Live Like You Were Dying

by Michael Morris

  Within two hours that dime must have spun into orbit as the camper trailer shook from the winds and rain outside. Rain fell so hard against the aluminum camper that it sounded like somebody was working it over with an electric nail gun.

  While my father pacified himself with the latest western he’d picked up at the super center where we’d bought supplies, I hunkered by the small window by the door. Pulling back the fruit-print curtains, I watched as balls of hail slammed down against the concrete slab around the grill. “Man, it’s hailing now.”

  Not looking up from the pages of the book, my father said, “It’ll stop and start like this most of the night.”

  “For a man whose new trailer is getting whacked up, you don’t seem too worried.”

  “There ain’t a thing I can do about it. Besides, around here storms roll in, and just when you think you can’t stand it, they roll out.” He put the book down on his chest and looked up at the tiny light that glowed above the sofa. “I remember this one time when me and your mama drove out to Fort Carson. We got near here and just did manage to pull into this motor court that an old man and lady ran. Then the rain went to pouring, and the ceiling in our room went to leaking.” He laughed and looked at me like I might have been there too. “I was holding up the trash can in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Your mama was running around with the ice bucket over the bed. As soon as one leak stopped, another started. I was fit to be tied . . . mad . . . son, I was mad.”

  “Sounds to me like you needed your money back.”

  “Where to go? This was back when motels weren’t strung out all over the road like nowadays. Before I knew it, your mama had a kink in her arm from holding the bucket, so we just let the rain pour. We pulled the bed over to one corner, and she told me to close my eyes. Then she put in to telling me a story about Hawaii and waterfalls and such as that. Before she finished I could near about smell the flowers that she claimed she was wearing around her neck. Slept like a baby the rest of the night.” He stared into the light and held on to the book that rose and sank against his chest. “The other day ya’ll got to talking about missing her. That’s what I miss. Nothing fancy. I just miss having her lay next to me at the end of the day.”

  “She was a good woman,” I said, trying not to look at him. Nodding, my father never looked away from the light, and I got the feeling that if he did, the words would be snatched away. “She was a good wife. Better wife than I was a husband.”

  A thud rang out louder than the thunder, and we both swayed with the force of the hit. Outside, the sounds of clanging metal and sirens howled in the distance while rain fell sideways. I pushed the door open and saw that the side of the camper was dented. A blue trash barrel was rolling down the driveway. Fighting to close the door, I felt the rain cool the skin beneath my clothes. “The side of the trailer is hit. Looks like a barrel did it.”

  Sighing, my father looked out from the window. “Always could be worse, I reckon. The ceiling could be leaking.” —

  Sunlight spread out across the camper floor the next morning, and the rays slowly crawled up into my bed. Opening my eyes, I ran over to the window. Wet cardboard and Styrofoam containers littered the campground.

  Beyond the playground, I saw my father walking toward the camper. He entered and handed me a cup of coffee.

  “Looks like she worked it over pretty good last night,” I said, running my hand through hair fit for a wirehaired terrier. “I tossed and turned the whole time.”

  Flicking a packet of sugar against his thumb, he said. “Slept like a baby.” He locked the cabinets and got behind the wheel. When we got to the intersection just past the campground, he turned the truck in the direction of town. “Umm,” I said sipping the coffee. “The interstate is back the other way.”

  “I know it.” He flicked a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “This road is what they used to call Route 66. What they call the Mother Road. It ain’t even on the map no more, but back when your mama and me were driving to Fort Carson, we used to make this track regular. Let’s see how much of it I remember.”

  I made a mental note to mark the date and time of this one down in stone. My father, the man who timed his meals by the second, not by the hunger, was finally breaking free of a schedule. We were taking the long way, through little towns that were no longer fueled by tourist dollars, and down the path that had first introduced my parents to life beyond Choctaw.

