In the Shadow of Alabama Page 7

  You must take the “A” train

  To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem

  He has a hearing aid tucked into his ear, and it suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know how to get his attention. I feel awkward interrupting him. Should I call him Mr. Jackson? Private Jackson? His daughter solves it.

  “Dad?” she says, tapping him on the shoulder. “We’re here.”

  The song stops; he turns his chair around and looks at me with dark, dark brown eyes, enlarged from the thick glasses he wears, eyes that I immediately know once flashed with deep rage, once ignited with passion, but now are studying me with friendly curiosity. He is wearing an immaculate, crisp white shirt, a gray tie with red stripes, gray slacks, and a black patent-leather shoe shined to heaven. One pants leg is tucked tidily under him. I realize that he has gotten dressed up just for me, in my honor, and I am embarrassed that I am wearing jeans and a blouse. Even Rowena is wearing a neat pale blue pantsuit and low navy heels. Maybe Sandra was right about my looking like a farmer. Maybe this is my expression of the bad-taste gene.

  I walk over to him, extending my hand to shake his, but he grasps it with both his hands and holds on to it, still looking straight into my eyes.

  “Thank you for visiting an old man,” he says.

  “My pleasure,” I tell him. He gestures to a chair next to him. I see that it was set at an angle, waiting for me.

  “What can I call you?” he asks. “You may have to speak a little louder.” He taps his hearing aid to show me what he means, and I nod because I know how to talk to someone with a hearing aid.

  “ ‘Rachel’ is fine,” I say and he smiles and nods.

  “A nice biblical name,” he says. “Second wife of the second son, Jacob, who was described as ‘beautiful of countenance.’ Do you know the quote?”

  I laugh, embarrassed. “I don’t know about being beautiful.”

  “You look like your father,” he says. “You have his eyes and nose. His smile, too.”

  Though it’s true that I have my father’s almond-shaped brown-green eyes, and his straight, narrow nose, I barely remember him smiling. I don’t acknowledge Willie Jackson’s remark because I am still thinking how I can’t recall my father’s smile.

  “You like music?” he asks.

  I nod, hoping we aren’t going to discuss music, waiting for him to change the topic.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Rowena asks me, interrupting an awkward pause. “Something to eat?”

  “I would, indeed,” her father replies. “Bring us both some coffee. With two pieces of cherry pie, thank you. And a little scoop of vanilla ice cream would just make it perr-fect.”

  Rowena folds her arms and looks at him with mock indignation. “Old man,” she says, “there will be no cherry pie for you. You are a diabetic. I will bring you an apple.”

  “Do you see how mean she is to me?” Willie Jackson smiles and his teeth flash white in his dark face. I have the feeling they have these exchanges frequently. His daughter leaves and he leans toward me, his face turning somber.

  “I’m real sorry to hear about your dad,” he says. “What was it? I mean, in the end?”

  “His heart,” I say, and he nods knowingly.

  “I have a pacemaker, myself,” he says, patting his chest. “But there is only so much they can do.”

  I murmur something in agreement, but I feel an instant clutch at my own heart. There had been something they could do. The pacemaker was that something. My father would still be alive if he had been as reasonable as Willie Jackson. Not that I care, not that I care.

  “I want you to know I spent an awful long time trying to find him,” he says, almost to himself. “I knew he was from New York, but I lost his address—and by the time I—I—”

  “He moved to Phoenix about thirty years ago,” I say, leaning toward him so he can hear me. I am used to doing this for my father.

  “Saw his name in the Air Force News just a few months ago,” he says. “An article about him still trying to get that medal. That’s how we finally traced him.”

  I knew my father had been fighting for recognition for some kind of wartime occurrence. He had waged a futile fifty-five-year battle with army bureaucracy, for a medal that never came. I had long ago forgotten what it was all about, if I ever knew. I didn’t care much one way or the other.

  “How was he, in the end?” Willie asks.

  “We weren’t all that close,” I find myself saying. “He was—a—difficult person to get along with.”

