Free Black Helicopters by Blythe Woolston Page A

I can see what’s coming now. “Black helicopter!”
    Eric pushes the dog off him and into the backseat. He cranes down to see the thing coming at us.
    “No! No! Don’t look. Never look! Turn around!”
    “I can’t turn here. I can’t go the wrong way on the freeway.”
    “Just go across the middle, just go!” I grab the steering wheel and push it the way I need to go. But Eric pushes back and the car turns, skates across the lanes, and scrapes the metal guardrail beside a steep bank. Eric brakes and the car stops on the shoulder.
    In front of us, the black helicopter is moving toward the east, not toward us, please not toward us.
    “Don’t look! Don’t look!” I say it again and again. “Never look at a black helicopter.”
    “It’s not black,” says Corbin. “I saw it. It’s green and white. It’s a rescue helicopter from the hospital.”
    I rise up and my fist flies over the seat and connects with the side of Corbin’s head. Before the dog can take another fly at me, I grab its ear and pin it to the seat. Corbin is screaming and crying. “Shut your mouth or I will kill this dog,” I say. I pull the paring knife out of my pocket and push the point at the dog’s eye.
    “Listen to her, Corbin. Shut up. Shut up now,” says Eric.
    In the back seat, both the kid and the dog are whimpering.

Bo is on a three-day job.
    I sit in the bus.
    I’m all alone.
    I hold Da’s wool shirt against my face, but I can hardly smell his life there anymore. He is fading away. The last traces of him are dissolving into the air. If I had the laptop with me, I would watch the messages he left for us. I could see his eyes and hear his voice. But Bo needs the laptop when he’s working. I have to get by on what I remember, so I work on that.
    “Those People will be afraid,” says Da. He picks up the clock’s spring and turns it over in his hand. He holds it out to me, I reach out, and he drops it on my palm. “We will be showing them exactly how to be afraid. We will wind them right up. Then, once we get Those People all wound up, we will sound the alarm. People will wake up.”
    I remember.
    “This is the queen,” says Da. “She can move all of these ways.” He slides the piece along the board, back and forth, side-to-side, and corner-to-corner. “She is the most powerful piece on the board.”
    I remember.
    When I was alone so much — after Da said my job was to sign the messages in blood, after I couldn’t go out into the world anymore — when I was alone so much, I learned to play chess against myself.
    At first, I used books. I would play the game the way it had been played by the masters against each other. Doing that, I learned many things. Then, I learned to play truly against myself. When I moved white, I played for white. When I moved black, I played for black. The trick, then, was not getting stuck, not falling into stalemate. The trick was winning. That was hard to learn to do.
    I am always, always, always determined to protect my king.
    I have to keep the game going. That is when I see. The game
is
not finished. Da’s game is not finished.
    The King is dead, but he isn’t in check.
    As long as I’m playing, the King isn’t in check. The windup is still good. The energy is there, waiting to be let out. I just have to find a way to send the last message. When that happens, Da will have won the game.
    I don’t usually speak to Captain Nichols. There’s no reason for me to be mixed up in conversations about who and what and why as far as jobs are concerned. That’s between him and Bo.
    But today I knock on his door and ask, “Can I use your computer?” I want to see again about my Da. I want to find out other things that will help me finish his work.
    “You remember how it works?” he asks.
    I nod yes and he walks back to that room with me. It’s dark except for the light that breaks from the screen when he taps the keyboard.
    Captain Nichols leaves the room.
    I go to the paper to read about