The landlady, Mrs. Delaney, told us her husband worked on the Union Pacific Railroad as a porter and that was the reason for the color and the closeness to the tracks. “So whenever he’s passing through town, day or night, he can always spot our house like a beacon among all the others.”
I didn’t say anything, but I thought, Good God, why not switch on a lamp instead?
“Least you can’t see the glow from the inside,” Cal whispered.
Easy for him to say since he and my daddy wouldn’t be staying there.
As we wandered through the house, trying not to seem nosy, Mrs. Delaney told us chapter and verse about her family. She was a short, busybody lady who seemed to like talking more than listening. Her two grown sons, George and Robert, were serving in the navy, and she had a fourteen-year-old daughter named Willajean who was starting high school that fall. I didn’t spot her daughter anywhere around, but you couldn’t miss her sons because there were framed pictures of them everywhere you looked. It was like being in a George and Robert museum. Photographs of them in uniform. Pictures of them at graduation. A row of grade-school photographs. When she showed us the two tiny bedrooms she had for rent, it was no big mystery who the rooms belonged to. “These are my boys’ rooms,” Mrs. Delaney said. “What do you think?”
No matter what anybody thought, you could see we had to take what was being offered. It was like being the last one in the serving line at school, when all the choices are gone. My daddy and Cal shelled out a month’s rent, plus a little extra for food. “No reason why we shouldn’t share meals,” Mrs. Delaney insisted.
I hoped the lady was better at cooking than she was at keeping house because the whole place was like Fibber McGee’s closet—so crowded with furniture and all kinds of whatnot, you could hardly find a clear place to sit down. The four of us stood uncomfortably in the middle of the front room making last-minute conversation before my daddy and Cal left for the barracks.
Cal kissed the top of baby Victory’s head and gave Peaches a quick goodbye peck on the cheek, telling them he’d be back soon. Of course, Peaches didn’t want to let him go. You could see she was real close to coming apart at the seams.
“I’m not going to Japan, sugar pie. I’ll be at the top of the hill,” Cal tried to say, pointing at the windows. “If you look, you can probably see the airfield from here.”
Doing his best to steer clear of the discussion between the two of them, my daddy told me he’d send Aunt Odella a telegram to let her know I’d got to Oregon safe and sound. He looked as if he still couldn’t quite believe I was there. “Be a big help to the Delaneys, all right? Me and Cal will stop back again as soon as we can.”
From the doorway, Mrs. Delaney jumped in to add how I reminded her exactly of her younger boy, Robert. “He’s the spitting image. It’ll be like having him back home again. I’ll spoil him like I did Robert.”
Already I could tell she was gonna be a pain.
Then my father and Cal headed for the door and I’ll admit it was harder than I woulda expected to watch them leave. The scene took me right back to the days I used to get left with Granny—the way my father always pulled the door shut softly behind him and the extra skip you could hear his feet make on the last step. I swear the only thing missing was the disappearing smell of mint.
For a minute or two I was afraid I was gonna have to embarrass myself by reaching up to wipe my darned eyes, but then Mrs. Delaney came barreling into the rooms and started switching on every lamp until the place was blazing. She insisted we sit down for a getting-to-know-you chat. Meaning me and Peaches, of course.
“Won’t take no for an answer,” she said. “And I’ll introduce you to my daughter, Willajean.” She hollered for the girl to come downstairs. “Willajean!”
Now, I don’t think her daughter was real gung-ho to meet us, because there was a long wait before the girl finally slouched down the stairs. Honestly, she was about as unattractive as her name sounded—long-legged and skinny, with a pair of black-framed eyeglasses and a scorched hair-do that didn’t add much to her looks. Her skin was a nice shade of almond brown, I’ll give you that, but Aunt Odella woulda definitely told the girl to stand up straighter and to look people in the eye or she’d never survive in life.
“Willajean is going into the ninth grade,” Mrs. Delaney announced as her daughter sank down on the davenport. “And she’s real smart. What grade are you going into, Levi?”
