Forgotten Memories

I couldn’t have been but eight or nine years old that day, the day that I had locked away and forgotten about for so many years. Until a dream ripped it from it’s shackled place in purgatory and thrust it into my conscience.
The morning sunlight cut swaths of brilliance through the canopy of trees, causing a strobe like affect as we drove slowly through the mountain pass. The side window of the truck was slightly fogged over from my tired breath as I tried to keep a vigilant lookout for deer upon the mountain side. My father drove in silence, the rifle propped up between us, the cold blued steel riding against my knee.
I could feel the slow crawl of time speed up when the dirt road narrowed to a single lane, worried that we would meet oncoming traffic and have no where to go but over the cliff that dropped off the side of the road three hundred feet straight down. This was an irrational fear as when we did meet traffic, it resulted in only a slow dance of vehicles and a kind hearted wave from the other occupants.
My eyelids would droop and then shut for only a few seconds and sleep would come wrap me in it’s arms, only to release me moments later as we crawled through a washed out part of the road or rumbled over the tracks left by some tractor or bulldozer days, maybe weeks prior.
Occasionally we would find a place to pull off, and my father would take the rifle and walk off into the trees while I stayed tucked away in the truck, listening and waiting for the round to fire and echo across the mountain ranges, but it never did. Eventually my father would come strolling back up to the truck from a different direction than he departed, rummage through the ice chest for two cans of Dr. Pepper and then we would set off again, slowly making our way up the mountain.
As the day warmed, the smell of wild sage would permeate the air, it smelled like freedom and wilderness. The gnats and flies would take to the air as well, yet even they seemed energized by the location, not at all like the slow lazy flies you would find around the house in the city, they seemed to have purpose and drive as the zipped this way and that.
As we rounded a corner a shelf opened up on my side of the truck and ran for about three hundred yards out to the cliffs edge. Trees made it almost impossible to see all the way to the edge but not quite. I saw a man standing out there wearing a blue and tan vest. He was looking out over the valley below and as we drove slowly down the road, he would disappear for a second behind a tree then reappear. It was the first thing I had seen that wasn’t pointed out to me by my father yet I said nothing, I just watched.
I watched as the man wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, take a step back, and then plunge forward and right over the edge with two quick and sure footed strides. I saw him start to fall and then disappear behind a tree. I blinked a thousand times trying to see him again but I never did, even as the trees parted and I could see the edge of the cliff, he was gone.
Terror wrapped it’s claws around me so hard that I couldn’t even find the breath to breathe, much less say anything. As the realization that he jumped became reality all I could do was sink down into the seat as far as I could go and shut my eyes tight. I feared that his ghost would see me watching and come screaming at me with bared fangs, torn flesh, and demand to know why I didn’t say something
I cried quietly, and then somehow, locked it all away and forgot about it for twenty five years.