Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  Those boys were gone almost immediately. The McKiever brothers among them. The were sent to boot camps in Washington and Louisiana. We’d heard reports from all sorts of places I’d never been. And they were headed for places I’d hardly heard about and some I didn’t even know existed.

  I was jealous and I was angry.

  As that cold winter warmed into spring, the war was all anybody talked about. Several guys I’d played basketball with were already in uniform. Stub and Hackshaw had begged recruiters to let them sign up, but had been rejected. Apparently the army didn’t need guys with one arm or bowlegs. Orb quit school and enlisted, but he hadn’t been able to pass the physical. Frank Trotter had gotten arrested for whiskey-running, and the judge had agreed to let him go into service as soon as he finished ninety days in jail.

  But not everybody was so keen on serving the country. Piggy Masterson used his uncle’s farm in Pott County as a convenient way out. He claimed he had a farm exemption, but when our draft board got close to him, he’d move down to the farm. And when it looked like he might be called up down there, he moved back to Catawah.

  Les and I had no immediate plans to join up, but for very different reasons.

  The problem with Les was that he was in love. He and Berthrene Melrose had become officially engaged. She was all blushes and I’d see her staring across the room at him as if he’d hung the moon. Les was equally google-eyed. And he didn’t even rise to the bait when I teased him about becoming an old married man before ever bothering to be a bachelor.

  I allowed my own feelings for Berthrene to die a natural death. Les was my best friend, so that was that. I deliberately put her out of my mind. I went out of my way to avoid her when she was by herself. When she was with Les, I was always friendly, but I tried not to look her in the eyes. I was afraid she might see something of my heart.

  Truth to tell, it wasn’t all that hard. With all the excitement of the war—and excitement was what I felt most about it—I gave very little thought to girls at all. What I prayed for, hoped for and dreamed about was being called up. Mama would never allow me to volunteer, but if I was called, well, I’d have to go. I began to look at the draft board as my savior. All my ambitions centered on the hope of being a Selective Service Inductee.

  In May, graduation seemed almost an aside. I marched into the high school auditorium in my long black robe and mortarboard and sat on the bleachers set up on the stage against a backdrop of burgundy curtains. I don’t recall a word of the speeches that were made that day. What stands out in my memory is the color of olive drab all through the audience.

  Mama had stirred herself to watch me cross the stage and receive my diploma. But by the end of the program, she was exhausted. I took her home and put her to bed. She was shaky and weak, but she was surprisingly happy, babbling like a child about all she’d seen and who she’d talked to.

  She uncoiled the bun at the nape of her neck and began unloosening the braid. It was no longer the same dark brown as my own, but now had strands of silver that shimmered in the lamplight. I handed her the hairbrush, but instead of taking it she lay her palms on either side of my cheeks and urged me toward her as if trying to see me more clearly.

  “I’m truly proud of you, son,” she told me.

  “Thanks, Mama.”

  “You’ve always done right by me. No mother could ask for better.”

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled up at me. “Now, you run along to your graduation party,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I’m not all that interested.”

  Mama raised an eyebrow at that. “It’s high time that you should be,” she said. “That Sapphira Stark seems like a sweet little thing.”

  “Saffy?” I was stunned at the suggestion. The grocer’s daughter, and class valedictorian, had scarcely spoken a dozen words to me ever. I shook my head. “Oh, no, Mama.”

  She tutted. “Now I noticed that she’s not all that pretty,” Mama said, “but pretty doesn’t count for much in the long run and marriages are for a lifetime.”

  “I’m not ready to get married.”

  “Well, maybe you’re not ready to tie the knot, but you should be thinking about it.”

  At that moment I felt compelled to say something, to at least provide an inkling of what I hoped my future would hold.

  “Mama, there’s a war on,” I told her.

  For an instant she looked puzzled, then she actually laughed. “Oh, that’s way off somewhere,” she answered. “It has nothing to do with us.”

