Hazard Read online

  “Easy there,” he advised.

  I halted, mid-stroke, the heat from my vigorous sanding wafting up from the wood.

  “But you said it’s supposed to be thin,” I protested, my voice reedy and high. I was an impatient learner with a penchant for perfection, and the tyranny of my expectations made me anxious and accusatory.

  “Well, you’re right there.”

  He paused, measured and unaffected by my distress, an approach that would both toughen and alienate me at different points in my life. I waited, jiggling my knee as he finished fastening a miniscule wire inside his fuselage.

  At last, he straightened, satisfied with his handiwork, and turned to me.

  “Can’t flatten that wing, though,” he observed. “It won’t fly.”

  Taking up a pencil, he sketched a few strokes on the white paper surface of the table. Quick and clean, in a draftsman’s hand, a wing appeared. Cutaway on the side, its elegant swell on the left edge spilled down to the right, sloping and vanishing into a mica-thin trailing edge. Three more pencil strokes and the wind arrived, slipping over and under the wing. He stretched his long arms up above the storage cabinet and brought down a wing in progress, shifting it in the light so I could peer down its length and register its curve. Then, he propped it in front of me and turned back to his fuselage.

  It was the beginning of my long journey toward acquiring patience and the beauty of fine skills, neither of which came to me without struggle. As it was, my plane slowly came to life and, by summer’s end, I was in the Volkswagen alongside my father on the way to a model airplane contest on the flat plains of Colorado Springs.

  Feather-light, weighing less than a gram, my hand-launch glider rested in my lap, its thin fuselage like a glass straw in my fingers, its stabilizer barely thicker than a shaving. If not for the spotty brushes of red paint covering its surface and trembly black numbers I’d painted across the left wing, I wouldn’t have believed it was there. Unlike Dad’s plane, mine hadn’t a hefty engine, or even a contraption for a catapult launch; it was too simple even for ailerons, the little movable flaps on wings that turn a plane into an acrobat.

  “How do you say that again?” I’d asked a few weeks before, deflated to learn my plane was too young for loops and flips. Daddy had stopped tamping down his tobacco.

  “Ay-ee-le-ron,” he had repeated, holding his pipe a few inches from his mouth. “Tricky word. It’s French, I believe.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “‘Little wing,’ I reckon.”

  Hearing this, my head felt lighter. I caught the word out of the air and gave it to my plane, knowing she would need all the cleverness and French she could get. If my Little Wing were to have any hope of climbing into the sky, it would come partly from luck and partly from the strength in my arm and angle of my wrist as I flung her upward. Once airborne, she’d be on her own, up to the fate of fancier forces I didn’t fully understand—downwash, drag, wake turbulence—all of which meant she’d either spiral upward, catch the wind, and glide slowly back to earth, or cut a half slice through the air, stall for a miserable moment, and plummet straight down as if shot from the sky.

  Daddy pulled the VW into a dirt lot next to a crowd of other cars and we got out into a vast empty field. The sweep of space rushing all the way to the horizon made me teeter for a moment, and I stood pressed up against the car while Daddy unloaded our tent and cooler. Holding my plane, I didn’t move until he called me to come on. Cars were pulling in all around us with trunks swinging open and car doors slamming. Boys tumbled out and followed their dads, toting tool boxes and radio control gear. Here and there, moms clipped alongside with plaid thermoses of iced tea and brownie-stuffed Tupperware. The air rustled with excitement, and we were surrounded by a pageant of airplanes, all graceful and long-winged with sashes of black and red adorning the wing tips and rudders.

  In the bright bald daylight, Little Wing looked blotchy and small. Waiting for Daddy to set up our tent, I tucked her under my sweater and, once the tent was anchored, slipped her inside behind the cooler. Unknown to me, this was my pattern, a tendency to shield imperfection. For as long as I had been alive, whenever people stared at Roddy as if he were an animal, I had shifted my body in front of him. I did this now for Little Wing, stepping between her and the world’s eyes, which I knew could penetrate and wither. In the shadows, she wouldn’t have to feel shaky about who she was.

