Jitterbug

Part one: Kilroy Was Here

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Part two: Let Me Off Uptown

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Part three: Is This Trip Necessary?

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Part four: Lights Out

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

Chapter thirty-four

Chapter thirty-five

For my mother,

Louise A. Estleman, who dances still

War, my lord,

Is of eternal use to human kind,

For ever and anon when you have pass’d

A few dull years in peace and propagation,

The world is overstock’d with fools, and wants

A pestilence at least if not a hero.

—Lord Jeffrey

W
HEN HE STOOD OUTSIDE
himself—as he did most of the time, being an authentic objective—he compared himself to a house cat: ordinary, invisible, the most efficient hunter in civilization.

Others, uninformed, saw him differently. A girl he had taken to the movies told him he looked like Robert Taylor. That had pleased him, because he had liked Taylor ever since he’d seen
Billy the Kid
at the Capitol and had bought a wallet at Hudson’s with a picture of the actor in it and torn it out and stuck one corner inside the frame of the mirror on his bureau. He consulted it from time to time as he combed his hair, straight back with a wave up front. Only his hair was light brown, not black, so he darkened it with old-fashioned pomade from a jar he’d bought in a barbershop. He was working on a pencil moustache like the one Taylor wore in
Waterloo Bridge
, but it was coming in red and he was thinking of shaving it off. Taylor was clean-shaven for
Bataan,
a war picture he couldn’t wait to see, having read about it in
Parade.
He went to see nothing but war films since Pearl.

WJR predicted showers, but WWJ and WXYZ were sticking to partly cloudy. He despised indecision. Didn’t they get their reports from the same U.S. Weather Bureau? He wondered if he should snap on a hat protector. The rest of the uniform was wool and absorbed water without spotting, but he was worried about the visor.

He took pride in the uniform. It was Army Air Corps, chocolate tunic with amber corporal’s stripes on the sleeves, khaki trousers. It had been left in the closet of his last furnished room by the former tenant, who had been invalided out after Guadalcanal—shell shock, he supposed, or the man would never have forgotten it. The corporal was an inch taller and heavier through the chest and shoulders, but he had taken it to Schmansky Brothers’ and had it tailored to his fit, selected a khaki shirt and matching necktie at Richman’s, and gone to three shoe stores with his stamps until he found the right kind of brown oxfords in his size at Cancellation on Broadway. He applied Kiwi polish, spitting into the lid of the can, and buffed them with a horsehair brush until they gleamed like furniture on his feet. When he put it all on and looked at himself in the mirror, it was he who had been forced to leave combat after a fifty-caliber round had shattered his left tibia, whereupon a grateful War Department had assigned him stateside to sell bonds. When people asked him where his medals were he said he kept them in a safety deposit box at Standard Savings & Loan because he felt uncomfortable wearing them while better men were lying dead on beaches without a single decoration.

It helped that he was young and attractive, with a shadow of recent pain fluttering behind his clear brown eyes; but mostly he was convincing because he believed himself when he spoke. On those rare occasions when he did not stand outside himself, he could hear the thump of the mortars and chomping of the heavy machine guns behind their sandbags on the hills. The army psychiatrist who had interviewed him in the Light Guard Armory had diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic with persecutory patterns and delusions of grandeur, and stamped his file 4-F. Face burning with anger and mortification, he had gone home and written letters to FDR, MacArthur, Governor Kelly, and Mayor Jeffries denouncing the psychiatrist, whose name was German, as a fifth columnist. None of them had replied, but he was certain they were just being careful of the mails and had opened a file on the Kraut doctor.

The
Free Press
said partly cloudy, with scattered showers after two
P.M.
He expected to be back by then. He left the cellophane protector in the drawer and brushed the closet lint off the flat-crowned cap that made him think of a postman; he wished the army had come up with something more arresting, like the Afrika Korps. Hitler knew a thing or two about style.

As he turned to leave, his gaze went to the
National Geographic
map of the European Theater on the wall. He checked the paper again, the front page this time, and added another pin to the map. The navy and marines were pounding hell out of Pantelleria, an island the size of a decimal point sixty miles off the coast of Sicily, and the Italians were expected to surrender any time. The pin had a tiny paper American flag attached. He’d bought two packages of them at Woolworth’s and intended to use them all.

The fat woman’s name, he had found out, was Anna Levinski. She lived in the 2600 block of Dequindre in Hamtramck, one of those same-looking houses the Polacks had flung up five minutes after they stepped off the train. It had a peaked roof and a four-paned window directly above a plain front door, like a house in a picture drawn by a child. The first time he’d checked out the address he swore he saw squiggly brown crayon-smoke coming out of the chimney.

