In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  Someone, a couple, was strolling toward them, and instinctively, without looking up, Willie and August stepped into the street again.

  “Hey!”

  Willie startled. It was Fleischer.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Fleischer said, gesturing to the curb.

  August did an embarrassed shuffle and looked around. White folks didn’t talk to coloreds in the streets just like that. Just like they were friends. Even if they were soldiers.

  “This is my new wife, Ruth,” Fleischer proudly introduced the woman at his side. She was petite, Fleischer’s new wife. Blond, blue-eyed, pretty, in a soft, round way, with a round face, almost like Betty Grable, and Fleischer was looking at her with total adoration. She couldn’t take her eyes from his face, either. Willie felt like he was intruding, just by standing with them. “We got married in Corpus Christi. Only place we could find a rabbi.”

  How Fleischer managed to find himself a rabbi in Corpus Christi, Texas, take the Greyhound bus to get to him, and get married, all on Christmas Day, was something that Willie could never figure out. But married he was, and happy about it, too.

  Ruth gave them a warm smile and extended her hand.

  “Marty told me so much about you,” she said. “He says that you’re his closest friend down here.”

  Willie touched her fingers quickly and dropped his head, while August tipped his hat. “Yez’m,” he and Willie murmured together.

  “Hope you men had a merry Christmas,” Ruth said.

  “Yez’m,” August replied. “But we never did find those fried peach pies.” Ruth gave him a puzzled look.

  “His aunt Lily makes them,” Willie tried to explain.

  “You mighta heard of her,” August added.

  Ruth shook her head.

  “Well, anyway, we sure had a bang-up dinner at one of the churches,” Willie went on. “Turkey and macaroni and cheese, and beaten biscuits and ham. All you could eat.”

  “Pecan pie,” August added. “No peach—”

  “Well, we gotta run,” Fleischer interrupted. “Got to find a place off base to live, before my two-day pass runs out.” He took Ruth by the arm and led her toward the bus stop.

  “Merry, merry Christmas,” August called enthusiastically as they parted. Ruth waved back.

  When they were out of earshot, Willie poked August in the ribs. “Merry, merry Christmas,” he sarcastically repeated August’s words and then laughed out loud. “Man, you don’t know nothing! They don’t celebrate like us. They’re Jewish! They celebrate—Chramininakah.”

  * * *

  There were three more crashes during the holiday season. Three more families who wouldn’t be getting their son home at the end of the war. Three men who had died for nothing, as far as Fleischer was concerned. “It’s murder, that’s what it is,” he muttered to Willie after each crash. “Fairchild ought to be tried for murder.”

  “Murder,” Willie agreed. He rolled the word around in his head. Murder. It was the worst thing, he thought, that you could do to someone. It meant your personal right to die in your own way and your own time was taken from you, ripped out of God’s hands and changed forever. Fleischer was coming to work looking dog tired. Married two whole weeks now, he was sitting over a cup of coffee in his office and struggling to keep his eyes open.

  Willie almost hated to bother him, thinking a man should be left alone on whatever honeymoon he could piece together. He was probably up all night making sweet love. Yeah, he would leave the sarge alone as soon as he got the sign-off sheet initialed. He rapped softly on the office door before walking in. “Hey, Sarge,” he said, dropping the paper on the desk in front of Fleischer. “You sure do look sleepy.” He couldn’t contain a knowing smirk, though.

  Fleischer sat up and rubbed his eyes. “It’s those damn chickens, Jackson.”

  “Chickens?”

  Apparently Fleischer and his wife had managed to find a room to rent in an old farmhouse just outside of town. The cows were kept in a barn down the road. The pigs in a sty in the back. And one hundred and twenty-two baby chicks were being incubated underneath the house.

  “Do you know how much noise one hundred and twenty-two chickens make?” Fleischer asked.

  “I’m from New York City, Sarge,” Willie said. “I don’t know much about chickens.”

  “Hell, me neither.” Fleischer yawned. “I thought they came in pots. You know, with carrots and celery and matzo balls.”

