Jump into the Sky (3 page)

Gotta admit the scene made me smile.

Walking beside me, my aunt glanced over as if she wondered what in the world was going through my thirteen-year-old brain. “You still doing all right with that suitcase, Levi?”

My shoulder was pounding like the devil, but I didn’t admit weakness to anybody. Especially not Aunt Odella. I nodded, hefting the suitcase a little higher. “Yes ma’am.”

Right after that, she took a sharp left and headed down another block—a direction that surprised me because I figured we were going to one of the main streets where you could catch a downtown bus. Instead, she started walking through another familiar neighborhood of crowded
apartments where me and Archie had shot loadies dozens of times. We were the best around at sending our greased bottle caps flying down those street gutters. Archie had a Dr Pepper bottle cap that had never been beat. I’d blown out the knees of a lot of my pants, kneeling in those gutters and seeing how far I could whip those bottle caps down the metal grooves.

As we passed by more places I knew, I had to keep shaking my head and trying to ignore the sorry-tasting lump that was rising in my throat. Heck, I wasn’t ready to leave Chicago. Who would tell Archie and everybody else that I’d left town? And what was Archie gonna do without Goliath? And who would spit on the apartment steps and pick up all the perfect buckeyes from the streets? There was a lot I was gonna miss.

A
unt Odella didn’t stop for breath until we got to my great-uncle Otis’s barbershop on the corner of Forty-eighth Street. Uncle Otis was a legend in south Chicago. You couldn’t miss the big white-lettered sign painted on his store window:
WE CUT HEADS HERE
. When anybody asked why his sign said
heads
and not
hair
, he’d say, “One hair cut? What kinda fool would pay for that? You come here, I promise you we’ll cut your whole head.” If you heard him say it once, you heard it a hundred times.

Great-uncle Otis was also the only person in our family—even counting distant half-white cousins—who was rich enough to own an automobile and buy the gasoline to run it during the war. Didn’t take me long to realize Aunt Odella must’ve asked him to give us a ride. When we got to the barbershop, his big chrome and green Chevrolet sedan was already pulling slowly into the space in front of the store. I’m telling you, it looked like an Allied warship docking.

From the look Uncle Otis gave my aunt, I could see he wasn’t too happy about being there either. He was close to seventy, I’d say, short and dark as a stick of licorice.

“Don’t know why you in such an all-fire, speedy-hurry about doing this,” he whispered to Aunt Odella as he came around to open the door for her. The words probably came out louder than Uncle Otis thought because he was going deaf and nobody in the family wanted to be the one to tell him. “War ain’t even over yet.”

“Well, it’s all but over,” my aunt answered stiffly, motioning for me to slide in the back. The Chevrolet was a four-door model with a wide backseat of smooth tan leather that still smelled brand-new. Not a speck of dirt anywhere. Made you feel like you were sitting in a church. Up front, Aunt Odella yanked her door closed with an extra-loud thump.

“War ain’t no place for a fine young man like Levi,” Uncle Otis said, easing slowly behind the wheel with a lot of annoyed sighing that I could hear even from where I sat. The car lurched backward as Uncle Otis kept talking. “I lived through two wars, you know, and the Great Depression and the Panic of ’29, so I know what I’m talking about, Odella.”

My aunt’s voice rose a little louder. “How exactly am I sending him to the war? His daddy’s been training for months and months down there in the middle of North Carolina. Germans and Japs ain’t in North Carolina, are they? All this moving around and training he’s been doing for years
and he ain’t fought in a single battle yet, so far as I know.” She leaned her head back and rubbed the crook of her neck the way she always does when she’s mad about something. “Don’t know why I gotta take everything on my two shoulders in this family. When’s my brother gonna decide to take responsibility for his own son? When the Pacific goes dry? You and me both know of people who’ve come home from their posts for a visit at least—but it’s been over three years and Levi’s own father ain’t even
seen
him.”

I knew better than to jump into this regular argument with my two cents. Great-uncle Otis and Aunt Odella were worse than oil and water when they were together. Running my own mouth never helped either—although I couldn’t understand why my aunt often put the blame square on my father for everything. Why was it his fault that the army had sent him from Georgia to Texas to Arizona, then back to Georgia, and now North Carolina? Heck, none of those places were next door to Chicago, were they?

