The scene woulda been almost perfect if it hadn’t been for what Ace spotted later on. We’d been watching the fireworks for an hour or so when he noticed a faint glow in the direction of the Blue Mountains to the east. Now, if it had been close to daybreak, you woulda thought the orange glimmer was the edge of the sun barely coming up, but it had only just set. “That’s a damn fire way out there, isn’t it?” Ace pointed. A bunch of the troopers around him jumped up on the chairs and tables to get a better view, and the fuse that had been smoldering under the whole day suddenly flared up like a hot match. Curses went flying.
I could feel my daddy’s shoulders rising next to me. Standing on the other side, Cal was quiet. I figured it was a good thing Victory was with Willajean and Peaches, who had wandered off in search of our pie pans to take home. If the baby had been listening to the troopers’ language, who knows what her first words might’ve been someday …
You could tell the fellows weren’t too happy to see the fire, that’s for sure. Nobody mentioned a word about whether or not a Jap balloon might’ve caused it, so that possibility didn’t seem to be tiptoeing through anybody’s mind. Only thing they cared about was the flickering orange line in the distance.
“Whole war, the army’s been looking for ways to get us to give up and quit,” somebody said behind us. The voice sounded familiar. It might have been Killer or Ace. I remembered the scene they’d made at the river when we were fishing.
“Well, they finally got their Christmas wish, haven’t they?”
“Hell, if they wanted to, they could drop us straight into the flames right now and finish us off for good, couldn’t they?” There was a jeering ripple of laughter.
“Naw”—somebody else interrupted. “Remember, we gotta land our parachutes in the trees first. Then whoever makes it out of the treetops alive gets to try fighting off a raging inferno with his ax and a shovel. Then if you’re still in one piece after all that—congratulations, soldier—the army will fly you back here to Pendleton for whatever screwball mission they can dream up next.”
“That’s what we signed up to do.” My father spun around, addressing the shadowy crowd behind us. “None of us got dragged into the paratroops, did we?”
“We signed up to die for our country, not for a bunch of damn trees and balloons nobody’s seen, Lieutenant,” somebody nearby shot back. A lot of the troopers stalked away to the barracks—including my daddy, who wasn’t going to let that comment go, you could tell. The air around us popped with firecrackers and heat.
“That true, Cal?”
In all the arguing, the men had forgotten about Peaches and some of the other wives and girlfriends being there, I think. She must’ve come back and overheard the whole scene because her voice rose like a trembling balloon behind us. “That true about you landing your parachutes in trees?”
It was too dark to see her eyes filling up with tears, but you could tell they were. Right away, Cal went over to her and whipped his arm around her shoulders, insisting it was nothing for her to worry about. The few troopers who were left nearby jumped in fast to agree with him. “We’re the best there is,” they said, patting her back gently, acting embarrassed by what had happened. “Hooking the trees is nothing. We’ve already done it a half-dozen times and we’re still in one piece. Don’t listen to what some of the fellows are saying. Landing in trees is safer than rocking a baby, and there’s still plenty more training to do before we start jumping into any fires. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
But Peaches was still sniffling hard when we left.
Two weeks later, I was lounging in bed early one morning. Light was just coming through the cracks in the curtains when I heard a rumbling roar pass overhead. The sound shook the walls of the Delaneys’ house, making the yellow paint shiver. One shadow roared over the rooftops, followed by another, and another. Without even looking out the window, I knew the planes flying over us were C-47s from Pendleton Air Field and the men were heading out on their first fire call.
30. Seeing Underwater
Emerald Jones, the company cook, brought the official word about the mission a few hours later. We were still cleaning up the breakfast dishes—although nobody had eaten much of Mrs. Delaney’s bacon and eggs—when Emerald knocked on the screen door. “Thought I’d swing by and drop off a couple of messages Cal and Boots left for you,” he announced, trying to give us an easy smile. “Nothing to worry about. The fellows will be back home before you know it.” He pulled out the folded notes from his front pocket and held them toward us. By then, Peaches was a train wreck.
