Charlie: a short story

It wasn't until my seven-year old grandson Nicky was using the leaf blower to puff out my cheeks that I decided to make the jump.

Three hours of monkeying with the damn thing, and I was just about to put the finishing touches on it. The blower, not my grandson. He was my cheerleader. To some old farts like me, a kid of seven yelling "Yay Grampa! You fix that! Fix that like a boss!" might have driven them batshit. It was music to my ears, and it made me all sorts of Hallmark-lifetime special on the inside.
Each time he'd come up with a new cheer, I'd put on what May always calls my "super serious face". I'd furrow my brow deep, so the wrinkles in my forehead grew cavernous. My eyes would narrow, and my mouth would compress to a tiny line beneath my slightly sagging cheeks. I ain't gonna tell ya how old I am, because there's a few things a man can keep to himself. I'd been to the war, and I wasn't no spring chicken - I can say that much. Anyway, I had to put on a good show of things. Nicky's always looked up to me, the little snotball, and I loved him to death. I couldn't let something like a dad-blasted leaf blower get the better of me with him around. So I took him seriously as I could, and pretended like he was the one driving me on. That damn blower had to be fixed.

In my defense, I hadn't been the one to break it, either. Katrina did it. People always say "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and it's true. I'd just hate to see the sonofabitch that pissed off that hurricane. That damn leaf blower was the only thing left of the garage where my son had caught my addiction to engine grease. May said I was nuts to try to pull it out of that wreck, let alone put it back together. Just move on, she said. How're you supposed to tell your wife that a leaf blower means more to you than money, time, and effort? You'd sound like a proper nutjob, if you ask me. I just told her it had to be done, put on my "serious face", and told her it had to be done. She threw her hands in the air as if tossing confetti onto some poor bloke behind her and walked away. She was mad a bit, I was mad a bit, then we went for one of our long walks and everything was ok again.
"Grampa?"
I looked over from the blower to see Nicky making what he must have thought was a proper "serious face". Don't laugh, Charlie, I thought, if you do, it'll crush the boy. "What is it, kiddo?"
Nicky took a deep breath and held it. When he started to turn red, I figured he'd just about pop. Sure enough, what he said came out all in a rush, like someone had pushed fast-forward on my old VCR. "Thatblower'sspecialtoyouisn'titcauseyouspentsolongonitandIwannaknowwhysitsospecial?"
I blinked, then started guffawing. Not laughing, not chuckling, but letting loose fit to bust a gut. That boy is just too damn sharp for his own good. My own wife of 40 years can't pick up on something that gets me riled up, but that boy knew right away. Wiping tears from my eyes, I set the blower down and picked him up with my grease-stained hands. I set him on my knee, thinking that I'd catch holy hell from his ma about it, then looked him in the eye.
"You bet it is, slugger. You want to know why?" The look he gave me clearly said, Duh Grampa, I already asked that. I shrugged. "This leaf blower's the last thing left of our old house where your daddy grew up. I figure if I fix it, maybe I can fix him and me."
This made Nicky's eyes go all misty, and I had to bite my tongue from doing the same. Damned if little kids don't hit that spot right in my gut that just makes me turn into a blubbering idiot.
"B... but Grampa... why is Daddy so mad at you?"

