The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Read online

  Roger

  When Roger first met Nella, the joint was getting so hot that the windows dripped with dew. Isaac Hayes blared from four-foot Pioneer speakers, and the dance floor was full.

  “First time in this joint, huh? My first time too. Just visiting my buddy Maurice — over there — I’m up from Ramstein,” Roger said when he approached Nella.

  Roger liked white girls, but not American white girls. They didn’t do much for him, because they acted like you were supposed to be happy just because you got to rub your brown on their cream. But not these European girls — they loved the black boys they met in the bars near the American base. Roger loved them back.

  He didn’t wait for Nella to answer. A smile was enough invitation. And she did smile, even though it was hidden behind her hand.

  “My name’s Roger Morse.”

  “Nella Fløe.”

  “Nella Flow. You ready to cut loose? Do you flow when you dance?”

  He could tell she didn’t understand all of what he said: joint, loose.

  “You’re from here?” he asked. “I’m Danish,” she said.

  “Danish, huh? Danish girl, what’s it like there? In Danish land?”

  Nella laughed. “Danish is from Denmark,” she said. She was from a small town on the peninsula, Herning.

  “Her-kneeing,” Roger said, imitating her accent as he put a hand on her leg.

  Nella laughed, but she didn’t move away.

  “Denmark. That’s where those stories are from. The ones we read as a kid.”

  “Hans Christian Andersen?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I used to dig that stuff as a kid.”

  Nella looked at him quizzically.

  “Like,” Roger said. “Dig is like.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what’s a pretty Danish girl doing here?” he asked.

  “Practicing my English. Then I am going back home to go to school,” Nella said.

  Roger smiled wide. “I can teach you some language,” he said and scooted closer to Nella, putting his arm around her. She touched her hand to his leg.

  They danced that night. They kissed. Roger recited for Nella some Shakespeare he learned from a Vincent Price album. That seduced a girl easy. Never underestimate the appeal of a black boy speaking in tongues. That was Roger’s personal style.

  They kissed some more. And that night Roger couldn’t help but make love to that shy white girl who came from a little town in a little country he knew nothing about — except that in her country’s stories, wishes came true.

  Rachel

  Aunt Loretta has taken me for the first time to see the Multnomah Falls, beautiful waterfalls about one hour away from Grandma’s. Only they’re not moving. Waterfall after waterfall is frozen in midstream — giant icicles — stuck in a going down way.

  The biggest waterfall is as tall as a cathedral. We walk up the wooden trail steps as high as we can. The wind tickles up the back of my neck even though I am wearing a hat and am wrapped up with a scarf so that you can only see my eyes. It’s so cold even Aunt Loretta’s cheeks are red. “That Indian’s showing up in you,” Drew says and kisses her cheek with his frozen breath.

  We stand before the waterfall like we are in church. Drew, Aunt Loretta, and me. We stand on the little wooden bridge high above the water and hold our hands together as we watch nothing. The water’s not moving.

  Maybe eight other people are standing nearby watching the nonmoving water not move.

  There are no black people in Nature today. Only us.

  The wind catches me at the ankles now. My socks have fallen on the climb up the stairs to this lookout point.

  “No way we could get Miss Doris up to see this,” Drew says.

  “There’s no way my mama wants to be out in the thick of cold climbing up stairs to see anything but the Lord himself,” Aunt Loretta says. “But if she did …”

  Aunt Loretta doesn’t finish what she’s saying. She stares out at the falls and moves her hands in the air like she can measure what she is seeing. Like she’s framing it with her hands.

  “You about done with this cold, Rachel?” Drew asks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aunt Loretta is leaning on the rail, looking at the waterfall now. She’s hypnotized. I think she is crying.

  Drew sees that she is crying too.

  Aunt Loretta cries without sound, but I can see a shudder go through her. Is it the cold wind? Drew is saying something to her. I hear in only half volume. The wind is in my good ear, and in the other a thrumming, a hum.

