Key Grip

by Dustin Beall Smith

  I stood up from the sofa, my head suddenly clear, and joined the family for dinner, then asked my father for the keys to the car.

  It is characteristic of all propitious relationships that the moment of first contact seems, in retrospect, inevitable. It happens with love, and it happens with apprenticeships.

  It was bitter cold that late January night when I drove to the neighboring town of Bedford. My father had described what he felt sure was the entrance to Istel’s property—a nondescript and narrow macadam driveway marked by a battered black mailbox—a few miles east of town. I found the driveway with no problem. Icy in spots, it wound, snakelike, up a very steep and heavily wooded hillside and broke out suddenly into a cul-de-sac directly in front of Istel’s stone mansion. I parked my father’s two-door Chevy between a vintage Bugati racecar, partially covered with a tarpaulin, and a Mercedes 300-SL convertible. A green Volkswagen Bug and a ’57 Chevy station wagon were parked in front of the garage.

  I killed the headlights and waited for guard dogs to bark, but nothing broke the silent darkness surrounding the mansion. When a first-floor light came on, I stepped out of the car, took one last hit off my cigarette, and blew smoke at the stars. Leaving my ski cap and coat in the car, I walked to the front door.

  It opened just as I was poised to knock.

  I had expected someone other than Jacques André Istel to come to the door, but there he stood in khaki pants and a white T-shirt, looking just as “simian” as that New Yorker profile had described him: jet black hair, hunched shoulders, jaw and neck thrust forward as if he were some great ape about to beat his chest at a challenger. A normal person might have recoiled, but I was no normal person that night. Perhaps that’s why I ignored his hostile affect and took a cue from his expression, which seemed both challenging and hopeful, as if he had all along expected someone to show up on his doorstep at just this time of night, though he wasn’t yet willing to grant that I was that person.

  “What is it you want?” he asked, his French accent stronger than I had imagined.

  “I want to make a parachute jump,” I said, rubbing my bare hands together.

  Istel chuckled. “Hey, Lew!” he called over his shoulder. I looked beyond Istel, into the wide but completely bare foyer—no furniture or art of any kind—and watched Lew walk jauntily toward the door. He had a pleasant face—smooth-browed, soft, and as wholesome as a Midwestern farmer’s—and a welcoming smile.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” said Istel.

  “Yeah,” said Lew, “I see!” He held out his hand to me. “Lew Sanborn.”

  “Dusty,” I said, shaking his hand, then belatedly shaking Istel’s.

  I stood there shivering while Istel launched into a lengthy description of his plans to open the first sport-parachuting center in the United States. I hadn’t expected a sales pitch, but I listened politely. When Istel was finished, both men stood there staring at me, Sanborn apparently amused by my impulsive late-evening visit.

  “We’re going to open the center in May,” said Istel, his lower jaw thrust forward, as if he were trying to retain a mouthful of water even as he spoke.

  “Sounds good,” I said, “but when can I make a jump? I might not be around in May.”

  “Are you looking for work?” Istel asked.

  “Yeah,” said Sanborn, “are you looking for work?”

  Unprepared for the question, I stammered that I was just about to ship out on a Scandinavian freighter headed for a port in Europe. “Going to Brooklyn tomorrow,” I said. “Probably ship out within the week. Might be gone a year or two. Don’t know.”

  “Really?” said Istel.

  “Hey, that’s great,” said Sanborn. “A year or two!”

  They were toying with me, I could tell, but I didn’t let on that I knew. I figured it was a test of some kind.

  “Yep,” I said. “Just about to ship out. So . . . when can I make a parachute jump?”

  “How much does that pay—working on a freighter?” asked Sanborn.

  I’d heard rumors that apprentice seamen on non-union freighters earned two dollars and fifty cents a day. “Two-fifty a day,” I said. “Plus room and board, obviously. Since it’s a freighter.”

  “Obviously,” said Istel, looking at Sanborn and nodding.

  “Obviously,” said Sanborn, nodding at Istel. “Since it’s a freighter.”

  “Okay,” said Istel. “Two dollars and fifty cents a day—that’s what we’ll pay you.” He extended his hand to shake on the deal.