I thought back. I couldn't tell him the truth, not at this age. How can you explain to a child what terminal cancer is? "Sick" don't cover it, no sir not at all. "Sick" isn't waking up every morning thinking that you're on borrowed time every moment you spend next to your wife. "Sick" isn't having your skin a perpetual shade of green from all the gosh-darn chemicals and radiations that are floating around in your beat up old hide. "Sick" you get better from. Worse, "Sick" doesn't make your only boy avoid you because he's scared to death of death and can't tell an old man he loves him.
"I don't think even he knows that, kiddo. Don't worry about it too much, son. Daddy still loves Grampa, and things will work out all right in the end." He looked at his shoes, a picture-perfect little sad boy right out of Norman Rockwell.
Damned if I don't hate sad silence. That's what gets me the most about this damn cancer. People don't yell, "Hey Charlie!" anymore, or offer to buy me beers on Vet's day. The cancer had turned it all into sour-smelling pity. You really can smell it on people. All the "How are you feeling, Charlie?" and "Are the treatments going well, Charlie?" stink to high heaven of sympathy, and I can't stand it. Smelling something like that come off of my little Nicky was just too much. I had to do something, so I pulled an old trick out of my hat.
"Hey slugger," I said as my hand found his mop of blond hair, "how's about we fire this thing up and you make Grampa look funny?"
His head snapped up immediately. Nothing like the promise of mischief to put a fire in a boy's eyes. "Whatcha mean, Grampa? How can the blower make you look funny?"
I grinned in spite of myself. "I'll show ya. Let me start up the blower, and then we'll go over yonder so your Gramma don't see us being straight-up fools, kay?"
Nicky nodded furiously. He was as eager as me to get his mind off his father. Not that his father was mean, or bad to him. I'd have striped that bastard raw if he hurt my grandson - police badge or not. No, Sam was just stubborn and macho to the core (much like his old man), so he didn't want to admit that I was dying. I was just playing at it to piss him off, he said. Couldn't stop thinking about myself, he said.

Picking up the blower and walking out the garage door, I motioned for Nicky to follow me. I hoped he didn't see the way I clenched my dentures at the pain in my gut, but I couldn't help it. Cancer can be like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants, only it's my gut instead of ants, and a hot poker instead of a magnifying glass. Bad as it was, walking outside took the pain out of me right quick.
It was the one of those storybook days, the kind where the princess has found the prince and they ride off into the sunset. The sun had gone all gatorade orange and was shimmery around the edges, like the end of one of those old westerns I like so much. Scept I was no Clint Eastwood, and that damn blower was no six-shooter. Still, it was the kind of summer evening that I hadn't known the Midwest was capable of till after the hurricane.
We worked our way around the back of the garage, where the roof and deck blocked the windows from the house. May'd probably have burst my eardrums if she caught me teaching Nicky the kind of shenanigans I had in mind. I set the blower on the ground butt-first once we were out of sight of the house, and commenced pulling at the cord.
Not pulling the cord, mind you. Pulling AT it. Pulling the cord implies a measure of success. For a good five minutes I yanked that sucker up and down with not so much as a sputter. I was about to swear up a storm and kick the damn thing to hell, grandson or no grandson, when Nicky reminded me I was a dumbass with a simple question.
"Grampa, does it have gas?"
Does it have gas. I'd seen more in my lifetime than probably you or your family has, let me tell you, but that boy was still sharper than me in seven years than all of mine. All that work on the damn thing and I hadn't bothered to fill it up.
Ten minutes later (I'd had a bit of a spell hoofing it back into the garage and getting the gas can down) and the damn thing was finally puttering out behind the house again. Nicky was crouched on his haunches, tilting the thing up towards my bent-over face. I looked him squarely in the eye.
"No matter what Grampa looks like, you can't laugh, understand?" He nodded. I was born with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic, so I counted down with my fingers. One. Two. ....... One. This drew a giggle from Nicky, but he quickly stifled it. It was now or never.
Three.
Nicky pulled the handle, and a gust of dirty, smelly air caught me full in the face. After thirty-seven years, I heard Lt. Michael's voice again. Let's go you apes! You want to live forever? My cheeks flattened against my aging head, flapping around like the jowls on Droopy Dog. I heard Nicky gasp, then watched the fascinating process of how he tried to stifle a laugh. He won somehow, his tiny eyebrows clenched in concentration, but I could see the smile beating at his defenses. Acting purely on instinct, I opened my mouth as wide as I could, letting my whole gob blow open like a parachute. I moved my head from side to side, flattening one cheek while the other puffed out obscenely, my teeth standing out like the false things they already were. May always said that the treatments could take my teeth, but not my smile from me.
It was too much for poor Nicky. He collapsed, laughing fit to burst, and the blower died. For a moment I still felt the wind through my
(uniform)
hair, and then it hit me. I had to take one more jump.

