In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  They stopped right outside the door. Fleischer jumped from the jeep and paused. He wasn’t a fighter, Willie knew.

  “I’m going in,” Fleischer said, but didn’t move.

  “You don’t have to,” Willie reminded him. “You could file something—go through channels. Everything goes through channels.”

  “This went through channels,” Fleischer said grimly. “And look what happened.” He clenched his fists, but stood there. “I’m going right in,” he said.

  Willie studied the sky. Clear blue, clear for takeoff. A few Vultees were disappearing into the clouds overhead. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Fleischer faced the door, then suddenly turned around, pulling something from his pocket. “Take this,” he said and held it out. It was a gold ring with a large blue topaz stone on one side, and the letter M engraved next to it. Willie took it into his hand and stared down at it. It felt heavy and smooth and cold. He rolled his finger across the stone.

  “What is it?”

  “My bar mitzvah ring,” Fleischer said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and I don’t want to lose it.”

  * * *

  The fight only lasted a minute or so. Fleischer had gathered himself, kicked open the door to Hogarth’s office, and given him a roundhouse punch before Hogarth could get out of his chair. Willie could see that much through the door. Hogarth answered with a well-aimed slug and Fleischer flew backward, out the door.

  “You’re a dead man,” Hogarth shouted after him. “You will burn in hell, if I have to light the fires myself.”

  An alarm sounded somewhere, the MPs surrounded them all like an angry swarm of wasps, and Fleischer was handcuffed and taken away.

  Willie gave a statement that basically he saw nothing, knew nothing, wasn’t involved, was just the driver. They dismissed him. Though it was the literal truth, he felt very bad over it, but it could have been ugly for him. He touched the ring in his pocket with shaky fingers and drove back to the hangar.

  * * *

  Fleischer was released a few days later, by order of Colonel Fairchild. It seemed that Hogarth didn’t want to press charges over the punch; in his statement, he said he was more interested in the war effort than to prosecute a delusional crank soldier; it had all been a misunderstanding. Hogarth let it be known that he would drop the charge of striking an officer, if Fleischer would let the matter of who actually invented the sacks quietly disappear. Fleischer felt he had no choice.

  “I shouldn’t have punched him like that,” Fleischer explained to Willie. “I should have just killed the fucker outright.”

  Though the charges were dropped against Fleischer, it wasn’t over. Hogarth had his supporters, who were urging him to prosecute the “little Jew.” Remarks about returning Fleischer to Jerusalem were passed around the mess; remarks about “Ikie—the kikie” were whispered behind his back; salt was dumped over his food when he wasn’t looking; he was pinned to the wall in the latrine by a burly sergeant he didn’t recognize. It left Fleischer nervous and short-tempered and chronically worried.

  “It’s not fair,” he complained to Willie. “I’m getting hung by the balls for nothing.”

  “I know, Sarge,” Willie agreed. “Things ain’t never been fair.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before Fleischer completely stopped talking about Hogarth. And then stopped talking about the sacks. At Ruth’s urging, he submitted receipts for his expenses, to help buy more oilcloth, but it came back denied because they were unauthorized. The wash rack made do with the ones they had.

  “That savings bond would’ve made a nice surprise for Ruth,” was Fleischer’s only reference to the whole thing.

  But in late January, the Air Force took over the manufacturing of the sacks, except that they weren’t sacks anymore; they were tight little rubber fittings that snapped onto the ends of the wires. The men had to remove their gloves to work the fittings on and off; the chemicals burned their fingertips and it slowed them down. But the little rubber caps did the job, Willie supposed, even if they couldn’t compare to the beauteous rose designs of the oilcloth. Turnaround time for getting the planes clean slowed to a crawl, but for some reason, no one came in to complain. Colonel Fairchild, it seemed, had decided to leave them alone.

  The whole matter was dropped as though it had never happened.

