Born to Fly Page 5

  Once he was gone, I dropped my weeds and plopped down in his rowboat. My arms were pretty sore from pulling weeds and swatting mosquitoes all afternoon, so I figured I would just lie back and rest for a minute or two. I squinted at the puffy clouds overhead and closed my eyes, wondering where Dad was, and whether he was missing me as much as I was him.

  “Ow!” I felt a mosquito bite my cheek, but when I swatted it, it stung my face like a bullwhip. Yeow! Sunburn. Unlike Margaret, who got tan every summer, I was pale and freckled and quickly burned. The whole side of my head felt like I could have boiled an egg on it. I peeled my eyes open and took a minute to adjust to how dark it had gotten. I realized I must have slept all afternoon. It had to be after eight, ’cause I could already hear the twilight katydids chirping.

  And I could hear something else. Whistling.

  It was coming from two people. The whistling was off-key, but I could sort of make out the tune. It was a tone-deaf version of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” the Andrews Sisters’ latest hit.

  I stood up in the boat and scanned the woods, but I didn’t see anyone.

  Then I saw something move. Some branches. About forty yards away. I squinted my eyes and looked harder. It was Kenji, stepping out of the woods and walking toward me. But he wasn’t whistling.

  Farley and Raymond were. They came out of the woods about twenty yards behind him. I ducked down and watched through the weeds. Kenji didn’t bother to turn around, just picked up his pace.

  The whistling got faster, and so did Farley’s and Raymond’s footsteps. Suddenly Kenji broke into a full run.

  When I looked back an instant later, Raymond and Farley had disappeared.

  “Ha!” Kenji spun around and struck a mock karate pose. But no one was there.

  A lonely owl hooted in the darkness and I tried to keep from snickering. I could see Kenji relax with relief just as—

  A spotlighted ghost face appeared on the branches of the tree above him, laughing. It was Raymond with a flashlight under his chin. He hollered, “Sayonara, sucker!”

  Suddenly Farley leapt out and grabbed Kenji from behind. “It’s time Mr. B-b-baseball saw a real Yankee slider. Show him, Raymond.” Farley held Kenji with his arms tight around him.

  Raymond worked up a juicy hocker, which wasn’t hard ’cause he was always sneaking his dad’s chewing tobacco. Then he spit and let it fly at Kenji.

  But at the last second, Kenji spun around perfectly so that it was Farley who wound up blinded with an eyeful of tobacco juice.

  “Ahhh!” Farley screamed.

  Kenji broke free and took off, heading right for me. Raymond jumped down and fussed to clean up Farley. “I’m sorry, Farley.”

  Farley brushed him off. “Leave me alone! Just get him!”

  Kenji ran hard, panicked. I knew exactly how he felt. I’d been there a hundred times with Farley hot on my heels. But the stink of marsh weeds was still fresh on my hands, reminding me who got me stuck with this lame report topic. “Serves him right,” I said to myself.

  The bullies were gaining, though, and I could see that Kenji was getting tired.

  “You’re gonna eat mud!” Farley snarled.

  Finally my conscience kicked in. Not even Kenji deserved that. I tossed my weed collection into the boat and rocked the boat free.

  “Hey! Over here,” I yelled.

  Kenji spotted me, but seemed suspicious.

  “Stay out of this, Birdbrain!” Farley hollered when he saw me. He and Raymond speeded up as I started to cast off.

  “Hurry!” I told Kenji. “Come on.”

  It was clear he had no choice but to trust me. He splashed through the water and flopped into the rowboat.

  Farley and Raymond, neither one a good swimmer, sloshed into the water after us.

  I quickly shoved the other oar into Kenji’s hand. “Row, stupid!”

  He did, but not very well. We rowed furiously, but our strokes were fighting each other, causing the boat to zigzag.

  Suddenly Farley popped his head out of the water and grabbed hold of my oar. “Got you, Jap lover!” His grimy hands were a lot stronger than mine and it took all my weight to keep him from tipping the boat over.

