Comic Book Hero Chapter 3

Once again, Mike’s workshop looked like the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. Three manic days of testing Tom’s condition had left a junkyard trail of bits and pieces scattered over every surface of the old garage, across the workbenches and even hanging from the walls and rafters. The new mixed in with the old, just purchased tools and machinery tumbled together with the cobbled and improvised.

Tangles of rope drooped below eyehooks hastily screwed into the exposed beams, and a complex assembly of block and tackle rigging hung down from overhead. A brand new medical scale stood in one corner, surrounded by a conglomeration of plastic bleach bottles filled with sand, their individual weight scrawled on the outside in black laundry marker. Two dry-erase whiteboards, liberated from a store room at Tom’s workplace, hung from ten penny nails along one wall, their surfaces covered with a mixture of both brothers’ handwriting.

Mike stood in front of the right hand whiteboard, writing furiously, while Tom sat on a shop stool in the middle of the concrete floor. Although late in the day the workshop was still hot, the poorly ventilated one-time garage holding in the day’s heat like a thirsty sponge. Both brothers were dressed for it, in cut off denim shorts and T-shirts. But Tom also wore a strange accessory, an old parachute harness purchased that morning from an Army-Navy surplus store. A red and white Igloo ice chest sat at his feet, the ice long since turned to water, one lone bottle of Tuborg draft floating disconsolately near the top.

“Okay”, Mike began, summarizing, stabbing at the whiteboard with a black marker. “Now we know when you lift, you can lift yourself and an equivalent amount up to your own weight, but nothing more. Anything you want to carry, can’t weigh more than your two hundred and thirty four pounds.”

“Right,” Tom nodded, punctuating his comment with a sip from the almost-empty bottle of warm beer in his hand. “But what we don’t know is, is that a set amount, or does it fluctuate with my own body weight? If I lost ten pounds, would I only be able to lift two hundred and twenty four?’

“Lose ten pounds? We talking about the same guy here, Jumbo? Anyway when you move laterally, the amount of weight you can lift goes down. It’s as if you borrow from your lifting power in order to move.”

“We think. There’s not enough room in here, we can’t really be sure until we conduct some tests in a bigger environment. Or outside.”

Mike winced, saying, “Stop reminding me. I don’t even want to think about what could happen if someone sees you tripping off into the wild blue yonder.”

Tom shrugged, taking another sip from his bottle. They had already covered this same ground before. “You know we gotta do it sometime, bro.”

“Not anytime soon, dammit” Mike snapped. “Never mind some duck hunter seeing you and taking a potshot, Tom. You ever think about what could happen if you try lifting without a roof over your head? What if you don’t come back down? You idiot, you don’t even know if you can!”

Tom shrugged again. He wasn’t offended, he knew Mike’s anger grew from his concern. But he decided to let the subject drop, for now.

“S’Okay, what else do we know?”

“Alright, we know whatever you do doesn’t use magnetism. It doesn’t disrupt nearby electronics. And a compass needle doesn’t even twitch when you’re lifting, not even when you’re the one holding it. When you eat or drink, your weight changes, and that does correspondingly alter your ability to lift. Water weighs eight pounds to the gallon. You drank a quart of water, and increased your weight by two pounds. But when you lifted, you were able to lift two pounds more, not two pounds less. So whatever it is, it’s probably some sort of field effect. And yes, if you lost any weight, it’d probably be that much less you could fly with.”

“Hmmm. Okay, so here’s the next question: how far does the field project? Does it just affect me, or would it also affect my clothes? How about if I was carrying somebody? Would I affect them too?”

Mike smirked, a cat eating a canary smile that Tom knew well. His older brother was about to do something clever.

Mike strode across the floor, pausing at a workbench to pick up one of the many empty beer bottles that littered the workshop like dead soldiers. From his pocket Mike pulled a piece of string, one end of which was tied to a small metal hex nut. Dropping the weighted end of the string down the mouth of the bottle, he then wrapped the free end of the string several times around the neck, leaving the hex nut suspended halfway between the bottles’ bottom and top. Turning, he approached Tom, shaking the bottle lightly so the weight would rattle back and forth. Stopping about a foot away from where Tom sat on his stool, Mike reached out with the bottle, touching it lightly to his brother’s T-shirt covered chest.

