AN ORDINARY DAY IN A SMALL TOWN OUT WEST . . .

If you saw him coming toward you on the street, on a day with nothing special about it, you would think he was just an ordinary kid.

            Suppose, for instance, you're traveling west with your family, and something breaks on the van after you finally got all the way across Kansas.  You dad manages to nurse the vehicle to the nearest small town where--"Thank goodness!" (says your mom)--a mechanic is on duty.  He can fix the van, but it'll take a few hours.  Mom walks your little brother to a playground nearby and Dad nods absently when you say, "I'm walking down to the railroad track."

            It's the kind of town that always makes your parents ask, "How do people make a living out here?"  There's a rusty railroad track, a single intersection with stop signs, a grocery, hardware, pharmacy, library stuck in the corner of a Laundromat.  Maybe the library has a computer you can use.  You're about to check it out when you see a kid coming your way.

            You notice only because he's about your age, and (on second glance) because of his peculiar walk, a floaty stride that looks like he's making do with less gravity than most people.  Otherwise he seems pretty average: t-shirt and jeans, baseball cap turned backwards, one shoe untied, sticking-out ears, freckles.  You open your mouth to say Hi at the very moment he stops.

            One hand goes into his jeans pocket and takes out a shiny object about the size of a cigarette lighter.  Maybe a tiny cell phone, because he seems to be talking into it.  As he talks his shoulders rise--and rise, until you suddenly realize they're not shoulders. 

Your vision slows down.  Long primary feathers peak behind him, each quill sharply backlit, spreading like the ribs of a fan.  Your brain speeds up: is this a movie?  How's he doing that?  Am I dreaming?  You glance around for the camera, but this Podunk town appears as unremarkable as before.  The few people on the street take no notice.  When you turn back, the boy has put his phone (or whatever it was) back in his pocket and is running right at you.

            His back has exploded in feathers.

            "'Scuse me!" he calls out, sweeping you aside.  A wad of wind punches your chest; the pale primaries rattle like shutters in a hurricane as his feet leave the ground.  A fluffy white down-feather drifts past your nose and makes you sneeze.

            He pivots in the air, one wing reaching for a current while the other rows in short, steady strokes.  Having gained an altitude of about twenty feet he glides away, wingtips curled like a hawk's, a shoelace trailing behind him.

           Your thoughts were scattered in the wind's sharp breath.  But as they begin to creep back, stunned and shaky, here's what you're thinking:

           It's true.  All those stories about Bird Boy, that you thought were urban legends?  They're really true. 

"Dad!" you shout, barging into the repair garage.  He's leaning over the office desk writing a check while the clerk prints out a receipt. 

            "Good timing," he says, with a glance in your direction.  "We're all done here; get in the van and we'll go pick up your mom and brother."

            "But dad, guess what I saw--there's this kid with wings, and he can fly!"

            "Really," he says, handing the check to the clerk with a raised-eyebrow look.  Kids these days!

            "Yeah, really!"  You turn to the clerk.  "You know who I'm talking about?"

            "You mean Roy Ray?" she says.  "Sandy hair, freckles?"

            "Yeah, yeah, but--"

            "I know who he's talking about," she says to your dad.  "It's just Roy Ray."

            "But he has wings!" you insist.

            "That's enough," Dad says firmly.  "Next you'll be telling me how you saw Bat Boy at the convenience store."

            He pushes you toward the door and you glance helplessly at the clerk, who lifts a hand to wave bye-bye.

            Then you lunge for the street, hoping to catch a glance of a wingtip or airborne shoelace.  But the big western sky is blue as a robin's egg and empty as lies.

Where and when?

Does a story begin with characters or with action?  It may seem like one or the other, but the real answer is neither.  Stories begin with a setting: a particular place and time.  Even fantasy worlds must feel real.  The action can't take place in no place: characters and actions need a stage.  Otherwise the characters are floating, and none of their actions matter.

Creating the setting is another challenge, because the author can't spend much time doing it.  Things have to start happening pretty quickly, or the reader will stop reading.  Another thing the author should avoid--usually--is a lot of backstory, or explaining how the situation at the beginning of the story developed.  But my problem is, a boy with wings requires some explanation.  So I go into the history of how his wings grew and use that history as a way of introducing the main character, his family, and the town.  The town is very important to the situation, because Tomahawk Chop has to be understood as a place where a kid with wings could, just maybe, have a more-or-less normal childhood.

Next question: too much backstory?  Do you appreciate knowing all this stuff, or would you rather the action get off the ground (so to speak)?  Let me know here.

Chapter One

BIRTH OF A LEGEND

To be fair, doubts about Roy Ray Rappaport was perfectly understandable.  Except for bats, winged mammals are so rare they're assumed to be myths.  Even seeing is not always believing. 

