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.
One morning after I woke I sat staring at the board. It looked confusing to me. It was a blur. The pictures became more and more intrusive to me as each day wore on.
About a month after we found out the plane disappeared a man started visiting my mother. He looked younger than my dad. He wore jeans that looked worn out and a faded tee-shirt that said something I didn't understand. His hair was scraggly and his face scruffy. He often stayed only an hour or so, but sometimes I saw him in the morning, eating breakfast in the chair where my dad usually sat. The first time he saw me and couldn't avoid talking to me he said he was sorry about my dad and I told him to go fuck himself. He flashed me the finger and I went at him with a knife, but I didn't stick it into his leg like I wanted to. I just stood there holding it in an attacking stance and breathing heavy.
"Shit, dude, you're a little psycho aren't you?" I didn't answer, just threw the knife back onto the table with a clunk.
It was during a similar moment of impulse that I decided to burn down the bulletin board that I had so meticulously organized over the previous few months. I used a match from a box of "strike anywhere" matches, and the "anywhere" I used was the corner of my desk where a military photo of my dad sat framed and neat. He looked handsome in the photograph, dressed sharp and proud. He always took pride in his appearance, and he told me that looking nice was the first step to any kind of success. I'd never quite taken to that philosophy, and usually went to school in old jeans and dirty sneakers. I struck the match and the sulfur in the smoke struck my nostrils. The little flame danced with life. Then I held it to a curling corner of the article in the very bottom left corner of the board. It was an article about President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and their connections with Hussein. I torched it. The flames built slowly but with precision from poster to diagram to article.
Now the smell of burning paper was in the room and the situation created a strange feeling in me, a feeling that I'd done something wrong, something I couldn't take back. I hadn't fully realized the result my actions would produce. I stood there frozen, watching the carefully placed articles ignite in flames, ignite quick like dry tree branches. There was not much heat from the fire, but the smoke alarm began to make its loud beeps, a sound I had only heard when something burned on the stove or in the oven. My mom, who must have been outside working in the garden because when she came in she was holding in her hands a small shovel, shouted at me, asking why I was trying to burn down the house, but she was already on her way to the bathroom and out again with a bucket that she filled in the bath-tub. I heard her telling me to go downstairs, telling me to get out, not even asking for my help. The first douse was small, only one quarter of the bucket had been filled, and her throw was off the mark by about three feet, and it ended up splashing the curtains on the window. She had panicked. I stared, my eyes now focusing on the diagram of my father's fighter jet. It hung there but didn't burn. The flames rushed over it as if it was oil and the flames water. There was no reaction between the two, no acknowledgment of the others existence. I had hung it up with a string the day I acquired it, and when the string burned the diagram fell to the ground. There wasn't a mark on it, not even smoke damage. Nothing. When it fell to the floor it landed upright, and it stood there, strong, as the little pieces of black paper floated around the room. My mom yelled from the bathroom for me to get the hell out while I still could. I knew there was really no immediate threat. There was more smoke than anything. She came in with another bucket and this time I grabbed it and with one swoop doused what was left of the fire. My mother was out of breath, and her face had been somehow smeared with the black stuff that burned paper turns into. She began to cry. I set the bucket down and very clearly and with confidence uttered something that I can never imagine, under any circumstance, forgetting. "I think Dad's still alive." My mother, already sobbing, looked up and I saw the feelings in her face. She pitied me. She probably thought that I was taking all this worse than she was. After all, she had the scruffy guy. "He's gone, honey." I thought about it for a minute. Of course she was right. They'd called, and even though they hadn't found his body, the possibilities were low that he was still alive. He was presumed dead. "I just don't think he's dead. I feel something."
Just then the scruffy guy walked in. He shouted if anyone was home. We didn't answer. My mother and I looked at each other and I saw it in her eyes that she felt bad for what she was doing, although at the time, I didn't quite understand what that was, and she saw that I felt bad about it too. We didn't speak. I think, at that moment, we just understood each other. The scruffy guy wandered up to the top of the stairs and appeared in the doorway of my room. "What happened here?" I helped my mother to her feet and she brushed herself off and with a quick breath blew the hair out of her face. "Look, I think it's best if you leave." Scruffy appeared to take stock of the situation. He gave me an evil stare, probably thinking I had something to do with my mom's change of heart. Then he looked at the toasted bulletin-board, seemed to process it all in his head, and must have decided to cut his losses, because he shrugged his shoulders and walked back down the stairs, a muffled "see ya" the only words he spoke. My mom looked at me and I saw a great pain in her face. Then she cried more, erupting, spastic cries, crying with convulsions. She started to hit her hands against the door and I thought she might break through the thin wood. Then I felt it, I felt it for the first time. I knew my father was gone and not coming back. I picked up the drawing of the Tomcat and went over it once with my hand. Except for the actual drawing of the plane, which made it hollow, so you could see its insides, I understood little of the numbers and symbols that were attached to arrows pointing at certain spots of the jet. The plastic, or whatever it was, was warm, like a towel just out of the dryer. My mom asked me what it was.
"Dad's plane. It's fire proof." I said.
And she laughed quick once, like a laughter that rumbled from somewhere covered up for awhile, and she put her hand on the drawing too. Then I laughed because she laughed. Then we laughed together and she asked me not to try and burn the house down anymore and I agreed. The smell of smoke lingered sharp in the air. A breeze came in through the window that ruffled the yellow curtains and brought in the bittersweet scent of the fresh cut grass from outside. She sniffled, picked up her shovel and said she was going to finish up in the garden, and I hung the drawing back up on the wall, everything else on the bulletin board had vanished.
* www.Globalsecurity.com
