I’m sure Willie hears it, too, but he chooses not to acknowledge that he might not be wanted. “Thought I’d get a jump start on things,” he replies.
“A jump start on what things?” Rowena asks suspiciously.
“Well, did you ever get your kitchen ceiling painted?” Willie asks. His voice is filled with a plea to be needed.
Rowena puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head. “Old man,” she says, “do not think for one minute you are going to paint my kitchen ceiling.”
“We’ll just see,” he says, drawing himself up. “I’m feeling real good, and I got plans.”
Rowena says nothing more, just takes his crutches and helps him into his wheelchair. They ring for the nurse to let her know they’re ready to leave, and she appears a few minutes later.
“I got to wheel him to the front door,” the nurse declares, taking over the handles. “Insurance regulations.”
We follow behind, carrying Willie’s stuff. “He gets like this every once in a while,” Rowena whispers to me. “His numbers go crazy and he goes to the hospital. Then he feels good, comes home, wants to do everything. Eats what he wants. Thinks he’s seventy-five again.”
* * *
We make an unlikely caravan crossing the parking lot: Rowena pushing her father’s wheelchair; Willie Jackson, dressed in navy slacks, a pale blue shirt, and yellow tie, riding like a sultan, his satchel on his lap; and me, following along, carrying plastic bags filled with laundry and medical supplies.
“We can pick up two gallons of semigloss super white on the way home,” Willie announces as Rowena lifts him into the car and begins dismantling the wheelchair. She grunts with the effort. It’s an old-fashioned chair and won’t fit in the trunk, so she has to grip the bottom center and pull it up hard to collapse it, then lift it into the backseat of her car.
“I’m not picking up paint,” she huffs, struggling to get the castors over the door sill. I help her, then squeeze in next to it. “I have to drive Rachel back to the motel to pick up her rental car. That’ll take up the rest of the day.”
“When she gets her car, Miss Rachel can drive me to the paint store,” he says, gesturing to me. Rowena’s eyes and mine meet. I give her an invisible smile that says “No, I won’t.” She gives me an invisible smile of relief back. Just like horses, I think. The secret code between me and Rowena is working almost as well.
* * *
The next morning I am making Willie breakfast. Rowena had asked me to stay over and spend the next two days with her father, since he can’t be left alone, his health aide isn’t available, and in his haste to come home, he had forgotten that Rowena works all day. I don’t mind helping. Rowena has already left for work, and I am nervously fumbling around her kitchen. I’ve never cooked anything for a diabetic before, and I am absolutely paranoid that I might use a wrong ingredient and get him sick. Willie, himself, is not to be trusted with his own menu.
“I can have waffles,” he tells me right off, as I dice some green pepper for the one-egg omelet allowed on his menu sheet. “Two. With maple syrup, and a slice of ham.” He points to the refrigerator. “Rowena always keeps maple syrup on the bottom shelf in there.” I look at the menu hanging on a cabinet door. Along with his egg, he can have whole wheat toast, one slice, but only if his blood sugar is below one hundred.
“What was your blood sugar this morning?” I ask.
“Perfect,” he replies and uses his crutches to pull himself over to the kitchen table, to sit down.
“ ‘Perfect’ is not a reading,” I say, whisking the egg and carefully sliding it over the peppers. “It has to be a number.”
“I know what I can eat,” he scolds me. “And I want waffles. I been a diabetic for twenty-three years and I been doing just fine.”
I try not to look over at his one leg, lost apparently, because at some point he didn’t do all that fine.
“No waffles, no syrup,” I tell him. “I made you a nice omelet.” His face registers disappointment as I serve him breakfast and tell him he can also have a helping of cottage cheese, and canned sugar-free peaches for dessert.
“Canned peaches,” I say ironically, handing him a dessert dish filled with fruit.
He touches them with his spoon. “Canned peaches,” he repeats. “Your father made the most god-awful fried peach pies I ever ate. The dough was like cement.” He pronounces it “see-ment.”
