“Holy mackerel, the driver must do takeoffs and landings in his spare time,” Cal joked, trying to hang on to Victory with one arm and save some of our belongings with the other. Still trying to straighten out her dress, Peaches shot a look at Cal that wasn’t a smile of amusement, let me tell you.
We were dumped farther away from the airfield than we wanted to be. Who knows why the driver didn’t take us the whole way—Cal said it didn’t matter, we needed the fresh air anyhow. As we trudged up the hill to Pendleton Air Base, you could see it wasn’t gonna be a real beautiful place. Mostly hard-packed dirt and white two-story buildings scattered here and there.
“So this is my new post,” Cal said when we reached the top. He handed Victory back to his wife and turned around slowly, studying everything. About halfway through his turn he stopped and pointed at some far-off specks in the sky. “Will you look at that, Peach—the boys are jumping today.”
Right away, Peaches smacked her hands over her eyes and plopped down on one of the suitcases, saying she wasn’t looking at the men jumping, nohow. “It scares me half to death. Don’t even like imagining what you do, Cal, let alone seeing it for real.”
If you squinted hard, you could just make out a bunch of tiny gray dots in the far distance. “You sure those are parachutes?” I said doubtfully, because it looked like nothing but a faraway flock of birds.
“Yep.” Cal nodded, shading his eyes. “And right now their chutes are drifting on the smooth morning air and they’re just sitting back and enjoying the ride.” His voice sounded wistful. “Boots and the boys are probably floating along, wondering what in the world those three sorry specks are doing at the gates of Pendleton. They people? Or ants?” He pretended to wave, although the specks woulda needed the vision powers of Superman to notice us from that far away.
“See, you can tell it’s our boys by the way the chutes look,” Cal said. “Everything’s in a perfect pattern like one big connect-the-dots in the sky. They must’ve jumped outta the bird without missing a beat.” He draped an arm over my shoulders. “I’m telling you, we are perfection in the air, Legs. You’ll see—the 555th is sweet perfection.”
Even with Cal pointing out every little detail, I had my doubts about what we were looking at. Like I said, the far-off dots didn’t look much like parachutes, and you couldn’t see any human beings holding on to them. I may not have had Aunt Odella’s sixth sense for things, but whatever sense I did have was telling me there was no way my father was up there in the wide blue sky. No chance at all.
A white army guard interrupted our gawking. He came ambling toward us on the other side of the gate, toothpick dangling from his lip. His smooth young face didn’t even look old enough to grow whiskers yet and his arms were a bright sunburned pink. “You folks want something?”
I think the twangy western sound of his voice impressed us all—it was kinda like being in a Western movie and a war newsreel at the same time. Tugging the official army letter out of his pocket, Cal showed it to the young soldier and told him how we’d come from Camp Mackall in North Carolina to join the 555th in Oregon. “And I’m hoping to find some off-post housing for my family,” Cal said, nodding at us.
The young soldier’s eyes rested on my face for a minute or two, as if he was trying to figure out how I belonged with the rest of them. We must’ve looked like a real mismatched set of silverware—Cal, Peaches, baby Victory, and then me, a thirteen-year-old kid standing next to them.
“I’ll check with the commander.” The soldier ambled slowly back to his small guard shack and disappeared inside. Meanwhile, we waited in the flies and hot sun, without a stick of shade anywhere. Peaches flapped a towel over Victory’s face, trying to keep her cool. The sky was empty, and Cal said the paratroopers were probably on the ground rolling up their chutes at that very moment.
I thought it was more likely the birds we’d been looking at had flown away.
Finally the guard came back and swung open the gate without saying a word to us. Guess that was his idea of a warm welcome. After we got inside, he closed the gate again and took off in the direction of a white building nearby that had a round garden in front of it. A ring of desperate-looking red flowers was planted inside the circle of white bricks, with a flagpole stuck in the middle.
I figure the commander must’ve had radar for eyes because the guard hardly got past the garden before a uniform loaded with all kinds of badges and pins and patches came barreling out of the building. Cal snapped to attention as the white commander headed stiffly toward us. Me and Peaches stood up a little straighter too.
