“What in the sweet name of Georgia are y’all talking about, Calvin Thomas?” Peaches turned around to stare at us as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “The whole world is a colored person?”
“Me and Legs are just having ourselves a little philosophical discussion, that’s all.” Cal ducked his head and changed the subject to what we were gonna eat for our noonday meal. But the idea of the whole world being a colored person somehow made me feel better.
24. Six Days
Over the next couple of days, we rode on so many different trains and traveled through so many states, I gave up keeping track after a while. Cal had figured it would take us three or four days to get West.
It took six.
And let me tell you, when you are traveling on one train after another, day in and day out, for six straight days, pretty soon you lose interest in almost everything except the inside of your own eyelids. Your brain gives up caring about the landscape and spends most of its time wondering when the next stop is coming up. Every now and then, you glance out the window and notice: Oh, more trees, more grass, more cows. And then you go right back to staring at nothing.
Heading west, we crossed the Mississippi River—and I’ll admit the Mississippi was an impressive spectacle. We reached it in the late afternoon on our second day of traveling. Now, I was expecting it to look something like Chicago’s familiar blue-green waterway where Uncle Otis used to fish for monster catfish. But the Mississippi wasn’t like any river I’d ever seen. It didn’t even look like water—more like coffee with cream. Picture a smooth, wide, coffee-colored river.
Peaches held Victory up to the window to see the sight. “Look at that big ol’ river, Miss Victory,” she said. “That’s the Mississippi. A lot of terrible things happened on that river a long time ago to people who were your ancestors. They got shipped down the river in chains and never came back. But ain’t it a peaceful-looking picture today? M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i …” She spelled out the name slowly, as if Victory was gonna remember eleven letters in a row, when she wasn’t a month old.
Got my first taste of coffee after we crossed the Mississippi too. On the other side of the river, the train stopped at a station in St. Louis that was a river all by itself. Soldiers everywhere. Torrents of tan and khaki, moving in all directions. I saw fellows tucked in places you wouldn’t think human beings could sleep. Me and Cal spotted one soldier stretched out on his army duffel under the men’s washroom sinks. Swear to God, he was fast asleep under the water pipes with men shaving their whiskers and brushing their teeth right above his head.
While Peaches was cleaning up Victory in the ladies’ washroom, Cal and me wandered over to a place called a canteen where they serve free refreshments to weary soldiers traveling through. Cal was a big friend of anything free. Being in uniform, he got one of the ladies to give him two steamy paper cups of coffee, and brought them over to me, balancing them in each hand. “How do you drink your coffee, Legs?”
See, this was a tricky question to answer, because the truth was, I wasn’t allowed coffee. Aunt Odella woulda had a flying fit seeing me with a cup, because she believed it could turn you even darker than you already were if you drank it too young. She still fixed hers with extra cream, and she was no spring chicken. Trying to be cautious, I told Cal I drank mine with some cream added.
“Really?” Cal looked surprised. “No sugar at all?”
Heck, did you put sugar in coffee?
“Maybe a spoonful,” I replied, hoping that was the right amount.
“Coming right up.” Still carrying the cups in his wobbling way, Cal headed back to the table where they had cream and sugar for the soldiers to use, and he slopped some into each cup. When he returned, he handed over my portion of river-colored liquid—only a shade or two lighter than the Mississippi itself—saying how me and my daddy were nothing alike when it came to coffee.
“Your daddy, he uses half a family’s sugar ration in his. I’ve seen him put four heaping spoonfuls into one darn cup. Then he sits there stirring and stirring his coffee, trying to get all the sugar to melt.” Cal grinned and shook his head. “No fooling.”
I tried to act like this was a habit of his that I already knew about. Took a confident swallow of my own coffee and almost spit the whole mouthful on my shoes. Even with the sugar and cream, it tasted darned awful. Chunks of curdled cream floated on the top. I blew puffs of air across my cup, pretending it was too hot to drink. Good God, it was no wonder my daddy put so much sugar in the stuff.
