Bend like that

I should’ve went Christmas shopping with Mama in July. Gooseflesh had my arm’s peach fuzz at attention, as I pointed 200 yards off Bunchy Yoakam Road and into the woods.

“There it is,” I said. 

Daddy white-knuckled the fire truck's steering wheel. “We can’t do a thing until the FAA shows up. If there’s airplanes involved, you got to call the FAA.”

The window squeaked when I rolled it down. I seen it. I seen it. The plane’s impact with the pine tree propelled the pilot from the cockpit through the plexiglass windshield. On the broken windshield, the wind whirled a strip of blue and red parrot-themed Hawaiian shirt. I tried only looking at the shirt, but the shirt wasn’t as interesting as its former owner—the dead pilot. 

His upside-down, bed-rail thin body had landed and weaved inside an adjacent water oak’s lower branches, and he was posed inside the tree’s limbs, as if he were a catfish washed ashore and trapped inside a plastic beer yoke. The wind wouldn’t blow his grimy, gray hair. He was a lifeless marionette, and the limp parachute cords were abandoned strings. But he wasn’t a toy; he was a real man. 

He couldn’t be dead. No way. I waited for his body to twitch, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. He was dead. And even if the body would’ve twitched, it wouldn’t work right. Not ever again.    

The inhuman arm angles were a maze. There was anticipation. Will he fall? And if he did fall, would he land funny? Not land funny like haha. But land funny, you know, in a strange position, his face buried like an ostrich and butt straight up in the air. The arms would be more twisted bones and roped like snakes spiraling a fencepost. He’d never bend right again.

Daddy untangled the CB radio’s cord while the dust settled.  

“Part of the job,” he told me. Then, he mashed the CB’s transmission button and spoke into the handset, “I found it.”

The radio dispatcher garbled something, and I couldn’t understand what they said.

All eighteen wheels of the Epworth Volunteer fire truck crushed the seashell gravel as Daddy parallel parked. Twenty yards from my door sat a set of sun-baked cement steps with a rusted iron rail, but there was no house nor foundation. Better to look yonder. Better than the thing I didn’t want to name.

Daddy said, “Hurricane Frederick sucked that house right up out of the ground. The old Fletcher Place, that’s what this is.”

A wind-blown map from the wreckage topsy-turvied through the overgrown acreage, and it was nice spotting something from the crash that still moved. Had to’ve come from the plane because there were no houses for four miles.

Daddy slid the smut-stained fire-fighting gloves on. “You don’t have to stare.” 

Mama. I missed my mama, should’ve gone Christmas shopping with her and Maw-Maw in July. Could’ve been watching them browse through blouses and brassieres. But no. I had to stay at home, so I could watch Beakman’s World. 

I flicked the flashing siren switch on and off, and Daddy spanked my hand—two quick pops with a wet towel sting. “Treat it like a bright blue welding arc,” he said. 

But it was hard, the not peeking.  

Outside of the truck, daddy went left, and I went right. We walked until the black and yellow barricade tape lost all slack. I moved faster than him because the firefighting turnout gear weighed him down—the heavy long-sleeved jacket, the gloves, the trousers—full regalia. He even wore the black fire helmet, but he kept the face shield pushed up. 

I was in a t-shirt and cut-off shorts, struggling with the heavy roll of caution tape and as it unspooled, it warned Do Not Cross over and over, as if once wasn’t enough. The tape spool was so heavy that it bent my arm and wrist funny. Bent funny like—don’t say it. I won’t say what my arm bent funny like because that’s the thing I couldn’t name. God, I should’ve gone Christmas shopping in July.

Daddy tied his side of the caution tape to a patinated bicycle that’d grown inside a shortleaf pine, and I wrapped my end around the step’s iron rail. Paint chips shook free and stuck to my arm hair. 

My caution tape knot was beginner loose. 

“My body doesn’t bend like that,” I said.

Daddy said, “Damn straight, Tom. Don’t nobody supposed to bend like that.”