“At ease, soldier,” the commander said, more to the flagpole than to Cal, it seemed like. Cal slid his arms behind his back, and Victory started making burping noises and waving her little fists as if she was free to move now too. The man’s steely eyes slid in her direction. “Your family?” he asked Cal, not even trying to hide his disapproval.
“Yes sir. That’s my wife and baby daughter. And the older boy is the son of Second Lieutenant Battle, sir. He’s been staying with us for the duration.”
The officer’s eyes swept over me and I felt the same kinda chill I’d got from the storekeeper in Fayetteville. Antarctica in a uniform, that’s what the commander reminded me of. The ground began to sway and wobble beneath me as I tried not to breathe too loudly. Or at all.
“And your mother is where?” the commander snapped.
Heck, I had no idea what to reply. You don’t go around telling somebody who has more stripes on his uniform than a U.S. flag how your mother was a Chicago jazz singer who took off when you were a baby.
Cal jumped in to save me. “His mother is gone—deceased,” he added, with only the smallest trace of a fib in his voice.
The commander’s face grew more displeased, if that was possible. “Well, I don’t like Negroes being here on this post—or in the town either, let me be perfectly straight about that, soldier.” His eyes nailed Cal to the dirt. “If it were up to me, none of you would be in this war. You’d know your place and stay in it. And our GIs would be out fighting the Japs where we belong. We have a tough enough war to wage in this world without playing around with the color lines and wasting our damned time training Negroes to jump out of airplanes.”
Let me tell you, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Could not believe it. Had to practically glue my own lips together to keep my mouth from dropping clear open. A commander of the U.S. Army talking to Cal in that uppity way? Trust me, if Aunt Odella had been listening, there wouldn’t have been a barbed wire pie big enough to serve the man. Couldn’t see Cal’s face from where I was standing, but his body didn’t move an inch during the whole speech. He was a statue.
The commander continued his talking without letup. “But since I have my orders and you have yours, soldier, it seems there is nothing we can do about the problem of you being here at Pendleton, is there?” He glanced at his watch and gestured at the buildings around us. “Except for some of my officers and pilots, your battalion is the only one here. Their barracks are at the end of this road. I expect they should be back from their practice jump within the hour.” His eyes swept over us again, a dark cloud cutting out the sun. “Good luck finding a place for your family to live. Negro soldiers aren’t welcome in too many places around this town, and their families—even less.”
Victory picked this moment to let out a sudden, earsplitting screech as if she’d just been stuck by the world’s biggest pin. From the look the commander gave her, I was afraid he might take her outta this world right then and there. Peaches must’ve feared the same thing, because she pushed Victory’s howling face into her shoulder and began rocking her worse than a ship. Thankfully, the commander turned and headed back to his headquarters, leaving us all in one piece.
Once the officer’s door slammed shut, Peaches hollered at the top of her lungs, “You hush up,” as if she was talking to Victory, but I don’t think she was. Her words echoed in the stillness around us. Hush up. Hush up.
Hush up. Cal rubbed his eyes and shook his head ever so slightly. Under his breath, he ran through a whole list of cuss words that woulda made Aunt Odella turn a new shade, let me tell you.
Then, just as fast, the storm cleared and he broke into a wide smile. “Well, now that we got that pleasant conversation with the colonel squared away, I think it’s time to find my buddy Emerald in this friendly place and get ourselves some chow.”
We were walking in the direction of a building Cal thought was the mess hall when a collection of trucks and jeeps pulled up at the same gates we’d come through. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as we stopped and looked back, watching the gates swing open and the trucks start motoring through them, one by one. Next to me, I heard Cal shout to Peaches that it looked like Tiger Ted driving the first truck. With the sunlight glaring off the windshield, I couldn’t see a soul sitting inside, but Cal waved his arms at the driver. I remember the trucks stopping all of a sudden and doors flying open as colored soldiers piled out of them, sweeping up Cal as if he was their long-lost brother. Me and Peaches had to step back before we got swallowed up in the fray. And somewhere in all that noise and confusion, I heard Cal shout, “Hey, Boots, you recognize that boy standing over there?”
