Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  I’d never ridden in a plane and the only thing I knew about radios was turning the dial to hear Charlie McCarthy. The army shifted me into the air corps and taught me to be a radio operator. I figured out pretty quickly that since there are two ends to a communication and one of them is going to be stuck at base, I applied for and was accepted into gunnery school.

  That was better. I was eighteen years old, not the age to be interested in talking my way through a world war. I wanted to shoot at something, even if it was only a target with a Hitler moustache.

  I guess I was too good, or not good enough. While most of my classmates went on further training on newer planes, by June 1943, with less than a year in service, I found myself shipped to the South Pacific as a replacement.

  The crew didn’t exactly welcome me as a long-lost brother. The first time I saluted my pilot, he looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  “Could they have sent us anybody greener?” he asked rhetorically.

  There were grunts of agreements all around. Then Mugs, a wry-spoken sergeant who was the flight engineer and waist gunner spoke up.

  “We don’t have green in this man’s army, Lieutenant,” he said. “We call it olive drab.”

  That comment provoked hoots of laughter and was the source of my nickname. The fellows began calling me Olive, which quickly and fortunately was shortened to Ollie.

  I remember my first mission in the Martin Upper, the Plexiglas cupola of the plane. I was as excited as I’d ever been.

  “Just do your job, Ollie, and try not to get us killed,” Mugs told me. “Up in the turret you’ve got better than 180 degrees of slight-line, the best view on the plane. We’ve been keeping Libby out of trouble since Guadalcanal. You’re going to have to be alert to do the same.”

  I assured him that I would, with all the bravado expected of a ignorant kid.

  Our plane, Lusty Libby, was a C-class B-24 Liberator. It had four Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines, eight guns, a bomb bay with a maximum load for 8,000 pounds and a seven-man crew. Libby had seen significant action in the Thirteenth Air Force, the Jungle Air Force they called it. And I was anxious to see some action myself.

  For takeoff I crouched down in the fuselage, but I climbed up into my position as quickly as I could. The clear Plexiglas bubble sat atop the plane and could be rotated in any direction. I sat on what could only be described as a bicycle seat and spun around, taking in the sight. It was beautiful, it was incredible. It was more fascinating and exhilarating and totally thrilling than anything I’d ever done in my life. I’d been in plenty of planes in training, but I’d never actually trained in the Martin. And I’d never been over the water before, the sea and the sky both brilliantly blue. I thought it was wonderful…for about five minutes, until I realized how dad-gummed cramped and miserable it was. The sun came directly through the Plexiglas cooking me, but the air blowing up from below was freezing.

  Down below I could hear Mugs and Jedlowski laughing at me.

  “Now you know why you get the upper.”

  “Yeah, newest guy, lousiest position.”

  That’s how they felt, but not me. I had the best view in the whole war. When we were strafing for landing assists, I saw the guys running up on the beaches with nothing but a gun and guts. I was very happy to be above the fray. I sat in the Martin Upper basically for the duration. And when you’re fighting, you’re not hot or cold. You’re just acting on training and instinct and you keep at it.

  In the next six months, I got good at my job. We saw lots of action. We were the heavy bomber in the area, flying in support at six thousand feet. Bombing is a strange business. Flying in tight formation, all the way to the target, you know you’re just an explosion waiting to happen. Any fighter with a half-good shot can blow you all the way to kingdom come. And you’re likely to take the next plane with you when you go. There’s a heaviness. You can feel it in your chest, you can hear it in the voices of the crew on the radio. And when the pilot gives over control to the bombardier, you hold your breath. Then it’s bombs away. And strangely your fear goes with them. The lightened plane lifts and your spirit does, too. Of course, the danger is not over, but somehow, because you’ve completed your mission, you have confidence that you can withstand anything that happens. And things do happen.

  In the Pacific we also did a lot of near-ground-level strafing, just above the small arms fire, but too low for ack-ack, the anti-aircraft guns. I liked that. I hated the ack-ack. I’d much rather be shot outright by another fighter. But the worst for me was flak, the impact-bursting shells shot into the air just hung there, suspended, waiting for a plane to fly in to explode. Just seeing the stuff made my skin crawl. Sometimes the whole sky seemed filled with the small black clouds. If we were alone we could pull up or down, but if we were in formation, we just had to hold position and fly right into it.

  Up on the top, I could always see it coming. For me, the helplessness of that was worse than a squad of zeros homing in. But then, fighting the fighters was my job. On short runs we’d have escorts, fighter planes whose mission was to keep the enemy away from us. But in the Pacific, distances were great and the flying range of those tough fighter planes was not. Once we got too far, we were out on our own.

  My position was the watch on top, making sure no fighters slipped in over us to get a bead. I had two .50-caliber guns that could shoot five hundred rounds per minute. Of course, you couldn’t do that for long or they’d get hot enough to burn through your gloves. Short bursts were best. Short bursts, on target. After a time or two I didn’t even have to remind myself. It became as natural as breathing.

  As time went on and missions were completed, I came to truly like my perch in the Martin. And I had ample opportunity to give it over to someone else. We got two new crew members in that time. Dupre came down with malaria and was sent to the field hospital in Espiritu Santo.

