I have always been a nervous, black cloud, half-empty glass kind of guy. I have been startled by the cat brushing by, causing me to reach for the least lethal weapon—a wooden spoon, a peeler, an empty milk carton.
I come by my nervous disposition honestly. My mother calls it the “Southern malady.” She has the same condition, only worse. She grew up in a formerly wealthy section of Montgomery, Alabama in a house and neighborhood that reeked of possession. The house had been in her mother’s family for over a hundred years and once was stately. When she lived there, it was more haunted than alive. Pictures of her two elder sisters who had both died before they were seven littered the house.
We know of at least three occasions when my grandmother was institutionalized. Back then, institutions were more for avoiding scandal than treatment. Grandpa Elliott was not much of a source of comfort my mother. “He was sad,” my mother said, encapsulating drunken philandering and profligate spending in three words. It is no wonder my mother ended up a fragile woman who drove two husbands away. She lives in a small apartment with double deadlocks. When I pick her up for family events, she stares out the window as if she is on her way to an abattoir. My kids call her “your mother” as opposed to my wife’s mother who they call “Nana.”
It should not come as a surprise when I heard a thump, a curse and rustling coming from just outside the kitchen door, I succumbed to hysterical blindness. I imagined the back door kicked in, gun raised and fired. I was dead, slumped in a kitchen chair with a peony blossom of blood in the middle of my chest.
The fact he knocked in no way comforted me; all it meant was that he preferred to torture before killing. My hands were so sweaty I could barely operate the locks and knob. But the last thing I wanted to was make him wait a second more than was necessary.
He was at least four inches taller than me, which made him around six-foot two, even without the army helmet with the two stars on it and his boots, coated in mud. His face looked like it had been carved out of stone by a lazy sculptor with only barest strokes for eyes, nose and mouth. He took one step forward and grimaced. “May I,” he asked, pointing at one of the kitchen chairs. He wasn’t the sort of man one told no.
He walked past me, dragging his parachute like a coronation train. He also dragged in an uprooted rhododendron that somehow I would have to explain to my wife, Karil, who was asleep upstairs. He plopped into the chair and tilted his helmet three-quarters of an inch up as if this was the only relaxation he would allow himself. “Landed on the pavement, again. Did it on D-Day, fractured five vertebrae, but don’t tell anyone.”
A soldier who parachuted both seventy-two years into the future and onto my front yard was worried that I would betray his sore back. Who would I tell? Who would believe me?
He leaned forward and held out a hand that made mine feel like it was made of limp pizza dough. “Jim,” he said, “Jim Gavin. General Gavin of 82nd Airborne. Jumping Jim.”
I had registered for the draft when I turned 18, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the military. “Hello?” was the best I could offer.
He reached out into his shirt pocket and took out a small well-used leather notebook that had a pencil attached to it with string. “It says you have problem with confidence” he said, quickly closing and returning the notebook to his pocket.
Saying I had a problem with confidence was like saying dogs bark and cats don’t. I was perpetually pestered by doubt like sweat flies annoy a wildebeest. If my family had a crest it would be the Latin for “Is this okay?” I could do nothing, be it deliver a report, make pasta or offer cunnilingus without asking if it was okay.
He shook out a cigarette out of the carton and in one fluid motion perched it between his lips, lit it and took a deep inhalation. All without asking permission. Another thing for me to explain to my wife in the morning. Hopefully she would be too upset about the shrubbery on the floor to notice the acrid remnants of an unfiltered cigarette.
“You may not believe this,” he said, using the glowing end of cigarette like a laser pointer. “But there were times over the drop zone when we were in the dark except for the Germen’s search lights and the bursts of flak all around the plane. I knew as soon as I jumped, I was going to be lit up like a Christmas tree; the Kraut machine gunners drooling to get me in their sights. Believe me, those are times when a man could consider losing confidence in himself.
Consider it? My God, it was all I could not do but assume the fetal position at his feet.
He looked around at the kitchen. To me, it was full of warped cabinets, incontinent plumbing and general decay that spoke of a rehab project now in its second decade. “Nice place you have here. Cozy. Warm. Dry.”
“Thanks,” I said, unsure if he was making fun of me. I plopped into a chair like a paratrooper with a defective chute hitting a bog.
Grimacing he stood up and walked behind me. He put two competent hands on my shoulders that could either provide comfort or snap my neck.
“Son, you have to stop comparing yourself to people. Yes, I was one of the youngest major generals and my life story deserves a News Reel of its own: father of the paratroopers, I was at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the final push to Berlin, part of the occupational government of West Germany and then a highly successful career as a businessman and finally Ambassador to France.” He inhaled like he was enjoying the aroma of a fine brandy that would make me gag. “That was my life and this is yours,” he said, we a broad sweep of his hand.
“Look, son, not every boy who jumped was brave. Some of them were simply pushed out and the static line hook, gravity and prop wash did the rest. They would scream all the way down. More often than not, the Kraut guns got them or they snapped their necks landing in a tree. Never understood why they screamed.”
I knew exactly why they screamed: the weight of the past, the doleful present, careening to a certain and dismal future. With regret’s heft, it was a miracle their parachutes could slow them at all.
He swiveling my chair until our faces (granite and putty) were aligned. “But most fellas just jumped without saying a word. They jumped because they weren’t so obsessed about history, because you don’t have a past at 12,000 feet. Even if you did, it isn’t like you could go back and fix it. They didn’t give a damn about the present either, because every moment could be your last. And the future? Who knew if you even had a future? Hero or not. Fate’s got your number. So why worry about it?”
He stared at me, daring me not to be transformed. Plummeting felt like absolution. Just let go and let gravity take the blame. The past would recede into the sky as the future rapidly encroached. I had been afraid of too many things in my life, too many to ever have happened. It wasn’t elegant or even planned, but I had stumbled into a life that was by most standards good. What had all that dread given me? Nothing but bad advice and sleepless nights.
I nodded like it was the first time in my life.
He patted my shoulder. “Sometimes you just have to jump, Pete. No questions. No doubts. Just jump.”
Wait, what did he call me? “Pete?” I asked.
He frowned. “You are Pete Chozick?” He reached for the notebook. “This is 208 Greenfield, right?”
I shook my head and pointed at the open door. “No this is 207 Greenfield. Pete lives across the street.”
“Damn,” he said, gathering his parachute. “Wind must have made me drift.” He left muttering, “figured you for a screamer.” The only remnant of him or his advice was a dead rhododendron splayed out on the kitchen floor like an unlucky paratrooper.