Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

  “Toni told me that she left you with Bud and Geri when she moved back to San Antonio and went to college,” Claire said. “You lived with them until after she’d married Ernst. So you must have been four, maybe five years old.”

  Jack just sat still, staring at the highway in front of him.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked finally. “Maybe you misunderstood my mother.”

  “No, we talked about it a couple of days ago.”

  He continued to drive in silence. Claire didn’t want to say any more. She wondered if she should try to change the subject. But that seemed wrong. The facts had been ignored too long already.

  Finally Jack spoke. “You know, I don’t have any memory of life with my mom as a single parent,” he said. “When I try to think back to preschool childhood, I can’t come up with anything that doesn’t include Ernst. I guess the reason that it always seemed as if my stepfather was there is because he always was.”

  “But you don’t have any memories of being here, with Bud and Geri?”

  “Yes, I have a few,” he admitted. “Since we’ve been here, there’ve been some things that have seemed somehow special. And that memory I told you about, when Mom came to pick me up in Ernst’s blue caddy. That must have been when I went back to stay with her.”

  He hesitated again.

  “The things I recall, from way back, they’re all loving, good things. So I must have liked being with them.”

  “So they had to love you,” Claire stated.

  He shrugged. “I guess so, back then. But something happened, somehow I didn’t live up to things.”

  “Of course you have,” she insisted. “They were always so proud of you.”

  He shook his head. “There’s only one thing that I really feel confident about being able to do well, and that’s building swimming pools. They wouldn’t let me do that for them.”

  Bud

  The hissing sound awoke me with a start. The raft couldn’t lose any more air. It’d already lost too much last night. If I wasn’t vigilant, my safe haven would collapse beneath me. I’d be back in the water. I’d be back in the water, like Lt. Randel. I put my finger over the hole once more and screamed at the ache in my arm and my back. The position I had to maintain to keep my hand over the leak was excruciating. Exposure to the salt and the sun had made my skin raw. I felt as if I were covered in boils. I no longer could think about rational reasons to stay alive. I was surviving on instinct and even that will was beginning to fail me.

  Would it really be worse back in the sea, treading water, than in the leaky raft, forced to maintain an immovable position?

  Randel, the answer reverberated in my head. Remember Randel. It was my own fault. If I’d taken Randel’s life vest, he would have drifted to the bottom of the sea. But I hadn’t taken the vest. And Randel’s body had bobbed and floated on the waves. Sometimes it was far. Then I would look up again and it would be close. I kept my eyes on it. Somehow I couldn’t look away. So I was glad when the sun began to lower on the horizon. I would be in darkness, unable to see the remnants of a man floating near by.

  I hadn’t counted on the glow in the water. I hadn’t thought about the predators under the surface.

  “No!” I screamed into the sunshine as the memory assaulted me. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to see Lt. Randel. I began to cry again. I hadn’t thought I had enough water left inside me to shed more tears. But I did.

  Randel was already dead, I reminded myself. He was already dead and you can’t hurt the dead. It’s the only way to be truly safe, to be untouchable. I longed to be safely dead. I envied my crewmates. I was jealous of nameless marines I’d seen strewn across beaches. I even begrudged my own sweet Geri her final rest.

  Wait, Geri was not dead. Yes, yes, she was. I realized I was not in that raft in the Pacific. I was here in the hospital. The hospital with the music. And the stabbing muscle cramps I felt in my arms, back were in the here and now, not the long ago.

  I’d made it back from that raft in the Solomon Sea. Back, more dead than alive. Truly more dead. I’d considered myself dead. And by being dead, I’d had no fear of dying. And with no fear of dying, heroism had come easy.

  “Zero at seven o’clock,” I hollered into the radio. “He’s headed out to sea.”

  “Does he see us?” the copilot asked.

  “He doesn’t care about us,” I answered, knowing it was true. “He’s too far out to have fuel to go back. He’s headed for the convoy. He’s going to kamikaze himself.”

  “Damn,” I heard someone say.

  “Is there a way we can warn them?” someone else asked.

  “Where are the fighters?”

  “They’re already circling the field.”

  “We’re too slow to catch him,” the copilot said.

  Captain Price wasn’t so pessimistic.

  “If we angle that direction at about sixty degrees, we might be able to intercept. What do you think, McSween?”

  “It’ll be close, sir,” he answered, after the slightest hesitation.

  “Captain, I’ll get him if you can get me close,” I promised.

  He banked the big bomber and we flew in low. Our top speed was three hundred miles per hour and the zero was pushing that or better. I could see him the entire way. He never saw me. He never once glanced to the left or to the right. He was a dead man. He’d already decided that. But he wanted to take some of our guys out with him. What he couldn’t know was that I was a dead man, too. And I was taking as many with me as I could, as well.

  He was a little faster than we thought. We were a little slower than we hoped. We came in well over a mile behind him.

  From the greenhouse nose the bombardier cursed. “We missed him.”

  “I got him,” I assured the captain.

  “You’ll never hit him at this distance,” someone else said.

  “We’ve come this far and I’ve got plenty of ammo,” I replied.

  “Knock him out of the sky,” the captain ordered.

