“Hightower. PFC Nora Hightower.” It was the name I always gave when it looked like there might be trouble, just in case someone decided to report me.
Not that I set out to cause trouble. It just . . . well . . . followed me.
“You see, our junior hostesses went through a rigorous application process—”
“We did too.” And an IQ test, a physical, a typing exam, and on and on, simply to prove ourselves. I’d scored near the top in all of them, and aced the driving test too.
“—and these young women are not even allowed to step out with one of the men on a date, much less . . .” Her voice trailed off, and her cheeks reddened under the face powder.
So that was it. “Much less what, Mrs. Coleridge? What do you think we WACs do, anyway?”
“Dorie . . .” Violet’s voice, less scared now and more with an edge of warning.
Which I ignored. “Filing medical records?” I suggested innocently. “Driving shipments of supplies from base to base? Directing an air traffic control tower? The members of the Women’s Army Corps work to free up the servicemen you seem so enamored with.”
Ever so slightly, the smug smile on the woman’s face faded. “I’m sure that’s true for the majority. But you can’t deny that rumors are started for reasons.”
“Eleanor Roosevelt said that rumors about the WAC’s loose reputation were part of a Nazi-inspired slander campaign to undermine the war effort.” I clucked my tongue, shaking my head at the notion. “Surely you wouldn’t want to participate in such a thing as a patriotic American citizen.”
I heard Bea suck in a gasp, but otherwise only the strains of “Swinging on a Star” broke the silence.
You know those high-noon duels in B-movie Westerns where the sheriff and the desperado stare each other down before pacing away to shoot? That’s what we did, Mrs. Coleridge and I, and for a second I wasn’t sure whose hat was white and whose was black.
Then a baritone “Hey, what’s the holdup?” alerted us to a group of army boys who were eager to get inside to dance with the respectable junior hostesses.
I glared at them, but Mrs. Coleridge smiled over my shoulder, her voice sweeter than a melted Milk Dud. “One moment, please.” Her eyes returned to us. “Run along now, ladies.”
Turning away without wiping that smug smile off the woman’s face was the hardest thing I had done in a long time. As we trudged back to the street leading to the fort, Bea was saying something about being too tired to dance anyway, but I wasn’t listening. My mind was already spinning through ways to sneak in, and I couldn’t help but give one glance back at the men who had stolen our place in line.
Wait. Was that . . . ? I took another look, and even in the twilight, it was obvious that one of them was a black man. And what’s more . . . I squinted at his uniform, and there it was, glinting silver on his shoulder: the brand of command. An officer.
My, my. Poor Mrs. Coleridge is having an eventful evening.
“Come on, Dorie,” Violet said, tugging at my arm. “We can play bridge back at the barracks.”
I waved her off, motioning her to be quiet. As if a card game could be half as interesting as this.
“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Coleridge’s stentorian voice boomed across the distance between us, right on cue. “But the USO club for colored servicemen is at the YMCA on East Olive Street.”
Her meaning—and firm stance blocking the door—couldn’t have been clearer. But the officer was either playing dumb or really was, because all he said was “I see. Are they having a dance tonight too?”
I edged closer, approaching from the side and leaving Bea and Violet behind, close enough to hear Mrs. Coleridge huff, “I don’t know the schedules of the other branches. But your kind aren’t permitted in this one, private.”
“Lieutenant, ma’am,” he corrected mildly. “First Lieutenant Vincent Leland.”
So I’d been right about the uniform. Usually officers didn’t dignify the enlisted men’s USO clubs with their presence.
“As you might have heard me say before, rules are rules.”
“I did hear. Thank you for letting me know how things stand. Which way to East Olive Street, if you don’t mind?”
She pointed to her left, and I think she would have gestured in any direction, so long as it would get rid of the latest inconvenience on her strained nerves.
“Thank you, ma’am. You have a good evening.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked where she’d indicated, not whistling a jaunty tune, but not storming off, either.
I can’t tell you what made me run a few steps after him, but suddenly there I was, calling out, “Wait!”
