Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  I was philosophical when I watched them racing around carrying plastic guns and pretending to shoot each other with great enthusiasm. It was just a game, I assured myself. Girls play with dolls and boys play with guns. That’s just the way it is growing up.

  “Were you in the war, Daddy?” J.D. asked me one time over the supper table.

  I was momentarily mute, so Geri filled in for me. “Of course Daddy was in the war,” she said, laughing lightly. “Almost all the daddies were.”

  J.D. nodded solemnly. “Lester’s father, his real father, was killed in the war.”

  “I know,” I answered. “Lester’s father was my best friend.”

  J.D.’s little eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Really and truly?”

  I nodded.

  “I’d make Lester my best friend,” J.D. suggested, “but he’s a lot older than me. I don’t know if he’d want a younger kid for a best friend.”

  “I thought Kevin was your best friend.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t want to give up Kev for a boy who’s older and that you don’t know so well.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “A boy can have lots of friends,” I assured him.

  “What did you do?”

  “Huh?”

  “In the war, Daddy, what did you do?”

  I tried to form appropriate words in my head.

  “Phil’s pop was a leatherneck and Kevin’s dad was a swab jockey. What did you do?”

  “I rode in a plane,” I answered.

  “An airplane!” J.D. exclaimed. “You rode in an airplane?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s neat!” Across the table I exchanged a glance with Geri. J.D. seemed delighted with what he’d learned. I hoped then that I would never have to say more.

  But that wasn’t to be the end of it. I suppose it was their generation. Maybe it was the comic books or the movies or TV, but our youngsters seemed fascinated with the war of their fathers.

  I remember lying on my garden cot and listening to the boys playing in the yard. I was amazed that sites like Anzio and Omaha Beach cropped up in the game along with the persistent verbal “rat-ta-tat-tat” of their weapons. They were just children and their war was make-believe. I took comfort in that.

  By age eight, J.D. and his buddies were all heavily involved in Boy Scouts. It was in my workshed that he earned his merit badges for woodworking, electricity and gardening. When the troop went for their overnight camping trip out to Sand Hills, I volunteered to chaperone. I figured I was perfect for the job, since I knew all the kids, I liked the outdoors and I would be awake all night long. Though there would be swimming, and I made it clear that I didn’t swim and I wouldn’t lifeguard. I didn’t even want to be a spectator when the boys were in the water.

  Frank Trotter had cleaned up his rough and rowdy ways and now served as the scout leader. He accepted my limitations and assigned me to stay at the camp. I had expected that and I was pleased.

  What I hadn’t expected was the talk around the campfire at night.

  I thought there would be ghost stories and jokes, but Frank was more serious than that. He’d done time at a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and he apparently thought it was important to share some of that experience with the boys.

  “The first day they brought me a bowl of rice,” he said. “And I said to myself, ‘I can’t eat this, it’s full of maggots!’” The boys universally made a sound of disgust. “About the third day, I was so hungry, I began picking the maggots out and eating it anyway.” The boys expressions were grim. “By the end of the week, I was looking through that bowl, eagerly eating the maggots first. They were the best part—that’s where all the protein was going to be.”

  Frank was a good storyteller and a likable guy. Just his good humor about survival was an important lesson. But I was totally taken aback that night when he turned his attention to me.

  “You know,” he said. “Mr. Crabtree is also a veteran. He was in a bomber wing that was responsible for protecting more than eight million miles of Pacific from the enemy. They fought from Guadalcanal to Tokyo.”

  “Were you a pilot?” one of the scouts asked.

  “I was a gunner and backup radio operator on a B-24.”

  “That’s safer than being in the infantry,” Tommy Giest said. “My dad was in the infantry.”

  “The infantry is very close up,” Frank told the boy. “And I’m sure your dad’s record is impressive. But bombing is actually a very dangerous job. The air corps had a high casualty rate.”

  “Maybe because the enemy didn’t have to shoot you right in the chest,” Kevin O’Neil piped in. “If they just knocked a big old plane out of the sky that was enough. Yyyyyyyyyyy-pow! You’re dead.”

  “If you’re a gunner, then you’re knocking the Japs out of the sky, right?” Bucky Williams exclaimed. “How many did you kill?”

  I was so taken aback that I didn’t answer. I never talked about the war. Once I arrived in Catawah, I’d been determined to keep my “kills” all in the past. Frank misinterpreted my hesitance.

  “Boys, you don’t ask a soldier about killing,” he said. “Soldiers keep count of missions flown, aircraft downed, positions overrun and targets neutralized. Killing is the unfortunate necessity of war, it’s nothing a man takes a bow for.”

  All the eager scouts looked appropriately solemn by his words, except for Bucky who just seemed as much annoyed as sobered.

  My eyes immediately went to J.D. He was just a little boy. He didn’t need to know anything about war and soldiers and killing. I wanted to protect him from this, to keep him from knowing anything at all about it. But his expression was one I hadn’t expected. He was looking at me with undisguised awe.