“Okay man, lift” he said, and Tom obliged, quickly floating himself three inches above the stool. As he did, the hanging pendulum of the weighted string in the bottle suddenly jerked to the side, to rattle and roll against the glass wall of the bottle where it touched against Tom’s body. Slowly Mike broke contact, easing the bottle away from his brother’s side, finally stopping when the hex nut dropped back down, to sway back and forth suspended from the end of the string.

With thumb and forefinger Mike carefully measured the distance between Tom and the bottle, holding the two fingers up for his brother to see. “About two and a half inches, bro. Enough to envelop your clothes, but not enough to have any real affect on any passengers. We’ll rig something more precise later, but for now that ought to give us something to work with.”

Tom nodded, giving credit it’s due. “Not bad, man. Why don’t we try hanging some chain on this harness, wrapping it real tight, then see if my lifting power goes up correspondingly. That would prove that it’s a field effect.”

Mike grunted a reply, already dropping to one knee to root around in the crates and cardboard boxes under one workbench. As he rummaged, Tom’s floating body slowly moved, sliding to the side away from the stool, then slowly sinking downwards to hover a foot above the floor. Quietly, one eye on his busy brother, Tom quietly set his now empty bottle down on the concrete, then reached toward the last bottle still floating in the Igloo ice chest.

Without turning around or even looking over his shoulder, Mike said, “And if you touch that last beer, flyboy, you’re a dead man.”

*****

The hot summer breeze had been slow, almost sluggish. Its heat-laden air making scarcely a sound as it flowed through the brown grass of the California foothills. But as the sun set and the temperature mercifully dropped the breeze began to pick up. Not brisk, still far from that, but with the promise of relief from the days searing heat as it gently sighed through the dried scrub of the isolated little canyon. Small animals, predator and prey alike, began to move underneath the indifferent gaze of the stars that also came out when the sun set. This far from the corrupting glow of the city lights, they filled the sky in their ages old panorama.

At the very center of the short canyon under a canopy of oak and elm clumped just off the rutted track burned a campfire, where the dancing yellow flames lit Tom and Mike’s camp. Leaping shadows flickered past the circle of light, cavorting like hyperactive children between the dome tent and Tom’s Chevy S-10. Gold and silver highlights reflected from the designer T-shirt Mike wore, it’s faded logo a surrealistic testament to a long since disbanded rock group.

Tom took another look at his watch, squinting in the shifting light. 8:45 p.m., and the sun had been down for over an hour now. They had arrived well before noon, and being experienced campers had set up camp quickly. The long hours of the rest of the day had crawled by, the conversation between the two brothers strained when they had bothered to talk at all. Well, now or never, Tom thought. He stood up, stretching, shaking out tension more than stiffness.

“It’s time, Mikey” he said, bending over to retrieve the shiny black bicycle helmet they had modified. The rest of Tom’s clothes were also black, T-shirt, denim jeans and heavy work boots. Tom put on the helmet, belting the nylon webbing strap snuggly beneath his chin.

A rubber and plastic ear plug and an electric cable hung down from the helmet, swaying with each and every action. With the sure movements of an experienced techie, Tom plugged the cable into the port on the radio clipped at the small of his back to the waistband of his jeans. A flip of a switch and a red telltale light came on the radio, a compact unit about the size of a paperback novel. Lastly, a small boom microphone attached to the brim of the bicycle helmet was swung down, the pill-shaped mike carefully positioned in front of Tom’s mouth.

“Hey Mike, you wanna help me with the commo check?”

Mike ignored him, refusing even to look up at his brother, his eyes instead focused steadfastly on the flickering flames of the campfire. Tom snorted, shaking his head in disgust. He picked up a piece of firewood from the pile just inside the circle of light, and flipped it underhand across the fire, where it struck his brother in the shoulder and bounced off. Angrily Mike swatted at the missile, sending it careening out of the circle and into the night. Briefly he glared back, but then without saying a word he turned his head around, to continue his sullen staring contest with the flickering flames.

