Jump into the Sky (8 page)

All right, I’ll admit the sweat mighta been mine.

Pushing up my damp sleeves, I picked up the suitcase and decided it was time to move on and find the bus to Camp Mackall, my father’s army post, before I melted into a sorry pool of uselessness. But a small sign on the side of the train station caught my eye as I turned—a black hand pointed toward the back of the building. No other words. Just a pointing black finger.

Seeing that strange sign gave me a jolt, let me tell you. Right away, my mind jumped back to Jim Crow’s warning.
Every sign you see and every doorway you go through in the South is put there to remind you which color you are. And you
better be sure you choose the right one every time
. But I didn’t know what the heck I was supposed to do. I didn’t know what the sign meant. Were you supposed to follow it or not?

Feeling real jittery, I started around the side of the train station, not sure what kind of trouble would be waiting there. But there wasn’t much to see behind the station. Only a few empty benches with another sign above them:
COLORED
. A water spigot nearby had the word scrawled on the bricks above it too:
COLORED
.

I let out a slow breath. So the old man hadn’t been razzing me after all.

Wondering what else he’d said that might’ve been true, I stood there staring at the spigot for a few minutes, trying to make up my mind about using it. How dumb was it to have a faucet with your color written above it? Made me feel like I was a kid back in grammar school.

Still, I was so thirsty after the hot train ride and all, I finally decided it didn’t matter to me what color was on the darn water. I leaned over to get a drink. Turned the squeaky spigot with my hands. Nothing happened. Put a little muscle behind it and yanked again. A trickle of rusty water splattered onto a slab of stone below my shoes and that was all.

I stood up feeling thirstier and angrier.

What kinda water did white people get outta their spigot?
I wondered.
What would they think if I just strolled inside their train station and tried it out?

Well, I’d almost made up my mind that’s what I was
gonna do—water was water if you were desperate—when I spotted a Coca-Cola sign in the distance. It was hanging in the window of a grocer’s store farther down the main street, maybe two blocks from where I was standing. It was like seeing Christmas, noticing that beautiful red and white sign waiting there for me.

At the exact same time, my fingers touched Uncle Otis’s roll of dollars in my pocket—the ones he’d slipped into my hand when he’d dropped me off at Union Station the day before. Had it only been yesterday morning I’d last seen him?

It felt like a week.

Well, I decided the folks at the train station could keep their colored water and I’d have myself a nice cold Coca-Cola instead, courtesy of Uncle Otis’s generosity. So, I drifted down the shimmering hot street toward the sign. Fayetteville was a nice-looking place, I gotta admit. Everything was neat and tidy as a movie set. There was a bench out front of the grocer’s store with
G. W. KEETON’S & SONS
painted on it and a bunch of faded war bond posters covering the windows. Pulling open the glass door, I stepped inside. The store was cool and dark after all the heat. A smell of flour and sawdust drifted up my nose. I stood there, blinking in the shadows, trying to see where the counter help was hiding, when a voice called out, “What d’you want, boy?”

You woulda thought the shadows were speaking.

“You got any Coca-Cola here?” I called out uncertainly. My words seemed to echo in the darkness, bouncing off
the rows of metal shelves and disappearing into the depths. Something moved in the far corner and a man emerged outta the gloom. He had on a sloppy white shirt—collar hanging open, top button missing—and then the rest of him became clear. Aunt Odella woulda called him a big eater. His chin sloped into his chest, no neck to speak of. I couldn’t tell if the man was G. W. Keeton or not, but I figured he worked there, by the look of the smudged-up canvas apron he was wearing. A can of apricots was in his left hand.

“Why you asking?”

The fleshy white face wasn’t smiling in a friendly way at me. Maybe I’d interrupted his canned-fruit count, who knows.

I pointed at the windows behind me where thin stripes of sunlight were showing around the war bond posters and advertising signs. Tried making my best guess at where the Coca-Cola advertisement had been hanging. “Saw a sign up there in the corner.”

“Did you now?” The man crossed his thick arms, staring at me with unblinking eyes.

Like an icebox opening, a chill swept over me even though it wasn’t cold. I eased myself backward a little, leaning in the direction of the door, and glanced toward the windows again. “Yes sir. I believe so,” I mumbled.