Told her I’d be in the eighth grade in the fall.
“See, that’s perfect.”
Well, the word perfect landed like a dud rocket on the floor between me and Willajean. You could practically hear the thud it made coming down. The older girl’s eyes cut over to me for one half second, glaring behind her wavy glasses, letting me know I wasn’t anywhere close to her idea of perfect. You can be sure she wasn’t mine.
Peaches wasn’t much help either. Her teary gaze kept wandering toward the front window and she didn’t contribute a word to the conversation. I think we were all relieved when our getting-to-know-you talk was over and we could go to bed.
I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning. Kept thinking about my daddy and replaying everything he’d said. Three years apart from each other and it felt like we’d only had three minutes to talk. We’d eaten a plate of turkey and green beans together, driven around Pendleton, and that was it. What if I woke up the next day and the 555th had shipped out again? What if those few minutes were the only chance we got to talk for another three years? I finally decided to give up on sleeping and switched on the light. Read some of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which I found on one of Robert’s shelves. Hoped Robert—wherever he was in the war—wouldn’t mind.
In his barracks on top of the hill, my daddy must’ve been kept awake by all the same thoughts. Next day, before we’d even sat down to breakfast, he stopped by again. “Can’t stay, but I wanted to say hello and bring you a treat for this afternoon. It gets real hot here,” he said, passing a ginger ale to me through the open car window. “That’s your favorite, right?”
Nope, it wasn’t, but I took it and didn’t mention a word about cream soda.
My daddy said he hoped there’d be some free time on the weekend. “Fingers crossed, me and Cal will be able to come back Saturday afternoon or evening sometime. We’ll all go fishing,” he added, not sounding too sure of the time—or the fishing. Seeing as how it was only Wednesday, the only thing you could be sure of was the long wait.
28. A House of Cards
Now, you’d think with my father’s orders to keep quiet about the balloon bombs and how careful he was when he first told us the story—rolling up the car windows and such—that it woulda been a deep dark secret in the town too.
Well, it didn’t take long for me and Peaches to realize the paratroopers at Pendleton Air Base must’ve been the only ones who were trying hard to keep their lips sealed. The rest of the town knew the whole story already, and didn’t mind sharing it with whoever they met. Honestly, if loose lips sink ships, Pendleton woulda been sitting at the bottom of the Pacific.
On our first morning at the Delaneys’—not long after my daddy dropped off the ginger ale and left again—me and Peaches were sitting with Mrs. Delaney and Willajean, finishing our breakfast, when Mrs. Delaney brought up the subject of balloon bombs. Right in the middle of spreading a thick layer of apricot jam on her toast, she turned to me and said: “I wonder if your daddy and the other fellows are going to keep looking for those Jap balloon bombs all summer?”
I’m telling you, me and Peaches almost toppled over like a house of cards.
I don’t think Mrs. Delaney noticed our panicked expressions as she spilled out every drop of information she knew, not even trying to keep her voice down—how she’d heard the balloons were made of some kind of rice paper and had Japanese markings painted on them. She said the folks in Pendleton had been warned the balloons could drift over anytime the wind was strong outta the west and explode a
nd start raging infernos and who knows what else. “So they tell us,” she repeated. “But we think it’s all rumors, don’t we, Willajean?”
Willajean hardly glanced up from a Modern Screen movie magazine she was studying. Just nodded.
“Don’t you think if big white balloons were floating through the air, somebody in this town would have seen proof of them?” Mrs. Delaney asked me and Peaches, but we didn’t dare open our mouths. I was convinced the U.S. Army was probably getting ready to haul us off to jail as traitors at that very moment.
“Well, we haven’t seen any trace of them. In fact, I was chatting about it with my neighbor yesterday,” the landlady continued, “and we were saying to each other how it’s nothing but stories they create to scare folks during war …”
So, the neighbors knew about them too.