For what seemed a long time Tom glared back at his brother, willing him to return the gaze, but the elder Blackwood remained adamant. Finally Tom sighed and turned away. He wasn’t mad at Mike, and he knew his brother wasn’t mad at him, not really. His was just scared, afraid of what they were here to do, afraid of the possible dangers to him. He had already been shaken by the explosion and Tom’s stay in the hospital, and his imagination was probably supplying him with all sorts of disaster scenarios. It was touching, seeing the way his brother worried about him, but it was really beginning to piss him off.

With one last sigh Tom walked over to the ice chest, selected a bottle of beer and a can of orange soda. He popped the cap off the bottle on the church key opener hanging from a string tied to the chest, then sauntered over to the log and sat down next to Mike. Without looking at his sibling he handed him the bottle, Mike accepting it also without looking at him. Tom popped the tab on his orange soda, and together the two men drank in silence. Neither of them wanted to continue the fight, and the offer and acceptance of the drinks was a tacit acknowledgement of that fact. The differences weren’t forgotten and nothing had been settled, and it was understood that any sort of eye contact could once again trigger hostilities. But for now a truce was declared, and peace talks would soon be initiated.

Mike cleared his throat, looking around the clearing, dappled in firelight. “Nice campsite” he said, his voice carefully casual.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is,” Tom replied, his tone equally casual.

“This the place you used to bring Benny to?” asked Mike.

“Yeah. His Cub Scout master told us about it.”

“Oh yeah? Do they hold jamborees and stuff out here?”

“Naaw. He said he used to come here as a kid. I don’t think anybody but me and Benny’ve been here for years.”

“Oh yeah? Well, this place is great. I really like that creak over there, too. Is the water fresh?”

“Yeah. It’s snow melt, this close to the Sierras it’s pretty clear. Some good sized fish there, too.”

“Is that right. Did Benny ever go fishing here?”

“Oh sure. In fact, this is where I taught him how. He caught his first one right over there, by that clump of oaks. It was just a little bluegill crappie, we had to throw him back, but Benny got a kick out of it.”

Mike nodded, but once again the conversation died, the subject of Tom’s absent son still an uncomfortable one. Tom stared into the night, trying to come up with something to bridge the gap opened between him and his brother. Finally, he said, “Hey, you remember Jody Gant?”

Mike looked up, his brow furrowed. “You mean from high school? I-can-get-you-anything Gant?”

“Yeah, that’s him. The skinny little weasel who sold dope and stuff out behind the bleachers after school.”

“Yeah, I remember. A total waste of flesh, that guy would sell his own mother for a box of CD’s. What about him?”

“It was my freshman year, remember? You scalped some tickets from him for a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco. You borrowed your girlfriend’s car, what’s her name, Cindy, and we cut school on Friday. We told Mom and Dad we were going camping.”

Mike grinned, remembering. “Yeah, that’s right. And you forged the letter from Mom saying we had to leave school early for Grandma’s funeral.”

Tom was grinning too, lost in the age-old game of remember-when. “Yeah, I think we used that one too much. She had about three funerals that year, before they caught on. Hey, you remember those two hippy chicks in the row in front of us? The blonde and the black girl with dreadlocks?”

“Ha! You mean the ones that caught you staring at them, then lifted their shirts and flashed you? Man, I thought you’d choke, you turned so red!” Mike guffawed, nudging Tom with his elbow. Tom grinned back, the shared memory working it’s magic, bridging the distance like a bandage on a raw wound.

“Hey, except for Dad’s Playboys, those were the first tits I’d ever seen. And later, you bought me my first beer, too.”

“Which you promptly threw up in the parking lot.”

He shrugged dismissively. “Well, it was a Grateful Dead concert, half the audience threw up in the parking lot. It’s part of the experience.” Tom looked away, his voice going soft and serious. “You know, Mike, that was one of the best times of my life. Thanks, man.”

Mike stopped laughing, the grin replaced by an uncomfortable look. He fidgeted for a moment, his hands restless in his lap. Once again he avoided Tom’s eye, but this time it seemed to be from embarrassment. Finally, in a small voice he started to say, “Umm, Tom…about that concert…”

“Its okay, Mikey. I already know,” he replied, taking a draw on his orange soda. He wanted to get a beer like Mike, but he restrained himself. With or without his brother’s help he intended to fly tonight, and he’d already made it a rule in his mind, you never fly when you’re buzzed.

Mike blinked at him. “You already know what?” he asked.