Lieutenant Leland turned slowly, removing his hands from his pockets like I might be the police accusing him of pickpocketing. “Piano hands,” my mother would have said. She was always despairing of mine, which couldn’t even span a full octave.
Now, this close to him, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was handsome, with a neatly trimmed moustache and a strong jaw. “Looks like we’ve both been kicked out of the club.”
“It seems we have.”
Unlike all the black people I saw in movies, he didn’t speak with a Southern accent and had no trace of a sunny smile pasted on his face. There was a hardness to the mouth under his trim moustache, no matter how mild the words that came out of it.
I was too curious not to ask. “Did you really expect to get in?”
He didn’t meet my eyes exactly, but he gave a tired smile. “Not really. I just came from Fort Benning, Georgia. Down in the heart of Dixie.” He drawled the last part. “I only wanted to see if Seattle would be more of the same. Should’ve guessed.”
“There is probably a back door, you know. To the gymnasium.”
Now he looked at me, but not with amusement the way I’d hoped. More like he thought I needed a one-way escort to the loony bin. That expression faded to a flicker hidden behind a stoic politeness. “Listen, private . . . ”
“Armitage,” I supplied.
“PFC Armitage.” He repeated the name slowly, frowning, and for a moment, I worried that he’d heard me use my other, false name at the door and was going to ask about it. But instead, he shook his head. “I’m an army officer, here on special invitation to get a job done. Not to cause trouble.”
A special invitation. He might as well have lit an electric marquee with a giant arrow to direct my curiosity.
“You do what you want,” Leland continued. “But me . . . I’m going to wait to dance till I’m invited in.”
I glanced at the white soldiers streaming into the gymnasium, where Mrs. Coleridge paused her ticket taking to glance suspiciously at us. “You might be waiting a long time.”
“Yeah, I might.” He nodded slowly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, from the way that lady is looking at me, I shouldn’t be seen talking to you, so . . .” He tipped his cap at me. “Good evening.”
With that, he continued down the street, whether toward East Olive or back to the fort, I couldn’t say. But not before I saw the glint of something else on the lapel of his uniform: a pair of silver wings.
But that didn’t make sense. There weren’t any black paratroopers . . . were there? Almost all of the black troops who had come through Fort Lawton were in the service corps—supply drivers, facility guards, and mess stewards—or else in their own segregated units. They certainly didn’t fly planes, much less jump out of them.
“Dorie!”
My name came out shocked and slicing, and I turned to see Bea advancing on me, her expensive leather shoes tapping against the pavement and Violet trailing behind her. She looked meaningfully after Lieutenant Leland. “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”
I shrugged off her concern. “I’d hoped he could help.”
“Help with what?” Violet asked.
“Boost me up to the windows, of course. That is, if the back door’s locked.”
Violet looked about ready to pass out on the sidewalk. “You
can’t be serious.”
“Dorie, we can’t—” Bea huffed and crossed her arms. “You know it’s not going to end well.”
My eyes went from the glow of light and music inside the gymnasium to the shadowed alleyway beside it.
“We’ve made sacrifices for our country too,” I reasoned. “It’s not right, turning us away.”
Bea shook her head. “That’s all well and good, but they’ve made it clear they don’t want us here.”
To that, I smiled. “That’s only because they haven’t seen us dance.”
In the military, sometimes you got used to falling into line. Obeying commands from Captain Dora Petmencky, the officer in charge of the Fort Lawton WACs. Abiding by the speed limit in the army motorcade vehicles. Standing up as straight as an over-starched shirt for morning roll call.
Other times, you found yourself clambering onto a garbage can to climb in a gymnasium window.
By some miracle, I managed to avoid spraining my ankle or tearing my hosiery, and after I let Violet and Bea in through the back door, we stole down the hallway toward the gymnasium, peeking out at the crepe banners, the swing band in the corner, the table weighed down with punch and doughnuts.
“Wait until this song ends,” I instructed, “and hustle right in there. Try to find a partner as soon as possible.” From the looks of the long stag line around the fringes, that shouldn’t be a hardship.
