Flight (16 page)

What Joe especially appreciates most is that
they talk to him. By having conversations with varying members,
each of whom is willing to share something that maybe they
shouldn’t, Jack learns that there are seven ways out of the lair.
The path that he and Blesonus had taken is one of the most
difficult. It is the one used when the den has guests. Three other
exits leave the den midway down three different sides of the
mountain—north, west and south. The last three passages are
supposedly long torturous bolt holes. One ends in the valley on the
mountain’s west side. Another exits on the south side behind a
waterfall several hundred feet above an abandoned logging road. The
third also opens behind a waterfall, which, after pitching through
four cascades, becomes a stream that flows to the Hudson River.

Joe figures that if he can make his way to
the Hudson, then his boating skills, developed during summer
vacations on the narrow scythe of Cape Cod Island, will provide him
with a means of escape. He is sure that he can find some kind of
boat that will get him downstream to Albany. From Albany, he can
make his way back north to Montreal, which has always been his
goal…or…or, some other place that can be decided later.

The morning after their failed mission,
Blesonus leads Joe further down into the mountain along a
steep-pitched tunnel until they came to a series of four caverns,
each of which has a pool of the “fish,’ which are the source of the
Greenlanders bio-luminescent paint. The animals look like giant
tadpoles. When Joe pleads, a skeptical Blesonus hands him a small
pot of the paint.

That night, instead of sleeping, Joe goes
wandering into the bowels of the mountain. He takes the pot of
paint with him, and every time there is an intersection in the
tunnels, he marks his way with a thumbprint. Each time there is a
choice, he opts for the way that seems to lead deeper into the
mountain. Even after several hours of searching, while yawning from
lack of sleep and fighting the growls in his stomach and the
throbbing in his knee, the frustrated boy still has not discovered
the exit he is seeking.

Joe is a hundred meters down a corridor when
he stops dead. He can’t remember marking the last intersection. The
panicky adolescent whirls around in the tunnel and rushes to
retrace his steps. Standing before the intersection, which indeed
has no marking, he tries to remember whether he had turned in from
the right or left. His heart is beating so fast that he has trouble
concentrating. He turns left, takes a step in that direction, then,
wavers. His body begins to quake. He tells himself to slow down,
that the quaking is less from fear than from low blood sugar from
the Greenlanders’ meager diet. The panicky boy slumps against the
cold of the wall and consciously slows his breathing. After several
moments, it dawns on him that it doesn’t make any difference which
way he turns. If he goes to the left to the next intersection and
there is no mark, then he will know that he must turn around, walk
past where he presently is and go to the next opening, which will
be marked.

Joe pushes himself up from the floor, plays
his hunch and turns left. When he comes to the intersection and
sees no glowing thumbprint, he retraces his steps. He is so
confident as he walks back that when he comes to the other opening
and finds no thumbprint, it takes him a moment to realize the full
implications. It stuns him to realize that he has forgotten to mark
at least two junctions.

The magnitude of his stupidity literally
floors Joe. He sits in the dark, with his thighs and calves
spasming as he stares each way at the unbroken line of
phosphorescence and ponders his next move.

From what Blesonus and the others have told
him, there is a spiderweb of tunnels, some natural, some left from
the mining operations, but most constructed during the heyday of
the Greenlanders, winding throughout the mountain and even into
adjoining mountains. Back when novices joined the Kin in droves and
visitors came to see the life extolled in news programs and two
documentary films, the trails had been well-marked. But, after the
lair was repeatedly attacked by anti-greens and Last Boyz, the cave
dwellers removed most of the markers to make things more difficult
for any intruders. Despite the fact that that over the decades most
of the world has forgotten that the Greenlanders, like the Shakers
before them, even exist, the majority of passages remain unmarked
and, even worse for Joe, unused.