“About the tickets. About how you paid Gant for them. You stole two comics from my collection, Silver Surfer #1, and the first X-Men crossover. They were worth about two hundred and fifty bucks back then, man. You got taken.”

Mike took a deep breath and looked away, embarrassed. He had never suspected that Tom had known about the theft, and to have it turn up after all these years had caught him completely off guard. And Tom’s casual acceptance of his crime was also leaving him confused, unsure of what to say.

“Hey, Mikey,” said Tom, his tone reassuring. “I told you it’s okay. I knew about it the day after we got back. But like I said, it was one of the best nights of my life! You didn’t have to take me, you could’ve taken Cindy, but you didn’t. I figured it was worth it then, and I haven’t regretted it once since. I mean, there’s just some things in life you just have to do. And thanks to you I got to go to my first concert, see my first tits, drink my first beer, and throw up in public for the first time too. I’m grateful, man. It was worth it, so stop sweating the small stuff, okay?”

Mike sighed and ducked his head, an uncomfortable little weight he hadn’t even known about suddenly gone. He smiled lightly, then gave his brother a somber look.

“You’re saying that’s what this is about, aren’t you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. It’s something I’ve got to do. And you know that, because you’d feel the same way if it was you. And if I don’t do it tonight I’ll just have to do it some other night, by myself. But I’d much rather have my big brother there to look out for me. Just like back in high school.”

Michael Blackwood looked at his brother for a long minute, a whirl of deep thought visible behind his eyes. Then without a word he rose from the log and crossed to the tailgate of Tom’s truck, where the CB base station had been set up. He flipped on the power and watched the dials light up, then picked up the microphone and clicked the transmit button three times. Tom heard the answering click through his radio’s earpiece, acknowledged it with a nod to Mike.

Mike spoke into the microphone, “Testing, testing, one two three four. Rock rules and Rap is crap, and Eddie Van Halen is king. How do you read, Flyboy, over.”

Tom replied, his tinny voice echoing back to him from the base station. “I read you loud and clear, Rockstar, over.”

Mike looked grimly at his brother, his face as set as a piece of the mountains to the west. “Then let’s do it, Flyboy. We ain’t got all night.”

“Roger that, Rockstar.”

With a deep breath and a shake to relieve the tension in his shoulders, Tom willed the golden sparks to gather at the edge of his vision. They came, dancing just at the corners of his eyes, almost invisible. He willed himself to rise, and slowly, like a bubble in molasses, he did so. In seconds he passed out of the nimbus of light cast by the fire, swallowed whole by the darkness. He knew Mike couldn’t see him and, hopefully, neither would anybody else.

The first thing he became aware of was the quiet. The crickets and the crackling fire, the trickling of water in the nearby creek, the background noises he hadn’t even noticed but were now conspicuous by their absence. In their place was silence and the soft sound of his own breathing. The stillness was everywhere, all encompassing, folding him in a blanket of calm.

Tom looked around, still rising. The countryside stretched before him, the dark rolling hills spread out like a crumpled sheet. The campfire dwindled, the only light below the stars in the infinite night, the spreading darkness making it easy to believe that his was the only spark of life left in the world. He felt a sudden wash of loneliness, so strong that he almost gave in, a primitive urge to stop and retreat back to the safety of the fire below.

“Flyboy, this is Rockstar, what’s your status, over,” Mike’s voice crackled in his ear.

Tom started to reply but stopped, startled. He had just risen above the last of the hills, high enough to see the lights of the nearest communities. Pictures painted in glowing dots, the straight and curving patterns of the streets, and the blocky squares of houses, buildings, and parking lots. The flow of traffic down the roadways, like blood cells pumping through veins. Familiar sights, city lights seen a thousand times while driving the highways through the Sierras, or even through the window of the occasional airplane.

But sweet Jesus, it had never been like this before! Never had the lights seemed so sharp, so clear, so… so clean. Closer by a good ten miles from the mountains, and without even the transparent barriers of glass and plastic. He imagined he could see the electronic pulse of the patterns, feel the thrum of life represented by each light, so close that he could reach out and touch it. Unconsciously he almost did, his hand rising on it’s own, only to be snapped back by the loud crackle of Mike’s voice in his ear.

