by Don Keith
School was to start the next Monday and Charlie winced when Jimmy told him he would have to cut back on the job some. That he could maybe only come in the afternoons for a little while. McGee told him to come by a couple of days a week, after he had gotten home from class, and he would find plenty of work for him to do.
Jimmy was not looking forward to school. It took away his play and radio station work time. And it would be difficult getting back into the habit, considering that he had not been in class since they had moved to Birmingham back in the early spring. Even then, school had never thrilled him. The teachers wanted to do all the talking and not listen at all. He knew, too, that he would be behind on all those hated lessons, and everyone there would be a stranger. He still did not know a soul of school age except Detroit Simmons.
And Detroit did not count. He was bussed ten miles across town to the colored school while Jimmy walked the six blocks over to Potter-Finley Middle School. It was a dreary dark-brick dungeon with a tall chain-link prison fence that separated the foreboding building from anything resembling brightness or happiness or freedom.
On his first day in class, Jimmy found it was not only the building that was depressing. The convoluted arithmetic, arid Alabama history, and incessant English lessons dragged on and on endlessly. The view out the window and through the fence of bright blue sky and emerald green grass made the torture even worse.
Miss Claudia Cleveland, his fifth grade teacher, was so old, dry and dusty, it seemed she was on the verge of disintegrating into a sudden cloud if a stray breeze found its way into their tomb of a classroom. Even her voice cracked and snapped like pine kindling when she spoke. No matter how warm the early-fall days were, she wore gray or dark-brown sweaters draped over her bony shoulders, wool skirts that swept the oiled floors in their stifling classroom, and heavy shoes fit for any man working at the mills. She stubbornly refused to open the windows to let in even a hint of fresh air, no matter how boiling hot it became in the classroom. The only green plant on her desk was a spiny cactus and it thrived in the dry heat while the kids sat and wilted.
It seemed that they were doomed to sit stiffly and swelter as they endured her droning lectures, the maddening popping of her dentures as she spoke, the audible creaking and cracking of her knees each time she rose from her desk. Little things kept them awake, like the accidental squeak of a piece of chalk on the blackboard as Miss Cleveland monotonously reduced fractions. When someone fell asleep and tumbled noisily from a desk. Or when some poor inmate accidentally broke wind and sent the whole cellblock into hysterics. Such simple distractions always drew cheers and made whoever did it a temporary celebrity.
The highlight of the school year came two weeks into the torture, and it was Jimmy Gill who did it. He found a bluebird at recess, the poor thing waddling crazily near a chinaberry tree on the tiny playground. It had been eating the fermented berries that had fallen from the tree and was staggering drunk.
There was no plan for mischief on his part. It all just happened. For some reason, he put the inebriated bird into his overall pocket and took it inside with him when Miss Cleveland summoned them all to return to class. While they reluctantly filed in, the old woman stepped to the cloak room for another sweater, chilled from her brief trip to the doorway to revoke their precious moments of recess parole. Jimmy was afraid the bird might come to its senses and start making noise, so he stepped quickly to the teacher’s desk and put it in the top middle drawer for safe-keeping. There was no other place and the windows, he knew, were nailed closed. He’d get the thing out of the desk and set it free after school, after it had sobered up. Like his mother, the thing would be fine after sleeping it off.
Two hours later, Miss Cleveland was busily diagramming sentences on the chalk board while the class fought sleep. Her piece of chalk broke with a loud snap and Jimmy sank deeply into his seat when he saw what was about to happen. Miss Cleveland looked at the nub of chalk then creaked over and reached to open the desk drawer for another piece.
Please, he prayed, still be drunk on your butt, bird. Let it please be asleep. But nobody heard his prayer. The bluebird, now revived and irritable from its chinaberry hangover, suddenly fluttered out, directly into the teacher’s shocked face.
