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Leap of Faith

Clay Coppedge

    One thing we all remembered about Cliff Cobb was that he had a horn in the middle of his forehead, just above his eyebrows. The story we heard was that the horn formed after he fell from the couch when he was a baby and a bone grew there as a means to protect the injured area. Our third-grade teacher told him doctors would be able to remove the horn when he became an adult and his bones finished growing, but Cliff assured her that wasn’t going to happen.
    “God gave me this horn,” he said. “God can take it away if he sees fit.”
    For a while, some of the other kids made fun of Cliff. Called him “Goat Boy” and “Horny Boy” until the day he head-butted Jimmy Thompson, knocked him nearly unconscious, and walked away laughing. We took notice. Cliff was short but stocky with a burr haircut and a perpetual scowl caused by the horn that made his eyebrows naturally furrowed. The other kids didn’t have much to do with him but I got along with Cliff fine. We were both mad for baseball and football, and we could spend half an hour together in the lunchroom without getting into a fight.
    Our friendship was sealed, at least for a time, when I fell victim to Oscar White, the designated bully at our elementary school. One day Oscar simply decided it was my turn to get beat up. He bumped up against me in the hall, then pushed me into a row of lockers.
    “Watch where you’re going, squirt.” He waited for me to say something back to him. When I didn’t he called me a chickenshit. I shook my head. All I could say was, “Nope, you got that all wrong.”
    He smirked and pushed me again. “Going to teach you a lesson,” he said. “Meet me at the gas station after school.”
    Most of the fights we had in grade school and junior high took place behind a Gulf gas station across the highway from the school. The same dozen or so boys always showed up to watch the fights, along with a couple of girls who were often seen the next day holding hands with the winner. Raymond, the old Black man who ran the station, allowed it to happen. Parents and school administrators took him to task but he never changed his policy.
    “At least if they work out they differences here, I can keep an eye on ‘em,” he told a meeting of the schoolboard. “I’ve had to stop a couple of fights. If I hadn’t been there, I think the losers of those fights might have lost they lives.”
    He might have been talking about the fight I had with Oscar.
    Oscar was a year old than me, a head taller, twenty pounds heavier, and a lot meaner. He kicked my ass from one side of the station to the other. He beat me until I dropped, and then commence kicking my ribs.
    That’s when Raymond stepped in. “Don’t you go kicking somebody when they down,” he told Oscar, grabbing the budding young psychopath by his wrists and pushing him away from me. “That ain’t no way to fight. Coward’s way to fight, man.”
    But Oscar was in a frenzy, like a shark smelling blood in the water. He pushed back and stepped toward Raymond, fist cocked, ready to give Raymond the same beating he’d laid on me. Into this scene stepped Cliff who, without preamble or ceremony, head-butted Oscar. There was a sickening crunch of bone on bone, and then blood. Oscar’s blood. Lots of it. He dropped to his knees, glanced up at Cliff, and fell over on his side. He eyes rolled back in his head, and it looked like he might expire right there on the spot but he puked instead.
    Raymond shooed the other boys away and assured Cliff he could have brought the matter to the same conclusion. Cliff shrugged.
    And then, as I sat on the ground and tried to stop my nose from bleeding and waited for my vision to clear and my head to stop ringing and Oscar was staggering in the general direction of his house, Cliff handed me a Coca-Cola, something none of my better friends had bothered to do. Maybe they were embarrassed to be my friend that day. Cliff didn’t care. Oscar wasn’t going to mess with him. Neither was anybody else.
    “That was pathetic,” Cliff said to me as I downed half the Coke in one swallow. He didn’t say it in a mean or taunting way but more as a simple observation.
    “He messed me up pretty bad, “I admitted. “I hit him, but it didn’t do anything.”
    “That’s the thing. You hit him once.” Cliff was clearly mystified by this tactic. “You never hit somebody once. You hit ‘em a bunch of times. You ain’t going to take anybody out with one punch. You got to hit ‘em a bunch of times. Hit ‘em as many times as you can. If you’re hitting them, they ain’t hitting you.”
    And so Cliff and I became pals. Sort of. Other than sports, we didn’t have much in common, but he gave me that Coke and some good advice. So we hung out together for a while.
    My parents were not pleased when I brought Cliff over to the house to look at my baseball cards. They didn’t know much about him, but they knew the family. After he went home my dad advised me to steer clear of the Cobb family.
    “They’re a strange bunch,” he explained. “They’re Church of the Firstborn people. They don’t believe in a lot of things that other people believe, like doctors. Don’t let him or his folks fill your head with any of their nonsense.”
    The issue didn’t come up until I rode my bike to his house one day. The Cobbs lived about five miles outside of town on a farm. They ran a few cattle, had a horse, a hog, some chickens, and a huge garden that supplied most of their food. His mother asked me right off what church my family attended and when I said we only went a couple of times a year, on Easter and Christmas, she shooed us out of the house and gave Cliff a sharp look.
    “That was the wrong answer,” Cliff said when we got outside. “You have embarrassed me. I brought home a heathen. Y’all might even be atheists for all I know.”
