Fatality                       

5,870 wds       

In memory of Betsy LeBuhn 1954-1976

On the way back to Laramie we drank beer but it didn’t do any good, if good means making us talkative and jolly. That day there was nothing to be jolly about. I can drink my share ~ the heavy, dark kind, nothing light. I’m wiry and energetic and only real beer holds me down. I can drink it and forget who i am, imagine myself as Perfect Man ~ false, like every image. The Perfect Man i carry around in my head has been proven false since that late afternoon with the sun dying among the mountains.

Three of us rode back to Wyoming in Jeremy’s jeep. Jeremy drove, Don sat in the front seat and i stretched out in back on heaps of skydiving gear ~ helmets, jumpsuits, parachutes ~ and kept my mind and body ready. I determined i would fake nothing and would not engage in talk to pass the time. We were all in the same mood rolling home. We didn’t want to talk about it and nothing else was important so were silent.

In Ft. Collins we stopped for gas. Traditionally the passengers paid the driver for gas, so i handed Jeremy a five dollar bill.

    “Keep it.”

     “Why?”

“Keep it.”

I had to get away from him and everyone else, so i went around the whitewashed cinder block building, past bathroom doors and a pile of scrap metal and beyond to a fence. It felt like i had to get around many things standing in my way. Beyond the fence was a small back yard, one of many behind a row of houses on a residential street in a poor neighborhood. In the yard a small table with a tattered umbrella over it was set around with chairs with cushions of snow. I leaned on the fence rail and studied this scene, calm and fresh, strange to me now.

I will never forget this day, i said to myself. Already the woman’s death was currency, a jewel of experience in the hard, true world, an arrow showing the way, a route to take. If only i can  read the arrow right! Who else possesses such wealth? Men who go where few have the courage to go and suffer what few can bear, these have earned it.

I will remember all that happened exactly as it happened and all that may yet happen this day, i told myself. I will remember every detail and will live thereby, live more fully because of it. Living more fully will put this day to use and give her death a purpose.         The certainty of the same death happening to me, to all of us one way or another, forces me to pay attention. Someday i will die like her, or some other way, does it matter? Dying on a day like this would be better; i would be involved in a sport i love with people i respect. It would be quick and lights out in a damp grassy field scattered with snow, the day cool and clear. 

Now i concentrated on this yard. An old car rusted to one side, ten feet from the table with the worn umbrella and in front of the car was a large tank on a cement slab and around the slab the ground was bare where gas or oil leaked out and killed the grass.  Opposite the car stood clothes-line poles with pins on the plastic coated lines and beside the back door steps of new concrete, trash cans in a wooden rack on wheels. To the right and left were more yards, each different or similar in various ways, each holding life within limits. 

All this was vital and easy to remember because i grew up in houses like these and played within fences. I could have relaxed here and grown used to this one particular square of yard above all others. It would be secure and i could sleep my life away. I woke from my daze. An engine started. They were waiting for me, anxious, curious.

We maintained silence riding through the mountains. To me, this is the most beautiful highway in the world, Rt. 287 from Ft. Collins, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming. At Laporte just north of Ft. Collins the road turns west, passes the entrance to the Cache La Poudre valley and turns north into the mountains. It curves and climbs and winds until the Laramie valley opens out. My apartment, my studies, my part-time job, my brother, all were there. We had made the ride through the mountains south to the Drop Zone and returned many times. I knew the route well since i was a boy hunting and fishing in those hills. But this ride with evening closing in was very different because we had seen a woman die.  

We didn’t know her; she was from a club out of Boulder. She came to the DZ with others from her club, got in the old Cessna 180, jumped and was tangled in her gear, passed out or committed suicide, nobody knew, nobody will know. All evidence hit the ground at one hundred and twenty miles an hour. She was a non-survivor. On our other trips home we had celebrated our own survival, drank beer and were jolly, exalted, though less. This trip we shared one skull shattering idea.

