Cemetery Street, John Zunski [read any book TXT] 📗

peeks, they were a train wreck.
Beetle took an immediate liking to Shannie. Shannie became Beetle’s protégée. “I just hope Shannie always shaves her armpits,” I complained to Count. “What’s the fascination with hairy armpits?” Count asked. “They’re not fascinating, they’re fucking disgusting!” I retorted.
My fingers are uncoordinated and I could never get the hang of rubber banding the risers. I became frustrated and still believe rigging belongs in the realm of smoke and mirrors. Shannie took right to rigging and by the end of the summer was ‘unofficially’ packing chutes. “You better not tell a living soul,’ Shannie warned. “I swear Just James, if you tell anyone, even Count, I’ll cut your balls off.” She sounded like Beetle. Beetle was always threatening to cut balls off.
“My lips are sealed.”
“I rigged a chute solo today,” Shannie said. “A newbie’s going to jump it. What if it malfunctions? What if she burns in?”
“What did Beetle say?”
“Everything looked fine.”
“What are you worried about?”
Shannie sighed and rested her chin in her palm. “I don’t want to go tomorrow. I’ll never be able to live with myself.”
The next morning Shannie said she couldn’t go. “If anyone asks, tell them I’m not feeling good.” I wasn’t surprised to see Shannie and Diane pull into the airport’s parking lot. The jumpers were loading.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” I teased.
“Ha-ha,” she responded. “Who has it,” she asked Beetle.
“Four,” Beetle said.
“It would be,” Shannie complained. In the summer of ’86, students went one at a time. It meant Shannie had plenty of time to contemplate her pack job. “It was fifteen minutes of hell,” Shannie later admitted.
I joined Diane – who, clad in her customary denim shorts and half top, stood with a foot resting on the bottom rail of the fence separating parking lot from tarmac. I sat on the top rail next to her. “Did she really pack a parachute?” Diane asked. I brought a finger to my lips. “No one is supposed to know.”
Shannie paced from the staging table into the office, back to the table, to the manifest shack, back to the table, circle around the table and finally back to the manifest shack when the Cessna cut its engine so that the first jumper could exit. “The last jumper is wearing Shannie’s rig,” I whispered to Diane as I watched Shannie staring skyward.
“I’m really proud of her,” Diane said.
“Me too,” I watched Shannie resume pacing; this time she was intercepted by Beetle, who uttered a few words and led her into the office. “She threatened to duck tape me to the rigging table.” Shannie later said. Beetle had told her: “You may have packed the chute but it’s my ass. If anyone finds out, I’m fucked. If it malfunctions, it’s my balls that get cut off.”
“She really trusts you,” I told Shannie. Shannie bit her lower lip.
Diane grabbed my hand as the Cessna made its final approach. The warm softness of her touch woke every cell in my body; I was covered in goosebumps.
Shannie and Beetle stood outside the office door, their gazes directed skyward. A tinge of jealousy rushed over me as teacher and student stood together. The pilot cut the plane’s engine and I looked skyward.
“Oh fuck,” I murmured - my body suddenly rigid. Jumper four had a problem. As the jumper fell away it appeared the parachute malfunctioned.
“What’s happening?” Diane’s dug her fingernails into my wrist.
Then it was over. Jumper four was under a full canopy. “Thank God for a reserve,” Diane sighed.
“That’s not the reserve, it’s the main.”
“And you,” Pete Condra – the jumpmaster for the student load – said to jumper four. “Flawless exit, a great smile, flawless arch. It was so perfect I almost had a perfect load of shit in my pants.” Pete’s hands flew in many directions as he spoke. “Your arch was too good,’ he demonstrated with the back on his hand. “Your pilot chute burbled, it got caught in the vacuum created by your arch. It had no where to go.” Jumper four, whose name was Michelle, was a twenty-something brunette with a toothy smile. She would eventually become a sky-god who would be killed years later in a plane crash at a skydiving competition. “It looked like you were having so much fun holding your arch that you were going to hold it all the way into the ground. Don’t laugh,” Pete told the others. “I’ve seen it happen.”
After hearing Pete’s explanation, Shannie beamed.

Two years later, during the summer of ’88, a year after the Iraqis hit the USS Stark with an Exocet missile killing 37 American sailors, Count made his first jump. He didn’t have to worry about his chute burbling, he wasn’t talented. Ironic, considering two years later, as Shannie and I were making our first jumps, he was stationed at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky as a member 101st air assault division, the modern incarnation of my Grandfather’s old division.
If Count was nervous, he hid it well. “Nothing to be nervous about - other than little Ms. Ortolan confusing twisty ties for rubber bands.”
Unlike the first time she rigged a parachute, Shannie didn’t have to wait until the last pass of the Cessna to witness her handy work; Count was first to exit the plane.
“Not bad,” Pete critiqued Count. “It looked like you wanted to go into a fetal position. Then a light bulb went on and you remembered to look up. Congratulations. Good luck in the army.” A month later, Count left for basic training. Three days after Count’s departure, I helped lower a coffin for the first time.
During the spring of 1990 - around the time Count decided to re-enlist - on the night before Shannie and I made our first jump, Diane, Shannie and I sat around the Ortolan’s kitchen table sipping coffee. “I have something to show you,” Diane said. Shannie and I followed Diane into her bedroom. She handed me the cardboard box with an UPS label affixed to its top. A chill ran along my spine when I noticed the sender: The Reverend Floyd Meaks, Shepherd of the Hills Non Denominational Church, Pleasanton, California. “The box is empty,” Diane said.
