"I'm really proud of her," Diane said.
"Me too," I watched Shannie resume pacing; this time she was intercepted by Beetle, who uttered a few words and led her into the office. "She threatened to Duck tape me to the rigging table." Shannie later said. Beetle had told her, "You may have packed the chute but it's my ass. If anyone finds out, I'm fucked. If it malfunctions, it's my balls that get cut off."
"She really trusts you," I told Shannie. Shannie bit her lower lip.
Diane grabbed my hand as the Cessna made its final approach. The warm softness of her touch woke every cell in my body; I was covered in goosebumps.
Shannie and Beetle stood outside the office door, their gazes directed skyward. A tinge of jealousy rushed over me as teacher and student stood together. The pilot cut the plane's engine and I looked skyward.
"Oh fuck," I murmured - my body suddenly rigid. Jumper four had a problem. As the jumper fell away it appeared the parachute malfunctioned.
"What's happening?" Diane's dug her fingernails into my wrist.
Then it was over. Jumper four was under a full canopy. "Thank God for a reserve," Diane sighed.
"That's not the reserve, it's the main."
"And you," Pete Condra - the jumpmaster for the student load - said to jumper four. "Flawless exit, a great smile, flawless arch. It was so perfect I almost had a perfect load of shit in my pants." Pete's hands flew in many directions as he spoke. "Your arch was too good,' he demonstrated with the back on his hand. "Your pilot chute burbled, it got caught in the vacuum created by your arch. It had no where to go." Jumper four, whose name was Michelle, was a twenty-something brunette with a toothy smile. She would eventually become a sky-god who would be killed years later in a plane crash at a skydiving competition. "It looked like you were having so much fun holding your arch that you were going to hold it all the way into the ground. Don't laugh," Pete told the others. "I've seen it happen."
After hearing Pete's explanation, Shannie beamed.
***
Two years later, during the summer of '88, a year after the Iraqis hit the USS Stark with an Exocet missile killing 37 American sailors, Count made his first jump. He didn't have to worry about his chute burbling, he wasn't talented. Ironic, considering two years later, as Shannie and I were making our first jumps, he was stationed at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky as a member 101st air assault division, the modern incarnation of my Grandfather's old division.