Sherman Alexie - Flight

“Yeah.”

“But you didn’t. Why not?”

On the video, my image disappears for a second. I’m gone. And then I reappear.

“Whoa,” Officer Dave says. “Did you see that?”

The detective rewinds the tape. Presses PLAY. I’m there in the bank. Then I’m gone— poof. And then I reappear.

“That’s weird,” Officer Dave says.

“Aw, it’s just a flaw in the tape,” Eyeglasses says. “They reuse these tapes over and over. The quality goes down. They got weird bumps and cuts in them.”

Eyeglasses is probably right.

On the video, I am staring at the little blond boy and his mother. I smile and wave.

“Who is that?” Eyeglasses asks me.

“It’s just a boy and his mother,” I say.

“Do you know them?”

“No.”

“Then why are you being so friendly to them?”

“They were beautiful,” I say.

Detective Eyeglasses snorts at me. He thinks I’m goofy. But Officer Dave smiles. He must be a father.

“Do you know where we might find this Justice?” Eyeglasses asks me.

“Maybe,” I say. “We lived together in this warehouse down in SoDo.”

“Jesus,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

“You didn’t ask.”

I lead them to the warehouse. I wait outside with two rookie cops while Dave and Eyeglasses and a SWAT team check out the whole building.

Nobody is there.

Pretty soon, Eyeglasses comes out and takes me upstairs to the room where Justice and I lived for a few weeks.

There are empty cans, bottles, and plastic containers. There are two beds made out of newspaper and cardboard. There are newspaper photos and magazine articles taped on the walls. All the people in those photos and articles have crosshairs painted over their faces. They were all targets.

“This is where you and Justice lived?” Eyeglasses asks me.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if he was here, he’s gone now.”

“Yeah.”

I know that I won’t see Justice again.

Eyeglasses stares at me hard. He’s good at staring hard.

“Zits,” he says. “I’m happy you changed your mind about using those guns.”

I’m happy, too, but I can’t say that.

Later, as I sit in a holding cell, waiting for a transfer to yet another halfway house or juvie hall or real prison, Officer Dave visits me.

He leans against the bars of my cell.

“You’re going to die,” he says.

I’m trying to be as tough as I used to be, but it’s not working. I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.

“You are going to die,” Dave says again. He says each syllable like it was a cussword. Or a prayer.

“So I’m going to die,” I say. “What does it matter? I don’t matter. I’m nothing.”

“Zits,” he says. “You matter. Everybody matters. You matter to me.”

“You’re a cop,” I say. “You don’t care about anything.”

“I care too much, man,” Dave says.

I look at him. Tears are rolling down his big cop face. Who knew that cops could cry?

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

Dave wipes his face. He’s embarrassed by his tears. But he has something important to say, so he says it.

“A few weeks ago, we got this nine-one-one call,” he tells me. “A man said there was this crazy screaming in the house next door. Like babies just crying and crying, louder than he ever heard before.”

Dave looks at the ceiling as if his memory was playing like a movie up there. I look up and see it, too.

I can’t jump into Dave’s body but I can feel and see and understand a little bit about his pain, I guess.

In their squad car, Dave and his partner pull up in front of a house. A small, dirty house. Garbage on the lawn. Two broken cars in the driveway.

The cops knock on the front door.

No answer.

They knock.

No answer.

Dave puts his ear to the door.

“Can you hear that?” he asks.

“What is it?” his partner asks.

“It sounds like water running.”

Dave steps down on the lawn and peers through the front window. Through a crack in the curtains, he can see two people lying on the floor.

“Two people down, two people down,” he says.

Dave and his partner draw their guns and burst through the front door.

Two people lying on the living room floor. A man and a woman. Dead.

No, alive: passed out.

Beer bottles, wine bottles, vodka bottles, crack pipes, the stink of meth.

“Jesus, I hate that smell,” the partner says. He kicks the man. “Wake up,” he says.

The man doesn’t move. Just breathes heavy.

He kicks the man again. Harder. “Wake the fuck up,” he says.

The man just lies there.

“I hate these freaks,” the partner says.

But Dave is already moving into another room. He’s following that sound: running water. He steps into a pool of water in the hallway.

Cold water. Where’s it coming from? The bathroom at the end of the hallway.

“We got something going on here,” Dave says to his partner.

Together, they walk down the hallway. Through the water. Getting deeper. Flooding the house.

They reach the bathroom door.

With head nods and hand signals, they talk to each other.

Are you ready to go in?

Yes.

Okay, on three.

One, two, three.

Dave turns the knob and pushes against the door.

It’s locked.

No, it’s just stuck. A difficult door. Dave pushes hard. The door screeches open.

And they see two toddlers, a boy and a girl, two or three years old, lying still on the floor.

Covered with burns: their legs, their backs, their bellies.

Hot-water scalds.

The tub faucet pours out water. Overfills the tub. Floods the room.

It’s cold water now. Ice cold. But it was boiling hot when it overflowed the tub, when the two babies were trapped by the difficult door, when they screamed so loud that the neighbor could hear them, but not so loud that it woke their parents from their drunken stoned slumber.

“Oh, my God! Oh…my…God!” Dave shouts. “Get an ambulance here, now, now, now!”

Dave’s partner calls for help.

Dave kneels down in the water and picks up the babies, one in each arm. Their eyes are open and blue and blind. They’re gone.

Dave cries.

He wants to go back in time. He only needs to travel back an hour — just one hour — and he’ll be able to save these kids. He’ll take them away from their terrible parents, from this terrible life, and he’ll love them. He’ll keep them safe.

“They were just babies,” Dave says to me. “Helpless little babies. I couldn’t save them. I was too late.”

I don’t know what to say.

Dave weeps. I weep with him.

He leans against the bars of my cell. I don’t know if I’m the one in jail, or if he is.

AFTER MONTHS OF COUNSELING, social work, mental therapy, and absolute boredom, the medical professionals and social workers and cops decide that I am not going to kill anybody. I am not dangerous.

Really, that’s what they say to me: “Zits, we don’t think you’re dangerous.”

How am I supposed to respond to something like that?

“Oh, uh, thank you, ma’am.”

I mean, jeez, I’m a fifteen-year-old foster kid with a history of fire setting, time traveling, body shifting, and mass-murder contemplation. I think I’m a lot more than just dangerous.

I think I might be unlovable.

But as dangerous and unlovable as I am, the state places me in a temporary foster home.

With Officer Dave’s brother and sister-in-law.

“They don’t have any kids,” Officer Dave says. “But they always wanted a baby.”