“You think you and your daddy’ll go back to Chicago once the war ends?” Peaches asked. I told her I was sure we would, since that’s where we’d both come from. Started picturing all the familiar places—Hixson’s and movies at the Regal—and realizing how I’d missed the whole darned summer. Aunt Odella’s last letter said Uncle Otis was having wife troubles again, so I woulda found out the inside scoop if I’d been there to get one of his razor cuts. And believe me, I was in desperate need of one. There wasn’t enough Vaseline in the world to help my head.
Cal said wherever I ended up in the world, I had to remember not to become a B-boy again. He called it an army term for somebody who’s always getting left behind. “You gotta stick with the people you got, no matter what. Don’t let people keep taking off, and don’t you sit around waiting on them to come back.”
I told him it wasn’t something you had much choice about usually.
“You always got choices,” Cal said.
When the eastbound train pulled into the station early the next morning, everybody in the unit turned out in their good dress uniforms to pay their respects as Mickey’s body was sent home to his family. The troopers lined up in motionless rows of olive green on both sides of the station. Standing anywhere near the men, you could smell the faint scent of wood smoke drifting around them, but their uniforms were pressed and spotless. The boots and brass shone in the sunshine.
Willajean and Mrs. Delaney came to the train station in somber black and navy dresses, and they put me in one of Robert’s church suits. We were all melting in the sun as we stood together with the other army families and friends.
When the coffin got loaded onto the train and the entire 555th saluted, I don’t think there was a dry eye on the platform. Man oh man, it squeezed my throat hard when I saw the coffin pass by my father, who was trying his best to hold his salute, but you couldn’t miss the crumpled look that went across his face when it did.
I kept thinking about that trout and remembering how alive that fish was. How it had flapped and sparkled in Mickey’s hands. No matter what, I just couldn’t believe those hands were silent inside that box now.
Before getting on board the train, Peaches and Cal came over to where I was standing. Peaches was holding Victory, but she gave me a hug with her free arm. “Don’t you go getting into any trouble without me around keeping an eye on you, Levi, you hear? Remember, I got four brothers, so I know all the tricks.”
Cal shoved a paper bag into my hands. “Peanuts,” he said gruffly, trying not to get teary, you could tell. “Don’t eat them all this afternoon.” He patted my back. “Sure we’ll see you around again, Legs.”
“You will.” I tried to sound sure. Although the honest truth was, we had no idea if that ever would happen. My eyes burned like the dickens, watching them leave.
As the train started pulling away, the two of them waved goodbye and Peaches held baby Victory up to the window so we could see her. I don’t know if Peaches and Cal noticed it or not, but baby Victory suddenly gave us one of the sweetest smiles you ever saw. Everybody who was watching started waving and smiling back—troopers, officers, everybody. Now, Aunt Odella probably woulda said a baby named Victory giving a dazzling happy smile was a sure sign of the war coming to an end.
And it was.
Four days later, Japan surrendered.
32. When Sugar Went Flying
Word of the surrender spread faster than a wildfire around Pendleton. One minute, it was an ordinary kind of afternoon—people going about their business, automobiles rolling down the street, birds chirping, flies buzzing—and the next minute, things were flying. Handfuls of loose change. Hats. Purses. Shoes. People just threw whatever they were carrying straight into the air. I heard later that the owner of the local five-and-dime tossed the contents of all his candy jars into the street. Gumdrops, lollipops, licorice—you name it. Sugar went flying. Wish I’d been there. Willajean and Mrs. Delaney were shopping at Rexall’s, and they said it was a real sight.
Before I heard the news, I was sitting on the Delaneys’ porch feeling real blue about Peaches and Cal being gone, when Graphite suddenly came tearing down the road. Didn’t know the old heap could go that fast. But there it was, speeding down the street way faster than the wartime speed limits allowed—bald tires going thump thump thump on the gravel. Pulling up to the house, my daddy threw open the door, waving at me to climb in. Tiger Ted was driving.
“War’s over!” Tiger shouted. “Come on, Legs, we’re going for a ride.”
The car was already packed with troopers, but I squeezed into the front with the door handles denting my knee.
“Have a roll!” Daddy shoved a roll of toilet tissue into my hands. What the heck was I supposed to do with it? “Throw it!” he hollered, a huge grin busting across his face. “Let those babies go.”
Before I could even get my roll started, Graphite was careening back and forth down the street, horn blowing, and we were sending toilet paper flying out the windows in fluttering streams of white. All over town, you could hear church bells ringing and horns blaring. People were standing in their yards, waving U.S. flags and flapping bedsheets and towels and who knows what-all at everybody driving past. It was like being in a crazy parade of joy. Don’t know how I’d pictured celebrating victory if it ever came, but I sure never imagined it would be riding around trailing toilet tissue behind me. We must’ve had two dozen rolls in the old Ford, and we used up every single one papering the town before heading back to the airfield to reload.
As we pulled through the gates of the air base, the guard suddenly closed them behind us. Which kinda took us by surprise, you know, since the war was over.
Then he padlocked them.