  Chapter 33

  Willie and I spend a whole day playing Double Solitaire and Rowena was right. He cheats. He slips cards from his pocket onto the table, returns his cards, and reshuffles the deck when he isn’t happy with the hand he gets, forgets it is my turn and plays a second time, adds the numbers wrong after insisting on keeping score. I didn’t care. I was listening to his reedy voice reach back and pull up the past.

  * * *

  The Alabama spring came in February, soft and misty for a week or two before dropping back into winter again. The pale sun and tender air slid across the base with promises of warmth and gentle rains, then rescinded with cold nights, before settling, finally, into a damp gentility.

  It was a dark spring.

  McArthur was fighting gallantly in Bataan, the RAF was desperately and unsuccessfully trying to sink a key German battleship, the Tirpitz, Japan had pretty much conquered all of the Pacific, and the U.S. War Relocation Authority was interning Japanese-American citizens.

  It was an uneasy spring.

  The mercurial weather only made Fleischer more jumpy; he saw enemies everywhere. Hogarth was insidious, he had friends, and there had been small incidents. Or maybe not. Fleischer was never sure. He didn’t trust the system, he didn’t trust his superiors, he didn’t even trust the weather. He constantly wore a thick dark green sweater that Ruth knit for him, even on the warmest days, like it was going to protect him.

  It was a spring of longing.

  August yearned for his family and the farm at home.

  “I always help my mama plant,” he told Willie. “She be planting beans and collards and corn ’bout now. I turn over the soil for her, ’cause it has to be just so.”

  Willie could picture the big man pushing against a till, moving the dark loam, softening it for planting. August was a farm boy, and Willie knew nothing about farming. August could look up at the sky and tell what the weather was going to be the next day. He could sniff the air and predict rain within an hour. He knew the feather and call of every bird that flew overhead. His mother sent him seed packets, and he planted tomatoes and pansies in the hard-packed dirt outside the barracks.

  “Gotta have some flowers, too,” he told Willie. “My mama always says that collards is good for the stomach but flowers is good for the eyes.”

  As for Willie, spring made him nostalgic for his music. When the weather was good in Harlem, he used to sit on the fire escape outside his bedroom window and play. He missed the feel of the trombone against his lips, the shudder and vibration of the music coming from his breath and fingers. The way the air curved itself into songs as he played. He decided to ask his sister to send him his old trombone. It would be nice to run his hands over the smooth brass, almost like caressing a woman, coaxing a response. He missed his music very much.

  * * *

  “Look at that sky.” Every so often Fleischer would stop at the hangar doors and comment on the horizon. The sky was all innocent blue now, without a hint of malice. Only the Brits were crashing, mostly because they were still “bouncing” on farms, a quick touchdown and up, buzzing cars on the highways, playing fiercely with each other against the backdrop of fleece clouds. They still pissed off the helpless brass, but it would make them crack fighters when they returned to the UK. Fleischer stood in the morning sun and studied the sky above. His arms were folded, and his face held no expression at all.

  “What you lookin’ at, Sarge?” August asked him. August was still in charge of pushing the planes into the hangar to be cleaned. He stopped to look up at the sky, too.

  “It’s what I’m not looking at,” Fleischer replied with a ce
rtain grim satisfaction. “I’m not looking at planes falling.”

  * * *

  But he was restless. The sacks had served to challenge him, absorb his energy, direct it. And he had nothing to preoccupy him anymore. He paced the floors, made a doll out of a small corn dust broom for Ruth, invented a joke—a flashlight battery stuck inside a carefully hollowed-out light bulb, so it lit up without being plugged in. He was still fixing broken appliances one night a week in his apartment, but mentioned how Ruth was annoyed with the tiny rooms getting cluttered with radio tubes and extra plugs, and boxes of screws and tools laid out across the kitchen table. And the chickens, which always seemed to sneak in from their pen under the house into the bedroom, but it was mostly the clutter that was driving her crazy.

  “Can you imagine?” Fleischer complained to Willie during coffee break. “I’m trying to earn some extra money and she’s not happy.” It was a real problem, he went on to say, and she wasn’t going to sleep with him until he solved it.

