Club Icarus

Middle Flight

60 Middle Flight From a distance, from the little black shades he wears, his brown eyes look shot out, like eyes of a tanned skull. But get closer and he is just James Bond. The photo is 3 X 6. It is far too small for a wall, too wobbly for a desk. Belonging nowhere it ends up everywhere and I find them again one morning ten years later, unpacking boxes from another move, these four men, smiling out against a backdrop of fence and ivy. The frame is cheap, tinted gold, and loose around the little photo of us on a back deck in black tuxes a few hours before a graduation gala at Union Station for Paul who takes the center weight of the shot. His right hand wraps around a can of Bud as he curls a smile. More of the white of his shirt shows than on the rest of us. And he is straighter than us, who have done this already somewhere else. It is his grinning eyes that first lock into you. Jon slumps coolly in a lawn chair, lower than all of us, in the left hand corner. Almost all black, almost all shadow in his closed coat and arms. His eyes are shut as tight, his lips as full, as a corpse or a drunk. Yet not dead, and not yet drunk, he is just caught in a blink by the photographer. He curls a smile, his legs are crossed 61 like my father’s though, unlike my father’s, right over left. In the far right, leaning in, leaning on my leaning father in imperfect parallel, I do my best dash of smile, my left hand holding my right wrist, my straight hair in a stiff curl of gel. In the photo I am taller than my father, but leaner. He is big, his tanned face is wide and grinning my grin. In a week he will collapse on a green, his stomach exploding into his guts. And he will never be hungry again and he will always be too thin and the thin will kill him. But here, in this shot, one week before his seven years yellow in hospitals and bile, he is large. Larger than us. And in his hands that curl a heart, he nurses a beer. ...