The woman shrieked, slapping at the confused bird, using language not fit for fifth-grade ears. The class was instantly wide awake, sitting up straight, watching the whole thing play out in front of them like a good television show. Jimmy cringed, sinking lower in his seat.
Miss Cleveland lapped the room twice, still screaming and slapping and cursing so loudly she could probably be heard throughout the entire school building. The poor bird had somehow gotten itself tangled in the old woman’s hair bun, flapping its wings as hard as it could to escape. That just made Miss Cleveland scream and slap and curse more.
Finally, she found the room’s door, managed to tear it open, and made it halfway down the hallway before she fainted dead away. The hung-over bird somehow got free and fluttered down the short stairwell, past a surprised janitor, and then outside to blessed freedom. The entire class had followed their teacher out the door, thrilled with the unexpected entertainment that dropped so wonderfully into their day.
Jimmy Gill, the skinny new kid, was an instant idol to all but Principal Cornelius Fagan. He was not amused. For a moment, as he sat in Fagan’s super-heated office, Jimmy thought he was about to be expelled from school for good.
“Son, I’m at a loss,” the huge old man spoke from behind his cluttered desk. He was looking down on Jimmy through a set of bushy eyebrows, an exasperated look on his gray face. Jimmy was sitting low, in a tiny chair more fit for first graders than someone going on eleven years old. “This irresponsible stunt could have seriously injured one of our finest teachers. And a dear friend of mine, I might mention.”
The principal stood and began pacing in tight circles around Jimmy.
“Perhaps if I required that you stay after school for the remainder of the term...”
Jimmy’s stomach fell. Getting free from that prison each day, running through the jungle with Detroit, crawling over the tree-bridge to WROG, or hurrying home, sitting before the Zenith, and pulling in distant rock and roll music were his only salvations.
He even passed time in class each day by writing down the call letters and locations of the stations he heard each afternoon after school. Finding the cities on the big map that hung behind Miss Cleveland’s desk. Or listing on the blue lines in his St. Joe spiral-bound notebook the artists and songs the stations played. If that was taken away from him, he might as well be shot dead right then and there.
“No, please! I have...”
“Yes, young man?”
“I have a job after school.”
Principal Fagan stopped pacing and looked at him incredulously. Even in that deprived neighborhood in which it was his misfortune to be employed as an educator, it was uncommon for a fourth-grader to work after school.
“Yes, and exactly what kind of job is it, young man? Bird trainer?”
The old bag of wind snorted softly at his own joke, bent forward at his ample waist, opened his eyes wide in disbelief, and stared down at Jimmy through the underbrush of his eyebrows.
“No sir. I work at WROG. The radio station.”
The principal laughed again and resumed his circular pacing.
“I suppose you are a radio announcer, then. Maybe you play the piano. Yes, that’s it. You play the piano on the radio. And I suppose ‘Bird of Paradise’ is your favorite number.”
Fagan fairly giggled out loud.
“No sir. I take out the trash and do odd jobs for the engineer there, Mr. McGee. You can call him and ask him about it if you like.”
But Jimmy was secretly hoping he would not do that. Charlie McGee would be just as likely to tell Fagan he had never heard of the “little bastard” as to confirm his employment. Charlie was like that sometimes.
The principal again stopped strutting around the office.<
br />
“Do you know Jerry Diamond?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
Jimmy guessed Diamond had seen him around the station enough to confirm that he worked there. At least, he hoped so.
“He is a former student of mine, you know. When I had the high school, that is. An excellent student. On our debate team. I listen to him often in the mornings. Not as much now as I did before they began to play all that rocking, rolling, jive Negro music. Can’t stand that. Makes me nervous.”
“Yes sir. Me, too.”
Jimmy would have confirmed black was white if it would get him out of having to stay after school.
“Well, Mr....” He glanced at the folder on his desk. “...Mr. Gill. Stand up and bend over. I’ll give you ten whacks with The Enforcer and expect no more of these shenanigans from you from this moment forward. And you tell Jerry Diamond that Mr. Fagan said ‘hello’ and to play me a nice Glen Miller selection. Or maybe some Guy Lombardo music. I do dearly love Guy Lombardo.”
