JUMP

by

Kevin Durden

Sandy was the kind of guy I figured would have to get married, if you know what I mean. Early on he developed a reputation for being, well, impulsive. He loved the jump. I suppose that should be, "he loved to jump," but it wasn't the takeoff or the landing he loved. It was the middle part, the falling. And maybe he fell in love.

So when he decided to tie the knot with a friend of my wife's I had no choice but to agree to be the best man. You see, I'm not a big fan of weddings. Not that my opinion matters much: I am a man. The engagement is the man's day, the wedding is the bride's. Actually, the wedding day is the bride's mother's day, and who really wants to be involved more than you have to, I ask you?

I have to say, though, that today's bride and today's wedding beat all others in my experience all to hell. I am not sure this even qualified as a wedding. This was more of an Attempted Wedding, if you'll pardon the criminal ring that has. The wedding party photos, which the bride had sense enough to schedule an hour before the ceremony, went as well as pictures ever do. The reception was fine. Li'l Smokies in barbecue sauce go a long way toward making any event a success; if they're in a silver chafing dish, so much the better. So the before and after parts of the wedding were sewed up tight. That middle part, the actual marrying, well, that was sticky.

* * *

"Where is he?" my wife hissed. Carolyn had gotten the impression somewhere that this was my fault. I was trying to divest her of this illusion, so far without success.

"I don't know," I said, "he's got to be around here somewhere." We were trying to keep our voices low because the tile in the men's room made a terrible echo. "The guy would be late to his own funeral."

I admit in hindsight that was a poor choice of words. "Funeral, wedding, it's kind of the same thing," Albert said, just back from searching the parking lot. He wasn't trying to make things worse between Carolyn and me, but he sure wasn't helping much.

As you go through life, it's very important to have someone by your side who can point out when you're being an asshole without hurting your feelings. Carolyn is my girl. She can give me a look across a crowded room and let me know I've stepped in it. Today, she gave me the look across a urinal.

"Okay," I said, "I'll check the pastor's office. Maybe he went to find a quiet place to pray."

"Sandy praying?" Albert said. "Isn't that the first sign of the apocalypse?"

Carolyn turned on him and he ducked behind a stall door. "You can't give me that look," he said. "I already have a wife."

Carolyn gripped my arm as we left the bathroom and threaded through the crowd in the entry hall. "Where is he?" she asked through smile-clenched teeth. "I thought you knew this guy."

I tried to walk without looking hurried or showing the pain from Carolyn's dragon-lady-nail-salon-wedding-specials cutting into my arm. This is not my fault, I protested to myself. The thing of it was, I thought I knew him, too.

* * *

We sure started out together early enough. From the first day in Mrs. Davie's first grade class, when he landed on me after vaulting over a shelf in the Activity Corner, Sandy looked for higher and more difficult jumps, and I always had the honor of second jump. We jumped off the front steps of the library, slid off playground swings at the highest arc, jumped from the Civil War cannon in front of town hall (the muzzle pointed north, just in case . . .), and plunged from the twisted branches of a 150-year-old oak we visited on a field trip.

We understood (and were impressed) that the tree was older than even Mrs. Davie, but the jump was the thing. We barely sat long enough to wolf a baloney sandwich and down a half-pint of sweet orange punch. We traded the salty pretzel sticks away and gave the apple a token bite to prove to Mrs. Davie we had tasted of it. The tree beckoned us with its coiled limbs and whispered to us in the hiss of its leaves in a light breeze.

Sandy and I learned something that day: if you jump off something taller than yourself, keep your toes pointed, knees bent, and land in a tumbling roll. Sandy landed flat-footed and jammed his knees into his chin, biting his tongue. I overcorrected; my head and my backside hit at about the same time. I remember lying flat on my back in the cool dirt, looking up through a haze of pain at the canopy of leaves and the bright blue north Florida sky above. Sandy's face appeared over me, his teeth coated red. "Go again?" he asked.

* * *

I told that story at the rehearsal dinner last night, when Ari, Sandy's bride-to-be, asked me about growing up with Sandy. Carolyn remarked that the impact trauma to my head and backside at an early age explained a lot of things she'd wondered about in our years together. I tell the story and she gets the bigger laugh.

