Jump into the Sky (20 page)

W
e were on our sixth morning and our last dried-up, crusty drop of hope when we finally reached Pendleton, Oregon. After going uphill for most of the night, it seemed like, our train arrived in a town that looked no different from a hundred other towns we’d passed through already. “Approaching Pendleton station,” the conductor announced in a bored voice as he came through the cars. “Everybody off who’s getting off.”

Now, I’d been picturing a Wild West kinda place, with swinging-door saloons and fake storefronts, but all I spotted from the train windows as we slowed down was an ordinary Main Street of redbrick buildings, striped awnings, and stee-pled churches. Not a tumbleweed or cowboy in sight. Low rolling hillsides without much green on them surrounded the town. In the far distance, there seemed to be a bigger line of purplish hills against the sky.

You shoulda seen us shoving comics and magazines and
Victory’s things into our suitcases and bags at the last minute as the train slowed to a stop. With six days to get ready, you’d think we woulda been better prepared to arrive, right?

We weren’t.

Cal’s uniform had lost all its sharp creases somewhere back in Nebraska probably. He tried to spit and polish what he could, tucking his tie inside his jacket like all the GIs did and setting his army cap precisely on his head. Edge above the eyebrow, that was the rule, he told me, pulling it forward carefully with both hands until it balanced on the tip-top of his eyebrow, but its peaks were crushed from being in his duffel too long. Peaches pinned a wilted hat on her head. I had an armload of suitcases.

What was surprising to me was how nobody else got off the train at Pendleton except us. We stepped into the warm June morning by ourselves and glanced around looking for where to go next. No signs seemed to be pointing their accusing fingers at us, so that was a good thing. Maybe Oregon would be more like Chicago after all.

There was a small group of white GIs waiting on the platform, lounging on a pile of army duffels and gear. Cal strolled over to them to get some directions, but a white wall probably woulda been friendlier. I heard him ask where Pendleton Air Field was, and one of the fellows pointed to the far left, in the direction of a hill you could see on the edge of town. When Cal asked them for a lift up there, the request went nowhere until he handed over some dough.
Then one of the soldiers reluctantly got up and flagged down an army truck nearby.

As we walked over to the truck, it was clear Peaches wasn’t crazy about the whole plan of riding in the back, especially when she saw how the only seats were benches and there was a strong odor of musty socks under the truck’s canvas top. Me and Cal got a good whiff as we jumped inside.

Reluctantly, Peaches handed baby Victory to us and then she stood there, hands on her hips, sweat dotting her mahogany forehead. “How’m I gonna crawl up there, Cal?”

“Give Levi your hand.” Cal nodded at me. “He can help you climb in.”

“I’m not running my good stockings,” she insisted, not moving. She was wearing a dress with faded green stripes that had seen better days and a pair of scuffed white pumps.

The army driver revved the motor like he was running outta patience, and the smoky cloud of exhaust just about extinguished us.

“Sweet and sugar, almighty Jesus—” Peaches reached for my hand and yanked so hard I nearly ended up face-first on the Pendleton dirt like an outlaw in a Western movie.

“Don’t you let go of me, Levi!” Peaches hollered as she scrambled the rest of the way inside, all arms and legs, showing who knows what-all to the world. We were hardly seated on the benches before the truck blasted off down the road and sent us sliding.

“Holy mackerel, the driver must do takeoffs and landings
in his spare time,” Cal joked, trying to hang on to Victory with one arm and save some of our belongings with the other. Still trying to straighten out her dress, Peaches shot a look at Cal that wasn’t a smile of amusement, let me tell you.

We were dumped farther away from the airfield than we wanted to be. Who knows why the driver didn’t take us the whole way—Cal said it didn’t matter, we needed the fresh air anyhow. As we trudged up the hill to Pendleton Air Base, you could see it wasn’t gonna be a real beautiful place. Mostly hard-packed dirt and white two-story buildings scattered here and there.

“So this is my new post,” Cal said when we reached the top. He handed Victory back to his wife and turned around slowly, studying everything. About halfway through his turn he stopped and pointed at some far-off specks in the sky. “Will you look at that, Peach—the boys are jumping today.”