After every second or third whack from the huge wooden paddle, Mr. Fagan thought of other bands he would like Jerry Diamond to play for him. Jimmy Gill did not care. He had avoided detention and could make the trek to WROG or curl up in front of the Zenith instead of serving his sentence.
He was out the door of the school and half-way home before he realized a truism: plenty of other people were as fascinated with and curious about radio as he had been. The kids in his class were always asking him about songs and deejays since they had found out he worked at WROG. Even his grandmother was mildly interested in what he did and who he saw at the job. She would sometimes give him a minute’s attention before something moving about on the television screen would jerk her interest back to the box.
He stored the thought away. Who knows? Maybe it would be of some use to him someday.
Nine
It was usually near dark when Detroit arrived at Jimmy’s house. The days were growing shorter, so their play time was cut, their adventures curtailed by nightfall. And Jimmy could only spend an hour or so doing chores for Charlie McGee before the station signed off for the night and he had to feel his way back through the woods to get home. Grandmama did not seem to care where he spent his time as long as he checked in periodically, changed the channels for her when she did not feel like getting up, or brought her a pack of cigarettes from the kitchen cabinet. She knew and cared more about the daily activities of the Walt Disney Mouseketeers and the Little Rascals than she did of her grandson’s comings and goings.
One afternoon, Charlie told him to go ahead and get the scrap teletype paper out of the control room because he had to leave early on important business. So far, Jimmy had pointedly stayed out of that tiny room since the morning he had met Jerry Diamond. He did not want to risk riling the disk jockeys, the stars of the station. Charlie set out their trash in the hallway so Jimmy could get to it without risking intruding.
That day, Jimmy nervously waited for the "ON AIR" light to fade out, then opened the heavy door and slipped inside as quietly and inconspicuously as he could. The biggest man he had ever seen was squeezed impossibly into the narrow space between the two turntables. Massive folds of flesh draped over almost onto them, and the man could barely reach the switches he toyed with on the console because of the grotesque belly that stretched down and away from a jiggling set of triple chins. The swivel chair underneath him bent dangerously under his incredible mass. The telephone receiver was almost lost, tucked between a dumpy shoulder and an ear that was nearly hidden by wads of flesh.
"Baby, you know I want to meet you so bad,” he was saying to the phone’s mouthpiece, his voice raspy and clipped and short of breath. "You sound so-o-o sexy to me. You really do, sweetheart!"
"Mister?"
Jimmy did not know whether to interrupt or not, but he needed to get the trash can and be gone before it got any later and darker outside. There was no way he was going to get it out from beneath the desk and past this mountain of a man without bothering him, though.
"Hold it, sweetie, and don't let it get cold," he said to the phone and made a couple of kissing sounds. Then slowly, with obvious effort, he twisted his body around in the chair as it screeched its resistance. He had to raise his elbows to keep from knocking the tone-arms off the records resting on each turntable. He stretched the coiled phone cable until it was straight and threatened to snap.
"Whatcha need, midget?"
"Trash? I need to get all that paper and stuff out from under there," Jimmy answered, pointing to the trash can piled full of used teletype paper and other garbage.
The man threw a stack of paper toward Jimmy and shoved another pile off the edge of the desk in the direction of the trash can, the phone still hiding somewhere there in the pillow of his shoulder. He had no neck, just rolls of fat up to a brush of oily hair on top of his head.
Risking a crushing, Jimmy reached under his chair for the purple-splashed paper and stuffed it into the trash can while the massive man turned back to his bank of switches and dancing meters. He cranked up the music on the control room’s speaker and talked quieter so Jimmy could not hear what he was saying to whoever it was on the other end of the telephone.