  Willie Jackson doesn’t seem surprised. “Tormented,” he says. “Though now they call it PTA?—DDT? KFC—something.”

  “Tormented”? The word startles me. I would have said “furious,” “outraged,” “bitter,” to describe my father’s unfocused, towering rages that leapt from subject to subject like a pinball, his dark silences that went on for days, his distance. Willie Jackson is gauging my reactions to his words, but I am careful to have none. Still, I am turning over this new one. Tormented.

  “My biggest regret is not finding him sooner,” he says softly. “Not that I might have changed things, but . . .” He stops, and tears fill his eyes. I wonder at them, where they come from. What physiological process releases them so freely in other people? He tries to wipe them away with gnarled fingers.

  “Yes,” he says. His hands are shaking with emotion, and he wipes his eyes again, then looks around. I get him some tissues from the box on the nightstand near his bed. “An apology. Long overdue,” he says. “Long overdue.” I’m not sure what he means, and I sit down again, quietly waiting for him to compose himself. He does and sits up straight. “So, what would you like to know?”

  I am caught off guard. I hadn’t composed any questions, organized them yet, hadn’t thought in what order I would ask him about the “murder” word or the album or how they are linked.

  “You probably want to know the whole story,” he says. “Why I sent you a music album that never belonged to your father.”

  But I don’t. I don’t want to hear my father’s story. I don’t want to hear Willie Jackson’s story. I just want a sound bite, a quick answer, a swift resolution so that I can know it, file it away, give the album to Sandra, and be finished with it. I’m sorry I came. He takes my silence for complicity.

  “You’re right. The beginning, of course,” he says. “We shall start where all things should start. At the very beginning. Like Genesis.” He gives a wide smile and stares into my eyes, directly.

  He is struggling to pull me in. I don’t want to follow. Coming here was a mistake. He is watching me with expectant eyes. I am searching for something to say, to thank him for his time and apologize because he won’t get a chance to share some hoary old wartime remembrance.

  Because I am terrified.

  My heart is trussed together by tangles and knots of bad memories. Of wrecked dreams, of futile longings that never led to being loved. I can’t let it all unwind. I will come undone if I do. I will fall through the floor, into the deepest abyss, and keep falling until I am completely gone.

  “Looks like he gave you a tough time,” he says, his voice gentle, even though I hadn’t said a word. I look down at my hands shredding tissues without my permission. “He was a difficult man, even then,” he says. “You couldn’t tell him anything. That was his best quality and his downfall.”

  Who is this man? Why does he seem to know more about my father than I ever did? I don’t want to hear him out. I don’t want to have to forgive my father for anything. It was all put to rest when we buried him.

  “Your daughter said you were sorry for calling him a murderer,” I blurt out. “I want to know—”

  “But that’s the end of the story,” he interrupts me, and leans back in his chair with an expression as though this was self-evident. “Well, almost the end. But if I didn’t tell you the beginning, you would have to hate me in the very end. I wouldn’t want you to hate me.” He gives me a sweet, pleading smile, which I realize is
totally manipulative.

  I look at him, this old man, and wonder whether that’s the whole reason he wants to tell me his story, that it’s really Willie Jackson’s story and he wants some kind of exoneration from me, for making my father the way he was. He is waiting, and smiling, and suddenly I know why he wants to tell me. Because Willie Jackson wants to die in peace. I don’t think my father died in peace, maybe because of Willie, and for a moment I am resentful.

  “I couldn’t hate you,” I say simply. I couldn’t. I didn’t hate my father. I just avoided the emotions he brought out, avoided the whole subject. I want to leave right now, I think desperately, but Willie is watching me with the same unwavering, beseeching look.

  Don’t ask anything of me, I am thinking. I have nothing to give you. When I was young, my sister and I blew notes through empty glass soda bottles. Long, hollow sounds that came to nothing, because of the emptiness.

  “Maybe just tell me about the album, then,” I say. I’ll give him that, and then I’ll leave. After all, how much of a story could an album have?

