Like clockwork, Shannie appeared with grandfather's mud pie. This time, she was dressed in a black dress. "Why are you making a mud pie?" I asked her the previous night. "We're not burring him."
"I'm paying respect," she answered.
Under my weight the limb swayed in the wind. As she knelt in front of Grandfather's grave, her right hand battled to keep her face free of her blowing hair. "That's my last pie," she told me later. "I don't feel the need anymore."
"Now that we have Stan's ashes, what do we do with them?" Shannie asked as we passed a Sunday afternoon in the maple tree. She had taken it upon herself to be their caretaker. She kept them in her jewelry box atop her dresser under a wallet size picture of my grandfather.
"Ain't it obvious?" Count launched an empty coke bottle into a towering trajectory. The three of us watched its flight in silence, anticipating the crash and Duke Nukem's response. The bottle exploded; the dog erupted.
"Is it?" Shannie asked.
"Take him skydiving," Count said.
"That's tacky, He was killed skydiving."
"Count's right. It's what he wanted. He told me so. He wanted one last jump."
"There's our problem, you have to be eighteen." Count said.
"We wait until James is eighteen," Shannie said. "Then James gets the honor."
"I'm sixteen. We'll only have to wait two years. I'll take the course and dump 'em," Count said.
"He's James Grandfather! James gets the honor," Shannie repeated.
"That's four years!" Count argued. "His ashes will decompose by then."
"Ashes don't decompose dumb ass," Shannie said.
Over the following weeks, the three of us became obsessed with everything airborne. We spent weekends at Squaw Valley airport watching parachutists. The jumpers got to know us. An instructor approached us asking why we were so interested. He offered to scatter Stan's ashes. We politely denied. Word spread and soon we were unofficial mascots of the Squaw Jumper's Parachute Club.
We spent the rest of the summer doing odds and ends around the club in exchange for getting our first jump free. The head rigger -whom to this day I know as Beetle, introduced us to the art of parachute rigging. She was a leftover flower child with a penchant for exotic dew rags and unshaven armpits. "She's cool," I told Count. "But her armpits make me sick." I found myself sneaking peeks, they were a train wreck.