  “Didn’t you see all the men in uniform tonight?” I asked her. “Fellows are being called up all over town. I could be called up, too.”

  She shook her head. “You’re my only son, Buddy. No one would take you from me. I have no worry on that score. Now go on to your party. Have a nice time, flirt with some girls. But no drinking,” she insisted. “Not one drop.”

  I nodded.

  I’d gone up to the gym where a very lackluster graduation dance was taking place. There were more chaperones than seniors. A few couples danced on the hardwood floor. A herd of unattached females stood self-consciously on the sidelines. I knew immediately that the reason I was greeted at the door so warmly was more for the desperate need of guys going stag.

  I smiled at everyone. I drank two glasses of fruit punch. And just so I could report it to my mother, I danced one dance with Saffy Stark. She was all dressed up in something frothy and pink. But her depth perception seemed to be bad without her glasses. She stepped on my foot about three times.

  When the music ended, I escorted her back to her place in the line of wallflowers and thanked her politely. Then, pretending to head for the punch bowl once more, I ducked out the side entrance.

  Beyond the lights of the doorway, the town was dark and ordinary. The sliver of moon overhead was the only illumination until I got up to the highway. There I turned south and headed for the edge of town. This main artery in and out of Catawah was two narrow lanes of pavement with deep drainage gulleys on either side. A pedestrian had to either walk in the road or on the steep edge of the ditch. I chose the former, preferring to risk my life rather than my good shoes.

  I didn’t have to walk far. Les drove by me and then made a U-turn in the street to come back my way. His 1934, five window coupe was a little scarred and faded, but it was still a luscious car, and between the two of us, we kept it running like a sewing machine.

  “Hey, Bud,” he called out as he pulled up alongside me. “You headed home or to the Jitterbug?”

  I raised my hands and shrugged. “I haven’t decided. I’ve had all the punch and cookies I can stomach. What’s a guy supposed to do on his graduation night?”

  Les smiled broadly. It was the kind of grin that came so easy to him and was so appealing to all of us. It was more than just straight white teeth and a handsome face that the girls so admired. It was the energy in his expression that made me believe that life might be bigger and more exciting than I thought. Like me he was still dressed in his graduation suit, but he’d discarded his coat somewhere.

  “Well, we’ve got some plans,” he said.

  Beside him, Berthrene gave Les a small ineffectual punch in the shoulder. “Remember, it’s a secret,” she admonished him.

  Les’s grin didn’t falter, but he did roll his eyes. “It’s only a secret for tonight. By tomorrow everybody in town will know. We’re running off to Fort Smith tonight to get married.”

  I stood there, mouth hanging open, stunned into silence. Berthrene filled in the gap.

  “But you can’t tell anybody!” she said, shaking a finger at me.

  “I won’t say a word,” I assured her.

  An old truck turned down the highway behind Les. He glanced up into the rearview mirror.

  “Hop on,” he said to me. “And I’ll drop you off at the Jitterbug.”

  I stepped up onto the running board and threaded my arm through the window for a handhold. Les cruised down the highway with me on the side. The
wind blew through my hair and the speed was surprisingly exhilarating, like a carnival ride. I let out a holler of enthusiasm. In the distance I spotted the multicolored lights strung along the roofline of the Jitterbug Lounge. The front door of the place was propped open with a wedge of wood and the music spilled out into the dusty parking lot.

  Les eased off the side of the road and came to a stop.

  “Thanks for the lift,” I told him, jumping off.

  He pulled on the brake and shut down the engine.

  “I’ll be right back,” Berthrene told him as she hurried out of the car and headed for the door of the Jitterbug.

  Les stepped out of the car and we walked around to the back of it. He leaned back against the wheel well and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

  “When did you take up smoking?” I asked him.

  Les shrugged. “This is my first pack,” he admitted. “All the guys in service smoke ’em, so I thought I’d get the jump on it.” He held out the pack to me. “You want one?”

