The Good Oak

Seven: Zazpi

seven I zazpi The day Dad turned forty, we walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong. I was in my bedroom working on a report for Ms. Helm's class about the Cuban missile crisis. My report was already three days late, and Ms. Helm told me that if I didn't turn it in first thing in the morning, I'd get detention . Detention seemed unavoidable, since I hadn't written a word about Cuba or Castro or Kennedy or any missiles and didn't plan to. The whole thing was boring and had nothing to do with me. Why couldn't I write about something that was going on now? Like the Miami Dolphins' perfect season ? Or Evel Knievel's motorcycle jumping over fifty-two cars? I was flipping through my history book thinking what a waste of time history was when I came to the picture of the first moon walk. The image filled the page. I moved my book under the desk light to get a better look as I ran my fingers over the picture. The coolness of the moon seemed to come through the paper. Neil Armstrong stood in his space suit saluting. The gray mountains behind him looked 47 like the Estrellas south of Phoenix at dusk. From the city, like the moon's mountains, the Estrellas appeared lifeless. But I knew they weren't. I'd seen pictures of the mountains' slopes in Arizona Highways. They were covered with cactus and trees and animals-some as big as deer. It was just that because of the distance I couldn't see those things from my house. In the book's picture, an American flag seemed to be blowing in a wind I had learned in science class didn't exist. And there was part of what looked like a cheap kid's model of a spaceship off to the side. The ground at the astronaut's feet was marked with footprints, which I thought made it funny that the caption read, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Obviously there'd been a lot more than one step taken on the moon by the time the picture was snapped. "Do you remember wanting to go live on the moon?" Dad said from behind me, and I nearly fell out of my chair at the sound of his voice. "Geez," I said. "Don't do that." "Sorry," Dad said and ran a hand through my hair. "I never wanted to live on the moon." I started to shut the book, but Dad slipped his hand between the pages. "You wanted to be an astronaut." He leaned over my shoulder to look at the picture of the moon walk, and I smelled the burned potatoes from dinner and dust and sweat from work on his shirt. "I don't remember," I said. "I do," Dad said. "But didn't every kid in America dream of being an astronaut that day?" I looked up into my dad's face. He was smiling, and I saw how his front teeth were a little pushed together and not quite even. His eyes and skin were the brown of my oiled baseball glove, and his eyebrows, like his dad's, were thick and wild. "After the telecast," Dad said, "Oxea helped you build a spaceship out of wooden pallets in the barn. Me and Aitatxi watched as Oxea did the countdown for your reentry into Earth's atmosphere." Dad held up ten lingers and began curling them down one at a time as he counted back, "Hamar, bederatzi, zortxi, zazpi, sei, borzt, lau, hiru, bida, bagnojoan -go! And you jumped from the loft into a pile of hay." "Did I get hurt?" "You were grinning from ear to ear when you popped up through the hay. And you kept saying, 'Did you see that, Dad? Did you see that? I'm as-trow-nut. I'm going to live on the moon.'" "I did not," I said. "Now, then, you think I'd kid about something like my son being an as-trow-nut?" Dad laughed as he fell back onto my bed. "Boy, I would have liked to have gone to the moon with you and Neil. Maybe I should've been an astronaut." Dad an astronaut? The thought that my father could be something other than what he was had never...