  I did just that. I put so many holes in the tail and fuselage, it must have been like trying to fly a block of Swiss cheese. The bombardier was also shooting, and the zero burst into flames.

  He went down into the water within sight of the ships.

  Through the radio headphones I could hear the other guys cheering. I felt nothing. Dead men don’t have feelings.

  But it was hard to get that across to anyone. I wouldn’t have even tried to explain it to J.D. And I didn’t.

  On gray, rainy days he would go get the shoe box from underneath the bed and he would lay the medals and ribbons and assorted paraphernalia on the table to examine it.

  For the first few times he’d ask questions.

  “Now what’s this one?”

  “That’s the American Defense Ribbon.”

  “Oh yeah, right. American Defense Ribbon.”

  But quickly he knew them better than I did.

  It was all harmless, I told myself. Little boys like to play soldier. And I made sure that it was never too much a game. I reminded him of all the men, like Les, who hadn’t come back. And that instilled the proper reverence, but I still worried. Geri waved away my concerns.

  “He’s a child,” she reminded me. “Children need to be proud of their parents.”

  I knew she spoke from her own heart. Her father, who’d been the town joke for her entire lifetime, passed away that winter of 1959. His six daughters had been devastated. In the strange way that they always decided things, they refused to have Darby Shertz transported from the church in a hearse.

  “Daddy always hated being shut up in cars,” she explained to me.

  Instead, the pallbearers had loaded his coffin onto the pushcart that he’d rolled a million miles through the dusty streets of Catawah for one last trip through town.

  We walked behind it.

  But in our little, small-minded town a funeral procession was not enough to restore a man’s dignity. I could hear the
young boys call out as we passed them on the street corners.

  “Dirty Shirts!”

  “Did you bury him in a dirty shirt?”

  “He’s finally off to that laundry in the sky.”

  They laughed at their own cruel jokes. I wanted to jump out of the procession and race over and break somebody’s nose.

  Instead, I took my cue from those women. With heads high and stance proud, they followed that coffin, deaf and blind to anything or anyone outside their circle of mourners. Even J.D., walking with his cousins, Julie and Leo and Bernard, gave no inkling of having heard the hecklers.

  We were all deliberately dry-eyed as the old man’s body was lowered to his final resting place. The Shertz daughters gave no outward clue to the grief that simmered below the surface.

  That evening after visiting with family and eating a hasty dinner, J.D. announced that he was tired and going to sleep. It was more than two hours before his bedtime. And he rarely adhered to the requirement without complaint. Worried, I followed him into his room to tuck him in.

  “You want me to read something?” I asked.

  He was way too old for bedtime stories, but I felt I needed to distract him somehow.

  I shouldn’t have worried. Even with oversized front teeth and dressed in cowboy pajamas, J.D. was wise. He shook his head.

  “I think Mama needs to cry about Grandpa,” he told me. “She won’t do it in front of me. It’s important to be brave about family things, but I don’t want her to have to be brave any longer.”

  His insight stunned me. That he looked so much like her, with his tousled brown hair and pointed chin, was an accident of his birth. That he understood his mother so well was a beautiful gift.

  I kissed him on the forehead. “Goodnight, son.”

  He rolled over on his right side and I tucked the covers around his shoulders.

  I found Geri cleaning up in the kitchen. I opened my arms and she slipped into them, allowing all her emotion to come pouring out. I don’t think I had realized until then how good it felt to give comfort. In our marriage I was so often on the receiving end. But that night I held her as she sobbed and shook and relinquished all the grief and hurt and loss she felt. I knew that she’d long since forgiven her father for being the man that he was. That night I think she was finally able to forgive herself for being ashamed of him.

  It was late at night when she finally fell into an exhausted sleep. I got up and walked to work. Up Bee Street toward town. It was a Friday night and the Jitterbug was busy. But the music had changed. There were no swing bands coming into town now. The place had become a honky-tonk. And all the songs were for crying into your beer.

  I had no reason to cry. I wasn’t dead anymore. I’d gotten a new life. A life I’d never expected and one I knew I didn’t deserve. My dreams still haunted me from time to time. But they were just dreams now and I was no longer afraid of them.

  In the weeks after the funeral, Geri and her sisters made an unexpected discovery. In the back of the kitchen pantry, behind the flour barrel and umpteen jars of homemade preserves, they found a half dozen one-pound coffee cans. Each one stuffed solid with paper money. And from the looks of it, much of it had been buried in those cans for years. The sisters were completely dumbfounded. Their father had lived the life of the poorest of paupers. For years they took turns paying his light bill. Every Easter they’d taken up a collection among themselves to pay his taxes. The only clothes he owned were other people’s castoffs. His pantry stayed full because of the generosity of his daughters and their husbands. And now, now that it was too late to ask any questions, they discovered that he had more money than any of them. Counted up, the cash in the cans amounted to more than $30,000, a fortune at that time.

  Geri put her share in a savings account at the bank.

  “That’s going to be your college money,” she told J.D. “No one’s ever going to tell you that you can’t afford to finish your education.”

  The little guy nodded, unconcerned about the future.