  “Nah, I tried it once when I was a kid,” I told him. “Dad-blamed tobacco made me sick as a dog.”

  Les grinned. “That’s something I admire about you, Bud,” he said. “You never feel like you’ve got to prove anything to anybody.”

  I propped a foot on the bumper and crossed my elbows on my knee. “I don’t have to prove nothing to the knot-heads in this town. I was born smarter than most of them will ever become.”

  Les chuckled. “And you’re such a modest guy, as well.”

  I laughed with him.

  Turning to glance toward the music coming from the honky-tonk, Les’s mood turned more somber. In that gap I poured in the words that I’d been too stunned to speak at the side of the road.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Getting married, that’s…that’s really something.”

  Les nodded. “Truth is, I know she wants a church wedding and all the trimmings. But we both feel like our time is so short. I don’t know when I’ll be called up, but I think it’s soon. Dr. Phillips said that the draft board was scraping the bottom of the barrel April and May to get their quota. They’ve been licking their lips to see us all graduate from high school.”

  I nodded.

  “Berthrene and I just want to be together every minute that we have the chance,” he said. “I was thinking that it was nobler to not marry her until I come back, but we both know I might not come back. And I want to be with her now.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “That makes sense. You two are really lucky to have each other.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Les said. “I want you to be my best man.”

  “Me?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

  “Berthrene’s in there getting herself a bridesmaid. She seems to think that just about anyone would do. For me, it just wouldn’t feel right if I had anyone stand up with me but you.”

  “I’d be honored,” I told him.

  We stood across from each other but I felt as if we were on a precipice. The future spread out before us was a stark and dangerous place. But the waiting was harder than the falling—we were both filled with an eagerness to jump.

  “We’re ready!”

  I turned to see Berthrene hurrying out of the club. Inexplicably, her companion was Geri Shertz. If she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it.

  “I’m so excited for you two,” she said to Les. “When I heard there was going to be a wedding, I just couldn’t miss it.”

  “Geri was the only girl in the place who felt like she could just not show up at home tonight and nobody would worry,” Berthrene explained.

  Geri didn’t show so much as a smidgeon of embarrassment by that explanation of selection as bridesmaid. Instead she held up a brown paper bag.

  “And I brought the hooch,” she said. “You can’t have a wedding without a toast of celebration.”

  “All right!” Les agreed.

  We didn’t ask how a sophomore, no more than a kid really, could come up with liquor. It was a poorly kept, small-town secret that Geri was an underage hostess at the Jitterbug. She had access to anything that was available.

  Les took the bottle from Geri, reached inside the paper to unscrew the cap. He offered a drink to his bride-to-be. Berthrene took a dainty sip, immediately complaining that it burnt her throat. Les chuckled and then tested it himself. He made a face.

  “This is really cheap stuff,” he told Geri.

  She agreed. “But the cheap stuff will get you just as drunk as the stuff that costs more money,” she said.

  Les raised an eyebrow at that and handed the bottle to me. I tasted the whiskey. It had to be 150-proof bathtub Scotch. It nearly choked me to death before I tried to hand it back to Les.

  “Keep it,” he told me. “You’re going to need it, bouncing a hundred miles in the rumble seat.”

  He opened the driver’s side door and Berthrene scooted in.

  Geri looked at me and smiled, a little hesitantly.

  With a sigh of resignation, I handed her the whiskey bottle, stepped on the running board and opened up the small pop-up seat on the back of the car. Once I got in, I turned to her. I took the bottle and then offered a hand in. She scrambled up beside me, showing a goodly amount of shapely leg that I tried not to notice. We scooched together too cosily for my comfort in the tiny seat. I’d ridden back there before, but never with a girl I was avoiding or with a bottle of rotgut.

  “You all okay?” Les asked.

  I nodded and knocked on the window affirmatively. We took off down the highway.

  Beside me Geri said something.

  “What?” I asked her.