I respected Jeremy and liked Don. Don and i were similar, same age and height.  He was thirty pounds heavier. I had grown up in a little road bulge town in Wyoming, like Don’s home in Nebraska. Jeremy was the boss, the club president, and came from the east coast, a land of mystery. Sometimes he was lordly to us country types and talked too much, but he was also enthusiastic, vigorous and he knew skydiving. Driving through the mountains, Jeremy could get nervous about rock slides, deer or bears on the road or blizzards “slamming in, closing the road and locking us in ice.” Don and i laughed out loud, we couldn’t help it. “Don’t get locked in ice,” we shouted to each other when Jeremy wasn’t around. Don and i felt superior to Jeremy about many things but not about skydiving and skydiving was most important.

I was at ease in mountains and not worried about ice. I grew up there hiking, hunting and fishing. On the way home driving through the mountains we usually drank beer and jabbered about jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, a joke in itself considering the condition of the airplanes we jumped out of.  And life and death and all the rest. Even intoxicated and high on pot and silly we had intense, clear conversations.

One evening driving home Jeremy was obnoxious, probing Don for revealing details from his past and mocking him for being a farm boy, a hayseed. Though younger and a lowly student at the University of Wyoming where Jeremy had been a physics professor for over two years, Don handled Jeremy the Egghead like a pro. Don got by every question, accusation and snide remark and kept the mood light, even as Jeremy dug deep and became genuinely vicious. Jeremy may have had the wallpaper, the diploma in the frame above his desk, but Don knew how to corral an angry bull. Don gave away nothing. 

I had other friends like Don, most of them thinner. Don could eat enough for two farm boys and drink a pitcher of beer in one minute, we timed him, he picked it up wet and set it down dry. I saw him do it only once, of course, he had sense enough not to kill himself merely to boost his reputation. 

One day at the Drop Zone Don’s buddy Snorts (nickname) showed up from their home DZ in Nebraska and told us back in the sticks (All of Nebraska is in the sticks but Wyoming is not, Wyoming is in the rocks.) Don was known as Donnie Lee. He said to us, “I want to get away from all that, just call me Don.” So that’s what we called him with a heavy down beat, to remind him, 

so he knew we knew he was really Donnie Lee and we had something on him. It didn’t bother him. Don was sharp, someone had let him in on the joke early. 

One night Jeremy was driving Don’s car (i think because driving made him the boss) in Colorado and was speeding and ran a stop sign in some small town. We were feeling tough and free so get the hell out of the way! Why not run a stop sign? The place is mostly graveyard, no other cars for miles, but a cop was hiding out and we were fresh business so he secured his coffee and doughnut in the specially made coffee/doughnut rack built into the dashboard of his patrol car designed to minimize spillage during a high speed chase and paid for courtesy of you the taxpayer, and stopped us. He was counting on Jeremy paying his salary that week and a few bills. 

I was in the back seat feeling the speed and not paying attention. Jeremy went back to the cop car and returned with a ticket for one hundred and fifty dollars. “Golly, Jer, is that all you could get from him?” Don said, but Jeremy didn’t laugh. He then had to drive to a mail box in that empty, dusty town and mail a check to the cop shop. The officer gave Jeremy a self-addressed, stamped envelope and followed us to visually confirm the deposit. Jeremy was so pissed off Don had to drive. We had to talk a long time to connect with Jeremy.

“You live in Wyoming, right?” Don said. “Why do you care? Tomorrow morning put a stop payment order on that check!” 

“You would do that?”

“Sure i would. I live in Wyoming too!”

Since we rarely took Don’s car, or mine, to the Drop Zone, we told Jeremy, who drove us all in his jeep most of the time, that the chances were good that if he could avoid being stopped again in his own vehicle by the same cop they would never catch him. If Don himself was stopped in his car in Colorado he would say i don’t know nothing about it, my buddy borrowed my car and loaned it to this other guy, i was sick in bed that day. Anything would work. Our evaluation of the situation worked itself around to where that officer had to be truly dim to think the check would not be stopped. Feeling ran high against the man of law and the system that “shat him out.” Cops? Who needs them? Why even bother with them when they’re that green? A truly intelligent, purposeful individual can sweep them aside with ease. It’s sad but that’s what life is mostly about, putting that kind of human garbage behind you. 

