Jitterbug (9 page)

On her way past she smiled and skated her nails across his bare chest. “Have to be somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“Church?”

If he said yes again she might want to go with him. “I’m working today.”

She looked back at him from the bathroom door. “On Sunday?”

“Sundays are busy sometimes. The post office is closed.”

“You should get a better job. There are lots of openings with the war and all.”

“I just started this one.”

She pulled a pout and drew the door shut. He heard her chunk down the seat, then a trickle of water into the bowl. It made him want to vomit. He always ran water in the sink when someone else was in the apartment.

He took a shirt out of the drawer and put it on. In the bedroom he selected a necktie from the rack inside the closet door, inspected his uniform quickly to see if it had been disturbed—women were nasty little snoops, he should never have taken her back to the apartment—tied a quick Windsor, and opened the drawer in the nightstand. His father’s service picture was there, in a silver frame. He didn’t keep it out because the uniform was infantry. It didn’t go with the aviation death he’d drafted, and anyway he didn’t like to think of his father wallowing in the trenches like Lew Ayres in
All Quiet on the Western Front.

Or a boy stretched out naked in his own filth.

Straightening his tie with the aid of the mirror above the rack, he thought about last night in Roma’s. He’d wondered about the two men who had passed his table on the way to the private room at the back of the restaurant, the big one and his smaller friend, who seemed to be leading the way. They dressed similarly, in cheap dark suits. He was pretty sure they were policemen. Later, when they’d come back and collected their two companions and moved toward the door, walking four abreast rather than breaking into two groups of two like ordinary diners, he was sure of his assumption. There was something familiar about the leader, his tired face and large forehead; he thought he’d seen his face in a newspaper photograph. It made him think of his father. Not that they looked anything alike, and when he thought about it, tried to pull it apart, the similarity went away.

He took his zip-front jacket off its hanger—two-tone worsted, brown with cream-colored sleeves—shut the closet door, and went back into the living room. The girl, still clad in just his shirt, was standing in front of the sideboard. She had the second drawer open. He could see what was inside from across the room, the jumble of pasteboard squares, some loose, others held together with rubber bands. “You sure have a lot of ration stamps.” She turned to smile at him. The smile stayed, even when she saw his face. She really was criminally stupid.

A
SPARROW SHIT ON
Dwight Littlejohn’s head at work and he thought,
go shit on a white man’s head, I ain’t no better off than you.

The rafters were full of the little bastards. They flew in through the bay doors, which were never closed, built their nests under the galvanized roof, and hatched youngsters who might never know what it was like to live outdoors. He only thought about them when they shit on his head, though. It happened often enough he didn’t bother to take off his beanie and slap it against his knee anymore. The last time he’d done that the foreman had yelled at him, said he was holding up the line, what was he, a fucking yellow saboteur? So he thought, what the hell, the birds weren’t doing anything to him the whole white world hadn’t been doing for nineteen years.

Dwight Littlejohn worked in the longest room in the world. That was official, according to Ripley. He didn’t like to think about it, and was grateful that his job confined him to one section of the L-shaped building at Willow Run. The section stood in what had been a cornfield before the eminent-domain lawyers swept in like SS shock troops and pounded industry up the ass of rural Michigan with sledgehammers stamped
U.S.
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.
He didn’t like to think that the Liberator plant was the longest room in the world, because when he put down his riveting gun and climbed out of his coveralls and into his 1932 Model A with the rumble seat stuck open perpetually (just like the doors to the plant), he drove home to the smallest room in the world, elbowed in as an afterthought under the slope of a leaky roof in one of a row of saltbox houses on Cross Street in Ypsilanti.