  “Did you bring it back with you?” he asks, glancing down at my handbag.

  “It’s home,” I answer.

  He throws his head back and laughs. “That’s okay, the album comes at the very end, anyway.”

  “The end?”

  “Oh yes,” he says. “The end of the story. About a year into it, long after I met your father.” A flash of sadness crosses his face. “When I wanted to be his friend again. When it was too late.” He reaches over to touch my hand again. “How long you staying?”

  “Actually, today. And tonight. I just wanted to—” I start, getting flustered. This is not going at all the way I wanted. “I’m flying back home first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh no!” He shakes his head. “You stay at my daughter’s place and she’ll dig out all my old things. I haven’t looked at some of that stuff in years.”

  “I run a business,” I apologize. “Horses. And I write books.” I usually don’t tell people that I write books, because everybody thinks that they’re a writer. All of a sudden I’m hearing long, rambling, pointless stories about lives that have come to nothing along with requests that I write it all out for them and then post it on Amazon.

  “It would make an old man happy.” He tilts his head and smiles sweetly again; now I know for sure I’m being conned. “I don’t buy any green bananas,” he says, “if you know what I mean. And I can answer a lot of questions.” We stare at each other for a moment. He wiggles his white eyebrows up and down to further disarm me.

  “I suppose I could call my barn manager and tell him to run things for another day or two,” I murmur, although Malachi pretty much runs things without even telling me what he runs. “Just tell me one thing up front,” I add. “The album. Why you sent him an old album. I don’t recall my father ever listening to music. Ever . . .” It’s all I can manage before I think about my old piano and what he did with it.

  He laughs heartily and fishes in his shirt pocket for something, enfolds it in his knobby fingers, then holds it in his fist in front of me. “Yes,” he says, “I know. He hated music and I’m not Jewish, but—” He opens his hand slowly, with a flourish, like a magician, revealing a gold ring with a blue topaz off to one side, and a gold M engraved in the middle. “As you can see, I have your father’s bar mitzvah ring.”

  Chapter 9

  They looked like kids to him. But nineteen-year-old Private First Class Willie Jackson knew the French government wouldn’t have sent a troop of Boy Scouts all the way to Alabama to learn how to fly bombers. The French soldiers were small, child small, and stood at the train station with the other soldiers, puffing furiously on Gauloises, chain-smoking one after another after another, waiting for a commanding officer to show up and direct them to their barracks, or wherever the hell they were going in the stifling, sodden heat of Montgomery.

  Alabama sun was really something, Willie thought, it was really something. It battered you, enshrouded you, like it had made a pact with hell and humidity to bring you to your knees.

  * * *

  They stood on the platform, crowding it, the Australians, the Canadians, the Brits, a few Greeks, the French, and the Americans; they stood in tight clusters in the ravaging heat, giving each other wary glances but directing their conversations to their own kind.

  Except for the Americans. The Americans didn’t all stand together. The white soldiers stood in the middle of the platform, as though claiming it as American territory, joking loudly, ribbing each other, while the Negro soldiers stood at the end of the platform, near a latrine with a sign on it that said COLOREDS. Willie guessed it was their territory, of sorts.

  He was from Harlem, New York, and had never seen a sign like that until his train started passing through D.C. He had taken his basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, but he had heard about the signs; his grandmother had warned about them. Still, when he first saw them, he was shocked, then sickened, and finally mad. Everything was labeled white or colored. Everything. The drinking fountains, colored water, for Chrissake, the public toilets, even the sections set aside in the shabby little restaurants on the way down, if they allowed you in at all. It was in your face all the time. White and colored. White and colored.

  He stood with his new best friend, August W. Randolph, and chatted about the heat, about the jazz music, about nothing, and waited, along with everyone else. August was a big kid in a man’s body, probably six-foot-four, and chubby, with a round, sweet, light brown face that carried a sleepily benign expression that gave away his slow-to-understand mind.

