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I used to think he would always be there—his voice rumbling like a Harley-Davidson, his red head and freckled white face beaming, almost luminous, and his sometimes neglected stubble of beard scarce and jagged and refusing to populate any more than the Kalahari.
Barbecues at our place usually ended up in a corner of the garden where rolling laughter muffled afternoon thunder and the smell of rain promised to wash up spilled beer and spoil the grill. An autobiographical archipelago of entertainment and mock-abuse regularly saw to it that the food was cremated, and had the guests drunk on his exploits. He would swallow his beer and bellow on about jumbos and kittens and hippos, and how learning to water-ski in flat-dog infested waters was the preferred method amongst real men. Elephant size stories about elephants, knives bigger than swords, airplanes painting smoke-stream pictures above the Zambezi Valley—there was no end to him.
Once, he and I took a Piper Cherokee into Ficksburg—home of the Cherry Festival and Eastern Free State Airshow—and damned near flew the thing head-on into the Northern Drakensberg granite. It was a miserable day for two boys to be out flying and we had been showing off our aerobatic display skills to a couple of girls in Johannesburg earlier that morning, before heading out to the nimbostratus-covered mountains in the southeast. We popped out of the clouds in rain that was falling in ropes at around four hundred feet and a half-a-mile from the Franshoek Mountain Lodge.
“ **** me,” I said, pointing at the mountainside we had missed crashing into by nothing more than luck and around a quarter-of-a-mile. “Look at that!”
“Good thing you flew around it,” he said. And then he said, “I bet you couldn’t do that again,” and he smiled that smile that said he would sit there next to me whilst I tried it if I wanted, and if it killed me trying, well then he would be right there at my side. I can see the grin on his face right now.
I wrote a poem about him once. It was not much of a poem. Well, perhaps it was not that it was not much of a poem. Perhaps it was more that he was just so much bigger than any of my poems could presume to be—larger than literature. He would go around reciting passages from it as if it were the only poem he knew—perhaps it was. I even heard him advise a Lusaka air traffic controller one day: “Heed not commands nor threats nor guns, nor waste a second lest you be gone.”
Sometimes, he would talk so loud I used to imagine that his voice could blow doors open or burst open windows, or even send whole towns flying the way they did in those old black and white movies made about when the U.S. was testing the atomic bomb. I used to tell him not to bother calling me up on the phone when he was like that, because I could hear him talking from the other side of town without it anyway. He said it was a gift and that God had given it to him and that there was no way on earth he was going to throw away a God-given talent. I still hear his voice, with the cigarettes in it, sometimes when I am flying alone, or when I am doing the other things that we used to do.
Nowadays I crack myself up sometimes when I suddenly remember the **** we used to get up to. Running away from that restaurant in Hillbrow without paying the bill after scoffing down their steaks and playing catch with a bunch of kids in-between the tables. Sneaking up on those lions in the Okovango Delta with blankets over us, and then jumping up, screaming, running around, and scaring them shitless—he said they had scattered like an Italian platoon under fire. I never thought that it would ever end.
I fished him from the river. I wish I never had. I did not want to remember him that way, but I had to find him. We could not find him at first. We searched from morning until dark for five days, the way you search when you know it is about death. And then, it was a Wednesday, and I saw his shoe floating amongst the reeds on the Zambian side of the river. It was one of those trail shoes, made by Caterpillar, and it had a heel that looked like The Incredible Hulk, smiling. Only he was not smiling. He was lying face down in the water and when I reeled him in a part of him rolled over slowly until he was face down again. I recognized the freckled white skin on his back and on his leg.
They said he died happy. They said he had died doing what he loved doing most. My little brother: dead at age twenty-eight on July 23, 1994. He had been painting smoke-trailed images over the Zambezi River, in a Beechcraft Bonanza, outside Chirundu. They said it was quick. They said he did not feel a thing.
I can still feel it now.
Copyright 2007 Wayne Shannon
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