The Boy with the Balloon

My dad took me to the park to see the town’s annual model plane fair. There were detailed mini hurricanes, a giant Boeing made of styrofoam, and what looked like a real-life military transport plane. It was eight feet in length, a beast of a machine. Michael, the man who constructed it, told my dad it took him seven months to perfect the model. I can’t imagine spending that much time on anything, let alone a model plane of all things.

Mother had made us cheese, spinach and rhubarb sandwiches to snack on while we watched the show. She knew we’d be out for a while. And boy were they delicious. I remember a single drip of rhubarb jam falling onto my lap as I watched a monoplane fly by the tree we were sitting under.

It wasn’t long before the Tallaway brothers arrived with their massive, and I mean massive, c-123 provider, a scaled-down replica of the one their father flew in the war. Dad told me stories about those planes, how they’d drop off ammunition into the middle of the forest hoping the Americans would get there before the Viet Cong. I could picture the sight of a parachuting crate making its way to the ground, getting lodged within the impenetrable Vietnamese forest canopy. Like rain on a windbreaker, it did not make its way through.

I sat with my packet of potato chips, honey soy flavored, as my dad chatted with an old high school friend.

“I been out here waiting for something to happen but nothing’s excited me,” said my dad’s friend. He was a tall man with large, grippy hands, the kind that you’d imagine could rip a tree out of the ground. “These damn amateurs think they can fly their rivet machines like no one’s looking. They ought to be shown the rulebook.”

“Hit ’em with it,” my dad interjected. His friend laughed while patting my dad on his back.

“You’re damn right, I’ll hit ’em with it. Hit ’em right in the cheek where it stings.”

Taking very little notice of the conversation, I continued watching the planes do loops in the sky. The propellers whizzed like crazy overhead. From behind me, I heard my dad screaming “watch out.” A four-foot long Sopwith Rhino dove towards me and my packet of potato chips. I was frozen in time, seeing an imminence I had never experienced before. Dad lunged to where I was sitting and pulled me aside. The plane landed nose-first into the box of cookies dad had bought on the drive over. “Keep an eye out for things like that, alright?” I nodded to acknowledge his words.

“Blyme, that was a close call.” The owner of the plane was running up the hill with his seven-year-old and eleven-year-old sons. It was clear on his face the embarrassment he was feeling.

“What the hell were you doing? You nearly killed my son.” My dad started going off at the owner of the Sopwith, yelling and screaming, expletives flying faster than the planes themselves. “Take your stupid junk and leave. We don’t condone such recklessness.”

“Who do you think you are? You’re not in-charge here.”

“No, I’m not, but I’m a patron of this event and therefore I have a say in these matters, and my say is that you better set sail or I’ll embarrass you in front of your own kids. That’d suck, wouldn’t it?” I admired the bravery my dad showed at times, but in that moment, I was more ashamed than I had ever been. I wanted to run over and grab his hand and whisper to him that it was all an accident, but I had little courage to do so.

The man walked away all smug and uptight. He turned his back towards us and strutted like the irresponsible idiot he was. These were all the terms my dad had described him with during the car ride home.

The event became normal again. My dad was chatting with his friend about the planes, badmouthing the ones they felt didn’t deserve to be there. I was enjoying life while sitting next to scraps of a Sopwith Rhino scattered around the picnic blanket. But it didn’t bother me. As I said, I was enjoying life.

From out the corner of my eye, a large object appeared in the sky. It wasn’t a plane because it made no noise. It wasn’t a kite because I could see no string. When I surveyed the pilot grounds, I saw a little Asian boy with a controller in his hands. His eyeline was directed at the object I was figuring out. I turned to my dad, completely confused at that point, and asked him what the big white thing floating in the sky was. He told me it was a balloon. Balloon? I asked. Like a hot air balloon, he said, drifting in the wind wherever mother nature wished it to go, but what my dad didn’t know was that this ‘mother nature’, whoever she was, was actually a thirteen-year-old Asian boy messing around with his controller.

I called as far as my voice could reach, warning him that his balloon wasn’t welcome, wasn’t meant for this type of show. He either couldn’t understand me — which the PC voice in my head told me to not assume — or I was just another warning he chose to ignore.

Unaware of the incoming plane, the kid’s balloon flew straight into the path of the Tallaway family’s c-123. BOOM! All I heard was the explosion, like a party popper but ten times louder. It startled everyone in the tents. My dad and his friend stopped their conversation. We all peered into the sky as the flimsy white fabric glided towards the field in front of us all, resting gently in the tall grass by the patch of flower weeds.

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Cover photo courtesy of Chris Leipelt via Unsplash
(https://unsplash.com/@cleipelt)