  She tried again.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, I knew it was you out here,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t know it was you.”

  I nodded. It was true, and there was really nothing to say about it. I unscrewed the cap on the liquor bottle and took another swig. Les hit a pothole in the road, and I got a little more than I wanted, splashing down my shirt as well as my throat.

  Beside me, Geri was grinning.

  “You’re a crazy girl, do you know that?”

  She agreed.

  I offered her a drink and she took one. Unlike Berthrene, she had no trouble with the burn of cheap booze. The night was dark and black and clear. There was a good-size moon on the horizon. Not a full one, but better than half. It could barely penetrate the trees as we twisted through the farms and woods along old Highway 64. It was too noisy to talk, and we had nothing much to say to each other. We drank our way to Fort Smith. As the night got later and we both got drunker, she snuggled up against me. I should have resisted it. But she was small and sweet and soft. It’s hard for a man to turn up his nose at that, even when he knows that’s what he ought to do.

  To avoid the thoughts that plague a young man of eighteen, I began instead to concentrate on what Les had said to me and to think about the future. I really hoped that he was right. That we would get called up in the next few months. Unlike him, I was looking forward to it with such eager anticipation. I might go to Europe or North Africa, China or the South Pacific. It didn’t matter to me if I only got so far as California or Norfolk. I wanted to get out of Catawah. I wanted to go so much. And I knew that sometimes when you wanted something so much, fate was fickle enough to ensure that you never got it. Like Berthrene. I had loved her from afar for so long. And I would have fought any fellow for her heart. Except of course, Les. Les was my best friend. Because she loved Les, I would bow out. And that was that.

  I couldn’t help but be concerned that my escape through military service might prove to be just as elusive. As I sat, snuggled up with Geri in the rumble seat, the wind blowing in my face, I worried about Doc Phillips, heading up the draft board. He made a house call to see Mama every other week. He knew her condition, her dependency. And he knew I was taking care of her. Was it possible that he’d use that knowledge to make his decision? Suddenly the fea
r that I might get passed over went through me and I shuddered with it like cold. The bottle of whiskey I held was a handy remedy.

  By the time we reached the home of the justice of the peace in Fort Smith, I was very unsteady on my feet, but feeling no pain at all. Les got annoyed with me. He was trying to rouse the guy by politely knocking on the door. I decided it would be quicker just hollering and raising a ruckus on the man’s front lawn. Les, Berthrene, even Geri tried to hush me, but it was my rowdiness that finally got the man to the door.

  Angry and in his bathrobe, the bald, fat man with a muttonchops moustache allowed himself to be placated by Berthrene’s tender pleadings. Within minutes we were ushered into the family’s parlor.

  It was a well-appointed old home with high ceilings and a massive brick fireplace. The lady of the house came down to join us. She seemed totally unperturbed at having her sleep interrupted by a drunken lout and his friends desperate to be married. She was a tall, lanky kind of woman with a horsey face and a long gray-streaked braid hanging down her back. There was a naturalness about her. She had that kind of confidence that kept her as sure of herself in housedress and slippers as she would have been in an elegant gown and tasteful jewels.

  “I can see you young gentlemen are in need of some coffee,” she said as cheerfully as if we were honored guests. “I’ll brew a quick pot. Why don’t you make yourselves comfortable. Augustus will fill out your paperwork.”

  Neither Les nor Berthrene could take a seat. He paced the rug. She managed to stand in one place, but she continued to pick nervously at her fingernails. I glanced over at Geri on the sofa beside me. She looked pale and scared, as well.

  I wasn’t jittery at all. Somehow, in the back of that rumble seat I had come to a momentous decision that I was certain would put my life on the track I longed for. The relief I felt about it had me almost giddy. In fact, I couldn’t recall when I’d felt better. I was so relaxed and the sofa was so soft. I could have easily stretched out and enjoyed a nap.

  “Are you boys joining up?” the judge asked