Runaway by Erin Keane

Author:Erin Keane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2022-04-21T18:35:50+00:00

5

Taking Off

Megan disappeared into the sky over New York, and my mother landed in Kansas to rejoin her family, only to leave immediately for California to pick up her father. The Colonel was home from Vietnam, and the family would be moving to North Carolina and a new Army base. I imagine my mother moving through the new house filled with the unpacked gilded furniture, heavy oil still life paintings, and ornate antique weaponry my grandparents collected, stopping to trail her finger along the Airborne mascot. That’s the one thing of the Colonel’s I wanted after he died; not the butter-colored two-seater Triumph TR6 he only took out of the garage on beautiful days, and not the creamy baby grand piano that once graced the saloon of a Kansas City whorehouse, which I never in my life saw anyone play. I wanted what sat on top of the piano: a human skull wearing the maroon beret of a US Army Airborne Division, proudly displayed along with framed family photographs. A skull wearing a beret is a classic Death from Above motif, and my grandfather’s company had its own variation: theirs had dice for eyes, a tribute to both luck and when it runs out. I didn’t even want to ask for the beret, figuring it would be precious to my mother or her brother. I just wanted the skull. I didn’t know at the time that the anonymous dead person’s head I had grown up admiring, stolen from a village graveyard somewhere near St-André-de-l’Eure in the early 1960s, would be gone by the time I thought to ask for it.

The Colonel told the story often: how he decided he needed an actual human skull to grace his desk back when he had been promoted to captain. (Even knowing this, I can’t think of him as any rank other than colonel; it’s what we called him and how we thought of him, by his highest rank.) He enlisted his friend Jack to help, and together, they walked to the village cemetery, scaled the wall, broke into the charnel house, and selected one by hand. So maybe they had been drinking. The Colonel went back over the wall first and called to his friend from the street below.

“Throw him here, Jack!”

And Jack, looking up over the top of the wall, pulled his arm back and threw the human head like a football. It soared over the Colonel’s head and smashed into a hundred pieces in the street. They had to act fast, before someone came to check on the commotion.

“Well, go get another one!” the Colonel yelled back.

The next skull Jack pulled from the pile of bones dropped down smooth and easy into the Colonel’s waiting hands. Then they ran.

The skull traveled with him from desk to desk across France, then to the family’s next post in Germany, and after that from home to home, base to base. At some point, they acquired the piano and completed the tableau, a visual aid for a story to tell whenever he had an audience.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.