A 3rd Night

Johnson played harmonica.  He was from the south, he had been in the Army a total of 53 days and he was usually very quiet.  But at dusk, as the caravan of buses headed out towards the airbase, he played low soulful riffs on a scratched up piece of metal.  I found it comforting, the heat from the North Carolina wind milling in from windows halfway down, the sun chasing and orange in the glow.  It relaxed me in ways I didn't know, mostly because I was looking for a distraction.  Anything to think about besides the jump.

I tried thinking of her, conjuring a face, a stare.  But as soon as I started thinking of the dark eyes I returned to the black door of an airplane, beckoning me forward.  Like stepping into her gaze I trudged dutifully towards it, and then hurtled myself out into the slipstream of the breeze.  At one thousand feet it was a pirouette of sky then ground then sky then parachute then ground.  Colors blended and the wind was white noise.  I was surrounded by thousands of jumpers, dark black in the air, and just as I thought about the fall I put my ankles tightly together and pounded hard down into the sand.

I never had felt so alive.  And tapping my thigh pocket I felt the hard metal cylinder of quarters.  I wanted to remember how my heart was still exploding in my chest, my hair wet with sweat and my face dripping colors from the camoflauge paint.  I packed up my chute and dropped it into my carrier bag...rolling just briefly over to watch the blinking lights of a slew of C-130s wink red lights above me, mixing with stars and a sky with scant clouds.

I hurried back with the other soldiers to the landing zone rally point.  We waited for buses to take us back to barracks, none of us talking, each remembering the thirty seconds we were in the air.

And then we stood in lines of 9 or 10, shuffling our feet and looking at watches as we waited for the phone booths to become vacant.  Husbands calling wives, boyfriends calling girlfriends, calling parents, mouthing I love you in a glass encased stall blinking with fluorescent light.  A moth coming in now and again.

Finally I had the booth, and pulled the roll of quarters out.  I dialed her number, listening to the stirring sound of circuits traveling miles towards her.  A robot voice informed me of the amount of the call and I fed four quarters in before I heard the whir of a dialed call.

Then, in those days of phone booths, it was just two people connecting.  There were no machines...no tapes of recordings.  It was luck at times...catching somebody available with the phone not being used.

I let it ring 12 times.  When I hung up the receiver the four quarters clanged loudly in the coin return.



The barracks were simple, constructed with maximizing sleeping for exceptionally tired soldiers with spare amenities.  Mostly littered with bunk beds, there was a glaring absence of privacy.  At night, men stirred with noises and sleep talking...with no air conditioning it was enough to lie in bed and listen to the sounds of trucks driving by and the occasional sound of the fire guard walking by.

I counted the holes in the ceiling, wondering where she was.  It was not a concern.

Rather it was just an erosion that started a tiny bit of worry...when your heart is beating enough to almost hear in the dark, and adrenaline is still a syrupy trail throughout your body and one is trying to relax enough and go to sleep...just calming, just quieting...if he had spoken to her he might have had that release...she was safe...he was safe...and he could fall asleep.

Instead he thought about the night jump and tried to keep her from insisting that his mind return back to worrying about her.