“You remember anything else about him?” I managed to choke out between swallows.
“Okay … what can I tell you about Boots?” Cal squinted upward like he was trying to pluck some possibilities out of the air. “Well, he got his nickname from always having the best-looking pair of jump boots in the whole battalion. Swear they could be a picture postcard for the army paratroops when he’s done polishing them. Always makes the rest of us look like slackers.” Cal grinned and there was a pause as he tried to come up with more. “Let’s see … he’s a heck of a hip shot with the Browning. You want him on your side if you ever end up in a battle. And like I’ve said before, he’s real sharp at cards—poker especially. His eyes don’t miss a trick. Now, that’s kinda like you, Legs.” Cal gave me a soft jab in the ribs. “You got his same poker face sometimes.”
Cal drained the last drops of his coffee and smacked his lips together. “Sometimes he can be a man of few words, but mostly he’s easy to talk to. Still, he don’t tell jokes anywhere near as good as me.” Cal tossed his paper cup into a nearby trash can as we headed back to the platforms. “You and me are gonna work with him on that weakness, once we get back together with him.”
Once we get back together with him. No idea why those words stuck with me for the next couple of days, but they did. Maybe because Cal was so sure we’d meet up with the men, and I wasn’t at all convinced it was gonna happen. Let’s put it this way, if we were playing poker, I wouldn’t have bet a dime on it. Cal didn’t know my daddy’s habit of leaving like I did.
Beyond St. Louis, the land outside our train turned into a pie crust. Aunt Odella used to flatten dough on our kitchen table using the side of a water glass as a rolling pin, but I don’t think her pie crusts were as flat as the land we passed through heading west. Missouri and Nebraska coulda won a contest, hands down.
We watched a big full moon come up from the horizon outside St. Louis. From our train windows, the ghost-white orb didn’t even look real as it rose into the sky. Guess it must’ve made an impression on me, because I dreamed about it later—and I don’t dream much. Even more surprising was the fact my father was there in the dream with me. I remember how we were bundled up in heavy coats and gloves and all, like it was a freezing cold Chicago night. But we weren’t stomping around Chicago—we were trying to climb a snow-covered mountain. Only it wasn’t snow, I realized after a while. It was sugar. We were climbing mountains of white sugar trying to touch the big moon that was hanging just above them.
Each time we got to the top of a peak, the moon kept slipping farther away. It would look like it was right in front of us—just within reach, a few more steps—and then we’d get to the spot, and the moon would be farther off than we thought. Each time my daddy would say, “Well, let’s keep on going and we’ll try the next mountain.” And so we’d keep climbing.
When I finally woke up from that crazy dream, I felt like I’d climbed the darned Himalayas. Peaches said it was probably the full moon giving me bad dreams. I figured maybe it was my punishment for trying out that nasty coffee, who knows.
By the time we’d spent another two days on trains, I don’t think the sight of a rainbow-colored moon coming up from the horizon woulda impressed any of us. Only good thing I can say is that at least we didn’t have to keep riding in the colored cars once we left the South. We could sit wherever we wanted to, but the better seats didn’t change the fact we were still stuck on a train.
To pass the t
ime, Peaches had taken to walking up and down the swaying aisles with Victory on her shoulder, hypnotizing all the passengers as she went back and forth, back and forth, stepping over people and all kinds of riffraff, until somebody complained to the conductor, and they made her stop.
One afternoon, Cal decided to give me some paratrooper lessons. “So you can impress your daddy with how much you know,” he said, but I think it was just something to keep us from going nuts.
He taught me the commands—Get ready, Stand up, Hook up, Check equipment, Sound off—and how you Stand in the Door and jump with your chin down, elbows tight to your sides, and your feet together. He had me practice it, right where we were sitting. In the middle of a Union Pacific train car. I’m sure the people around us wondered if I was having some kinda nervous attack.