One of the troopers tried razzing the soldier, asking him if the army was afraid the Japs were gonna sneak into Pendleton and steal our toilet tissue. The guard didn’t look like he appreciated humor much. “Colonel’s orders,” the fellow snapped, and headed back to the guard shack.
Later on we found out the real reason.
Once people ran out of safe things to launch into the sky, it seems they turned to unloading whatever ammo they could find to make a bang. They shot off pellet guns, hunting rifles, pistols, fireworks, Civil War relics—you name it, you could hear things exploding all over town. Guess the army didn’t want to take the chance of any of that spare ammo getting unloaded on the colored troops and starting trouble, so they decided to keep the men at the airfield for their own protection, they said. A lot of the soldiers were real steamed about it. Same thing had happened on the Fourth, and they hadn’t forgotten about that treatment either. Ace insisted he was gonna sneak out—he said nobody would keep him behind a fence like a Jap prisoner, not when he’d fought for our country and almost died for it.
He might’ve tried to get out too, if it wasn’t for the celebration meal Emerald cooked up later on. I swear there couldn’t have been anything edible left in Oregon after seeing how much the cook put together. Slabs of beef and heaping mounds of mashed potatoes, boatloads of gravy, and one entire table of nothing but cakes and pies. Plus, one dessert Emerald set on fire. The men joked how the army’d probably make them parachute onto desserts next. We ate until we were way past stuffed. Anybody who tried to climb a fence after that meal woulda been a fool.
After chow, a few of the troopers wandered over to the old piano in the corner of the mess hall. One of them started banging out a tune and the others started dragging over troopers to help sing, until there was a whole crowd gathered around. Let me tell you, the army has a few songs ladies should never ever hear. Probably made the piano blush.
Of course, my daddy had to get pulled into the fray. “You got a good-sounding voice,” he said, giving me a rib poke after we’d joined in on a couple of numbers. “Guess you didn’t get that from me, huh?” A smile crossed his face, but it faded quick because both of us started thinking about Queen Bee Walker, I guess—which made the moment go from happy to sad faster than a so
ng.
The whole night was full of the same ups and downs. Like MawMaw Sands said, life can be a crazy mix of sweetness and pain. Only four days after we watched a coffin get loaded onto a train—we were singing songs and celebrating victory over Japan. At the same time we were celebrating, Mickey’s heartbroken family was probably making plans for his funeral. Some of the troopers said if the war had ended a few days sooner, maybe they wouldn’t have gone on that fire call and Mickey would be alive to see the victory. It was still hard to understand why it had to be him who was lost.
Everybody agreed it was a shame Cal wasn’t around for the celebration, because no doubt he woulda been the life of the party. I know me and my daddy were both kinda lost without him. We wandered from the piano to the poker games, but my father only played a couple of halfhearted hands before he said, “Let’s bug out of here and get some air.”
We found a spot outside the operations shed, where you could perch on some oil drums and get a good view of the flashes of fireworks and gunfire still blasting all over town. It was a clear August night, with the moon almost full. It floated above us like a pale Jap balloon—trust me, it didn’t take much imagination to see the connection. Reminded me of the big moon I’d seen outside St. Louis and my dream about chasing it with my father. Pictured us in that dream again, climbing mountains of sugar, trying to touch the darned moon.
Swear my father must’ve been reading my mind because, at that same moment, he sighed and said, “Sometimes I think we might as well have been chasing the son-of-a-gun moon in this war.”
I asked him if he meant the balloon bombs. “You still think they were real or not?”
“I don’t know,” my daddy said, shaking his head. “Keep trying to tell myself the Japs could’ve stopped sending them for some reason, and that’s why we never came across one—but sometimes I wonder, what if it all turns out to be lies? What if we were out here for nothing? What if I was a fool to believe what the army told me? How will I live with sending a young kid to his death?”
Even with the celebrations going on around us, you could feel the gloom surrounding him. All his lieutenant shine was gone.
“Why’d the army never send any of you to the war, do you think?”
It was a question that had been nagging at me for a while. After all, Mrs. Delaney’s sons had been sent to the Pacific. Archie’s brother had been sent to Europe. Why not the troopers at Pendleton?
Answer was simple, my daddy said. “Army couldn’t keep us separate from white soldiers in battle. When you jump out of a plane, you come down in the middle of everything. Whoever you land next to, you fight next to. Nobody in the army wanted to take the chance of us landing next to them. Thought all our training would change their minds, but it didn’t, I guess …” His voice trailed off into silence.
“Maybe someday it will change.” I tried to sound hopeful.
My daddy sighed. “Who knows. Feel like I’ve spent half my life chasing after things or trying to change them. Chased balloon bombs and decent work. Chased people who I thought loved me. After your momma ran off, I spent all my time looking for her. Every town I traveled through, I’d search around for her name.”
Wasn’t sure I’d heard him right at first. Had he said he went looking for my mother? Always thought she’d vanished into thin air and was never seen again. Never heard anybody in my family tried to go in search of her.
“Finally found her in Detroit. Couple of years after she ran off, I saw her name on a poster outside a club when I was driving around selling those encyclopedias I used to peddle,” my father continued. “It said QUEEN BEE WALKER HERE TONIGHT.” He pointed at the words as if they were written on the night air in front of us.
