Presto!

It flew.

It flew, Jane. All the way to the bottom of the hill, not a single dip out of place.

And then a few more times? I stood on the edge of a small cliff, and sent the wings down that, too. Same thing- all the way to the edge, and then down, down, to a gentle landing. You never saw a paper airplane touch the ground so gentle as my wings did that day. And it was so much more than just a touchdown, too. Remember, I’d put a ton of work into the way the wings would gear, mesh, automatically adjust and correct itself when there’d be a stray gust of wind or a thermal underneath. The wings knew now how to correct, adjust and be ready, even if I wasn’t watching, like how your body is always adjusting and re-calibrating and rebalancing when you walk from your house to the mailbox, or some of these little yuppies are always jogging every morning in their weird little one-piece suits that look more like something a paratrooper woulda worn during the war.

But the wings, Jane! I felt like someone had given me a blank check to travel anywhere in the universe. I wasn’t even thinking about making money then, y’understand? It was all about the wings, it was all about being able to fly. I was never gonna get true-flight from lightning, anymore than I was gonna win the lottery and be set for life. But by golly, Jane, I was gonna fly, and not by payin’ through the nose and sittin’ in some giant metal cigar, either. I was really gonna fly, the way men’ve wanted to fly since the world was made and we looked at the birds and wondered ‘why can’t I do that?’

The whole of the world seemed open to me then. And in just a few more tries I knew I hadda get up there myself and do it.

Sure enough, I got the wings ready on the Fourth of July, up on the nearby cliff (really just a steep hill, but it was a small town- we called it a cliff). My wings were totally unfolded and ----

I took the leap. Into the air, and like they had a dozen times already, they held and I glided over the grass and the small bushes below.

And now I needed to do more than glide- I pumped the wings a bit, just a bit, and I got lift. Up, just six feet, but up. I wasn’t just gonna glide and catch myself running with my feet, no ma’am. Just good old fashioned flap-your-wings and rise, the way we’ve birds do a thousand times a day, if you’re watching.

And I rose, and went higher. I felt the warm summer sun on may face, and best of all, my wings weren’t made of wax, like my poor namesake. My wings were wood, plastic and metal. Not the toughest stuff on earth, but definitely melt-proof no matter how high I went.

The only problem was that I had no one to share this with- no one at all. My every waking moment was spent either putting minimal effort into my schoolwork or these wings, and I had no friends or social life to speak of. Why bother? My ‘peers’ would look at a Friday as an opportunity to worship the football players who disdained them, get drunk and throw up on Saturday night and then jump up and down and clap their hands with the Baptists on Sunday. What was that, compared to flying?

I eventually convinced my mom and my dad to come out and see. It took quite a bit- my dad was only vaguely aware of my existence at this point, figuring that I was like most teenagers and looking for a reason to be away from home as much as possible. So long as he was able to have his beer and read a book or two at night uninterrupted by the cops bringing me in for something evil or other, he didn’t care and didn't need to. Mom was still good, but kind’ve one-part worried about her son’s weird little obsession with flying and two-parts sick of hearing about velocity, calibration, pullies and drive motors.

And yet, here they were, standing on a Saturday afternoon, where I’d practically pulled them after I’d gotten home. Dad had a rare Saturday off his many jobs and was willing to come, reluctantly, to watch his goofy son who couldn’t throw a baseball jump off the sorry excuse for a cliff we had in our little Podunk town.

And then they saw.

Dad’s jaw dropped. Mom put both her hands over her mouth. I cheered, I coasted, I curved and I swerved. I went twenty, thirty, fifty feet into the air, circling over their heads and whooping like a Commanche that’d just single handedly whupped and scalped the six nations.

Now, how did I keep my secret? Why did I keep it?

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Well, truthfully, I didn’t think that the locals would be interested. I mean, you give flowers to an ape, is he gonna marvel at the arrangement, or thank you for the thought? Well, I thought most of the folks would look at me and then jeer at me. The Tom Richert crowd would take one look at the wings I’d slaved over a year to build and call me a cheap knock-off of the American Airman. And, to be fair, maybe they’d be right. Getting the gift of flying after you get hit by lighting? That means Jesus is your teammate and God the Father’s just become your personal coach, trainer and marketing department all in one big blast outta the sky. Building wings in your backyard shed says you were a bright boy, and you had a lot of spare time on your hands.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, huh? Too big for the britches, even though no one wears clothes with those anymore. Well, of course pop went nuts, happy as I’d ever seen him. Ma went even crazier. I think all those years of having the other mothers talk about their sons playing football and dating girls and becoming boy scout leaders and whatnot while her son spent hours in the shed every night tinkering had put a weight on her. And now here I was, flying, actually flying, right in front of her! Something at last she could brag to the other moms about and hold her head up high in the town over . . .