“But you told me you ate at least seven,” I remind him. “You sounded like you enjoyed them.”
He squints his eyes as if to look back into the past. “As I recollect, that’s all I had to eat for the day,” he says. “Sometimes the food was awful bad in the colored mess and us boys skipped it entirely.”
* * *
Willie and I go through the pictures in the bedroom carton. He gently lays the folds of the silk parachute aside and lifts the pictures from the box and spreads them across the kitchen table. I hand him the photo of the laughing sandy-haired pilot.
“Jink,” Willie says. “I told you about him.” He touches the face in the picture with a thin finger. “We promised each other after the war was over, we would jam together. You know, have a little blow session. That’s what we musicians call it, when you play together.”
“Yes, you told me.” I examine the picture closely. Lindsey Davies was very handsome. Long, almost equine face, aquiline nose, high cheekbones. I can hear the strains of his Welsh accent, the clip and swing of his words.
Willie finally puts the pictures aside and sits at the table, then points up to the ceiling. “Let’s get that paint,” he says, but I detect something in his voice. Maybe worry.
“Are you really sure you want to?” I ask. “It’s an awfully big job. Looks like it’s going to need two coats.”
He studies the area above him, pondering the work. “I suppose not,” he says slowly. “Maybe in a few days.” His face fills with relief. He suggests a game of cards. The only game I know is double solitaire.
We play for a few hours, and Willie beats me every time, playing to the foundation cards until he wins. I look up and am happy to see that his face is filled with innocent pleasure. I am glad to be here, but there is an impatience welling up inside of me, to get home. I need to do things at home.
Rowena calls a little later. “How’s it going?” she asks.
“We’ve been busy,” I tell her. “Going through those old pictures, playing cards.”
“Great,” she says. “I can’t thank you enough for staying with him while I’m at work. I called for a home health aide. She should be coming in a few days.”
“No problem,” I reply. “We’re having fun. He’s a wonderful man.”
“Yes, he is,” she agrees, then laughs. “Just watch him during those card games. He’ll cheat your socks off.”
* * *
Breakfast the next morning goes well. Willie has a bowl of oatmeal and some pineapple chunks and a piece of wheat toast. I am relieved that his sugar has been right where it should be. I haven’t poisoned him.
“Today I want to go downtown and renew my driver’s license,” he announces as I clear the table. He hobbles his walker to the front hall closet and grabs his sweater and fedora, then gets his wheelchair and lowers himself into it, parking his walker in a corner. “I plan to buy myself a car.”
I look at this frail man, sitting in his wheelchair, clutching his hat—because in his day, gentlemen wore hats—waiting expectantly by the front door. I open the door and stand beside him. The sun is sweetly yellow and melts into a flawless blue sky. The clouds are white and high, the wind calm, like a movie set.
“I don’t even know where the Motor Vehicle is,” I say.
“Washington Street.”
“I don’t know how to get there.”
“I’ll drive,” he says. “I’m a real good driver. I drive everywhere.”
“Today isn’t a good day for driving,” I tell him.
“You think I can’t do it?” he asks. “I’m a very a
ctive man.”
I get a sudden sad stab of pain in my heart. I am afraid that Willie is failing mentally, that he is lost in the past. Then I wonder if any of what he has told me is even true.
“The rental car isn’t fitted for you,” I say, trying to be diplomatic, trying not to disappoint him again. “You’d need hand brakes or something.” But I can barely look at him, because I know my face is full of information I’m afraid he’d mistake for pity. And Willie Jackson is not a man who would stand for pity.
He looks down at his leg, the neat tuck of pants under his body, then looks up at the sky.
“We can take a nice walk,” I suggest, my voice becoming gentle. “I’ll push you. I don’t mind at all, pushing you.” And I realize immediately that was wrong. Willie Jackson is not a man to be pitied or a man who would sit in a chair to take a nice walk.