  “Sounds about right to me, though I don’t know nothing about matzo balls.”

  “Know what else?” Fleischer rubbed his eyes. “These chickens don’t appear to have much interest in sleeping late.”

  “No, sir.”

  “They’re up before I am,” Fleischer continued gloomily. “Every morning. One hundred and twenty-two chickens.” He sighed. “What is so important to a chicken that it has to be up by four in the a.m.?”

  Willie tried to look sympathetic. “Can’t you find someplace else to live?”

  Fleischer shook his head. “It’s only two bus rides away. We can barely afford this, even though my pay was raised to twenty-one dollars a month. Ruth is eating mashed potatoes on white bread to fill up.”

  “Probably better than what we get in the mess hall,” Willie observed.

  “Yeah, well. The only good thing is at least we get a free chicken thrown in every two weeks when we pay the rent.” Fleischer signed off on the paper Willie was holding, then brightened. “But this idea came to me out of the blue. I was thinking about the plane crashes, you know? And for some reason, I thought maybe we can put something on the tips of the wires. Some kind of protection.”

  “Just came to you out of the blue?” Willie said with a sly smile. “To slip some kind of protection onto the tips of the wires? Just came to you, on your honeymoon?”

  “Yep,” Fleischer said in earnest, not getting the reference. “So I came up with this invention. Ruth and I been making dozens of them. Little sacks. I’m going to bring them all in and test them out.”

  “And you spent your whole first married week on that?” Willie repeated.

  “Yep.”

  Willie shook his head. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time, now, don’tcha!”

  Chapter 30

  “They almost good,” August declared after downing six little fried peach pies. He took a big gulp of very light, sweet coffee. “’Course, my aunt Lily’s are better.”

  Fleischer had brought in a shoe box full of peach pies earlier that morning for the coffee break, after an hour’s commute on two buses and a very close inspection by the guards posted at the front gates of the base.

  “Got a treat for you guys,” he had announced as soon as he walked into Hangar Five, setting the box down on the office table and proudly pulling off the wax-paper covering. “I fixed a record player for that sergeant in Requisitions, and he paid me in canned peaches. Twenty cans. We were up all night making these.”

  The men dug in right away. Willie ate as much as he could hold. Clyde Sanders thought the crust a little thick, Charlie Hobbs thought they could use a little more sugar, and of course, August politely mentioned how they fell short of Aunt Lily’s, but in less time than it took to offer them, they disappeared.

  “Where’d you learn to make fried peach pies?” Willie asked, helping himself to the last one.

  “I asked my landlady,” Fleischer replied. He poured them another round of coffee, more like a dinner party host than a sergeant in an airplane hangar. “Glad you boys finished them off. For some reason, Ruth said she doesn’t want to see another peach as long as she lives.”

  * * *

  Twenty huge army-size cans of peaches. Fleischer always had deals like that. Always after fixing someone’s radio or record player or steam iron or even washing machine, anything, as long as they could haul it to his apartment. He set aside one night a week repairing things for the locals in order to earn some extra money, though he mostly got paid in pork pies or pots of ch
eese grits or bottles of moonshine that smelled suspiciously like antifreeze, or, as in this case, twenty gigantic cans of peaches.

  Many mornings he brought the extra food in; the men were always hungry, since food in the mess wasn’t particularly tasty, and they appreciated the supplements to their regular fare. They wolfed down all sorts of local oddities, and gladly accepted the blankets or cast-off sweaters or extra woolen underwear or mismatched socks.

  * * *

  It had occurred to Willie more than once that he really ought to give something back to Fleischer. Maybe some kind of wedding gift. But Willie had no money; the only thing he kept in his barracks locker was a pearl-handled shaving kit with a silver comb and matching brush. He figured his mother must have saved for months to buy it; it was all he owned besides his trombone, which was still safe at home in Harlem. And he certainly wasn’t handy enough to make unique items the way Fleischer was fond of doing, so after some deliberation, he finally pushed the matter to the back of his mind.

