Jitterbug (11 page)

Passing them now, gripping the handle of his lunch pail hard enough to imprint the waffle pattern on his palm. The unbreakable steel Thermos inside made a good weapon. Taking it out and carrying it by its neck would have been like asking for trouble, but he could still swing the kit and kaboodle if he had to.

He didn’t have to. The conversation—it was about the war, something to do with Sicily—stopped, he found himself walking through a hurricane eye of silence, feeling little beads of sweat pop out on the back of his neck. Then he was past them and somebody said something about Eisenhower and somebody else said, Eisenhower, shit, he’s one of
them,
and Dwight let out his breath. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.

He paid thirty dollars a month for his room at the very top of a two-story house that represented no architectural style in particular and had very little going for it apart from a new oil-burning furnace and middling-good water pressure. Neither the local building inspector nor the county tax authorities had been notified that the owners, a couple in their sixties with a grown son in the VA hospital in Ann Arbor, were taking in boarders. The bed was a reasonably comfortable single on an iron frame, shoved up under the slope of the roof so that he had to bend double to get into it, and avoid sitting up abruptly when his alarm clock rang. He had a reading lamp—really just a bulb with a funnel shade, suspended from a stringer—a stack of magazines,
Life, Popular Mechanics,
and
National Geographic
(the African issues, for purposes of masturbation), and a Philco Transitone that got uncommonly good reception in that high spot, especially at night, when you could swear Fatha Hines was right there in the room. It was loads better than a soggy tent, except when it rained and he had to dig out his collection of battered pots and empty Maxwell House cans to catch the leaks.

The room depressed the hell out of him even when skies were clear. He wanted his own house. That was the reason he had left Eufala, gone along when Earl dangled the incentive of a life of plenty and city lights in the form of a full-page ad in the classified section of the Montgomery paper headed
FORD WORKING FOR VICTORY
and featuring photographs of men and women, many of them colored, working at the “War Bird Powerhouse” in Willow Run. For Earl, a dollar an hour meant zoot suits, a gold tooth, and juke music every night. For Dwight it represented freedom from a life rented from people who owned things, a chance to own things himself. His Model A was the first thing he’d ever bought and paid for, and it had taken him the better part of a year haunting junkyards for parts and crawling in and out from under its chassis with the tops knocked off all his knuckles and rust particles in his eyes to get it running. At forty bucks a week minus withholding—more when he put in overtime—he’d figured he could save enough to manage the down payment on a house at the end of two years. A place he could paint any damn color he pleased, and where he could pound nails to hang pictures anywhere he wanted without having to answer to some landlord. It didn’t have to be Rose Terrace. Just a thousand square feet of siding and foundation to prove he was a better man than his father.

He’d failed to figure in Earl, though. The two hundred he’d had to pay Elizabeth’s parents to keep his brother out of prison had pushed back his timetable six months. And when he turned off the radio and unscrewed the bulb in the lamp and set aside his
Life
with Joe Stalin on the cover, he couldn’t sleep for thinking that Earl’s hundred-and-forty-dollar suit and three-hundred-dollar diamond ring were going to push it back further yet.

A
NITA … OH,
A
NITA … SAY,
I
feel
something!”

“What you feel, Roy? The heat?”

“No, I feel like blowing!”

“Well, blow, Roy, blow!”

And Roy Eldridge blew, taking the trumpet to heights only visited before by the divine Louis. Then the brumping brass section came in behind Anita O’Day’s husky contralto, leader Gene Krupa hurled himself into his trap set, walloping the bass like the naval fleet pounding Corregidor. The little wooden dance floor thudded under the feet of the jitterbugs, the boys in their canary yellow zoots playing leapfrog with the girls in their plaid skirts and bobby sox. Just like the Oriole, only there the dancers were white and the band was live. But the Wurlitzer was cranked up all the way, knocking dust down from the rafters and plaster loose inside the laths. If you closed your eyes you could see the line of golden horns pointed at the ceiling and the pretty girl swaying behind the microphone, giving you a flash of garters and white panties when she shook her skirts. “Let Me Off Uptown.”