  I hesitated. Did he think I was that much of a sucker? I could make two-fifty an hour, even without a college degree.

  “Plus room and board, of course,” said Sanborn, holding a finger up to Istel’s face, as if he’d suddenly become my agent. “And the jumps are free, remember that.”

  “Of course,” said Istel, his hand still extended. “You won’t get rich working for us,” he added “but I’ll guarantee you that if you work hard and stick with us, you’ll make a name for yourself and have a great time doing it.”

  He had me. We all shook hands again. And with that, they moved aside and invited me in.

  Two days later, at the wheel of Istel’s green Volkswagen Beetle, I headed north on a mission to tack up parachuting posters in restaurants, ski centers, and college dorms all over New England. Because I had attended boarding school in southern Vermont, I was familiar with most of the ski centers, the roads, and how to negotiate them in winter (no interstates then). My itinerary would take me straight up to Mont Blanc in Quebec, back down through Vermont, with stops at Stowe, Sugarbush, and Killington, and then east into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I’d hit Dartmouth College and Tuckerman’s Ravine. Istel fronted me cash for expenses and Sanborn loaded the Beetle with two boxes full of bright orange flyers announcing the May opening of the Orange Sport Parachuting Center, in Orange, Massachusetts. The artfully painted posters depicted a single-engine airplane silhouetted against a white sun. Beneath the plane, a spread-eagled skydiver fell into empty space. JUMPED YET? IT’S GREAT! read the boldface copy. It was the most provocative advertisement I’d ever seen, even more challenging than the war bond posters my father had painted during World War II. One of his had depicted three children standing in the shadow of a Nazi swastika, DON’T LET THAT SHADOW TOUCH THEM, it warned. That dark challenge had been met. Now it was time for a new adventure, a new test of will. And where better to go than up?

  Along with the posters, I carried two main parachutes and a chest-mounted reserve chute. I also packed white coveralls, a pair of thick-soled Corcoran boots, a white football helmet, and bubble goggles.

  “Anyone asks,” Sanborn had said, “just suit up and give them a full-gear demonstration.”

  I could not imagine giving such a demonstration to a stranger, especially since I had never even been in a small airplane, much less jumped from one. But I could not wait to try on the gear. I spent the first night in Putney, Vermont, at the home of a former teacher. It snowed the next day and took me eight hours to get into Canada. When a snowplow almost buried the car, I pulled off the main highway just a few miles south of Montreal and stopped at a little roadside establishment called L’Auberge something-or-other. The snow banks in the parking lot were ten feet high.

  “How much for a single room?” I asked the middle-aged woman at the reception desk.

  “Vous êtes seul?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You are alone?” she asked again, apparently disgusted by the need to speak English. Heavy bell-shaped earrings stretched her earlobes to the limit; gravity tugged at her fleshy cheeks.

  “Yes,” I said. “A single room, please.”

  She looked at me with suspicious mascaraed eyes.

  The room rate did not conform to my strict expense budget, but I had no choice. I signed the register and proudly noted my professional affiliation as Parachutes Incorporated, U.S.A. The woman issued me the room key and pointed to an interior hallway just off
the lobby.

  “No outside entrance?” I asked, illustrating my question with hand gestures.

  “Comment?” she asked. She smelled of tobacco and talcum powder.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  I unloaded the car and carried everything—parachutes, kit bags, posters—through a set of glass doors, into the motel lobby, and down the long hall to my spacious room. It took me four or five trips, each step monitored by the huffy proprietor. I dumped everything on the bed. After parking the car, I bought a Coke and some peanuts in the lobby and went to my room, eager to be alone with the equipment.

  I stripped off my outer garments and stepped into the jump suit, buttoning it up to the neck. Next, I put on and laced up the spit-polished jump boots, the tops of which came to my mid-calves. I pulled heavy rubber bands over the boots and bloused the cuffs of the coveralls, military style. I stood up, two inches taller in cushioned soles, and admired myself in the large mirror above the dresser.

  “Not bad,” I said out loud.

