Jump into the Sky (26 page)

My daddy strolled up to the porch, smiling too. “It went almost picture-perfect,” he said. Real proud, you could tell. “Couldn’t have been better. Got the fires out and all our men back home safe.”

The fellows were heading down to the river for a swim. My daddy said that’s all they’d been thinking about for days in the smoke and heat—taking a plunge in the cool river
the minute they got back. And then sleeping for a week. Peaches and Mrs. Delaney insisted they had to eat too. “After everybody’s done swimming, you come back here and we’ll stuff you full of chow again,” they said.

Well, I sure wasn’t gonna stick around the house cooking with the ladies, so I headed down to the river with my daddy and Cal. By the time we got there, it looked like half the U.S. Army was already swimming. The men had found a spot where the Umatilla River took a slow curve, making a deeper pool on one side, and that’s where everybody was splashing. The shrubs and tree branches along the riverbanks nearby were decorated with more things than a Christmas tree. Ladies woulda been blushing, let me tell you.

Daddy and Cal peeled off their duds down to their army underwear, sending up powdery clouds of dust as the uniforms hit the ground. “Come on, Legs, take the jump with us,” Cal said, waving one arm. My daddy was already on the water’s edge. “You don’t wanna be the last one standing in the door.”

Now, up until that very moment I’d only waded in a couple of nasty city creeks with Archie before. You know, if there’d been a hard rain, we used to go walking in them, tossing rocks and such for fun. So when my daddy had talked about cooling off in the river, I figured he meant splashing around in the shallows, in water below your knees—not swimming in the darned river itself.

Heck, I couldn’t swim a lick.

From where we were, you could see most of the men already standing in water up to their shoulders. Good God. It made me realize how many big things my daddy and me still didn’t know about each other. Things that could kill you. My father turned around, waving an arm at me again.

“Can’t swim,” I mumbled real low to Cal.

“Honest?” Cal glanced back at me, surprised. Then his eyes darted toward my daddy, who was still waiting impatiently on the riverbank. Cal must’ve guessed what a tight spot I was in. “Well,” he said, “no time like right now to learn. I’ll stick to the shallows with you. Come on.”

That river felt good on my toes, I gotta admit. I slowly eased in up to my knees, but the rocks on the bottom were slick, so you had to be careful where you stepped. Cal wandered within an arm’s reach of me, not giving away my secret, but my daddy gave up waiting and splashed out to join the other men, who were whooping and hollering in the middle.

The air hummed with loud voices, as if the troopers had suddenly been released from a long vow of silence. They’d done something nobody else thought they could do. They’d jumped into trees with parachutes and put out forest fires with nothing but shovels. It was like boxing Joe Louis and coming out alive. I swear the stories that went flying around the river woulda sent Peaches to bed for a week if she’d been listening. I heard the fellows jawing about which troopers had hooked their parachutes onto the
highest branches and who got down to the ground without a scratch. Heard how one team cleared a half-mile fire lane through a forest and scared off what they thought was a bear one night. Another team hiked fifteen miles over a mountain to get back to civilization.

Tell you what, it made me feel ashamed to be standing there in the shallows like a sissy girl with my arms crossed over my goosebumpy chest, after hearing all the brave things they did.

Told Cal I wanted to try going out deeper.

“Up to you,” he said.

Pretty soon I was standing next to my daddy and the other men, in swirling water up to my waist. Thought I might die of mortal fright, my heart was thumping so bad. Couldn’t even see my feet below me anymore. They’d disappeared.

“Want to try ducking your head under, Levi?” my father asked, giving me a look that said my secret was out. Suppose it didn’t take a U.S. Army officer to figure out why I was half dry when everybody else had rivers trailing down their dark skin. “The water feels pretty good,” he added.

Heck, what could I say? My daddy could jump into trees but his son was too chicken to get his head wet?

“Hold your nose.” Cal gave me a friendly wink. “Me and Boots will make it quick.”

Of course, you know all the other troopers overheard the conversation and came over. Killer, Brothers, Tiger, Ace—they
were all standing around. Nothing like having a big audience watch you drown yourself.

