“He’ll warm up,” Cal whispered.
One trooper even challenged me to an arm-wrestling match for a cookie. Seeing as how his arms were the size of most people’s legs and his nickname was Killer, I gave him any cookie he wanted and got the heck outta there.
While most of the fellows were friendly, you got the strange sense that beneath the smiles and joking, there was something else brewing in the room. Seemed like the soldiers were trying to be polite to us and all, but it was a lot of hard work to do. And once you turned around, the sunny conversation slipped back into a black cloud. Cal noticed it too. “Guys don’t seem real gung-ho today. Maybe they’re all tired-out from the jump this morning, who knows.”
While me and Cal were taking the peanut butter cookies around the mess hall, Peaches gave my father the scoop on Aunt Odella and how she’d sent me packing. Guess the truth woulda come out eventually, but it was too bad my daddy had to find out so soon that I wasn’t the desperate runaway he thought I was. It woulda been nice to hang on to that piece of fiction for a while, you know?
What seemed to puzzle him the most was why Aunt Odella decided to give me the heave-ho in the first place. “Doesn’t sound like her at all,” he kept insisting as the four of us talked after the meal.
I gotta admit I sweated over how much more to say, especially after what Peaches had already told him. Knew I had to walk a narrow tightrope with my facts. Couldn’t exactly tell him how Aunt Odella thought he needed to take responsibility and be a father to his son. So, I tried to pin the blame on the cactus instead. I described how Aunt Odella had been convinced her old cactus blooming was a sure sign the war was ending and that’s why she’d sent me to find him.
“Let me get this straight.” My daddy plucked out the lollipop he was chewing on and gave me his best lieutenant stare. “Odella sent you away because a cactus told her the war was ending?”
All right, so it wasn’t completely, one hundred percent true, but I nodded.
My daddy let out a long sigh. “Holy smokes.” He shook his head slowly. “This war has turned everybody’s minds a little crazy, even Odella’s. Never woulda expected it of her, of all people. She was always a hard nut to crack, I thought, but maybe the war caught up with her too after all this time.” He brushed off his canvas trousers and stood up like he’d heard enough.
Tried not to let him see my big sigh of relief.
“Well, we better get busy finding you and Cal’s family a place to live. Can’t have you bunking in the barracks, right?” He cracked a smile. “Let’s head out back and I’ll introduce you to Graphite, our official army heap.”
The four of us wandered outside, with Peaches holding baby Victory, who was fast asleep for once. Behind the mess hall, there was a well-worn Ford the soldiers had bought for themselves. It reminded me of the old jalopy my daddy used to drive.
“Only a 1937,” my father said, “and it runs great.” The vehicle had one door painted army green while the rest of the car was black, and there was a piece of plywood for a front bumper. Uncle Otis woulda called it a disgrace on wheels.
My daddy said, “Get in and I’ll take you for a ride.”
Now, you’d expect after three years of being away from my father, I’d get to enjoy a few minutes sitting next to him as we rolled down the road. But I guess some things never change, no matter how old you are. Cal took the front seat and I had to squeeze into the back along with Peaches and Victory and all our things, as if I was being returned straight to age nine. I’ll admit it stung a little.
“Ain’t it wonderful seeing your own daddy again?” Peaches whispered as we started toward town. “Can’t imagine how you must be feeling after all this time.”
I kept my feelings to myself and didn’t point out how all I was looking at was the back of his head, which was a familiar memory of mine. Already knew the razor-sharp line his hair made just above his collar and the creases of his wide red-brown neck.
Once we got to the town, my father turned onto Main Street, showing us some of the local places: Rexall Drugs, the Hotel Pendleton, the Cherry Fried Chicken Shack, F. W. Woolworth’s, Chinese groceries, and churches on every corner almost. The town reminded me a lot of Southern Pines—only without the bushy green pine trees and bright flowers. Low brown hills surrounded Pendleton and everything looked a little faded, as if it had been in the sun too long.