  I took the free-fall parachute from its kit bag and arranged the harness. Then onto my shoulders I heaved it, like a thirty-pound dinner jacket. Sanborn had told me this particular parachute design was an example of the latest technology—something the U.S. Army was just itching to get its hands on. Gone was the old central-release mechanism used in World War II. On this chute, the chest and leg straps each had a foolproof quick-release buckle, and the suspension lines could be jettisoned easily if you were being dragged along the ground in a high wind.

  I had rehearsed all this information on the drive north. Now that I was actually suiting up, it began to make sense. Watching myself in the mirror, I tightened the straps, stowing the excess under a special elastic cover provided for that purpose. I clipped the reserve chute to two D-rings on the front of the harness and cinched the whole business tight to my body. I put on the bubble goggles, donned the football helmet, and snapped the chin strap. The smell of dry silk and the linseed stink of canvas made me feel brave.

  Completely outfitted, I gazed in the mirror. Captivated by the person I saw standing there, as I had been mesmerized by photographs and paintings of soldiers when I was a boy, I felt like a man about to pass through a turnstile into some mythic world. It would be easy to underestimate the significance of that moment—pass it off as adolescent posturing—but I think it was precisely then that two energies began to interact within me: desire and will. By desire I don’t mean a conscious wanting, as in wanting to be free and heroic, but rather an ill-defined longing—like that of Narcissus—for some satisfactory reflection of myself. And by will, I simply mean intent. I did not have to decide anything. As I stared at myself in the mirror, longing was transformed miraculously into intent. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t jumped yet. At that moment, I had no doubt at all that I would. The proof stood right there in front of me. The commitment was already made. A feeling of warmth spread through my solar plexus, as if I had just swallowed hot soup. I was going to shake off the curse of the college dropout—and escape what I perceived at the time to be my father’s limited world. Soon I would be testing the rarefied air of the parachutist.

  Only a handful of Americans jumped out of airplanes for fun in those days. Air-to-air free-fall photography did not yet exist. What would it feel like, I wondered, falling all alone through space, free and entirely on my own? “Like lying on a mattress of air,” Istel had said, “no feeling of falling at all.”

  I could only barely imagine free fall, but I had no trouble envisioning the reputation that would result from such an adventure. Shamelessly, I held an interview with the press right then and there in the motel room. I positioned myself in profile to the mirror, so that I could glance occasionally at the handsome fellow in the glass and admire his strawberry blond hair and his intense blue eyes. I began addressing a very pretty female reporter who just happened to pick me for a private interview and who chose, for some inexplicable reason, to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed, pencil in hand, notepad resting on her otherwise bare knee.

  “Am I ever scared?” I said, shooting her a cocky grin. “Well, not scared, exactly. But a modicum of apprehension is healthy when you’re jumping from a height of twelve thousand feet or so. After all, you’re plummeting toward the earth like a rock. At higher altitudes, lack of oxygen complicates the situation . . . Why, yes, actually, I do. I’m glad you ask. I feel it is important that young people have a challenge such as this, but it is not for the faint of heart, as you can imagine . . . Afraid of heights? Me? . . .Do they always send such pretty reporters to cover international championship events like this? . . .Am I free for dinner? You mean tonight? Should we maybe fool around first?”

  Just then there came a loud knock on the door. I froze. “Just a minute!” I shouted, ripping off my helmet and bubble goggles. I began frantically loosening the reserve chute tie-downs. But it was too late. The proprietor, using her own key, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me.

  “Je le savais!” she screamed.

  “What?” I said.

  “Vous n’êtes pas seul!”

  “What?”

  Her breast heaved and her gullet trembled. “You are not alone! I knew this!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I hear you talking to her! Je le savais! Where is she?”

  I couldn’t decide which was worse, getting caught harboring an unpaid guest or talking to an imaginary woman.

  “Who?” I asked.

  The proprietor yanked open the closet door, then tore back the shower curtain. She even got down on all fours and peered under the bed.

  “I’m alone!” I protested. I started to explain that I was rehearsing for a part in a movie, but she stood up and stomped out before I could finish.