Once I had my eyes clenched shut and enough oxygen in my lungs to last until next week, I leaned forward as Cal and my daddy pushed my shoulders underneath the river’s surface. When the cool water hit my face, my eyes popped open by themselves—just outta sheer panic, I guess—and I couldn’t believe you could
see
under the water. There were yellow-green rays of sunlight coming down and the blurry outline of the rocks on the bottom. And legs. My legs. I was looking around—thinking,
Son of a gun, this is pretty neat that you can see underwater
—when they yanked my shoulders up and I was back in the open air, rubbing water outta my stinging eyes. My whole body felt cool and fizzy, as if I’d been turned into a bottle of ginger ale on a hot summer day.

“You feel all right?” my daddy asked, looking worried.

And I thought how nice it was to be worried about for once. Maybe I’d just stay there all day and soak up that worry like a big sponge. Thirteen years’ worth of worry.

Couldn’t keep a slow grin from easing across my face, though. Man oh man, I was proud of myself. Big Man had conquered the Mississippi, that’s what it felt like. “I’m feeling fine” is what I said—which made everybody lose interest and go back to whatever they’d been doing before, since it looked like I wasn’t gonna die after all.

I’m telling you, that afternoon on the river with my daddy and the other troopers is something I’ll never forget.
I remember how the sun sank behind the bluffs near the river, turning the rocks a warm coppery color like pennies before the war. I remember the way the light danced on the rippling brown shoulders of the men as they skipped rocks and sailed an old tennis ball back and forth through the air, higher and higher against the blue. Tiger and Ace put on a boxing show, waist-deep in the water, that woulda impressed the daylights outta Joe Louis. Somehow Mickey managed to catch a fish with his bare hands—scooped up a little rainbow trout by the river’s edge. All of us watched the silvery colors flash in his palms, everybody oohing and aahing. It was something magical, the whole afternoon. I think everybody woulda stayed there forever, if they’d had the chance. But the next spark was already smoldering somewhere.

It wouldn’t be long before another fire was starting.

A
s the bone-dry days of July drifted into the beginning of August, I swear the air itself seemed to have turned to smoke. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, the eye-watering smell of something burning could jolt you outta a sound sleep and make you think your own bed had caught fire. Almost every morning, we’d hear the big airplanes climbing into the sky over Pendleton carrying another group of troopers on a fire call. Sometimes the calls were nearby—the Blue Mountains or one of the big forests to the north in Washington State. Sometimes they were as far off as Montana or Idaho.

Hardly anybody bothered to look up when the airplanes came and went anymore, because all of us knew it had nothing to do with Jap balloons or the war in the Pacific. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Every night the sky was lit up with lightning from distant storms that never arrived, and the troopers said most of the forest fires they saw were started by
lightning. Only my daddy still insisted there was the chance that some of them could’ve been caused by enemy balloons. “I’m not giving up yet,” I heard him tell Cal, who laughed and said he was as stubborn as the Japs.

Word was the Allies were planning to invade Japan soon. On the radio, there were daily news bulletins about waves of B-29 Superfortresses bombing Japanese cities in preparation for a land invasion. Honestly, people in Pendleton didn’t seem to be paying much attention. When the grocery store in town ran out of summer melons, it created a bigger stir than the war news. Customers got into a fistfight. The police had to be called. You couldn’t get through August without melons, folks said.

I think the paratroopers at the airfield were too tired to care what was happening in the Pacific or to worry about how they were being left out again. Most of them hardly stirred from their bunks between fire calls. Tumbleweed coulda rolled through the barracks. Nobody had any spare time to cool off in the river or go fishing for trout like they’d done before. Cal and my daddy would stop by for a quick visit and fall fast asleep at Mrs. Delaney’s kitchen table while you were talking to them. Their eyelids would start to droop, their shoulders would sag, and it would be lights-out. We’d have to shake their arms to get them to wake up.

Then, on August 6, the biggest bomb in history was dropped on Japan.

And that news woke us all up.

*  *  *

When President Truman made the announcement over the radio, it caught everybody off guard, let me tell you. It was a Monday morning. Cal and my daddy had been gone for a couple of days on a fire call. Me and Peaches were helping Mrs. Delaney pickle some tomatoes, and the whole kitchen reeked of vinegar. Willajean was sitting at the table with a clothespin on her nose, writing letters to her brothers.

I remember how the radio was on, playing music. One minute we were listening to some patriotic tunes—and the next minute President Truman’s voice was interrupting to announce how the Allies had dropped a bomb on Japan that was two thousand times stronger than any bomb ever used in wartime.