When I asked what door the jumpers stood in, Cal looked at me as if I had way less sense than he thought. “The open one.”
“While the plane is flying?” My voice was shocked.
Cal rolled his eyes. “How else do you think you get out of an airplane? The wings? You stand there in the open door until they say ‘Go’ and you feel a smack”—he reached out and gave the side of my leg a slap. “And then you jump out.”
Holy creeping criminy.
Cal went on, “You count to yourself on the way down—one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, waiting on your main chute to open. If you get to three thousand and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen, you pull your reserve chute and float down to earth, no big deal.”
Don’t know about you, but it didn’t bring me much comfort to find out you had two chances for complete failure before you slammed into the earth face-first.
“Now, assuming everything goes well and your main chute does what it’s supposed to, you’ll hear a snap as it pops open and you’ll get yanked upward by the force. I mean, everything gets yanked up. Your eyeballs, your toenails, your teeth, your privates … everything.” Cal gave me a wide grin. “We call it the shock.” He said it was like being a stretched-out rubber band that suddenly flies backward.
“Know what you do after your chute pops open?”
I thought about saying I’d thank the Lord Jesus and promise never to be so dumb as to jump out of a plane again.
“You check for blowouts.”
“What?”
“Parachutes get holes in them, just like anything else. They’re nothing but nylon and thread. Anyhow, if a tear opens up, trust me, it’s only gonna get bigger on the way down. Pretty soon you’re holding on to Swiss cheese.” I could see Cal’s eyes dancing behind his serious expression, so who knows if he was razzing me or not.
“But if everything looks fine and dandy, no blowouts, then you just hang on and float down to earth, looking at the pretty world stretched out below you—the trees, the hills, the rivers—getting closer. I’m telling you, it looks like one big picture painting from up there, Legs.” Cal pointed upward. “It’s like being a giant butterfly or a bird or something. Everything’s so quiet and peaceful as you float down. We call it enjoying the ride.”
Okay, he made that part sound almost good. You could tell from the expression on his face, he lived for that moment. For the ride. It took me a minute to realize all the important details he was leaving out. Such as the fact that paratroopers didn’t usually jump into peaceful places like the ones he was describing. In a battle, they’d float down into fields studded with artillery and tanks and enemies trying to kill them.
Since Peaches was sitting in front of us, flipping through a magazine, maybe that’s why Cal was being careful with how much he said. I asked him if he ever got scared when he was jumping.
Cal tugged an apple out of the bag below our seats and took a loud bite before answering. “Maybe when I was first training. Not much now.” He shrugged. “You’re either somebody who can trust things or somebody who can’t. Or you can trust certain things but not others. Emerald Jones, our battalion cook, washed outta the paratroops because he couldn’t jump out of a plane. He doesn’t worry one bit about cooking over crackling hot flames where he could set himself on fire any day of the week—but he can’t trust plain old air enough to jump into it. That’s why trust is a funny thing.”
I wasn’t a big fan of trusting things either. Whenever Archie was trying to get me to do something stupid, he used to tell me, “You gotta trust me.” The few times I believed him, I paid the price. Still had the scar on my forehead from when we turned a packing crate into a toboggan and rode it down a flight of stairs in his apartment building.
And I’ll be honest—when you get left by your own mother before your life is hardly started, it doesn’t give you much faith in the rest of the world sticking by you either.
Cal wiped his hand across his mouth. Our end of the train car smelled like an orchard. “Golly, that was a good apple.” He was done talking about the army, you could tell. “Look at all that nice scenery out there.” He pointed toward the window.
Stretching as far as you could see, the land was covered with wavy grasslands. Oval-shaped clouds drifted neatly across the sky in patterns large and small. Looked as if they were making up their own Morse code. Who knows where we were by then. Idaho? Wyoming?