Besides, Roy Ray was not born rare, or not in a way anyone noticed. 

            His father worked in a paint factory and his mom raised and sold houseplants.  Their baby did everything a baby was supposed to do: cry, eat, burp, poop and smile (sometimes in that order). 

He did not do anything a baby was not supposed to do, such as sprout extra limbs.  So his parents naturally thought he was normal, until two months and three days before his third birthday.

That was the day he started saying his back hurt.  Only because he was not quite three, he didn't just say it.  He yelled it: "Hurt!  Owee!  OUCH!"

His shoulder blades looked a little red and puffy to his mother.  She gave him baby aspirin and made him take a nap.

            But the next morning, when his back was even redder and Roy Ray was yelling twice as loud, Mrs. Rappaport took him to the county clinic thirty miles away.  "Probably nothing to worry about," said the overworked doctor.  "Growing pains.  I'll write a prescription for it.  Come back in a week if it's not any better."

Mrs. Rappaport stopped at the clinic pharmacy for a bottle of bright red syrup that went down tasting like cherries and burped up tasting like axle grease.  But it stopped the pain, so that when the next unusual thing happened, Roy Ray didn't have to scream about it.

           "Wook!" he lisped to his mom while she was drying him off after a bath.  He humped his back and made his shoulder blades wiggle--up and down and back and forth, like a rabbit's nose.

His mother so surprised she dropped the towel.  "My goodness!" she cried, and then, "Ray!  Come quick!"

She had to call Mr. Rappaport twice because he was watching a baseball game.  When he finally ambled down to the bathroom, Roy Ray was making his little shoulder blades do something like a tap dance.

"Wow," said Mr. Rappaport after a moment.  "I never saw that before."

"Does this mean he's not normal?" asked his wife anxiously.

"What's normal?" Mr. Rappaport replied, and went back to the game.

           That night, Roy Ray's back hurt so much he drank the absolute maximum dose of cherry/axle grease syrup before he could finally get to sleep.  He woke up feeling much better, which was a relief to his mother until she pulled off his pajama top.

"Ray!" she screamed.  "Come here, now!"

            In the kitchen, Mr. Rappaport was so startled he dropped the cup of coffee he was pouring.  Rushing to the boy's room, his eyes met the same curious sight that shocked Mrs. Rappaport.

            Roy Ray's shoulder blades had lifted right off his back.  In fact, they had each divided into two jointed parts that stretched and flexed while his parents watched.  In fact, they weren't shoulder blades at all.  What they looked like more than anything was a pair of turkey wings, covered with pale pimples.

They were about that size, too.  Not very big, as you know if you've ever been last in line at Thanksgiving dinner and the wings are the only part left on the turkey platter. 

"That's something you don't see every day," Mr. Rappaport finally said.

"I think we should go back to the clinic," Mrs. Rappaport said.

Though he didn't have a high opinion of the medical profession, Mr. Rappaport agreed.  He even took a half-day off work to go along. 

The doctor on duty was not the same one who had seen Roy Ray before.  "Our boy seems to have sprouted wings," Mrs. Rappaport explained anxiously.

            "Hm," the doc remarked.  "What are you giving him for it?"

            "Giving him?  Well, nothing.  That's what we came to ask you."

            "Hm," said the doc again.  Then he sent Roy Ray over to be X-rayed while he looked through his big desk reference book.  When the X-rays were developed he spent a lot of time studying the pictures.

             In the waiting room, Roy Ray stacked building blocks and knocked them down while his father tapped his foot and glanced at his watch, hoping nobody noticed the way the boy's back was twitching under his jacket. 

             When the doc called them all back to his office he said, "I'll admit, I'm not familiar with this condition.  It seems quite rare."

             "What do you think caused it?" Mrs. Rappaport asked, with a worried frown.  Though she herself was perfectly normal, some of her relatives were, frankly, not.  Mrs. Rappaport couldn't help wondering if she carried some kind of weirdness gene.

             "Impossible to say.  Let's wait a month and see if these--er--protuberances show any sign of going away.  Many childhood conditions do, you know.  If not, we'll consult a specialist for a second opinion."

             The thought of a specialist reassured Mrs. Rappaport, but now her husband was the one worried.  As they left the office, with their little boy skipping between them, he muttered, "A specialist.  How much is that going to cost, I wonder?"

              "Don't worry, Ray," his wife soothed.  "Maybe it'll go away on its own, like the doctor said."  As for Roy Ray, he was feeling much better now that the bumps had worked their way out and weren't stretching his skin so much.

            About a week later, the pale pimples covering the--er--protuberances burst out in downy pinfeathers.

