Born to Fly (13 page)

“Now, son, where were you on the night of the explosion?” District Attorney Lashley asked.

“I was walking out of the woods. I had just brought some food to my daddy.”

“You mean your father, Ben Peck, who had been living in the woods?”

“Yep.”

“What happened to your father?”

That was when Farley stood up and pointed straight at Uncle Tomo.
“He
killed him.”

“That’s a lie!” Kenji jumped up and hollered.

“Silence!” the judge said. You could see that Kenji’s outburst made him mad. “Young man, you will sit down and keep silent, or you will be forced to leave. I will not have
my courtroom turned into a circus.” He nodded at Mr. Lashley. “You may continue, prosecutor.”

“Son, did you see him kill your father?” Mr. Lashley touched Farley’s shoulder like you would if you thought someone was gonna cry, only this was more like he was pretending he thought Farley was gonna cry. Like he was acting.

But Farley shucked away his hand anyway. “I seen him running away from the factory and into the woods just before the factory blew up. Next day, they found my daddy with a knife in his back. That’s how I know that Jap done it.”

“He’s lying!” Kenji burst out. “He wasn’t even in the woods that night. We would have seen him.”

“We?” Mr. Lashley said.

“Shut up, Kenji,” I shushed him. But it was too late. The lawyers went up and talked with the judge for about ten minutes. When they were done, Farley was dismissed and a new witness was called to the stand.

“Kenji Fujita.”

Kenji got up. He looked at me. I shook my head. He turned around and marched to the witness box.

The bailiff held up the Bible. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

Kenji nodded. “I do.”

He was so short you could barely see him over the fence of the witness box, so after they swore him in, they had him
sit on a briefcase. Then the district attorney approached with his first question. “Ken-ji, huh? Exactly what kind of name is that?”

“I don’t know. My name?” Kenji looked puzzled.

“Behave yourself, prosecutor,” said Judge Dickens.

“Was there some sort of objection, Your Honor?” Mr. Lashley asked real innocently, like he didn’t know what the judge was talking about.

“No objection from me,” Mr. Wylie answered.

“Well, there ought to be,” the judge barked. Then he looked sternly at Mr. Wylie. “Listen to me, Felix. Either you defend this man properly, or I’ll call a mistrial faster than you can say William Jennings Bryan.”

Mr. Wylie straightened his strand of hair. “Of course, Your Honor.”

“Now get on with it,” Judge Dickens said.

District Attorney Lashley started over. “Thank you, Your Honor. Now Ken-ji, your uncle, Mr. Fujita, keeps explosives in the house, doesn’t he?”

“Just fireworks,” Kenji said.

“Just fireworks. Uh-huh. What were you doing when the explosion occurred at the Warhawk engine factory?”

I bit my lip and shook my head again at Kenji. He paused a second, then blurted out, “We had just shot off some flares by the bay.”

“We,” again?
Oh no! He’s done it now
.

“You mean, you and your uncle?” Mr. Lashley asked.

Kenji looked at me. “No. Me and a friend.”

“Oh. Do you mean Bird McGill?” Mr. Lashley trumpeted.

Suddenly it felt like everyone’s eyes had pounced on me. I wanted to crawl under my chair. It was even worse than that time in the third-grade spelling bee finals when I ended
Mississippi
with a
y
. Mom turned to me, too, but I just looked down at my shoes.

“Do you mean Bird McGill?” the DA repeated.

“I guess so,” Kenji answered.

“So you and Bird were playing with your uncle’s explosives?” the DA said with a smirk.

“No. Just some flares. You know, Roman candles. We needed enough light… to take a picture.”

Mr. Lashley looked suddenly interested. “What
picture?”

Kenji mumbled, knowing full well they would never believe it. “Of the submarine we saw.”

“Submarine?” The DA dropped his jaw, like a circus clown would if he was pretending to be shocked.

Mr. Wylie snorted, struggling to contain his laughter. It was like one of Farley’s dumb fart noises in school. It wasn’t really funny, but when one person started laughing, it was contagious. The rest of the spectators heard Mr. Wylie’s snort and started to scoff and snicker.

Judge Dickens pounded his gavel. “Mr. Wylie, you are begging for a contempt citation.”

Mr. Wylie cleared his throat and tried to put on a serious expression. “It won’t happen again, Your Honor.”