Right away, Peaches smacked her hands over her eyes and plopped down on one of the suitcases, saying she wasn’t looking at the men jumping, nohow. “It scares me half to death. Don’t even like imagining what you do, Cal, let alone seeing it for real.”

If you squinted hard, you could just make out a bunch of tiny gray dots in the far distance. “You sure those are parachutes?” I said doubtfully, because it looked like nothing but a faraway flock of birds.

“Yep.” Cal nodded, shading his eyes. “And right now their chutes are drifting on the smooth morning air and they’re just sitting back and enjoying the ride.” His voice sounded wistful. “Boots and the boys are probably floating along, wondering what in the world those three sorry specks are doing at the gates of Pendleton. They people? Or ants?” He pretended to wave, although the specks woulda needed the vision powers of Superman to notice us from that far away.

“See, you can tell it’s our boys by the way the chutes look,” Cal said. “Everything’s in a perfect pattern like one big connect-the-dots in the sky. They must’ve jumped outta the bird without missing a beat.” He draped an arm over my shoulders. “I’m telling you, we are perfection in the air, Legs. You’ll see—the 555th is sweet perfection.”

Even with Cal pointing out every little detail, I had my doubts about what we were looking at. Like I said, the far-off dots didn’t look much like parachutes, and you couldn’t see any human beings holding on to them. I may not have had Aunt Odella’s sixth sense for things, but whatever sense I did have was telling me there was no way my father was up there in the wide blue sky. No chance at all.

A white army guard interrupted our gawking. He came ambling toward us on the other side of the gate, toothpick dangling from his lip. His smooth young face didn’t even look old enough to grow whiskers yet and his arms were a bright sunburned pink. “You folks want something?”

I think the twangy western sound of his voice impressed us all—it was kinda like being in a Western movie and a war newsreel at the same time. Tugging the official army letter out of his pocket, Cal showed it to the young soldier and told him how we’d come from Camp Mackall in North Carolina to join the 555th in Oregon. “And I’m hoping to find some off-post housing for my family,” Cal said, nodding at us.

The young soldier’s eyes rested on my face for a minute or two, as if he was trying to figure out how I belonged with the rest of them. We must’ve looked like a real mismatched set of silverware—Cal, Peaches, baby Victory, and then me, a thirteen-year-old kid standing next to them.

“I’ll check with the commander.” The soldier ambled slowly back to his small guard shack and disappeared inside. Meanwhile, we waited in the flies and hot sun, without a stick of shade anywhere. Peaches flapped a towel over Victory’s face, trying to keep her cool. The sky was empty, and Cal said the paratroopers were probably on the ground rolling up their chutes at that very moment.

I thought it was more likely the birds we’d been looking at had flown away.

Finally the guard came back and swung open the gate without saying a word to us. Guess that was his idea of a warm welcome. After we got inside, he closed the gate again and took off in the direction of a white building nearby that had
a round garden in front of it. A ring of desperate-looking red flowers was planted inside the circle of white bricks, with a flagpole stuck in the middle.

I figure the commander must’ve had radar for eyes because the guard hardly got past the garden before a uniform loaded with all kinds of badges and pins and patches came barreling out of the building. Cal snapped to attention as the white commander headed stiffly toward us. Me and Peaches stood up a little straighter too.

“At ease, soldier,” the commander said, more to the flagpole than to Cal, it seemed like. Cal slid his arms behind his back, and Victory started making burping noises and waving her little fists as if she was free to move now too. The man’s steely eyes slid in her direction. “Your family?” he asked Cal, not even trying to hide his disapproval.

“Yes sir. That’s my wife and baby daughter. And the older boy is the son of Second Lieutenant Battle, sir. He’s been staying with us for the duration.”

The officer’s eyes swept over me and I felt the same kinda chill I’d got from the storekeeper in Fayetteville. Antarctica in a uniform, that’s what the commander reminded me of. The ground began to sway and wobble beneath me as I tried not to breathe too loudly. Or at all.

“And your mother is where?” the commander snapped.

Heck, I had no idea what to reply. You don’t go around telling somebody who has more stripes on his uniform than
a U.S. flag how your mother was a Chicago jazz singer who took off when you were a baby.

