Geese are disgusting. St. Tim’s is on the flyway, goose poop everywhere. Every evening lines of geese flying low over our heads, and every morning there are green globs all over the lawn. Geese aren’t even good fliers, but they are good for explaining to young Misfits of Physics things like aerofoil and parasite, profile, and induced drag. It’s easy, really. Air passing over the top of a wing is faster than the air passing below it, causing less pressure above, causing lift. Flapping helps. Sometimes.
When I wasn’t inside practicing English, I sometimes went outside to play with Kim when we were little. Tea parties in the pool stopped when I was five, but not flying. I was the pressure below her wings; she was the bird. Carla said she and her brother Doug did the same thing sometimes. Different culture, same culture.
Carla spent a lot of time with her brother in the summer, told me her dad would make Doug work the peach orchards, “make a man of him.” As soon as she could get away from her mom and dishes, she found Doug in the trees. A few years older than Carla, he’d be hauling limbs bigger than he was, carrying a tree saw in the other hand. Brother and sister transformed into bug-hunters, and that’s where she found her love of bugs. And she told me that sometimes when they couldn’t find bugs in the bark or leaves, Doug rolled up his sleeves, made an offering of his flesh to mosquitoes. He got them fat in a second. But he kept flexing. And the bugs popped. Blood bubbles. He got four going at once sometimes, that was, until their dad found them. Carla said their dad could come up really quiet, smack Doug on the ear, topple him. Doug never said a word, though. Tough guy, her big brother.
Doug and Carla were tough. Their dad thought he was so avant garde with performance art he sponsored in his gallery, goat blood poured on walls, and the artists all in black. Carla told me about one who smeared blood on her breasts, and that was too much, so she and Doug snuck out. They ran into the fields surrounding the suburban gallery.
She told me they tried goose calls. Doug was better at it. Somehow his throat opened up, and his jaw unbuckled so his voice went hollow.
Then they tried flying. His back flat on the dirt, Doug took off his shoes and lifted up his feet. “Here,” he said to her, “lay on my feet.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll lift you.”
So she put her belly on his socks. His toes tickled a little, but then she moved forward and he pushed up, and she was in the air.
“Put your arms out.”
And she did, like Kim, and she was a goose flying south over the Delaware cornfields, and he made the noises geese make from the back of his throat, and he lifted her higher, way high, and his eyes were right in her eyes, except her body was in the sky. And she leaned a little too far to the left, and his foot slipped out from under her, and wham, gravity, she was on the ground. Her nose was blood and her eyes not seeing for awhile.
Doug kept saying, “I’m sorry, Carla. I’m sorry,” and really, it wasn’t Doug’s fault. She stuck her finger under her upper lip like her dad did, and pretty soon it stopped. There was blood all over her shirt and Doug’s shirt and on her face.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Not even, I’m too big.”
“Are not.”
“Am, too.”
“Scared?”
On her back she lifted up her legs and her skirt went up and her panties showed, but she felt safe because it was Doug. It’s funny the things she told me. He lay his belly on her feet. At first he was heavier than she thought, but pretty soon she got the hang of it. Her feet, she said, might have gone right through him, but his bones stuck. He put out his arms, and she held him up. She couldn’t do the goose noise. His eyes were in her eyes, and her eyes were in his eyes, except his body was in the sky. I can see them because we did the same thing, except Kim never lifted me.
Carla is strong that way. She adapts.
It was bugs that drew us together. Flying bugs: mosquitoes, dragonflies, flies. Not too long after she arrived at Tim-Tim’s as a Third Former, she was out staring at shrubs. This girl with her curls going all over stood in the middle of shrubs outside of classrooms.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You okay?” In between classes, I had a stack of lab books under one arm and walked up to her sideways.
“Better than you,” she said. She didn’t even look at me, kept bent over looking at a dragonfly, a blue-spotted brown one that stayed still on a big leaf.
“What do you have there?” I said. Two steps closer, and she jumped and turned at the same time, came down in a crouch. Her arms out, her weight low, she was ready to tackle me or run or slap me silly.
“Whoa,” I said, “just curious.”
“It’s gone,” she said. “Thanks.” And the dragonfly was no longer framed by the green leaf.
“Sorry.”
“Aeshna juncea,” she said.
“Sedge Darner,” I said. And that’s when she looked at me.
After that afternoon, we walked many afternoons, all over campus. I told her about how dragonflies move, and how some bugs live in water until a certain age and then fly, and about inertia and entropy and turbulence. She told me the Latin names of everything, about larvae and spiders and how she can see the web shake when a fly feels the spider approach. As a fifteen-year-old, she was the type of scientist I could never be: She was outside doing it. As a Physics teacher, I was inside thinking about the outside.