“Flyboy, this is Rockstar. Damn it, what’s your status, Tom!” he snapped. Mike’s voice acted like a slap from a wet towel, bringing him back to reality. Quickly Tom replied.

“Uh, yeah Rockstar, I’m five by five. Just caught up in the view, that’s all. And watch your language, Rockstar. The FAA’s got it’s own scanners, they don’t like that kind of talk.” The admonishment came automatically, more to cover his own embarrassment than for any other reason. Tom sternly ordered his errant imagination to stop playing around and stay focused.

He looked down, searching for the campfire and his brother, and felt a moment of panic when he failed to find them. But a quick glance showed him the dancing fire several hundred yards off to the west, the distance slowly increasing. Insight came, and with it a memory, a conversation held years before with some friends who had gone hot air ballooning for their anniversary. They too had talked about the silence, and of how the air had seemed so still because they had floated with the wind. Obviously that’s what Tom was doing now, he was adrift, like a twig in the creek below. Facing towards their camp, Tom willed his body in that direction.

The clear night air that had seemed so pleasant before was suddenly sharply cold, the change making Tom gasp. Gooseflesh dappled the skin on his exposed arms, the black t-shirt woefully inadequate for the altered conditions. But Tom easily ignored it, the sensation quickly overcome by the realization that now, finally, he was actually flying!

Blood pumped through his veins as he shot by over the camp, flitting through the night air effortlessly. Quickly gaining skill, he banked at a right angle to his last course, pushing himself more, glorying in the speed, laughing like a child at the pure joy of it all. He tumbled to a halt, actually flipping head over heels before coming to a complete stop. All thought of careful experimentation vanished, blown away like stale dust beneath a cleansing wind.

Tom swept through the night, climbing higher, whooping with glee as he effortlessly did a series of barrel rolls. The wind worked its cold fingers through the bike helmet and into his hair, made his clothes snap, and brought tears to his eyes. The night echoed with his wild laughter as he flew, faster and faster, ignoring the cold, buoyed on by an overwhelming sense of freedom. And he was free, he thought, more free than anyone had ever been. Of all the billions of people who now walked or had ever walked the earth, nobody had ever been or felt as free as this. The universal dream of all mankind, since the first caveman had looked up enviously at the soaring birds, and he, Tom Blackwood, was actually doing it!

“Flyboy, dammit, will you answer me!!”

Tom pulled up so suddenly the tendons in his back cracked, chagrined by the worry in Mike’s voice. With a rush of guilt he realized that he had been hearing his brother for several minutes, but not noticing the sharp note of encroaching panic. Looking down he quickly spotted the campfire, impossibly far below. Christ, he must be over a thousand feet up! Much slower than he had risen he dropped towards the burning beacon and his anxious brother, suddenly becoming aware of just how cold he was as he fumbled for the microphone with numb fingers.

“Yeah, yeah Rockstar, this is Flyboy. Sorry about that, everything’s fine, I just lost track for a minute. I’m, uh, I’m coming in, over.”

Reaction was setting in by the time Tom reached the safety of solid ground and the circle of light, his landing much less graceful than his takeoff. His knees buckled as he came in too hard, dropping him on his ass with a dull whump. Mike ran over from his place by the base station radio, concern and anger both warring for dominance on his face. Concern won out as he saw Tom sitting there, his arms wrapped around his chest and his knees pulled up in a fetal position, shivering. He quickly gathered Tom up and hugged him close, walking him on unsteady feet to the fire. He settled his brother down on the fallen log, as close to the warmth of the flames as possible, and helped him pull off the bicycle helmet. Tom tried to talk, to explain himself, to tell his brother through chattering teeth of the wonders he had just experienced. But Mike angrily stopped him, and instead he bundled him up in a blanket from the tent, then poured him the last cup of coffee from the thermos. It had been such a warm night neither of them had thought to brew up a fresh pot, but the thermos coffee was still hot enough to bring a warmth to Tom’s cold flesh.

Only after he had drained the cup and his shivering had ceased did Mike stop hovering, squatting to straddle the log and peer anxiously into Tom’s eyes.

“Tommy,” he said, talking slowly, the way you do to a person who’s just been in an accident. “Are you alright, Tom?”