  With her tucked away, I stepped back out into the sunshine and settled myself on the blanket next to the tool box. Its stepped layers hinged open to a treasure of doo-dads. Daddy sat in a webbed beach chair, fiddling with his remote controller, and I took up doing what I loved best, fishing out the parts and pieces he needed: a spool of thin wire, needle-nose pliers, the red-tipped cap to the glue.

  “Howdy there, Ray,” a man hollered out, pulling up to our tent. He had a paunchy middle and a round, balding head that looked pink and sore from the sun. “Heard you brought my oldest boy some competition today.”

  I looked up, shielding my eyes, squinting in the glare. A gangly boy with a head of dark, wiry hair shuffled just behind the man to a big-footed halt. And buzzing lower down near the man’s thighs was a younger boy, a Shorty Pants, with a rooster cowlick that sprang from his head, like Roddy’s. He was pitching a plastic toy plane from hand to hand, throttling the air with a whining engine noise and then plunging its nose in a low-flying death dive.

  “Well you heard right, I reckon,” my father said. He stood up from his folding chair, wiping 3-in-1 off his fingers, and held out his hand. Everyone knew my dad. He was a champion flyer, and our rooms at home were lined with his gleaming, spired trophies. “This here’s my daughter. I expect she’ll give you a run for your money.”

  The man let out a delighted “Ha!” His moustache split above his teeth as he grinned and shook hands with my dad. His eyebrows danced up and down and his pupils darted about, searching for my plane. Then he clapped a hand between his older boy’s shoulder blades.

  “Hear that, Buddy? There’s a girl at your rudder!”

  A small pulse of uncertainty penetrated my chest and lapped once around my ribcage. My heart did not like this man. His arm shot out and caught Shorty Pants in a neck hold, and he scrubbed the boy’s hair with a knuckled hand as he snorted and caught my eye. He winked, the drop of his eyelid like a small, quick cut. Then he looked over at my dad.

  “You’ve got a son too, don’t you Ray?”

  I dropped my chin to the tool box, where screws and bolts lay bunched in their bins. The air thickened suddenly in my ears and I felt something heavy pressed on my chest. Glancing sideways, I brushed my eyes across Daddy’s face. A shadow flickered across his eyes.

  “Yes sir,” he said. “I do.” His voice was not his own. Its color had shifted slightly, as if dampening down a shade. The man didn’t notice.

  “Still too young to come along, is he?”

  The smallest of minutes passed. I thought of Roddy. If he were here, he wouldn’t be bombing a toy plane. He’d be hunched beside me on the blanket, his little boy legs stretched out from his shorts. He’d be pulling on his lip, making his washing machine sounds like he does: hissing at first, then a low chugging in his nose, tongue thrubbing far back in his throat, followed by a shush shush shushing and a whispery trail of rrrs, and, finally, a whiney yi yi yi yi yi, meaning he’d come to the spin cycle, at last.

  I picked up a bolt and turned it with sweaty fingers. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a rag in my father’s hand wiping slowly down the leading edge of his wing, then his fingertips running back over the same edge, as if he were checking for splinters. I wondered if I could see inside my father’s head, what would be there? Would it be crowded like mine, tangled with all the things you couldn’t say?

  “That’s right,” he said, finally.

  When my father spoke again, he remarked on what a good day it was for flying. Then the boy’s father said, “May the best man win,” and they turned away.
/>
  I watched them go, the man’s arm draped over the taller boy’s shoulders, Shorty Pants running backward in choppy steps and jabbing his toy plane in the air as they disappeared into the sea of tents. In their wake, a voice rose from some deep place within me and broke the surface of what I feared. Daddy doesn’t have a real son.

  I gasped and jerked my eyes to my father’s face, to see if he’d said this. I knew he hadn’t. I got up and went into the tent, sat down in the shadows next to my plane, and wrapped my knees in my arms. My head, wobbly and heavy, lay like a stone on the knobs of my kneecaps. I couldn’t say how long I stayed there, feeling a murky and shapeless regret that I was a girl. When I heard Daddy calling me to fetch my plane and come on out from the tent, I stood up, knowing I was different. No matter how well I threw or how lucky I got with the wind, I would never be a boy. And I sensed that I could never fill that space for my father.