There wasn't much laughing this afternoon. I've seen brides panicked, angry, and drunk, but Ari handled Sandy's vanishing act with class. Not that she didn't cry a while; with the stress of planning a wedding and the shock of a missing groom, I think she's got her reasons. I've heard that a gypsy woman is treated as an infant--with no responsibilities and waited on hand and foot--for a month after her wedding, and again for a month after her husband dies or divorces her, the idea being that such a life change entitles her to a little madness, a little withdrawal. The way I count it, Ari has sixty days' vacation coming to her.

But this afternoon, she was the snow queen. After a whispered, albeit shrill, huddle with her mother, father, and Carolyn, she decreed that we'd just go on to the reception. With finger sandwiches, Li'l Smokies, and champagne laid in for a hundred and twenty-five, there was no sense in a hundred and twenty-four going home hungry. Or sober, for that matter. Ari didn't say anything ill about Sandy, but it was clear the way she sat quiet that she was hurt and wanted to know the "why"; she already knew the "who," "what," and "when." If I knew the "where," Sandy'd be honeymooning or hospitalized tonight. He's my friend, but that's no way to treat a lady.

Ari spoke to everyone, even thanked the band for coming. If she'd asked them to play "I Will Survive," and danced solo (we all grew up on disco, remember), no one would have been surprised. But she didn't need a theme song--she's one tough lady, and my feeling that she'll come through this all right was colored by the sneaking feeling, reinforced by frosty looks from Carolyn, that, well, this could be my fault.

* * *

Sandy and I were close friends for all the time we lived in north Florida. When I joined the Army we drifted apart, except for a few times home on leave and one time six years back when I saw him in the airport in Atlanta. Neither of us was much for writing. When he called last January he did not apologize for not calling sooner and I did not apologize for not calling him.

We caught each other up on the world in short order. Me: wife (Carolyn: red-head, good-looking, fun date, fair cook), kids (two: one each type, five and three), job (property insurance field agent: good student discount, how close to the nearest fire station, and all that). Sandy: not married (but not gay either, he quickly added, this being the nineties), no kids (that he knew of, anyway), job (baby formula sales rep).

"You sell baby formula and you ain't married?"

"Why should that matter?" he asked.

"Seems you'd have more credibility if you'd used formula yourself. Do you get to go in and see, you know, hot young mamas breast-feeding their babes?"

"Naw, I try to convince people that bottle-fed is just as good as breast-fed."

"What?" I said, "You're a traitor to men everywhere, is what you are."

Turned out he was working out of Jacksonville, about two hours away, but his company was moving him to Tallahassee. Carolyn overheard my side of the call and told me to invite him for supper once he got settled.

"She must have someone she wants me to meet," Sandy said, laughing.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Her name's Ari. She's got six-month-old sextuplets and she's an A-cup, a formula salesman's dream." Carolyn tagged me with one of those one-knuckle punches girls use.

"Get out!"

"But," I added, rubbing my arm, which was going to bruise, "she's got most of her teeth and a real nice personality."

Sandy asked, "So, really. Does she have any?"

"Any what? I guess Ari's about a C-cup, right hon? Anything more than a mouthful . . ." Two bruises.

"No, man. Kids. Has she got any kids?"

"Oh. Yeah, a son, real nice boy. Why? You got a problem with kids?"

"Little larval humans."

"You can't talk that way, they're your customers."

"Come on, once you have kids, your life isn't yours anymore."

"Well . . ."

"When's the last time you went to a ball game?"

"It hasn't been all that long?"

"Not counting Little League, now."

"Well . . ."

"See? Have kids and your life's over."

"Yeah," I said, but remembered what we'd said summers ago, when we'd found a new jump: "What's wrong with you? You want to live forever?"

A few weeks later Sandy came over with his snazzy car, gold wristwatch, and buttoned-down casual self, and yes, Ari was there. Somehow, despite behind-the-scenes fencing and cajoling, first between Carolyn and Ari and later between Sandy and me, they really did end up hitting it off. All Carolyn and I had to do was clear the dishes, serve coffee, and sit across the table and grin at each other. When they got engaged and started planning the wedding we were pretty tickled with ourselves, aside from a little twinge on my part that Sandy seemed to be ready to settle down into married life awful fast after playing the field so long. But I kept it to myself; some guys, when they're ready, they're ready.

