Your father once told you this story about a man who nose-dived his cropduster into the cornfield behind the house. He had a photograph of it, him standing in front like the crashed plane was Mount Rushmore. It was a big deal, he said. People don’t die spectacularly in Illinois.

But this pilot did, and even though he wasn’t in the picture, you can still imagine him laying there on the hungry ground in a way that men don’t when they have choices left: all angles, wrong places. Your father thought the pilot may have done it on purpose. He said that there was a look on his face like he wanted it this way, like dying in the air was his fondest wish. But he didn’t die in the air, you thought. He died on the ground, died because he wasn’t in the air anymore.

You wanted your father to tell you more, but your mother came home from waiting tables and said something about his cherry tobacco. They yelled. You were five. Your father stormed out to the barn, slammed the screen door. Your mother fed you minestrone soup and peanut-butter crackers and put you down to sleep.

You know that you saw your father again. You know that he came inside that night to tuck in your covers. You know in the morning he ate his fried eggs and watched the grain futures on the black-and-white. You know that the last words you ever heard your father say weren’t “All right, all right, god-damn it, I’m going.”

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Teague Bohlen teaches fiction at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he also serves as co-editor for the arts and literary magazine Copper Nickel. His fiction has been seen most recently in Pindeldyboz, and his first novel The Pull of the Earth was just released in late 2006.