26. The Shock
I’ll be honest—I don’t think either of us recognized the other at first.
Once Cal pointed me out, I remember how all the soldiers suddenly moved backward like the Mississippi drying up—and how there seemed to be only one man left standing nearby, just a step or two away from where I was.
Now, I’d always pictured my father being way bigger than me, almost Superman in size—maybe because I was a lot smaller when he left. But I was almost eye to eye with the soldier across from me now. Same face as mine, with the jaw jutting out a little. Same nose. Same mouth. The look in his dark brown eyes was shock, I remember that clearly. I’m sure my eyes looked the same way. And in that split second as we stood there, staring at each other for the first time in three years, I knew exactly what Cal meant about the feeling you get when a parachute opens. How your eyeballs, your teeth, your toenails, everything gets snapped upward by the force of the parachute catching you. Because that’s how I felt—as if my whole body had suddenly been yanked upward. Everything was a blur of air, sky, skin.
I remember how my father’s big arms suddenly wrapped around my shoulders, and the loud clang as his helmet hit the ground. Heck, it felt like being clutched by an army tent, with all the canvas he was wearing. My worn-out Chicago shoes came real close to being pancakes too. Didn’t need to wonder where my big feet came from, after seeing the size of his jump boots.
What got to me the most, though, was realizing how I was dead right about the buckeyes. My father was the color of buckeyes. I’ll be darned, I remember thinking when I stepped back. Guess I’d always doubted that memory a little. Had my daddy really held a buckeye next to his arm and said he’d fallen from the same tree? But I would have known that familiar red-brown shade of his arms anywhere. Probably coulda made a whole father—a whole family—outta all the buckeyes I’d stuffed in my pockets over the years.
My daddy spoke first. His voice was softer than you’d expect from a big man, although I guess mine wasn’t real booming either.
“How you doing, Levi?” he said, taking an embarrassed swipe at the glistening corners of his eyes. Then he glanced around at all the soldiers standing there gawking at us like we were humanity on parade. You could tell he was real uncomfortable, and I was feeling warm under the spotlight too. He cleared his throat once, and then again. Rubbed the back of his neck in a way that reminded me exactly of Aunt Odella. “Well, this sure is some kinda surprise I wasn’t expecting today,” he said finally.
I know people were waiting on me to say something warm and heart-tugging next, but every line of the English language seemed to have left my head. Instead, I stood there with my hands stuffed in my pockets and my feet shifting uneasily on the dirt. Felt the same as when we’d arrived in Pendleton earlier that morning—how even though we’d had six days to be prepared, we weren’t ready. I’d had three years to plan what to say to my daddy when I saw him again, and now I couldn’t come up with one useful word.
Peaches and Cal swooped in to save the day. “Holy mackerel, we been traveling across the country forever,” Cal announced in an extra-cheerful voice. “We’re ready for some eats. How about if we double-time it over to the mess hall and leave Boots and his son alone, so they can have themselves a little peace-and-quiet time?”
I don’t think those soldiers coulda jumped outta a C-47 any faster than they took off after Cal said those words. Me and my daddy were left standing with nothing but our own shadows for company as they piled into the trucks—squeezing Peaches and Victory and all our gear inside with them—and zoomed off.
* * *
Now, you’d think we could have let down our guard after that and picked up the pieces where we’d left off as father and son. But, after three years of being apart, what do you talk about first? In the movies, it always seems perfect when two lost people find each other. Some sad-sack music starts playing and a sunset rolls across the screen and then the movie’s over.
Heck, that woulda been nice, but it doesn’t happen that way in real life, I guess. The sun wasn’t anywhere close to setting and there was no orchestra in sight. Honestly, it felt like we were two strangers—as if we were two people meeting on a bus. Sure, we’d sent all those letters back and forth to each other, but letters aren’t the same as a conversation, you know what I mean? By the time you get a reply to something you’ve written in a letter, you’ve half forgotten what you said.
Searching around for something to talk about, my daddy brought up Aunt Odella.
