FEBRUARY 2010
Robert Jackson Kelley stole his last plane on a cloudy night, the moon casting hazy light through the gray-gauze sky. He crouched in the trees, his legs cramped, pausing only to be sure the cops hadn’t beaten him to the hangar. This time he had to move fast. No rummaging for food. No thumbing through the manuals or pacing around the planes, admiring their gleaming wings and sleek bodies like diamond rings in a jeweler’s case. Asking to be smashed and grabbed. All he needed was to pick a plane. Get into the air.
He had to stay focused.
He bolted for the building, arms pumping, sharp pain puncturing his ribs—probably bruised or cracked from his prior botched airborne escape. The cold numbed his stiff fingers. The screwdriver he’d pocketed the last time he broke into Tomkins Airstrip thumped against his leg as he ran.
He was eighteen years old.
Nowhere to go but up.
Yellow police tape fluttered across the door he’d jangled, bullied, and finally kicked in three nights before, when he’d stolen his second plane from this very airstrip. The door hadn’t been replaced, the splintered wood still gaping like he’d left it.
Perhaps they were preserving evidence, but it felt to Robert like they were welcoming him in.
He stepped over the tape, but he knew he hadn’t crossed the finish line just yet.
He scrambled for the hangar door and pulled it up, rattling on its track. Cold air rushed by him into the cavernous room, chilling his clammy skin.
The Cirrus SR22 wasn’t what he’d flown before, but it was close enough. Its Garmin system was just as simple. The plane’s nose was tipped in sea-green paint. And the cockpit was unlocked, a sign that this plane was his as sure as if his name had been printed on its keys. He slid into the pilot’s seat, shut the door behind him.
Robert had already decided on Canada for his final destination, but he had sudden second thoughts. What about somewhere warmer, where he could surf year-round? This plane could fly him to Puerto Rico. Jamaica. The Bahamas. He didn’t really care, as long as he made it to a new island. Anywhere but Yannatok. He’d torched his bridges in Washington.
He rapped on the plane’s control panel, drumming a rhythm as fast as his heartbeat. He knew how important it was for him to hurry, but his churning stomach stalled him. His fingers slipped over the screwdriver’s cold tip.
He thought he’d seen on TV that Puerto Rico had white sands and Bermuda had pink. Maybe he’d see the difference from 10,000 feet. When he got there, he could land this last flight on the beach and leave it behind, waves lapping at the wings.
Then he changed his mind. He’d stick to his plan. Canada was the way to go. Only fifty miles north. Safer. Landlocked. He’d had enough of islands. He jimmied the screwdriver into the ignition.
* * *
Two days before, the world had learned the name of the kid who could not be caught. The sheriff had released his soon-to-be-notorious mug shot, and an ambitious graffiti artist had emblazoned the Yannatok Bridge with tall red letters, spindly stalks stretching skyward: WWRF. Robert’s mother drove past it on her way to the 911 dispatch center; Robert saw it from the vacation home he’d broken into. WWRF. Lots of environmentalists on the West Coast. World Wildlife something something? Some riff on WTF? The sheriff delegated the cleanup to his deputy, and eventually someone from the Parks Department power-washed the letters away, dripping crimson into the bay. None of them figured it out. None of them knew how every time the tagger had paused, the wind blowing red flecks back into his hair, he’d gazed at the sky, looking for a star that moved.
Where would Robert fly?
* * *
Robert Jackson Kelley’s Facebook page—which wasn’t his, and was in fact created and maintained by Scott Adams of Levittown, New Jersey, after the second stolen plane made the news—boasted the mug shot that ran in the Seattle Times, photos of planes Robert had never flown, and 100,961 friends. Goth kids, frat boys, preps, tattooed bikers, the odd soccer mom, from South Africa and Amsterdam and every US state. Kids from Yannatok High whom Robert had sat next to in study hall and never talked to. Scott Adams himself was a high school sophomore and his own Facebook page hadn’t been updated in months, its stale Family Guy memes reaching only forty-eight friends. On the night Robert stole his last plane, he had no idea that his Facebook status was a flippant “See ya, suckers!”
Robert Jackson Kelley had 100,961 virtual friends. But when he was on the run from the police, crouching in a vacant house or in the woods, plotting his next migration, the only person he had wished he could call was his mom.
* * *
This last plane flight, Robert knew as he huddled inside the aircraft like a cave-dwelling bear, might not work out like the others had. He knew the basics of landing from searching the Internet, and the simulators had been preparation enough: slow down, extend flaps, turn downwind, power back, level off. No tower to approve his nonexistent flight plan. Googling Cessna back when his only flights had been the simulated kind had yielded all kinds of useful diagrams, along with shots of six-year-olds at the controls, playing pilot. But in his gut he knew that twice he had not landed but crashed, and another crash could take him out. Or even worse: a crash could crack his spine, sever his legs. Even just breaking them would leave him helpless and bleeding in a field, or crawling through the spruce trees. Or stuck in the wreckage like an animal with a snared limb.
From the pilot’s seat of this last plane, he smiled despite the pain in his neck, his chest, the rash of seat belt burn. Then Robert tweaked the screwdriver until the engine fired.
He’d land this one.
Or die trying.
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Fenn
