Jump into the Sky (25 page)

In Pendleton, the Fourth of July was more about noise than food, it seemed like. People bought armloads of whizbangs and rockets from the Chinese who’d been living in the town for years—ever since they built the railroads, Mrs. Delaney told me. I swear every man, woman, and child in Pendleton must’ve had their own Chinese arsenal. For weeks after the holiday, the streets of downtown were littered with burnt paper tubes and blackened fuses popping under your feet, no matter where you walked.

Probably the only people in the entire place who weren’t allowed to shoot explosives into the sky were the paratroopers at Pendleton Air Field. Which burned them up, of course. But the army didn’t want to take the chance of any
kind of trouble starting between the town and the soldiers, the commander said, so they kept the whole battalion stuck at the base for the Fourth. No passes into town allowed.

Me and Peaches decided we’d join them for the holiday and try to raise their spirits a little with two homemade pies. Then Mrs. Delaney asked us to take Willajean along. You could tell she didn’t want to come, but Mrs. Delaney insisted. To make matters worse, Willajean’s mother put her in a church dress and white gloves, and gave her a ladies’ pocketbook to carry. The girl looked like a Sunday-school teacher.

When we got up to the base, most of the troopers were sprawled outside the barracks in their white undershirts and army trousers, looking bored and hot as they pitched dice and round metal washers in the dust. Somebody said my daddy was trying to get a movie projector started inside the mess hall, but he wasn’t having much luck with the projector or the people. Honestly, the whole place felt as if a slow fuse had been lit underneath it, and it was only a matter of time before everything exploded like Chinese fireworks.

Peaches must have sensed the uneasiness in the air because her voice sounded extra cheerful and extra loud. “Happy Independence Day!” she shouted, giving everybody a bright smile as she popped out of the automobile with Victory in her arms when Cal dropped us off. You could see a handful of other guests scattered around too—a couple of
soldiers’ wives and girlfriends. Lucky for Willajean, some of them looked as overdressed and out of place as her.

“Don’t forget the pies we brought, Levi,” Peaches said.

Instead of giving the pies to Peaches, I made the mistake of handing them off to Ace, who was sitting on a wooden crate nearby, tossing washers into his army helmet. Of course, he didn’t even lift the wax paper to take a peek at what flavor the pies were. Or say a polite thank-you. Just walked off with Peaches’s hard work, saying he’d put the food in the mess hall for later. I know she was hurt. Then Victory started howling as if she wasn’t in a celebrating mood either, and you could see people glancing around for somewhere else to go. The holiday was a collapsing table with everything sliding downhill fast.

Thankfully, one of the fellows came to my rescue. Mickey, the young trooper I’d met on the first day, wandered over and invited me to join a game of horseshoes with him and some of the other men. “We’re short a person on our side,” he said. “You want to pitch some shoes with us?”

After I told him I’d come over, a shadow moved behind me and I knew Willajean was standing there awkwardly like a lost extra in a movie. Mickey’s eyes glanced past my shoulder, clearly wondering who the Sunday-school teacher was, and I knew I didn’t have any choice but to introduce her. “She’s one of the Delaneys who live in Pendleton. Her brothers are both serving in the navy.” I tried to make the story quick.

“Nice to meet you, miss.” Mickey stuck out his hand. “You can come to the horseshoe pits and watch, if you want. I’ll find you a chair.”

It went better than I expected. Mickey drew people like flies, no matter how reluctant they were. Willajean started out hunched over a book she’d brought along, as if she was hoping to disappear, until he convinced her to keep score. “You gotta help us keep the other team honest,” he said, trying to joke with her. “Look at them. You can tell they’re a bunch of cheats.” It wasn’t long before she took off those dumb white gloves Mrs. Delaney’d made her wear and warmed up a little. Smiled a few times. Stuck her book and her pocketbook under her chair and forgot about both of them.

The whole gang of us had a great time drinking sodas and pitching horseshoes until it got too dark to see them landing in the dirt. My daddy joined us after giving up on the projector. We matched up officers versus enlisted, North versus South, West versus East, jumpers versus legs.

Second Lieutenant Battle and his son were two of the best, let me tell you. I wondered if maybe I’d finally discovered the one talent in the world I’d got from my daddy—pitching horseshoes. Who woulda thought? Never played horseshoes before in my life, but both of us had dead-on aim. Got more three-point ringers than anyone.

After dark, everybody gathered outside the mess hall, dragging out chairs and tables, to watch the flashes of
fireworks over Pendleton. Being on a hill, the airfield turned out to have a view that couldn’t be beat, so I think everybody was starting to feel better about being stuck at an army post for the Fourth. Mother Nature was putting on a good show herself, lighting up the night clouds with bright bursts of summer heat lightning. Don’t know which was more impressive—Mother Nature or what the people of Pendleton shot into the sky.

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.

E
merald 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.”