What difference does it make, for that matter, that most people live and die? Most of them never know a goddam thing, never know they’re alive! Sub-humans, they never come close to what a man or woman can be, never even suspect another world exists. Trash, mindless, wasted flesh, fertilizer, shitcan the whole pile, burn them up and push them into a hole!

That fool in blue would never make a skydive. God no, never get close to the aircraft, unless it was full of coffee and doughnuts. I wouldn’t get on a lift with him. That pinhead is too busy chewing gum, he chews it to keep his mind busy. 

But he is useful, as a tool to keep the rabble in line. Those toiling ants; a guard dog is needed to keep this trash from spilling into the streets. Most of the human race fits that category. Jesus, it’s pitiful, but what can you do, can you get them all in one place and nuke the sorry garbage? That’s the solution, but impossible. Compulsory birth control, that’s the only viable solution, said Jeremy.

Don didn‘t know what compulsory or viable meant (i didn‘t either, but knew enough not to ask) and Jeremy struck a lordly tone in informing his underling. We got very nasty that time ~ pure mean and i backed out of the conversation. Usually after a day jumping i'm faded enough to drift off anywhere.

       Eventually, as i say, we talked El Presidente back into being happy. He had lived on that restrictive east coast so long he was shocked to think Don, or anyone, would bounce a check off the cops.

On other evenings we drank a few beers and got mellow, a popular term back then. I tried to drift off to sleep, but only came close to it, feeling the shift and sway of the car turning through the hills on Rt. 287. I remembered places along the road. This turn was for Virginia Dale where, according to the historical marker, one of many my brother never tired of calling “hysterical markers,” because our father had to stop at all of them, Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice-president, was almost cornered and carved up by indians. The day we stopped to read it my father had to tell me why it would be bad if the red men got Hannibal’s hair, though he probably didn’t have any hair left to get. “Those old red boys didn’t have much use for a man without hair,” my father said, lifting his cap and laughing. I remember his smiling face. 

North along the road was the Borderline Bar, so called because within sight of its rough plank porch with un-milled log rails and posts and a chair made entirely of deer antlers with a patch of deer hide for a seat, stood a heavy sign with tall, flowing letters grooved into the wood and painted welcoming all to the state of Wyoming. Beyond this sign the country became rockier. We came to this bar on the northern edge of Colorado when we were too young or unable to buy beer at home. We were glad for the ride because we had no place but the car to drink the beer. When the police cracked down in Laramie and closed the liquor stores and bars to minors the Borderline Bar would run dry by eight pm Saturday night. Inside there was a long pine bar top smoothed by many elbows, a tv and, opposite the bar, six tables and an electric shuffleboard of polished wood with a scoreboard flashing above it.

I was told that upstairs at the Borderline Bar there had been a murder and the body dismembered. No one would tell me the details. My brother said the victim was a boy my age and my father sat on his stool, listening, turning a damp labeled beer bottle on the dark varnished pine, turning it with his fingertips, saying nothing and the round, red face of the grinning bartender said, "Yes sir (sir, to me, a boy!) right up them steps, that's where they dragged the body by the feet, the head going clump clump clump on each step. They did the ghastly deed with a knife and ax in the bathtub." Like hanging a deer from the back legs to drain and skin it, that's how it happened, i thought. 

That was many years ago and i did feel tricked, but they also taught me much that was useful. I will always remember that bright round bartender's face, dead now i'm sure. He was always sick with something. Many diseases were mentioned. Now we know he died of alcoholism. His name was Ray.

