Black Helicopters

by Blythe Woolston

  “Sit you down here,” Captain Nichols says, and he pulls out the chair with wheels so I can sit down at the computer. The keys are dirty with the filth of the Captain’s fingers. When I touch it, the keyboard feels different than the laptop. It’s bigger, and I don’t know how to move the cursor. I don’t know how to click.

  “Here,” says Captain Nichols. And he puts my hand on a lump beside the keyboard. “Use the mouse.” His hand swallows mine up. He pushes down and clicks, double-clicks. He moves the cursor. He moves my hand. His fingers are blunt. His thumb is wide and thick as a hammer handle.

  “Like that,” says Captain Nichols. “You got it?”

  I make the cursor arrow move across the page and turn into a pointing finger hand sitting right in the middle of the picture of the flames at the Willow Gulch cabin fire. The picture fills the screen and the video starts to play:

  “Thanks for watching this evening. Leading our news, explosions complicated fighting a fire at a residence on Willow Gulch Road. Anna Frank files this report.”

  “They knew the cabin was a complete loss immediately. . . .”

  There are pictures of smoke from a distance, the way we saw it. Pictures of our home, still full of fire. Pictures of the back door resting sideways against a tree. Some guy in a white shirt is talking. “It was a complete loss. When the first unit arrived on the scene, the house was fully involved with fire and it partially collapsed while we were walking up there.”

  The girl is talking again, she says:

  “According to Chief Borglund, there were several loud explosions shortly after they arrived. The blasts blew this debris around the cabin.” The pictures of the back door against the tree are there while the girl says, “The explosions may have been caused by propane tanks inside the structure. There were no serious injuries to civilians or firefighters responding at the scene. Water from a nearby creek was pumped and used to extinguish the fire. Chief Borglund says the fire marshal is conducting an investigation, but at this time it’s being deemed accidental. He says that the cabin may have been occupied, but declined to give further details at this time. Back to you, Sonia.”

  And the film freezes again, on the picture of the flames.

  “Look here,” said Captain Nichols. “Click on this.” He points at another link on the page.

  Fire officials said the blaze at a Willow Gulch cabin was “suspicious” but did not identify a cause. Human remains believed to be those of the owner-occupant were recovered. Authorities did not release his name because they had not been able to contact his relatives. Pending investigation, the area is cordoned, but a neighbor reported the structure was “leveled to the ground.” Another resident who had been on the scene said, “Black as that smoke was, you could tell some bad stuff was burning. It smelled bad, chemical bad, there’s no question about that. Maybe that place was built of railroad ties or something. Never been in there. He lived there alone. He never bothered us, and we never bothered him.”

  Authorities have tentatively identified the body recovered at a fire in the Willow Gulch as cabin owner Dalton J. White, 42. Darryl Barbrady, chief forensic investigator at the medical examiner’s office speculated White died of smoke inhalation. The body remains at the state crime lab in Missoula. Barbrady said that the structure’s complete destruction might make it difficult to pinpoint a cause of death. Barbrady added that whatever sparked the blast might never be determined either, but fire officials are investigating.

  “Da’s dead.” I say.

  “That’s what Those People say,” says Captain Nichols. “But yeah, that’s what you got to go on. If he ain’t dead, he might as well be. They got him, and they want everybody to think he’s dead. Sorry, kids. That’s the way it is.”

  After a couple of minutes, Captain Nichols says, “He was a level dealer, your daddy. He coulda used a tinfoil hat maybe, but he was fighting the good fight. And I promised him I’d help you out if you needed it, so that’s going to happen. We can talk about that in the morning. We can talk about all of it.”

  “You ever read books?” I twist sideways so I can see the little boy in the back seat.

  “I read books,” says Corbin. “That’s how I learned about Helicoprion. That’s how I learned how all this used to be under the sea. All the way to Wyoming. All the way to Kansas.”

  “Was that back in the dinosaur times?”

  “Before the dinosaurs. There were lots of things before dinosaurs.”

  “And lots of things after.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Well, we’re here. And that’s after the dinosaurs.”

  “Not after. Dinosaurs are still around. They’re just being birds now.”

  “Birds?”

  Two ravens cross our path, their shadows are a moment on the hood of the car, and then they are gliding into the past behind us. And we are in their past, too, from their perspective. “Turn left at the next road,” I tell Eric. I don’t say, Turn because of the ravens, the gliding, guiding ravens.

  I turn back to Corbin in the back seat and say, “I don’t think I’d want to meet any dinosaur bird big as a tree so it could just peck me up like a bug. But you don’t believe that, do you? You don’t believe in dinosaur birds.”

  “Not like that. That’s stupid. They turned into birds. They laid eggs. That’s a thing they’re alike. And there’s other things. Things about their bones and feet.”

  “Did they caw like ravens? Did they sing? Like meadowlarks?”

  “We don’t know that. Songs don’t leave fossils. There’s no bones in noise. Why don’t you know that? What kind of books do you read? Did you read any useful books?”

  “I didn’t have any books about dinosaurs. I like books with stories in them. Like Tarzan. I read Tarzan lots of times.”

