Just like he walked over to them every single Friday night before our bonfire, or when asking for any concerns to bring to Morrissey at their monthly meeting, or when some of us decided to go into town for a hard-earned burger. No matter how wide the gap was between us, Jack would never stop trying to cross it.
Alone.
It seemed to take a year for Jack to cross the cookhouse with his slow, deliberate walk.
“It’s nothing but pride.”
Thomas’s voice in my ear made me jump, quiet though it was. The others hadn’t even noticed Jack, arguing with Shorty about whether he’d really been attacked by a mountain lion while on lookout duty the summer before.
I didn’t turn away from Jack, who was saying something to Roger and his friends that was too quiet for me to hear. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The Scriptures say we should expect to be hated in this world. But Jack wants to be loved by everyone.”
I frowned, not sure how to respond. Wasn’t that the goal of peace? To love and be loved by all?
Across the cookhouse, Roger’s donkey-bray laugh seemed to echo against the exposed pine rafters, making even Shorty stop his latest tall tale and look over. “Yeah, right. It’s too bad you’re too yellow to fight alongside me,” he crowed to anyone listening.
“What’s the matter with him?” Shorty wondered aloud.
“Aw, the same as usual,” Charlie said, waving at him to get back to the story.
While Roger jeered something I couldn’t quite make out, I watched Jimmy. Lanky arms folded over his chest, thick eyebrows set, his expression unreadable, as usual.
When we’d first come to Flintlock Mountain, he’d been in his final years of high school, proud to show off what he knew about the forest to the new recruits. But then his older brother died in the war, and since then, Jimmy barely spared a moody grunt in our direction. What are you going to do now, Jimmy, left in the forest all alone?
Like a deer who sensed it was in a hunter’s sights, Jimmy’s chin snapped up. His eyes met mine, lit with a “Who do you think you’re looking at?” hostility. I jerked my gaze away and pretended to be engaged in our table’s conversation.
Soon, Jack slumped down next to me. “I had to try.”
I nodded. Someday, even Jack would give up, and no one would walk across the gap at all. And they’d have only themselves to blame.
My supper finished, I was thinking about licking my plate when ranger Les Richardson strolled over, holding a few letters fanned above his head. “Mail call, boys!”
Shorty got a postcard from a friend at another CPS camp, and Charlie, Thomas, and I all had letters from family. Mother tried to write a few times a month—short letters mostly, asking me questions and saying hardly anything about her own “dull routines,” but they were better than what Jack got, which was a card at Christmas with his parents’ names and a ten-dollar bill. Dorie never signed it.
Still, Richardson paused behind Jack, holding a crisp envelope out in front of him. I glanced at the stamp in the corner. A blue victory eagle emblem. No return address.
Not again.
“Another one for you, Armitage.” He grinned, exposing crooked teeth, and let the envelope fall to the table. “You got a girlfriend?”
“I’m afraid not.” Jack laughed, and to anyone else, it probably sounded as carefree as a summer Saturday. But I was his best friend. I saw the slight wince around the corner of his eyes as he took the envelope.
The others had discovered both a green scarf and a picture of Charlie’s fiancée, Marie, which Shorty was holding aloft, whistling like she was Miss America instead of a shyly smiling waitress while Charlie hollered at him to give it back.
I was the only one watching as Jack opened his envelope, pulled out the article, and read.
He never crumpled it up like I would have done, tossing it in the rubbish bin we filled with tinder for Friday night bonfires. Instead, he folded it neatly in half and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
None of the rest of us ever got the anonymous articles, and I’d asked Jack before who he thought was sending them, all about the latest battles and worst news of the war. His best guess was some high-school friend who’d joined the military.
I slapped him on the back. “Don’t let some prankster get to you, Jack. We’re doing the right thing.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice charged with more uncertainty than I’d ever heard. “I hope so.”
There’s nothing like a crew of smokejumpers to make sure a campfire gets put out properly. By the time we were done prodding for any half alive coals, the ashes were paste, leaving me shivering down to my socks.
“It’s almost curfew,” Thomas reminded us, distinguishable in the sudden darkness only by his voice.
“Who made you blackout warden?” someone—Hank?—said, which is what all of us were thinking.
For once, I led the noisy charge over the dirt path from the bonfire area to the bunkhouse, half of the men behind me exhausted from a long day, the other half chattering about the weekend stretching out in front of them.
That’s how we burst into the bunkhouse, with its neat row of a dozen bunk beds . . . to see Jack sprawled out on his bunk, scribbling in his journal. He barely looked up when we entered.
Something wasn’t right.
The others dug around in trunks for pajamas and toothbrushes, hurrying to get ready in the few minutes we had before lights-out.
I sat down on my own lower bunk, next to Jack’s. “You weren’t at the bonfire tonight.”
He shut the journal, gripping it tightly. “I’ve missed some before.”
Which was a lie, and we both knew it. Jack was always at the bonfires. Tenting the wood to start it, inviting Jimmy and Roger to join—though they never did—and starting a round of stories with a hushed, “Gather round, my children, and listen to a tale that’s truly true,” a phrase borrowed from his father’s stories.