  That winding two-lane road brought us face-to-face with long-faded billboards advertising everything from pet monkeys to maple syrup. With its curves and postcard-perfect views of valleys dotted with wildflowers, shiny roadside diners, and Main Street storefronts with double-paned windows, the road brought us back to a past I’d never known before. It brought us back to redemption.

  Chapter Nine

  Past the city limits of a town that was nothing more than a dot on the map, we pulled off onto a gravel parking lot. Red mountains speckled with bright-green pines stood guard over a flat-roofed building below. A tall neon sign flickered with the words Nickel and Dime Diner.

  “This place used to be called something else . . . something Mexican,” my father said as he pulled the keys from the ignition. “Anyway, we stopped here one time when we were heading back home for Christmas. The Christmas before I took off for ’Nam.”

  I knew that the subject of war was off-limits. The scar on his arm and the hunk of missing flesh that made my father’s back seem unbalanced were the only signs that he’d ever even served in the war. “It’s best just to leave some things alone,” my mama would say whenever I’d ask about the scars.

  A moose head with wide antlers hung on a paneled wall at the diner’s entrance. Inside, a woman with a freckled face welcomed us. “We’re full at the moment. But feel free to have a place at the snack bar if you like.”

  We sat on red-vinyl stools at the snack bar and ordered from a menu that was smeared with crayon marks and grease. A young boy with a pencil tucked behind his ear mumbled a greeting and put two glasses of water before us. If the waiter lacked hospitality, the man sitting next to me made up for it. Wearing a blue baseball cap with gray sideburns sticking out from underneath, the man started talking as soon as he sat down. “Go with the hot roast beef sandwich,” he said.

  “Pretty good, huh?” I asked, still holding the menu.

  The man nodded and smiled, revealing a gold tooth. “Traveling through?”

  “Something like that,” I said and glanced at my father. He was staring straight ahead with his cap pulled down lower. “Where’s home?”

  The question caused me to flinch. Up until now, I would have answered “Atlanta” without batting an eye, but now that place seemed about as far away as the canyon we were in search of. If nothing else, coming back to Choctaw had reminded me that part of me had never really left in the first place. “Choctaw,” I said. “A little place down in Georgia.”

  “I was in the service with a fella from Savannah. Anywhere close to there?”

  “No, we’re farther south.”

  “That fella saved my life one time. We were Green Berets.” The man fanned his hands in front of him just like he might have a hot plate of food to worry with. “Down in Saigon. Top secret. Sorry, I can’t disclose the details.”

  With stories ranging from evacuations to attempted assassinations, he painted a war story as flashy as any spy novel. Food did not slow him down. He simply spewed food and tales all in one breath. My father never spoke until after the man had picked up his tab and left the building.

  “The way I figure it, if anybody’s got to brag about war, they ain’t got much to brag about,” he said, picking up the check.

  Questions long held since the first time I saw his scarred back as a child now came to me in waves, teasing me to walk out into the deep end of the past. “Did you want to go? You know, fight the war?”

  He didn’t answer until he had cranked the engine and we were pulling away. “It was my job. I didn’t necessarily want
to go and leave my wife and baby boy. But I got called. It was my duty.”

  Staring straight ahead at the broken yellow line that separated the highway, I was quiet and never asked about the scars. He never told me the details either. With my father, the past was chipped away in pieces, and I was left to arrange them into a story.

  “The first time me and your mama made this trip, we were just wet behind the ears. I’d just finished jump school at Fort Benning when we got married.” He chuckled and shook his head. “When I got stationed out here in Colorado, I never let on to your mama how scared I was.” A construction crew was working up ahead on the road, and the traffic slowed and then stopped. “You jumped out of planes, huh? I never knew that.”

  My father turned and looked at me as if I’d said I didn’t know that his name was Ron. “You did too.”

  “No. I . . . you know, wondered . . .”

  “Well, I jumped a lot,” he mumbled as he leaned forward over the steering wheel and tightened his grip. “I liked it. It was . . . you know . . . fun. I’m talking about the training. Now, when it came time to jumping out of a helicopter in ’Nam . . . it would make the best of ’em pee in their jump-suits. Especially after seeing your buddy blowed to bits like clay skeet.” He glanced at me, and I nodded my head in agreement, thinking that if I didn’t show some sort of reaction, he would stop talking.