Those past evenings going home on Rt. 287 in the settling twilight were peaceful with fading vigor, unlike the day of the fatality. Riding home the evening the woman killed, i lay in the back of Jeremy's jeep on the gear and smelled the dirt from the field in the dry canvass or the sleek, less permeable nylon rip stop material of the parachutes, plus chicken and cow shit ~ there is a difference in the stink. The farmer of the land beside the Drop Zone was allowed to let his animals run loose in the field on weekdays when no one jumped there. All these odors mixed with my own body odor. My body rested while my mind went ahead to home along this well-known road curving out of the foothills and straightening onto the prairie and into the Laramie valley. As we passed the cement plant with one chimney and soon after buildings and lights of the town i often thought of myself as a soldier returning to base. This time we suffered a casualty, a beautiful young woman, age twenty-one.

And there, as on other occasions, i would visit my brother. He would have what was expected in his kitchen or on the end table of his living room; a bottle of beer, a cup of tea or coffee, a small plate with pastry or fruit on it, neatly arranged.

Into this warm haven i would burst with a shout, "I saw a young woman die! Her parachute didn't open and she slammed face first into the ground at a hundred and twenty miles an hour!"

Wait, no, not that way, not with this. This is important. Instead, i would be silent, reserved, moving with knowing strokes, and he would listen to me, listen to the power of my silences. In the set of my shoulders he would feel the presence of an inviolate learning

My brother does not listen to me or, more precisely, he selects what he wants to hear and somehow his selection makes the rest important, or unimportant. And just as i get well started he interrupts ~ with what? It doesn't matter. Somehow he suggests my sentences are too long, or that i elaborate too much or i talk too fast or fail in relating a coherent story. The word uneven is one of his favorite words. This won’t happen tonight. Tonight he will listen and nod and accept what i say and how i say it. It is too important for him not to listen.

Tonight i could be smug, yet even this change would fit the routine and he would have it all out of me in his way. At first he would not understand, pretend to be too busy in his own thoughts and suggest, without saying so rudely or directly, that i should save it for a better day, this is not the time. It has never been the time before now. So i will insist and he will be surprised by my energy and grow gently probing and concerned and i will lay it all before him so he can tell me at his leisure what he thinks of it. 

Or in another mood, if his day went well for him he might welcome me with a generous smile and a bottle of beer (he never drinks beer from a can) and i would be compelled to suddenly spill the whole story. Perhaps others would be there, a dinner party, women in fine clothes aghast to hear a young woman would take such a risk and, she was killed? My very presence a threat, my brother would move in to protect them from the barbarian. He would be serious, polite and firm, attentive of course and in some way let me know this kind of thing, right now, is inappropriate. Have you had dinner? Matilda will fix you something n the kitchen.

Or there could be a bunch of guys back from a ball game playing cards at the kitchen table, empties everywhere, a cloud of smoke in the low light, the table covered with chips and ashtrays on an old army blanket. This is his gang of veterans and they have enough experience with corpses to put my story directly into the shitcan. It's like life, it's like death, it's like nothing at all. Deal the cards.

Any way it happens, i will have an audience with my brother. I will tell him everything, every detail, and when i reach a certain, over-loaded point i will see him smile in his particular way and know from this point on i am telling the story again, shining a false literary light on lesser facets of the jewel, adding subjective features detrimental to the whole,  piling ever more onto an overly ornamental style. In the past he has said this is what i do, but i can't remember exactly when or how he said it. 

How can i argue with him? This material is vital, it bridges a necessary span, a distance between two points that allows the reader or listener to warm, to get not too comfortable but into an engaging rhythm. You feel it at the time the event rolls open and clarifies. My brother nods and asks if this whole thing is not now too delicate. It's like carrying a very full bucket of compost or, let’s be fundamental, liquid shit, which remains beautifully fertile 

in the bucket or in the ground ~ in proportion ~ but if you spill it on your boots it just stinks.

Yet even if i succeeded as a craftsman he would say, "That's a dangerous sport you're in."  And no more. The weariness in his tone is the signal to discontinue communication. He will gesture toward my exit and at the same time glance at the door to his studio, his work, his own exit. No one else goes in that room. "Tomorrow's another day," he says and stands up with indisputable power and i have to go. 

       As we drove into town i pondered just such an audience.