I started to work the knots loose from my bootlaces, which were just as unyielding as Jack seemed to be. “Any particular reason you skipped tonight’s?”
“I had some writing to do.” When I didn’t give up, he waved me away. “I’m fine, Gordon.”
I studied him. Thumbs smeared with pencil from writing who knew how many pages in his journal. Face lined with worry. Eyes that couldn’t meet mine.
That’s not how I would have described “fine.”
“What’s the matter, Captain?” Shorty, his towering six-foot-three frame sticking awkwardly out of plaid pajamas, cut in, leaning against Jack’s bunk with arms akimbo. “Too much fried chicken giving you a stomachache?”
“That’s probably it.” With the spotlight shifted off him, Jack knelt at the foot of his bunk and tucked the journal away in his trunk and locked it, as usual.
Whenever Shorty teased him about locking his trunk among friends, Jack made some joke about not trusting Lloyd, our resident socialist who wanted to redistribute wealth. At which point, Lloyd couldn’t resist launching into a defense of how real socialism worked, and Jack escaped without further questions.
Once Thomas had enforced lights-out, I could hear Jack’s bed frame creaking as he got settled.
“So where were you really?” For a while, our voices would be covered with the grumbles of men finishing the process of getting ready for bed as they stumbled around in the dark.
“I told you. Writing.” He must have known I wouldn’t accept that for an answer, because he sighed and added, “And talking to Morrissey.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “This late?” Morrissey’s family lived on national forest property on the other side of the clearing from our bunkhouse. “About what?”
For a minute, silence stretched so long I thought Jack was pretending to be asleep to avoid telling me.
“I volunteered for lookout duty.”
“Are you crazy?” I whispered, loud enough to earn a shush from Charlie on the bunk above me. “Why?”
“I need some tim
e alone, that’s all. To think.” He sighed. “Listen, Gordon, don’t tell anyone.”
I snorted. “They’ll be glad it’s you and not them. I hear Shorty set up a chess game last time, playing against himself. He still lost.”
Jack’s laugh was muffled, like he’d turned his face to his pillow to keep from busting up, just like old times back in college, when we’d had no worries about the draft or the war.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I promised. If he wanted a week of boredom, he was welcome to it.
“Thanks, Gordon.” He sounded relieved, the gloomy tone—so unlike him—gone again. “You’re a good friend.”
It was enough to make me roll over and close my eyes. Jack was stressed by another anonymous letter, that was all. Everything would be all right in the morning.
CHAPTER 4
Dorie Armitage
January 9, 1945
The real trouble with working in the Transportation Corps wasn’t the busted distributors or the infernally complicated army truck engines, but instead getting oil out from underneath one’s fingernails before a date.
I tossed the nail file on the dresser in surrender, my attempt at good grooming only half complete. The fellow I’d met at the New Year’s dance would just have to face the fact that he was stepping out with a Fort Lawton garage girl. Arthur? Arnold? No, Archie, that was it. It was so hard to keep track of names after a party.
After changing into my favorite civvies—a green dress with white polka dots—I started in on my bird’s nest of hair. The difference between glamorous curls and overgrown shrubbery from the set of a Gothic horror film is hours of care, not something you can pour out of a bottle and apply in three minutes. I set to work determinedly with my brush and curling iron.
Having a mirror and nightstand was an unheard-of luxury. The WAC barracks had been inside the fort for a while, but they soon needed the space and exiled us to an old hotel in town. Even though we’d lost the view of the bay out our windows and they’d gutted the hotel beds and put in regulation cots, none of us girls gave a squeak of protest.
Back in my early enlistment days, I’d been dying to be sent overseas. Pounding away on a typewriter in North Africa or sorting mail in the Pacific sounded hopelessly romantic, not to mention possibly riding in an airplane—a childhood dream that both Jack and I shared. But when I first saw the brass fixtures of the private baths in every Stratford Hotel room, all my jealousies of the girls “over there” went right out the window.
As I jabbed pins into my dark locks, I hummed the Paramount Studio theme. There was something thrilling about the theater—especially the dazzling blink of the marquee, once blacked out after sunset but blazing again in full glory now that reports of Pacific victories put to rest fears of nighttime bombing raids. While I watched those beautiful people flickering up on the screen, I could forget about the latest recruitment numbers, the riot between American soldiers and POWs, the casualty reports . . .
“Doris.”
I glanced up to see my roommate, fellow Private First Class Phyllis Stanley, stationed in the doorway, galoshes in hand because she always remembered to take them off at the front door.
“Margaret told me a young man’s here to see you,” she continued, disapproval dripping from her voice into the puddles I’d created with my own galoshes, still on my feet.
“Really?” I started and glanced at the clock. A full half hour early? Funny, Archie hadn’t struck me as the punctual sort. “I’ll be right down.”
“Are you sure you should—?” Phyllis began, but I wasn’t going to tune in to Radio Sour Stanley anymore, where the number one single week after week was “Disapproval of Dorie’s Choices.”
“Now, there’s no use scolding,” I said, jamming on my black pillbox hat to cover my unfinished hair. “As long as I’m back in time for curfew, a night out is squarely within the rules.”
