Blue Skies Tomorrow (16 page)

He tried to think of Helen as little as possible. Too painful. He prayed for her, but how could he help? If he hadn’t raced into romance, he could have written to her and counseled her as a friend.

When he found out what Jim had done, Helen lashed out—not at Jim, but at Ray. She hated him for knowing the truth, because she couldn’t face the truth herself.

Ray stood in the rubble of another failed romance, but for the first time, the failure was his fault.

“Novak?” Hawkins’s forehead crinkled up. “You remember what I said about a Fort ditching at sea?”

Ray blinked away his memories. “Yeah?”

“It was your brother.”

Ray leaned his elbows on his knees and ran his hands into his hair. Jack looked so small and pale on the hospital cot, not his usual daring self.

The doctor said he’d been pulled from the Channel in time but came close to dying. Dad and Mom would have been devastated, as well as Walt, and Ray himself.

“Lord, what am I doing here?” he whispered. His decision to fly a combat tour didn’t affect just Ray but his whole family. Was it selfish to try to prove himself if the effort killed him and hurt those he loved? Or did this concern for safety show he was the worst kind of coward, only worried about his skin?

He puffed out a breath and pulled his black notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. “What is courage?” he scrawled. “What is cowardice?”

Fear didn’t make a man a coward, but rather the inability to act due to fear. Could Ray find courage to take action when necessary? Did his faith run deeper than his seminary knowledge, deep enough to sustain him no matter what?

Life had never tested his courage, so he needed to test it himself. At the bottom of the page he wrote, “Will I pass, Lord?”

A groan rose from Jack’s cot, and the pile of blankets shifted.

Ray stuffed his notebook back in his pocket. “Jack?”

His gaze swam in lazy circles until it settled on Ray.

“Jack?” He rubbed his brother’s upper arm, which felt chilly. “Hi there. Think you can stay awake?”

“Awake?” Jack coughed so hard, his metal cot creaked.

“Look who woke up just in time for bed.” The nurse, Lieutenant Taylor, scurried to the bed. “I can’t give you anything for that cough, Major. You need to clear out that seawater, but would you like some more morphine?”

Jack’s mouth twisted under his black mustache. “But I’m—didn’t I?—I didn’t die?”

Ray laughed softly. “You came mighty close. You were unconscious when Air-Sea Rescue plucked you out of the water. You had a bad case of hypothermia.”

Jack craned his neck and stared at his right leg up in traction, then broke into another coughing fit. “My foot?”

“Oh, you broke several bones.” The nurse flipped her hand and laughed. “You’ll be in a cast about six weeks, young man.”

Jack squinted at the window. “What day is it?”

“The seventh,” Ray said. “The invasion was a success. We’re making progress.”

“My crew—did they make it?”

“All safe. Startled a flock of sheep, but they’re fine.”

“Good.” Jack frowned. “Where am I?”

The nurse popped a thermometer in his mouth. “You’re at the 65th General Hospital. We just came to Redgrave Park in Botesdale in Suffolk. You wouldn’t believe the quaint little villages we have around here. The nearest town of any size is Bury St. Edmunds, which is about—”

“I been ’ere b’fore,” Jack grumbled around the thermometer.

Ray raised a smile to the nurse, not the first time he’d had to smooth his brother’s rough edges. “Jack’s based at Bury St. Edmunds.”

Jack narrowed gray-blue eyes at Ray. “What’re you doin’ ’ere?”

“Took you long enough to notice.”

“But what—where?”

“The Combat Crew Replacement Center in Bovingdon—training, waiting for assignment to a bomb group.”

“Com’at . . .” Jack hitched himself up and spat the thermometer out onto the bed. “But—but you’re an instructor. No, you’re in that supply job. What happened?”

Explaining his decision required skill. If Jack sensed his real motive, he might use his rank to interfere. “I volunteered,” Ray said.

“You what?”

“Major, I need your temperature.” Lieutenant Taylor poked the thermometer at Jack’s lips.