    I didn’t like the way he brought my family into this. “Apparently you don’t know very much. From what I hear, y’all don’t even have enough sense to go to the doctor.”
    Cliff turned on me. “You don’t know anything about our religion. You don’t know anything about any religion. You don’t even go to church!”
    “Yeah, but I have sense enough to go to the doctor when I’m sick. That’s what they call common sense.”
    “It’s in the Bible! ‘Heal thyself.’ We pray. We believe. That’s all it takes. God protects us.”
    “How does he protect everybody in the world at the same time?”
    Cliff turned solemn for a moment. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
    “So do doctors.” I thought it over for a moment. “Okay, maybe it’s not that mysterious. They just give you medicine.”
    “Not the same thing. A doctor can’t protect you like God can.”
    The Cobbs had a big windmill behind their garden, which gave me the kind of idea you get when you’re trying to have the last word in an argument you’re not going to win.
    “So let me get this straight. If you were to, say, jump off the top of that windmill, nothing would happen because God would protect you.”
    Cliff nodded. “That’s right.”
    “So do it.”
    “I don’t need to prove nothing to you.”
    “That’s because you can’t. It’s all bullshit.”
    “Want me to whip your ass?”
    “What would that prove? You knocked Oscar White clean out, but he’s still dumb as a doorknob. We both know you can kick my ass. But can you jump off that windmill and walk away? That’s what I want to know.”
    If I’d thought he’d really do it I never would have dared him like that. I was just trying to make a point. But he scampered over to the windmill and climbed it easily all the way to the platform on top, at least thirty feet up there. Just watching him made me a little queasy.
    “Uh, Cliff,” I called to him. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you jumping off the windmill. Let’s just forget it. Okay?”
    Cliff called down to me, “I can see your house from here!”
    And then he took a flying leap, spreading his arms wide as if he were diving headfirst into the ground like an Olympic diver. He might have realized at the last minute that a headfirst landing would be asking too much of the Almighty because he tried to right himself at the last second and landed on his back. He hit the ground hard and I could hear the breath leave his body as he bounced once and was still. I ran over to him, wondering how I was going to explain this, especially if he was dead.
    Cliff’s eyes were bugging out and he was trying to breathe but not doing a very good job of it. The effort caused him to make a weird croaking sound. He finally let loose with a long exhale and propped himself up on his elbows.
    “Are you all right?”
    He got to his feet very slowly, breathing hard. He fixed me with a hard look, though even his normal look was intimidating enough. “Satisfied?” he gasped.
    “You don’t look too good in the eye.”
    “I’m fine.” He gasped, caught his breath again, and managed a sneer to go along with his scowl. “If you’d done that you’d be dead. You atheist!”
    “I ain’t going to find out. I got more common sense than that.”
    Cliff wobbled away toward his house, limping, gritting his teeth, and throwing his shoulders back. I still wasn’t sure he was going to survive this.
    “Aw man, I didn’t mean anything by it, Cliff. I was just messing with you.”
    “It’s time for you to go home.” His voice still had a gasping quality. “I can hear your mama calling you from here.”
    We weren’t friends after that, but we weren’t enemies either. We played on the same Pony League team and had the occasional conversation, but our days of hanging out together were over. Cliff dropped out of school in the ninth grade. I didn’t see him again until several years later when he and his scowl showed up on my porch. He still had the horn on his forehead. He said was on his way to visit his mother and had run out of gas and could I give him a ride? I drove him to the same gas station where we used to have our fights and he took a gas can back to his car. He told me he had worked in Lubbock as a truck driver for the last several years and liked it just fine. I asked him about his family. Except for his mother and an uncle, they were all dead. None of the others had made it to sixty.
    “Only the good die young,” he said, and tried to smile but it didn’t work, maybe because he was pushing forty by that time and looked sixty. He mentioned having a bad back and I wondered if it stemmed from his flying leap of faith from that windmill.
    Back at his car, Cliff offered to pay me for my trouble but I waved him off. “No problem. I’m sure you would do the same for me.”
    “I would. I really would. You were always a good guy. You were about the only one who ever tried to spend time with me. Even if you nearly caused me to kill myself.”
    “I always felt bad about that.”
    “It was a stupid thing. We were kids. We didn’t know any better.”
    He drove away and I never saw him again. I moved out of town and all but forgot about him until last year I got news that he’d passed away two weeks previous at the ripe old age of fifty-six. I found two obituaries online, neither accompanied by a photo.
    In one, where the photo would normally go, was a picture of a windmill, backlit by a setting sun. I thought about Cliff that night, but mostly I thought about the windmill that I’d dared him to jump from all those years ago. My decision to attend the funeral increased attendance by a third.
    The services took place at the Natural Baptist Church, the local Church of the Firstborn having disbanded when the congregation dwindled to three faithful and aging souls. On my way into town I noticed that the former house of worship is now a community clinic. Mysterious ways, indeed.

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