My father’s note was scrawled in his usual squinty handwriting: Fire call. Gone a couple of days. Keep an eye on everybody. So long, Daddy. Cal had written Peaches a long love note that made her cry a waterfall every time she read it. Trust me, he shoulda left his message on a hankie. It woulda been easier.
* * *
If I thought the six days crossing the entire United States took forever, it was nothing compared to the six days we had to wait for word from the men. Felt like eternity going backward. Peaches hardly left her room, and Mrs. Delaney fussed over her and Victory worse than a mother hen—tiptoeing around the house, keeping all the curtains closed for their peace and quiet, making sure nobody slammed a door. Every morning me and Willajean would escape after the breakfast dishes were dried. Willajean wasn’t Archie, but she was all I had to talk to while the troopers were gone. I’d fidget around the kitchen, waiting while she gathered a bunch of smelly scraps for the Poets before we left. Then we’d feed them on the way to the river.
She could say some crazy things sometimes, though.
One day she told me how she was sorry my father had to leave on the fire mission. How it was too bad both of us had goodbye fathers.
“What do you mean by that?” I fired back, feeling like I had to come to my daddy’s defense.
“Ones who are always leaving for somewhere,” she said. “That’s all.”
I’ll admit, I never put two and two together and thought about how me and Willajean had that part of our lives in common. It was true I’d only seen Mr. Delaney a few times in the month or so I’d been there. He was working day and night for the Union Pacific Railroad because of the war.
Despite Willajean’s strange ways sometimes, I have to give her credit for sticking with me during the six days the men were gone. Every morning—no matter how hot it was—she’d climb up the bluffs with me and watch the sky. Tried to tell her she didn’t have to come. All I was doing was keeping an eye out for the C-47s returning home. Or any balloon bombs that might happen to drift over—although I’d almost given up hope of that ever happening. Mostly I was trying to keep busy with something useful, so I didn’t have to picture all the things that could be going wrong on the troopers’ mission.
Each time Willajean would shrug and say how she didn’t mind sitting with me for a few hours. Usually she’d bring a book. By midafternoon, when even the trees had crawled into the shade, we’d head back to the Delaney house to find something cool to drink and to take our turn in front of the porch fan.
That’s where we were sitting when the airplanes finally came home. All of us—Mrs. Delaney, Peaches, Willajean, and me—were crowded in front of the whirring fan, drinking lemonade, when Mrs. Delaney suddenly said, “You hear something?” Bolting upright, she plunked her glass on the porch railing. “I don’t think that’s a train. Sounds like airplanes to me.”
Sure enough, it was.
I swear none of us moved or breathed until we heard the backfiring sound of Graphite finally coming up the street an hour or so later. Then Peaches made a spectacle of herself, running down the steps and kneeling in the small rectangle of dirt that was the Delaneys’ front yard. Raising her arms up to the sky, she begged and hollered, “Please, Lord Jesus, please let that be my Cal coming back home safe and sound.”
Me and Willajean stayed where we were, and just stood up to get a good look as the car came around the corner.
Honestly, I don’t know how the driver could see to make the turn. That old Ford was packed to overflowing with people. As soon as its bald tires rolled to a stop in front of the house, my daddy, Cal, Tiger, Mickey, and a couple of other troopers bailed out wearing the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen. Didn’t seem to matter that their army fatigues were a mess and they stank like a campfire. They were grinning from ear to ear. Cal came tearing up the walk and swept Peaches into his arms. Left smudges all over the nice dress she’d put on to welcome him home. But she didn’t seem to mind one bit.
“Hooo girl!” He swung her around like a carnival ride. “We made it home, sugar pie. Yes sirreee, we did.”
My daddy strolled up to the porch, smiling too. “It went almost picture-perfect,” he said. Real proud, you could tell. “Couldn’t have been better. Got the fires out and all our men back home safe.”
The fellows were heading down to the river for a swim. My daddy said that’s all they’d been thinking about for days in the smoke and heat—taking a plunge in the cool river the minute they got back. And then sleeping for a week. Peaches and Mrs. Delaney insisted they had to eat too. “After everybody’s done swimming, you come back here and we’ll stuff you full of chow again,” they said.