  Willie had managed to crib a few Gauloises from one of the French soldiers, who hadn’t minded sharing, who hadn’t minded passing his pack around to the coloreds, because he didn’t know yet how it was in America in 1941. Willie and August gladly lit up and took long drags and blew smoke rings that drooped into ovals in the humid air. And waited.

  “Hey,” Willie said to August, gesturing to the latrine door. “Aren’t they nice to give us our own personal shithouse?” His voice dripped with sarcasm, but it was lost on his new friend.

  August, a local from Birmingham, looked over at the sign. He knew all about signs. “Not so personal,” he drawled softly. “We got to share them with each other.”

  * * *

  The train station was just outside Gunter Air Force Base, and the only information Willie had was that it was a major training base to teach the flyboys how to handle the bombers. The big planes. The B-17s, affectionately called the Flying Fortresses. Willie even fancied that he could wind up becoming part of the crew, maybe one of the five gunners who flew in it, or maybe the radio operator. In his more ambitious dreams, he was even the bombardier. He had the required two years of college under his belt.

  Yeah.

  He looked around at the crowded station and took another drag on his cigarette. Probably everyone here was dreaming the same thing, though not everyone was colored. It made all the difference, he knew.

  He had his assignment in his pocket; he had been told not to open it until he reached Gunter. Well, he had reached Gunter. He slid his pocketknife under the envelope flap. It opened easily, and he peeked inside. So. He wouldn’t be flying. Why should he feel so disappointed? He knew all along he wouldn’t be flying. His papers read Base Security.

  * * *

  The men were growing bored. They gave each other surreptitious glances, eyeing uniforms, ranks, openly eavesdropping on each other’s conversations and commenting on them, for want of something better to do.

  “What kind of uniform is that?” One of the Americans, a Southerner by his deep accent, looked pointedly at a British RAF cadet who had been complaining loudly about the heat. “Y’all a Yankee?” he drawled.

  The cadet, a tall, good-looking man with straight sandy hair and light blue eyes, gave him an incredulous snort. “RAF, mate,” he replied, then flashed a disarming grin.

  “Naw, I’m certain ya’ll are a Yankee,�
� the Southern boy persisted. “That’s even a New York accent y’all got there.” The RAF cadet made a face and shook his head at this.

  A skinny American sergeant with a pencil-thin mustache, curly black hair, and a prominent Adam’s apple, took issue with this. “Waddya, stupid?” he snapped at the Southerner. “They’re English. RAF. Look at the uniform.” Then he pointed into his mouth. “This is a Noo Yawk accent.” He motioned to the RAF cadet. “Hey, show this cracker what I mean. Say something in English.”

  “Lindsey Davies, here.” The British cadet extended his hand to the New York sergeant. “And actually, I’m a Welshman.” The sergeant gave him a blank look. “Wales,” Davies explained.

  The sergeant shook his hand. “Marty Fleischer,” he introduced himself. “Brooklyn.”

  “Is that one of your states?” Lindsey Davies asked.

  “Absolutely,” Fleischer said, then gave a harsh, abrupt laugh.

  Half a dozen planes suddenly cluttered the skies above them, small planes, like a flock of starlings. Probably trainers, Willie thought, glancing up at them. They flew through the turgid air, disappearing into the haze, reappearing, dropping down into dives, then turning sharply. Willie noticed some of the men staring up at them, a certain hunger in their eyes. Those would be the flyboys, he decided.

  A jeep squealed to a halt next to the station, and a major clambered onto the hood, stood up, and carefully balanced himself before putting a bullhorn to his lips.

  “I am Major Dugger. Welcome to Alabama, men. Y’all will remain heah,” he yelled at them, his languid Southern accent distorted by the bullhorn. “Y’all will remain heah.” As though there was anywhere else they could go. “Y’all will be told what to do after I take roll call.” He shuffled through a handful of papers and cleared his throat to make a few more announcements about the jeeps that would pick them up.

  “I can’t quite catch the accent,” the RAF cadet commented to Fleischer. “What’s he saying?”