  “So when you go to college you can study what you like,” I tried explaining further. “You can be a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, whatever you want.”

  He smiled up at me.

  “I just want to be like you, Daddy,” he said.

  My heart caught in my throat.

  “I’ll expect more from you than that,” I said, trying to make a joke of his words. But I was serious.

  “Well, it’s way too soon for you to decide,” Geri piped in. “And besides, I was hoping that you’d follow family footsteps into the trash business. Whether those are family footsteps or someone just tracking in, either way, you’re a natural for it. Your room is always littered.”

  J.D. giggled along with his apology. “Sorry, Mom.”

  It was too early, I suppose, to think about his future. But the future has a way of rushing toward you when you least expect it.

  In the fall of 1965 the newspaper went from a daily to a weekly and my job disappeared. I kicked around that winter, trying to find work I could do that had decent pay that allowed me to be on the night shift. I finally got hired on to do sorting at the post office substation in Glenpool. There was a strange camaraderie at the place. Lots of aging G.I.s like me. No one ever spoke about it, but I felt strongly that I was not the only soul in the place who was still haunted by the past. Geri worried about me making the long drive every night and morning. And we talked about selling the house and moving closer. But home was home. And J.D. was growing up among his aunts and uncles and cousins. And we thought that was a good thing.

  Too quickly his bicycle and beanie flip gave way to Beatles records and basketball. Before I had a time to even savor his childhood, he was a teenager. He grew to full height in this thirteenth year. He didn’t have long, athletic lines. He retained the small, slight build of the Shertz family. But he never let that stop him. Only five foot nine on his tiptoes, he couldn’t post up on the court, so he made his points scoring on jump shots and dribbling inside for layups.

  Geri and I never missed a game, not even in the early years when he did most of his minutes on the bench. Tuesdays and Fridays from October to February, our calendar was filled.

  “It’s because you only have the one boy,” Hackshaw Hurst told me. The father of four sons and two daughters, each of whom played sports, he was never expected to show up at any particular game. “When my kids see me, it’s a big occasion and they’re grateful. J.D. takes it for granted that you’ll always be there.”

  I knew he was probably right, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be there. I wanted to share every moment of his young life.

  Of course, there were some moments when I wouldn’t have been welcome. Geri and I were both caught a little off guard when he started dating. He’d never shown a lot of interest in girls. At first it seemed harmless enough. He went to a class party with the sister of one of his teammates. And then to the movies a few times with the Methodist preacher’s daughter. But by junior year he seemed to be exclusively steady with Melinda Masterson.

  Melinda was blond and peppy, with bright eyes and a great big smile. She was an average student and socially quite a bit more popular than J.D. She was a cheerleader and one of the runners-up for homecoming queen. She had a pale little voice, but could carry a tune and sang soprano in Sunday choir. We might have thought their pairing to be a perfectly nice one, but in a small town, you always know way too much about other people’s lives.

  Melinda’s mother, Bertie McNeil, had been a local beauty who at the tender age of nineteen had gotten involved with Piggy Masterson. She got pregnant out of wedlock, which was not unheard of in any generation. However, instead of hastily making an honest woman of her, Piggy decided to wait until the baby was born and could be certified to be his. This action suggested that Bertie was not merely a girl in trouble, but also an immoral girl. Her family’s humiliation was horrible. Bertie hid out at home until she’d had her baby, but that didn’t help. Everybody knew and disappro
val was unanimous.

  After Melinda was born and a blood test revealed that Piggy was the likely father, a fact that Bertie had insisted was a certainty from the start, the two were married. But Bertie could never really forgive what he had done to her. And I doubt that Piggy tried very hard to make it up to her. They divorced a few years later.

  By the time Melinda was in high school, Piggy was on his third wife and had two other children, both boys. He was very proud of his pretty daughter, but he didn’t have much time. What he did have was money and he lavished it on her. He made sure she always had plenty of nice clothes and spending cash. And for her sixteenth birthday, he bought her a baby-blue Ford Mustang.

  So throwing into this mix a healthy, active teenage boy, who we, his parents, feared might have a sex drive as strong as our own caused Geri and I a lot of worry.

  “You have to talk to him,” she insisted.

  “He knows all about the birds and bees,” I assured her.

  “Yes, but does he know how determined a teenage girl can be when she puts her mind to getting her claws in a certain guy.”

  “I assume you’re speaking from experience,” I teased. “That didn’t turn out so bad, did it.”

  Geri waved away my attempt at humor. “I just want to give him a chance to choose a girl himself, before this one does all the choosing for him. You two need a father-son talk.”

  So on a pretty autumn Saturday, I encouraged my son to help me wall in the wash porch to make another room. In truth, it was more me helping him. I was a competent carpenter, but J.D. had a knack for seeing how to put things together. I wouldn’t have thought of making the wash porch into a room, but J.D. recognized the possibilities. And when he pointed them out, I felt almost stupid for not having seen something so obvious myself. We worked well together, understanding instinctively what we needed to do for each other. Few words were required. By midafternoon I hadn’t quite managed to bring up the all-important subject.

  I suggested we take a break. We sat down in the shade of the steps each with a glass of cool water.