“But what do we do if—?” Violet began, but the concluding brass flourish of the latest number cut her off.
This was our moment. I’d already done a quick reconnaissance to find a likely group of fellows and strode up to them. Bea and Violet could follow if they liked. This close to Puget Sound, we all knew what sink or swim meant.
“Hello, boys,” I said in my best sultry voice as I came near the group of soldiers, and a private with slicked-back hair was already turning toward me when I heard a “Hey, Doris! Glad you made it.”
I turned to see Max, as close to a “buddy” as a gal could have on base and a real mechanic besides, not just someone who ducked into the transportation corps because it seemed like an easier job. He always showed up on time and carried an Italian-English dictionary in his back pocket to communicate with the prisoners of war who worked in the garage.
Yes, a stand-up guy, Amos Maxwell, though a poor fox-trotter, I found out only a few moments later. No rhythm at all, but he made up for it with grinning enthusiasm.
A verse and a chorus in, something caught my eye on the far side of the gymnasium. “Take me over to the basketball hoop, will you, Max?”
“All righty then, Doris. Whatever you say.” Step by step, we danced our way over, with Max tramping on my feet more than the floor. But that was all right with me, because by the time we made it to the foul line, there was Mrs. Coleridge, guarding the punch bowl.
Her eyes roamed the crowd generally, then—spotting a couple both in khaki, maybe?—she stared directly at me, her jaw falling slightly ajar. Hollywood couldn’t have planned it any better.
And me? I lifted a hand off of Max’s shoulder to wave . . . and took another whirl toward dancing the night away.
CHAPTER 3
Gordon Hooper
January 5, 1945
The smell of government-issue meatloaf could cling to a place for days. Better than the stench of the glob of canned meat we mixed up on fire drops, but still, not appealing.
So my nose got turned around when I entered the cookhouse and smelled roast chicken.
A glance at the chow line told me that it hadn’t been my imagination. Mrs. Edith Morrissey, our district ranger’s wife, presided over the line, nearly popping her apron strings in pride and holding her pair of tongs like a scepter.
I grabbed a tray and held it out. “Christmas come twice this year, Mrs. Edith?”
She plopped a large thigh on my plate, plus a drumstick—the benefits of being nice to the cook. “Didn’t you hear? Roger’s going to . . .” She shrugged. “Well, it’s his birthday.”
I glanced over at Roger Kirkwood, sitting next to Jimmy Morrissey, the only two non-CO smokejumpers, both of them fresh out of high school and sure they would live forever. “Did he petition Roosevelt to declare it a national holiday?”
Mrs. Edith picked up a spoon and waggled it at me as we moved down to the vegetables, the crow’s-feet around her eyes crinkling in amusement. “Now, Gordon.” A generous scoop of green beans hit my plate, along with a fist-sized baked potato. “He’s not a bad young man, or I wouldn’t want my Jimmy spending time with him. Just a little full of himself. He’ll learn.”
I scanned the cookhouse for my friends. Not that it was hard to find them: eighteen of us smokejumpers clustered into two groups, the COs and the two townies, plus the two dozen staff and rangers who worked at the park, taking up half of the tables in a cookhouse meant for one hundred boisterous Civilian Conservation Corps men back in the ’30s.
Charlie Mayes spotted me from across the room and waved to an open seat across from him, next to Jack. Lloyd and Shorty were there too, but it was the ever-dour Thomas Martin that made me look for another table to join.
Only for a moment, though. No sense in leaving Jack alone to face him.
As I passed by the table full of rangers, I sneaked a look at Sarah Ruth Morrissey, seated amid the gruff and grizzled men in their green uniforms, like a bluebird in a pack of grouse. As usual, she preferred their company to us fellows her own age.
Her eyes met mine.
Caught.
I nodded at her, and she tilted her head in what might have been a nod, or maybe it was just a crick in her neck. That was Sarah Ruth. Pretty as a sunrise, but if I’d heard a rumor that she was raised by a pack of mountain lions in her early years, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Quickly, I veered away, before I could start blushing.