The DA approached the jury, jingling the change in his pocket like he wouldn’t have believed Kenji in a million years. “Where is this ‘picture’ of a submarine?”

“Well…” Kenji lowered his head. “The factory blew up before we got a chance to take it.”

“Of course it did.” Mr. Lashley grinned. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Then Kenji jumped to his feet. “But it was in the bay! Bird and I saw it. It knocked over our rowboat!”

Mr. Lashley called out louder, this time sounding out each word like a kindergarten teacher repeating something for the tenth time, “No. Further. Questions. Your Honor.”

Kenji cried out, “He didn’t do it. He didn’t kill Mr. Peck. Ask Bird. She knows who did it!”

Oh no! Why’d he have to say that?

“That’s enough, son,” the judge said, growing angrier. “Your testimony is finished.”

The crowd grew unruly. Once again all their eyes turned to me. I felt a chill, and I knew that somewhere, somehow, in that courtroom, the man in black was watching me right then.

The judge pounded his gavel again and checked his watch. “This trial will reconvene the day after tomorrow, after the July Fourth holiday.”

Mom took hold of me. “Bird. What is Kenji talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, hoping like crazy she couldn’t tell I was lying.

Terrified, I grabbed Kenji as he walked past and pulled him into a corner. I shook him. “I told you not to say anything until my dad comes home.”

“It’ll be too late,” Kenji pleaded. “My uncle needs your help now.”

From the back of the crowd, Farley shot us an angry look, and I knew things were only gonna get worse from there on in.

The next night, I was lying awake in my bed holding a small American flag as the last of the July Fourth fireworks exploded in the Widow Gorman’s backyard down the hill. After years of saying “H, E, double-L, no!” the Widow Gorman had finally let the town use her cornfield for the show. But even though I knew Dad was off somewhere fighting for our freedom, I didn’t feel much like going to the fireworks that year. And with Kenji staying at our house and the trial and everything, Mom had figured it would be best if we just watched them from home. Mom had made sandwiches and potato salad, but I didn’t eat much. Not because it wasn’t good. I just had too much on my mind.

What was I going to say at the trial? The man in black had said that if I told them about him, he’d hurt my family. No one would believe me anyway. What was the point? But if I didn’t tell them, then Kenji would look like a fool and a liar. And it’d be Farley’s word against Kenji’s and Uncle Tomo’s. There didn’t seem to be any way out. Unless…

Maybe they wouldn’t call me to the stand? Why would they bother? They had laughed at Kenji when he told them about the sub and the picture. Who wants to hear the crackpot ramblings of a weirdo kid like me who memorizes fighter plane manuals and sees sea monsters and submarines? Yeah, what was I worrying about? They probably wouldn’t even call me to the stand.

So instead of thinking about the trial and Kenji, and my dad, and the man in black, I decided to distract myself into falling asleep by dreaming up ways to smother my snoring sister Margaret. She sounded like a congested water buffalo.

Then I heard:
“Shhh!”
“Stop flapping your trap.” It was several boys’ voices whispering outside my window. I couldn’t catch all of what they were saying, but the loudest one kept stuttering, like you-know-who. “Gimme that. You want them to hear you, s-s-s-stupid?”

Before I could get out of bed and to the window, there was the crackle of a match and the next thing I knew, one of our upstairs windows shattered like someone had thrown a brick through it.

“Hey! Come back here!” I hollered at three or four shadowy figures running into the darkness.

“For gosh sakes, Bird. Who’re you yelling at?” Margaret joined me at the window. But they were gone.

Then, as we leaned out our window, we both noticed the orange flickering coming from Alvin’s window.

“Fire!” Margaret shouted.

But her voice was drowned out by a rapid-fire flurry of
BANG!
and
POP!
that sounded like bombs and gunshots.

We raced into Alvin’s room just as the curtains caught fire. A string of firecrackers exploded and danced among the flames on the floor. The smoke was already making it hard to see and breathe. Poor little Alvin was cocooned in his blanket, screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!” Kenji dragged him out from under the covers.

“Watch out for the broken glass!” I warned him. Kenji threw my little brother over his shoulder like a carpet roll and dodged the glass splinters as Margaret shoved the three of us out the door. She stayed behind, trying to smother the flames with a blanket.

“Is everyone all right?” Mom yelled as she collided with us in the hall.