I held my breath waiting to hear more.
“So, I parked in front of the club, trying to decide what to do. How could I get her back? What could I say to change her mind?” My father glanced over at me. “I sat there for who knows how long, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Not one word. So I reached for one of those fancy encyclopedias I sold. The L volume. Wanted to see what it told you about love. Always gave people the line that anything you needed to know in the world was inside those books. And you know what I found out?”
I shook my head.
“I found out love isn’t in the encyclopedia. You look up love and there is nothing written there except for a few words telling you to look somewhere else. So you know what that made me realize, Levi?” He paused and stared up at the night sky. “It made me realize there are things in this world even the smartest encyclopedias can’t help you with. Love. Death. War. Why some people treat other people the cruel way they do. You need to look somewhere else for answers to the tough questions like that.”
My father gave me an uneasy look, like he suddenly realized he’d gone on way too much. “Anyhow, I stared at the poster outside the club for a long time before I decided maybe there was nothing to say, maybe some things were better left alone. After that, I drove back to Chicago and gave up selling encyclopedias for good. Figured I needed to try something new in my life.”
“You never talked to her?” Thinking if it had been up to me, I woulda gone inside for sure. Just to have some proof she was real, you know what I mean? And to find out why she’d left us. Woulda told her it was a big mistake to put those three words on a napkin too. I Am Levin. What dumb words to write. They had cursed me forever.
My father said no, he never talked to her.
“I decided it was better to move on,” he said. “Had you and me to look out for, and finding work wasn’t easy back then. I played for some of the traveling baseball teams and sold insurance. You had to do whatever you could to make ends meet. Then the war came along and I signed up for the army after Pearl Harbor, figuring I’d do something bigger with my life and serve my country. I’d be part of the first colored paratroop battalion and do something nobody else had done. Somewhere in between all that—the war decided it didn’t want me, and you grew up too fast.”
Heck, I had no idea what to say after hearing his sad speech. I tried pointing out to my father how he’d always been good about writing letters. “No matter where you were, you always wrote.”
Couldn’t tell in the darkness, but I’m pretty sure my daddy rolled his eyes. “Letters aren’t being a father.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Not much better.”
I tried something else. “You sent me a scorpion.”
A sneaky grin passed across my daddy’s face. “You still remember that gift?”
“Still have it.”
“You pulling my leg?” My daddy glanced over at me, grinning wider. “You kept it from Odella all this time?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s something,” he said, still smiling.
I had the feeling maybe I’d cheered him up a little.
Digging around in his pocket, my father came up with a crushed pack of Wrigley’s and tore it open. “Have a piece,” he said, passing a stick to me.
Sitting there in the darkness with the smell of spearmint drifting on the air around us, I decided life can be a real strange circle sometimes. Three years ago, I’d been a pesky kid begging for some chewing gum instead of missing my father. Now the two of us were sharing a pack of Wrigley’s and I was listening to my father go on and on about how much he’d missed me.
I couldn’t help wondering if my life woulda been any different if he’d talked to Queen Bee Walker all those years ago. Maybe they woulda fallen in love again, who knows. Or maybe she woulda taken off and left us twice in one lifetime. Guess there is no way of knowing if something is gonna be a Hollywood ending or a flop, right?
Sat outside with my father, talking and watching the celebrations, until way past midnight. Saw two shooting stars zip across the night sky, although I didn’t see either one land and sprout into a tree like MawMaw Sands said. Despite the big party everybody below us in the town seemed to be having and the happy crescendo of noise coming ou
tta the mess hall, I could tell my daddy was still wrestling with the idea of the war being over. More than a couple of times, he said, “All I want is for the people down there to know we did our part for our country. Don’t want to go home feeling like we did nothing.”
Maybe the stars were listening that night. Or maybe MawMaw Sands was right all along about believing in things you can’t see. Turns out my father didn’t have to wait very long to get one of the things he wanted. The next morning, everybody woke up to the news that something about Jap balloon bombs was in the headlines.
33. Headlines
Word reached the airfield as the men were getting into formation before breakfast.
Nobody was putting in much effort that morning, I gotta admit, with the war being over and all. Uniforms were wrinkled and trouser legs weren’t bloused real carefully. Everybody just threw on their jump boots and clomped out the door, laces dragging.
I’d only got a few hours’ sleep. I’d slept overnight in the service barracks, breaking every army rule there is—and probably worrying the Delaneys half to death—but since the army had locked up the base, what else could I do? My daddy couldn’t take the chance of sneaking me into the officers’ quarters, so Emerald found me a bunk in his barracks and some of the other fellows were kind enough to short-sheet the bed before I got into it.
Of course, I shoulda known from all my daddy’s letters that you can’t trust the mess hall crew any farther than you can spit, but there I was—tugging and tugging on the blankets with sweat beading up on my forehead—until the men, who were howling with laughter by then, showed me what they’d done. Told them they were a bunch of fools before I yanked the blankets over my head to get some sleep.
Jump into the Sky Page 22