By George V. Tucker

The Oklahoma mornings are so cold and windy that, when you step outside your uncle's house on your way to school, you can unbutton your jacket and be carried to the bus stop. The chilly blast of wind fills the loose bags of fabric under your arms and lifts you into the air. You fly clumsily, like a bear or a rhinoceros suddenly given wings. The other neighborhood kids are like sparrows, playing mid-air games of tag or racing to land on a rooftop. You feel alien among them.

The older kids, the juniors and seniors, are mostly too heavy to fly anymore, except on stormy days. They trudge on sidewalks in heavy leather jackets while the younger kids flap by in denim or plastic windbreakers. You're a junior, but, lucky for you, you're skinny. Light as a feather, your cousin Gigi the cheerleader used to say when she flung you into the air. So, although you're sixteen already and have a driver's license, you can still fly.

Flying's fun, and you like it a lot, but Oklahoma's a new and not entirely wonderful place to you. You've only been here since your mother's nervous breakdown from trying to decide how to split up the property when your dad comes home from the Persian Gulf. You decided you were not property and called your Uncle Ted, who has brown teeth and bad breath, asking if you could stay with him. You've been here two weeks. He gave you your own bedroom and an allowance and takes you to the YMCA at night to work out. You refuse to go into the sauna.

Other kids stream past you. They bank and turn with ease, calling to one another and diving like peregrines. You've noticed most kids in your school do all their homework in study hall so they won't have to carry heavy books home. A shifting backpack full of biology and algebra texts could kill you, drag you down if the wind slacked, maybe in front of an eighteen-wheeler full of construction equipment that wouldn't even have time to honk before you were crushed to death under the wheels. So you learned to leave them in your locker.

To say you've made no friends would be an understatement. Not even your teachers have talked to you yet. No, wait, there was that group of older Indian boys that harassed you at Hardee's, then followed you halfway home, yelling at you. Your newness is like a huge birthmark on your forehead, like Gorbachev’s, only worse. At times your voicebox is paralyzed by shyness.

You fly past the only tree in the whole neighborhood, a sad mulberry which has surrendered to the constant wind by bowing to the ground. Before Oklahoma, you thought of the word "prairie" as some quaint landscape, full of tall grasses bordered with stately trees, stitched with springs, filled with jackrabbits and deer. That's the impression you had from books and movies. The real place, real prairie, is more like the moon. Everything in Norman, Oklahoma is bent permanently toward the east – you imagine that even the natives' legs are longer on one side than the others. Any buildings over three stories (of which there are five in the town) have a distinctive eastward list. The weeds that grow in ditches touch their heads to the ground facing the morning sun. You think you remember something about Hopi kivas in the Southwest all facing east, too – worshipping the sun, or for spiritual-religious reasons. Here most doors face east so, when you open them in the mornings, a gale won't hurl you to the floor and rearrange the furniture.

You do a few slow orbits around the bus stop before settling down to wait. Your shoes crackle on the frosty grass. Where you're from, the school bus stopped on your block, once. You didn't miss it. In Norman, there are a series of bus stops strategically placed to be exactly eight blocks away from your house. The bus starts its rounds at 7 in the morning and keeps going until 8:30. You are always ready for the earliest bus, because it is the most empty.

As the bus arrives and its canary-yellow doors squeal open, you decide to master flight. You have read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and, even though you didn't quite understand it, you feel a yearning to fly like an eagle. To soar. Not so you can be like the other kids, though – this is not a conformist urge – but for the sheer joy of it. Also because you got tangled up in someone's television antenna the very first day you tried, and that was embarrassing. You still have scratches on your hands from the aluminum vanes.

You read during the bus ride. Books are your armor, the shield you hold up between yourself and the conversations that hover and buzz around you. You're a little scared you'll turn into that kid at the old high school who sat on the sidelines during baseball games reading Lord of the Rings, whom you secretly wanted to join. You're not good at catching baseballs, whether thrown or batted at you. No one liked that kid whose name slips your mind like a minnow.

The bus stops at another designated point and a few Indian kids climb aboard. They're wearing what you think of as the uniform: ratty jeans, a denim jacket, white high-top shoes that haven't seen polish ever. Where you're from, the word "minority" meant black people. You never really talked to black people much, not because you're racist, but just because they made you feel vaguely uncomfortable. In Oklahoma, there are pockets of Indians left over from the westward surges of the pioneers. They have mahogany skin and hair black as shadows. Some of the obnoxious kids at the back of the bus yell, "Hey, Hiawatha!" and make those stupid war cries by patting their hands over a pursed mouth, "Ooh-ooh-ooh," like you did when you were about five. Their stupidity is depressing. The Indian kids, stoic as trees, ignore them and sit in different seats.

