Free The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow Page A

down. P-p-put me down.” Little Man would laugh.
    “Roger, stop the horseplaying. His nose will start to bleed again.”
    “Will it Little Man? Will it?” Roger would toss Little Man into the air a bit higher each time he asked.
    Little Man would laugh hysterically until Nella came into the room to stop it. Roger thought if he could will some strengthinto that small body, Little Man would overcome the nosebleeds, and the colds and stomach pains that no doctor could ever cure. But Roger grew tired of Little Man being sick, of Little Man’s sickness. Roger got tired of being careful, of seeing how weak his son really was. Roger would beat him when his nose bled. His hands would twist the tender yellow skin on his son’s arm. Roger would use his military voice. “Stop that. Boy, you better quit.” He loved that boy. He could kill him.
R OGER TOLD B RICK that in the seventies the best thing to be was black. The white people thought you had moves. They thought you knew music better and deeper than anybody else.
    As the only black boy in a family of Danes—and because he got the discount on liquor with his military ID—Roger was always the center of the party. They’d play some Stevie Wonder, drink some beer, drink some Seagram’s, and then some schnapps to top off the night.
    That’s how they spent all their holidays. Roger, Nella and the boy would drive north to Denmark to see her sister’s family, or her sister’s family would come visit them on base in Germany. This visit Nella’s sister, Solvej came without her husband, a seaman.
    “Watch out now, Nella,” Roger said. “We gonna have to move tonight.” Roger had never moved so good. Go on, Stevie, sing! Roger loved the harmonica interludes. He put his hands to his mouth like he was holding one.
    Roger moved. He danced—and damn if he didn’t start to sing too. Solvej joined in. She was a choir girl and a woman without her man around. She was cutting loose.
    Roger’s duet and slow dance with Solvej ended the night. But then there was the kiss good-night that lasted a little too long. It was the first time Roger had heard Nella raise her voice. She called her own sister a whore. It was also the first time Roger hit a woman—really. No, really. He didn’t know how it happened. But Nella fell into her sister’s arms crying, and she left with her sister. Roger was silent and drunk and watched them go.
    Roger grabbed a cigarette and sat down. “My little Danish girl will come back. Won’t she? Won’t she, Little Man?” he said. Little Man stood behind the couch.
    “Come here, boy,” Roger used his cotton voice. But Little Man just stood there. “Boy, I said come here!” Roger’s voice was all gravel. With that the boy sat by his father, made his father’s arm around him not a noose but a wing. “We just gonna wait. My little Danish girl will come home soon. She’ll come home.”
    It was late, so late and the music was gone. The man and the boy fell asleep together on the couch, waiting, the cigarette still lit in Roger’s hand. Burning.
    Roger didn’t know how much time had passed when he woke coughing from the fire’s smoke. Where was Little Man? He’d wriggled out from Roger’s hold. Roger kept yelling into the flames. Little Man was small for his age. He could hide good. He could hide anywhere. Where was he?
    “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” The fire licked through the walls and inhaled the back of the wooden house in a quick blaze. Little Man was nowhere to be found, Roger told Brick. Still, he kept screaming his son’s name into the flames.
    “NOOO!” R OGER SCREAMED as if he were reliving that night.
    The nurse rushed in, faster than she did when the alarms would ring. She checked the tubes and looked at the lines on the monitor above the bed. “What’s the matter?”
    Roger was holding the flask in his hand and looked at her blankly, unsteady on his feet.
    “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to go now,” the nurse