  “Did you win any medals?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, hesitantly. “Like almost everybody who’s been in combat, I have a few. I…I was awarded the Bronze Star in Okinawa.”

  “Wow!” the word was uttered in a chorus of awed respect.

  “What did you get those others for?” Kevin asked.

  “My unit,” I began slowly, “bombed and strafed our way from the Solomons to the Philippines. I received one for an air strike against a place called Truk. Another for bombing oil refineries in Borneo.”

  I hadn’t wanted to talk about the war. I never wanted to talk about the war. But now, looking at the admiration in my son’s eyes, I fooled myself into believing that there was no danger in toying with those demons.

  “Man, I’d really like to see those,” Bucky said.

  “Me, too,” J.D. admitted.

  That night, as all the boys slept in their pup tents, I tended the fire and arranged my thoughts. Why not show the medals, why not grasp the good in the memories that I was working so hard to be free from? Both the American Legion and the VFW had invited me to join. I’d avoided them both. I didn’t want to wear a uniform cap and hang out with the fellows who could talk about the good ol’ days in combat. Those who returned were divided into two groups. The ones who wanted always to remember and those who wanted nothing more than to forget.

  I was staunchly among the latter, but now I was thinking that maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was good for our boys to admire us. To recognize our sacrifice. To remember friends like Les, who we lost. If I did that, then maybe it could all end up making sense. That somehow we could render down all the horror and have nothing left but honor.

  I talked to Geri about it.

  “Your dreams are less frequent now,” she pointed out. “You seem much more rested, more healthy than before.”

  I nodded agreement. “I feel a lot better. I only have the nightmares maybe once, sometimes twice a week now.”

  “So I guess they might just get to fewer and fewer until they go away completely,” she said.

  That seemed like a reasonable assumption to me. Geri had made it happen. I felt that I was more alive than dead. And part of being alive was seeing the war the way that the p
eople around me now saw it, a great and glorious victory for democracy, a noble triumph of good over evil. If the gory, gritty details of how that came about were lost to memory, then so much the better.

  That next weekend I showed J.D. my service medals. I usually slept while Geri and J.D. went to church. But that day I didn’t sleep. I got the shoe box out from under the bed and after Sunday dinner I spread the contents of it on the dining room table.

  J.D.’s eyes were as big as saucers.

  “You’re a hero,” he told me in an awed whisper.

  “No,” I assured him. “I just did my job.”

  I don’t think he even heard me. His eyes were completely filled with shiny metal and bright strands of ribbon. We looked through all of it. The Air Medal with its bronze clusters, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the Victory Ribbon, the Good Conduct and Marksmanship medals and, of course, the Bronze Star.

  That one attracted J.D. immediately, but because of his time in Boy Scouts, he knew that sometimes the ribbons meant as much as the flashier medals. He asked questions about everything. I answered factually, but not completely. I told him what it all was, but never revealed what it all meant. Or who I’d been back then. And I never mentioned anything about the water.

  “What about the Bronze Star?” J.D. asked. “They only give that for something special.”

  I answered that easily. It had happened late in the war, and when I thought about it, I felt next to nothing.

  “We’d completed our mission, dropped off our escort and we were headed back to base. Our plane was in the back of the formation. For some reason I looked over to my left and in the distance I saw a zero. He didn’t seem interested in us, and I realized that he was too far from home to ever get back and that he was headed in the direction of the carriers supporting the landing. There was nobody in the sky but us. So we pulled out of formation flew over and took him out before he could kamikaze himself into the carrier.”

  “Did you shoot him out of the sky yourself?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I think so. But the whole crew got the kill.”

  The pride in the boy’s eyes almost unmanned me. “He was a dead man already,” I tried to explain. “He’d already made that decision. We just made sure that he went out alone, not taking a bunch of our guys with him.”

  J.D. nodded gravely.

  “Why don’t you ever talk about the war, Daddy?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I try not to live in the past. I want to spend my time thinking about you and your mama and what we do today.”

  He accepted my answer, but his brow was furrowed. I knew he really didn’t understand.

  “But when you’ve done something big like this,” he said. “When you’ve been a hero, people ought to know that.”

  “I’m not a hero,” I told him again.

  “I guess what you mean is like what Mr. Trotter says sometimes. The real heroes didn’t come back.”

  That wasn’t truly what I meant, but I wasn’t sure I understood myself. It wasn’t going to be possible to explain it to my son. At least not then. When he’s older, I promised myself. When he’s older I’ll try to tell him everything.

  Until then, I tried to make him proud. I joined the American Legion, hung out with the aging G.I.s and did volunteer work for my community. I found it to be a significant strain, but I marched in parades and served as honor guard at funerals. Either of these duties during waking hours was likely to result in more water dreams in my sleep.

  Things finally made a turn for the better in the early sixties. With the organization of our local civil defense, I found my niche. American Legion volunteers constructed the alarm tower at the highest point in town, just east of the cemetery. Though supposedly built to protect Catawah from a Soviet nuclear attack, CD mostly kept watch for spring weather and bad storms. By taking on civil defense as my civic duty, I was freed from sharing war stories with the guys. I was still a man my son could look up to, without having to look back on the past. Instead, I was high on the tower above it all, and I kept my eyes and my binoculars on the horizon, looking for danger.