From the high school, you'd think Norman is a pretty cosmopolitan place. It's near an army base, so there are kids from all over the country in the high school. There are also many XXX video houses and a bewildering variety of nudie magazines at the convenience stores. There are even a few Asian kids at the school, who always wear jeans with creases in the legs and button-down shirts. This is how you usually dress – without the creases. Everything you own seems permanently wrinkled, but that's okay with you. You don't want to look like you're going to church.

The high school building was designed by a psychologist who ran rats through mazes in his spare time. Its halls sprawl across a dozen acres of prairie, unbelievably convoluted. You're lucky if you find your locker twice in a day. You carry a map of the building in your jeans pocket, but hate pulling it out in the halls crowded with the between-class rush, so you wander and are forced to take seats near the back of the room after class has already begun. No one seems to notice.

You use the time before class starts wisely, tracking down your locker and removing two metric tons of textbooks. You go to homeroom, which is deserted except for one Asian kid in a blue-striped shirt. He smiles at you. You sit and finish up your algebra homework, which is banal, in your opinion. It's a well-known fact that only 1% of the world's population ever uses algebraic equations. Ever.

You're finished by the time homeroom begins. A television, bolted to the wall about seven feet up like a dead gray eye, flickers to life and your daily dose of commercial brainwashing begins. You hate it. Fifteen minutes of "news" delivered by twentysomethings whose vocabulary consists of one-syllable words. Today, they tell you the word "scud" used to be a verb, generally used to describe clouds drifting across the sky. That was before it became a threat. The word "scud" now implies chemical weapons, great green clouds of gas that do not scud but ooze across the ground, killing. This does not put you in a good mood for the rest of the day.

The nearby Southwest Oklahoma State University is famous for its programs in agriculture and animal husbandry, which explains why you have to dig ditches and muck out stables in your horticulture class. Your advisor, a bony man who sweated while he talked, told you it was all learning about plants and stuff. Those were his words, "Plants and stuff." You seemed to be making him nervous so you agreed to the horticulture class. You've learned that horse shit is easier to pick up with a pitchfork than a shovel, and that after spending an hour in a dusty stable your mucus will be black for the rest of the day. The rest of the class are the sorts of boys you avoid. The burly, surly sort who refer to all women as "bitches" and talk about which girl is a "ho" and which a "tease." They threaten one another with pitchforks and pruning shears. You give them a wide berth.

Not all your classes are as bad as that, though. You're light-years ahead in the chemistry class, which is just now getting to polar and nonpolar covalent bonds. You try not to yawn.
French is another story. You are far from bilingual, but thought you were progressing well in your former French class. In the Norman high school the French teacher is from Quebec and only uses English when calling the roll. When she gives the class instructions, it sounds to you like she's swearing. Every word sounds vehement on her pouty lips. She's very pretty, though; hair cut short like a movie star's, long arms and legs, round glasses. You're content to watch her while she writes en francais on the chalkboard and berates the class like a native Parisian.

Today, near the end of class, a blonde girl asks you for help in conjugating an irregular verb. She has blue eyes and a cute pug nose. Luckily you know the answer, and you assist her, thinking she's probably flirting with you. She's attractive, but, compared to the teacher, who is luscious, she's just another high school girl.

You haven't yet discovered the cafeteria in your rambles through the school. And you don't want to sit alone for those 45 minutes. At lunchtime, you go to the school library and read a fat paperback history of World War Two and try to ignore the moans that come from your shrunken stomach. The room's empty except for the octagenarian librarian who smiles at you like your grandmother used to, and always seems happy to see you. She looks like the kind of person who bakes homemade cookies for the neighborhood and accidentally drools sometimes. You always smile back and sit, not speaking, just reading about Monty and Rommell and Goehring. You're up to the invasion of Sicily. You're confident you've learned more from this book than from two weeks of horticulture, chemistry and French.

The last class of the day is American history, where the teacher has given everyone in the class $10,000 in fake money and forces them to spend it on the stock market. The students spend at least thirty minutes working on their portfolios every day, using calculators to determine how much 3/8 means toward their retirement. There's already a self-made millionaire, who bought MacDonnel-Douglas at just the right time. They talk of defense contracts while you read.

The bus ride back is loud and chaotic. You always wait for the last bus, which is the least crowded. One afternoon you waited too long and had to make the long walk home, when you weren't even sure where home was. That was the day you made crosscultural contact by being yelled at by the group of Indian boys. Now, you're sure to always catch a bus. Sometimes some strange boy's hips are pressed against yours, and you studiously ignore one another, afraid of being labeled "fags." An accusation like that could stick with you until you graduated and attended college in a faraway place, somewhere up north where it snows in the winter and everyone knows who Marcel Proust is.