He glared at her. “Later.”

She dashed away, chattering to herself. With Dad’s forceful personality, Jack made an effective commander, but a less-than-pleasant patient.

His gaze bored into Ray. “You volunteered?”

“Yes.” He set a determined expression on his face. “I need to be here.”

“But why? And why now? I thought you and Helen . . . ”

Jack might as well have punched him in the gut. “Long story. I’ll tell you later.”

“Women always make for long stories.”

Ray gave him a sympathetic look. Jack had been pursuing a nurse for about a year. “Didn’t work out with Ruth?”

“Nope. Category E, damaged beyond repair.” He slid under the pile of blankets. “Remember those balsa wood planes Grandpa always put in our Christmas stockings?”

Ray leaned forward on his knees. “Sure do. Never lasted long, did they?”

“Kind of like macaroons.”

Macaroons? Ray held up one hand to stop Lieutenant Taylor, who approached with a syringe. The last thing Jack needed was more morphine.

“Remember?” Jack said. “You’d get one or two flights out of them, then crack the horizontal stabilizer, glue it together. Next flight you’d snap the wing in half, glue it together. Chip the nose, more glue. Eventually the glue weighed it down so much it couldn’t fly.”

Ray murmured.

“That’s what it’s like with Ruth. Too many crashes, too many cracks, too much glue. Can’t fly.”

Somehow, under all that medication, Jack made sense. Even if Ray survived his combat tour and Helen worked through her problem and ignored the men sure to find her attractive, it was too late for them.

Helen Carlisle was the most wonderful woman Ray had met, he’d had his once-in-a-lifetime chance with her, and he’d blown it.

16

U.S. Naval Magazine, Port Chicago
Friday, June 9, 1944

“Don’t worry, Helen. The ordnance isn’t fused. It can’t detonate.”

“I know.” She gave Vic a smile even though he’d said the same thing a dozen times in the two weeks she’d worked for him.

Still, she held her breath as they drove from Vic’s office to the pier, as if a misdirected puff of air could cause an explosion. Hundreds of boxcars full of torpedoes and bombs and depth charges hunkered behind high earthen revetments.

Vic parked the staff car and opened the door for Helen. She stepped out in her new gray suit, holding her pad of paper as if she knew what she was doing. She hadn’t taken secretarial classes since she planned to go to college with Jeannie, who had just graduated from Mills and had a swanky job in San Francisco. Helen didn’t even know shorthand. However, she typed at a fast clip, wrote businesslike letters, and took furious notes.

Vic stood in front of her in his blue service uniform. “I’m glad you’re here. You give me hope.”

Helen sighed. For such a brilliant man, he sure repeated himself. “You know I’m only here to earn enough money to set up house.”

“Marry me, and we’ll set up house together. You’ll never have to work again.”

“Are you going to ask me every single day?”

“Until you say yes.”

Helen’s stomach soured. But she only needed this job for three months. “We’re here to see Petty Officer Carver Jones, right?”

Vic huffed at the change in subject. “Right. He’s the one with a degree from Howard University.”

“You mentioned that.” Several times.

He led her to the pier, where a freighter docked in Suisun Bay. The water flowed deep here in the Delta, where the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers merged into a bulge and gathered strength to finish the journey into San Francisco Bay.

“They finished widening the pier,” Vic called over the noise of machinery and men. “Now we can load two ships at once, and we’ll get—”

“Twice as much ordnance to the Pacific Theater.”

He raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Yes.”

At the base of the dock, Vic saluted an officer, who sent a seaman to find Petty Officer Jones. In the loading area, hundreds of men worked at a fast pace, carrying crates, rolling torpedoes, loading items in cargo nets, hooking up winches, and swinging booms. Marines stood on guard, and naval officers called out orders. All were white. All the sailors doing the hard labor were black.

Like the pictures of antebellum plantations in Helen’s high school history book. Something inside her squirmed. Only the whips and dogs were missing from the scene.