  * * *

  A week after the peach pies, Fleischer came in with another surprise. This one a chicken feed bag filled with, well, Willie didn’t know what they were exactly. Made from white oilcloth with little pink roses, that Fleischer and his wife had purchased at the local five-and-dime, they were small, odd-shaped pouches, hand-sewn with tight black stitching and shoelace drawstring tops. These were the sacks Fleischer had been talking about, and Willie guessed they looked as plain as their name, though the roses gave them a nice touch.

  Sacks. Fleischer showed the men how to slip the whole thing around the ends of the wires and pull the shoelace tight. They were shapeless, slippery, awkward to use; the men struggled to make sense of them.

  “Dumbest thing I ever did see,” Charlie Hobbs complained to Willie. “We’re supposed to increase productivity, and he gives us these damn things to slow us down.”

  Willie nodded sympathetically. “You know how to solve that, don’tcha?”

  “What?” Hobbs asked.

  “Put ’em on faster.”

  * * *

  Fleischer made sure they were always in use. He reminded his men, exhorted them, brought in dozens of new sacks when the old ones cracked from the chemicals. They soon became part of wash rack protocol.

  Unless Hogarth came poking around. Then, courtesy of August, who was excused from wash rack duty to be the lookout because of his deep, penetrating voice and his inability to do much else, the sacks would be whipped off and tucked out of sight. Fleischer didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing until he had proof that it was making a difference.

  “Visitors!” August would call out, initiating a flurry of activity. By the time Hogarth came through the doors of Hangar Five, the men were deeply engrossed in hosing down the floor, sharpening already-sharp tools, rolling planes back and forth, or elaborately tightening nuts and bolts that had been tightened just moments before.

  * * *

  It amused Willie that Hogarth never noticed that while the hoses were officially bubbling and hissing and steaming away, and in general, filling the entire hangar with the usual acrid, foul-smelling, gasoline-laden steam, there was never actually anyone washing down the planes while he was around.

  Once Hogarth left, it was a different story. Sacks were pulled out from under armpits, from behind benches, from lunch boxes, from empty coffee mugs, and carefully placed back on the connections, ready to do their jobs.

  “It’s like a scientific experiment,” Fleischer explained to Willie. “I have to prove they work. The brass won’t believe anything unless the whole procedure is written down, in black and white.” To that effect, he kept a daily journal. He replaced every wire with new ones so that they would have a fresh start, squinted over the connections before and after cleaning, examining every wire, the jeweler’s loupe wedged firmly in his eye, and wrote endless notes in his constant companion, a little black book. Notes and notes and more notes.

  * * *

  By the end of February, there hadn’t been any more crashes. Not one. Not one American boy or French or British cadet was lost to a Vultee falling from the sky. It was all the proof Fleischer needed. He gathered his papers, and the carton of sacks, new ones made fresh every two weeks, and decided to file a request for another conference with Colonel Fairchild.

  “You’ll come with me,” he said to Willie, as they pored over the request form lying on the table in the radio office. “We can tell him together how we did this. I’ll make sure the whole squadron gets credit.” He scribbled a statement at the bottom of the paper and pushed it toward Willie to witness.

  Willie was reluctant. He didn’t care so much about getting credit, or even a medal, so much as he cared to be left out of the fray. Fleischer had disobeyed orders, and that was tricky stuff. Willie didn’t fancy spending his remaining army years in prison.

  “It’s really your invention, Sarge,” he said, gently trying to ease the form back to Fleischer.

  “You guys did the cleaning,” Fleischer replied, sliding it right back to him. “I want to be fair.”

  And Willie pursed his lips and signed his name to the paper.

  * * *

  The reply came two days later. A base messenger brought an official-looking envelope to the hangar addressed to First Sergeant Martin Fleischer. Fleischer slit the envelope with a letter opener he had fashioned from a shard of broken propeller and read through the contents. He pulled off his face mask and stormed into his office, where he immediately kicked his chair across the floor.