* * *

My God, Sandy a baby-milk pusher and me an insurance pencil-neck, positively respectable as we sink into middle age and the healthy, wholesome challenges of lawn care and painting picket fences. There was a time when you couldn't get us to do chores without the threat of the belt, couldn't get us to wear shoes except at school, church, and days the flag flew at half-staff. All our waking hours were spent in pursuit of the jump.

We'd pick our way barefoot through the sandspurs and beggar lice to the edge of the quarry to jump thirty feet into the milky rainwater that filled the bottom half of the pit. Looking down didn't do any good--there could have been, and as a matter of cold fact were, all manner of rusting, snag-toothed excavation tools abandoned in the water below. We knew the places where chalky shelves of limestone jutted from the sides of the pit only feet below the surface when we needed fathoms to arch out of our dives. We knew we'd be blind in the murk until we kicked and rose, shot back towards the light, broke the surface, and felt . . . well, like we could live forever.

I said looking down didn't do any good, and I misspoke. Looking down gave you time to think of all the things that could go wrong, tense against the sting of water on belly and thighs if you didn't hit right. Looking down was good, a twelve-year-old's good, full of the richness of dread and anticipation, of things known, unknown, and hinted at--all that even before the jump.

The jump: we forced ourselves to hold at the edge as long as we could, trying to balance the need to step off with the growing pressure of the wait. If you judged it just right, you'd take that step you couldn't take back just as the others on the bank and watching from the water below thought you'd lost your nerve and wouldn't budge if you stood there the rest of the summer. I felt the shocking loss as my toes slid off the slick tuft of grass, fighting for a smooth, streamlined arrangement of arms, legs, and body as I fell, because it is one thing at age twelve to be about to die, and quite another to be about to die and look foolish in the dying. What always shot through my mind, but I never said, just before I hit the water, was Wait! I didn't mean it! I can do better!

Then I hit the water, the sting and shock telling me that I was still alive, but the thin stream of bubbles rising out of sight in the murk reminding me that there was still some work to do if I wanted to stay that way. The effort of swimming up, following the bubbles, feeling the solid, heavy ache of water pressing down on arms, legs, and chest, paid off not in the insults of friends as I broke the surface, criticizing my form or questioning my bravery, but the sight of the next person to jump. That was the thing about the jump: having made it, you lost interest. What you were really thinking about was your next jump.

We all had different styles, signatures to our jumps. Some held their nose, did the walking-off-the-edge-of-the-cliff shtick, shouted "Dy-no-mite!" or fell, flailing and screaming, to slap the water and emerge red-skinned, always claiming that it hadn't hurt. Not Sandy; the hamming it up, the whooping and hollering were marks of amateurs. To him as expert, and me as journeyman, the jump was sweet science. He stood, arms straight out in a cross, balancing on his toes in a way that if anyone else did it you'd tease them for it without end but for him was, well, just right. He kept his eyes closed, not squinched tight shut, but like he was going to sleep or listening to a song, waiting until the end came. And then he fell.

For a blink he seemed to hang there, arms swept out, body rod-straight from head to toe. He stretched out in the air like he was on a bed, then that split-second was gone and he nosed down past horizontal, gathering speed and gravity in a rush, only bringing his arms over his head to part the water just before he hit. No slap, no splash--he dove through the surface like a shining iron spike.

Watching the Olympics on TV in the summer, the only thing we really understood about the diving was the smaller the splash, the more points the judges gave. Sandy would have put all those people to shame. He wasn't diving so much as returning to the water, it seemed like. The water never welcomed me the way it did him. To me it was something to trick, to dodge the worst of the sting through luck and craft. To him it was a friend.

Just to be around to see Sandy jump was justification enough to do all manner of things. In September, after school started, we'd both come down "sick" just so we could go make one more afternoon of jumps--even though it was Florida, it was north Florida and as winter approached, the days at the quarry would become an epic memory. We'd pretend we were escaping from a prison island, make up and act out these fantastic movie plots, every scene ending in a jump. What was a lie in the balance against that kind of living?

* * *

We lied for each other many times after that, sometimes to avoid punishment (deserved) and other times with nothing in the balance but the pure-T hell of it, but no lie I could come up with would match Sandy's wedding stunt. By long habit, and hope that I was somehow right, I tried.