  But of course, I never saw it coming.

  The music was playing again. I was in that dad-gummed hospital where the music played. And I knew all the words as I listened to the song “It’s Easy To Remember and So Hard To Forget.”

  I could hear the hiss of the machine on my face and the consistent beeping of the monitors. There was someone in the room with me. It was a woman. I couldn’t see her, of course, but I could smell a feminine perfume. Was it a nurse? No, there was nothing professional about this person. She was holding my hand and she was talking to me. I tried to focus on her. I really tried to hear what she was saying to me, but the music was too loud. It completely drowned out every word.

  Monday, June 13, 9:37 a.m.

  Jack and Claire met up with the doctor just as he was leaving Bud’s room. The man had his head down and might have walked right past if Jack hadn’t stopped him.

  “How is my grandfather?” he asked.

  The doctor gave a shrug that was not at all reassuring. “He’s about the same. He’s not really improving, but he’s still hanging in there.”

  He gave Jack a pat on the shoulder that felt more like condescension than compassion. Jack was grinding his teeth unpleasantly as he entered the room. Bud lay propped up on one side facing away from the door. The change in position gave the impression of movement, but Jack had already learned that his grandfather had to be turned regularly to prevent bedsores. The long blue hose down his throat had been replaced with a clear mask over his face. His wrists were still tied to the rail and a brace on his head had been added to keep his thrashing to a minimum. It was a strange helplessness for a man who’d always been so active.

  It made Jack sick to his stomach to see it, and his reaction to his feelings was to take a seat across the room and retrieve his cell phone from his pocket. He knew Claire was looking at him reprovingly, but he refused to meet her gaze. Instead he pressed the speed-dial code for his office.

  Laura picked up. “Swim Infinity.”

  “Hi, it’s me,” Jack said, expecting correctly that she could always recognize the boss’s voice. “Everything going along well there?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered. Her tone was slightly off. “The crew is out at the Jacobsons’. They’re filling the pool this morning and finishing up the landscape. Miguel was having some trouble with the client. She’s complaining about the sago palms. She wants them planted closer together, but he says they have got to have room to grow.”

  “Miguel’s right,” Jack told her. “I’ll call Mrs. Jacobson and convince her.”

  “Great. Josh and Crenshaw are at the Guillermos’. They were supposed to do the pour at seven-thirty this morning, but as of a half hour ago, the truck still hadn’t shown up.”

  Jack focused on what Laura was saying, but his eyes watched Claire as she sat beside Bud’s bed. Holding his hand and chatting with him like she always did.

  “Have you followed up with the cement company?”

  “I called when he called me,” she answered.

  “Well, keep calling. Call every fifteen minutes and remind them how many guys we have over there that are on the clock.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Ah…no, not really.”

  She didn’t sound that sure.

  “Let me talk to Dana,” Jack said.

  It was almost imperceptible, but Jack could tell that Claire was listening as soon as she heard the name mentioned.

  “Well…ah…she’s not here.”

  “Oh. Where is she?”

  “I…I really don’t know.”

  “Did she just step out?”

  “She…well…she never came in this morning.”

  That revelation momentarily left Jack speechless. After perhaps a ten-second pause he recovered. “Did she call in sick?”

  “No, she didn’t call in.”

  “
Did you call her?”

  “Yes, I did. But she didn’t pick up.”

  “How many times have you tried?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. “Maybe ten times. I’ve left her voice mails on both her home phone and her cell and sent a red-flagged e-mail to her BlackBerry.”

  “That’s strange,” Jack said. “Well, she must be really busy with something. I’m sure she’ll call in when she gets the chance. And I’ll try her myself later.”

  He hung up. Glancing up, he saw Claire watching him. Their eyes met and there was disapproval all over her face. She quickly looked back to Bud and began talking again.

  Jack placed a metaphorical chip firmly on his shoulder. He was making a living. He was supporting his family. That was what a man was supposed to do. And the man’s wife shouldn’t be trying to guilt him about it.

  He made his other calls, deliberately taking his time. He spent twice as much discussion on the sago palms as necessary, verified the arrival of the cement truck with Josh, and then, after unsuccessfully trying to contact Dana, finally slipped the telephone in his pocket.

  Jack glared over at Claire defiantly. She looked just about ready for a fight. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, they both detected the telltale sound of a person scooting down the hallway.

  “It’s one of the aunts,” Claire warned just before the door opened.

  Jack found himself sitting up straighter as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  Aunt Viv shuffled in on her walker with the yellow tennis balls; a big brown purse was hitched to the front like a saddlebag. The old lady was out of breath, but she smiled when she saw them.

  “Oh good, I caught you two,” she said. “These dad-gummed hospitals are as bad as airports on keeping one thing as far as possible from everything else. And this rattletrap of a metal horse of mine just has one speed.”