Three Falls by Pat Deebel
One fall day while dad picked some early corn, I sat beneath one of four huge oaks that edged our woods extending 50 feet or so into the cornfield. I sat facing south, enjoying the warmth of the sun as the wind blew and dragged leaves from the limbs above.
I loved the moments between blows when the sun heated me to the point where I thought I must take off my sweatshirt. But then another gust of wind would chill me, inciting in me a desire to keep the sweatshirt and don a jacket too. And so, I sat between the oak’s roots where they gnarled into the ground, me leaning and half dozing, looking up with half-open eyes to see leaves swirl and drift down to me.
Sometimes I would look into our woods. With each new wind gust, I could see thousands of leaves in the air all at once, taking the shape of the wind, swirling, lifting up, raining down, letting go of their only home, drifting like huge yellow and brown snowflakes, scratching against each other as they descended. Their dry, dusty, sweet smell swirling into my nose with the wind in the trees producing a subtle low volume roar. How could a moment be better than this?
Fast forward, another fall, me a senior in high school running my last season of cross-country. Our coach sends us out to run an hour “Indian-style.” We run single file and every several minutes the leader pulls out to the side, slows down and then falls in behind the last guy running.
The leader determined the pace and direction and since we all led at some point, the overall run was a tapestry of where each of us wanted to go. While leading, I pulled us into a cemetery and onto some narrow trails which went up and down small hills skirting the field edge of the long-dead and living woods next to them.
After leading for a bit and when it came time to fall back, I moved off the trail, slowed and pulled in behind Terry Anthony at the rear.
Breaths came hard and fast on the hills we climbed up and drifted down. As I looked ahead I could see Ed and Bridges and Tony Cox and Rick Lowhorn and I think Mark Goggin moving ahead of me, heads bobbing, shoulders rolling and the wondrous moments as another gust of wind prompted the leaves to come raining down and crowd around us, between us, spending their last moments above earth, our feet crunching the dried leaves already down. Our hissing breaths, drawn in and forced out of us like some sort of mantra, some sort of shared rhythm punctuated those life moments when we moved as one organism. We shared the wonder, the day, and each other’s breath and toil as we conga-lined through fall.
Fast forward three years, another October, another fall day. I sit on the high edge of a road embankment near a sharp turn of an old two-lane paved road. A drunken man lays dying in the high bluegrass below me. I sit with knees drawn to my chest.
Moments before, I could barely make out a pulse, barely hear him breathing. A front tire had just stopped spinning on his overturned convertible when I arrived.
Coolant drained from the radiator giving me the occasional whiff of sweet, hot anti-freeze.
I can hear the distant siren, getting painfully closer and I relax into the grass. Someone of authority is coming. I look back at the drunk. He has not moved. He has not made a sound. I can hear crows calling and bob-whites making song. Yellow leaves cascade down from the ginkgo trees edging the creek, gliding over his car, him and me. The drunk does not move. I do not move. The state police car arrives and parks behind my old blue Corvair.
A tall, thin, and stern-looking State Policeman gets out of his cruiser and puts on his hat. He watches me as he does so, then walks closer to where he can see the drunk. He can see the beer bottles scattered around the car.
And he can certainly see the drunk in the grass. He doesn’t hurry. The officer goes to and kneels next to the beer-soaked man with a three-day beard.
“How do you think he’s doing?” the State Policeman asks, tilting his brimmed hat up at me.
“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I answer, still not moving. “He was alive a few minutes ago, but it was difficult to feel his pulse. His breathing ... I could just hear it.”
The cop nods knowingly then repeats my steps, feels for a pulse, listens for a breath, then pulls up the guys' shirt revealing his stomach which I now see is black and blue and bubbly.
The State Cop sits next to me before pulling off his hat laying it carefully next to him. “You OK?” He asks me, perhaps perplexed by my apparent indifference to the drunk’s current condition. Or most likely realizing I am in a bit of shock. I don’t know what I am supposed to do or feel.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I suppose I’m a little wigged out. How could he be so stupid?”
The trooper looks down at the drunk, shrugs his shoulders indifferently. “Could I bum one of your smokes? I’ve been trying to quit,” he asks and for the first time, I realize I am still smoking a cigarette.
“You bet.” I smile, somehow feeling more relaxed.
I hand him my half-empty pack of filtered Camels. He takes one out, feels his pockets for a lighter and not finding one leans in like he’s going to kiss me and lights his cigarette from mine, still between my lips. He smiles then because he knows I am now focused on him, not the dying drunk at our feet. I am with him and not the death about to happen.
“Hey, fuck ’em. He killed himself and there’s nothing we can do about it. Fuck ’em dead twice, the dumb shit. Be glad he didn’t kill you too.”
With that disgusted pronouncement, he went to his car and called in asking for an ambulance, the coroner and a tow truck.
He asked if I could hang around for a bit because if the coroner couldn’t come, he had to fill out different paperwork. I said: “sure.”
“It would save me a lot of paperwork if the coroner does not come.” He thinks for a moment, “We’ll just say this guy was dead when you got to him and I’ll verify that. We’ll make up a time of death. Does that give you any heartache?”
I shook my head no getting into the boring side of this death then repeated what the trooper had said earlier. “Fuck ‘em dead. Fuck ‘em dead twice.”
The cop smiled, patted me on the shoulder and lay back in the cool grass to smoke his cigarette as the ginkgo leaves drifted around us and continued to flash yellow, then brown over our smoking heads.