  “Some of the boys took to the bottle over it. But I used letters to keep me even-keeled. I’d write your mama every day if I could help it. For some reason . . . it was easier for me to say what I wanted to say with the pen instead of my mouth.” I felt the sun pour over me through the truck window and tried to imagine my father writing a letter to my mother. “When I got back from ’Nam I kept on writing her letters. Usually on Sundays, while she was at church. I’d slip off to Brouser’s Pond and fish a little and write a little.”

  Racking my mind for any sign of a letter in the chest that Malley had found, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to this part of my parents—the part that was buried deeper than the bottom of a cedar box full of memories.

  That night while I paid for our rental space at a campground just the other side of the New Mexico border, I pulled a sheet of blank paper stamped with the campground logo from the welcome folder. An older lady, wearing a yellow vest stitched with the campground logo, smiled when I pointed to the sheet of paper. “Excuse me, ma’am. Do you have any more paper? Maybe some envelopes too?”

  Sitting outside on the concrete picnic table, I smoothed out the paper against the folder. The smell of charbroiled beef rose high above the campers. Looking up, all I saw were portable TV antennas and satellites attached to the tops of expandable motor homes. Open spaces. Where were the open spaces?

  Climbing to the top of our camper, I squatted next to the air vent and listened to the sounds of my father moving about as he got ready for bed. The camper door squeaked open and he leaned out, looking for me.

  “I’m looking for stars,” I yelled down. “Thought they might give me some inspiration to write a letter to my wife.” Nodding, he turned to close the door. “I was wondering. With all that racket you’re making up there, I figured I’d look up and find the mother of all squirrels.”

  After I’d felt the trailer tilt, signaling that he was now in bed, I flattened the paper against the folder the same way I’d done a hundred times before a final exam.

  With pen pressed to paper, I sat there under a sky covered with more stars than I knew existed. My father’s matter-of-fact words now echoed in my head. It was easier for me to say what I wanted to say with a pen instead of with my mouth.

  So I just started writing. First about the stars and how I wished Heather was there to see them, and how, if I could, I’d stand up and make her a necklace from the night sky. I wrote until I had three pages filled up with words that should have been spoken long ago.

  The next morning, the New Mexico sky was tinged blue, a color that reminded me of the bluebonnets that we’d passed along the highway back in Texas. Ordinary things that I’d never even noticed, let alone knew the names of, now caught my attention. Up until the accident and the discovery of the spot, I would have just flown past the interstate with the rest of the drivers, never noticing the beauty that waved against the breeze of passing vehicles.

  Now, as we drove along the old Mother Highway at a speed worthy of a Sunday-afternoon stroll, everything in our path was worth investigation. And for the first time I realized that even a mindless act like breathing had become easier since leaving Atlanta.

  Pulling into a gas station tucked beneath a cove of rocks, we found an old man sitting on a stack of tires. He wore a gray work shirt with the name Stu stitched across the pocket. Pumping the gas, I waved, and he ambled closer to the trailer, circling it twice before speaking. “You’re a far piece from Georgia.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “We’re going to the Grand Canyon with some stops and starts along the way.”

  He nodded and massaged the crown of his head.

  “Is there anything around here we might need to check out?”

  Tucking his hands in his pockets, he motioned with his head toward the highway. “When the tourists used to pass through, they’d usually stop at the zoo just north of the red light. But they closed that . . . oh, I don’t know how long ago. The woman who owned it had this chicken that would play the piano for a fifty-cent piece. Word is, she financed a move to Scottsdale off of that chicken.”

  “Really?” I said. “Well, maybe that’s what I need. A piano-playing chicken.”