“They friendly around here or not?” Peaches leaned forward to ask my father. I knew she was wondering about all the flak that white commander had given to us.
“Not real friendly, no,” my father shouted over the rushing noise of the open windows. “Most places you won’t find signs like you’d see in the South. Out here, they’ll just pretend they don’t see you. You go into a restaurant and try to order something, and nobody will come to your table. The sun could rise and set for a week, and they’d let you sit there, waiting.”
Well, how dumb was that? That’s what I was thinking in the backseat. What was the point of spending six days sitting on our behinds and sleeping on trains to come to a place where people would pretend we weren’t there? We’d gone from being colored to being invisible, which couldn’t be considered any big improvement in my opinion.
“So we can’t go in any of the places you showed us?” Peaches said, her voice rising.
“You can go in a few of them—Rexall’s is fine. And the banks will take anybody’s money, of course. And you can order whatever you want from the Chinese,” my father said as we rolled past two tiny restaurants that didn’t seem to have one word of English on their signs. Just a bunch of squiggles and shapes. My daddy insisted the Chinese were friendly and we’d learn to fall in love with rice and noodles.
Shaking her head, Peaches slumped into her seat and began patting Victory’s back as if she was going for the lands peed record in burping. Don’t think she was real happy with the idea of eating Chinese people’s food. Franks and beans were beginning to sound good again.
Up front, the conversation switched over to the war itself. And things didn’t get a whole lot better. I heard Cal ask my daddy if he knew when they’d be heading to the Pacific and what their mission might be.
There was a strange silence.
You could see Cal turn his head and glance curiously at my father. After another minute or two had gone by, I heard him toss out the same question again. “So what’s the word on our mission?” he asked, being more casual. “Didn’t hear nothing back at Mackall before we left. When we shipping out?”
Another long silence. My daddy’s eyes didn’t stray from the road as far as I could tell. Finally I heard him say quietly, “We aren’t shipping out to the Pacific, Cal.”
I swear Peaches must’ve been hanging on to every syllable being uttered up front, because her happy voice suddenly shot out from the backseat, “Hallelujah, Lord Jesus, my prayers have been answered!”
Only thing was, Cal didn’t seem to share Peaches’s same hallelujah spirit. He jutted one elbow out the open window and gave a sigh of frustration you could hear in the backseat, loud and clear. “So we’re not shipping out?” he repeated.
“That’s right,” my daddy answered.
“When are we gonna stand up and say we’ve had enough of this nonsense, Boots?” Cal’s suddenly loud voice startled both me and Peaches. Didn’t sound like Cal at all. “I’m done with coming to these places.” His hand jabbed furiously at the scenery going past. “Nobody wants us here. Nobody wants us in this war. Uncle Sam sends us chasing all over the damn country from one hick army post to the next like a bunch of fools, telling us we’re training for missions we never get sent to do.” His voice rose. “They send half the airborne to invade Normandy. Never send us. Tell us we’re gonna be the ones to go after Hitler and mop up in Germany. Never send us. Tell us we’re training for Italy. Never send us. When are we gonna say we’ve had enough of being lied to?”
As Cal talked, my mind circled back to the train ride south where I’d been asked to do my part for t
he war and help guard the baggage—only there was no baggage to guard. Could still picture Jim Crow howling with laughter when I didn’t know the real reason I’d been sent to the baggage car was the color of my skin. Cal’s story had some of the same echoes of mine, you know?
In the front seat, Cal’s voice rolled on, getting even louder. “We got the best damn jumpers in the army, Boots. We’ve done everything—every screwball stunt the army’s asked us to do. Jumped out of gliders. Tried out parachutes nobody else would try. This time I thought for sure we’d be going to the Pacific. Thought there was no question at all.” He shook his head. “Can’t believe we’ve come all the way out here—to who the hell knows where—and the army’s changed its mind again. It ain’t right, Boots. You know it as well as I do. This whole war, we’ve been risking our necks day after day, trying to prove we can do things better than everybody else. And for what?” Cal swiped his army cap off his head and flung it angrily out the open window. “For a hell of a lot of nothing if you ask me.”