Shorty Schumacher looked up at me as I set my tray down. “Say, Gordon, you’ve got Mrs. Edith wrapped around your finger. What’s with the grub?”
“It’s a miracle, I’m telling you,” Charlie declared, then shot a cautious look at Thomas—the Apostle Tom, as Shorty called him. Except Lloyd, we COs were all religious, but Thomas was especially devout.
He was already frowning and opening his mouth to start a treatise on the nature of miracles when Mr. Morrissey strode to the front of the cookhouse, his gray hair glinting in the bare-bulb light.
“Attention, men,” he said, as if a commanding officer addressing his troops. It ragged on us when he did things like that.
As the chatter died down, Morrissey went on. “Tomorrow, Roger Kirkwood will be presenting himself for service in the United States Navy.”
Roger stood up and saluted, then smirked in our direction.
There was a murmur of approval from the table of forest rangers and a shrill whistle courtesy of Jimmy Morrissey—Earl and Edith’s son and Roger’s best crony. So that’s what Mrs. Edith didn’t want to tell me. Today wasn’t just any birthday—it was Roger’s eighteenth birthday.
“Kirkwood, we thank you for your hard work in fighting fires here at home,” Morrissey continued, “and we wish you well as you serve your country in a new way. We’ll pray for your safe return.”
Mrs. Edith started a good-natured cheer, and I clapped politely, until I realized that the men at my table were sitting stock-still, hands frozen on their silverware or trays—in Shorty’s case, with a piece of chicken halfway to his mouth.
Roger grinned like he was being photographed for the newspaper, then leered at our silent tables with a superior smirk that only a freshly minted eighteen-year-old could pull off.
Once the clapping died out, Morrissey went on. “One other announcement. As of tomorrow, we will be reinstituting the fire watch.”
This time, even I joined in the groaning. Not more lookout duty.
“As some of you”—he looked directly over at Jack—“have pointed out, there have been more winter fires than usual this year. While we typically only man the tower during peak season, I�
��ve decided to make an exception. We’ll be back to normal rotation: CPS men and regular forestry employees will alternate at the Flintlock Mountain lookout with shifts of one week.”
Sure, for the first day, the rest from physical labor would be nice. There was even a good collection of books tucked away up in the lookout tower. But by day three, the silence would start to grate, and after a week, even the crowded bunkhouse would sound like paradise.
“I won’t apologize for the inconvenience,” Morrissey continued, staring down all of us in turn with pale eyes, like an osprey on the hunt. “All those assigned will do well to be vigilant. If these forests burn, the damage to our nation can’t be underestimated. We don’t have the manpower to fight a disaster like the Great Fire.”
All the old-timers talked about that fire using the same tone of doom. It had been headline news all across the nation in 1910, the year my parents first met. Three million acres were destroyed by the end of it, gouging through Idaho, Montana, and Washington. It was our job to make sure it never happened again.
“And now, let us pray.” We all bowed our heads as grace was spoken over the last cookhouse meal Roger Kirkwood might ever eat.
“Almost makes you think we oughtn’t to eat the stuff,” Shorty said glumly, after the amen. “On account of dinner being a war celebration.”
Though none of the other boys slowed down much—Lloyd actually eyed Shorty’s portion—we all glanced at Thomas, who thoughtfully tapped a fork against the corner of his mouth.
Then he nodded. “First Corinthians 8. Even food sacrificed to idols is clean for any believers who can eat it with a clear conscience.”
Shorty’s round face brightened, and he took another chunk out of the wing on his plate, muttering around it, “Thank God for First Corinthians.”
I scooped another forkful of potatoes, trying to lose myself in the complaints over lookout duty starting up again.
Across from me, Jack stood, just like I’d known he would. It was always Jack.
He paused and looked right at me, inviting me to join, but I stared down at my canned peaches instead. When I looked up again, he was walking over to Roger’s table.
The Lines Between Us Page 3