High Flier

It was Jessie who noticed first. She almost always had her face turned up to the sky. Before I’d met her in high school, birds were just background noise or cute pictures on Christmas cards. She could talk for hours, if you let her, about how amazing birds are, about their flight patterns and behavior. Even I would have been bored with it by now except for the fact that when Jessie talks about birds, she gets that faraway look, like she might just take off any moment and join her feathered friends in the clouds. After a while I start to hang onto her every word, then I am flying with her.

If we hadn’t missed the bus, because we’d been watching a flock of cattle birds congregate, and had to walk home we probably wouldn’t have known anything about it. We were walking past Lenny’s used car lot. Jessie was scanning the skies and I was just mulling over how to earn myself an extra five dollars allowance so we could go to see a movie at the weekend.
“Lammergeyers have been seen flying at 25,000 feet over Mount Everest. Imagine how strong your lungs would need to be to fly at that altitude. That’s why birds have…”
Suddenly Jess grabbed my arm with the grip of eagle talons and begun to stab at the blue overhead. Once I’d wrenched free, I followed her finger expecting a vulture or at least a bald eagle. But it wasn’t a bird. It was a woman. And she wasn’t flying, though she was probably as high as she could get in this small town without growing wings. She was sitting, quite calmly, eighty feet in the air, astride the neon sign that glowed sullenly over Lenny’s Lot.
I stopped walking suddenly and bumped heads with Jess.
“She’s going to jump!” I spun around looking for something, I don’t know what, as though for a moment I thought I might catch her.
“No, I don’t think so.” Jessie squinted up in the autumn sunlight then began to rummage through her book bag. A moment later she had retrieved her 70x folding binoculars, the ones that I had teased her about for weeks since her fourteenth birthday. The ones that I now had to stop myself from snatching from her to use myself. I held my breath while she pointed and focused. The seconds stretched out like sticky treacle. Then she lowered then and smiled at me.
“I think she’s watching the sky. Maybe it’s the birds. It’s surprising more people don’t want to…”
“Let me see.”
I slipped the binoculars from her fingers while she speculated on the populace’s growing interest in all things winged. I had to fiddle with the lenses a bit before I got a clear picture of the woman. My first though was that she must be cold up there. She was only wearing a tee shirt and jeans. I snuggled deeper into my jacket and fine-tuned my vision. She looked older than we did, yet somehow very young. Her hair, tied in a short braid, was blonde, almost white. Her chin was tilted upwards and she seemed to be looking straight through the clouds. She sat very still, as though she was waiting. I scanned the sky all around her, but if she was watching something, it was something only she could see.
“If it isn’t batty girl and robin red eyes!”
The binoculars swung down to Kyle Kinley’s blurred leer. I snatched them away from him and was about to put him in the picture once and for all when Jessie grabbed me and pulled me onto Lenny’s Lot.
“Watch your feathered friends don’t drop you a message.” He called then ran on to catch up with the other tenth grade bullies. I opened my mouth to call back but Jessie was moving through the lot to get a better view of the sign so I shrugged it off and followed. She was staring through her binoculars again and reporting on the woman, who apparently had still not moved.
By now other people had begun to notice and quite a crowd was gathering. They formed a semicircle in front of the sign’s thick gray legs. Their necks were craned back, their mouths open like turkeys. Some of them waved their arms, but the woman didn’t notice. There was some speculation among the grown-ups whose feet were still on the ground, as to how the young woman had reached her pinnacle short of a parachute. Eventually someone pointed out the discrete outline of a door in one of the gray legs. Several people tried shouting up to ask what she was doing, but either the traffic had drowned their voices or maybe she was keeping the Fifth Amendment.
“We should probably call the police.” Even as I said it, the sheriff’s car pulled onto the lot, followed closely by a fire engine and ambulance. Then suddenly there were TV cameras and Lenny was pushing through the crowd, rubbing his hands together, and probably thinking how great this was for publicity.
Jessie and I were tucked between the dusty cars. With the binoculars we didn’t need to get as close as the others so we could watch them too. No one even noticed we were there. We laughed at Lenny posing for the camera and took turns focusing on the woman while the sheriff cleared his throat and pointed his megaphone to the sky.
“We all want...we all want to do everything to make it as easy as possible to bring this young lady back down to earth.” He smiled as though he’d made a clever joke, then continued. “So everyone stay calm and cooperate with me and my team here.”
While he was talking, the firemen had already positioned their ladder and one of them was making his assent. The crowd watched in silence broken only by the traffic from occasional bursts of traffic. The sheriff pushed through the crowd, close enough to the fire truck to be in range of the TV cameras and smiled behind his megaphone.
“You’ll soon be in safe hands ma’am.” His voice creaked like a rusty hinge and he discreetly popped a throat lozenge into his mouth. “Our fire department is here help you safely down. Stay calm. Once you’re on the ground we’ll make you comfortable then get you some assistance.”
We watched in silence as the woman at last looked down, first at the sheriff, then the crowd and lastly the fireman who had now almost reached her. We saw her lips move silently for a few seconds in and guessed at what she had said.
Jessie of course thought she might have invited him to join her, watching a circling hawk. But I saw the look she gave him. It was the look of someone who had turned up at the platform just as the last train pulled out. Then she turned back to her contemplation.
The crowd suddenly buzzed like an angry hive, as each watcher danced around his neighbor. Then someone nudged someone, who nudged someone else and all eyes tilted back to the woman, who was now having another exchange with the fireman. The man in question was nodding emphatically as she spoke. Only when she swept her arms wide, as though she was about to take off, did he move to grasp her waist to stop her losing her balance.
Jessie and I were pressed together trying to see through the binoculars with one eye each. Eventually we gave up and edged closer to the crowd.
The fireman said something else and shook his head. At this her shoulders moved up and down, perhaps with laughter or resignation. Either way, she let him lift her off the sign and they both came down quite peaceably. Reporters were milling though the crowd in hope of finding a relative, friend or at the very least an acquaintance of the mysterious woman, but they only found one bizarre speculation after another.
As the woman was closed inside the ambulance, the sheriff spread his arms to keep the crowd back. He needn’t have bothered; they were already drizzling away. Jessie and I had to run the rest of the way home before anyone had time to worry about us too much. I soon forgot Lenny’s sign, but the woman’s melancholic gaze stayed with me.
The next day the Town Tribune boasted a blown up shot of the woman straddling Lenny’s sign under the headline ‘High Flier’. The story offered nothing new for those who had witnessed it first hand. That is, except for one item. When the fireman asked her what she was doing up there, she had answered, “I’m waiting to go home.”

Two days later the woman was already forgotten. The Tribune printed a special extended edition. The cover and subsequent four pages were taken up with an incredible story of UFOs. People all over town had been wakened during the early hours by flashing lights in the sky. There was a series of blurred photos of a luminous cigar shape above the trees. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Those who had slept as normal muttered about mass hysteria and doubting glances at their neighbors.
Of course it was Jessie who found it. It took up only a half-inch column on page five. The mysterious woman had disappeared from hospital without trace the night before. Her identity remained unknown. I looked at Jessie, who was about to take flight and shrugged.
“Maybe,” she said, “she found her way home.”