“But he’s a—”
“—perfect gentleman,” I finished for her, applying a touch of Headline Red lipstick and blotting it with a hanky. “Look at him, arriving early. It’s positively chivalrous.” I didn’t mention the way Archie had ogled me after monopolizing me on the dance floor. Agreeing to a date was the only way I could get him to leave me alone.
I tucked my coat in the crook of my arm, dashing down the stairs to the second-floor landing. Then, with a look over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching, I sat on the bannister. A girl has to make an entrance, and I’d tried it while dusting for Saturday morning inspection. Archie would love it; men always did go for girls who could make them laugh.
The familiar rush fanned through me as I let go and slid down, a few seconds of controlled falling.
Is this what it would be like to fly?
I could see a pair of dull boots and army khakis by the front door as I descended, and had just enough time to wonder why Archie hadn’t changed into his civvies for the date before the rest of the soldier came into view.
Not slicked-back Private Archie What’s-His-Name.
But the lieutenant from the dance, the one who’d been turned away and directed to the colored USO, staring at me like I’d just fallen through a hole in the ceiling.
Or, well, like I’d just slid down a bannister toward him, giggling like a fool.
Which, unfortunately, I had.
I ground to a halt on the second-to-last stair, gripping the balustrade to keep from toppling over at his feet.
“Good evening, PFC Armitage,” he said formally, taking off his hat.
“Lieutenant Leland,” I managed, tottering off the railing. Heels on the stairs again, I tried to sound professional. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
Maybe Archie was in the dayroom, or to the left toward the reception desk. Oh, how was I going to get past the lieutenant without making things any more awkward?
“Yes, well . . .” He seemed at least half as flustered as I was, so that was something. “Do you have a moment? I have a few questions to ask you.”
“Me?”
He nodded, and I used the pause to duck past him and through the archway. “Normally, I’d be happy to, but I have to meet with . . .”
I stopped. No sign of Archie in the hallway or the dayroom, and with the Christmas tree that had once stood between the tall windows hauled out, there wasn’t anywhere for him to hide.
Suddenly the half hour early and Phyllis’s particular disapproval made sense. I turned and looked at Leland. “You’re the one who came to see me?”
His face had “Didn’t I just say that?” scrawled over it.
“If you’ll allow me to explain,” he said, and again I was struck with the unexpectedness of him, the paratrooper emblem beside his silver officer bar, the crisply enunciated words that sounded so at home coming out of his mouth. “I’m in Seattle on a special assignment.”
“So you mentioned.”
“Which involves your brother.”
Of all the ways I thought he might finish that statement, dragging Jack into it had never occurred to me.
I could tell he was watching me for a reaction, and I really tried not to give it to him. But it was no use. I could feel my joints stiffening up with tension, like Oz’s Tin Man.
“You want to talk about Jack?”
“Yes, ma’am. Major Hastings told me one of the WACs here was the sister of a conscientious objector—apparently it came up in your records.”
By the time you were done with the interview process, the army knew practically everything about you, from your birthday to your preferred brand and style of garters. I’d told them about Jack straight off rather than risk them finding out later.
“When we met the other night,” Leland continued, “I recognized your last name, and when I checked my records, I found a Jack Armitage listed as a conscientious objector at one of the camps in this region I’m planning to . . .” He coughed. “Well, I recognized it, that’s all.”
“But there must be hundreds of Armitages in the country.”
I glanced at the mantel clock. Assuming Archie was on time, I had twenty-six, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to donate a single one of them to the topic of Jack. “Listen, I’m nothing like my brother.”
“Yes, the uniform was my first clue.”
Was that a joke? I studied him closely and noted the corner of his mouth turning up. Aha! The man did have a sense of humor. That could be useful.
Before I could comment, a familiar voice filled the hall. “. . . and I hear you’ve conspired to host a variety revue for Valentine’s Day.”
Sergeant Helena Bloom was the dread of all of us, finding dust and fault where no one else could and filing frequent reports with Captain Petmencky.
I wouldn’t say I squeaked exactly, but a surprised sound did leak out. “Come on,” I said, yanking Leland into the dayroom and toward the mantel, still decorated with wilting holly boughs from the holidays. There, no one could see us from the hallway.
He opened his mouth like he was about to ask what I was doing, so I placed a finger over my lips and jerked my head toward the doorway.
The footsteps became louder, and the sergeant’s voice with it. “I would like to attend the dress rehearsal.”
“Oh, but it’s all informal.” The second voice belonged to Clarice, a chum of mine and our social coordinator. “We’re not even sure there will be a dress rehearsal.”
Her voice became dim as she trooped down to the gig list, likely to make sure the correct girls were serving out their penalties on KP duty. “There will be now. We don’t want anything veering toward the burlesque.”
Once I couldn’t hear Clarice’s protest, I breathed again. “Close call, Lieutenant. At ease.”
Judging from his tin soldier–straight posture, ease was the last thing he had planned. “This is official army business, PFC Armitage.” The chill was back in his voice, like a spring Seattle day turned suddenly rainy. “I’m not here for a social call.”
The Lines Between Us Page 4