If Every Chute Opens
Men packed close in airborne steel. Smell of sweat. Rumbling C-47. Metal clattering through a pocket of dry air. The sky above Nebraska. September 1943.
Private Saul sits on the hard bench with his back against the fuselage and his knees pressed together. Men are close on both sides. Private Anders is to his right.
Every trooper completes some pre-jump ritual. Private Davis blows and pops fuchsia bubbles. Blows and pops. Blows and pops.
Private Saul studies the laces of his boots. He keeps his eyes there. He tries not to look at the laces of the boots next to his. He tries not to look at the laces of the boots of Private Anders.
Private Bend whispers to the little badger puppet snug on his finger. His finger bobs up and down as the knit sock of black yarn replies. The engine groan drowns out the badger’s encouraging words.
Private Saul closes his eyes. He recalls training. Staggering under the weight of his pack, jogging loops around the base, around the C-47s that would later bear him. Stumbling to his knees. Private Anders lifting his pack from him before he could argue. Private Anders upright under the doubled weight. Watching Private Anders run off. Following.
At the front of the plane, Private Tripp pets the regiment’s mascot, a parachuting half-coyote mutt. The spot behind the dog’s ear that Private Tripp always rubs before a jump is worn bald. The hound, Sergeant Geronimo, outranks Private Tripp. Sergeant stripes are stitched on his harness, just below the small parachute. Sergeant Geronimo has gotten to liking the jumps so much that he has to be chained to the bench to prevent him from bailing too soon.
Private Saul steals a glimpse at Private Anders. Private Anders appears distracted. He does not return the glance. The overtightened helmet chinstrap cuts a white line into his skin.
The dual propeller roar is constant, but it seems to always escalate, always climb toward the same crescendo.
Private Jurgens screams insults at each man up and down the benches of the plane. His mouth gapes as he tries to make himself heard over the muting noise. His belligerence drew laughs on the first few jumps. But Jurgens’s tirade missed Private Elby one jump, and Elby’s chute didn’t open. Now each soldier relies on the guarantee of each jump’s barrage of insults, strains to hear it, and grows nervous if it is not personal enough, if it does not sting.
Private Saul stills the hand he realizes has been jittering. He feels the rushing air of a different day’s jump. The long float. The ranch wives and daughters moving cattle. The dark smoke of the rail engine, bringing still more paratroopers to practice jumping into the cushioned sandhills. The sound of the C-47 receding, and the chute rocking him down. Then, the sudden wrenching, the cords of his parachute tangling with those of Private Anders’. The whipping around and the tumbling into the slender penstemon. The weight of Private Anders lingering on top of him, and the scent of him. Their milky parachutes billowing with the breeze, canopying all around them, hiding their urgent mouths and hands.
“Stand up,” yells the jumpmaster. The men find their feet. They are pressed in a tight line. Private Saul feels Private Anders’ breath on his neck.
The fear settles like familiar dust on their shoulders.
The door is open. The sky yawns.
Smell of sweat.
“Hook static lines,” yells the jumpmaster. The soldiers clip the straps from their parachutes onto the cable stretched above their heads.
Men blink tears away, crack knuckles, pass flatulence. Men laugh at nothing, shift their weight, cross themselves. Men mutter promises that are sucked out into the void.
At the front of the line — the coyote-mutt’s shrill whine of anticipation.
Men packed close in airborne steel. Smell of sweat.
Up and down the line, the soldiers check the packed chute of the man in front of them. They tug on straps and look for weakness. Private Saul checks the parachute in front of him. He feels the pulls and pats on his own chute and knows Private Anders is there. Private Saul trusts that Private Anders is not wracking himself, is not in snarled agony at this proximity, is not overborne by a shame. He trusts that Private Anders does not loosen or tear or knot.
“Jump,” yells the jumpmaster.
A sudden, collective intake of breath.
A surging group weight.
A bark. Wordless hollers.
Eighteen men in ten seconds.
They fling themselves out the door and into the sky. They caterwaul blind into the bright gulf.
At the moment the blue takes him, Private Saul thinks of the sea, the sandhills rolling below like so many gentle waves, the way the white prairie clover will pock at him like sea spray as his trouser-tucked boots plod with ease into the reedy grass. He thinks of Private Anders mooring down not far off, one of hundreds of dandelion seeds floating down from the C-47s and sewn across the hills.
All this, if every chute opens.
ξ
Sean Theodore Stewart is a writer finishing his MFA at the University of Idaho, where he is the fiction editor of Fugue and the 2020–2021 Hemingway Fellow. The Arkansas International selected his story as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer's Prize, and his other work has appeared in Salt Hill and The New Territory. He is originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska and now lives in Brooklyn with his partner, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.