  “I want to be that girl again,” is all I can hear of what Aunt Loretta says. Drew seems to know what she means. He leans into her, but I move away. I don’t want hands on me.

  I take small steps backing off the bridge. I walk slowly and carefully. What I’m scared of I can’t explain. It’s the look in Aunt Loretta’s eyes, the way her voice sounds small and hurt. Maybe she’s measured a long icy fall.

  When I finally get off the bridge, I see that Drew is still holding Aunt Loretta. But then suddenly she pushes him away to stand up straight again.

  By the time we are sitting in the lodge drinking hot cocoa, Aunt Loretta doesn’t look like herself, but she doesn’t look broken. We laugh about Drew losing his hat. A strong wind stole it. He grabbed for it, but it was already gone, flying down toward the frozen stream below. We laugh about the woman who said my eyes were pretty but then looked at Aunt Loretta and Drew real funny. “Maybe she thought I was stolen,” I say and laugh. But I think what a family is shouldn’t be so hard to see. It should be the one thing people know just by looking at you.

  “Now, if I didn’t have this mustache, we’d basically be twins you and me,” Drew says. I laugh, but Aunt Loretta doesn’t join in. Aunt Loretta just smiles.

  AUNT LORETTA SEES new after the day at the falls. Old things, throwaway things, leftover things, she sees them new and different and worthy. She makes Grandma save the bags from her morning tea on a plate by the toaster oven. She wants my old crayons — the ones that are broken or stubby nubs. She collects leaves from the dying flowers in Grandma’s garden. She saves pebbles and wrappers and peels. And she makes things with them.

  Aunt Loretta has always decorated herself. Now she decorates the house. She has replaced the brown-green swirls on the couch with an African brown fabric that has pictures of leopards and zebras and elephants. Next to the porcelain figures of kings and queens, she’s placed a statue of an Igbo goddess. The goddess means life and fertility and nobility. Aunt Loretta is teaching me about African things. African can mean a lot of things and it’s important to be specific. Aunt Loretta has never been to Africa but wants to go one day.

  On the walls she’s hung a photograph of an old Asian man with a straw hat, and one of a Masai man, a certain kind of African man, in a bright yellow tunic. Grandma doesn’t like any of these things. She doesn’t want her house “lookin so African.” She likes things respectable, she says. She fusses but she doesn’t take down the pictures or the statues. Almost every day there is something new: a new mask or trinket or something hanging on the wall.

  Grandma tut-tuts when she sees Aunt Loretta has set up an easel in her bedroom. After the day at the falls, Aunt Loretta dug out an easel, paints, and a paint cloth from the basement trunks. “Don’t be makin a mess,” Grandma says. “You never careful with the mess that makes.”

  Grandma is worried about neatness and order and doesn’t have time for messy things. She doesn’t think Aunt Loretta should either. A lizard is not going to be interested in a woman with paint underneath her nails, or a woman smelling of chemicals instead of peaches and white soap.

  Aunt Loretta paints every day now. She paints from memory at first. Every day she makes a new painting of a waterfall, moving or not moving. She calls them Untitled 1, Untitled 2, and so on, until she gets to number 15. She names the next ones Figure by the Falls, Woman on Bridge by the Falls, The Dream by the Falls. I make up better titles for them, but she doesn’t
use them. But then she uses me.

  She wants to do my profile, and I am supposed to look down. I don’t know how to sit still. I notice I am making the same face as the statue on the mantel.

  “Funny, you have that same wrinkle your dad had.”

  “Really?”

  “Your dad was the most handsome man. I think some of my friends were my friends just so they could be near to him.”

  “But my dad was also the smartest,” I say without a question mark, because this is how I remember him.

  “He sure couldn’t spell, but that’s supposed to be a sign of genius. Double consonants. Those always got him. He’d make them double when they shouldn’t be and vice versa.”

  Aunt Loretta doesn’t talk much while she paints, but I ask her anyway, “Did he like any of your friends? Like Helen.”

  Aunt Loretta laughs. “I suppose so. There was Helen. A couple more.”

