Read Online On the Wing by Eric Kraft - Free Book Online

shut—put my foot in it if necessary.
    *   *   *
    I HEARD LEM’S WHOLE STORY that night, and some parts of it I heard many times. Keeping silent while he told it was very difficult. As I listened, Lem’s deviations from the versions of the story that I knew and considered correct, including my own, sometimes annoyed me so much that my emotions bubbled and seethed within me, producing a kind of reactionary pressure that threatened to force an objection or correction from me. I stifled the urge, and instead I let the steam off in bursts of inoffensive interjections.
    â€œWow!” I said when I wanted to say “That’s an outrageous fabrication, sir!”
    â€œAmazing!” when I wanted to say “Totally unbelievable!”
    â€œAstonishing!” when I wanted to say “You’re full of it, Lem!”
    In Lem’s version of the invasion story, the men of Hopper’s Knoll defeated the Martian invaders, but the Martians, routed and in full flight, blasted the village with a memory-eradication ray to erase any recollection of their ignominious defeat. The true story of Hopper’s Knoll might have gone forever untold, even unknown, if Lem hadn’t caught the flu a couple of years later. Fortunately for his career as local historian and raconteur (and unfortunately for the integrity of the tale as I knew it and told it myself) he had caught the flu, and in an influenza fever dream he recovered his memory of the battle. Through the agency of the story that he told, Lem’s recovered memory became the catalyst for recovered recollections from other townsfolk, who—one by one and little by little—added bits of plausible detail to Lem’s account, in an epidemic of fantastical recollective collaboration, until the whole town remembered what had happened, and their story had become full and rich and multi-faceted, with a large cast of characters whose roles and remembrances reinforced one another. At last, “tetched by Mnemosyne,” as Lem put it, they remembered in full how they had saved the world.
    I remember Lem’s story, and I remember that I was fascinated by his telling of it, and the way that the others who remembered having been a part of it contributed their bits on cue, clearly savoring the opportunity to strut onstage for a moment. Later that night, lying in bed in the spare room upstairs in the farmhouse at Gurney’s place, I rehearsed the story until I fell asleep, so that I would remember it and be able to reproduce it and criticize it when I got the chance, but when I recall the story and the telling now, I find that the whole experience is dominated and somewhat obliterated by the memory, in the peripheral vision of my mind’s eye, of a dark-haired girl on the edge of the listening crowd. I remember the story well enough, but it isn’t what interests me now. She is.
    *   *   *
    IN THE MORNING, I soldiered my way through the endless farmhouse breakfast that Ma and Pa Gurney insisted I needed for the trials of the road ahead and then began preparing Spirit for takeoff. I was just about to say goodbye to the Gurneys when the man who had been my interrogator pulled into the driveway in a pickup truck, stopped beside Spirit, got out, and joined us.
    â€œSon,” he said, in a kindly but no-nonsense way, “I’d like a word with you before you leave.”
    â€œA word to the wise?” I asked.
    He gave me that squinty-eyed look that I was getting used to, and took me aside, a few steps away from Ma and Pa.
    â€œYou know,” he said, “a lot of people are suspicious of strangers, especially kids who come flying into town on motorcycles.”
    â€œSo I’ve learned.”
    â€œOn this trip of yours, I’m afraid you’re always going to be the stranger riding into town.”
    â€œAn object of suspicion.”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    â€œStrange as a