The Forest Club was jumping, especially for a weeknight. Saturdays there would be a local band, not quite Chick Webb but close. Dwight preferred the juke. It left money in his pocket that otherwise would have gone into the cover, and the music was just as good on somebody else’s nickel, although to his taste there was a shortage of Sidney Bechet and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He didn’t think that jazz was served by pushing it through three times as many instruments and adding strings.

In any case he seemed to be in the minority. All these welders and riveters were determined to get as much out of their time away from the plants as their paychecks would support. The music wasn’t even loud compared to the decibel levels they were used to. Some of the young men probably didn’t work in the factories, were just waiting to be called up; Dwight knew them by the wild glaze in their eyes and their molar-exposing grins. There wouldn’t be much dancing in North Africa.

He asked the lean, chestnut-colored youth in the red jacket behind the bar, plainly too young to be serving alcoholic beverages, for a gin ricky, paid for it, and moved off to an uninhabited spot where he could hear the music without distortion. The room was indistinguishable from many of the white clubs in town, if you didn’t figure in the Oriole and places like that; the rosy light over the bar and the pink-and-green shifting neon of the juke threw the exposed pipes into shadow and gave the bare brick walls a kind of dangerous ambience, like that movie
Algiers.
Charles Boyer might have felt right at home, sticking out his lower lip and talking about “Ze Casbah.” Right before one of these tough fuckers whose families moved north right after the Emancipation Proclamation slipped a blade between his Gallic ribs.

Not that it was that kind of place. Located in Paradise Valley, the city’s most staunchly colored section, the Forest Club complied with most of the statutes enforced by the State Liquor Control Commission since Repeal, which included a ban on illuminated beer signs, batwing doors, and anything in writing referring to the bar as a “saloon”—bad memories of the sodden times that had given birth to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the eighteenth Amendment.

There was even a yellowed bill, framed and forgotten on the wall above the back bar, reminding customers that it was unlawful to consume alcoholic beverages in a standing position. For all Dwight knew the law was still on the books, but even when there were vacant stools at the bar he’d yet to witness anyone connected with the establishment admonishing a drinker to find a seat.

He looked around in vain for anyone he knew. Most of his acquaintances worked at Willow Run, and he didn’t get into town too often, by choice. Detroit was a pretty good old place, ugly as a ticky old hound dog but just as friendly, if you knew just where to scratch it. Its Negro population was well ensconced, the grandsons and granddaughters of freedmen and runaway slaves who had reversed directions on the Underground Railroad to Canada under Lincoln, and he didn’t feel as out of place as he’d feared. Most of the hostility; in fact, came from the scions of these old families, who looked upon the wartime newcomers as uncouth country cousins who threatened to upset the balance of eight decades; Dwight’s drawling speech had gotten him more than his fair share of rudeness from black merchants in town. The rest came up with the rednecks, newcomers themselves who had never before ventured any farther from their scrabbly little farms and flyblown hamlets than it took to do business with the local moonshiner, and couldn’t get used to the idea that Jim Crow didn’t travel.

He could handle, or rather avoid them all right, and the worst he got from belligerent members of his own race was short change and the occasional bottle of milk that had started to turn. The reason he stayed out of Detroit was it was an excellent place to spend money. Dwight was his father’s son, his brother’s brother. Saving didn’t come naturally to him, and so he had to ride herd on himself all the time. That was a little less difficult in Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti was the dullest town this side of Eufala: neighborhoods of Victorian and Queen Anne houses and a three-block business section of hardware stores, family bars, pot-roast restaurants, and a great marble mausoleum of a bank with solid-oak tellers’ cages inside built to repel John Dillinger. The whole place might have been dug up by the roots anyplace between there and Alabama and transported by flatbed up 23, complete with rednecks. In Ypsilanti the challenge was to find something worth wasting one’s money on. He didn’t regret his choice of places to live.