“I can see,” I said turning the box over in my hands. “Why would you get a package from my grandfather’s minister?” I asked.
“Before he died, your grandfather asked if I could do him a favor,” Diane answered.
That’s why he was in her room, I thought. “You knew him?” I asked.
“He introduced himself. Anyway, we made an arrangement. Your grandfather said if anything happened hold onto my ashes until James is old enough. He knows what to do with them. I trust him. The minister sent his ashes here for safekeeping. To keep your mother happy, the good reverend gave her bogus ones.”
“I’ll be damned,” I uttered. “But what about the switch? The one Count made.”
“That was phony.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was important that you thought it happened,” Diane said.
Diane and Shannie followed me into the kitchen. “You didn’t need to know about it, but you needed to know that we weren’t burying his real ashes,” Diane said.
We could have jumped the previous winter, but we chose to wait until the weather broke. “I’m not freezing my ass off,” Shannie said. I agreed.
Throughout the class, I found myself glancing at Shannie; later in the morning I noticed I wasn’t the only one. A forty-something man – who Pete Condra dubbed Sergeant Slaughter – with a square jaw, high forehead, and a horrible comb over mauled her with his eyes. Sergeant bragged he was a Philly cop.
“Does he think he’s fooling anyone?” Shannie quipped during break. “Like I didn’t notice he’s going bald.”
“Male pattern baldness is traumatic,” I said.
“How old is your sister,” Sergeant asked.
“You a pervert?” I snapped.
“I think she’s cute.”
“My sister is eight years old and has spina bifida. Stay the fuck away from her!”
“No. No,” Sergeant Slaughter laughed. He leaned against the outside wall of the office and took a long drag off a cigarette. “The cute blonde inside.” Chris, his buddy – a fifty-ish looking man with graying hair and the beginning of a pot belly rolled his eyes. “You have to excuse him,” Chris said after lunch: “He’s high strung.”
“She’s taken. Her boyfriend is a mean motherfucker,” I told him.
“I eat mean motherfuckers for breakfast.”
“The Sergeant is on the prowl,” I warned Shannie.
Never one to back down, Shannie asked Sergeant and Chris if we could join them for lunch. “I hear you have a boyfriend,” Sergeant said. We shared a booth at the greasy spoon next to the airport.
“I see you have a wife,” Shannie pointed out Sergeant’s wedding band.
“She died. Cancer, a few years ago.”
“The jackass isn’t even original. Howard Stern’s been saying that for years.” Shannie fumed after lunch.
“Why do you still wear it?” she asked him.
“It reminds me of our good times.”
“Maybe we have something in common,” Shannie glared. “I like wearing tampons all the time - they remind me of the good times me and my menses share.” I laughed. “Assholes understand flatulence,” she told me later.
As the afternoon progressed, so did Shannie’s flirtatiousness. “Look at those big black boots. Big hands, big feet, makes a girl wonder,” she winked. Sergeant kept a poker face. He even scolded Shannie that this was not the time, this was a matter of “life and death.”
“Give me your home number,” Shannie teased.
“Okay guys,” Pete Condra lisped. “You think you are ready to do it?” The knot in my stomach tightened.
“You remembered them, right?” I asked Shannie.
“Geezus Pete, for the hundred and fifty-second time; they’re on the shelf in the rigging room.”
“You sure?”
Shannie rolled her eyes.
“Let’s do it,” Pete announced. Shannie placed her arm around me and whispered, “Beetle rigged Sergeant’s chute to open lazy, very lazy.”
As we waited, Shannie and I sat against the office wall. Sergeant paced back and forth. “Stan would be proud of you. Hell, I’m proud of you.” She placed a hand on my cheek, the cool dampness of her palm betrayed her nervousness.
Sergeant stopped in front of us. “Better watch it kid. Her boyfriend is a mean motherfucker.”
Shannie glowered, Sergeant resumed pacing.
“First jumpers, manifest,” the PA announcer ordered.
“That’s us,” Shannie said.
“Bug,” I said struggling to my feet. “I ah, I ” the words wrapped themselves around my tongue like a car around a telephone pole. “Thank you,” I closed my eyes. My heart punched my chest for not expressing itself.
“Anytime Just James - what are friends for?” Without a word, we walked together towards manifest.
A sharp whistle cried out followed by Beetle’s soggy voice. Despite my numerous protests she insisted on calling me Jim. “YOO! JIM MORRISON!” she yelled. “YOU FORGET SOMETHING?” She waved the tube containing Stan’s ashes.
“HURRY YUP” Pete lisped over the Cessna’s prop. When we got to the door the jumpmaster gave us the exit order. I struggled to hear Pete over the prop. “Chris four, Chames three, Channie two, Chargent one.” I followed Chris through the open door on my hands and knees to my spot in the rear left side of the Cessna.
Pete barked last minute instructions as the plane taxied to the end of the grass runway. The plane came to a momentary rest before swinging around. The pilot idled up. “LEAN FORWARD,” the jumpmaster ordered. I reached around Shannie with both hands and held her belly; through her jumpsuit I felt her stomach vibrate as the plane lurched forward. As the plane accelerated along the bumpy runway, she leaned her rear-end into my crotch and guided my left hand