He’d gotten the number from the butcher at the Holbrook Market at Eight Mile and Dequindre, where she’d bought a six-pound pork loin, two pounds of sliced bacon, and a whole boiled ham, all in one visit. Total red points: 102. Elsewhere in the store she bought butter and eggs, paid for the whole shebang in cash with more ration stamps than he’d seen at one time since his last trip to the OPA, and drove off in a big green gas-guzzler of a Pontiac Torpedo four-door sedan—with an “A” card on the windshield, to boot.

Watching the house, he’d learned she was married to a foreman at Dodge Main, a hulk with small ears and a dented black lunch pail who inspected engine blocks for the M-4 tank. The couple had no children, but they liked to throw a party once a month, hoarding stamps so they could serve delicacies to other line workers and their wives and listen to the Tigers on the radio. The husband was probably a saboteur, passing on blocks with fissures that split open on the first steep hill, stranding the crews out in the open for the first German 88 to get them in its sights while the wife made sure their bunkmates went hungry and couldn’t fight.

When he stepped outside himself he didn’t really believe that. Then he knew that they were what they seemed, a pair of hoarders who lived on rodent fodder and shank’s mare for weeks at a time so they could show off for their friends one night. Such practices caused shortages at the front, where a can of K rations and a bit of powdered egg were as important to victory as gasoline and ammunition. They might as well be saboteurs. Just thinking about them made him walk faster, as if by getting there five minutes sooner he might save the life of some dogface who would never know he existed.

He made himself slow down. Sole leather was blood in time of war, and anyway some 4-F shirking cop seeing a man running down the street in the uniform of his country might shoot him for a deserter. Irony of ironies.

Walking up the narrow strip of concrete in Hamtramck, rough and porous as bread, he unbuckled the straps that secured the flap of his briefcase. It was plain tan leather, double-stitched, with cardboard-reinforced dividers, a close match to the dispatch cases carried by army couriers, $12.98 at Saks. He knocked.

He heard feet shuffling from the back of the house, the tiny squeak of the hinged lid being lifted away from the small glass peephole. He was all house cat now, beneath the surface; all his senses were on end. He gave the fat woman on the other side of the door a full second to take in the uniform, then snap open the lock. She didn’t disappoint him.

“Yes?” Strong accent. She might have been in this country thirty years, but she wouldn’t have much need to practice her English in that neighborhood.

Standing close to her for the first time, he was surprised that her head barely came to his epaulets. She’d seemed so imposing giving her order at the butcher counter. Her graying hair was tied back in a bun, tightly enough to smooth the creases in her face. It was a pretty face despite the fat, or perhaps because of it. Younger-looking than the gravity of her carriage suggested.

“Good morning, ma’am.” He touched his visor, smiling his Robert Taylor smile. “Corporal Adam Kolicek, United States Army Air Corps.” Her face smoothed out further at the sound of the name. “I wonder if I might interest you in a subscription to
Boys’ Life
or the
Saturday Evening Post.
I’m selling them for the war effort.”

“No boys in this house,” she said.

“The
Post,
then. I have some samples.” He took out November 29, 1941, and April 11, 1942, both Rockwell covers. Older women loved Willie Gillis.

“Mr. Levinski likes
Argosy.”
She raised herself a little, trying to peer down into the briefcase.

He tilted it toward him. “No, ma’am, just the
Post
and
Boys’ Life.
Fifty percent of the subscription price goes to feed and clothe our men fighting overseas.”

“How much is it?”

“Just two dollars. That’s sixty cents less than the price at the newsstand.”

She mopped her hands on her apron. He was confident of her decision. Hoarders always felt guilty.

“Come in.”

He stood in a tiny dark living room crowded with overstuffed furniture. The usual portraits in glazed oval frames hung on the papered wall above the heating stove, opposite a large wooden and ceramic crucifix looking down on the sofa. A floor-model Zenith gleamed in a corner under an embroidered shawl. Uncovering, he tucked his cap under his arm.

She asked him to wait and shuffled down a narrow hallway lined with more pictures, an ornate wedding certificate in a plaster frame with cupids. He watched to see which doorway she went through. It would be the bedroom, where the valuables were kept.

The place smelled of old meals, heavily seasoned. He thought of all the meat that had been consumed there while American flyers were starving in Nazi POW camps. He laid his cap on the radio and twisted the knob. The tubes warmed. “Trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel.” The Pepsi jingle.

She came back clutching two crumpled bills in her fist. She frowned at the radio.

He smiled, embarrassed. “Hope you don’t mind, ma’am. My wife works at Ford Willow Run. She expects me to keep her up on
One Man’s Family.
”

“You are married?” She smiled for the first time. It made her almost beautiful.

“Next week’s our anniversary. I shipped out the day after the ceremony.” He reached inside his case and took out an order form, grasping the stainless-steel handle inside as he did so and bringing it out behind the sheet.