Well, I sure wasn’t gonna stick around the house cooking with the ladies, so I headed down to the river with my daddy and Cal. By the time we got there, it looked like half the U.S. Army was already swimming. The men had found a spot where the Umatilla River took a slow curve, making a deeper pool on one side, and that’s where everybody was splashing. The shrubs and tree branches along the riverbanks nearby were decorated with more things than a Christmas tree. Ladies woulda been blushing, let me tell you.
Daddy and Cal peeled off their duds down to their army underwear, sending up powdery clouds of dust as the uniforms hit the ground. “Come on, Legs, take the jump with us,” Cal said, waving one arm. My daddy was already on the water’s edge. “You don’t wanna be the last one standing in the door.”
Now, up until that very moment I’d only waded in a couple of nasty city creeks with Archie before. You know, if there’d been a hard rain, we used to go walking in them, tossing rocks and such for fun. So when my daddy had talked about cooling off in the river, I figured he meant splashing around in the shallows, in water below your knees—not swimming in the darned river itself.
Heck, I couldn’t swim a lick.
From where we were, you could see most of the men already standing in water up to their shoulders. Good God. It made me realize how many big things my daddy and me still didn’t know about each other. Things that could kill you. My father turned around, waving an arm at me again.
“Can’t swim,” I mumbled real low to Cal.
“Honest?” Cal glanced back at me, surprised. Then his eyes darted toward my daddy, who was still waiting impatiently on the riverbank. Cal must’ve guessed what a tight spot I was in. “Well,” he said, “no time like right now to learn. I’ll stick to the shallows with you. Come on.”
That river felt good on my toes, I gotta admit. I slowly eased in up to my knees, but the rocks on the bottom were slick, so you had to be careful where you stepped. Cal wandered within an arm’s reach of me, not giving away my secret, but my daddy gave up waiting and splashed out to join the other men, who were whooping and hollering in the middle.
The air hummed with loud voices, as if the troopers had suddenly been released from a long vow of silence. They’d done something nobody else thought they could do. They’d jumped into trees with parachutes and put out forest fires with nothing but shovels. It was like boxing Joe Louis and coming out alive. I swear the stories that went flying around the river woulda sent Peaches to bed for a week if she’d been listening. I heard the fellows jawing about which troopers had hooked their parachutes onto the highest branches and who got down to the ground without a scratch. Heard how one team cleared a half-mile fire lane through a forest and scared off what they thought was a bear one night. Another team hiked fifteen miles over a mountain to get back to civilization.
Tell you what, it made me feel ashamed to be standing there in the shallows like a sissy girl with my arms crossed over my goosebumpy chest, after hearing all the brave things they did.
Told Cal I wanted to try going out deeper.
“Up to you,” he said.
Pretty soon I was standing next to my daddy and the other men, in swirling water up to my waist. Thought I might die of mortal fright, my heart was thumping so bad. Couldn’t even see my feet below me anymore. They’d disappeared.
“Want to try ducking your head under, Levi?” my father asked, giving me a look that said my secret was out. Suppose it didn’t take a U.S. Army officer to figure out why I was half dry when everybody else had rivers trailing down their dark skin. “The water feels pretty good,” he added.
Heck, what could I say? My daddy could jump into trees but his son was too chicken to get his head wet?
“Hold your nose.” Cal gave me a friendly wink. “Me and Boots will make it quick.”
Of course, you know all the other troopers overheard the conversation and came over. Killer, Brothers, Tiger, Ace—they were all standing around. Nothing like having a big audience watch you drown yourself.