  Corporal Charlie Hobbs had a suggestion. “Why don’t you use my church?” he said. “I can ask Pastor Booker if he would mind.”

  Charlie, like August, was a local boy and faithfully attended services off base every Sunday, since he wasn’t allowed into the chapel on base.

  “I don’t have any money to pay for the use of the church,” Fleischer said. “I’m trying to make money. I can’t pay any kind of rent.”

  Charlie thought for a moment. “The church has a lot of things that need fixin’,” he said. “Maybe you could trade work for space. Maybe the good Lord means for you to do a little church work.”

  * * *

  Apparently He did.

  Pastor Booker was delighted to offer the trade. One day a week, staying into the evening, Fleischer visited the First Baptist Church of Montgomery and fixed all the things that Pastor Booker, a man not much older than himself, brought him. He fixed things for believers and things for nonbelievers, record players and radios and clocks, even wristwatches, and irons and toasters. He fixed the boiler for the church, and the pump on the organ. He even fixed Mrs. Booker’s pressure cooker and took back a huge metal pot of ham hocks and chitlins, which the men happily ate as soon as they returned to base. A few of the men regularly came with him and worked at the church, painting, repairing, cleaning, planting, weeding, a never-ending list of the Lord’s needs. It was all working out pretty good, Fleischer told the men, pretty good.

  “Maybe the good Lord did have something to do with it, because the church was surely in poor shape, and no money to fix things,” Charlie Hobbs replied. He put his hands together and looked upward. “Thank You, sweet Jesus.”

  Fleischer was taken aback for a moment, then gave a rueful smile. “Well, maybe He did,” he said softly. “’Cause I never thought I’d be going to church on a regular basis.”

  * * *

  Fleischer had finished the last of the jobs. A sewing machine. The bobbin wouldn’t let the thread out evenly, and Fleischer got it to run. Its owner was a seamstress and offered to pay Fleischer off over the next several months. The machine was her livelihood, he knew. He also knew she didn’t have a dime to spare, since being poor in Alabama seemed to reach below the depths of plain poverty. He handed her the machine and told her to forget about paying him. He had done that with a lot of his other clients; one more didn’t matter.

  * * *

  Evening was near, the sun was drifting downward, and a soft half-light was falling over Montgomery. Fleischer and the rest of the men—August and Charlie Hobbs and Leon Hamilton and Willie—were tired. They had carried boxes of clothing for a clothing drive into the basement, tarred a portion of the roof, changed light bulbs in the twenty-foot-high rectory, painted a small bathroom, and fixed some tile.

  Pastor Booker gratefully accompanied them to the door, where he blessed them. “And maybe the Lord Jesus will lead you back to us,” he said to Fleischer. “Maybe you will find Him in your heart and return to the flock as a faithful follower.” He made a blessing over Fleischer’s head and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “Thank You, sweet Jesus, for bringing this man to us.” Fleischer looked embarrassed.

  “Thank you, Pastor,” he mumbled, then signaled his men. “We’d better go. We got a bus to catch.”

  * * *

  I had just finished serving Willie his lunch. A waffle with sugar-free syrup, a spray of butter-flavored something or other, and a slice of turkey bacon, which I thought would make him very happy. He loves waffles, but he only glanced at his plate.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, taking a sip of my coffee.

  “You’re not going to like me much after today,” he says quietly.

  I jerked back in my chair with surprise. “Why do you say that?” I asked. “I do care about you.”

  His lips moved without words. “I will tell you the bus story now.” He sighed “It’s the story you really came for.”

  * * *

  Fleischer and his men would have to take the bus from the church and change to a second one, for a long ride back to base. The first bus was late, but eventually pulled into the stop and the doors flipped open. The second one was waiting at the curb, and because it was dinnertime and a bus headed for the outskirts of Montgomery, where the base was located, it was empty. The men climbed on and settled into seats. Normally, servicemen in uniform rode free, but Fleischer knew that courtesy didn’t apply to his men, so he paid for all of them. Leon Hamilton headed straight for the back. Willie sat just past the middle, toward the back, next to Charlie Hobbs. Fleischer sat one seat in front of the middle; August looked around and yawned.

