ELKINS, a Thursday—I had a bone to pick with the Paratrooper.
On a recent business trip, I had as usual tried to make up for the unruly beard and piercings by overdressing slightly—and, I dare say, snazzily: my favorite slim fit Combat Gentlemen dress shirt, pink tie, and light v-neck sweater holding it all together.
But on taking off the sweater that evening in my AirBnb, I had chanced to notice in a mirror that the back of the right sleeve of my shirt was marred by a bleach—not stain, I guess, but in a way the opposite of a stain.
It had to have happened at the Paratrooper’s shop. At home, we never use bleach with laundry, and for that matter I don’t think I’ve ever even washed this shirt myself, preferring always to get it professionally laundered and pressed immediately after returning from the business trips that are my only occasion for dressing up these days. Something reassuring about the crisp, plastic-cased shirt hanging ready in the closet, just in case.
So after lunch I tucked the shirt under my arm and set out on foot toward the southern edge of town, the ugly stretch of road where lie our one grocery store, one of our two car washes, the newly redone McDonald’s, the defunct computer-repair shop, and the Paratrooper’s place of business.
But what was my plan, anyway? Did I think the Paratrooper was going to buy me a new shirt? Did I want him to? There was an argument that this would simply be what I was owed, but as I walked I found I didn’t really picture that happening and especially didn’t picture myself forcing the issue. The walk, along busy Randolph Avenue, soothed by the whoosh of passing log trucks and oilfield services vehicles, seemed to calm me and put thoughts of confrontation out of my mind.
“Hey, Sutton!” the Paratrooper called as he emerged from the racks of hanging clothes in the back of the shop. “Sorry for keeping you waiting!”
I spread the shirt on the counter, and he started writing it up as a normal drop-off. I almost hated to bring up the problem—and when I did, he at first took me to be consulting with him as a neutral professional in the clothes-tending business, missing the accusation I was trying to make.
“Well, you got two choices,” he said. “Keep it covered up”—I had already mentioned that I almost always wore it under a sweater or jacket, as an explanation of why I really couldn’t be sure when it had happened—“or you could alter it into a short sleeve shirt.”
“No, I mean, I think it happened here,” I finally broke it to him.
He reacted with muted disbelief.
“Usually the girls are real good about telling me when something happens,” he murmured. “Well…”
He seemed at a loss. I discovered that my heart wasn’t in taking any sort of hard line.
“How about a free wash and press and we call it even?” I asked.
“Works for me!” he said. “How much starch you want?”
As he wrote up the ticket—by hand, on the same sort of little carbon receipt pad I used when I worked at the record store during high school in the early 1990s—he asked how my father was doing.
“I always liked chatting with him,” he said.
From here we got onto the subject of health, and suddenly he was rattling off a list of injuries that was only startling until I remembered that he is, after all, the Paratrooper: “I’ve had both knees replaced, been shot, stabbed, got my nose broken four times, broke my ankles more times than I can count.”
This last, of course, was down to his Vietnam-era practice of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
“How many times did you jump, roughly?” I said, wondering if he would even know.
“359,” he answered.
Of course he would know.
“What’s a high career number, you know, for someone who stayed in a long time?” I asked.
“The colonel had something like 5,000 under his belt when I was serving,” he said. “He did every single training jump so he racked them up.”
Then the Paratrooper told a story about when the colonel had had a “total malfunction,” i.e., both his primary and his reserve chutes failing to open on a training jump. If I understood correctly, this colonel had been able to sort of body surf through the air and divert himself from falling toward the hard open field where everyone normally came down to instead land in a marshy area nearby.
“He broke both legs but he survived,” said the Paratrooper.
“What’s the lowest you can open a chute and still make it down safely?” I asked. He didn’t exactly answer that question but told me that, when he was jumping, they were equipped with an altimeter-based device that would release their chutes automatically at 3,500 feet, “in case you passed out or got shot or something.”
The bell on the door jingled as a woman entered and I stepped back to let her approach the counter, but the Paratrooper wasn’t done talking parachuting.
“We had these two guys who were always racing to be first to the ground.”
This sounded like a race you wouldn’t want to win.
“Trouble was, one of them weighed 150 and the other was about 245. That little guy tried every trick in the book but he never won. I told him, he’s got 90 pounds on you, you’re basically just giving them cases of beer away. But he wouldn’t listen.”
I wasn’t so sure, some vague memory of physics class and everything falling at the same rate of speed flickering awake in a recess of my mind. (Later, looking it up, I learned it’s more complicated than that.)
“Well, I’ll let you get to your next customer here,” I said. The woman who’d come in was waiting patiently by the door.
“I’m just here to pick up Girl Scout cookies,” she said, indicating the low table by the counter stacked with boxes of Tagalongs, Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, and gluten-free Trios.
The Paratrooper tore my ticket off his pad and handed it over. “Have a good day, Sutton!” he said cheerfully.
I returned the sentiment and turned to go.
The door closed behind me. The bell rang. I turned left, and started walking home.