That was a surprise, let me tell you—seeing Cal’s good army cap go sailing into the weeds. A sweaty silence filled the automobile, as if everybody was waiting on everybody else to say something next. You could hear Victory’s hiccupping breaths and the sound of Peaches mumbling “Sweet and sugar, sweet and sugar,” under her breath like a piece of scripture. My father’s shoulders didn’t budge from their stiff place against the front seat. Don’t know what I thought finding my daddy would be like, but I never imagined this crazy scene.
Finally my father broke the silence.
His voice was dead calm, like Aunt Odella’s when she’s in a fury. “You asked me about shipping out, and I said we weren’t going to the Pacific,” he answered evenly. “But you didn’t ask me if we have a mission here.” He paused, making sure he had everybody’s attention, I guess. “If you had asked me that particular question, Sergeant Thomas, I would have told you yes, as a matter of fact, this time we do.”
27. Secrets
Prying the details outta my father wasn’t easy, though. Guess MawMaw Sands knew what she was doing when she gave me the Keeper of Secrets basket, because my father was one big keeper of secrets up there in the front seat, saying nothing more as he drove down the road.
Retrieving Cal’s cap wasn’t a piece of cake either. Me and Cal had to wade through a battalion of grasshoppers to get it. When we got back to the car, Cal kept apologizing for losing his cool and asking if it was a big mission or a small one. Was it gonna be in Oregon or somewhere else? Had training already started or not? But he coulda been talking to the scenery, because my daddy wouldn’t answer one question until he was good and ready. Even Peaches couldn’t get him to talk. She poked my father’s shoulder with one of her fingers. “Puh-leeze, why won’t you tell us more? I’m an army wife. And Levi’s your son. And we don’t know a blessed soul out here. Who we gonna blab secrets to?”
My father kept his mouth shut until we were well outside of town and all signs of civilization had disappeared. We were rolling through an empty landscape straight out of a Western movie, where you almost expected to see Indians coming over the grassy hilltops on horseback, when he finally stopped and took a left down another road. It turned out to be even more deserted than the one we’d been on. The road started out as gravel and ended up being nothing but two wagon ruts.
Peaches complained loudly, “Sweet and sugar, you trying to turn us all into powder in the backseat?”
The wagon trail ended in a grassy spot overlooking a shallow river. In the far distance, you could see the tip-tops of a few church steeples in Pendleton sticking up, and beyond that, the purplish-blue hills we’d noticed from the train.
“Wanted you to see the Blue Mountains,” my daddy said, pointing at them through the windshield, “and the Umatilla River.” It was a real pretty place, we had to agree. But I think even baby Victory—who didn’t recognize the difference between food and her fingers yet—coulda guessed he hadn’t brought us all the way out to the deserted spot to admire the landscape.
Sure enough, after we’d spent a few minutes gazing at the view, my father cranked up his window like we were in a spy movie. Without even being told, Cal rolled up the one on his side until we were sealed inside that Ford, tighter than a canned ham. “We’re under orders to tell the civilians around here nothing,” my father began in a low voice. “So you can’t go and repeat—”
“We promise our lips are sealed,” Peaches interrupted.
Cal turned around and gave her a glare. “Hush up. Let him talk.”
What my father said next shocked us all. I don’t think any of us were expecting to hear we were under attack. But that’s exactly what he said. Clearing his throat, my father told us that we were under attack by the Japs.
“What?” Peaches shouted, bolting upright in her seat. “The Japs are here?”
All of us glanced nervously toward the closed-up car windows, as if the enemy might be lurking outside at that very moment. As if Japan was just over the next hill.