The flight home is far more difficult. This time the wind is in your face, forcing a fist past your teeth. To fly home, you must open your jacket and let the wind swell in it, ride high into the air, so high you'd probably die if you panicked. You can see the whole block from up there, can see the yards of people who've hired Arthur's Landscape Service to drive up in a truck and spraypaint their brown and dying grass a lurid green. Once you get the height, you fling your weight forward, spilling the air from your wings and plummet downward, headfirst. You use your jacket as a control surface now and let your legs hang behind you as you fall, and wait until the last few feet that make your nuts cling tight to your skin until you turn, hold the jacket tight, let it fill with wind again and yank you away from the ground like a bungee cord, your internal organs firmly rattled by the close call. It takes about twenty climbs and dives to get home that way. Below you, people walk on the ground, leaning heavily into the wind.

You plummet to the sidewalk outside your uncle's house, hitting hard enough to make your teeth clatter and your ankles ache. Each time you do this, fly home against the wind, you know you may die. You may plummet too far too fast and dig a trench in an unnaturally green yard with your forehead. You may get snagged by another television antenna and not be able to extricate yourself. You may fly into power lines and be fried crispy. It's dangerous. Usually you wouldn't do such things, but this is different. This is flying.

In the evenings, when Uncle Ted comes home from his merchandise distribution job, you sit at the chipped kitchen table eating microwaved meals. He explains mutual funds to you, the commodities market, what the terms "bear" and "bull" mean. You nod a lot and are mostly silent. Once he encouraged you to take a job at the nearby 3M factory, invest a little money, and you could be a millionaire by the time you're thirty. He proved it on a paper towel with a blue felt-tip pen.

After dinner he changes into a jogging suit and reads Stephen King novels. You turn on CNN to check the progress of Operation Desert Shield, because your father is in Riyadh right now, probably cleaning his M-16 or drinking instant coffee from a tin cup. You wish him well. Even though you're sure he doesn't understand an atom of you, you love your father and are proud of him for going across the ocean to live in a tent in the desert under the threat of attack. It seems noble, and, in a way you can't quite articulate, stupid at the same time. You tried to talk to your uncle about this once, but thoughts refused to coalesce into words and his active listening began to annoy you. It's easier just to keep quiet and watch the news. And drink instant coffee from a white ceramic mug with your uncle's company logo on the side.

After a while he drives you to the Y in his battered Toyota. The entire floor there is covered with indoor/outdoor carpeting that smells like old sneakers. You play racquetball solo for an hour, until sweat drips in your eyes and makes the handle of the racket slippery.

When you get home, there's a message on the machine from your mother. You call her back, dutiful son that you are, and she reads the letter she just got from your father. He stole some trucks from the port of Riyadh to help his unit move to the front lines. He walks between tents in his flak jacket and pot helmet, with his gas mask slung over his shoulder. It's very hot. Once you've hung up, you're amazed at your mother's audacity, to talk to you about the man she wants so fiercely to divorce. You don't understand her. But, after all, she's a woman. Just another inscrutable woman.

You go to your room and, using cardboard you snip from the boxes that held your books and clothing, you make control fins to strap onto your wrists and ankles. You're thinking, with more surface in the air, maybe you could steer better, be a little more nimble. Somehow, you feel an urge to impress the neighborhood kids, these aerial acrobats whose names you don't know. You will get better at flying. You decide to practice until you can snatch dragonflies out of the air with your teeth. The weekend seems far away.

That night, in the single bed in your uncle's spare bedroom, you wonder about your life. If you had three futures, you'd be an astrophysicist, a writer, and a fighter pilot. You shift under forty pounds of quilts that almost smother you (because your uncle keeps the house at a comfortable fifty degrees) and imagine dropping canisters of napalm on Iraqi soldiers, imagine GIs cheering as you fly low over their lines and strafe enemy tanks. A picture of yourself, taller and thicker, climbing into the cockpit of an F-16 plays before your eyes. You're wearing a green g-suit and your French teacher is waving a white handkerchief up at you. You strap yourself into the jet with a noble expression on your face. But you're good at math and physics, which you think is very interesting, although you wonder about its relevance. And the writer thing, maybe then you could explain to your dad what it's like to catch the Oklahoma breeze in your jacket and fly toward the rising sun.

This morning there's a cold breeze blowing through your body as you brush your teeth. You think of the pug-nosed blonde with the unusual pendant – she is the source. You wonder if she'll speak to you today, again today, perhaps setting a precedent for the rest of the academic year.

After eating a bowl of cereal, you consider trying out the cardboard stabilizers you made last night, but shake your head. You wouldn't make the early bus if you took the time to strap on the fins.