  But Kenji thought fast and swatted his oar, splashing water right up Farley’s nose.

  It worked! Farley started coughing out seawater and let go of my paddle.

  After a few more sloppy strokes, Kenji and I found a one-two rhythm and we started to pull away. Farley and Raymond chased us as far as the sandbar cutoff, but once they went underwater and realized they couldn’t touch bottom, they decided to retreat. Looking like two drenched rats, the bullies barked and bellyached from the shore.

  “Chicken!” taunted Raymond.

  “Traitor!” screamed Farley. “You’ll pay for this, Bird.”

  As we pulled away, Farley and Raymond shrank in the distance. Feeling safe, I stopped rowing and let us drift into the bay.

  “One thing about Farley, he swims about as good as an anchor,” I joked.

  Kenji was silent, catching his breath.

  “Don’t say thanks or anything,” I snapped.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s the least I could do after you stole my report topic,” I told him.

  “I didn’t steal it,” he said. “Anyway, if you want it so bad, take it.”

  “What? You mean it?”

  “It’s just a stupid airplane,” he said.

  “Airplanes aren’t stupid,” I told him. “Especially Warhawks.” Just what kind of weirdo was this kid? “Don’t you know they had a ten-to-one kill ratio in China against the Japs?” Then I shut myself up. What was I saying? He was a Jap. “I meant, you know … the Jap-a-nese.”

  “I know what you meant,” he said.

  Great. Now it was gonna be a long uncomfortable silence and I’d probably say something stupid, like—

  “My little brother still pees in this water when he goes swimming.” Oh my God! I thought. Did I really just say that?

  Kenji looked at me like I was a polka-dotted sea slug.

  I couldn’t help it. When things got quiet and uncomfortable, I’d sometimes say stupid stuff. Like once, we were all sitting around the Christmas dinner table waiting for Grandma to say grace—and she passed gas. I mean a really big one. But everyone pretended like she didn’t and just held their breath while she kept on praying. Uncle Rupert was practically turning blue. Finally I couldn’t take the silence and blurted out, “I didn’t know you knew how to fart, Grandma.” I had to eat dinner in Grandma’s cellar for that one, but Dad told me later that I probably saved Uncle Rupert from having an asthma attack.

  “I just meant, you know, I wouldn’t gulp down any of this water if you ever go swimming in the bay here,” I explained.

  “Sure,” Kenji said. He reached into his jacket and carefully pulled out a soggy yellow Milk Duds box. It was empty. He pulled another one out of his shirt pocket. Nothing. Then he found a third one in his back pants pocket. He dug his fingers in deep and pulled out the sorriest-looking, most waterlogged chocolate-covered caramel I’d ever seen. He was about to pop it in his mouth when he felt me staring, and stopped.

  “Milk Dud?” he said, offering it to me first.

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  Kenji shrugged “okay” and started chomping away. His foot happened to bump the fishing rod in the boat, so he leaned over and picked it up, kind of gently.

  “This your rod?”

  “Nope. It’s Father Krauss’s.”

  “Oh.”

  He examined the assortment of fancy lures and treble hooks dangling on the lead.

  I pointed to the silver lure with tiny mirrors on both sides. “That’s his favorite lure.”

  “It’s a pretty fancy setup,” Kenji said.

  “You fish?” I asked.

  “My father used to. He’s gone now.”

  “You mean… dead?” I said, surprised. I guess I hadn’t really thought about how this kid end
ed up living with his uncle here in Geneseo.

  “More or less,” he said.

  More or less? That didn’t make sense. “How can someone be more dead, or less dead? You either are or you aren’t, right?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s none of your business.”

  So I shut up. I’d found that was the best thing to do when someone said “It’s none of your business.” There were some things (like why Minnie’s big sister Emily had to go live with her aunt after her belly started to get fat) that they’d never tell an eleven-year-old girl no matter how many questions she asked. I was trying to figure Kenji out, but it was almost like he was joking about his dad being dead. Or maybe he didn’t care?