  “See,” Mugs told me. “You don’t need a war to die in this place. You can go from natural causes.”

  Dupre didn’t die, he got better, but they sent him home.

  Hawkins, our bombardier, was taken out by a zero over Bougainville. The Jap plane was coming straight at us. He had a thick trail running behind him, so he probably knew he was gone. I didn’t really notice when Hawkins bought it, but I just looked that pilot in the face and kept firing. I must have hit something, because his plane blew up and we flew straight through the pieces of it. Something hit my turret and nearly knocked me out of place. But I was fine, the Plexiglas was only scratched and we got the kill. I didn’t know until we were nearly back to Henderson that Hawkins was dead. Mugs and I cleaned his brains and blood out of the greenhouse nose. Even without that, the trail of bullet holes in the plastic told the story.

  He wasn’t the first guy I knew who died. It was a war and guys were dying every day. You expected it, you got used to it. But a crew is like a family when you’re fighting. It was like a death in the family.

  I found myself thinking a lot about family. Guys talked about that the most, their homes, their wives, their girlfriends. Surprisingly, in that beautiful place, among interesting people and more excitement than you could ever really enjoy, the thing that meant the most to me and that I appreciated most were Geri’s letters from home.

  She wrote me every day, but they’d arrive in a great big bundle. I would pounce on them like a starving man and then linger over every word as if it were an endless banquet.

  “Crazy Girl,” I often muttered under my breath.

  I loved hearing from her. I thought it was just the lure of the familiar. Hearing about places and people that I’d known all my life. And the news was always good. She’d bought some brooder chickens, and they were big and fat and in high demand. The spring rains had been just about right and she’d canned string beans and crookneck squash till she thought her arms would fall off. She put by sixteen quarts of peaches from the tree in the backyard and two dozen pints of pickled beets, half sweet, half sour. Sitting on a tropical beach w
ith all the coconut and breadfruit a man could eat in a lifetime, my mouth watered for those pickled beets back home. She’d been able to share her meat rations with her sisters. She’d gotten Mama to get outside and help with the victory garden. And Berthrene was in the family way.

  I read each letter with a smile on my face. They were all signed the same way, “Your wife who’s waiting for you at home, Geraldine.”

  If she meant to fill me with guilt, the line worked very well.

  From a distance I heard music playing. I looked up and down the beach line and out into the sea. It seemed to be coming from that direction, but there was nothing out there but some PTs and an L-10. No horns or clarinets, but the sound of Benny Goodman playing a sad and sentimental “Hour of Parting” floated clear and crisp on the morning air.

  Then the unbearable beauty of the South Pacific faded back into the memory that it was, and I knew I was in the hospital once more. That strange dark hospital where the big band music played in the hallways.

  Friday, June 10, 5:30 p.m.

  Jack had slept through the buzzing of the cell phone, the padding of his wife around the house, the smell of coffee brewing, but when he heard the footsteps of an unknown person sneaking around the house as quietly as possible, all his senses came on alert. He opened his eyes and was on his feet in one motion. But he was saved from some ancient midbrain fight-or-flight response by the sound of his wife opening the wash porch door for the supposed intruder.

  “Hi there,” Claire said. “Can I help you with that?”

  “I was just leaving this on the step for you,” the stranger answered. “Everybody thought you’d still be asleep and we didn’t want you to wake up hungry.”

  Jack sighed with relief and flopped face-first down on the bed once more. He was exhausted, physically and emotionally. His muscles ached from the long night in the hospital’s chairs. He stretched that ache across the bed as far as he could. What he really wanted was a nice long swim.

  He relaxed into the memory of it. He didn’t actually recall his first venture into the water. He did remember lessons at the club. And he’d liked it immediately. The splashing around, jumping off the diving board or going down the slide. It was all fun. But ultimately it was the silence that lured him in. When the laughing kids and scolding mothers and competing radios got to be too much, he’d slip into that cocoon of silence under the water. The rest of the world didn’t disappear. But it would be muffled, distant and of no concern. That’s what he wanted this morning, the sanctuary of the swim.

  It had been surprising to him how accepted his interest in swimming turned out to be. His mother and Ernst were most often disparaging of things that appealed to him. The two were either completely befuddled or openly critical. They always made great efforts to steer him in some more acceptable direction. To their way of thinking, why would he want to disassemble the lawn mower when he could play chess instead?

  With swimming, however, they seemed very pleased. They immediately got him a private trainer, which took some of the fun out of it, but nothing could obliterate the temporary escape the water provided.

  By high school he was making an impressive showing at almost every meet. He was fast off the blocks and could rack up decent times on any of the strokes. But it was the distances that he loved, distance where he really shined. He was at his best in the fifteen hundred meters. It was a length that coaches often meted out as punishment, but for Jack it was pure pleasure.

  Swimming had another benefit back then: it gave Jack an identity. Everybody had to be in some group. By virtue of the swim team, Jack was a jock. With that designation came its own expectations. Fortunately, those were expectations Jack could live with. Jocks didn’t worry too much about grades. Jocks didn’t need other activities or organizations. Jocks got girls just on the strength of being jocks.