The wind is erratic this morning; you can feel its caprice in the ruffles of your hair, the tugs on your jacket. Flying today might be more dangerous than usual. You spread your wings anyway. You are flung up and away like a frisbee. Glancing around, you notice far fewer in flight than yesterday. It is dangerous, you think, and cut straight for the bus stop.

The wind shifts, twitches, and you must keep your body alert and in constant motion. It's exhausting. Despite the cold, you're sweating by the time you reach the bus stop, one quick orbit, and are just about to land when the wind dies. Your eyes go huge and you hear high shrieks from the entire neighborhood, then the roar of still air rushing past. Your own throat fills with tearing noise.

The cold hard ground reaches and slaps you with a flat hand. Silence, dark, and for a moment you can't breathe. You claw at the frozen dirt until air finally floods into your lungs. The wind of life. You open your eyes and see dead brown grass, huge. As you stand, slowly checking yourself for injuries, the wind again pushes at you. Your ribs feel pummeled and everything aches, especially the inside of one cheek where you bit yourself. You spit blood onto the dead grass and trudge toward the bus stop.

Waiting, you see about a dozen kids walk by, some limping, all dirty. One boy in a grubby denim jacket has a strange angle to his right arm and you can see the gleam of tears on his cheeks. You can't even trust the wind.

After the daily French tirade, you're hunched over your notebook in class when the pug-nosed girl comes up and asks you to help her conjugate an -ir verb. She's wearing a red sweater today that nicely accents her gold necklace. You introduce yourself.

"I'm Elizabeth," she says.

"Nice necklace," you say. She cups the gold helicopter in her hand and smiles.

"Why do you bring all your books to class?"

"I can't always find my locker." She grins.

After you correct her faulty French, Elizabeth explains that her father is a lieutenant in the army, a helicopter pilot. Apache. You nod, and tell her about your father, a sergeant in the infantry. You don't remember the battalion number but you describe the shoulder insignia to her: a white sword with blue and red flames. She nods, her hair bobbing. You tell her about your father stealing trucks, and she laughs. Encouraged by her laughter to a pitch of courage you've never known, you ask her to come to your house that evening. To watch CNN together. She says yes, and the rest of your day passes in a haze.

On the flight home, you dive toward the convenience store, buy a sixpack of Cokes and some chips with your allowance money. You feel like you're riding the fastest wind ever, even though you walk the rest of the way home. You're flying so fast the breath is being ripped out of your mouth, exhilarating. You're smiling so wide your mouth hurts.

Two hours later, Elizabeth rings the doorbell. The Cokes are cold, the chips are in a bowl, and you are sitting on the floor in front of the television. A stranger in Baghdad is describing the sounds of explosions, tracer bullets cutting the air and leaving glowing streaks, a missile the size of an airplane that flew past his window. With your new flier's eyes, you can see a path through the streams of bullets and missiles – a narrow one. You might not be able to do it with your backpack on. You've been staring so long your eyes are dry and red.

Elizabeth lets herself in, glares at you, then notices your expression. Mouth open, the rushes to sit beside you and she gasps, then stares. Maybe, you think, both of you hoping, praying hard enough, together, will be enough. Enough to stop it all or at least to protect two fathers who were now in a war. War. Chills run up your arms and you shiver – Elizabeth puts her arm around you. You reach around and support her lower back with your own arm, and your chills are warmed away. Her sweater feels as soft as a kitten.

CNN cuts to Wolf Blitzer, the man with a tricolor beard, who is standing in front of a huge map of Iraq, pointing to red silhouettes of airplanes, missiles, tanks. His words don't sink into you but the red does. Jets, Scuds, T-42s all just waiting to . . . Elizabeth eats a chip. The crunch startles you from reverie into the present.

"It's begun." You nod and go to the refrigerator for Cokes. You crack hers open, set the cool can down beside her.

"Is the floor okay, or should we sit on, uh, something else?" you ask.

"Floor's fine." Elizabeth sips her Coke and gives a ladylike belch. "My dad'll be one of the first in. Just like Panama. Helicopter pilots always are."

"It's going to be a long night," you say, and sit down beside her again. Soon you will tell her how terrified you are, how you've never been separated from your family before, how you want all this, well, most of this, to be a dream you'll wake up from. But for the moment the TV is showing live images from midnight Baghdad, and all you can do is watch.

Your Uncle Ted comes in soon after. His forehead wrinkles and he walks over, squeezes your shoulder, then disappears into his room.

Your back is sore. Your eyes hurt, all the Coke is gone, and your lips tingle from the salt on the chips. Elizabeth still sits beside you. You look at her, examine her profile in the TV light. You stand and take her hand. She looks up at you with eyes wide open. You walk together to the front door and open it, step onto the porch. You leave the door open.

The moon is a silver crescent above. The stars look like tracers frozen in place. The breeze plucks at your sleeves and, together, you raise your arms.