Cal jumped in to save me. “His mother is gone—deceased,” he added, with only the smallest trace of a fib in his voice.

The commander’s face grew more displeased, if that was possible. “Well, I don’t like Negroes being here on this post—or in the town either, let me be perfectly straight about that, soldier.” His eyes nailed Cal to the dirt. “If it were up to me, none of you would be in this war. You’d know your place and stay in it. And our GIs would be out fighting the Japs where we belong. We have a tough enough war to wage in this world without playing around with the color lines and wasting our damned time training Negroes to jump out of airplanes.”

Let me tell you, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Could not believe it
. Had to practically glue my own lips together to keep my mouth from dropping clear open. A commander of the U.S. Army talking to Cal in that uppity way? Trust me, if Aunt Odella had been listening, there wouldn’t have been a barbed wire pie big enough to serve the man. Couldn’t see Cal’s face from where I was standing, but his body didn’t move an inch during the whole speech. He was a statue.

The commander continued his talking without letup. “But since I have my orders and you have yours, soldier,
it seems there is nothing we can do about the problem of you being here at Pendleton, is there?” He glanced at his watch and gestured at the buildings around us. “Except for some of my officers and pilots, your battalion is the only one here. Their barracks are at the end of this road. I expect they should be back from their practice jump within the hour.” His eyes swept over us again, a dark cloud cutting out the sun. “Good luck finding a place for your family to live. Negro soldiers aren’t welcome in too many places around this town, and their families—even less.”

Victory picked this moment to let out a sudden, earsplitting screech as if she’d just been stuck by the world’s biggest pin. From the look the commander gave her, I was afraid he might take her outta this world right then and there. Peaches must’ve feared the same thing, because she pushed Victory’s howling face into her shoulder and began rocking her worse than a ship. Thankfully, the commander turned and headed back to his headquarters, leaving us all in one piece.

Once the officer’s door slammed shut, Peaches hollered at the top of her lungs, “You hush up,” as if she was talking to Victory, but I don’t think she was. Her words echoed in the stillness around us.
Hush up. Hush up. Hush up
. Cal rubbed his eyes and shook his head ever so slightly. Under his breath, he ran through a whole list of cuss words that woulda made Aunt Odella turn a new shade, let me tell you.

Then, just as fast, the storm cleared and he broke
into a wide smile. “Well, now that we got that pleasant conversation with the colonel squared away, I think it’s time to find my buddy Emerald in this friendly place and get ourselves some chow.”

We were walking in the direction of a building Cal thought was the mess hall when a collection of trucks and jeeps pulled up at the same gates we’d come through. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as we stopped and looked back, watching the gates swing open and the trucks start motoring through them, one by one. Next to me, I heard Cal shout to Peaches that it looked like Tiger Ted driving the first truck. With the sunlight glaring off the windshield, I couldn’t see a soul sitting inside, but Cal waved his arms at the driver. I remember the trucks stopping all of a sudden and doors flying open as colored soldiers piled out of them, sweeping up Cal as if he was their long-lost brother. Me and Peaches had to step back before we got swallowed up in the fray. And somewhere in all that noise and confusion, I heard Cal shout, “Hey, Boots, you recognize that boy standing over there?”

I
’ll be honest—I don’t think either of us recognized the other at first.

Once Cal pointed me out, I remember how all the soldiers suddenly moved backward like the Mississippi drying up—and how there seemed to be only one man left standing nearby, just a step or two away from where I was.

Now, I’d always pictured my father being way bigger than me, almost Superman in size—maybe because I was a lot smaller when he left. But I was almost eye to eye with the soldier across from me now. Same face as mine, with the jaw jutting out a little. Same nose. Same mouth. The look in his dark brown eyes was shock, I remember that clearly. I’m sure my eyes looked the same way. And in that split second as we stood there, staring at each other for the first time in three years, I knew exactly what Cal meant about the feeling you get when a parachute opens. How your eyeballs, your teeth, your toenails, everything gets snapped upward
by the force of the parachute catching you. Because that’s how I felt—as if my whole body had suddenly been yanked upward. Everything was a blur of air, sky, skin.