“You think I’m soft in the head,” he shouts, suddenly rolling his chair away from me. “Because I want my life back! Well, Miss Rachel, I am in full, clear possession of my mental faculties, thank you! You will not humor me. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m saying. I know!” His eyes flash with indignation.
“I believe you,” I say, and I do, again. There is too much Willie present for me to have even doubted him. He rolls to the front door again and stares up at the sky for a long time, as though he was trying to will his chair to fly through the heavens.
“Perfect day for flying,” he says. “Just enough wind to lift your wings. Good WX. That means good weather, you know, good WX.”
“Did you ever fly?” I ask him. His face crumples into sad lines.
“I wanted to fly commercial planes, you know, after I got out of the service.” He looks down at his hands. “But you got to have flown in the service and there was no chance of that.”
“Did you become a musician?”
“No,” he says softly, touching his hearing aid. “Lost the music. Lost the music in the war.”
“How?” I ask him.
“Explosion.” He stares out at the sky, then suddenly looks up at me. “Listen to me,” he says. “Listen to an old man. Don’t let anyone take the music away from you.”
I can’t answer him; I just nod mutely, thinking, It’s too late for that. “Okay,” I finally manage to say.
We stay at the front door for a while, feeling the soft breeze rustle over our arms. “So what did you do for a living?” I ask him.
“Oh, I went to school, got a degree in education. Became a high school shop teacher,” he says. “Was the first black teacher to work in Brookfield. Nineteen fifty-four.” I am glad that we can talk again. That we got our rhythm back, but his choice of words puzzles me.
“‘Black’?” I ask. “But you’ve been saying ‘colored.’ ‘Colored’ soldiers. ‘Colored’ mess . . .”
He takes my hand and looks at me, looks me in the eyes. “Darlin’, I called myself colored, so you would know that back when I was in the service, I was colored. I was just a colored man when it wasn’t good to be a colored man.” His eyes fill with tears at the pain and the memories. “Then I got out, times changed.” He sits up in his chair. “I’m a black man now.” The tears slide down his cheeks, and he nods his head with each proud word. “I live in a world that is led by a black man and I am a black man. You know what that’s like for an old man like me?” He gives me a triumphant look, but he is still weeping.
I reach over and caress his face; his tears wet my fingertips.
There it is.
Tears.
The strongest symbol between humans, no matter where they are from, no matter what color they are. The one gesture that cannot be anything but pure. The one that even horses cannot share.
And I reach down and pat his hand and wish I could weep with him.
Chapter 32
It seemed Hogarth got himself a new personality as well as a new rank and a new office. He was now in charge of Hangar Security, and was friendly, amiable, even, to Fleischer, though Willie might as well have been invisible, standing there.
“What you got there, Fleischer?” Hogarth leaned forward and reached out to the carton of sacks Fleischer had thrown on his desk.
“I was ordered to bring these in,” Fleischer said carelessly. He hadn’t saluted, hadn’t said anything else. Just walked in and threw the carton on the desk. He had resigned himself to going through Hogarth, because there was no other way to save the pilots. And saving pilots was what it was all about.
Hogarth picked up one of the sacks, turned it over in his hands, slowly, carefully, examining every inch of it, as Fleischer explained what he had been doing. He pulled out his ever-present loupe and showed Hogarth how to look through it, showed him a sample of the old wiring, a few pieces of new wiring, how the sacks worked, his enthusiasm finally overtaking his initial suspicion.
“Made these yourself, didja?” Hogarth asked, opening and closing the little drawstrings. “Where’dja get the idea from?”
Fleischer explained about the connections, how he always thought it had something to do with the connections.
Hogarth held up his hand. “Wait just a second,” he said, and pulled out a pad and pencil. “Connections, eh? What are we talking about here?” And Fleischer continued to outline how he changed the pressure settings, how he got a hunch, how he finally decided that it was how the wires were hooking together.
Hogarth listened to every word. He reminded Willie of a bulldog puppy he had when he was a kid, listening with his head cocked, one ear tilted toward Fleischer, nodding with every word.