Kenji and I nodded, coughing. Mom uncovered Alvin, kissed him, and grabbed me hard, by the shoulders. “Take Alvin and Kenji downstairs, now!”

The last thing I saw before running down the stairs was Mom and Margaret ripping Alvin’s choo-choo-train curtains down and using his blanket to try and smother the flames that had already engulfed the German cuckoo clock that used to be Grandpa McGill’s.

The thing was, I’d always hated that cuckoo clock. It never kept the right time and always got stuck
cuckooing
, over and over, every Saturday morning until Dad would silence it with a screwdriver. But it was strange to see my
house on fire. Even the things I used to hate about it were suddenly the things I wanted desperately to save. Two hours after the fire started, I sat wrapped in a blanket on our front lawn, staring at the upstairs of our wonderful, drafty yellow farmhouse, which was now stained black from the fire. Principal Hartwig and the other volunteer firemen, along with Lieutenant Peppel’s squadron from the base, had formed a bucket line and managed to put out the fire. Margaret rocked Alvin and sang to him softly, trying to get him to fall back asleep.

Mom and Deputy Steyer packed Kenji’s stuff into the police car. Kenji sat in the backseat looking pale and pretty scared. I was scared, too. Someone had tried to burn our house down. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but I knew it was Farley.

“It’ll be safer for everyone with Kenji at the station,” said the deputy.

“But Dad will be home next week,” I protested to Mom. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but the truth was, I felt safer having Kenji around. He was the only person on my side.

Mom knelt down by me. “Bird. Remember our deal? Wouldn’t you say this qualifies as trouble?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Not to mention, your father would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”

“It’s really for the best, Mrs. McGill,” Deputy Steyer said.

I tried to believe them. But making Kenji go was like letting the bad guys win. It wasn’t Kenji’s fault we were at
war, any more than it was Farley’s or Father Krauss’s or Mr. Ramponi’s. Was I the only one who could see that?

The next day was the hottest day of the summer. All the lady jurors fanned themselves with their straw hats while the men broke down and loosened their ties and shirt collars. Kenji had to sit up front with Deputy Steyer.

I made sure we got there late so that Mom and I would have to sit in the balcony. After the excitement of the fire, Mom had decided it would be best for Margaret to stay home with Alvin until the trial was over.

Judge Dickens called the court to order. “Your next witness, prosecutor?”

I held my breath and doubled-crossed my fingers, just like when I didn’t want Mrs. Simmons to call me to the blackboard.

“Tomo Fu-jita.” It worked!

Uncle Tomo got up slowly and walked to the stand. He looked small, and old, and I could tell he was uncomfortable with all the people staring at him. There was something different about the way the DA questioned Uncle Tomo, too. Mr. Lashley didn’t even bother trying to be polite to Uncle Tomo, as he had with the other witnesses. He started out asking Uncle Tomo the same simple questions over and over. It was like he was talking to a child and trying to catch him in a lie.

Then, all of a sudden, the DA just blurted out, “Mr. Fu-jita. Why did you kill Mr. Peck?”

Uncle Tomo looked surprised. So did the judge and everyone else.

“I not kill him. I not kill anyone.”

“Why did you sabotage the factory?” the DA asked.

“I not sabotage the factory.”

“Where were you the night of the explosion?”

Uncle Tomo paused. “I visit someone.”

“Your accomplice?”

“No. Makiko.”

“And who or what is Ma-ki-ko?”

“My wife.”

“Really.” Mr. Lashley rolled his eyes for the jury. “Does your wife live in the woods?”

“In cemetery. She die, on the boat to America.”

I think that must have made Mr. Lashley a little uncomfortable, because he quickly changed the subject. “So, when you left the cemetery, is that when you ran into Farley Peck?”

Uncle Tomo shook his head. “I never see boy. When factory explode, I run home to find my nephew.”

“Mr. Fujita, why would this boy Farley, whose father was murdered, lie?”

Because that’s what Farley does
, I wanted to say. Everybody knew that. I’d known it since the first day of kindergarten, when Farley told me his dad used to be President of the United States.

“Perhaps he want someone to blame,” Uncle Tomo said. “I understand this.”

“You
understand
. How thoughtful of you.” That was when Mr. Lashley walked over to the evidence table. He unfolded a large flag. It was white, with a big bloodred circle in the center.