Plus, most of the boys I knew in the neighborhood hadn’t seen their fathers or older brothers since the war started either. Take Archie and his family. His older brother Joe had been in the service for more than two years—and now it seemed possible they might never see him alive on this earth again. All you had to do was look around and you could count the gold stars in the windows of families who’d already lost somebody in the war. At least we didn’t have one of those. The star hanging in Aunt Odella’s apartment
window was still blue, glowing like a tiny speck of hope up there on the third floor.

Uncle Otis wasn’t ready to give up the argument with my aunt either. Being a barber, he could talk somebody bald. “How’s Levi gonna get along in the South?”

“Same as he gets along up here. He’s a smart boy.”

See, now my aunt was taking my side in a swift counterattack. She was sneaky that way.

“The South ain’t like Chicago,” Uncle Otis snapped. “It’s no place for a colored boy from the North who don’t know the rules. If Charles wanted Levi to be down there with him, it seems to me he’d have said so.”

Still keeping my opinions to myself, I silently agreed with this point. I didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of whatever important training my father might be doing down there in North Carolina. In one of his recent letters, he’d written about going through gas grenade drills, which still gave me the creepy-crawlies whenever I read over the details. How you walked into a tent with a gas mask on, then they closed the tent flaps and threw a poison grenade in a barrel, and you had to take your mask off and say your name and rank before you were allowed out, half dead from fumes.
Nobody had any tears left to cry
, my father wrote.
Coughed for a week
.

God knows what would happen if I stumbled into a gas grenade tent by mistake down there in North Carolina. Had anybody in the family considered the fact that my father
might be preparing for a serious war mission this time? Or where I’d go if he couldn’t keep me? What if I ended up wandering around the country like a war refugee pushing all my belongings in a rattletrap wheelbarrow? Good grief.

In the front seat, Aunt Odella fanned herself with a cardboard church fan from her purse, not saying another word to Uncle Otis. There were two white doves on her fan with the words
PEACE ON EARTH
written above them, although there wasn’t much peace inside the automobile right then. The doves’ wings flickered back and forth in the air like little white-hot flames. But Aunt Odella kept the rest of her opinions to herself, and Uncle Otis didn’t turn around.

W
ith it being Saturday and the streets not being too crowded, we arrived in downtown Chicago faster than a German Panzer tank division entering Paris. Uncle Otis could be a terror behind the wheel, let me tell you. He nearly got us killed right outside the train station when he slammed on the brakes in the middle of the intersection and hollered, “Great snakes, thought it was the next corner!” Spinning the steering wheel in a wide arc, he missed a Tip-Top bread delivery truck by inches, or we woulda all been sandwiches.

“Sweet Jesus almighty, Otis!” Aunt Odella shrieked.

I jammed my hands into the seat, waiting to hear every automobile in the city crunch into a pile of twisted metal behind us.

We came to rest in front of Union Station, an enormous building that looked more like a Greek temple stuck in the middle of downtown Chicago than a train station. Huge
white columns soared upward. Next to it, people scurried around, looking no bigger than ants.

“We’re here,” Uncle Otis announced with just the smallest tremble in his voice as he turned off the motor.

Although I’d been to Union Station before, the massive size of the place still made my scalp prickle. When my daddy left for the war, the whole family had come to the station to see him off. I could remember all of us being dressed up in our scratchy Sunday best as we sat together in the Great Hall, waiting on his train to leave. Probably looked like a sad bunch of funeral mourners. There was Uncle Otis and his new wife, my daddy’s two younger sisters, who’d since got married and moved away—and of course Aunt Odella. The way she remembers it, she spent the entire time telling me to stop sliding off the smooth wooden benches into a heap of boredom on the marble floor. I was only nine. “You were a handful until I got you straightened out,” she’d add. “Your daddy and Granny weren’t firm enough when they raised you.”

What I recalled most about the day was Wrigley’s gum. They were selling gum at one of the newsstands nearby, and according to my aunt, I begged everybody in the family—and even some passing strangers—for some of that gum. “When your daddy goes and gets himself killed in the war, you’ll be sorry all you cared about was a pack of chewing gum,” Aunt Odella had finally snapped at me, shaking my arm hard enough to rattle my teeth in their sockets.