  When I stepped squinting into the sunlight, my dad was shaking hands with a man holding a stop watch, and I knew it was my turn to fly.

  “Aren’t you going to time me, Daddy?” I whispered up into his ear.

  “No. No, that wouldn’t be right,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It has to be official. Go on with Mr. Small here. He’ll record your time.”

  I moved off our blanket as if stepping into the deep. My courage slid like water down my legs.

  Mr. Small explained I’d have three tries. To my dismay, the three would not be done all at once, but with an hour break in between. This was in favor of fairness, mixing up the breezes and elements like a deck of cards so that no one had an unfair advantage. But for me, who wished for a hasty finish, it only served to make me miserable.

  Mr. Small may have sensed my distress. He was soft-spoken and kind as he led me beyond the tents to a marked-off space in the dirt and repeated the rules to me before walking a few paces away and holding up his stopwatch.

  “Okay,” he said. “Give it a whirl.”

  I turned Little Wing onto her side and placed the pad of my forefinger in the notch Daddy had carved in her wing right next to the fuselage. My other fingers slid down to the blob of clay that protected her nose, and squeezed. Looking out over the field I took a deep breath, and then another. Finally, knowing I couldn’t wait any longer, I jumped into a sideways slide and whipped my arm in a low scoop, as if flinging a rock across water, winging the plane off my fingers.

  Little Wing spun upward and vanished into the glare of the sun. I huffed and closed my eyes, hunching up my shoulders. I didn’t want to see her drop like a stone and already I could feel a sting of tears under my lids. Mr. Small said nothing, and I guessed he was feeling bad for me. When finally I glanced over, he was standing still, stopwatch held out in front of his white collared shirt, looking up.

  I frowned and lifted one hand up to shade my eyes, tilting my head back. High overhead, Little Wing hovered in the same spot, caught for a moment in a gust of air that pushed directly on her nose. Then just as suddenly, she sighed and slid forward, floating for several yards before dipping slightly and gliding for several more, then lifting gently and bobbing, as if I’d taught her how to dance. Unhurried, she circled and floated the way she was supposed to, and just when I thought she was coming down for a landing, she lifted her nose one last time and skimmed along the cheat grass another two yards before a tuft reached up and caught her, bringing her to rest.

  Mr. Small clicked his watch and wrote down a number, which, by day’s end, landed me a second-place trophy.

  If I were any other child, I would have celebrated. I’d have held my trophy and paraded it to the car, tracing its wooden spire and flashy golden wings, exuberant and chattering. I’d have insisted Daddy swing into the A&W on the way home so I could order a vanilla shake and French fries, even though it was getting dark and Mama had a pot roast warming in the oven.

  But there were so many reasons I couldn’t rejoice. I wasn’t a boy, and because of this, I didn’t belong in this world of airplanes. Tangled in with this new realization was a harder truth: Roddy could not belong, even though he was the boy.

  Riding along in my lap, her nose scuffed and her fuselage cracked, Little Wing likely knew what would, in the end, prove true. I would not go on to be a champion flier. Beyond that day, I would abandon her to my father’s workbench.

  Chapter 10

  Split Levels

  Spring came early the year I turned eleven, startling the buds into quick, hard blooms and rattling me with sneezes. I pushed my fists deep into my eye sockets and rubbed, viciously, feeling my eyeballs slip around like grapes.

  “Don’t,” Barbara Ann whispered. “You’re only making it worse.”

  We three—Barbara Ann, Roddy, and I—sat in the back seat, riding with our parents to the Goodings’ house for supper. We’d been driving for an hour, coming in from the mountains and making our way through the streets of Cherry Creek.

  “So what,” I said, darkly.

  I felt vengeful, the way allergies always made me feel. The fact they nested only in me, not Barbara Ann or Roddy, darkened my resentment. They were a part of my father I didn’t want and couldn’t give back. Pushing my face into a frayed wad of tissue, I rode on, too puffy to care where we were going, even as the car rounded into a driveway.

  Barbara Ann nudged me and pecked a forefinger on her window.

  “Look, it’s a tri-level!” she whispered, breathy and awed.

