Sherman Alexie - Flight

The soldiers are so close now, I imagine I can smell them. I smell gunpowder and sweat and blood and hate.

“Go!” I yell. “Run!”

“But what about you, sir!” Small Saint shouts. “I wont leave a man behind, sir!”

“You have to! Go! Go!”

“No, sir! No, sir!”

I can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s ready to make his stand here. That he will fight a million soldiers to save the Indian boy.

But this is not supposed to be his end.

There are two children riding that pony. They’re supposed to be children and stay children for as long as possible.

“You have to save him!” I shout. “Save the kid!”

And now Small Saint understands. He knows he might escape if he leaves me behind. He knows he has a better chance. It’s a horrible choice to make, but he must make it.

“I’ll hold them off,” I say. “I’ll buy you more time.”

How crazy. I can’t even uncurl my back and I’m going to fight charging cavalry soldiers?

“Go,” I say. “Please.”

It’s the please that does it. Funny how a little politeness can change people’s minds.

Small Saint salutes me and then he’s off, galloping at full tilt, to disappear into the dark trees.

I’m lying alone.

The soldiers ride closer and closer.

In great pain, I roll over on my stomach, and then crawl to a log. My cover. I brace my rifle on the log. I don’t even know if this old Indian rifle works anymore. But I’m going to try.

I take careful aim at the tree line.

The cavalry roars closer and closer, just minutes and seconds away.

I take careful aim. Then I laugh. This journey started when I shot a bunch of strangers in a bank. A horrible, evil act. And now I’m lying in the dirt, getting ready to shoot a bunch of other strangers. This time in self-defense and in defense of the two boys who are riding farther and farther away from me.

Is there really a difference between that killing and this killing? Does God approve of some killing and not other killing? If I kill these soldiers so that Small Saint and Bow Boy can escape, does that make me a hero?

I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I don’t even have a good guess.

I take careful aim at the trees. In my fear, I realize the trees look like people. Giants. An audience of eager giants. All waiting for the show.

Me versus the soldiers.

I take careful aim at the dozen soldiers who crash into my view. They see me and curse and laugh. They are happy to have caught me. They ride hard toward me.

The general is with them. His face a mass of bloody bandages.

I take careful aim. I don’t know if I have the heart to kill them. Isn’t that odd? I once filled a room with bullets. I shot people who would never do me harm. And now I’m not sure I can shoot at the men who plan to kill me.

I hear screaming. I realize it is me screaming.

I hear weeping. I realize it is me weeping.

I close my eyes.

I’M FLYING.

I open my eyes in an airplane: a small plane. There’s enough room for two or three people, but I’m alone.

I’m the pilot. I’m inside the body of the pilot.

No, I have become the pilot. I don’t feel separate from him.

I fly just below a ceiling of clouds and above the ocean. If I flipped the plane over, the ocean would be my ceiling and the clouds my floor, and it would not matter.

It is my plane, the clouds, the ocean, and me. All of it is beautiful and interchangeable. All of it is equally important and unimportant. All of it is connected.

I am the pilot and the clouds and the ocean and the plane.

Man, this has to be Heaven.

I laugh.

Yes, it is Heaven.

I have survived my journey through time and place and person and war and have now arrived in my Heaven.

And my Heaven is a small airplane that will forever fly. It will never land.

Maybe that sounds boring. A small part of me thinks, Well, yeah, that is boring. But I am happy right now. It feels like the kind of happy that can last forever.

I wonder about Small Saint and Bow Boy. Did they escape? What happened after I left old Gus’s body? Did he suddenly wake up and shit himself when he saw his old friend General Mustache shooting at him?

But I can’t wonder and worry too much. I’ll go insane, I think. But if being crazy means I get to fly a plane, then I’ll take crazy.

The really funny thing is that I’m scared of flying. Terrified, really.

I’ve only been on two flights before: the one to visit New York with that rich Seattle do-gooder and the other with my mother. When she was pregnant with me. I know I’m not supposed to remember it. And I don’t remember it, not really. But I can feel it. I have the memory of it in my DNA.

I have the photograph of my mother sitting in the airplane: a big jet. I don’t know who took the photograph. I think it was my Indian father. I think so because my mother smiles in that photograph. She stares into the camera and smiles.

It’s obvious that my mother loved my father.

A few months after that photograph, my mother was in labor with me, and my father was leaving. By the time my mother held me, a newborn, in her arms, my father was already hundreds of miles away, never to return.

Fucking bastard.

And then six years after he left, my mother was dead of breast cancer. I think she missed my father so much that it killed her. I think her sadness caused her cancer. I think her grief grew those tumors.

I miss my mother. I miss her all the time. I want to see her again. And now here I am in the body of a pilot as he flies.

It makes sense.

The last time my mother was happy she was on an airplane. So maybe this is my last place to be happy. Maybe I’ll be as happy as my mother. Maybe I am flying to meet her.

But no, that’s not it.

I can feel this body remembering. Every part of you has different memories. Your fingers remember the feel of a velvet coat. Your feet remember a warm sandy beach. Your eyes remember a face.

My eyes remember a face.

I remember a brown-skinned man. Black hair, curly black hair. Brown eyes. Eyeglasses. A short man, thin but muscular. He wore a black shirt and blue jeans every day of his life, every day that I knew him. Who is he? Who is this man I’m remembering? Is it me? Am I the man I am remembering?

No, I am a pale man. Blond, blue-eyed. Big. Strong. I fill up this airplane.

I am much larger than the man I am remembering. I am reconstructing him. His name is Abbad. He is an Ethiopian, a Muslim.

He’s lived in the United States for fifteen years. Came here for college, to study mechanical engineering, and never went back home.

I look over at the empty seat beside me, and Abbad is there. Or the memory of him is there. Or his ghost is there.

“Jimmy,” he says to me, “tell me the truth. You must tell me the truth.”

His English is slightly accented. It is a beautiful accent. Abbad is a beautiful man. Small and dark and beautiful.

“You cannot hide the truth from me, Jimmy,” Abbad says, and laughs. “I can smell your lies. They smell like onions and beer.”

My name is Jimmy. I am Jimmy the pilot.

“Abbad,” I say, “I didn’t think you were a terrorist.”

“You are a liar, Jimmy. When I came to your door, when I said, I want to be a pilot, you immediately thought of September eleventh. You immediately thought I was another crazy terrorist who wanted to learn how to fly planes into skyscrapers.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Of course you did. And do you know how I know you thought such things?”

“How?”

“Because I was turned away from seven flight instructors before I came to you. One flight instructor pulled a gun on me.”