Her dire prediction stuck in my mind for the longest time. I was sure I’d sent my father to certain death because of a pack of Wrigley’s. Never liked the taste of chewing gum much afterward. These days, all the Wrigley’s went to soldiers anyhow.

“Hurry up, Levi. Collect your things and get out. We’re holding up traffic.”

You could tell Aunt Odella wasn’t in any mood to stand around gawking at the scenery. She was already hefting my suitcase outta the automobile before Uncle Otis had his door open.

Watching everything with a disgusted look, the old man shook his head once he got out. “That woman is Joe Louis in a dress.”

I was pretty sure the comment wasn’t meant as a compliment toward Aunt Odella, since Joe Louis was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Couldn’t imagine him ever wearing a dress—but it wasn’t too far-fetched to picture Aunt Odella knocking out somebody with a pair of quick left hooks. Nobody messed with her if they could help it.

“Here, I wanted to give you something for your trip,” Uncle Otis whispered. He reached into his pocket and slipped a roll of dollar bills into my hand. Uncle Otis was always sly about money. Sometimes he’d drop by the apartment for a visit and the next thing you know, you’d find a
dollar or two stuck in the sofa cushions. Or a quarter left under one of the crocheted doilies my aunt kept on her tables.

“Told Odella over and over, it ain’t right to send you down there,” he said, keeping his voice low and leaning so close I could smell his familiar cigar and peppermint-candy breath. “But nobody ever listens to the advice of old men like me. Told her sending you down there to the South is like sending an innocent lamb to the slaughter.”

He squeezed my arm hard. Even being seventy, he had fingers as strong as a pair of shears. “You run into any troubles down there, you find yourself a colored barber and you have him ring me up here in Chicago. I’ll pay for whatever it takes to get you home, safe and sound. You can always stay with me and my wife if you need to come back, you hear?”

I knew Uncle Otis was just being nice, because it was a well-known fact his uppity wife didn’t like kids at all. Whenever I came for a visit, I had to take off my shoes and sit on towels spread across their good sofa. No way his wife would ever let me move in and become something permanent.

Told Uncle Otis I’d be fine. Then thought I’d die of embarrassment when he suddenly reached up and patted the top of my head as if I was some toddling child in his barbershop—when the truth was, I was already a couple of inches taller than him.

“You’re a fine young man, Levi,” he repeated at least three or four times. “You got a wise head sitting on those
shoulders. Don’t let nothing happen to yourself down there in the South, you hear?”

Well, I wasn’t as stumbling ignorant about what I’d be facing as Uncle Otis thought I was. I’d picked up a few things from my father’s letters during the months he’d been in North Carolina. Already knew the place was overrun with mosquitoes and nasty sand ticks that could make your hands swell to the size of a Christmas ham, according to my daddy. And there were some problems with snakes too. My father wrote about the fellows finding a large snake curled up in their army jeep one chilly morning, and waking up half the camp as they bailed out.

Now, I wasn’t a big fan of snakes, but I wasn’t a lamb going to the slaughter either. Could watch out for my own two feet and put up with a few bugs if I had to. Soldiers were dying of a lot worse things in other places.

Aunt Odella motioned at the two of us impatiently. “We gotta get moving or Levi’s gonna miss the train. You can head on back to the shop now, Otis. I know you got customers waiting. I’ll find my own way home after I buy Levi his train ticket and all. No need to keep holding up traffic.”

With one last disgusted shake of his head, Uncle Otis got in his chrome and green battleship and drove away.

Y
ou woulda thought the war had already ended, seeing how Union Station was packed to the walls with civilians and soldiers. I don’t know who was left to fight. Everywhere you looked you could see people hugging and waving and crying and holding babies and squeezing through the smallest spaces with army duffels the size of tree trunks. As me and Aunt Odella were heading down the big marble staircase to the Great Hall to buy a ticket, the whole crowd around us suddenly froze for a minute. My suitcase slammed right into the backs of Aunt Odella’s knees.