“Who paid for the materials?” he asked, when Fleischer finished.
“I did,” Fleischer replied, explaining that it came from his twenty-one-dollar-a-month salary that left barely enough money for groceries for him and Ruth. “My wife worked on them, too.”
Hogarth chuckled. “If that don’t beat all,” he said cordially. “Now you got the little woman working for the U.S. Army Air Corps.” He tossed the sack into the carton, and leaned back in his chair.
“The colonel mentioned you might be coming in with something,” he said. “And this is a doozy.”
“It was challenging,” Fleischer said.
“Challenging,” Hogarth repeated and jotted the word down.
“And I want to mention that all my men worked on it,” Fleischer added, gesturing to Willie. “They should get credit, too.”
“I’ll have to write this up, you know,” Hogarth said. “Gotta go through channels. But I’ll get right on it.”
Fleischer dropped his notes on the desk. “It’s all there,” he said. “We can save a lot of boys.”
“I know we will,” Hogarth agreed heartily. He stood up and extended his hand, without even one glance at Willie. “The United States Army Air Force thanks you for your hard work,” he said. They shook hands. “And,” he added, “the colonel is going to be very, very impressed.”
* * *
Two weeks passed. Three. The men continued to use the sacks; Fleischer continued to take notes, make small modifications, scan the skies anxiously, all the while waiting to hear from Fairchild. There hadn’t been any crashes since they’d started using the things, and Fleischer was happy, buoyant, that his invention was making a difference.
“Throw out the old ones,” he said to Willie one morning as he carried in a box of replacement sacks, now patterned with yellow daisies, the five-and-dime having run out of pink rosebuds. He was still making them at home with Ruth, still waiting for some kind of acknowledgment.
“They’re probably sending the specs to a private firm to have them made properly,” he explained to Willie. “Gotta stamp ‘U.S. Air Force’ on them or they won’t use them.” He sighed. “I would give anything to have thought them up a month sooner.”
Willie knew what he meant. They’d still be sharing warm beer with Jink Davies.
“My mother always says, things happen when they’re supposed to happen,” Willie tried to console him. “Anything yet from the colonel?”
Fleischer shook his head. “You know how careful they have to be,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”
* * *
It got a big write-up in the Stars and Stripes. A commendation and a medal. A raise in rank and a United States savings bond that would be worth one hundred dollars in twenty-five years. The thing was, it was awarded to Chief Master Sergeant John P. Hogarth, and his country was proud of him for being instrumental in saving the lives of all the young men who were stationed at Maxwell Field Army Air Force Base for bomber training. It had been challenging, Hogarth said in his interview, challenging, to finally figure out what was causing the crashes and convince the men in the Housekeeping Unit to help.
Fleischer let out a roar of fury and a string of curse words that could have scorched the paint off the plane in front of him. Willie had never seen anyone’s complexion turn that purple.
“That prick took my idea and signed off on it,” Fleischer screamed as he waved the newspaper over his head. Willie took the paper from his hand and quickly scanned the article.
“He takes a nice picture,” he said, but Fleischer was in too foul a mood for levity.
“Get in the jeep,” he barked to Willie. Willie’s heart dropped into his boots. He left the paper on the office desk and followed, but only as far as the hangar doors. He stood his ground there.
“I don’t think you should see Sergeant Hogarth at the moment,” he said. “Maybe go through channels.” This was going to get ugly, he just knew it. He could smell ugly a mile away.
“Don’t worry,” said Fleischer. “You won’t be involved. That’s a vow.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
Fleischer started the jeep. “To call the medics,” he replied.
“Medics?”
“Oh yeah,” Fleischer replied. “’Cause—between me and Hogarth? After I finish with him, one of us is going to wind up dead.”
* * *
Hogarth’s office was at the end of a long, low-slung building that housed airfield maintenance equipment, and Fleischer drove there like a madman. Personnel were jumping out of his way, thinking it had to be some sort of base emergency. Willie thought he could hear the siren of MPs in the distance.
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