“What?” Mrs. Delaney spun around. “Willajean, turn up that radio.”

As the president kept talking, all of us were so still, you woulda thought we’d been turned into pillars. “The bomb has harnessed the power of the universe,” the president’s voice of doom continued, “and it will bring down a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Right then, I thought poor Mrs. Delaney was gonna collapse. The eyes behind her glasses glazed over and her body started swaying. Peaches’s hand flew toward her elbow, trying to catch her. I grabbed a chair and she sank into it. Man
oh man, it was close. A few more inches either way, and she woulda been facedown.

The president kept talking about the bomb that had been dropped on Japan—an atomic bomb, he called it. But Mrs. Delaney had stopped listening by then. She was staring toward the kitchen window, where the curtains were hanging limp as laundry. No wind. “The world’s ending,” she whispered weakly. “The apocalypse is coming.”

I’m telling you, her faraway voice gave me the creepy-crawlies.

“Now, Mrs. Delaney, you know that’s not true,” Peaches said, hands on her hips, her righteous voice taking over from the radio. “The president of the United States wouldn’t come on the radio to tell us the world is ending. It’s a beautiful morning, everything outside looks fine and dandy, nothing different at all. Here, put this cloth on your forehead to calm yourself down, and stop worrying about nonsense.” She ran a towel under the spigot and then held it toward Mrs. Delaney, who waved it away.

Mrs. Delaney was an avid Bible reader. She studied her scarlet-edged copy faithfully every night, and the Book of Revelation seemed to be one of her favorites. “Never hurts to be prepared for what’s coming,” she’d tell us, whenever she sat down to read. Which probably explains why she was convinced the end of the world had arrived.

“We’ve gone and let out the four horsemen, God help us, we have,” she repeated, rocking back and forth as if she
was in a trance, eyes staring. “The sun’s going to go out next and the stars are going to fall out of the sky and fire and earthquakes are going to consume us.”

“Now, you hush up, Mrs. Delaney.” Peaches’s voice was firmer. “The world hasn’t ended yet. No need to go scaring everybody over something that hasn’t happened.” Meaning me and Willajean, of course, although I think she’d given Peaches the end-of-the-world jitters too. When a train thundered past the house a few minutes later, all of us jumped about ten feet.

It was Peaches who switched off the radio and ordered me and Willajean out the door. “Get some air. Don’t want you listening to all this bad news. Here’s some money for some ice creams.” In the hallway, she dug some change outta her purse and handed it to us without even looking at it. “Go on now.”

Me and Willajean stepped outside like we’d been sent into a minefield. Doom was coming. A brown sparrow darted in front of us and the thought crossed my mind that the ordinary sparrow could be the last bird we ever saw. Couldn’t help looking around at all the possible lasts: last bird, last wilty geranium, last spiderweb, last pillowcases on the line, last empty milk bottles on the steps. The sky was the same washed-out blue it had been for weeks, but the color felt like a trick—a peaceful camouflage curtain, hiding something unknown behind it.

“You afraid?” Willajean asked me, eyes blinking behind her glasses. “Because I am.”

“Naw,” I said, keeping my voice easy.

“What if they drop one like that on us?”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know? Why couldn’t they?”

Willajean was too smart for her own good. Sometimes I wished she’d just stop thinking.

“Tell me why they couldn’t, Levi. Tell me some reasons why not.”

While I was trying to come up with an answer, tears started coming down Willajean’s face, and pretty soon the girl couldn’t breathe from all the hard crying she was doing. We had to stop walking and I dug around in my pockets trying to find something to offer her, but all I had were the pennies and nickels from Peaches and crumpled bits of paper.

Willajean’s words poured out along with her tears. “I want to be a poet like Emily Dickinson someday and write poetry everbody reads, and live in a nice house that isn’t yellow, and save all the dogs in the world, and have a handsome fellow who loves me and thinks I’m pretty, and marries me …” The torrent of words kept going. “It isn’t fair, all those people in the Bible got to live as long as they wanted—why does the world have to come to an end while we’re living in it?” She turned toward me, her glasses steamed up and her face a mess of tear trails. “I know I’m not pretty at all or your girl or anything, Levi, but do you think you could kiss me just this once?”