The plant was a hangar-shaped building one mile long, with two 150-foot-wide bays through which the unfinished airplanes—or ships, as they were entered into the log—were shunted, acquiring their aluminum skins, wings, rudders, hydraulics, thousands of miles of insulated wiring, machine guns, and cockpits as they went. Albert Kahn, the genius architect behind the art deco wonders of the Packard and sprawling Ford River Rouge plants, the Fisher Theater, and the buildings that housed the Detroit
News, Free Press,
and police department (not to forget Rose Terrace, the elegant Grosse Pointe mansion where Edsel Ford died), had envisioned a straight tube into one end of which loose parts were shoveled and out the other end of which rolled gleaming bombers gassed up and ready to level the cathedrals and mosques of the Old World the same way Henry Ford and son had flattened the barns and farmhouses and forests that had stood on the site for a century. But Kahn had died a few months into the project. Less artistic heads had reasoned that the inconvenience of crossing county lines with one piece of construction outweighed aesthetics, and so the building was bent in the middle, obliging the cigar-shaped fuselages to turn a corner heading into the stretch. It was still plenty long enough for the drones who had to walk a mile just to get out into the parking lot.

Dwight had been working there since January, when he and his brother Earl drove up from Eufala, Alabama, to go to work for the defense industry, as Earl liked to put it; Dwight told people he screwed airplanes for a living. That was when they’d fucked up the rumble seat, jammed a hinge or something tying Grandpap’s ancient ironbound trunk behind the seat of the coupe. The main building was still under construction then, and whenever there was a pause in the shrilling of the drills and rivet guns, the clatter of clawhammers rushed in to fill it. For all he knew, they were working on it still. For sure they had begun pouring slab foundations for additional buildings. The first center-wing fixture went into production less than nine months after clearing had begun on the land; in the time it took to make a baby, the Fords had turned a cluster of farms and wooded lots into a factory, complete with its own airport for flying out the finished product.

He worked in Center Wing Vertical Assembly, Department 936, punching rivets into a fifty-five-foot section of steel and. aluminum that when he had first seen one reminded him of the inside of a Westinghouse refrigerator, all ribs and racks and gleaming metal. Now it reminded him of nothing, because he’d stood in front of thousands of the bastards and punched millions of little button-shaped pieces of iron into them. From there the center section went to Assembly, where they were attached to the fuselage and the outer wings were added, expanding the span to 110 feet. After acquiring flaps and ailerons, engines, propellers, and a coat of camouflage paint, the finished B-24 bomber took on fuel and was flown to its destination, either in the United States or England, by female and male pilots of the Ferry Command in Romulus. He bet the Krauts and the little yellow fuckers in the Philippines shit when they looked up and saw the shining tidal wave coming their way.

But aside from such patriotic deviations the finished airplanes meant nothing to Dwight, who almost never saw one. He was concerned only with filling the little holes with rivets. The holes were made by the man who stood next to him with an electric drill. They had worked side by side for five months and had never spoken a word to each other. The other man was white except for his cherry red neck, and Dwight was black on both sides of his family going back to before the Civil War, which was still being fought in Alabama, and apparently in Kentucky, too, where the fellow who worked the drill was from; he’d overheard him talking to another Kentuckian in the locker room. The man’s name was Boyd. Since he wasn’t openly hostile, Dwight had ceased to think of him. The little holes were more significant, and since the fellow never missed making one Dwight had no reason to think of him at all.

It was the loudest place he’d ever worked. Against this solid wall of high-pitched whines, whomping drill presses, pinging hammers, and constant shuddering rumble of the great unfinished engines of war moving down the conveyors, he looked back on the noises of his previous employment as silence. All the air horns on all the packet boats and all the cursing of his fellow dockworkers bucking bales of cotton off the barges on the Chattahoochee didn’t answer. The place stank of oil and raw metal and rubber and sweat, but he didn’t smell these things anymore and wondered sometimes if his olfactory sense had sustained as much damage as his hearing. Already his friends who didn’t work at Willow Run complained when he chose a table too near the jukebox at the Forest Club; when they made the selection he could scarcely tell the woodwinds from the brass. But hearing was overrated. The job could have his as long as it continued paying him more in one week than his entire neighborhood in Eufala had made in a month.

He could do without having his head shit on, though. The symbolism was just too heavy.

