me. Part of me wants to look at the words Mabby wrote on the jars: PEACHES, CARROTS, PICKLED BEETS. Sometimes in the summer, I come in here where it’s cool and dark to look at the letters my Mabby wrote. It helps me remember that she was real.

  I can’t read the labels now. Bo needs the light to see, so I shine it where he is working. He shifts some plastic milk crates full of rusted hinges and parts that don’t fit anything. He moves some boards leaning up against the back wall. He steps aside, and the beam of light threads down into the tunnel. This is the back door to the den. This is the way out Da made. Da might be in there, waiting for us.

  We need to go find him.

  There’s a med kit in a coffee can on the shelf. We need that. I hand the flashlight to Bo. He moves fast to the first turn point, then he keeps going, silent. I follow in the dark. I know where I’m going. It’s like getting a cup of water in the middle of the night. I’ve done it so many times.

  Then the light swings back on me and makes me blinder than the dark ever did.

  “He’s not there,” says Bo. “It’s caved in at second turn.”

  Da probably got out before the collapse. He didn’t need the med kit. That’s what I think.

  When we get back to the root cellar, Bo pushes the few last jars of food Mabby left behind out of the way. Behind them, there are other jars. Nothing says what’s in them, and you can’t tell by looking because they just look black. One, two, three, four, five. All there. Da never took a jar, either. He might have just been in a hurry; that’s what I think.

  Bo picks up a jar and unscrews the lid, and then he dumps it out on the floor. Inky water and another, smaller jar. He opens that jar. There’s a little kiss of air when the seal breaks. There’s a neat roll of money inside, just like Da stashed it. Five jars, five wads of money. The money and the med kit go into the backpack. The jars and the lids go back on the shelves. The boards and the milk crates cover the entrance to the den. We turn off the light and wait for our eyes to adjust. We open the root cellar door and step from the darkness inside to the darkness outside.

  The air smells bad. The smoke has all blown away, but the smell of burning is thick as snot. It makes my eyes water and my nose run.

  Before we leave, we have to retrieve the intel from the job shed. The padlock is still on the door. That’s a good sign. The little twig jammed in at the top corner is still in place. That’s a better sign. Nobody but us would know to look for that. If Those People opened the door and then locked it up again, they wouldn’t have known to put the twig there as a sign.

  I squat down and wait while Bo goes inside. It doesn’t take him long. Everything is always ready to go — the intel, the solar, the gun, the ammo — all in one package. Bo’s got it. He locks the door. He puts the twig back. If Da comes, he will know we were there. He will know we have the intel and everything is safe.

  We have everything. It’s time to get out.

  One thing I wish we had is the night-visions, but they were in the house, and now the house is gone. I wish we had the night-visions not just so we could move through the dark faster; I wish we had them so I could look at what’s left of my home. I wish I could look at that, and really see it, because what I can see doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe if I could see in the dark, I could know what happened better.

  I walk over the flat rock that was the front step, and I stand on it.

  If I opened the door that isn’t there anymore, I would have been in the kitchen. The grey enamel coffee pot would have been on the stove. I think that shape used to be the stove. I step to it and touch it. It still holds the warmth of the fire, even though they doused so much water on it. It was made for fire, but fire on the inside. When the floor burnt out from under it, it fell over. I squat down beside it and remember how I used to put my socks in the warming oven in the winter. Warm winter socks in the morning. I wish morning would come and I could climb down the ladder from my loft and put on my socks, warm socks.

  “Valley, we got to go,” says Bo.

  And we do.

  I’m disappointed when we come to the gate of the retreat property and it’s locked and twigged, but Da would have locked it if he came this way. And he would have twigged it, too. Da is always careful about the rules.

  So I’m optimistic again while we take the bike down the rutted dirt to the place where the bus is parked under the trees. I’m optimistic until I can’t see any smoke rising from the stovepipe sticking out the bus window. Maybe Da isn’t cold. That’s good, if Da’s not cold. That means he’s feeling strong. But when we stop the bike’s engine and there is still no Da, no smiling Da, then I have to start being optimistic that he will be getting here when he can. I have to remember that we had it easy. We had the bike for transportation. Da is having to figure things out. That can take time.

  Right now, we’re tired, but that’s OK. We’re home. This old school bus is wala for us, a den, a home. Da brought us here often enough to know the area — not often enough for anyone to notice that we were here.

  We build a fire in the little barrel stove and we dip into the water supply to fill the coffee pot. Pretty soon it’s on the boil. We just stand by the fire and wait. I get the front side of my body as hot as I can stand it, then I turn around and toast my backside. We open bags of food, add some of the hot water, and stir them up. Mine is gloopy and orange: lasagna. Bo’s is gloopy and tan: stroganoff. I eat a few bites before I break down and go to the metal storage box and pull out a bottle of corn syrup. After I stir some of that in, it tastes just like home cooking. Bo smiles and does the same.

  We are warm, our bellies are full, and we are safer than we have been in days. We can sleep now. When we wake up, we can check the intel for our orders. That will be soon enough.

  “I’ll tak
e first watch,” says Bo. It’s still daylight, but sleeping is going to be easy.

  “Four hours,” I say.

  “Hey.” Bo is shaking my shoulder. Judging by the moon, he let me have more than four hours. I’m grateful to Bo. He takes care of me, and I take care of him. That’s why we are us.

  I crawl out of the sleeping bag and he crawls in.

  One of Da’s wool shirts is hanging on the back of the driver’s seat. I wrap it around me. The sleeves are way long, nice and cozy against the early morning cold.

  I push the lever that opens the door of the bus and the doors flap open. I step out into the nearly dark world. Something happens to light when it bounces off the grey mirror of the moon: all the color bleeds out of it. It’s a world of grey-and-dark, grey-and-light that the moon shows me. There is a pair of night-visions if I want to get them. Da always made sure the bus was stocked with essentials, everything we would need. I don’t bother with the night-visions though, because keeping watch at night is more about listening than seeing. Even though my ears aren’t as good as Bo’s, I know paying attention is what matters. What I can hear now is the air moving through the needles on the trees and the squeak of one branch against another. I tuck my nose into the collar of the shirt. I can smell my Da. He’s as close as the smell of wood smoke, sweat, and wool.

  The computer is charged, but we wait until the sun is up so we plug it into the solar collector for a trickle charge before we turn it on. Never waste an opportunity to conserve resources.

  Bo and I sit shoulder to shoulder sharing the screen. We open the file named TROUBLE/SEPTEMBER. Da is talking to us. He recorded all the things we didn’t need to know until now. Five minutes later we have the intel we need for the next month. Now we just start counting off the days. Checking things off the list. When Da gets here, everything will be exactly as it ought to be. If he doesn’t get here when the month is up, we come back for the intel in the file named ACTION/OCTOBER.

  Today’s list is a short one: Settle in, scout for wood, play chess, be good to each other.