  “How did they look?” I ask. And for some reason what I mean is: Did they look like Mor? Or did they look like me? “Were they all light-skinned-ed?” I ask.

  “Light-skinned,” she says. “It’s light-skinned, and the answer is … maybe. I never thought about it.”

  “Aunt Loretta, when do you think he’ll come back to get me?”

  She doesn’t answer the question I ask. Instead she says, “He came to the hospital, Rachel.” Suddenly the hum of Grandma’s story playing in the next room isn’t the loudest thing in the house. “Those days, those first days,” she continues, “he held your hand and stroked your hair smooth.”

  “But then he went on the mission? I don’t remember.”

  “You were very, very sick.”

  “I almost died.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “When he finishes the mission, he’ll come back,” I say.

  “Rachel, you know we don’t know. We don’t know how long the things he’s got to do could take.”

  “Could he tell us?”

  “No, my sweet, I’m afraid — he probably doesn’t know either.”

  Aunt Loretta says “hush” after that but in a gentle way when she can tell I want to ask more. I have to be still for her to paint me. And for some reason I think about feeling lonely, right here in front of her. And I think about the things that maybe made Pop feel alone, right in front of us, his family. No one knew how to cut his hair — he had tight black curls like other black people. And maybe he even had ash on his elbows and knees sometimes. He never told us he was black. He never told us that we were.

  “The light’s not right,” Aunt Loretta says.

  Or I am a bad model, I think. There is something hidden about me that she can’t quite paint, Aunt Loretta says, but the word she uses is one of the big words I’ve learned: elusive.

  AUNT LORETTA STOPS painting people and makes paintings of animals. They look like the African animals on the couch. But they are not the same, Aunt Loretta tells me. I have never heard of a quagga or a thylacine or a moa. And even when Aunt Loretta tells me what they are, they still look like zebras and tigers and ostriches. She says these animals are different. They are extinct.

  She paints these animals against a blue or red backdrop that looks like the sky or a burning fire. In her paintings the animals are in motion, in the air, doing backflips and somersaults and high dives. I imagine them springing off that wooden bridge that stretches above the falls. I cannot imagine them land.

  Aunt Loretta says they are part of a series she calls Secrets of Extinction. I think about what those secrets may be. And I think about who keeps the secret if really you’re the last one. I think maybe she should call them Moments of Extinction. Because she’s painting what makes them move toward the end. It’s a funny thing to think about: moving toward extinction. And I think of how maybe I’m already extinct in a strange way — there’s no way to make another me: at least I can’t do it. But that doesn’t matter anyway because I never want to have kids.

  Brick

  Brick visited the next day again.

  He played the song two notes short of good, the man said with a smile. “You hear how you’re making a song out of what’s just a whistle. Like a bird,” the man said.

  “Yes,” Brick said.

  The two sat quietly for a long time before Brick asked, “Sir, what do you do?”

  “I’m a mapmaker.”

  “Oh.”

  “I map out where they can bomb the commies, when the time is right.”

  “Really?” Brick’s eyes were wide. “Who?”

  “Our guys. They go up in the big planes and find the targets with my maps.”

  “How?”

  “You know I’m not supposed to tell you any of this. It’s classified. You know what that means?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “Secret. Means it’s secret. Folks think we’re not at war — cause we’re outta Nam. But we’re always at war. Long as those commies are there, we’re gonna find a way to get them. When the time’s right, we’re gonna get them. Let me show you.”

  The man stood and moved the chair away from the girl’s bed. “We’ll make you the pilot,” the man said. “And I’ll call you Charles.”

  He motioned for Brick to sit and handed him a chart from the rolling table. He put his hat on Brick’s head.

  “Pretend that chart’s the map I made,” the man said, and he took a long sip from his flask and set it beneath the chair. Then he extended his hand to Brick, his fingers slightly bent as if he was holding something.

  The boy took from the man what was only air, but Brick was careful to mimic the shape of his hand. In his hand, the man explained, Brick held a walkie-talkie. The man had one too.