* * *

Two days later, May was cooking dinner, and I asked her the question.
"Dear heart," I said in as simple a tone as I could, "Love of my life, are you going to burn my steak again?"
That wasn't the question, but I felt it had to be asked. One old-fashioned slap later, and May and I were sitting at our oak dinner table with our old silverware and settling into a steak that any chef would consider a travesty, but what May called "decently cooked."
"Charlie Johnson, I don't know who taught you to talk to a lady like that, but I'll have you sleeping on that couch if you sass me one more time before we're done eating." May is older than me by a bit, but that didn't keep those gorgeous grey eyes of hers from lighting up like a firestorm when she got her dander up. Even though her hair was mostly gray and thin now, she still tossed it over her shoulder in that frustrated gesture I liked so much. Gray and thin it might be, but that woman will be beautiful till the day I die.
"May, when was the last time you felt free? I mean really free, as if nothing else in the world mattered just then."
She blinked, nonplussed. "Charlie, what an odd question. What do you mean by all that?"
I shrugged. "Just tell me, if you can. It's something I was wondering about the other day."
"We-ell.... I suppose it was that last trip we took up north to ride those snow machines. I felt like I could go anywhere and do anything on that thing, loud beast that it was."
Smiling, I shook my head. "You always had the grease gene as much as I did, May. I love you for it."
She smiled the kind of smile a young girl smiles when asked if she likes you back, but said nothing for a while. She appeared to be enjoying her ribeye, but I wasn't really sure how a woman would enjoy the taste of leather. When she finally spoke up, she asked what I thought she would.
"How about you, Charlie? When was the last time your worries just flew away?"
I thought for a bit even though the answer had come to me while my grandson flapped my face about with a leaf blower. It wouldn't do to let May think I was brooding, or she'd try to poke me one in the ribs. God, how that got me going sometimes. After what felt like the right amount of time, I pointed towards the ceiling.
"You remember when Sammy graduated his police academy, May?"
Her eyes widened a bit, but she smiled. "You always said you felt best when you were jumping out of a plane. God's mercy, but you're crazy as a bedbug if that's what you're referring to."
Laughing, I pushed my plate back. My appetite wasn't what it once was with all the treatments, and leather made my gut give an angry turn sometimes. "You know me better than anything, sweetheart. You can blame the 101st for getting me to like it. Once someone yells at me to do something, I'm either gonna hate it or love it. Jumping out of a plane just happened to be something I grew to love."
Smiling with her eyes, May looked out the window into the evening. Summer nights round here are pretty as can be, especially when the fireflies are out on our porch like they were that night. Little horny lightbugs, flashing their come-ons into the darkness. Mating displays can be pretty sometimes, I guess. It was another while before she spoke up again.
"Charlie... what brought this up? You can't seriously be thinking of taking another jump. We haven't got the money, and you're in no shape to fly anywhere, let alone jump out of a plane at tens of thousands of feet."
I stood up, feeling something in me bend the wrong way as I did so, and grimaced. The pain never leaves you be, you know. It's worse than a shark with the scent of blood. Sharks will bump you a few times, then get you in their teeth and finish things. Pain is a kitten. A vicious, body-tearing kitten, playing with you between its paws. It'll bat you around, throw you in the air, and wreck you wholesale just for the hell of it before it ends you. And when it takes you down, you'll still feel every damn thing. I hissed a bit through my teeth, seeing the concern on my wife's face, and that only made things worse.
Perhaps I mentioned that my sense of the dramatic gets me in trouble. It did this time, too.
"May Parker Johnson, I have a right to do what I please. I'm dying, and if I say that I want to jump out of a plane like I used to back in the war, I will jump out of a plane like I used to back in the war. You don't know what it's like, May. To leap out into that big open sky with a grin on your face and get your laugh stolen by the wind. To have that wind puff out your cheeks like... like your grandson is hosing your face with a leaf blower. For those few seconds while I fall I could do anything, and nothing scares me. Not those damn Nazis, not cancer, and not the fact that my only boy is too stupid to tell me he loves me before I keel over and die.
"For those few seconds, I could be God Himself."
May hates it when I blaspheme, and normally she would have scolded me. Instead she burst into tears, and my rant died deader than a doornail in no time at all. I walked around the table, wincing as I did so, and pulled her into my arms. She cried like that for a while, holding me as close as she used to before the cancer, and I didn't care that it hurt like a bitch. If a man can't hold his wife when she's crying, he ain't no kind of man.
Finally she wiped her eyes and looked at me. "Where will we get the money? Who the hell would take a patient with cancer up in a plane for a jump anyway?"
I held her close for a bit more, biting my lip against my gut. She couldn't see it, so I could do it. I finally let her go back a ways, and held her face between my dry old leathery palms. I kissed her forehead, then slowly eased back into my chair at the table. Knife and fork in shaky hands, I tried to choke down a few more bites of burnt cow for her sake.
Mumbling through the ruined beef, I said, "You know who would, and you know how I'd do it. Just like the old days."