  I looked up through the windshield. The house before us was like nothing I’d ever seen. Not at all like our house on Lamar Street, a single flattened ranch. This one split into all kinds of levels, each with different-sized windows, plus a crazy mix of roof lines. It looked very cool, and suddenly I was filled with a longing that was new to me. I wanted to have it. To be a person who might live there.

  Scooting after Barbara Ann, I crammed my wet Kleenex down into my purse and paused in the driveway with the rest of my family, straightening myself. I wore a new set of pedal pushers that zipped up the side and a stretchy blue headband I’d found in J. C. Penney’s. My mother raked her fingers through my bangs. “Tuck in your blouse,” she said.

  Only a few fuzzy things were known to me about the Goodings and why we might journey all this way for a visit. Jeanette and Bill Gooding came from a time in my parents’ lives I couldn’t fathom, before I was born. They were Kentuckians and shared with my parents a Southern upbringing in the dense, drenched hills of Hazard. Like my father, Bill Gooding had emerged from the University of Kentucky an aerospace engineer, and had left Appalachia, wending across the country to the echoing plains, where he, too, was now building rockets at Martin Marietta.

  “Well hello-o-o,” Mr. Gooding said, pushing the screen door, arching it wide so he could see us. We were in suburbia, a mysterious land to me, void of cottonwoods and weedy fields, and full of soft clipped yards and houses stitched together by fencerows and sidewalks: a giant quilt of families. “Come on in. I’ll hold the door.”

  Mr. Gooding looked like my dad, clean-shaven and lean, with a crisp-collared shirt and steady eyes. We clacked up concrete steps to the porch into a flurry of handshakes and tittery greetings. Mrs. Gooding joined in with a high sing-song, coming down the hall as we stepped inside, slipping off her apron and touching her short brown curls.

  Behind me, Roddy was twitchy and I felt him tether back on my hand. Halting on the threshold, I waited as he sorted out which foot had to go first. In that early time, Roddy’s rituals were mere glimpses of what would come later, when he was a young man, when he would pass whole mornings tapping his toothbrush, chopping in tiny steps down the hallway, freezing in doorways, incapable of skipping any of his ordered movements or complying with my pleading and pounding on the bathroom door. In the Goodings’ doorway he was still a young boy and needed only a minute to switch his feet twice, and then, at last, step across the threshold.

  The house was warmed with sunlight and smelled of pot roast. I looked around in wonder. Everything was wildly different from our
house, where you tramped from the porch straight into the living room. Here, we stood in an open entryway, and all around there was a dizziness of directions. To the right was a living room, softened in creamy carpet and spilling backward toward a dining room and a long, clothed table, set for supper. Straight before us were two flights of stairs, inviting a delight of ideas. One flight led down six steps where it disappeared into something called a “den,” Mrs. Gooding was saying to my mother. Or you could choose the up flight, lofting to where I imagined the bedrooms might cast a sky view over the backyard.

  Staring up to the landing, wanting to fly there and look around, I gasped. A tiny figure was standing up there, a young girl. She was dressed in a daisied jumper, with a lacy, collared blouse underneath. She had a slender, heart-shaped face and blondish hair that feathered across her tiny nose. She tipped her head sideways, taking each of us in, her bright silvery eyes flitting about like fairy wings.

  “Hi, hi, hi,” she called out in a light voice. She sounded like a bird. Like a chickadee.

  Hopping down the steps, her dress fluffing about her knees, she landed at the bottom a few inches from me and sang out, “Ta da!”

  “Here’s our Sarah,” said Mrs. Gooding, sending up a clatter of chuckles from the grownups, a kindness of sound.

  I blinked and looked away. Something was wrong. My eyes scuffled back to Sarah and, in a flurry of glances, I took her in. Her neck was bent sideways as if a hard swat had sent her head slamming down to her shoulder and everything had simply stuck there. Her toppled head, glued to the hunched knob of her shoulder, swung and pitched whichever way her shoulder moved. Beneath her shoulder waved an arm, which was less an arm and more a shriveled wing. Though its parts were all there, it looked as if someone had thrown it into a hot wash, shrinking it a size or two, her muscles shortening into taut bands that now held her elbow and wrist in bent and permanent angles. It looked like a turkey wing.