Tom looked up, his face creasing into the biggest, goofiest grin Mike had ever seen.

“Oh God, Mikey,” he said softly, almost whispering. “What a ride, man. What a fucking ride!”

With a disgusted snort Mike slapped him on the back of his head. Hard.

*****

“Rockstar this is Flyboy, over.”

“I read you five by five, Flyboy. What’s your position, over.”

“About two miles west of your twenty, Rockstar. I’m beginning my approach now, over.”

Three hundred feet above the gently rolling flatlands southeast of Sacramento, Tom flew in a straight line towards the far off peaks of the Sierras. It was midday, and bright summer sunlight reflected off the golden sea of grass that stretched below him, where a light ground wind sent wavelike ripples dancing across the wide expanse. A charcoal gray line as straight as an arrow bisected the otherwise empty landscape from east to west, a narrow piece of asphalt called Whiterock Road. At this time of day Whiterock was almost empty of traffic, and Tom and Mike had picked this particular stretch of it for it’s lack of habitation. But even if there had been an overcrowded mall below, no one would have seen him, because Tom was now invisible.

It was the second day after his first solo, two days in which the Blackwood brothers had been virtual strangers to sleep. After he had warmed himself up on that first night a much repentant Tom had insisted on continuing, but this time with a better choice of clothing. A flannel shirt and a sweatshirt, and a knit watch cap found shoved behind the seat of Tom’s truck had made a world of difference. They had dispensed with the bike helmet altogether, clipping the headset for the radio directly to the knit cap. Two more flights had followed that night, each one over an hour long. And although red hands and a chapped face told them the ensemble still needed work, the discomfort didn’t put the slightest damper on the jubilant celebration at the little camp.

And it was a mutual celebration, too. As Tom’s control had obviously increased with each flight, and as he showed no more tendency to forget the agreed upon safety measures, Mike began to relax, and soon found himself caught up in the excitement of the extraordinary dream they were both living. He found himself joining Tom vicariously in his trips through the night, and in his mind he wildly flung his own body through the blackened skies five hundred feet above the earth. He shared Tom’s exuberance, and through the bond they shared as brothers he felt his sense of total freedom. It was intoxicating, a giddy excitement that kept them both up with laughter and wild talk until the stars began to fade, followed by a bare three hours of sleep, which was all their nervous energy would allow.

They took Tom’s truck into town, stopping for a quick and almost un-tasted breakfast at McDonald’s. A brief stop at Tom’s apartment and then a longer stop at a sporting goods store took up the rest of the morning, and by noon they were on their way back to the campsite. And the next twenty four hours Tom had spent almost as much time aloft as he had on the ground.

Now Tom wore an ash gray sweatsuit, the kind with a hood and a belly pocket. The hood was down, exposing a head covered by a black ski mask and goggles, and black leather gloves protected his hands. Through careful and discreet experimentation they had found out that distance made the gray color of the suit blend against even the blue sky of a summer day, and at anything past two hundred feet off the ground Tom was just a shapeless blur. At his current height of three hundred feet, he was effectively invisible from the ground.

Tom flew faster, accelerating, following the path of the road. He straightened his body lengthwise into the wind, reducing his drag and wind resistance as much as possible, trying to squeeze out as much speed as he could. In one hand he held a stop watch, his thumb ready on the button, and in the other he held two old white socks, filled with sand and tied in a knot at their tops.

He knew he was going as fast as he could as he approached his truck, parked alongside the road far below him. He could just make out the figure of his brother standing by it, manning the radio on the tailgate. As he passed the truck he dropped one of the improvised sandbags, and at the same instant he pushed the button that started the stop watch, bringing it to his eyes to see the electronic display as it counted down the seconds. When the digital readout said 30 seconds, Tom dropped the other sandbag.

Reducing speed he slowly banked to the left, making a lazy u-turn that eventually brought him back above the parked Chevy. Hovering for a moment over the stationary vehicle, Tom paused to remove the ski mask, goggles and gloves, holding them in his hands as he scanned the countryside all around. Satisfied that he and Mike were alone and unobserved on the lonely stretch of road he sank down, coming to a bump free and silent landing five feet behind Mike, who still watched the sky with binoculars in the direction from which he had just come.