But even Dwight got the awfulest kind of lonely. The thought of spending another evening like last night, stretched out on the bed in his little narrow coffin of an attic room leafing through magazines with the radio on, made him feel bleak. He’d hoped he’d run into Earl in the Forest Club, or someone he knew from Willow Run. Instead, alone in this room full of strangers and loud music, he felt as isolated as if he’d stayed home. He resolved to finish his drink and catch the last bus. His brother still had the Model A. “What’s the matter, Jackson, shoes nailed to the floor?” He blinked. He’d been off in the middle ground, looking right at Earl coming his way through the crowd without seeing him. His brother had on his hundred-and-forty-dollar suit with what might have been a pink shirt—it was difficult to judge colors in the Forest Club—and Elizabeth was with him. “Hello, Dwight. Where you been keeping yourself?” He told Elizabeth hello. He knew the question called for a clever answer, but he was not a clever man. He only regretted it when he was in her presence. She was a striking girl, more handsome than pretty, in a way that would only improve with age. He liked her regular features and wide-set eyes, her ginger coloring, her hair cut short after the fashion established by women who wanted to avoid snagging it in the machinery of the defense plants, although she was too young for such employment. In her platform heels and yellow calf-length dress with padded shoulders she was as tall as Dwight and could pass for twenty-one anywhere in town. He liked the way her face shone when she greeted her brother-in-law. She genuinely liked him. She pecked him on the cheek and he smelled the brief light citrus scent she wore, clean and pleasant. She was wearing the ring Earl had bought her.

“Ain’t you heard, sugar?” Earl said. “Dwight’s working undercover for the eff bee eye. Dyes his hair yellow and puts flour on his face and goes to Bund meetings. Got him a teeny little camera in his belly button. He don’t answer to nobody but old J. Edgar hisself, or maybe Pat O’Brien.”

Dwight smiled; indulgently, he hoped. Elizabeth punched her husband’s shoulder. “You let your brother be. It wouldn’t hurt you to stay home some nights.”

“Maybe when I’m as old as old Dwight.” He tipped up his glass. Dwight caught a sharp whiff of pure grain alcohol. He hated vodka. It was their father’s drink.

“Through with the car?” he asked.

“Tomorrow. We gots to get home tonight.”

“Put oil in it? It burns oil.”

“You know I don’t know nothing about that.” Earl was bouncing to the “One O’Clock Jump.” “Let’s dance, sugar.”

“I can dance with you anytime. I want to dance with your brother.”

“I don’t think they got the minuet on the juke.”

Dwight said, “He’s close to right. I can’t jitterbug.”

She opened a little clasp purse and thrust a nickel at her husband. “Find something slow.”

“Wayne King? Sammy Kaye?”

“Try Dorsey,” Dwight said. “I’m not dead.”

“These Detroit boys going to string me up.” But he took the coin and moved off.

Alone with his sister-in-law, Dwight took a long pull at his ricky.

“Can I have a sip of that?”

“I might be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

She pouted. He handed her the glass. She sipped at it, made a face, and handed it back. “Too much Coca-Cola.”

“I’m not a big drinker.”

She shook her head, smiling. “Sometimes I can’t believe you and Earl are related.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, partly because the same thought had crossed his mind many times. The manic Harry James record came to an end. In the silence he took another drink and said, “Congratulations on your anniversary.”

“Oh, that. That was Earl’s idea.” She twisted the ring. “I told him we couldn’t afford it.”

“I guess it cut into your savings.”

She looked up at him quickly. Then a new record dropped down and a trombone started playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” Dwight glanced around, found a horizontal surface for his glass, and took her hand. The floor was crowded, for which he was grateful. No one knew you were a bad dancer when there wasn’t room to show it.

Elizabeth’s hand in his was cool. He held it loose for ventilation, because he knew his was moist. The feel of the small of her back against his other hand gave him butterflies. He hadn’t danced with a woman since the Piggly Wiggly episode. This close he could smell the warmth of her skin beneath the citrus scent. He wanted to press her on the subject of where Earl had gotten the money to buy her the ring, but he was afraid it would spoil the moment, end the dance; and that would likely lead to a scene between him and his brother. Maybe the question hadn’t really startled her, as he’d thought. Maybe she was surprised at him for prying. He resolved not to bring it up again pending evidence. And he despised himself for his cowardice.