  “Really, it’s true!” I called after her. “I am alone!”

  I was not alone, of course. Not really. You can’t be self-conscious and alone at the same time. I turned to the mirror again, my heart pounding with shame, my confidence shaken.

  Two weeks later, when Istel and Sanborn sent me to live in Orange, Massachusetts, in a rundown farmhouse on the edge of Orange Municipal Airport, I felt as if I’d been assigned to paradise. Already living in the house were Nate Pond and his father, Sebastian “Batch” Pond. Nate, a twenty-seven-year-old Cornell graduate who had recently become a third partner in Parachutes Incorporated, was well on his way to becoming what my father would have called a “rough customer.” What struck me right away was the glint in his eye—at once playful and angry—and his restless staccato laugh. His father was both a gentleman farmer and a pilot. As a young man, Batch had flown the mail in Mexico. He liked his vodka and kept cases of it under his bed. Nate didn’t seem to have fallen very far from the tree, though he favored beer. I was assigned the smallest room in the farmhouse. When I got out of bed in the morning, my knees touched the wall. But it was better than the basement at home.

  In the late 1950s, western Massachusetts was a region in precipitous decline, following the departure of the textile industry after the war. The town of Orange, though nicely situated in the Berkshires, felt unprosperous and dreary. It reminded me of the coal-mining town in How Green Was My Valley, the first movie I saw as a child. Aubuchon’s Hardware on Main Street was the place to be during the day, and you had a choice of three establishments in the evening: Frank’s Bar, which featured pickled eggs and fifteen-cent glasses of draft beer; the smoke-choked Orange Diner, where you could get a pretty good meatloaf dinner for a couple of bucks; or the upscale DiNapoli’s Ristorante, where you could dine in candlelit booths, complete with red-checkered tablecloths, and be served by the owner’s sultry, olive-skinned daughter.

  I’d come to view devastated towns like Orange through rose-colored glasses—oh, glorious, rootless America! Since I’d never had to live for any length of time in such a place, I was free to admire decay and ignore the misery of the working poor and unemployed. Beneath my romantic view of poverty lay a thinly disguise
d arrogance born of privilege. I had a developer’s eye long before I learned to distrust the process of gentrification that has transformed so many American towns and cities; everywhere, broken-down brick buildings, nonfunctioning wa-termills, and peeling picket fences resonated with potential. It helped, of course, that I was an advance scout for what would become a noisy invasion of skydivers—one followed closely by reporters and filmmakers. I was riding a gust of fresh air that would very soon put the town on the map.

  We began building the jump center in February, when Lew Sanborn arrived from Bedford, bringing his expertise in carpentry and construction. We cleared out the large Quonset-style hangar, erected a wall of parachute storage bins, built six long parachute-packing tables, and suspended a parachute canopy simulator from the I-beams. Next to the hangar, we converted a little wooden building into a classroom and installed thirty antique flip-top desks (complete with inkpots), a portable projection screen, and a rolling blackboard. Sometimes, during coffee breaks, I would light a cigarette and scribble in chalk cryptic messages on the blackboard, like Cogito ergo sum or Beware the philosophical implications of the transcendence of the ego. Nate would snort with contempt. “You asshole! That’s why erasers were invented.”

  We dumped a truckload of sand near the flight line, then smoothed it out and set up a water-filled fifty-gallon drum to serve as a platform for practicing parachute landing falls (PLFs). We designed and constructed a mockup of a Cessna 182, so students could learn the feel of the open door and rehearse aircraft exits.

  Istel had leased Orange Municipal Airport from the town of Orange for twenty years, in exchange for building an aircraft hangar, and on the condition that if Russia invaded America, the airport would revert to its intended purpose as a military evacuation facility. Along with three five-thousand-foot runways, the federal government had built a modern administration building, complete with plate-glass windows, Unicom radio, weather indicators, multidirectional loudspeakers, and a large windsock. Not to mention some pretty nice indoor restrooms and a generous reception area. The large parking lot seemed tailored for our arrival, and, just as Istel had envisioned it, high-octane gas was available and would attract the pilots of multi-engine planes, along with wealthier clientele.