Mr. and Mrs. Rappaport tried to keep it quiet, but most little boys are impossible to keep quiet, much less a boy with fledgling wings on his back.  One morning while Mrs. Rappaport was hanging laundry in the back yard and Roy Ray was playing in his sandbox, a man with a camera snuck around the corner of the house and snapped a picture.  Before long, images of a round-faced little boy with startled eyes and downy wings were popping up on the front pages of The National Exposure and The Global Scoop, right up there with the 100-pound baby and the alien just elected mayor of Winchell, Wyoming: BIRD BOY ASTOUNDS PARENTS!

By the time both parents realized that his "condition" was not going away, the only second opinion it made sense to get was from a Doctor of Evolutionary Biology at the nearest University.  Dr. Aaron A. Lemke became very excited after examining Roy Ray and ran a number of scientific tests, which he planned to explain in a long, ground-breaking paper.  To keep the discovery to himself, he locked all his assistants out of the lab. 

The tests revealed some very interesting things about Roy Ray but couldn't fix his condition.  "Can't somebody just, you know, take 'em off?"  Mr. Rappaport asked.  Not without serious damage, Professor Lemke assured them, and then offered Mr. and Mrs. Rappaport $1000 per month if they would allow their boy to be studied.  They said No thanks, and took Roy Ray home to grow up as normally as possible.

(That No thanks, incidentally, wrecked Professor Lemke's career.   Because, when he decided to go ahead and present his paper at the next evolutionary biology conference, he was laughed off the podium.  Without the real thing to display--and no assistants to back him up-- nobody believed his X-rays and test results.)

Refusing the Professor's offer took some determination.  Because even if the scientific community didn't believe in Roy Ray, other communities did--or at least, they believed if he wasn't the real thing he was a pretty convincing fake.  Once his wings grew too big to hide the family could have moved to Hollywood and raked in piles of money from TV producers.  But with all their faults (such as Dad's temper and Mom's fussiness) they loved their little boy and wanted a normal childhood for him. 

Difficult enough, with paparazzi lurking behind the bushes (at least until Mr. Rappaport bought a shotgun).  And when the furnace broke or the family car needed a new transmission, it was tempting to consider an offer from Ice Follies or 21^st Century Fox, or even Jimbo's Auto-rama for a grand-opening event.  But to every phone call and every agent who drove up in a Beemer or Mustang, the answer was always: No Thanks.  We're not interested.

"Even though," Mr. Rappaport might remark, gazing wistfully at the Beemer or Mustang as it sped away, "If they throw in a set of wheels like that . . ."

"Now, Ray," his wife might remind him, "you know what we decided.  Not until our son is eighteen--"

"Yeah, yeah."

            "Stick to your guns," advised Roy Ray's Aunt Agnes, who was so sensible she wrote a weekly syndicated advice column called "Ask Agnes."  But without a sensible aunt, and a home town that had known Roy Ray and his mother all their lives, those guns would have been much harder to stick to.

             In Tomahawk Chop, everybody minded their own business and adjusted quickly to quirks and oddities, like the two-headed chicken hatched in the Ortega's hen house and the crop circles at the edge of Smith's melon farm.  Or the area's own Bermuda Triangle: Cruikshank Pass, up north a ways, where two school buses and a vacuum cleaner salesman (among others) had mysteriously vanished. 

            Time, while not forgetting Tomahawk Chop, had mislaid it ever since the 1950s, when a uranium strike failed to produce any uranium.  When everyone left who was going to, what remained was the Mile High Paint factory, several pumpkin and melon farms, Lee's Semi-Super Market, Stuff-For-Less Discount City, a combination library/Laundromat and a weekly news and shopping paper called the Peacemaker.

            Long before Roy Ray's appearance the town's claim to fame were his great-aunts, Agnes and Flavia, who lived in a castle at the north end of town.  "Castle" is what the local kids called it: a three-story gray stone house built by their grandfather, "Leprechaun Harry" O'Grady, a silver prospector who struck it rich.  He always claimed the Little People told him where the silver was, hence the nickname.  The Castle was mostly a shell, since Leprechaun Harry had run out of money before he could complete the interior floors.  Agnes and Flavia lived in the servants' wing and wouldn't hear of tearing down the main structure.  According to Agnes, it would be a crime to throw out all that empty space.  But everybody knew the Castle was mostly useful for supporting Flavia's Observatory. 

Most cloudless nights, she could be found in the six-sided, glassed-in cupola, with her two telescopes and astrolabe and record books and volumes of Nostradamus, making observations and prognostications.  Often, after she'd been up all night querying the stars, The National Exposure would run an exclusive headline, such as INSIDE SOURCES CONFIRM: U.S. VICE PRESIDENT IS AN ALIEN.  Was Flavia communicating with aliens?  Her neighbors had to wonder but were too polite to ask. 

