Trent Reedy - Stealing Air

It was quiet except for a tick in the engine and the gurgle of the English River nearby. Brian touched his cheek. It was already swollen, and his fingers came away wet and sticky with blood.

“Brian?” Alex said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Not so sure about the flyer, though.” Brian stood up. His foot sank down in thick mud. “Or my shoes.”

“Brian? Alex?” Max appeared up on the road, silhouetted by the weak light filtering in from the streetlight across the road. “Have you sustained any injuries?”

“Have we sustained… Why can’t he talk normal for once?” Alex said quietly to Brian. Then he called back, “We’re okay, even though your flyer almost got us killed!”

Max stumbled down into the brush to meet them. “I’m very sorry. I followed the wing and tail design specifications for conventional aircraft. Plastisteel is lighter. The takeoff should have worked. I don’t understand what went wrong.”

“What went wrong is that I never should have agreed to this in the first place,” said Alex. “If it hadn’t been for Brian, we would have hit that tree head-on.”

“It’s not that bad,” Brian said. “What really went wrong, Max, is that the wings, tail, and propeller might be in the style of other planes, but this has to be the first flyer with skateboard landing gear. Skateboard wheels are light and can handle speed, but there are still eight of them. That’s a lot of drag to overcome.”

Max leaned over the flyer, checking for damage. “Fortunately, the engine is intact. I’ll have to find a way to improve it, to give the flyer enough power to overcome the drag.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll have to do it without me. I’m out of here.” Alex started walking away.

“Alex, wait,” Brian said. “We were flying! We must have been four feet up for a while. I thought we were really going to take off.”

“You thought wrong.”

Brian couldn’t let this fall apart. Working with these two on the flyer was the best part about living in Iowa. “So you’re just going to give up?” he said. “What about the money we’re going to make?”

Alex stopped. “Nobody wants to pay for an interview with three guys who made a plane that almost flew.”

“Nobody wants to buy the story of three kids who succeeded on the first try! People always want to hear about overcoming difficulties and crap like that. This will just make our story better, more valuable. We’ll fix her! It won’t be that hard.”

“Actually, it will mostly involve repairs to the starboard wing,” said Max, who was crouched in the dark by the flyer.

Brian bent down and examined the right wing by touch. He did not like what he felt. There was a dent right in the forward section of the wing, with a crack running back from the middle of it.

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Plastisteel has to be the strongest stuff on earth. We nailed that tree and the wing has just this tiny dent. We can fix this no problem.” Brian hoped he sounded believable enough to convince Alex to stay.

Alex squelched through the mud back toward them. “You really think it will be that easy?”

Max stood up. “Unfortunately—”

Brian elbowed Max. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to lift her up out of the mud and carry her back to the Eagle’s Nest tonight. Then, yeah, you and I will fix up the wing real quick, while Max works on improving the engine. We’ll be flying in, what… a week or so?”

“Actually —” said Max.

“We actually will,” Brian said quickly. “Hey, Alex, do you think you would be able to set up the interviews and stuff soon after that? Or maybe it’s too hard on short notice, and we should just wait until after winter when we can fly again.”

“Are you kidding?” Alex said. “The publicity and the money is the easy part as long as we can get this thing flying.”

“We can make it fly,” Max said.

“If we promise that we all stay with the project,” said Brian.

There was a little silence.

“Okay,” said Alex.

They carried the broken flyer back to the Eagle’s Nest, but they were so tired by the time they got there that nobody wanted to do anything besides call it a night.

Brian walked home. He gently eased the back door open and slipped inside, holding his muddy shoes in his free hand. His filthy jeans were rolled up so they wouldn’t get dirt all over the floor.

In the kitchen, only the little light above the stove was on. The house was silent. He peeked around the corner to the living room to see if Mom was reading in her favorite chair. She must have gone to bed early. She sometimes did that back in Seattle after big arguments.

Brian walked softly through the living room, careful to keep quiet on the wood floor by stepping first onto his bare heel, and then rolling forward onto his toes. Light spilled out from under the door to Dad’s office. He was still up working. He was always working.

Why did he even bother sneaking around? Nobody ever noticed him anyway. They probably wouldn’t even care about the cut and bruise on his cheek. He almost wished he would get in trouble for it.

He half smiled at the thought. The crash must have scrambled his brains.

After washing off the muck in the shower, which stung his scraped face, Brian dressed for bed and lay down on top of his bedspread in the dark, his hands behind his head on his pillow. A little light from the streetlamp on the corner reached inside his room, while the leaves on the tree outside made creepy shadows on the wall. Exhausted from the night’s adventure, Brian fell asleep at once.

The next morning, Brian stood on the deck of the half-pipe at the park, his back wheels over the edge and his front wheels up. He stomped the front of his board and dropped hard into the ramp. Down across the flat bottom, up the far transition to the lip on the other deck. He kicked his board up to grind his trucks on the lip before throwing the front of the board back into the ramp and up to where he had started.

Brian let out a long breath with his eyes closed, feeling the morning sun shine on his face. After the trouble yesterday with Frankie Heller and the flyer that wouldn’t fly, he needed something to go right, so he’d left the house extra early to skate it out with Spitfire . One of these days he would get enough air to hit the full 360-degree airborne spin. He was close. He knew it.

He also knew that it was a long skate to school, a lot of it uphill, and if he didn’t get going, he’d be late. Somehow he doubted Ms. Gilbert appreciated tardiness. He rolled out of the skate park and up Weigand Street past the square, moving fast and jumping curbs. Then he kicked like mad until he reached Lincoln Street at the top of the hill. Here, he could relax a little and enjoy the smooth run on the gentle downward slope until the hill dropped steeply near the school.

As he cleared the intersection at Seventh Street, he almost lost his balance. Wendy whipped around the corner onto Lincoln on her own board.

“Woo-hoo! Come on, Brian! Keep up!” She looked back at him.

She was a block ahead of him already. Brian kicked the pavement hard to go faster, Wendy coasting so he could join her.

“Wow, that hill is a rush!” she said as he came up alongside her. She knocked on her purple helmet. “Glad I’m wearing this.”

As they approached school, she jumped off her board and jogged to a stop, kicking up her board to carry it as she walked. Brian did the same. She frowned when she saw the bruise and scrape on his face. “What happened?”