For almost a minute Tom silently watched his brother. Finally he tossed the ski mask and glove bundle at Mike’s back and said, “Boo.”

Mike jumped when the bundle hit him, and stumbled as he spun around, almost dropping the binoculars. The startled look on his face was replaced by a scowl when he spotted Tom, whose own face held a fair approximation of complete innocence. Muttering an obscene comment about wise-ass siblings, Mike bent to pick up the dropped bundle and threw it back at his brother. Tom caught the missile, grinning, then turned to follow Mike back to the open gate of the pickup. As they walked Tom peeled off the sweatshirt, revealing a perspiration soaked black T underneath. He used the sweatshirt as a towel, wiping his face and hair dry, then tossed it into the back of the pickup along with his other gear.

They took the next part of their experiment from Tom’s pickup, two five foot poles with a hundred foot long measuring tape stretched between, another improvised gimmick made up in Mike’s garage. Each carrying a pole, they walked to the front of the truck and then down the road in the direction of Tom’s recent bombing run. When they reached the first sandbag Tom stopped, his pole planted firmly at the point of impact. Mike continued down the road with his pole, unreeling the yellow measuring tape until it had reached it’s full hundred foot length. At the end of the tape Mike stopped and made a blue mark on the asphalt, using the large piece of chalk taped to the bottom of the pole.

For the next half hour the two brothers continued, marking off the distance between the two sandbags. Finally Mike reached the last sandbag, the end of his pole resting barely two yards past the point of impact in the soft dirt by the side of the road. He waited there while Tom caught up, and while they busied themselves wrapping the tape around the two poles they compared notes.

“Okay, I counted 55 marks between here and the first sandbag, how about you?” asked Mike.

“Yeah,” replied Tom, “I did too. That’s 5,500 feet, or just over a mile. I dropped the bags exactly thirty seconds apart, so…”

“So double that and you did a little over two miles a minute. That means,” Mike said, stopping to whistle in approval, “That means, little bro, that your top speed is about 125 miles an hour! Not bad, Tom. Not bad at all.”

For a minute the young men shared wide grins, like two small boys marveling at the performance of a new toy. Finally Tom shouldered the two improvised measuring poles and turned to face back down the road, saying “I don’t know about your skinny ass, but I’m starving. Let’s grab some take out, then head back to the hills and break camp.”

“Sounds fine by me, but why walk? Here’s your keys, you pop over to the Chevy and come pick me up”, suggested Mike.

Tom agreed, and after exchanging the measuring poles for his truck keys he lifted up, rapidly climbing. Because he was now wearing a black t-shirt instead of the workout grays, Tom rose to five hundred feet before proceeding back to his vehicle, at a leisurely pace that still put him in the driver’s seat in less than five minutes. After picking up Mike and the equipment he drove east, and then north when he reached Sunrise boulevard. A brief pass through the window at a Burger King saw them adequately supplied with hamburgers and soft drinks, which they ravenously dug into on the way back to the campsite. They finished their meal and were bagging the wrappers just as Tom pulled in, parking next to the tent under the oak trees. Their spirits were high as they broke camp, and the good natured banter and light hearted insults reflected their mood.

“Man, you ate six burgers, Tom. That’s a lot even for your fat butt,” Mike said, as they broke down and folded the tent.

“Yeah, I know, but take a look at this.” Tom replied, standing up. Taking the waistband of the blue jeans he had changed into, he pulled them out, displaying a loose fit his clothing hadn’t seen in years. “Flying must take a lot of energy. I’ve been eating like a horse all week, and I’ve still dropped two notches on my belt! I must have lost ten pounds already. This is the best diet I’ve ever been on.”

“Yeah, maybe we can write a book. ’The Blackwood Brother’s Amazing Flying Diet Plan’. Get blown up in a mad scientist’s laboratory, fly like Superman, and watch the pounds melt away. We’ll be famous and make millions. A sixty-forty split, plus I get an extra 10 ’cause I’m also your agent.”

Tom prepared a return quip, but then stopped, some of Mike’s words striking a cord in his mind. For several minutes he mulled the thought over as they packed, loading the equipment into the truck. Finally as they were bagging up the last of their trash, Tom tried to broach the subject.

“Uhh, Mike. There’s something I think we should talk about….”