  Kenji grabbed the rod and tossed the line into the water. “So, what do you catch around here?”

  “Lately, nothing, because of the Genny,” I said, matter-of-factly

  “What’s the Genny?”

  “Do you scare easy?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” he scoffed. “I saw Frankenstein three times in a row, and I only shut my eyes once.”

  “Okay, you asked for it.”

  I had him just where I wanted him. So I began to relate the legend of the Genny.

  “Well, many years ago, there was this strange and beautiful fisherwoman named Genny, who lived in those woods over there by the bay.”

  I let my voice trail off, and even to me, the distant woods immediately seemed more mysterious.

  “She lived alone and sang strange songs at night, but she was the best fisher in the village, man or woman. Because of that, some people claimed she was a witch. They said she was very selfish and never threw any fish back, no matter how small. One year, after an especially long and cold winter, the fishing was very bad. Everyone’s nets went empty all spring and summer. Only Genny seemed to be able to catch anything. All the other fishers grew jealous and angry. So one night, when she was sleeping on her boat, they wrapped her in her blanket, like a snake, and tossed her squirming and screaming into the icy black waters of the bay.”

  I splashed the water just a little to give him the full effect. Then I made sure to stop and wait for the water to calm and grow silent again.

  “So … what happened?” he asked, his eyes big as golf balls.

  I smiled. Now he was hooked.

  “Well, after that,” I went on, “there seemed to be plenty of fish for everyone. Tuna, mackerel, you name it. The nets always came up full, year after year. Soon the fishermen forgot all about Genny. Until one night. It was fifty years, to the very night, from the time she was drowned. It was a night kind of like this one. With a full moon. In fact, I think it was the very same night as tonight.”

  “Get out of here,” Kenji said, squirming a little in his seat. He took a big gulp of air. “Really?”

  “That night, all the fishermen were on their boats. It was the last day of their fishing trip. The water was very still, kind of like it is now.”

  I started to rise and rock the boat, just a little.

  “When suddenly… a giant black serpent with huge fangs and the face of a woman burst to the surface! Then, one by one, the Genny devoured all of the fishermen who had killed her!”

  Kenji’s face was a quivering, ghostly pale sheet. He swallowed hard, then pulled himself together.

  “Aw … that’s a bunch of hooey.”

  “Hooey? You better not let the Genny hear you say that,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. It’s just a story.”

  I look at him, deadly serious. “I’ve seen her.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  I glanced at the mouth of the inlet and checked my bearings.

  “It wasn’t far from … right here.”

  At that moment, a violent tug on Kenji’s fishing line yanked him out of his seat.

  “Hey, how’d you do that?” he asked.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I answered. Then I came to the horrific realization. “It’s the Genny!”

  I flashed Kenji the international thumbs-down sign as he struggled to keep from being pulled over the side of the boat.

  “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s the pilot’s signal to bail out,” I told him.

  He gripped Father Krauss’s rod and reeled the line in furiously. “Are you gonna help or what?” he screamed.

  That snapped me into action, and the two of us fought the line like we’d hooked Moby Dick. Whatever it was on the other end, it was a lot bigger and stronger than the two of us. I looked over the side and realized it was pulling us and Father Krauss’s boat out of the bay.

  “Reel her in slow!” I yelled. “She won’t hurt us if she sees we’re just kids.”

  “You’re crazy!” Kenji yelled back. “Just cut the line!”

  “You got money for a new set of lures?”

  He shrugged and held on.

  But just as quickly as it had stretched taut, the line suddenly went slack, and the boat drifted to a stop. Kenji’s eyes bulged.

  “It’s going under us!”

  “Pick up the slack,” I said.

  Kenji started reeling and reeling, but there was no tension on the line.

  “Faster!” I ordered, panicked.

  Finally the end of the fishing line appeared. The lures were all gone.

  “The line’s been cut,” I said.

  Kenji took a big breath and straightened himself, trying to hide the fact that his heart was most likely ready to pound out of his chest. “Probably just a lost seal or something,” he fake-chuckled to himself.