We arrived at Jeremy's and unloaded the gear. The street was dark and quiet, as if nothing had happened. The club parachutes, one of which i used, we stowed in a closet. This was the only gear i needed. For my own personal use i carried a back pack containing food, a book if study were possible and extra socks, nothing more. I helped carry the gear to the closet where it is usually stowed in Jeremy’s house and Don offered me a ride home. I accepted, saying goodbye to Jeremy.

Don and i were equals, and in his car i felt like talking for the first time. This had happened before after we got away from Jeremy. Don didn't have to tell me he disliked Jeremy, but not enough to get out of skydiving to avoid him. I felt the same way. Since Jeremy came from the east coast he talked too fast, was older and thought himself special. He was president of the club, a position he held because no one else had a closet big enough for the club’s gear. We thought this increased his arrogance. On one occasion he strongly hinted that he would have preferred a job in a more populated ~ meaning better ~ part of the country, in a more prestigious university. His position at the University of Wyoming was the best he could get. We tried to do a lot more with him in the first months after joining the club, but now outside of skydiving we avoided him. 

In the car Don said, "Did you see her skull?"

"What was left of it."

"No face, no head, nothing. That's what it looks like when it happens to us."

"I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen to me."

"It was an accident. You can't stop it from happening, that's why they call it an accident."  I remember this one statement more than any other Don ever said to me.

I said, "You can stop it. You have to be super safe." Suddenly i was ashamed of sounding falsely confident to Don, who had fourteen more jumps than i had. "Anyway, walking down the street you can get killed. More people die in car wrecks, you know."

As i spoke he was shaking his head in the negative.

"You can't get hit by anything going a hundred and twenty miles an hour walking down the street,”  he said. 

I have tried to think my way around what Don said and haven't been able to do it yet. So, are we doomed?

"Well, i'm not going to worry about it now," Don said. "We made it through today, so far, that will have to do. I'm going to the Buckhorn. You feel like a beer?"

"Not right now, thanks, i'm going to talk to my brother."

I asked him to drop me a few blocks from the house so i could walk and clear my head. When i got out, thanking him for the ride, i said, "I'm not worried and i won't be discouraged, just wary. "

"Wary is the word for today. That's me, i guess."

"I'll see you next weekend, if not before."

"Look me up. I'll be at the Buckhorn or the dorm."

He drove away as i stepped to the sidewalk dappled in shadows created by streetlights just now coming on. I suddenly realized i had not warned him to avoid getting locked in ice> I must remember to say it next time, if there is one. Would there be a next time? Good old Don, a steady hand, a regular customer at a bar and living in the dorms so he can get enough to eat, that's practical. I felt uneasy for him; he lived on the tenth floor, he might have a nightmare and jump. 

Shouldering my pack, i walked. The street was quiet, some of the houses were warm and inviting, snug harbors, places of refuge. According to my plan, i had a few blocks to go so i could really think out everything i would say to my brother, plus i didn't want to take Don too far out of his way. 

At the time i was reading Carlos Castaneda's books. In one he speaks of certain times and places having power. The death i had seen today, the drug i had taken (alcohol), the restful ride home and review of my life and connection with the road which is so beautiful, had given me power. I wanted to use this power, not over my brother, but with him. I wanted to truly study his response, to understand him more deeply, listen as we sat together drinking beer or coffee and clearly see our differences and similarities and truly understand how he spent his Sunday afternoon. It could be called his average day and as such the most important of his life. The death i had witnessed and the power it gave me would create this fully illuminated situation. 

My brother moved well ahead of me; he was becoming educated in the arts and growing in the financial prowess that secures this quality of life. I had yet to do anything to match his experience as a marine, even one who served in peacetime. I wanted the sureness and solidity of having been there. Like him, i wanted to be a cultural adventurer also, but i needed

confidence and strength and that is acquired only through raw physical experience. He had that experience and was leaving me in the dust. He also led a strenuous life of the mind. I had to do a lot of reading to catch up. 

By the time i reached his house i had also reached conclusions. In the deepening evening i sat on the low stone wall between his driveway and the garden and collected my force of thought.