“How’s Odella doing? She all right?” he asked hesitantly. You could tell he was wondering if something might’ve happened to her and maybe that’s why I’d shown up on his doorstep all of a sudden.
When I told him she was the same as always, you could see the confusion deepen.
“How about Uncle Otis—he still cutting heads?”
I nodded.
“Huh.” My daddy hooked his fingers behind his back and studied the cloudless Oregon sky. “So you came all the way out here with Peaches and Cal to find me?”
It was easy to see he was jumping to the conclusion that I’d run away from Aunt Odella. That somehow I’d ended up with Peaches and Cal while searching the country high and low for him. Well, the last thing I wanted to do was go into the long story after I’d just arrived. Sometimes, in life, the imagination is way better than the reality anyhow, you know what I mean?
So all I said was yes, I’d come along with the two of them. Then I veered down a new conversational road and asked my daddy if he’d been one of the paratroopers we thought we spotted in the sky that morning.
A big smile finally eased across my father’s face. “Did you see us up there before?” He pointed at the sky. “Man, it was a heck of a beautiful jump this morning. Perfect weather. Warm and sunny, no wind. Couldn’t have been better. Just perfect.”
Even with the proof standing right next to me, I was still having a hard time picturing my father being up there in the wide-open sky. Kept glancing over at him like there oughta be part of a cloud stuck to him or something, you know?
Acting like he was eager to show me more, my daddy started in the direction of the mess hall, saying he’d give me a quick tour of the air base on the way to chow. I swear he walked at a speed most normal people would run. As I tried hard to keep up, he pointed out the different buildings on each side of the dusty road as if he was the official army tour guide and I was a fresh-off-the-farm GI.
Barracks. Officers’ Quarters. Post Exchange. Dispensary. Operations Shed.
None of the buildings were real special-looking. Most of them were painted white and didn’t appear to be used much. The whole place felt kind of deserted. As my daddy reached the screen door of the mess hall and pulled it open, I was glad to see peopl
e again.
“No officers’ mess hall here,” my daddy shouted over the clamor of a roomful of servicemen. “We all eat together, officers and enlisted.”
Second Lieutenant Charles Battle. Heck, I’d forgotten all about him being an officer. Watching some of the soldiers jump up to clear spaces for us at the tables and seeing them plunk water glasses and silverware in front of us, I felt kinda proud all of a sudden, you know? Pulled my shoulders back a little as we strolled into the big room. I was an officer’s kid, how about that? The Battle family. Kings of the mess hall.
Forgot my daddy was a lefty too until we banged elbows taking our first mouthfuls of the turkey and green beans piled on our trays. Guess he forgot I was a righty from the surprised look that passed across his face and how he said in an embarrassed voice, “Long time since we sat down to eat a meal together, I guess.”
No two ways about it, we didn’t remember the smallest things about each other. Even our elbows weren’t very familiar.
After chow, the cook I’d heard about from Cal—the one called Emerald Jones—came out of the kitchen carrying a big batch of peanut butter cookies. My daddy might’ve complained about the army food a lot in his letters, but Emerald’s golden-brown creations were the size of saucers. You could hear the cook’s friendly laughter bouncing all over the mess hall. “For our guests,” he announced, sliding the whole mouthwatering tray in front of our group. “You can share with some of the other fellows if you’d like, but only if they promise to do their fair share of KP.” There was a loud groan. “Pans don’t wash themselves,” Emerald tossed out as he headed back to the kitchen.
Me and Cal had a good time passing around the cookie tray until it was empty. There were at least a hundred paratroopers packed in the room, and I swear Cal introduced me to all of them. Twice. “These fellows are the greatest troopers in the airborne,” he repeated at each table.
Archie woulda been real impressed by all the muscle. I met the soldier called Tiger Ted who looked like he could beat the peanut butter cookies outta anybody. He’d fought Joe Louis once, according to Cal. Next to Tiger, there was a skinny soldier with light brown skin and a wide, goofy smile. Swear he didn’t look much older than I was. “He’s a good kid,” Cal said. “Everybody calls him Mickey.” Opposite him, a scowling fellow known as Ace barely glanced up when we passed by, just kept shoveling food in.
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