“Why do we have to sneak them out?” Timmy asked, though he knew.
“Shhh. Not good for us, Mommy says.”
“Do you believe that, too, Dad?”
“C’mon,” I said. Timmy laughed, and we took off with the whole bag.
We brought the Flaming Eagle out to the front yard, and I explained.
“The wings don’t flap, Timmy, but the plane gets its energy from us. On a real plane it’s an engine, but here it’s our hands. When we push it forward, something about the difference in pressure above and below the wings as the plane moves forward through the air, something makes a force called ‘lift’ that pushes the plane up.”
“Huh?”
“The wings push air down, even though they don’t flap.”
“How?”
Shit. “Like this.” I prayed for a good test run. I held the glider up over my head and waited for the breeze to run its course. When the air seemed still enough to be lucky, I pulled my arm back and imagined I was throwing smoothly from short to first. I released it at the top of my arm’s arc and let fly.
The Flaming Eagle knew what it was about, and it soared nicely up, then out toward the quiet street. It caught a draft and rose again, then glided down, over the curb on the other side of our street and into a rugged oak. Its nose hit the bark straight on, and the Eagle stepped back from the tree in midair, like it was stunned to have been interrupted. It stared at the tree for a frozen moment. Then its nose dipped in disappointment and the whole chassis corkscrewed for our neighbor’s lawn.
“I’m sorry, Dad. You worked hard on that.” The kid was consoling me. That seemed like progress.
“But you saw it, Timmy. It flew.”
“Until the tree.”
“There are no trees up in the sky where the planes are, man.” I thought about the bag of Oreos still waiting for us back in the garage and wondered if they would take Timmy’s mind off of Australia for a while.
“Let me show you something,” Timmy said. He ran across the street and retrieved the Eagle. He scavenged a few modest stones from our driveway and put them in the cockpit. He lifted his arm like a shortstop and let it go—and it dove from the start, thudding into the unkempt lawn, seven feet from our open mouths.
* * *
Dolly stroked my hair, leaving that sweet spot between her neck and shoulder for me to collapse into.
“It’s a matter of science,” Dolly said. “There are formulas for this—load, power, weight distribution, including the luggage. These things are not left to chance. Studies were done, and experts conferred with.”
“They weigh the luggage, sure. But they don’t weigh the passengers. This is another thing Timmy brought up. It’s not that I don’t trust the science. But then you have to trust everyone else to follow their formulas.”
“This is getting to you now,” she said, and she stopped her fingers’ movement over my head. “It’s a matter of science and a matter of trust.”
“It’s a delicate balance is all he’s saying. Timmy’d have no problem if, like, you were in charge of loading and flying the plane. But who are these airlines?” I tried sitting up more against the headboard. Letterman was talking to Drew Barrymore. It looked funny, but we had the sound turned down.
“What about this,” I said. “Did you know that birds have an air-filled skeleton? This is what they’re teaching in third grade now. It makes them lighter for flight. They float in air because they’re puffs of nothing up there.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Hon, stop. Birds have wings—they’re just like planes. They don’t float. They fly.”
“Their bones are hollow. It’s true. I looked it up.”
Dolly clicked off Letterman and rolled over. I stayed up and pictured sparrows flying through the night, held up by invisible gusts of wind, and each gust was a long arm in a tuxedo sleeve with a white-gloved hand cradling the bird. And each bird was looking down on the metal planes below, which were sinking in their arrogance and imbalance.
* * *
Australia crept closer. Timmy and I didn’t talk about it much. Dolly and Emma made their plans, looking at photos of the Great Barrier Reef from a gorgeous library book. Every once in a while, Timmy and I would be outside when a plane would shoot overhead, usually making a chalk mark in the sky. The airport was far enough away, though, that we couldn’t hear the engines, the roar of power that created the lift.
Tim was getting to be a decent ballplayer, and the baseball popped in my glove when he threw it to me. “Some good pepper on the ball, Tim. Here’s a grounder.”
He crouched for it and remembered to get his glove in the dust. It came up easily into his web, and he hopped before he threw.
Emma came out the front door with her “not my boyfriend” Nick, a kid I tolerated mainly because he was a good guitarist for a 16-year-old, and his rockabilly sideburns were worn honestly, not ironically.
“Hey, Mr. H.,” Nick called out. “Nice scoop, Timmy. Toss it here.”
Nick caught the ball bare-handed, then spun it up into the air and bounced it off his head and back into his hand.
Tim pointed up. “There goes another one,” he said, pointing at a chalk mark.
“My dad and Timmy are, uh…,” Emma told Nick, “wary of airplanes.”
“I’m not wary,” Tim said. “I just want to know for sure that they are going to stay up there. I mean, it just looks like a toy up there,” pointing, “like it’s held up by dental floss or something.” After all our work on the Flaming Eagle, I’d hung it just that way in Tim’s room so it swayed over his bed each time the air conditioning kicked on.
Nick looked at us very seriously. “You know what you should do, Mr. H.? My friends and I have been out to the airport. There’s a place where you can go along a trail from the road, then slide under a chain-link fence onto the runway yard. You can stand there and let the birds face you down, then—at the last second—lift right up over your head.”