  With the words “take off,” the man sent the boy flying high above the German air base, over water and mountains, over Soviet enemy ground. “Do you see the target?” he asked.

  The boy consulted his map. “Yes, sir.”

  “Shoot, anytime.”

  Brick let go of the controls and pushed the button.

  The man made the sound of an exploding bomb in a stage whisper.

  “Okay, got it!” Brick raised his arms for victory.

  “No, no, no … you say something like … the Eagle has landed. Remember! It’s classified. It’s all secret. It has to be in code,” the man said.

  “The Eagle has landed.”

  “We copy you. Come on back down,” the man said. He drank again from the flask.

  Brick smiled. Mission accomplished. The alarm bells suddenly went off as they often did, and a nurse entered the room to check.

  The nurse, seeing the boy’s stricken face, said, “Don’t worry. If it does that, everything’s working well.”

  The man adjusted his hat on the boy’s head. He saluted him.

  “Want to be like your daddy, huh?” the nurse asked and turned to check on the girl.

  “Okay, now what do you want to play?” the man asked after the nurse had left the room. The flask was in his hand again. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Brick shrugged. He was holding onto the walkie-talkie, the chart map, the feeling of being worthy of a salute.

  “Well. What?” Another long drink.

  “I don’t know.” Brick didn’t know games.

  “Hide and seek. You want to play hide and seek?” the man said like a tickle.

  Brick laughed.

  “Hide and seek? Hide and seek?” The man did tickle him, lassoing Brick at the waist with heavy arms. Brick squealed. He thought he had stopped his body from needing this — touch that equaled joy. But then the tickles became jabs. The man’s hold was not a lasso but a noose.

  “Let me tell you something, Charles. I tried to find you. I did try!”

  The man had a sad faraway look in his eyes. Brick was shaking.

  “You okay? I didn’t mean that, okay?” the man said. Suddenly he was weeping again, and Brick moved away, across the room.

  He looked at the man from the safety of the doorway. “I know.”

  “GOING OUTSIDE,”
BRICK called to his mother the next day. He walked downstairs. The wind thumped the courtyard seesaw against the ground again and again.

  Brick sat on a swing wet from the morning rain. He pushed hard enough to swing past the puddle below him, but he let his feet drag through the mud just because he was big enough now to reach. He imagined himself back in the cockpit, each splash through the puddle a direct hit on enemy ground.

  “The Eagle has landed. The Eagle has landed. The Eagle has landed.” But it wasn’t the same.

  Brick swung back and forth slowly to a stop. His reflection waved in the muddy puddle beneath him. And then the water suddenly splashed.

  “What you tell them, Shorty?”

  Brick was silent and shaking.

  “Huh?” said the man, grabbing his arm. Brick hadn’t seen the man who raised pigeons on the roof in weeks. Brick had stopped visiting him when the man’s large ring bruised Brick’s thigh. He didn’t want to be called Shorty, and he didn’t want the man to call him pretty. Besides, Brick liked a fancier bird than a pigeon.

  “You told them I was up there? If I wanted to I could fix your pretty little ass.”

  Brick had no words.

  “Look, yo. Only a crazy bitch would kill her kids. That bitch looked crazy for real. I ain’t no criminal. The cops let all my pigeons go. They smashed the cages. You know how much money I lost because of your shit, Shorty?”

  Brick stayed silent.

  “Now you got nothing to say, huh?” The man held his arm tighter, and Brick could feel the ring press into his flesh. “Yo, Shorty. Anybody ask again you tell them the truth. Tell them what I’m telling you. I didn’t see nothing. Yeah, I was on that roof scoping out new places for my cages. And maybe I’m the one who broke the lock. But that was months ago, and that crazy bitch was gonna jump anyhow.”

  Muddy and wet, Brick sat still even after the pigeon man let him go. He sat still even after the pigeon man walked away. Since the moment Brick said his new name he had not thought of the story that created it. He thought of it now.