Two boys, caught in the headlights of a semi-truck while sprinting home from school,
take a wrong turn into an airfield. They share a father, but not a mother. Neither are
aware of this fact. They share a name, too, the beautifully standard name of Jackie, short
for nothing, and trade clothes and glances between their two households. What little
they know is that once you’ve made it through the forests of Olympia, Washington,
you’ll find yourself in a great abandoned field filled with tiny fighter-planes, so old and
alive that you can see doughboys climbing out of them, lifting bronze-tinted glasses to
their foreheads after a long day’s work.
It’s Jackies’ ninth birthday next week. His father will give him a record and their
mothers will give them cards. Two become one in bi-monthly court hearings, destroying
any sense of when “Jackies” might be “Jackie’s” at the court stenographer’s discretion.
The two mothers are cordial, put-together, greeting each other at bus stops and making
sure each others’ children get home safe. They, too, trade clothes and glances.
All is still at the airfield. Afternoon rain leaves wings wet, grounding birds which stand
motionless on decayed copper propellers. Green-smelling air settles at the boys’ height.
They catch their lost breaths with jealous lungs.
“D’ya think we could figure out how to drive one of these planes?”
The moss of the Pacific Northwest coats dead soldiers’ etchings in steel. It infiltrates
lovers’ carvings on redwoods: ‘L + A’ becomes a hieroglyph. The forest silences far-off
sirens with the muffling power of velvet seats in an opera house.
The boy looks petrified. “Should we try? I’m afraid, Jackie. I’d like to go somewhere, I
don’t like the quiet here.”
“The quiet?”
The other boy nods. “Let’s go. Either we can fly it or we can tell people that we did.”
He smiles with a half-grown-in front tooth, and snaps together the middle button of his
corduroy jacket, boy’s size ten. Their speech has grown choppier since they realized just
how few words were needed to fill in the gaps of their shared thoughts. One of them
chips rust off of a door handle while the other climbs around to the driver’s seat, wishing
for tiny aviator goggles.
“I’ll drive, because I’m taller than you.”
“Okay.” A pause. “You’re not taller than me, it’s just your shoes.”
“I can reach the pedals. I hear that one of them makes you go up and the other makes
you go down.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Said Jackie, passenger, with suspicion.
“My dad told me. He’s a doctor.”
“Oh, okay. My dad’s a doctor, too.”
The plane was full of fermented oil, only fit to be drunk by skid-row robots with nothing
to lose. But the oil smiled through its dentures upon the leggy creatures directing it.
With the machinery’s blessing they were off, thirty, thirty-three feet off the ground,
Jackies silent over the hum of the engine.
Beneath them, forests, the greenest moss on earth, a green which neither autumn nor
smog could dull. Their thoughts traded: If those ancient men had learned to fly over
these woodlands, could they have ever brought themselves to fight in the Great War?
Entered that far-off world knowing there would be no moss to catch them there, over the
trenches?
And how’d those planes find themselves in that Northwestern airfield?
A question: “What kind of doctor is your dad, then?” The driver asked.
“I’m not sure, I don’t see him much. He mixes and makes things. I heard him talk about
something called Myopic Acid. A chemical, maybe. He’s a chemical doctor.”
With shaking panic, he responds: “Why don’t we get ourselves some of that chemical?
Maybe it could help us land.”
“We don’t know how to land?” Said Jackie, exchanging a pensive look with the driver,
which wordlessly answered his question.
Both boys tugged at frayed ropes and mildewed buttons as the view through the
windshield opened up into the city — a far cry from those woods and haunted suburbs of
their walk home.
Ahead: the children’s hospital. Newly built and terrifically brutalist, the kind of glassy
prison whose blue-tinged windows told no stories but those of expected, but still
disappointing news. And no rooftop garden (what are we, San Francisco?), no emerald
moss, instead, a bare concrete roof which, to the Jackies, appeared like a mirage in the
desert.
“There! Down there!”
One pair of legs possessed another and pressed down on a pedal, jolting the machine
like a car slipping out of gear.
“Aren’t we going a little fast to land on that roof?”
“No, we can always slow down. Why else would they have this pedal down here?”
And the plane shifted into the most graceful plummet possible, so gentle in its descent
that as it crashed through the roof of the hospital, only its rotten wheels broke through
to the top-floor offices.
The hospital workers went about their day, drowsy from their lunch-breaks and utterly
unimpressed by the bronze biplane that now stuck through the ceiling like a military
chandelier. God bless the concrete roof that now crumbled into administrators’ coffee
cups, God bless the rust flaking from the plane’s engine that vindicated a stubborn
scientist. See, this is why we wear eye protection!
The Jackies climbed out of their cockpit and onto the roof, feeling that they’d just
accomplished something great, and knowing that they’d never tell a soul. Who’d suspect
us, after all? But a phone rings on the floor below — no, two phones — because their
mothers’ intuition has always triumphed over their debauchery. Behind them, the
greenest forests you’ve ever seen grow gold in the freakishly early sunset. Even more
gold than usual, too, because two suns were setting that afternoon, two suns who
exchanged a glance before realizing that there should only be one.