Then, just as Jimmy started to open the door to drag out the heavy trash can, the first strains of "Dixie" punched its way out of the studio speaker. The red bulb filled the room with bloody, crimson light, the music hushed, and he heard the huge man's voice go low and smooth and so familiar that it gave Jimmy Gill goose bumps.
"And so, we come to the end of another broadcast day..."
Jimmy’s lips moved along with Rockin' Randy's litany as he waited for the end. He started to go back and speak to him, to tell him how much he enjoyed listening to his show. But when the music died, Randy was once again cooing to the woman on the telephone, rocking slowly from side to side, the chair beneath his bulk screeching in agony.
Somehow, he had pictured Rockin' Randy's wavy blonde hair, combed fashionably in a cowlick, a golden version of Elvis Presley’s famous black mane. Maybe a Clark Gable mustache, necktie slightly loosened at the throat as he smiled with perfect teeth and spoke deeply into the microphone, one hand cupped to his ear the way the announcers on television did it. He never imagined a mountain of flesh, sweating and straining for breath as his program took a backseat to some woman he was trying to sweet-talk on the other end of a telephone line.
The tower lights had come on by the time Jimmy dumped all the trash at the burning cage behind the station building. The moon lit the way back to the edge of the field, but it was almost too dark to see his way under the kudzu and honeysuckle. Jimmy was relieved when he finally popped out of the bushes into the knee high weeds in the backyard of the duplex. The lone working streetlight at the corner of Wisteria was the only illumination, but he noticed that there was something else that lit the still night air. Something ugly and sinister.
It was an eerie red glow beyond the house, back toward the high-line underpass he had run through before when he went off exploring to Ishkooda. At first, he ignored the red smudge in the sky and climbed up the back steps. But the strange light bounced off the house next door, and for some reason, he felt drawn to it.
Maybe it was a house on fire over there. Maybe a stand of grass ignited by a stray spark from a train. Or, God forbid, the Russians had finally dropped the A-bomb.
But there were no sirens. No Conelrad warning on the television sound that sifted out at him through the backdoor screen. Just the quiet of the early evening when most folks on Wisteria Street were at supper, watching the news, working second shift at the mill. Or the laughter and banter of I’ve Got a Secret and Grandmama trying as usual to out-guess the panelists.
In a matter of minutes, Jimmy was back down the steps and on the street that cut under the high-line railroad. He could see it then. The source of the scarlet light. High up on the railroad bank, near the underpass that led to the neat homes where he had gone looking for Detroit Simmons.
A huge
cross burned with a bright fire and black, billowing smoke. The smell of singed rags and kerosene filled the deathly silent air. Small groups of people from nearby houses stood in the street. Hands in their pockets, they watched without comment as the fiery light flickered off their slightly upturned faces.
Slowly, Jimmy’s eyes were drawn to a movement in the dark shadows. An old red pickup truck backed from its parking place along the dirt bank, then eased past those standing along the street watching. Two men with hoods over their heads sat in the front and two more, also hooded, sat behind them in the truck’s bed.
Jimmy Gill shivered, even though the dusky air was gentle and warm. The hooded men did not look back to the flaming cross or to the left or right as they passed the people gathered there. But one of the figures in the back of the truck raised his hand in a familiar gesture. The same one Jimmy had seen in movies on television about World War II. Arm straight at the elbow, palm flat, fingers toward the sky. The Nazi salute. A flash of light from the fire glinted on a chunky wrist watch with a black band that also looked familiar to him.
And there, through the tunnel, like a dim picture on a huge television screen, he could see other upturned faces also lit by the embers. Faces just like theirs, only darker. And those faces showed more fear than curiosity. More anger than casual interest.
A mother held close a scared, clinging toddler. A man used his hands to try to shield the eyes of a small boy who struggled to see what view was being denied him. And the woman Jimmy had met the day he had gone in search of Ishkooda and Detroit Simmons was in the crowd, too. From where he stood, Jimmy thought he could make out the jut of her defiant jaw.