Peaches whipped around in her seat and added her two cents, as if she’d been listening the whole time. “I’m sick of scenery. Don’t want to see no more scenery as long as I live. I want to get off this darned train. Get me off the train, Sergeant Thomas, before I go stark raving crazy.” She thumped her hand on the top of the seat.
Cal wagged his head, pretending to be sorry. “Can’t do that, ma’am. We got our orders. Nobody’s allowed to leave while we’re still in enemy territory. Sorry.”
Peaches lifted up one of Victory’s spit-up cloths, waving it in the air like a white flag. “Then I surrender. Just let me surrender and go home, Sergeant, puh-leeze.”
Cal told her nobody could surrender until we reached Oregon.
25. Jump Outta the Bird
We were on our sixth morning and our last dried-up, crusty drop of hope when we finally reached Pendleton, Oregon. After going uphill for most of the night, it seemed like, our train arrived in a town that looked no different from a hundred other towns we’d passed through already. “Approaching Pendleton station,” the conductor announced in a bored voice as he came through the cars. “Everybody off who’s getting off.”
Now, I’d been picturing a Wild West kinda place, with swinging-door saloons and fake storefronts, but all I spotted from the train windows as we slowed down was an ordinary Main Street of redbrick buildings, striped awnings, and stee-pled churches. Not a tumbleweed or cowboy in sight. Low rolling hillsides without much green on them surrounded the town. In the far distance, there seemed to be a bigger line of purplish hills against the sky.
You shoulda seen us shoving comics and magazines and Victory’s things into our suitcases and bags at the last minute as the train slowed to a stop. With six days to get ready, you’d think we woulda been better prepared to arrive, right?
We weren’t.
Cal’s uniform had lost all its sharp creases somewhere back in Nebraska probably. He tried to spit and polish what he could, tucking his tie inside his jacket like all the GIs did and setting his army cap precisely on his head. Edge above the eyebrow, that was the rule, he told me, pulling it forward carefully with both hands until it balanced on the tip-top of his eyebrow, but its peaks were crushed from being in his duffel too long. Peaches pinned a wilted hat on her head. I had an armload of suitcases.
What was surprising to me was how nobody else got off the train at Pendleton except us. We stepped into the warm June morning by ourselves and glanced around looking for where to go next. No signs seemed to be pointing their accusing fingers at us, so that was a good thing. Maybe Oregon would be more like Chicago after all.
There was a small group of white GIs waiting on the platform, lounging on a pile of army duffels and gear. Cal strolled over to them to get some directions, b
ut a white wall probably woulda been friendlier. I heard him ask where Pendleton Air Field was, and one of the fellows pointed to the far left, in the direction of a hill you could see on the edge of town. When Cal asked them for a lift up there, the request went nowhere until he handed over some dough. Then one of the soldiers reluctantly got up and flagged down an army truck nearby.
As we walked over to the truck, it was clear Peaches wasn’t crazy about the whole plan of riding in the back, especially when she saw how the only seats were benches and there was a strong odor of musty socks under the truck’s canvas top. Me and Cal got a good whiff as we jumped inside.
Reluctantly, Peaches handed baby Victory to us and then she stood there, hands on her hips, sweat dotting her mahogany forehead. “How’m I gonna crawl up there, Cal?”
“Give Levi your hand.” Cal nodded at me. “He can help you climb in.”
“I’m not running my good stockings,” she insisted, not moving. She was wearing a dress with faded green stripes that had seen better days and a pair of scuffed white pumps.
The army driver revved the motor like he was running outta patience, and the smoky cloud of exhaust just about extinguished us.
“Sweet and sugar, almighty Jesus—” Peaches reached for my hand and yanked so hard I nearly ended up face-first on the Pendleton dirt like an outlaw in a Western movie.
“Don’t you let go of me, Levi!” Peaches hollered as she scrambled the rest of the way inside, all arms and legs, showing who knows what-all to the world. We were hardly seated on the benches before the truck blasted off down the road and sent us sliding.
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