“You got any money to pay for your soda?”

I shoulda taken off then, feeling the icy dread that was getting stronger by the minute, as if the whole Antarctic
continent was slowly freezing around me. But I was stuck. I’d asked for a soda pop and now I was caught by asking.

Trying not to seem any more jumpy than I already was, I dug around in my pocket for one of Uncle Otis’s dollars and held it toward the man. Sodas were only a nickel, but I figured he’d give me back the change and all.

“Put it on the counter.”

The counter wasn’t far away. Now that my eyes had gotten used to the shadows, I could see the brass cash register nearby with some jars of gumdrops and licorice lined up next to it, just like Hixson’s back in Chicago. There was a pyramid of dry-looking donuts stacked under a glass dome. And ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes. And Ivory soap. I stepped forward and slid my dollar onto the top of the counter, making sure the man could see I had plenty of money and wasn’t trying to cause him any trouble.

He didn’t take his eyes off me. Just walked over and snatched my dollar bill off the counter. “I’ll get your soda from the back,” he spat out, and I listened to his heavy footsteps thumping down the aisle as if he was the King Kong of the grocery business. Seemed like a long time before he returned holding a dusty bottle of grape soda.

“There’s your Coca-Cola.”

The bottle slammed down on the counter so hard, I swear you woulda thought it was a grenade exploding. How the glass didn’t shatter to pieces I have no idea, but the
noise shocked me so bad, everything from my feet to my head suddenly began prickling as if I was being stuck by a thousand ice-cold needles. Even my back teeth started rattling together on their own. Standing there in that dark, deserted store, I suddenly realized the trap I was in.

Crossing his arms over his chest, the fellow gave me a slow grin, as if daring me to reach for the bottle he’d thrown on the counter. He was looking to pick a fight, you could tell. Heck, I wasn’t that stupid. I was tall, but it woulda taken two of me to equal his size. Archie woulda taken him on probably and popped him in the gut a few times, but not me. I wasn’t a fool. My brain told me to leave the soda where it was and run. Forget the rest of Uncle Otis’s dollar and bust outta that store in whatever way I could.

I tried turning.

But the man moved faster than I did. His hand snaked behind the counter and came up holding something small and metallic. “Don’t you even think about moving, boy.” My mouth went chalk dry.

Clenched in his hand was a gun.

Time seemed to stop.

Sounds seemed to stop.

The world outside the store shriveled up and disappeared.

The man shoved the bottle toward me with a lopsided grin. “Drink it.”

There was no way I could drink anything in that bottle. I couldn’t even swallow my own spit right then. My arms felt as heavy as hundred-pound rocks. I couldn’t lift them.

The man stepped closer and rammed the glass bottle at my chest. Grape soda splattered all over my good shirt and pants. “I said, drink it.”

My hands shook so bad, the glass clattered against my teeth and soda spilled outta the corners of my mouth and ran down my neck, until there were rivers of purple spreading across the front of my shirt. It was all I could do not to gag as the bottle emptied with sickening slowness. I don’t know how old that soda was. The liquid at the bottom was thick and bitter-tasting.

After every last drop was gone, the man told me to put the bottle on the counter. Slowly. And then step away from it.

My right hand trembled as I set the bottle down and moved backward, willing it not to fall over.

The man stepped closer. “You come walking through the front door of my store and ask me for anything again—next time, I’ll put a bullet in your head. You understand me?”

I whispered that I did.

“Didn’t hear you.”

“Yes sir.”

“You got three seconds to get your tail out that door, boy.” The gun waved sharply toward a propped-open back door. As I stumbled down the dark aisle, the man let loose
a volley of words behind me. Words you use for dogs and inhuman things and anything worthless in the world—

Even years later, I could still remember every single word he said as clearly as if they’d been burned into who I was that day. Long after the storekeeper was probably dead and gone, those terrible words never left me, and that’s the honest truth.