Once she came down from her glass tower, in her oversize lab coat with pockets stuffed with notes scribbled during the night, Aunt Flavia was in full agreement about Roy Ray: "Let him enjoy these happy golden years.  The cares of life will be upon him all too soon."

All too correct: as he grew, the cares of his particular life multiplied.  For example, around the age of five his chest, instead of flattening like most kids', began to round out like a pigeon's.  His mother dug that long paper of Professor Lemke's out of her file and read it with the aid of a dictionary to look up the long words. 

(There was no point in digging up Professor Lemke himself.  The man had taken to drink after his rejection by the scientific community and, the last anyone heard, was living in a homeless shelter in Spokane, a wreck of his former self, noisily blaming all his problems on the Rappaports.) 

"As the subject [meaning Roy Ray] matures, other anomalies will predictably occur, all necessary for flight.  One will be a distinct curvature of the chest area to accommodate the air sacs that are now adjacent to the lungs . . .

(Et cetera, meaning, his mother figured out, that Roy Ray's lungs were branching out with little extra bird-lungs.  Interesting.)

"In addition, the subject's skeleton reveals a propensity to de-ossification or striation of fibers, indicating less density than normal human bones.  This also . . .

(Wait a minute--Roy Ray's bones were going to be a lot lighter because the bone cells were farther apart somehow.  But wouldn't that mean they'd be more liable to break?)

"A normal concern might be the increased risk of fracture.  However, the subject's otherwise friable structure will predictably act in inverse ratio to the forces of gravity, and render him not impermeable, but resistant to injury . . ." 

She already knew what that meant.  Even though Roy Ray climbed as many trees, fences and garage doors as any kid, he never fell.  Or rather, the first time he lost his grip on the kitchen cabinet as he was climbing to get to his dad's stash of Snickers bars, his wings took over on the way down.  He landed on his feet, feather-light, and when his mother discovered him, he not only had a Snickers bar in each hand, he was leaping high off the counter top and fluttering to the floor, over and over.

It wasn't quite flying, but he worked his little wings to the point where he could launch from any height that wasn't too scary.  Sometimes he could stay in the air, flapping furiously, for almost a minute (something the birds don't tell you: flying is hard work).  His style left a lot to be desired, but he never broke a bone.

He broke other things, though, like a whole row of ceramic pots when jumping off the greenhouse roof, and his dad's garage radio when launching from the rafters, and the next-door neighbor's rosebushes when trying to gain altitude from his bedroom window.

When he was eight, his parents had another baby boy, whose back they anxiously kept an eye on.

For, in spite of their best efforts to raise Roy Ray as an average kid, it wasn't quite working.  He was average in lots of ways: he loved baseball and dreamed of playing outfield for the St. Louis Cardinals.  He also loved video games and potty jokes, didn't like school or bossy girls, could spit two yards, blow amazing bubble-gum bubbles, belch on demand and goof off creatively when he was supposed to be doing homework. 

But other things about him were just weird.  He could jump from a second-story building without getting hurt--that was cool.  But he also developed some odd tics, like bobbing his head and scratching with his foot.  That was not cool.  His birdy metabolism made him fidgety; if he wasn't fidgeting he was talking, always in trouble at school for one or the other.  He knocked things over with his wings.  He was prone to mites--mothers complained that he passed them on to other kids.  When he got careless about preening, which was most of the time, his feathers released a dust that made people sneeze.  He was also the smallest in his class, even including the girls.  And one morning, shortly after he turned seven, his mother heard a terrified cry from his bedroom: "Mo-om!" 

Dropping the potted geranium she'd just brought in, she raced down the hall to his room, where she found him sitting up in bed, hair in his eyes and wings awry, staring at a long rip in the top sheet.  "All I did was stretch!"

Glancing at his feet, Mrs. Rappaport exclaimed, "My goodness!  How'd we let your toenails get so long?"  But at a second look, she merely gasped, "My goodness!"

Overnight, his toes had grown and the toenails had curved right over the soft pinky ends.  They looked more like claws than nails.

"Bird feet!" Roy Ray wailed.  "I've got bird bones and a bird chest, now bird feet!  Will the Cardinals take me like this?  Will I have to cut my toes off?  Are my fingernails gonna grow like this?"

What next? his mother wondered.  She couldn't find anything in Prof. Lemke's paper about bird feet.  The only shoe that would fit was three sizes larger than average for his age, extra-narrow.  They had to be specially ordered and (his dad complained) cost a small fortune.  To Roy Ray they looked like clown shoes--another not-so-cool thing.  Socks had to be altered too, because his toenails kept poking through, and no matter how often the nails were trimmed they insisted on curving over his toes.

           What next, indeed?

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

[Caricatures by Tielman Cheaney.  If you'd like to learn to draw like this, go here.]