What? Keep it a secret? You nuts? Nosirma’am were we gonna keep it a secret! After living in the background of that little bitty speck of a town, d’you think for a second that I was gonna keep something like that quiet? Jane, honey, I don’t know if you were a wallflower in school or the cheerleader, but if the wallflower suddenly blossomed into a beautiful girl, d’you think she’s gonna come to class with a bag over her head? Hell no! I flew over my folks, then over the town, then right over the diner where Richert and his crowd hung out every Saturday afternoon to waste time, drink pop and figure out what kind of trouble they were gonna cause that day and that night.

Oh yes. They saw me. They all saw me. Every one of ‘em. I’ll never forget how Richert's girl looked at me, with her jaw dropped and her mouth wide enough to . . . well, never mind. I thought of the kind of thing that teenage boys think of all the time, and Riechert the Rocket’s girl was the prettiest dish in town!

I flew and I flew. No real flapping the way you think of seagulls or crows doing it, but something way, way stronger. Draw the wings forward, and then push and glide on the air, like I was swimming and the air was the water of a fast-moving brook.

Draw, push, glide.

I flew all afternoon, the air filled with the steady chuff-chuff-chuffing of wings’ small engine helping push the wings hard enough to keep me afloat.

Sunday, I guess folks were talking. They all went to Church, but being (at best) nominal Jews, I got to sleep in on Sundays and do my own thing on Wednesday nights. The only folks who were near close to being out of the main swim of things as us were the three or four Catholic families in town. They at least could go to the nearest Catholic Church two towns over, but we didn’t even know where the nearest synagogue was. But come Monday, I found out that the whole town was talking about the flying Jew-boy.

Yeah. But y’know, it was funny. You’d think a teenager flying down Main street in smalltown USA would bring every reporter from New York to San Francisco onto the place. But I guess with the American Airman tearing up the skies over Europe and sometimes even in New York City, a kid like me didn’t warrant more than a few lines in a coupla newspapers at best.

Still, it was real, real nice. In a burg like Fort Orlan, getting your name in print in the school paper was something. But when you get your name and your picture and a quote in print? And it’s in a paper from a big, fast-paced city like Landing?

Yeah. Landing. You never heard of it, either. Fort Orlan was such a small dot on the map that Landing, Arkansas (two states over, mind you!) was considered The Big City when we were growing up. New York or Los Angeles might as well’ve been Timbuktu or the Emerald City. Still, Ma had the interview and the pictures put into her scrapbook, and Dad, I imagine, walked quite a bit taller with a spring in his step over it for at least a week afterwards.

Oh, did things change for me at school? Somewhat. I was really a nobody there to begin with- a bit of a weirdo who fiddled with tools and gadgets rather than socialize. I wasn’t really all that book-smart, so I wasn’t hit on for help with homework or study help. And sports? Pfft! Next question.

But being ‘famous’? Even if that fame didn’t extend past the valley? Well, it was still pretty nice. People were talking to me who hadn’t even seemed to notice me before. One gal I’d had my eye on since the first day of ninth grade started talking to me, ho-daddy! I literally hadn’t known what her voice sounded like until that moment! And she was- well, really, really nice. Yeah, I’d gone from nobody to…well, somebody normal. Just a regular guy, now. And for someone who was on the outside looking in, that’s something you want every day of your life. I saw the nerds, the way they glared at me? At one point I think they considered me the only thing lower than they were, but now I’d climbed up a rank or two and it made them madder’n hell. I saw one of ‘em- an overweight little shit with red hair named Teddy Breise- whispering to Tom Richert when Tom’s football buddies weren’t around. Tom was a jerk, but he wasn’t a total dummy. He had his informers and advisors like any smart king in his kingdom.

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TO BE CONTINUED...