When my brother returned from his service in the marines he had more than mere experience, he held a force that overwhelmed everyone. Before he enlisted our father, also ex-military, told him what to do. Not so after his discharge. One day soon after coming home my brother lit a cigarette in the house. We were all amazed but what surprised us most was that our father, instead of whupping his ass, let him smoke. And Dad was proud of him for it, they were like old soldiers together. Now we were all well advised as to new rules. He had changed so much (inwardly) you didn't know if he would take you seriously or laugh in your face.

That was years ago, i was a child. Now i was working hard to maintain my balance and regain my self-respect and confidence. Skydiving was part of it. My general goal was to go anywhere, do anything and speak to anyone with all due respect of course, and live with ease in contrary conditions.

I was taking a big risk that my brother's mood would be good, that he would not somehow take this away from me. He had a lot of push with me and he used it. It was very easy for him to needle into my nerves and mix them around. Yet he did give me pull, too, he did help me. It was when he gave or took away that worried me and he did so when and where he wanted to, not before, not after. He was unpredictable and unreliable, despite his years of marine training. This idea paralyzed me.  I thought i had understood him, had found the key to being at ease with him. Now the fact that it was his 

decision, not mine, set me back. I was in danger here; he could block me or let me roll on, doing either on a whim. I would not die of it but i could be rubbed out, smudged, blurred, diluted, confused, live a mediocre life. I hate mediocrity.

Seven years older than me, my brother deserves my respect, even though i will have to be brutally honest here and say he had not earned it. Yet i will be well-mannered and show respect. I usually do. Even though he puts me down or at least makes me feel low because my ambitions and insight may threaten him, i see it is easier for him to silence me than listen. He avoids in his very mind thinking of what i say lest my words force him to change and respect me. I know this can be very difficult for him. My brother has trouble accepting change, even when he must know it's for the best. Change is necessary for growth and if he doesn't know this by now i'll have to tell   him how true it is. 

Because at certain times in the past he deliberately hurt me and did it for fun, for ego building and personal satisfaction i will have to confront him. At times when he was strong and i was weak i even insulted myself to gain favor. It never worked. Of all the people i know he is the most dangerous; he can make me despise myself.

Behind me where i sat on the low wall outside my brother's house i heard a toilet flush. Looking up, i saw a lighted window go dark. 

Within me ideas crossed with desire and mixed with the a hard strand of memory right through the middle of it, binding it. Above all was the memory of that young woman laying in the crusty brown grass and snow of that field.

I stood up. Night had descended on that woman's last day alive, her flesh was mixing with the earth. A lot of her, being completely pulverized on impact, had spilled out of her jumpsuit when the ambulance crew tried to pick her up. So will we all be mixed with the mud, though not so suddenly. I must walk with care.

  Yet i wanted to say to him, brother, i found the sky there. I filled my eyes from the great bowl of heaven and there by my feet lay a broken young woman i would never know, never love, a sacrifice to the god who keeps other lives unbroken, if they live with open eyes, it they are aware. She was shattered and lost to me and i was frightened, but i took heart from others whose courage sustained me. Others have suffered before me, others have survived. 

"Yes," he would smile and say. "I'm glad it wasn't you."

Liar!

This is what is left unspoken; "Had it been you i could deliver final, elegant words on your incredibly trivial existence."

  Hoisting my pack and slipping it on, i left my brother's garden wall. I might stop and drink a beer with Don. There might even be a woman or two at the Buckhorn. Women have been known to stray into that place, usually a rough sort. I would have the quiet strength women love so much. Or i could go home and think, live within myself. No matter what, i will take each step as it comes and hold onto it. It is mine, i will keep it, i will keep her. When we were kids my brother could put his hands on my stuff and i hated it, hated how he could do anything he wanted and all our father said was, "I gave your brother the responsibility, do as he says." Now this is mine, secure from him, secure from everyone. I will not ask him, will not communicate with him at all nor with anyone else. If they want something from me, they will have to come to me.                                            

End of “Fatality”