When I finally reached the back door, I slammed it open and half fell into the desperate heat and sunshine. Beyond the store stretched an empty lot full of weeds and bricks, and I crossed it at a flat-out run. Somewhere behind me, the empty bottle cut through the air and shattered against a pile of bricks nearby, sending up a sharp rain of glass shards. I kept going, my feet pounding through sand and dust and glass, as I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life. Faster than Jesse Owens in the Olympics. Faster than the wind in Chicago. Faster than the train that had brought me south.

I ran until the town disappeared, until the roads disappeared, until the people disappeared, and then I leaned over in somebody’s overgrown field, holding my aching stomach, and got sick all over the ground.

W
hat I didn’t understand was what I’d done wrong. Like I said, I’m not one who gets bothered over much of anything. Sock me in the stomach and I don’t crack even a little. I was a good kid, most people said. Never tried to cause Aunt Odella or Granny or my daddy any trouble, although there were a few times I did. Stole a pickle from Hixson’s Grocery once—but it was on a dare from Archie and he ate it, not me. Busted the school fence during a game of pie tag. But nothing big.

The storekeeper woulda killed me, given half the chance
.

As I crouched in the field on my hands and knees, sick as a dog, ants crawling up my legs, flies buzzing around my face, hot sun beating down, that’s the thought that kept pounding inside my head.
He woulda killed me for nothing
. That’s the honest truth. Just for coming into his store and being the color I was.

There was death in the newspaper all the time, but
I’d never thought about one of those deaths being mine. I wasn’t a German or a Jap. All I’d asked for was a soda pop. Never imagined I could lose my life as quick and heartless as one of our soldiers in battle. But the look in that man’s eyes had been pure straight evil. Don’t think Hitler himself coulda looked any worse.

With my head down and my elbows in the dirt, I felt like I’d been dropped straight into the middle of the war itself. It made me start thinking about Archie’s poor brother and how helpless it must feel to be lost behind enemy lines—spending days and weeks running and crawling for your life, not knowing who was after you, or where to go, or if you’d live to see the next day or hour. On the
Captain Midnight
radio show that I listened to each and every week, the Secret Squadron would always dive in to rescue stranded soldiers at the last possible minute.
The roar of the airplane engine, at first in the distance … then stronger as it sounds in a dive … this was Captain Midnight!

I knew the lines by heart.

But in the real war, maybe there was no Captain Midnight or his Secret Squadron coming to your rescue. In the real war, soldiers not much older than me were probably lying facedown in fields all over Europe. Lying there as hopeless as I was, with the smell of their own vomit and fear all around them, with no help ever coming. Maybe Archie’s lost brother was one of them.

Uncle Otis had tried to warn me, hadn’t he? He’d called
me a lamb going to the slaughter. But who woulda imagined you could become an enemy in your own country? Never thought I’d come south and feel afraid of my own skin. I’d never been in this kind of trouble before, and I’m ashamed to admit the tears started flowing and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

An hour passed, maybe more.

Wiping off my face with the edge of my shirt, I finally sat up and decided it was time to stop bawling and figure out what to do next. Our brave soldiers didn’t lay down and die, so I wasn’t gonna wave the white flag either. Levi Battle wasn’t surrendering without a fight. The afternoon sun was sinking fast, and it seemed to me I had only two good choices left.

I could try getting back to the train station in Fayetteville and buy myself a ticket out of town. Use up all the money from Uncle Otis and Aunt Odella to ride as far north as I could go.

Or I could stay where I was and figure out how to get to my daddy and Camp Mackall—although I had no earthly idea where I’d ended up after all my running.

While I sat there, making up my mind, a glare of sunlight suddenly bounced off the windshield of a truck turning down the road and coming toward me. Sinking lower into the weeds, I started praying hard to God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Moses, Aunt Odella, and all the other righteous
people I could name that the truck wasn’t chasing after me. Finally it got near enough for me to see the color of the arm poking out of the open driver’s window. Brown. Not white.

Heck, I just about melted into the ground with relief.

Standing up cautiously from where I’d been hidden, I waved one hand trying to flag down that rattletrap truck. I must’ve scared the driver pretty bad because he whipped his head around to stare wide-eyed at me as he passed. Wheels skidded to a sudden stop, dust and gravel spraying everywhere. “Sweet mother of Pete, you been shot?” he yelled, still staring.