  “Right,” I said. “Or a shark.”

  Then Kenji’s foot bumped against something in the boat.

  “Ahhh!” he screamed.

  I peeked out between my fingers. But it was just an orange life jacket under his seat.

  He tried to act tough, bending down to pick up the jacket. “Here. You better put this on.”

  “I’m no sissy,” I told him. “Why don’t you put it on?”

  Kenji dropped the jacket. “You think I bought that silly story about the Genny? Come on.”

  “You were scared,” I told him.

  “Was not.”

  “Was so.”

  “I was not!” he hollered, stomping his foot on the life jacket.

  “All right. Take it easy,” I said, flapping my hands for him to calm down. We both suddenly realized how still and eerily silent the bay had become.

  “You know, I ought to be getting home,” Kenji said.

  “Okay.” I reached for the oars. “But admit it, you were a little bit scared.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but before anything came out, all of a sudden, it was like there was an earthquake on the water. The boat rocked and rose up, as if we were being lifted by a giant.

  “What’s happening?” Kenji cried.

  KRRRRR, went a scrape like metal against the hull as something large and black slithered right beneath us.

  “It’s the Genny!” I cried out.

  CRASHHH! In an instant we were a pair of Daisy dolls tossed into the sea. It felt like we were being caught in the whirlpool wake of a giant whale as the swirling force of the diving beast sucked me under. The last thing I heard before the water swallowed me up was Kenji screaming out, “Bird!”

  Underneath, there was nothing but silence. The water was black as tar. I felt myself rolling over and over in the rush of seawater. The worst part was, I had no sense of which way was up. My lungs began to ache, starving for oxygen. I was frantically paddling in the water, but for all I knew, I might have been heading for the bottom.

  Then something brushed against my hand. I tried to pull away, but it grabbed on to me. It was Kenji’s hand. Our hands locked and I felt myself being dragged through the water. After what seemed like an eternity, we reached the surface and I gasped for air.

  Kenji helped me latch on to the floating life jacket—just in time to see a thin black neck rising out of the water only twenty feet a
way. The monster’s back broke the surface momentarily.

  “Look!” I screamed. Then my body stiffened as I realized that it wasn’t the black neck of the Genny, but something even more incredible. It was the periscope of a black minisubmarine!

  The submarine gently dove beneath Father Krauss’s capsized rowboat like an immense water snake. And then it disappeared.

  Kenji and I shivered and stared as the submarine’s telltale propeller wake headed out the inlet toward the Atlantic Ocean. Too scared to speak, we used our last bits of energy to hold on to the life jacket, kicking and paddling for the Geneseo shore.

  Once we reached the shore, we dragged our waterlogged bodies from the bay and collapsed in the smelly marsh weeds.

  “I told you it wasn’t the Genny,” Kenji spit out between gasps of air.

  “You mean you saw it, too?”

  “Saw it?” he said. “It was only about ten inches away from us.”

  “I just wanted to be sure.” I shrugged. “Sometimes I’m the only one who sees stuff.”

  “Well, not anymore. But what’s a submarine doing here?” Kenji asked.

  I thought it over, and there was only one explanation. “Spying,” I answered.

  “What?”

  “We’ve got to tell the deputy.”

  Kenji shook his head. “He’ll never believe us.”

  “Sure he will. You’ll see.”

  As he started to stand up, Kenji suddenly grabbed his stomach, doubled over, and groaned.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Naw. Too many Milk Duds.”

  “Come on,” I said, climbing to my feet. “I’ll get you some bicarbonate at my house.”

  We tried to slip in the back door, only to find that Deputy Steyer was already waiting with Mom, Margaret, and Alvin.

  “Mom!” I ran to her.

  “Thank goodness,” said the deputy.

  Mom kissed the crucifix around her neck. “Bird McGill, you had us worried sick.”

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “You won’t believe what we saw!”

  “I’m sure we won’t,” said Margaret.