  Willie handed off the steam hose to Charlie Hobbs and made his way across the slick floor to the radio office.

  “Sarge?” he asked.

  Fleischer waved the letter over his head. “What is this shit?” he was screaming. “Proper channels?” He let out a stream of invectives that Willie thought were both highly creative and explicitly vulgar.

  “I gotta go through channels,” he roared, crumpling the paper in his fist.

  “It’s probably just a formality,” Willie said, trying to calm Fleischer down. “You know how the army does things.”

  But Fleischer was beyond reason. His eyes bulged with anger, and there were flecks of white spittle flying from his lips with every word. The other shoe had dropped. The other shoe had dropped, and it was a direct hit.

  “It’s Hogarth,” he yelled. “Now I got to go through Master Sergeant John P. Hogarth. He outranks me! That motherfucker got himself another rocker.”

  Chapter 31

  Horses aren’t all that complicated. They eat when they are hungry and sleep when they are tired. If they are frightened, they run. Yet, they have gestures and signals that are exquisitely complex. A whole world of communication exists that determines who will be in charge, who will wait for the second bite of hay, who will watch over the others, who will no longer be part of the herd. The flare of a nostril, the flick of an ear, the merest suggestive raise of the head, all part of a code they worked out eons ago. It keeps everything in order. Every horse, no matter where it comes from, no matter the breed or color, obeys the ancient rituals. Ancient rules, you might say. I envy the clarity of it. I wish humans were as easy to read as horses, because we rarely get it right.

  * * *

  Willie is feeling strong today. I find him dressed and hopping around his room on crutches, packing his personal items into a tan canvas satchel. He announces that he has cleared it with his doctors to get discharged. He had been brought in to get his diabetes back under control and now it was. Discharge is to be Friday morning. Except that this is Wednesday afternoon.

  “Does Rowena know?” I ask him.

  He looks up from the little black grooming kit he is packing with an old-fashioned razor and hairbrush. I can’t help but notice that they have matching mother-of-pearl handles.

  “Not yet,” he says, tucking the grooming kit into the satchel. “But she’ll be happy about it. She’s been talking about getting some projects done.” He puts a few unused tea bags from his bed tr
ay into the satchel, then picks up a pile of newspapers, sorting through them and discarding the ones he has finished reading. The unread ones also get packed. He looks up and smiles at me. “She’s so busy all the time. There’s a lot of things I can get done for her.” His face is full of optimism. I can read it easily. He really believes that he is going home to help Rowena with her house.

  He swings his crutches in front of him and gracefully slides his body forward to reach the windowsill, where he has a philodendron and a small framed picture of his late wife. He puts the plant and the picture under one armpit and glides back to the bed, to pack these, too, into his satchel.

  “Work,” he repeats. “A man likes to be useful. I’m pretty handy. And Rowena needs me.” Now I see pride play across his features.

  But I am wondering how Rowena will take the news. She works long hours, and taking care of her father will be very difficult. His medications, his special diet, his strong need to be relevant. I wonder whether I should caution Willie that Rowena might not be able to bring him home today. Or that he would certainly find he isn’t physically able to do much work around her house. Not wanting to hurt him, I say nothing. I just nod agreeably, hoping my face won’t betray my doubts. We sit together in his room and wait.

  * * *

  Rowena comes by later to deliver several flawlessly pressed shirts hanging in a row, like men waiting for a train. “Anything you want me to bring home to wash?” she asks, rolling his old shirts into a ball and tucking them into a plastic grocery bag.

  “Nothing,” Willie says. “I’ll be doing my own laundry.”

  She stops in her tracks. “What?”

  “My numbers are all good,” he tells her. “They’re letting me go home today.”

  A fleeting look crosses Rowena’s face in spite of herself; it’s scarcely there, but I see it. I can read it. She feels frustrated and burdened.

  “I thought you were coming home this weekend,” she says levelly. “Today’s only Wednesday.” I hear the unspoken part. The exasperation.