the Fall

The wind was low, but it made a constant buzz sound as it blew over the ridges in the metal. “My photographer’s late,” I said.

Paula showed me to a folding card table in one corner of the hangar and handed me some forms. The forms said I was about to void my life insurance policy. Some people came in while I was busy voiding, and I heard the high rattle of an airplane outside. Carl was back and John and Sarah, here to celebrate John’s twenty-second birthday, had arrived. What better way to celebrate twenty-two than put twenty-three into question.

I set my forms down on the card table, grabbed my notebook, and went out of the hangar onto the asphalt.

“I’m Todd,” I said, “from the newspaper.”

“I’m Carl from the skydiving place.” He shook my hand and I was about to tell him about my photographer, but he kept walking toward the hanger and the couple there to celebrate John’s birthday. I walked after him with my notebook.

I spent four and a half hours at that airstrip, and in that time I never once felt comfortable around Carl, the man in whose hands I would later place my life. He walked over to the card table and picked up the six pages of forms I’d left there. Then, he drew back his lips and breathed in hard through his teeth as he scanned through them, stopping on page five. He turned the page around flat on the table and pushed it across, his middle and ring fingers crossing a blank line toward the bottom. I’d forgotten an initial.

“I hope I was more careful packing those chutes than you were signing these forms,” he said.

Me too.

After the forms, we received our instruction, and I got out my notebook. I’d done other stories for the paper before, covered lectures, written music reviews, but I was a little nervous about this one; I hadn’t done many big feature stories, and I wanted to be sure I had excellent notes. I took 38 pages of them.

I wrote down how strange John looked on top of a three-foot sawhorse, arching his back as if he were falling. I wrote down how Carl slapped me in the ass after no one could tell him which was the heaviest part of a skydiver. Carl said it was the ass part that fell fastest. That was why we practiced arching our backs belly down on the sawhorses.

I wrote down how shiny the red paint of the plane looked in the sun and I sketched the pair of jagged three-inch pink-white scars that framed Carl’s mouth from both sides. I took 38 pages of notes.

That was always a little unnerving, those scars. I didn’t mind them, but I couldn’t stop wondering if he’d gotten them falling out of a plane somewhere. Maybe on the edge of a propeller or colliding with a small, misguided bird. Or maybe someone had punched him in the face with a bottle.

To be fair, Carl did make remarks about my note taking during this time, saying I should pay more attention to his demonstrations (he was holding a badminton shuttlecock above his head and dropping it to the floor when he said this). I’m not certain what he thought I might be writing in my notebook. I am certain I made a note of the shuttlecock and of how it bounced.

Also in fairness’ interest, many remarks were made about the failproof nature of our upcoming dives throughout our two-hour training with Carl. Many remarks implied that we could not screw this up.