* * *
Couple of hours later, me and Peaches were standing inside Rexall’s in town buying some toothpaste and soap when the lady clerk asked if we were family members of the crazy colored soldiers up at the airfield, the ones who jumped out of airplanes and hunted for enemy balloons.
Heck, we couldn’t believe it. Twice in one day we’d been tested.
“No ma’am, we live outside of town and don’t hear much word about the war,” Peaches replied quickly.
“Don’t have a radio either,” I added.
Peaches gave me a sharp sideways look.
The clerk kept pushing. “Where do you folks live?”
Peaches answered real smoothly, “Southern Pines.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a small place.”
I swear I was sweating bricks by then.
Thankfully, the nosy clerk lady ran out of questions to ask and got another customer, so we could leave before we landed in more hot water. The two of us didn’t dare to speak another word to each other until we were halfway back to Mrs. Delaney’s house, when Peaches turned to me and said the West scared her already and all we’d done was eat breakfast and buy toothpaste.
Despite everybody else’s doubts about balloon bombs, part of me felt honor-bound to stick up for my father and his mission, no matter how nuts it seemed. I didn’t go around spilling the beans about it like everybody else in town. My father had asked us to keep quiet, so I did. But MawMaw Sands was right about how hard it is to believe in things you can’t see. I tried to keep an open mind, but it wasn’t always easy to do.
The Keeper of Secrets basket ended up on one of Robert’s bookshelves. When I was unpacking, I cleared off a spot among all his trophies and schoolbooks and stuck the basket in the center. Gotta admit it looked kinda mysterious sitting there. Sometimes, I’d glance up at it and wonder if MawMaw Sands herself would believe the balloon-bomb story? Seeing how certain she was that a shooting star landed in her yard and grew into a tree, I figured she probably would.
I kept some of my own secrets inside the basket for safekeeping: the dead scorpion, a couple of buckeyes, and a bunch of my father’s letters. Left the scorpion right on top for anybody who might get the dumb idea of nosing through my belongings.
With George and Robert in the Pacific, I guess it’s no surprise Willajean and me ended up being thrown together like leftovers in the basket of life. It being June, she had no school. And I was on my own as long as the men were busy with their training. So, Mrs. Delaney insisted on both of us sticking together for the duration.
“Willajean would be glad to show you around the neighborhood,” she said, clearing the breakfast table after me and Peaches had spent our second morning with the family. “Won’t you, Willajean?”
The girl looked like she’d rather be executed on the spot.
I tried telling Mrs. Delaney that I’d be fine on my own. Told her I came from the big city of Chicago, so wandering around a small place like Pendleton was no problem.
The lady ignored me and kept working on Willajean. “How about if you walk around the neighborhood with Levi this morning while it’s still pleasant outside and show him the river, and the downtown, and come back here for lunch? All right, Willajean?”
I don’t think Mrs. Delaney ever got an answer, but it didn’t seem to matter because she pushed us both out the door anyhow. Willajean started down the street ahead of me with her arms locked tighter than a person heading into a hurricane. Her long legs were scissors. Hard to tell who the heck she was most mad at—me, her mother, or both.
Now, Aunt Odella always raised me to be a gentleman no matter what, so I tried to be polite and talk to the girl. Not leave her in the dust, which is what I wanted to do.
“You lived here all your life?” I called out.
“Yep,” Willajean said over her shoulder, not bothering to turn around.
“Seems like a nice place.”
“Yep.”
The neighborhood was an older one with narrow clapboard houses crowded close together. The lucky ones had a small fenced yard or a lonely tree, but most of them didn’t. There seemed to be a lot of skinny-rib dogs wandering around the place, I noticed.
“This a white neighborhood or colored?”
“White.”
“They friendly?”
“Some.”
Good grief, you woulda thought there was a shortage on words.
I pointed out the strays. “They belong to people around here or just run loose?”
Willajean’s eyes flickered in my direction for the first time and she said one sharp sentence. “Why do you want to know?”