  “I saw a cartoon movie about Tarzan. It wasn’t very scientific.”

  “Hey, Bro, stop bugging her. Check in the pocket of my sweatshirt back there. My game’s in there — and some headphones. Why don’t you plug in and play? You can even play on my files — I’m totally cool with it. You can see levels you never saw before.”

  “Sweet!” Corbin starts pawing around in the pile of clothes on the seat. “Got it.”

  “You can do me a solid sometime,” says Eric, but Corbin is already connected to the machine, already gone; his body is already a husk in the backseat; all that’s left behind are his twitching thumbs and eyes.

  “So, what’s your plan now you come down from the mountains? Where you gonna live?” Captain Nichols asks the questions while he pours us coffee. He feeds us eggs too, real eggs, but they are burnt crisp and crinkly around the edges and don’t taste so good as I remember.

  “We need a place to park the bus where we aren’t snowed in all winter. That’s what we need.”

  “How you heat that thing?”

  “There’s a little barrel stove. We put the pipe out the window. And the kerosene lamp throws a lot of heat. We use that nights.”

  “Even a little stove needs a lot of wood to make it through the winter.”

  That’s a fact. It’s inarguable. It’s also true that we, right now, don’t have a lot of wood. There’s plenty of wood stacked by the root cellar where the cabin used to be, but it might as well be on the moon. We can’t go there. We can’t go back home.

  “What about your momma’s people? Would they take you?” Captain Nichols looks at Bo all the time, like Bo is the one to talk to, like Bo is the one with the com.

  “We are our momma’s people,” I say.

  “Well, then, your options are pretty limited. You got no decent place to sleep. You got no decent vehicle — you can’t drive that bus around, and you can’t haul anything bigger than a six-pack on that bike you’re hauling on the back of the bus. On the one hand, the best thing you got going for you is that you don’t exist — officially. Long as that’s true, nobody’s looking for you and nobody’s going to see you. On the other hand, the world don’t know you exist, so they don’t care if
you freeze or starve.” The Captain falls silent then. He just drinks his coffee and stares across the table at an empty chair.

  “What happened to your daddy’s truck?” Captain Nichols breaks the silence and gets up to fill his coffee cup again.

  “We saw it there after the fire, but we didn’t touch it. We had the bike. I guess it’s still there. It didn’t burn,” Bo says.

  “If you could get that truck. That would be an asset. I might even be able to find some work for you to do if you get that truck.”

  “What kind of work?” I ask.

  “Well, hauling things, to start. People always need things moved around. Your daddy used to move things for people. That was one thing your daddy did. I can maybe set up some jobs like that for you. If that works out. If you’re dependable, then we can figure out what other skills you got that people might need.” Captain Nichols nods at Bo’s bandaged hand. “What happened there? You blow yourself up a little bit? Your daddy, he never made mistakes like that.”

  “Bo never makes mistakes, either. The jack broke while he was working on the bus. So that’s no mistake. Metal fatigue. That kind of shit just happens.”

  “Yeah, shit does just happen. That’s a fact. Your daddy had some rarefied skills, though. Rarefied skills. And people trusted him.”

  “Da taught me,” says Bo.

  “Skills you can learn,” says Captain Nichols. “But trust you got to earn.”

  We wait. Bo puts his bandaged hand on his lap. I know he’s a little ashamed of it. I never thought about what people might think when they see his missing fingers. Now we are both thinking about that, about how it might look.

  Captain Nichols scoots his chair away from the table and stands up, taller than me, taller than Bo, taller than Da ever was. He takes the hat off and rubs his hair back, then he settles the hat back. That’s when he says, “I figure we got to go see if we can get your daddy’s truck. I figure it might still be sittin’ there. I drive you up there, you drive it back here.

  “If that pans out, you can stay here a couple of months to get yourselfs organized. But this ain’t no charity outfit. I’ll take a commission on the jobs and you gotta give me some rent and — and if you mess with my property, I’ll know. You’re under surveillance, and I’ll see if you pull any shit. That happens, I’ll sic every kind of government type on you so fast you won’t know if you are in hell or the nuthouse. You hear me?” He sticks his hand out at Bo. Bo stands up like a person, and they shake on it. It’s a deal. Everything considered; it’s a real fair deal.

  I look out the windshield and imagine the world the way Corbin said it was, all under water. The sun is going down and the shadows wash like waves across the valley from one hillside to another. The light gets greyer, and I can imagine that the water is flooding up to the sky.

  In the distance something small as a mosquito is rising over a hillside. It flashes bright in the moment of pure light the sun is leaving behind as it drops behind the western horizon. Maybe that speck is a helicopter shark that will slide through time and the sky to become a raven, or a meadowlark.

  “No! No! Turn around! Turn around now!” I scream, and I hit Eric.

  “What the hell?” Eric yells and flinches toward the door.

  The dog jumps at my arm, but his teeth don’t find me. It is stuck — wiggling and fighting — over Eric’s shoulder. Eric fights the dog, fights the wheel, and the car snaps from one lane to the other and back.

  “Turn around!” I yell, and I point at the sky where I can see what’s coming now. “Black helicopter!”