  “You can sit here,” Fleischer said to him, gesturing to the seat across the aisle.

  “It ain’t in the back,” August replied.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fleischer said. “There’s no one on the bus. And I don’t think anyone’s going back to base with us.”

  August flopped down in the seat and stretched his large frame out in front of him. Fleischer had some paperwork to do in the wash rack before he could go home; the men were hungry and tired and actually looking forward to the mess hall. They leaned back in their seats; August yawned. Willie closed his eyes, hoping for a quick nap.

  “Wake me when we get to the base,” he said to Leon.

  “We better get Charlie to wake us both; he’s reading something,” Leon answered and leaned his own head back. The men started to drift into a sweet reverie.

  Willie thought he heard a shout and opened his eyes. It was the bus driver. “Move to the back,” he was yelling. He was seated and looking at the men through his rearview mirror, looking directly at August. “Move way to the back, or I ain’t drivin’ this bus.”

  Fleischer stood up. “These are United States servicemen,” he said.

  “You tell that nigger to move to the back of the bus or we ain’t going nowhere,” the driver snapped back. He had turned around in his seat now; his large girth straining against the steering wheel. He pointed to August. “That nigger right there is out of order.”

  Flustered, August stood up. “Yessir,” he said.

  “Just wait there a minute,” Fleischer said to August, then turned to face the driver. “There’s no one else on the bus. These are servicemen. We’re going back to base.”

  “You tell that nigger to move to the back,” the driver repeated, his voice growing louder. Fleischer stood there, getting angry. He wasn’t in the mood for crap. He was tired of Alabama. He knew this happened, he’d seen it before, but not his men. Not his men.

  “Hey,” he started to say, but the bus driver grunted to his feet and stood with beefy hands on his ample hips.

  “Y’all startin’ something here?” the bus driver rasped, tilting his chin up.

  “No,” said Fleischer. “It’s just that there’s no one on the bus and these are United States—”

  “Y’all startin’ a incident?” The driver’s voice rose in fury. “Y’all planning to break the law?”

  August put
his hands out in front of him, palms up. He was confused. He never broke the law, and he didn’t understand what the screaming was about. He would move to the back. Right away. Right now. He stepped into the aisle. He would move. He didn’t want trouble. He stepped into the aisle so fast, he stumbled forward.

  The bus driver misunderstood. He saw August lurch toward him. “You stay right there, nigger,” he screeched. “Don’t you come at me.”

  August froze in place for a moment. “No, sir,” he said. He would never break the law. He knew his place.

  “Did you just say ‘no, sir’? Did y’all just tell me you ain’t movin’?” the driver yelled at him, his fury rising. He slammed the door open to prevail upon bystanders to summon the authorities. “Get the police,” he screamed. waving his hand out the door. “I need help! We got a incident here! We got a incident!”

  Some of them waved down a patrol car, which turned on its flashing red lights and pulled over. Two policemen jumped onto the bus, their guns drawn. It was all confusion, and screaming and movement and misinterpretation. It was all attitude and agony.

  “I didn’t do nothing, sir.” August stepped forward to apologize. His large frame filled the aisle.

  “That’s him,” the bus driver screeched, backing up. “He was comin’ at me. He was threatening me. Get him!”

  “Stop right there!” the officer commanded, but August was even more confused. He wanted to move to the back. He took another step to turn around.

  “Get him,” screamed the bus driver. “He’s runnin’ away.” August turned to see who they were going to get.

  “Stop right there,” the officer shouted, then fired off a shot. It hit August in the chest. His body lifted a foot in the air from the impact before he slumped across the back of a seat and slid to the floor.

  “No!” Fleischer screamed, running to August’s side and turning him over. The bullet had gone straight into his heart.