"He'll be back," I said to Ari at the reception. She just nodded and teared up again. If that didn't make me feel low enough, Carolyn, with the instincts of a mother bear protecting her cubs, charged into the silence. "The best man is supposed to make sure the groom's at church on time." Asshole, her eyebrows added. Albert chimed in. "Traditionally, the best man is supposed to do his best to keep the groom from getting to the wedding."

Albert was about to help me more than I could stand. "Hey, I got him to church on time," I said, "I don't know what he did after the pictures. He just dropped out of sight between the Fellowship Hall and the narthex."

"You should have stayed with him," Carolyn said.

"I did my part," I said. "Don't try to pin this on me. This ain't my baby." Poor, poor, poor choice of words. I didn't need Carolyn's look to know that; all I needed was for Ari to begin crying again, her arms coming down to cross over the gentle curve of her white-gowned waist.

Our Lord in heaven, I thought. That guy. What did he do?

I suppose there's two things you never get over: burying your parents, and the first time your first love, your true love, lets you down. And Sandy was it. Because it was love, without all the squirming men make over the word because we can't face it square-on. Even at twelve, if someone had cornered me and point blank asked me if I loved Sandy, I'd have said, "Damn right I love him." Our normal range of cussing hadn't gone much beyond "heck" and "farts" at twelve, even if it was the Seventies.

Okay, full disclosure, maybe I wouldn't have used the word "love," but the idea was there. It just wasn't a concept boys, especially where I was raised, thought on too much. Then again, the idea of running out on a pregnant bride, especially where we were raised, was not a concept at all. I had a lot to think about. That guy--what happened to him?

I wasn't the only one wondering, either. If you've never angered a blue-eyed red-head, that combination of ice and fire is too much to bear. I've heard tell a green-eyed brunette is worse, but the man who claimed such was not under Carolyn's glare every time she walked through the family room where I was watching TV that evening. I decided since the games weren't that close I'd do a little raking before supper, not that the yard would really need raking until Christmas.

Looking for leaf bags, I stopped at the castoff desk in the corner of the garage, my office. I found the bags in the battered bottom drawer. The desk was one of those where you had to open the center drawer to get the others to open. The center drawer is where I keep some of my army patches (my medals are on a wall at my office), a set of jump wings, black with tarnish (Airborne, of course, was there ever any doubt?), and some other don't-you-touch'ems I've pack-ratted since I left home for the Army with a two-suitcase allowance. You know, joining the Army was the first time I did something before Sandy. He came with me to the recruiter's office that afternoon, and for a minute it looked like he was going to enlist too. In the end I went on without him.

Getting married and having kids is another step I took away from where Sandy and I stood at eighteen. I think that's an age men never get past--everything that happens after eighteen is measured by referring to where we were and what we were then. Football heroics, wearing shiny shirts like Travolta's, sitting in the car waiting in line at the gas station on rationing days and lying about our luck with girls. I think maybe women lock in a few years later, around twenty-one. Carolyn and Ari started out from college wanting to make enough money to buy seats on the stock exchange; now, they talk about earning enough money through tupperware parties to wallpaper the kitchen. Parenthood does that to you. But you never stop trying to measure up to the dreams of eighteen or twenty-one, just like you never stop being--part of you doesn't, anyway--young.

The last object in the desk drawer is a slender stick of gray wood with a barnacle crusted on one end.

* * *

Another Sandy jump story--last one, I promise:

My parents took Sandy and me down to south Florida that summer for a beach vacation. This was after Saigon fell--we'd watched the last helicopter lift off from the American embassy roof on TV, watched as some people left behind jumped to grab the landing skid. This was after President Ford showed a knack for falling down stairs and hitting people with golf shots, but before Elvis and Colonel Sanders died. This was the summer of 1975--the summer of "Jaws."

We'd hit up with two local boys, who tried to judge us northerners (everything above Lake Okeechobee was "north," in their world) by the only test that mattered: the jump. They showed us how to slip up on the crossbeams of the pier. We followed them, crab-walking out over the water, hunched under the boardwalk. It would have been quicker just to pay our quarter and walk out to the end of the pier like normal people, but in those days asking for a quarter met with more questions about the spending of it than it does now, and the pier manager would have known that four boys without fishing poles would be up to no good. Jumping off the pier was against the rules. It was highly dangerous. It was also, the local boys claimed, "Far out!"