When the whistle screeched, signaling the shift change, Dwight Littlejohn stripped off his goggles and stopped work on his five hundredth bomber that month. His replacement passed him on the stairs to the catwalk without greeting—he, too, was white—and stepped into the hole inside the coil of electrical cord Dwight had just vacated. Time elapsed between the last chatter of the rivet gun on the nine-to-five shift and the first on the five-to-one: forty-six seconds.

“Hey, buddy, mind?”

Dwight, standing at the time clock, looked around for the owner of the piping tenor, then down. He’d learned not to grin when he saw a diminutive version of himself, scarcely three feet tall, in coveralls scaled down to a child’s size; the dwarves hired to climb inside the wing assemblies to buck rivets and seal fuel cells didn’t appreciate amusing their full-size coworkers. Dwight gripped the little man under his up-stretched arms, lifted him, and held him while he slid his time card into the slot and pulled down the handle.

“Thanks.” Back on his feet, the dwarf hurried toward the catwalks with a rocking gait, dripping with dignity. Dwight figured there were tougher breaks than being born black.

Earl was already at his locker and dressing for town. He had on pearl gray peg tops belted just under his sternum and was tying a tie with silver saxophones on a bright blue field. At his brother’s approach he grinned a gold-toothed greeting into the mirror inside the tin door. “Why so late, Gate? Take the slow freight?”

“Some of us wait for the whistle.” Dwight peeled off his coveralls and slung them into his own locker. “Who’s punching out for you?”

“Wash Adams. I covered for him last month when he was biffing that secretary he thinks looks like Lena Horne.”

“They all look like Lena Horne when you been staring at Pratt and Whitneys all day.”

“Don’t they just? I’m meeting Liz for the early show at the State. See you at the Forest later?”

“Only if you can see all the way to Cross Street. I’m bushed. I guess you’re taking the car.”

“I’d drop you, but I’m late already. You can ride the cattle car.”

“You’re so good to me.” The last time he’d taken the defense workers’ trailer-bus he’d gotten sick on monoxide.

“You can stand it. I’m an old married man.” Earl snapped his fingers.

His brother separated the key to the Model A from his ring and gave it to him. “You act like you’re still dating.”

“We are, Jackson, we are.”

There wasn’t much resemblance between the Littlejohns. Dwight was built low to the ground and solid, Earl lanky and tall. Earl spent God only knew how much of his pay on hair straighteners, with qualified success; his hair was black and glossy where he smoothed it back from his temples, but the forelock insisted on curling. It made him look less like Billy Eckstine than a dusky Frankie Sinatra. Dwight’s hair, tightly coiled, clung to his head like a helmet and at nineteen already showed faint traces of gray. People often assumed he was the older of the two. He was three years younger than Earl, but had closed that gap emotionally long before they left Alabama.

Dwight disapproved of his brother intensely. However, whenever Earl’s flippancy got him in trouble, in bars and parking lots, it was Dwight who waded in, fists pumping like pistons, to clear the way for the other’s escape. Similarly, he had opposed Earl’s decision, on the strength of ten days’ familiarity, to marry a girl he had met at the Forest Club in the company of her friends from school; but when the wedding took place at the Second Baptist Church, there was Dwight, got up in a rented tuxedo with extra blacking on his workboots to conceal their steel toes, handing Earl the ring. The couple married six weeks before Dwight found out Elizabeth was a fifteen-year-old bride. She had altered the date on her birth certificate to apply for a marriage license without her parents’ consent. It had cost Dwight two hundred dollars, all the money he had managed to put aside after two months working at Willow Run, to persuade Earl’s angry in-laws not to have his brother arrested for statutory rape. But then he usually got the shit beat out of him in those bars and parking lots, too. At times like those he felt old enough to be Earl’s father.

He watched his brother shrug into a suit coat whose hem swung almost to his knees, then tug on a matching fedora with a red feather in the band and smooth the brim between his fingers. The brim was at least six inches wide. “Holy shit.”

Earl struck a model’s pose, hand on hip. “What you think? It’s a zoot.”

“It sure is. Where’d you get it?”

“Clayton’s. Well, the suit. I had to go to Higgins and Frank for the hat. Keep the sun out of my eyes, you know?”