Heck, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have any reason other than trying to be polite. Girls were a complete mystery. I was starting to understand why me and Archie mostly stayed away from them. I shrugged. “Just asking.” Decided to stop talking altogether.
“You want to meet them?” Willajean’s expression warmed up a little as she pulled a wax-paper bundle out of the pocket of her sweater.
Then all the strays in the neighborhood came running.
By the time she’d opened the paper, there were four dogs yapping around us and slobbering on our shoes. Each of the strays had a name, she told me. She’d named them all after poets—there was Robert Frost, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe—and a sad-eyed beagle named Emily Dickinson.
“Why not?” Willajean said as she let the dogs lick every last scrap from her light brown fingers. “Something wrong with poetry?”
I began to get the feeling maybe stray dogs were the only things Willajean had for company. We passed a couple of kids playing ball in the street and none of them bothered to raise an arm to wave. Later, we walked past a bunch of high school girls downtown and they stared straight through us like we were walking windows. Since Pendleton was a small town, I thought for sure the girls would’ve known Willajean, but they didn’t say one word to her. Don’t know if it was because we were colored and they weren’t, but it made me feel real grateful for having a gang of friends back in Chicago, even if Archie could be a knucklehead sometimes. Couldn’t imagine growing up in a lonely place like Pendleton with nothing but hungry dogs and dead poets as my friends.
Well, I guess I was so caught up with feeling sorry for Willajean and picturing the sad-sack life she probably had that I never noticed the snake curled up on the road ahead of us, just outside of town. Which is a good lesson for life—before you start worrying about somebody else’s problems, you better keep an eye on your own.
Willajean nearly yanked my arm outta its socket as she yelled, “Rattlesnake!”
Let me tell you, she could find a voice when she needed one—I practically shot out of my shoes. After leaping off the road, we were relieved to look back and see the snake wasn’t a deadly-sized one, maybe just a foot or two long. Don’t think it woulda killed us, but I’m glad Willajean didn’t let us find out. I tried to tell her thank you for saving my life, but she kept walking. Guess she wasn’t a big fan of compliments.
West of town, there were big outcroppings of rust-red rocks along the Umatilla River. Willajean told me it was a place her brothers li
ked coming to all the time before the war. If Archie had been there, we coulda spent days climbing the rocks—although, knowing Archie, he wouldn’t have been happy until we tackled the most dangerous parts and nearly died. Willajean said people called them the Pendleton bluffs.
The two of us ended up climbing one of the lower outcroppings to get a better view of the river from the top of it. Willajean might’ve been a girl, but I’ll give her credit for not letting that fact stop her from scrambling up the big rocks in a skirt and unfit shoes.
“You turn around and close your eyes while I’m coming up there,” she ordered me. She skinned one of her shins pretty good, but she made it to the top. It was a peaceful view from up there with the Umatilla River, the town, the patchwork of wheat fields, and the distant mountains. I said it reminded me of sitting on the tar rooftops of Chicago. Only without the tar, or the rooftops, or Chicago.
“What do you think so far? Do you like it here or not?” Willajean said, picking at the bits of scraped skin on her leg.
I shrugged. “Haven’t been around long enough to know.”
“Well, I hate it.”
There was a long silence as I tried to come up with something polite to say about where she lived, some kind of compliment. “The dogs around here seem nice” was the best I could do.
Which made Willajean burst out laughing. Let me tell you, she had a startling-loud laugh for a quiet girl. I mean—spit flew. Honestly, I was kinda proud of myself for being funny for once. Archie was always good at cracking up girls, but I never had any luck. All they’d do was roll their eyes at me and wander off. Maybe this proved there was some hope for my sense of humor yet.
After she finished laughing, Willajean said being stuck with me wasn’t as bad as she first thought. “When I first met you, all I kept thinking about was my brothers, and how you weren’t them, but you’re all right, I guess. You want to bring some soda pops and books and come up here again tomorrow if it’s nice?” she asked, sounding desperate.
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