Once I had my eyes clenched shut and enough oxygen in my lungs to last until next week, I leaned forward as Cal and my daddy pushed my shoulders underneath the river’s surface. When the cool water hit my face, my eyes popped open by themselves—just outta sheer panic, I guess—and I couldn’t believe you could see under the water. There were yellow-green rays of sunlight coming down and the blurry outline of the rocks on the bottom. And legs. My legs. I was looking around—thinking, Son of a gun, this is pretty neat that you can see underwater—when they yanked my shoulders up and I was back in the open air, rubbing water outta my stinging eyes. My whole body felt cool and fizzy, as if I’d been turned into a bottle of ginger ale on a hot summer day.
“You feel all right?” my daddy asked, looking worried.
And I thought how nice it was to be worried about for once. Maybe I’d just stay there all day and soak up that worry like a big sponge. Thirteen years’ worth of worry.
Couldn’t keep a slow grin from easing across my face, though. Man oh man, I was proud of myself. Big Man had conquered the Mississippi, that’s what it felt like. “I’m feeling fine” is what I said—which made everybody lose interest and go back to whatever they’d been doing before, since it looked like I wasn’t gonna die after all.
I’m telling you, that afternoon on the river with my daddy and the other troopers is something I’ll never forget. I remember how the sun sank behind the bluffs near the river, turning the rocks a warm coppery color like pennies before the war. I remember the way the light danced on the rippling brown shoulders of the men as they skipped rocks and sailed an old tennis ball back and forth through the air, higher and higher against the blue. Tiger and Ace put on a boxing show, waist-deep in the water, that woulda impressed the daylights outta Joe Louis. Somehow Mickey managed to catch a fish with his bare hands—scooped up a little rainbow trout by the river’s edge. All of us watched the silvery colors flash in his palms, everybody oohing and aahing. It was something magical, the whole afternoon. I think everybody woulda stayed there forever, if they’d had the chance. But the next spark was already smoldering somewhere.
It wouldn’t be long before another fire was starting.
31. Revelations
As the bone-dry days of July drifted into the beginning of August, I swear the air itself seemed to have turned to smoke. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, the eye-watering smell of something burning could jolt you outta a sound sleep and make you think your own bed had caught fire. Almost every morning, we’d hear the big airplanes climbing into the sky over Pendleton carrying another group of troopers on a fire call. Sometimes the calls were nearby—the Blue Mountains or one of the big forests to the north in Washington State. Sometimes th
ey were as far off as Montana or Idaho.
Hardly anybody bothered to look up when the airplanes came and went anymore, because all of us knew it had nothing to do with Jap balloons or the war in the Pacific. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Every night the sky was lit up with lightning from distant storms that never arrived, and the troopers said most of the forest fires they saw were started by lightning. Only my daddy still insisted there was the chance that some of them could’ve been caused by enemy balloons. “I’m not giving up yet,” I heard him tell Cal, who laughed and said he was as stubborn as the Japs.
Word was the Allies were planning to invade Japan soon. On the radio, there were daily news bulletins about waves of B-29 Superfortresses bombing Japanese cities in preparation for a land invasion. Honestly, people in Pendleton didn’t seem to be paying much attention. When the grocery store in town ran out of summer melons, it created a bigger stir than the war news. Customers got into a fistfight. The police had to be called. You couldn’t get through August without melons, folks said.
I think the paratroopers at the airfield were too tired to care what was happening in the Pacific or to worry about how they were being left out again. Most of them hardly stirred from their bunks between fire calls. Tumbleweed coulda rolled through the barracks. Nobody had any spare time to cool off in the river or go fishing for trout like they’d done before. Cal and my daddy would stop by for a quick visit and fall fast asleep at Mrs. Delaney’s kitchen table while you were talking to them. Their eyelids would start to droop, their shoulders would sag, and it would be lights-out. We’d have to shake their arms to get them to wake up.
Then, on August 6, the biggest bomb in history was dropped on Japan.
And that news woke us all up.
* * *
When President Truman made the announcement over the radio, it caught everybody off guard, let me tell you. It was a Monday morning. Cal and my daddy had been gone for a couple of days on a fire call. Me and Peaches were helping Mrs. Delaney pickle some tomatoes, and the whole kitchen reeked of vinegar. Willajean was sitting at the table with a clothespin on her nose, writing letters to her brothers.
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