  Eric pushes the dog off him and into the backseat. He cranes down to see the thing coming at us.

  “No! No! Don’t look. Never look! Turn around!”

  “I can’t turn here. I can’t go the wrong way on the freeway.”

  “Just go across the middle, just go!” I grab the steering wheel and push it the way I need to go. But Eric pushes back and the car turns, skates across the lanes, and scrapes the metal guardrail beside a steep bank. Eric brakes and the car stops on the shoulder.

  In front of us, the black helicopter is moving toward the east, not toward us, please not toward us.

  “Don’t look! Don’t look!” I say it again and again. “Never look at a black helicopter.”

  “It’s not black,” says Corbin. “I saw it. It’s green and white. It’s a rescue helicopter from the hospital.”

  I rise up and my fist flies over the seat and connects with the side of Corbin’s head. Before the dog can take another fly at me, I grab its ear and pin it to the seat. Corbin is screaming and crying. “Shut your mouth or I will kill this dog,” I say. I pull the paring knife out of my pocket and push the point at the dog’s eye.

  “Listen to her, Corbin. Shut up. Shut up now,” says Eric.

  In the back seat, both the kid and the dog are whimpering.

  Bo is on a three-day job.

  I sit in the bus.

  I’m all alone.

  I hold Da’s wool shirt against my face, but I can hardly smell his life there anymore. He is fading away. The last traces of him are dissolving into the air. If I had the laptop with me, I would watch the messages he left for us. I could see his eyes and hear his voice. But Bo needs the laptop when he’s working. I have to get by on what I remember, so I work on that.

  “Those People will be afraid,” says Da. He 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. “We will be showing them exactly how to be afraid. We will wind them right up. Then, once we get Those People all wound up, we will sound the alarm. People will wake up.”

  I remember.

  “This is the queen,” says Da. “She can move all of these ways.” He slides the piece along the board, back and forth, side-to-side, and corner-to-corner. “She is the most powerful piece on the board.”

  I remember.

  When I was alone so much — after Da said my job was to sign the messages in blood, after I couldn’t go out into the world anymore — when I was alone so much, I learned to play chess against myself.

  At first, I used books. I would play the game the way it had been played by the masters against each other. Doing that, I learned many things. Then, I learned to play truly against myself. When I moved white, I played for white. When I moved black, I played for black. The trick, then, was not getting stuck, not falling into stalemate. The trick was winning. That was hard to learn to do.

  I am always, always, always determined to protect my king.

  I have to keep the game going. That is when I see. The game is not finished. Da’s game is not finished.

  The King is dead, but he isn’t in check.

  As long as I’m playing, the King isn’t in check. The windup is still good. The energy is there, waiting to be let out. I just have to find a way to send the last message. When that happens, Da will have won the game.

  I don’t usually speak to Captain Nichols. There’s no reason for me to be mixed up in conversations about who and what and why as far as jobs are concerned. That’s between him and Bo.

  But today I knock on his door and ask, “Can I use your computer?” I want to see again about my Da. I want to find out other things that will help me finish his work.

  “You remember how it works?” he asks.

  I nod yes and he walks back to that room with me. It’s dark except for the light that breaks from the screen when he taps the keyboard.

  Captain Nichols leaves the room.

  I go to the paper to read about the fire at Willow Gulch.

  There is nothing new about Da.

  I type in “black helicopters.”

  There is so much to read, and some of it isn’t like what Da said. I decide to not believe things that say there are no black helicopters or that the black helicopters are from outer space. I think Those People do not want the truth to be told, and one way to cover up the truth is to tell lies.

  But Da taught me enough to know tr
uth from lies, so I can learn more truth. I follow the links from one truthful thing to another.

  There are reports of a growing number of large, unmarked black helicopters. Black helicopters with no distinct markings are being seen daily in multiple states by many different people. It is extremely important that people get VIDEOS and pictures of these sightings.

  I cringe when I watch the videos. I can hear the helicopters — pock-a-pock-pock-POCK-A-POCK! — through the computer speakers. It’s all I can do to look at them on the computer screen. I have to remember it is like TV. The sharks on TV couldn’t bite me when I was little and these black helicopters can’t see me, can’t hurt me. I have to be brave enough to see this, to know this.

  Black helicopters have been flying over my city at sunrise. They travel in groups of three, usually, and fly low, maybe 100 or 150 feet above the ground. My neighbors have seen them, too. The noise wakes people up, but there’s never anything about it on the news.

  I read so many messages like that one. So many people know what is happening, but the messages aren’t getting through.

  . . . DEA uses black helicopters also . . .

  . . . dark camouflage . . .

  . . . no identifying marks . . .

  . . . numbers there, but cammoed, you got to be real close to see. Can’t see them when they fly overhead . . .

  . . . black-op military units conduct operations on US soil against citizens . . .

  . . . FEDGOV and its bootlickers just say “conspiracy theorist.” The sheeple hear that and go back to their TV trances . . .

  I can hear Da’s voice: “We will sound the alarm. People will wake up.”

  Captain Nichols is back. He is standing behind the chair, reading over my shoulder.