We crouched on the last beam, toes gripping the weathered wood as we watched the gray-green swells below. The locals began their litany, as familiar as our own: "There's some busted off pilings over to the left," the first one said, pointing.

"When you jump, push out more than up or you'll conk your head and drown," said the other. "When you come up, try to surface under the pier or you'll get hooked by the fishing lines."

"But don't try to swim back to the beach under the pier because the waves will smash you into the pilings."

"Yeah, just take a breath and swim under all the hooks until you're about twenty yards off to the side, then go for the beach."

"And hope you don't cut yourself when you jump, or that anyone's using really bloody bait today, 'cause it attracts sharks."

Sharks. They were going all out, seeing if they could keep us from jumping with just a word.

Sandy squatted lower on the beam, cracking his knee joints with a satisfying double pop.

"Sharks," he said. "Big deal, we jump in springs up north with alligators all the time."

This was true, and calmed the jump my heart made at the word shark. The two deep-tanned boys glanced at each other, eyes wide. West of the beach, out where the Everglades were slowly drying up and being filled in to make housing developments, golf courses, and shopping malls, alligators regularly crawled from the canals onto the groomed fairways to snap up golf balls and little yappy dogs. We were balanced between the known and the unknown--it was easy to believe in alligators, you saw alligators all the time, but who ever really saw a shark (not dogfish, now, a real shark) except at the aquarium or in books. Or in a darkened theater--alligators were a fact, sharks got by on potential.

I looked down at all the potential under the waves. Sandy must have seen my eyes go wide or maybe heard my breathing change. He nudged my shoulder with his. "Hey, what's wrong with you?" he muttered. "You want to live forever?"

So we jumped. In the final analysis, it was easier and more bearable than walking back. When we got ashore, the beach police were waiting, alerted by the pier manager (damn kids, scaring away all the fish). Sandy and I thought we were going to end up with a ride in a police jeep and mug shots as souvenirs of the jump, but my parents finally owned up to us, although they took their sweet time about it.

Before we left the beach, Sandy went down to the low tide line and pried two splinters loose from a piling, one for me and one for him.

* * *

I told that story to myself there in the garage with that splinter in my hand because I know that in the end I can't tell Ari, or Caroline, or you, what Sandy was really like. I can't tell because I don't really know. All I know for sure is what he did, what I saw. I had kept that piece of wood in my desk for a long time. This afternoon I looked at it and just didn't feel like keeping it anymore, and dropped it in the leaf bag.

I raked six good-sized piles of leaves and pine straw and got them bagged up before supper. After that I played crawl-around with the kids, watched a little football, and finally went upstairs. I sat in bed listening to the radio and watched Carolyn scrub her face and brush her teeth in our tiny bathroom. She popped the dental floss out from between her teeth each time with a little snap. She was still mad, didn't have to say anything for me to know it.

The weatherman on the radio predicted rain for Sunday. After Carolyn got in bed and snapped the light off I lay still a few minutes, then asked if she needed anything from downstairs.

I went down through the kitchen to the backyard and covered up the little turtle-shaped sandbox against the promised rain. I walked around the outside of the house looking for toys and anything else that needed to be moved up under the porch. In the front yard I stood in the cool November night, bare-legged but not feeling any mosquitoes this late in the year, and looked at the dark windows of the house, the shutters we'd replaced, the whitewashed fence. Taking good care of a house doesn't make it last forever, but it makes it better for a little while.

Aw, hell, I finally said to myself, and went over and did what I'd come out to do, tore the bottoms out of the leaf bags by the curb one by one until I found what I was looking for.

The jump is the only reason he should be forgiven. Nothing else. I see him there on the gray wooden beam over the green ocean, watch him as he rises up on his toes. And jumps--

§ § §

Kevin Durden was born in Savannah, Georgia and grew up at the edge of the Everglades west of Fort Lauderdale in Davie, Florida. He served as an Air Force Intelligence Officer in Texas, Alaska, and far-flung stations in exotic locations overseas.

His life got really interesting after he had children. He is presently a preschool teacher, scout leader, baseball coach, Sunday School teacher, and dad in Columbia, South Carolina. He can say, "Don't shoot! I know secrets!" in several foreign languages (including Texan) and bakes a wonderful banana bread. He might share the recipe if you ask nice at wkdurden@att.net. .

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