Free The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt Page B

wished we had. I was already halfway down, and instead of wafting like a leaf, I seemed to be dropping at an incredible rate. Some huge mechanism was pushing the land rapidly in my direction.
    I hit the earth, rolled as I’d been taught, and came up covered with flakes of last year’s cow droppings. Wind caught the parachute and wrapped me with lines. Bill bounded across the field, his face stained with manure.
    â€œDid you piss?” he yelled.
    I was so grateful to be sitting in dirt that I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He helped me out of the straps. I could smell dust and urine.
    â€œI knew you would,” he said, pointing to the wet fly of my coveralls. “Some guys load their britches. It happens at impact. After another couple of jumps, you won’t anymore.”
    A waiting truck trundled us back to the airstrip. When the plane landed, the guy who’d stayed aboard climbed out with his head down. No one looked at him. His presence was a reminder of our own unclaimed fear.
    Bill clapped me across the shoulders. “That’s why you have to pay in advance,” he said. “Next time you and me’ll go at a higher altitude.”
    He told me about his first brush with the enemy, an experience that had led him to reenlist. He was the first man behind the soldier walking point, leading their platoon through jungle. The point man gave the hand signal for VC and motioned Bill forward. Six enemy were walking toward a pond in a clearing at the bottom of the slight hill. They each carried a bucket in one hand, a weapon in the other.
    The point man whispered to Bill, “Cover me with single fire. I’ll be on rock and roll.”
    When the hostiles moved close, the point man began spraying bursts of automatic fire. Bill plugged away. His last thought, he told me, was wishing he was the one who got to use automatic. It seemed like more fun. After that, he always volunteered to walk point.
    A month later, Bill didn’t show up for work, an unprecedented event. He didn’t answer the phone and none of us knew where he lived. A police car arrived at the work site. The cop told us that the night before, Bill had removed his clothes and stacked them neatly. He then drank a pint of kerosene, and Zippoed his mouth—reversing the favored method of Vietnamese monks protesting the war. There was no note.
    He’d once told me that when a man died in combat, the survivors never eulogized him. Instead they insulted him for days, talking about how well rid they were of his presence, no matter how close they’d been, I considered taking his paintbrush, but decided it would be an affront. Sentiment, he’d said, only made you vulnerable.
    I aimed myself north, a tricky move without benefit of interstates. Five days later a gay black man picked me up at an isolated exit along the North Platte River in Nebraska. He claimed to eat white boys like me for lunch. I told him I wasn’t fit for a meal. He laughed and left my lingam alone, nestled and trembling deep in its fur. A cornholing on the road was my greatest fear, worse than murder. He said his single regret was being born black in the South instead of red on the Plains, because the Indians accepted homosexuality in a more civilized manner. Then he laughed and said it really didn’t matter because they both got fucked hard.
    He dropped me off near Omaha, where I found slaughterhouse work, herding huge steers down a narrow ramp to death. They walked steadily, without curiosity or comprehension. A man placed an electrical rod against their foreheads and literally zapped the crap out of them. It was boring and professional; at home we used a rifle. After one stench-filled day, I quit and walked to the vacant prairie at the edge of town, hoping to hear a coyote. There was nothing but bugs. Constellations spanned the sky. The moon moldered like a gnawed bone. Two hundred years back, someone asked Boone if he had