Joe rolls his head against the hard cold
stone as he tries to figure out the mathematics of his
situation—one mistake gives two possible paths, two mistakes makes
four possibilities, and if he has forgotten to paint three
entrances, he will have eight possible trails to backtrack. The
longer Joe sits, the more he feels how exhausted he is. The air
around him thickens. It feels heavy enough to wrap himself in it.
He doesn’t want to move. Suddenly, his panic triples as the idea
comes that what he is feeling is like the stories of lost hikers
going to sleep in a snow storm. Completely agitated, he jumps to
his feet and starts to run down the tunnel. It is only as he comes
to an intersection and the decision that implies that he gets
enough hold on himself to consider that, as unnerved as he is, if
he continues, he may only compound his troubles.

The cold, frightened boy holds back a sob as
he slides his back down the damp rock wall. He removes the monocle
from his eye and rubs the skin and muscles around the socket
contemplatively. After a few minutes of getting himself calm, Joe
rolls onto his side, draws up his knees and, just before he falls
deeply asleep, assures himself that he is too agitated to do more
than take a quick cat-nap.

Puzzled

When she woke the morning after the Fraunces
Tavern dinner, Prissi knew her day’s task was to find out more
about the faces in the Pequod Jones pix. However, rather than
immediately going back to the NYPD, she thought it made more sense
to see if she could find anything in the apartment or in the newly
arrived cases from Africa that would help her.

Minutes after her father left for work,
Prissi began her search in the small bedroom he used as an office.
Twenty minutes of rummaging file drawers and pawing through the
piles of papers stack on the badboard bookcase revealed
nothing.

Although she had some guilt as she snuck
around the office, those feelings were nothing compared to what
Prissi experienced when she moved her search to her father’s
bedroom. She found nothing more exciting than a water bottle, zines
and a pen on top of the bed-stand. The edstand’s dusty drawer held
paper clips, rubber bands, tissues, a pill vial, more pens and two
unopened paks of gum. The sock and underwear drawers held socks,
underwear and a musty smell that gave Prissi the creeps. Moving to
the closet, the mortified teener had a frisson of anticipation when
her hand touched something thin at the far end of the shelf above
the clothes rod. Standing on her tiptoes, she caught a corner and
withdrew a yellow padded Saf-Rap envelope.

With her quivering hands making the task more
difficult, Prissi finally managed to split the seal. She
half-pulled the sheet from the envelope. When she realized she was
holding her mother’s death certificate, she wondered why her father
would keep it in his closet. She flared her wings and sat down on
the rumpled sheets of her father’s bed. Pulling the heavy sheet of
paper free of its envelope, Prissi read the succinct recounting of
a life—name, date and place of birth, and place and date of…. Her
mother’s date of death was wrong. Nora Elieson had died on May
20th, 2094. That was a date Prissi could never forget. The paper
Prissi had in her hands said her mother had died on May 23rd. She
shrugged. That was Africa. A place so nonchalant about, so inured
to death, it didn’t even know when its people died.

When she started reading again, Prissi’s
quivering hands began to shaker. A snotty sob, the first one in
almost two years, strangled her. In a split second, a flick of the
eyes, Prissi’s life changed. The daughter’s life changed because
the mother’s death changed. Instead of dying from the injuries she
had sustained in a one vehicle accident along the Muyinga Gitega
road, the death certificate said that Nora Elieson’s accident was
no accident, that her death was self-inflicted.

As quickly as it had started, Prissi’s
sobbing stopped. Yesterday’s pix. Now, this paper. Was her family’s
life, and, thus, her life, all a lie? Something worse than tears
started to explode from Prissi, but she slammed it back with a
ferocity she didn’t even know she had. That, whatever that was, was
not getting out.

Prissi shoved the death certificate back into
its dark home. She tapped the edge of the envelope against her head
before she put it back on the shelf at the back of a closet, a
place where it did and didn’t belong.

The disturbed teener stumbled down to the
basement of the Gramercy Arms. Desperate to find something to make
sense of what she had just discovered upstairs, Prissi rotated the
five gears of the padlock securing the door of the mesh wire
storage compartment. She snapped the lock shackle and threw back
the door, pushed enough things aside so that she could spread her
wings, dropped to her knees and began picking up pieces of their
African life with the desperation of a hurricane survivor returning
home.