Later that night, we slept in the same bed for the first time in two years. I'd insisted on my own bed once the night sweats and vomiting fits hit, because I couldn't bear to see what it did to the woman I loved. I still think it's a gift from god that the night before I jumped those were absent, and I was able to hold my wife close one more time. Told her I loved her, and that I would always miss her. Told her to take care of my boy and my grandson, and that she'd do well to find someone else to pass the time with, since she still had those killer thighs and that laugh to drive a man crazy. She didn't say a word, just snuggled up against me. I think she cried.

* * *

My attic is a gosh-darn nightmare. Not only do I hate spiders, but the dust plays hell with my lungs. Still, I knew that if May saw what I was looking for, she'd call the cops on me, or worse, my son. Before dawn broke (she's always been an early riser), I woke myself up and slipped into some old rags. That attic staircase is unbelievably loud, but somehow I managed to pull it down from the ceiling outside our bedroom without waking her.
Ten minutes later and I was killing myself trying to stifle the sneezes. Each time I pushed one down I felt a piece of me protest, like a sack filled with too many things. I could swear parts of me bulged out. Where was that damn....
There. It was under a stack of photo albums, which didn't make any sense. They should have rolled off the crazy thing, but there they were, perched and wobbly as if they were about to drop and just didn't want to. I felt like it could have been me on that old army pack.
Forty years, and it still fit. I'd grown a belly after the war, too much beer and baseball, but it had gone the way of the dodo after my second round of chemo. Couldn't keep anything down. As the straps came over my shoulders, I could hear my lieutenant again.
Come on, maggots! You think Jerry's gonna wait for you to grow a pair? Out the door, and don't get dead! Even under fire, Lt. Michael had called us names. Goddam it, get some fire on those Krauts! Useless turds, I'll shoot you myself if you don't get a heave-ho! When he died, the unit broke up. We weren't sent to new positions or anything like that, but he was the glue that kept us together. We'd been through hell and back a few times already, so command decided we were done anyhow, and that was that. Most of my old mates were dead these days, but there were a few left. Men who would just laugh to see me wearing my old fatigues, or offer to buy me a beer. Men who wouldn't ask, "How do you feel, Charlie?"
A few I could count on like in the old days.
* * *