  The man was still recounting the money I’d given him for the gas when he looked up. “Oh, and there’s a hot-air balloon festival every fall. Now, that draws them in. The older people like me like to watch the sky fill up with balloons, and the younger people like you like to jump from the sky.” “Sir?”

  “They jump out of airplanes. Two, three, four at a time. Alton Zeller makes barrels of money carrying them up and down in his old army plane. He was a regular Red Baron back in the war.”

  I moved close to the old man and whispered, “Where did you say we could find this Mr. Alton?”

  Alton Zeller’s fortune earned taking the bold up in an airplane to skydive must have been spent on the vehicles he drove on the ground. Edges of the vinyl portable carport flapped against the breeze as every model of Porsche sat underneath. My father walked around the cars with his hands tucked in his pockets as I listened to instructions from a man who wore a gold chain with a diamond-encrusted Z strapped around his neck.

  When Z Man, as he liked to be called, asked if I’d ever skydived before, I mumbled but never responded. “If you haven’t done it before, you go tandem with my assistant, Jo. You’ve got experience, then you sign your life away to me and jump alone.” He waved his hands in the air, and the diamonds on his horseshoe ring sparkled. “A matter of forms,” he said in a thick northeastern accent. Turning toward a group of clipboards hanging on the wall, he once again waved his hands in the air and mumbled something. His hyper movement reminded me of an oversized flea.

  “So, what will it be? Tandem or alone?” he asked, never looking back at me.

  “Alone.”

  Reaching for a clipboard from the wall, he stacked it full of forms and then began flipping through a pile of green jumpsuits. Signing the forms that he handed me, I was determined not to say any more than I had to. I hadn’t made it this far to jump out of a plane with a nanny holding my hand. Z Man yanked a suit from the wall of the air hangar just as my father wandered over.

  “Try this one. Look, if it doesn’t fit, tell me now. Speak up while we’re still on the ground. You’ll save us all some headaches. No pun intended.” He laughed and patted my back. “Okay, sir, we have a nice air-conditioned lounge for you while you wait for your son.” He fanned his hand across the hangar to a white door framed in glass.

  “Wait?” My father looked at the man as though the Z on his necklace was blinding him. “I’ve waited forty year
s to jump again. I’m not waiting anymore.”

  “Okay,” he said in a singsong way. “Sir, are you physically capable? I’m sorry. I have to ask these questions. Insurance, insurance.”

  My father cocked his cap back and lifted his chin. “Let me put it like this, Z man. If George Bush can jump out of a plane at eighty, I dang sure can handle it at sixty.”

  The man’s necklace swung back and forth as he hurried inside the office to find another batch of release forms.

  “You’re sure you’re up to this?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Kicking me in the seat of the jumpsuit, my father grunted and said, “Boy, go on and get your tail in that plane.”

  The military-style plane made me think of something my father might have ridden back in Vietnam. We strapped on the helmets while Alton’s assistant gave us another pep talk.

  The roar of the airplane rattled her words until she sounded like she was talking into a fan. Looking over at my father with only the edges of his face exposed from the helmet, I pictured him as a young man, burdened with a wife and child, and fighting to come out alive.

  When my time came, I squatted down and touched the parachute case on my back. When I slightly turned, my father grinned the way a father might the first time his son hits a home run. I couldn’t believe we were about to jump from a plane, and my stomach turned with anticipation. Right then I knew if the fall didn’t kill me, Heather would. With wind knocking against me, I stood at the opened door and never looked down. Instead, I kept my eyes focused on the blue horizon and wondered if this was how all of creation looked to the eyes of God.

  Jumping was not hard after that thought. Jo gave the signal, and I just slipped out. Getting knocked around a couple of times, I tried to focus on the wide-open horizon before me as I fell faster and faster. It was the sound that I would remember. The wind whistled but never roared. I turned my head to look at my father. With his arms outstretched he seemed bigger than life as he gave me two big thumbs up. Letting out a holler that only the wind and God could hear, I felt the blood rush to my face. It was a battle cry of sorts. A battle cry meant for war against the impossible.