“Hey I just thought of something. How come you don’t get dizzy?” Mike said, unknowingly interrupting.

“Uhh—what?”

“I said, how come you don’t get dizzy? When you fly, I mean. Look, I’ve seen you get all rubber legged when you come off a ride at the State Fair, but for the last couple of days you’ve been tripping off into the wild blue yonder. Hundreds of feet up, and doing Immelmanns and barrel rolls and stuff. But you never once even lost your lunch. So how come you don’t get dizzy?”

“Oh, good question. Here, let me show you something.” Tom put the last of the gear into the back of his truck, then stepped up onto the log that had sat next to the campfire. He stood on top of the log, his arms straight out from his shoulders as he tested his balance. When he was ready he started to walk, one foot in front of the other and down the length of the log, his arms rising and falling jerkily as he did. And as he walked he continued the conversation with his older brother.

“This is what it’s like when I’m not lifting. My balance seems to be about the same, no better and no worse than before the accident. But if I try this when I’m lifting, even if it’s only a couple of pounds or so…” and suddenly Tom’s wavering stopped. He stood up straight and lowered his arms, and walked the length of the log as easily as if he had been on a flat sidewalk. At the end of the log he jumped down lightly, and with two quick steps and an impossibly high jump he was standing on top of his truck, casually and confidently balanced on the sidewall of the pickup’s bed. He walked to the end of the sidewall, bent to slap the cab with one hand as he turned around, and then strolled back to the opposite end at the tail gate. He did a somersault as he dismounted, landing with feet together and bringing his arms up with circus theatricality.

“And it’s a whole different story,” Tom finished. “Really, Mike, I don’t know how it works, but somehow when I lift, I get perfect balance.”

“Huh,” his brother grunted, trying not to look impressed. “Okay, Baryshnikov, we’ll file that away for now with all the other questions we got. Now let’s get moving, if I don’t get home and spend some time with Cathy and the kids, I’m going to be staying at your place.”

Tom gave a dramatic shudder, then took the driver’s seat while Mike road shotgun. But as he inserted the ignition key he hesitated before turning it on, remembering what he had been about to tell Mike earlier. He was tempted to let it slide, but with an almost audible sigh he realized the subject was too important to wait.

“Mike, there’s something we better talk about. About the flying.”

Mike heard the tone in his brothers’ voice, and recognized it. Whatever Tom was about to say was serious, and the time for joking was past.

“Look, you know we’ve got to keep this a secret, don’t you? I mean, we can’t go public with it. Not ever. If the wrong people find out… do you know what I’m getting at, Mikey?”

Mike sighed, but he nodded his agreement. “Yeah, Tom, I know. I’ve been thinking about it too. We both read Firestarter. You’re saying it could get kind of nasty if people found out you could fly, and decided they wanted to use you, right? Or maybe they want to see if they can duplicate it. Like maybe by taking you apart, to find out how you do it, right?” Mike winced, as the image of his little brother manacled to an operating table passed briefly through his mind. He decided he didn’t like that thought, not one bit.

Tom nodded solemnly, “Actually, I was thinking more on the lines of what they might do to you, or to anybody else I care about. But yeah, that’s the general idea. We have to keep this a secret, man. I’m not saying we can’t tell anybody, sooner or later we’ll have to, especially if we ever want to figure out how this happened. But we’ve got to be careful about it.”

“Agreed. In fact, we shouldn’t tell anybody who doesn’t absolutely have to know. We don’t tell Mom and Dad, I don’t tell Cathy and the girls. And you don’t tell Miko or Benny.”

Tom frowned sourly. “That won’t be hard. She’s still got him in Japan for the rest of the year. I only see him when we do a web cast, and Miko still avoids talking to me at all. But are you sure you can keep this from Cathy?”

Mike shrugged. “Not a problem. If I do anything that doesn’t involve her or the kids, she pigeon holes it under ’Guy Stuff’ and completely ignores me. I’ll just tell her I’m going to your place to watch a ballgame, and she’ll be glad to get me out of the house.

“OK, so we know who not to tell. Now we got to figure out who we can trust who can answer some questions. Any ideas?”

“Yeah, I do,” Tom answered, as he turned the key and started the pickup rolling down the dirt road. “I think I know just the guy.”