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If you had asked John Sheppard as a child what he'd like to be when he grew up, the answer would have been astronaut. Or it might have been, if you'd been lucky enough to catch him between the ages of six and eight. Prior to that, he might have said cowboy or fireman, or his mother's favorite, Frankenstein. But on his tenth birthday, when the summertime heat browned their yard and there was no school to separate the molten days, John's uncle showed up on the porch. "Come on, Johnny," he'd said with a grin. "Got a surprise for you."
It was a Cessna 152, dwarfed under the soaring ceiling of the dusty hangar. The paint was faded, and it sounded like it hadn't flown for years when his uncle started it up. John squeezed both eyes shut until he felt the wheels leave the ground, and then grinned, peeking through one eye to watch the pavement sink below them. Somewhere over the grid of baked California orchards and narrow streets, he relaxed, and shoulder to shoulder with his uncle in a cabin that smelled of tobacco and old sweat, the mountains tilting in the distance and his stomach lurching, John fell in love. From that day forward, whenever anyone asked what he wanted to be, his answer was always the same: a pilot.
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In his backyard treehouse, perched between the biggest branches of the biggest oak, John folded planes with the yellow paper of his mother's legal pads. She bought them by the pound and would never miss a few sacrificed to the cause.
Each fold was careful, checked twice before John made the crease sharp with a smooth rock he carried in his pocket. He drew decals, thrusters, a cockpit and pilot with markers that made the treehouse smell like cherry and black licorice.
The planes flew only as long as it took them to crash to the ground. John watched them fall, then made more, new planes with new folds and each one flew longer, higher, and a little straighter than the last. It was a lesson that stuck with John, but one he didn't recognise until much later, when keeping your nose up and out of the dirt become more than a goal for a sunny afternoon and a pad of paper.
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John had been a regular at the small public library down the road. It was housed in the same old building as "Curly Sues", a beauty shop; to get there, he had to brave the sticky checkerboard floor and the inevitable cooing of women with hair in rollers or perched beneath mammoth hair dryers.
It wasn't long before he'd read everything they had to offer on planes and flying, and began accompanying his mother into the city once a week. While she ran errands and had lunch with some fellow teachers, John would climb the wide, alabaster steps of the main public library. He'd bypass the children's area -- what he wanted to know couldn't be found there, he knew -- and head directly for the information desk.
Mr. Corrigan was an elderly man, with bushy eyebrows and ears that seemed too large for his head and dark liver spots on his hands, but he always had smile and sour candies on the desk, and he always set aside books for him, books on the principles of flight and avionics. He would photocopy pages for John from books that were too old or too rare to be checked out, with notes jotted in the margins in big looping handwriting. Mr Corrigan had flown in the war, and when John asked him questions, he always had the answer.
The library building was on the town square, and it faced a park. There were huge oak trees that lined the edges of the park, and a gazebo surrounded by delicate pink and purple blossoms. Sometimes, if his mother was taking a little extra time, John would spread out on the grass in the sun to wait. Where other boys might have been had imaginary battles with plastic soldiers or watched the passing clouds, John was reading Mr. Corrigan's notes, his head buzzing with the sound of jet engines.
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Later, John would tell people he learned to fly before he learned to drive. It wasn't true; Dad was away a lot and Mom didn't always get home in time to take John where he needed to go. Half of every paycheck from the movie theatre and the museum went into the Jeep, as old as John and, as he was often told, the ugliest model they'd ever made. But, it took him to school and home and to work and to the library, and the Jeep could carry more books than John could ever strap to his bike.
After he turned 17, and Dad finally gave in, John needed the Jeep to get him out to the Valley for his flying lessons. The other half of every paycheck went into the Jeep's gas tank, but John had seen the sky, and he knew it was worth it. What was left, and the few dollars he still got from Mr. Corrigan for washing his planes (John refused every time, but the man had lived through two wars and still had fight), John kept in a Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox in his closet.
Someday, that money would buy John a stick and a rudder and the wide blue sky.
Three times a week, the final school bell couldn't ring soon enough. John hurried home to the quiet house on the corner of his tree-lined street. He made a couple turkey sandwiches, wandered through the pantry, adding an apple and two granola bars to the brown paper bag. (The blueberry Pop Tart, he ripped open and ate on his way out the door.) Three times a week, John drove the lime green Jeep out to the highway, hot, crowded, and most days, took the whole of R.E.M.'s Murmurs and Michael Jackson's Thriller to get out of the city. He was listening to "Beat It" again, on the radio this time, when he pulled the Jeep off the asphalt and onto the parched strip of earth that led to Atlantis Flight School.