  So Jack allowed himself to be absorbed into the whole persona of being a swimming jock. And part of that meant narrowing his world to pools. In sophomore year, when Ernst and his mother discussed with him the possibility of volunteering at the hospital in the summer, Jack quickly acquired his lifeguard certification and lined up a full-time job from June to August. By senior year he was part-timing for the City Parks Department pools year-round. So it really wasn’t that miraculous that he was given the assistant manager job of Dellview Pool that first summer he was home from college. He opened and closed the facility, ran the receipts for both the gate and the snack shack and supervised all the personnel, including the lifeguards.

  That was how he had gotten to know Claire. He had noticed her the minute she’d walked onto the deck. It was not just that she was female or had a nice figure. Almost half the staff were girls and all of them looked good. There was some indefinable difference that had caught his attention. Maybe it was the modest one-piece swimsuit. Or it was the quality of her speech, slightly more precise than the rest of girls’. As one of the crew had put it, “She has no twang in her Texas.”

  Or perhaps it was some vague exotic quality that Jack liked. She was not like the other girls. And Jack was very sensitive to being an outsider.

  At first he was only trying to make her welcome, to ensure that she felt included. Within only a few days it had become something more. He really liked talking to her. She was so smart and interesting and upbeat. People immediately loved her. He found that he did, too.

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked him.

  “Two brothers.”

  “Are they like you?”

  Jack shook his head. “Not at all,” he answered. “They’re both geeky science guys. Middle school scholars, pasty white and addicted to Dungeons & Dragons.”

  She laughed, open and throaty. It was a clean sound and at the same time very sexy.

  “Still,” she told him, “it must be nice to have siblings.”

  He shrugged an agreement. “You’re an only child?”

  “More than just only,” she answered. “I’m an only child sent to boarding school. Therefore, I refer to myself by the technical name alonely child.”

  Jack chuckled. “Sounds pitiful enough,” he said.

  Claire nodded feigning seriousness. “Yes, indeed, all the downside of being an orphan without the glimmer of hope that someday a loving adoptive family will come and take you home.”

  “Hey, being raised in the bosom of the nuclear family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, either,” he declared. “Especially when you really don’t fit in all that well.”

  “You don’t fit in with your family?”

  “You’ve heard the story of the swan raised by ducks, right? I’m the duck raised among a family of swans,” he said. “I just go quacking along being myself and my parents give each other these horrified looks of ‘Where did we go wrong?’!”

  Jack smiled as he remembered that first fun summer they shared together. He hadn’t meant to fall so hard for Claire, but he’d found her admiration for him, her belief in him, very hard to resist.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” she called from the back bedroom door. “I thought I heard you stirring around in there.”

  Jack propped himself up on his elbows. “I woke thinking the barbarians were storming the castle and I needed to rescue my damsel in distress. But then I heard you taking care of it. How are the barbarians, by the way?”

  “They brought home-cooked food,” Claire answered. “It was very nice of them.”

  Jack sighed. “They probably feel about restaurants the same way they feel about motels,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” she chided him. “Staying here in Bud and Geri’s house is very homey. And I much prefer eating home-cooking in my pajamas over having to go out and find a restaurant.”

  Jack could hardly argue that, so he didn’t.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked instead.

  “Starving.”

  “Well, let’s see what they brought us.”

  Jack rolled out of bed and slipped into his signature khaki shorts and padded bare
foot into the kitchen.

  Claire was unpacking a brown cardboard box and inspecting the contents of all of the containers. Jack immediately pitched in to help her.

  Some things went into the cabinet, some into the refrigerator and some things straight onto the table. Claire rounded up a couple of plates, and Jack attempted to relearn the technology of ice-cube trays, as they put together a meal.

  He couldn’t remember the last time they had worked together on such a mundane task. When they were newlyweds, every breakfast was a team effort, every supper was a collaboration. When had they stopped doing that, and why?

  She filled him in on her call to his mother. He wasn’t surprised that the kids were doing fine. Though he had mixed feelings about the news that they were doing rounds with his father and brothers. Jack had never really liked the hospital that much, though he had craved the attention he had received at the side of his stepfather. Everyone from the custodian to the hospital administrator knew Ernst’s name and treated him with respect. Jack had basked in the glow of that.

  “Who is this little fellow?” a pretty blond nurse had asked once.

  “I’m his son!” Jack piped in the answer in a youthful soprano.

  The nurse seemed momentarily surprised.

  “Stepson,” Ernst corrected.

  “Oh.” The nurse laughed as if that explained everything. “I was wondering about all that gorgeous dark hair.”

  She ran her fingers through it and smiled at him. Jack remembered that, but the feeling of the moment stood out stronger than the features of her face. His stepfather had not claimed him. Ernst was not his dad and even strangers had a right to that information.

  “Why can’t he just be my father, too?” Jack had asked his mother so many times.

  “Because you already have a father,” she answered.

  But Jack didn’t want his father, the dead father. He wanted Ernst, the cool father, to be his father.

  He only hoped that his own children wouldn’t end up feeling the same. “I could take the kids to work with me sometime,” he said to Claire.