Suicide?

Suicide? It wasn’t possible. Her mother was
happy. She was healthy. Her mother loved her. She would never kill
herself. Prissi held and discarded familiar objects…and thoughts.
Although she rubbed the sides of vases and lamps, no genie emerged
to change her fate. She rubbed her forehead with hands that smelled
of a lost life, but no thoughts came that could make sense of the
crime of which the paper in her father’s closet accused her mother,
a crime of which Prissi and her father, though indirectly, also
were accused.

It was after five o’clock before a drained
Prissi stood up amidst the mess she had made. She had found nothing
that told her why her mother would commit suicide. But, she did
have answers to other questions. Now, she understood why they had
left Africa immediately after the funeral and why her father wasn’t
able to recover from his wife’s death. Prissi wanted to be at the
door when her father came home and tell him what she knew.

With the disengagement of a sleep walker, the
distraught girl tried to bring order to her thinking by bringing
order back out of the chaos she had created in the storage cage;
however before she had made much progress, exhaustion, more
emotional than physical, made her quit. Even though her father
would be home from work before long, Prissi didn’t go back to the
apartment. Instead, the feeling that had welled up in her father’s
bedroom, the feeling whose release she feared, propelled her
through the acid rain-etched glass doors of the Gramercy Arms.

It was just after 6:00 p.m. and the green
glow of the aqua-phosphor street lights along 21st Street painted
ghastly faces on those walkers hurrying along the sidewalk.
Overhead, the pulse of the beating wings of the walkers’ bosses,
and the tapestry of crisscrossing beams of flighlights, filled the
air. Prissi had burst out of the door without an idea in her head
except to move fast enough so that the turmoil within wouldn’t
overwhelm her. But, once outside in the cool dark air, some
rational fragment of her brain reminded her that it had been over
six hours since she had eaten anything. While six hours was not a
personal best, it was the longest she could remember going without
food since starting boarding school. Even though her mind was
indecisive, her belly knew immediately that it wanted to head
toward the Malawi deli two blocks west of Fifth Avenue. Prissi
thought that if she hurried, she just might get there before all of
the mbatata biscuits were gone.

In Burundi, mbatata biscuits had been
Prissi’s favorite food. Now, despite her painful confusion, the
teener smiled at the thought of how she and mother would buy them
from a stall at the market near their apartment building. Biscuits
in hand, she would cajole her mother into buying an Irn Bru. They
would walk down to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with their
unhappy bodyguard in tow, eating and drinking and talking, talking,
talking.

Prissi had just switched on her flightlight
when she heard someone trill her name. The voice was familiar, but
for a second, because it was so out of context, she couldn’t quite
place it. She looked up to the balustrade that stuck out a meter
from the front of the apartment building across the street and saw
a shapeless figure crouching there.

“Prissi, it’s me.”

Recognition came.

“Freeieekin Caesar.”

The shadowy figure leapt off the parapet,
flapped twice and landed in front of Prissi. The amorhous form
pushed back a hood, pulled off a watch cap and metamorphosed into
Jack Fflowers. A dirty, disheveled, intriguing Jack Fflowers.

“What’s going on?”

With a theatrical self-satisfied grin at his
arrival’s effect on Prissi, Jack drawled, “I’ll tell you, but I’m
really hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”

“I’m just running out to get some dinner.
C’mon with me. It’s not far.”

Jack shook his head, “Not a good idea.” He
nodded to the blue-black sky overhead as he pulled his hood back
up.

“Why are you hiding? Isn’t it Joe that’s the
fugitive?”

Jack interrupted Prissi, “Can we go some
place safer?”

Although Prissi prided herself on not being
thrown off course, there was something about Jack that made her
willing to wait to ask her questions.

“Come on up. My dad will be home soon, but I
can say I ran into you, say we’re good friends from school, you
know.”