"Well if it isn't old double-ugly hisself. Charlie Johnson, back from the dead and looking like he could just whup my wrinkled old ass!"
Laughing so hard it hurt, I grabbed the bald, skinny man in front of me by the forearm. "Chuck Finley, you son of a gun, you look younger than the Devil! I still hate you for being the one of us who got to be Chuck and not Charlie."
There we were, two old men wheezing at each other in an aircraft hanger like a couple of kids with asthma problems. Grinning like idiots, the lot of us. Chuck truly didn't look that old to me, you know. He may have had a few more liver spots on his skin than me, and a lot more flesh around the middle, but he didn't look old. He looked like I didn't feel - alive. Finley was the squad clown before I was transferred in, always cracking wise and pushing insubordination with Lt. Michael. After I showed up, it seemed to make him more of himself. The two of us would spout dirty jokes before every practice drop, scream or laugh on the way down (he did the screaming, I swear to you), and keep everyone's spirits up in the mud.
Right now he was pulling me over to a little desk in front of his beat up old Piper aircraft. It was right in the way of the props, so I guessed he hadn't done any flying lately.
"What brings you round these parts, Charlie? Your place is what, a hundred miles away? Not that I was eager to see your ugly mug again, but spill - why you here?"
I lifted up my battered old pack and slammed it on the table. There was a silence as Finley digested what I'd fed him, and his eyes narrowed.
"I don't know what you mean by bringing your old chute into my shop old man, but you best not be thinking what I think you're thinking."
Lifting my hand up, I held it in front of his face. I had the shakes pretty bad from the walk to the hangar, and he could see it. I set my hand down on the table with a dull thud, and grimaced. "I'm dying, Chuck. You must have heard."
He shook his head. "Yeah, I heard, but I didn't believe it. You were our good luck charm, Charlie. Old double-ugly could never die, and would laugh the Devil hisself in the face when the time came. Why you bringing that old chute out here now?"
It didn't take me any time at all to reply. "So I could laugh the Devil hisself in the face, friend. I ain't going out like no cripple, no sir. I intend to go out of this world the way I want, the time I want, and that's now. You remember what Donner used to say?"
Chuck hung his head a bit, then said, "Yeah, I remember. Black bastard used to say it every damn day in the war. 'I ain't gonna be a slave to no man.' What's that got to do with your old ass?"
My hand was still shaking. I grabbed it with its twin to still the shakes, then spat, "This pain is making me a slave, Chuck. Donner and me, we think the same way. I have to do something, I have to be free again. When I'm jumping, I am."
Chuck was still mad. "That old chute may not even open, do you realize that? I'll probably be arrested for just taking you up in the freaking plane, let alone letting you jump with a chtue that old!"
"So you'll get arrested. What are they going to do, put an old vet like you in the pen? I highly doubt that. Hell, old Frank worked for the damn DA for a few years, he'd bail you out. I have to do this."
"The hell you do. That pretty wife of yours is going to be heartbroken. She'll die alone, your boy will be right about you, and those beautiful grandkids of yours you always send me pictures of will cry their little eyes out."
"You don't know that. For all you know, the chute could open and I could be fine. I could die in a bed of this damn cancer, cursing you the whole time."
"Charlie.... Charles, this is crazy. You can't do it. I won't do it."
"Charles Finley, this is the last request a dying man will ever make of you. If you won't do it for me, just think of that time when I took a bullet for you. I didn't hesitate then, and damn you if you hesitate now. I need this."
Sometimes when two men talk, things get too close to the way women do it, and we know it, and that makes us stupid. So for a moment, we didn't say nothing at all. That silence stretched, and stretched, and stretched, but didn't break. After a while, Finley looked me in the eye, and I saw his old piss and vinegar at work.
"If I do this for you - if I take you up one last time and let you jump out my plane with that old chute, I get first dibs on your wife."
I still had the tears in my eyes from laughing when we boarded the Piper.
* * *
Chuck is yelling to me over the radio. "We're at ten thousand, Charlie! Before you jump, I want to check your chute!"
I'm about to shake my head, but I realize he can't see me. "No way, old man! I packed this thing myself when we got home."
He laughs at me, loud and long. "I remember camp, you old fart. The way you pack a chute you're lucky that thing fits you." Finley rambles on a bit more, but my mind is elsewhere. I always get like this before a drop. Spacey, out to lunch, whatever they call it. I'm thinking about how good it will feel to be free again.
Finally I snap back to reality. Chuck is yelling, "Hey! Dumbass! Get that door open before I change my mind!" There should be some dramatic speech, I think. He should try to stop me at the last minute. Instead, I see that he's laughing. His eyes are all bright and shiny, the way they were when he'd curse nonsense at the Krauts, calling them sausage-lovers and stop-sign stealers. He's his old self, and so am I. I'm back, and he can see it too, so he gives me a thumbs up, just like we did in the old days, and I'm out the door.

It's called "free falling" for a reason. The laugh builds in my ruined gut, bubbles up to my scarred and irradiated lungs, and spills out of me like a kid busting through a gate at an amusement park. I can see the ground, but it's so far away... it's miles and miles down, and I'm flying like people only dream about. Old bones or not, I twist and flip, spreading my arms and legs so I can face up and look at the sky for a moment. The sun is bright, the clouds are puffy, and all I can think about is that God must have it pretty nice if he can see what I can see. Still laughing, I flip back over to see the ground getting bigger, but I don't care. All my motions are automatic, and I don't feel them. My legs are gone, my hands are gone, my pain is gone. My worries don't exist. No man but me is in control of my destiny right now, and I'm drunk on it, reeling back and forth in the wind. For these few seconds, I'm myself again, and, I'm free.

I'm still laughing as I pull the cord.