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• Shop Till You Drop

This Issue 04/12/2007

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• Street Beats
• Unbreakable
• Reviews

I remember hearing my mother on the phone telling her friend that my father would not be coming back. I was sitting on the cement stairs of the front porch, sock-less in my sneakers, the blue laces loose and untied, dusted with dirt, the summer wind ruffling my tee-shirt. I remember thinking about my dad and wondering if he felt any pain when he died. I tried to imagine what it was like in his last moments, the wing of his aircraft jagged and smoky, bleeding wires and spouting fluids. I think he must have been trying to recover stability, come out of the dive, pull-up, maybe even eject. I don't know if he thought of me or my mom, but maybe when he finally realized that despite all his training and practice, there was nothing he could do to prevent the Tomcat he flew from crashing into the cold, night sand of the desert. Maybe in that last moment he thought of me and my mom. Maybe he had a quick thought before he went and that thought was a prayer.

I heard my mother say goodbye and put down the phone receiver. Then I heard the screen door creak open and slam shut. She sat down next to me, her hand on my shoulder, and she told me the same news she had told her friend. We sat there for awhile, the breeze making the screen door open a little and shut right away. We didn't say much of anything. Then the phone rang again and my mother went in to answer it.

When the war started, when Hussein made his army invade Kuwait, I followed the events in detail. A big, wall-sized bulletin board was in my room, previously covered with posters of cheetahs and lions and pumas cut-out from a wild-life magazine, but it filled up quick with maps of the Middle East that were printed in the weekly news magazines. It filled up with articles from the paper with big blocky headlines. I also had a schematic diagram of my father's fighter jet. "That's classified, keep it safe," he'd said when he handed it to me, and I took the white paper that was covered in plastic in my hands as if I were receiving the key to a secret room, and I promptly thumb-tacked it up on the bulletin-board, right next to a diagram that showed the average items a soldier in the Middle East might carry: the infamous M-16 rifle, gas masks, grenades, things like that. I followed everything I could. Then when the fighter jets started going down and the scarred pale faces of the pilots began to appear on the cover of the magazines, I began to get worried for the first time since my dad left. I had a picture of Hussein on the board, and I threw darts at his face until the paper disintegrated and I had to tack up a fresh one.

After I found out about my dad, the bulletin board became something different to me, like a looming ghost that never tried to hide, or some kind of tomb or graveyard. I couldn't understand how things could keep going. The magazines kept arriving, the headlines were still printed, but my dad was now out of it all.