A black man wearing a blue chambray shirt and dungarees approached and saluted Vic. “Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Stand easy. Mrs. Carlisle, this is Petty Officer Carver Jones. Jones, my new secretary.”

She extended her hand. “How do you do?”

“How do you do, ma’am?” He shook her hand and dipped his square chin. He had the light build of a scholar, not a dockworker.

Vic clasped his hands behind his back. “So, Jones, are the men pleased with the new recreation facility?”

“Yes, sir, but they wonder why it took the Navy a year and a half to meet that need.”

“Shameful. That’s why I worked so hard to speed up the process.” Vic gave Helen a quick look.

She uncapped her pen, ready to take notes.

“We appreciate that, sir, but the men still have complaints.”

“Send the men my way.”

Petty Officer Jones tucked in his lips and gazed along the length of the pier, which jutted upriver. “They’re afraid of retaliation, sir. They prefer to have me present the complaints anonymously. They hope my pretty words will persuade you.”

“Truth persuades me. Justice persuades me.”

“Yes, sir. In time they may see, as I already have, that you’re on our side.”

Helen scratched her pen on the corner of the page to get the ink flowing, and shot Vic a glance. Despite his annoying traits, he was a good and fair man.

“Thank you, Jones.” He lowered his chin. “I wish I could do something about pay levels, promotions, and segregation, but I can’t. And I can’t change the Navy’s archaic policy keeping you men from combat. But is there anything else I can help with?”

“Two things, sir, which affect safety. First of all, the officers have stepped up the competition between shifts. We believe the officers are betting on us. We’re concerned that safety has been sacrificed for speed.”

Helen scribbled notes, but her gaze darted to the dock. What kind of men bet on such things? And did she really want to be close to the sloppy handling of munitions, fused or not?

“The second issue is training.” Jones rubbed the back of his neck. “The men are on edge. None of us were trained in ammunition handling. We’re learning on the job, and we haven’t received a single lecture on safety. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“I’ll get on that immediately, see what I can do.”

The men exchanged salutes and parted.

Vic opened the car door for Helen. “Good man, Jones. He’ll be a leader in the Negro community someday. You know, I thought this was a losing assignment, but I’ve changed my mind. I have a chance to do some good, plus I’m making connections. Now, don’t you want to marry a man with such a shining future?” he asked in a tongue-in-cheek tone.

“No, thank you.” She lowered herself into the seat, and her jaw tightened. Why did the men in her life want to control her? Vic pestered her to marry him, Mr. Carlisle told her how to raise her son, and Jim—Jim still controlled her from his watery grave.

Vic drove away, and Helen doodled on the page as if rearranging her notes.

Jim controlled her most of all. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t shove back the memories. Her façade lay in ashes, as did the Daddy book that had propped it up. Mrs. Carlisle wanted her to assemble a new scrapbook, but Helen couldn’t paste the falsehoods back in place. The man beat her, burned her, and caused two miscarriages.

Babies he kicked out of her.

Grief swamped her, and she swung her gaze out the window to conceal the tears burning the backs of her eyes. The first time he beat her unconscious, the first time he killed a child inside her, she threatened to tell her father the truth when he examined her, but Jim cried. He actually cried, he was so sorry, he just loved her so much, that’s why she made him angry when she didn’t behave, and it would never happen again. Never.

She told Papa she slipped in the tub and had been bleeding anyway.

Jim got away with it. He always did.

Clumsy cripple Helen.

Vic parked the car by the wooden administration building.

“I need to use the ladies’ room.” Helen bolted from the car and dashed into the restroom.

Jim said no one would believe her anyway. Fun-loving, sunny, popular Jim. Who would believe he beat his wife?

Ray believed her.

Helen sobbed. She leaned against the bathroom wall and fumbled inside her pocketbook for a handkerchief.

Ray was the only one who had ever figured out the truth, the only one who believed the truth even as she denied it and spewed hateful insults, hateful because he did know the truth.