My daddy continued without a pause, telling us how the Japs had invented a new secret weapon and they’d already started using it to attack the West. Only the new weapon wasn’t like the kamikaze planes they’d been unleashing on our ships in the Pacific, or the deadly bombing of Pearl Harbor, or anything like that. “The truth is,” he said, “the Japs are attacking us from across the ocean using secret exploding balloons.”
What?
I’ll be honest, if I’d heard this story line from my friend Archie, I woulda called him flat-out nuts and asked for some proof. How could the Japs be attacking our country with balloons sent all the way across the Pacific Ocean? And if it was true, why hadn’t we heard a single warning about it on the radio? Or read something about it in the newspapers?
But my father didn’t seem to have any doubts about the story he was giving us. He went on describing how the enemy’s new weapons looked exactly like giant hot-air balloons, only they were filled with hydrogen gas instead, and they floated across the ocean on the air currents carrying clusters of bombs beneath them.
“Bombs?” Peaches’s voice trembled.
“Picture a huge white balloon, maybe three stories high, carrying a ring of explosives and fire bombs beneath it,” my father said, sketching an invisible circle in the air.
I sincerely hoped Peaches didn’t picture it.
“Once the balloons get here, they start drifting down and exploding. It’s been so dry this spring, the West is a matchstick. Wouldn’t take much for this whole part of the country to go up in flames. The army’s put us in charge of fighting fires out here this summer and finding whatever balloon bombs we can track down. We’ve already started training.” My father glanced toward Cal. “Army’s calling it Operation Firefly.”
Operation Firefly?
Honestly, even the name sounded made-up. A mission to fight forest fires and find balloons?
Guess Cal must’ve had a few of his own doubts because he asked, “How many enemy balloons have you seen since you’ve been out here?”
And here’s where the whole story began to deflate, because my father had to admit none of the paratroopers had spotted any yet. Not a single one. The army had given them drawings of what the balloons looked like, and a couple of photographs, and a small square of cream-colored paper the army claimed came from a Jap balloon, but none of the men had come across a real one.
Which might’ve explained the dark feeling me and Cal had noticed in the mess hall.
“We’ve only been out here a month,” my father tried to say. “I keep telling the men it’s only a matter of time.”
Inside the automobile, the doubts and questions grew along with the temperature. Cal sighed and rubbed his forehead as if it was all too much to take in. Next to me, Peaches chewed on her lips nervously and stared out the window. It felt like the times when Uncle Otis told a wild story at the Sunday dinner table—something about ladies usually—and how nobody at the table would know what to s
ay next and everybody would suddenly get interested in picking up their peas, one by one, with their forks. It was the same kind of embarrassed silence.
I didn’t know what to think. The idea of big balloons floating all the way across the Pacific Ocean with bombs attached to them seemed nuts. On the other hand, it didn’t seem likely that the U.S. Army would go around inventing stories either.
Up front, my daddy must have decided he’d spilled enough secrets for one day, because he cranked open his window to let in some fresh air and started up the motor. The sun was already low on the hills in front of us, casting shadows. “We better head back to town before it gets too late.”
In no time at all, the conversation switched from balloon bombs to where we were gonna rest our weary heads that night. Guess the uppity army commander knew what he was talking about after all, because we stopped at two or three places in town with ROOMS FOR RENT signs, but I don’t think they woulda opened their arms to Mary and Joseph if they’d been our color.
Finally we ended up at a house belonging to one of the few colored families in town. My daddy said some of the other troopers knew the Delaneys from church and they were real nice people—if you didn’t mind the crazy shade they’d used to paint their house. When he pulled up to the front of it, all we could do was stare.
The place was yellow. Bright corncob yellow.
As if the eye-peeling paint color wasn’t bad enough, the back of the house was next to the railroad tracks. Honest to goodness, if the place was moved a couple feet farther, locomotives coulda barreled right through it.
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