Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  The room depressed the hell out of him even when skies were clear. He wanted his own house. That was the reason he had left Eufala, gone along when Earl dangled the incentive of a life of plenty and city lights in the form of a full-page ad in the classified section of the Montgomery paper headed FORD WORKING FOR VICTORY and featuring photographs of men and women, many of them colored, working at the “War Bird Powerhouse” in Willow Run. For Earl, a dollar an hour meant zoot suits, a gold tooth, and juke music every night. For Dwight it represented freedom from a life rented from people who owned things, a chance to own things himself. His Model A was the first thing he’d ever bought and paid for, and it had taken him the better part of a year haunting junkyards for parts and crawling in and out from under its chassis with the tops knocked off all his knuckles and rust particles in his eyes to get it running. At forty bucks a week minus withholding—more when he put in overtime—he’d figured he could save enough to manage the down payment on a house at the end of two years. A place he could paint any damn color he pleased, and where he could pound nails to hang pictures anywhere he wanted without having to answer to some landlord. It didn’t have to be Rose Terrace. Just a thousand square feet of siding and foundation to prove he was a better man than his father.

  He’d failed to figure in Earl, though. The two hundred he’d had to pay Elizabeth’s parents to keep his brother out of prison had pushed back his timetable six months. And when he turned off the radio and unscrewed the bulb in the lamp and set aside his Life with Joe Stalin on the cover, he couldn’t sleep for thinking that Earl’s hundred-and-forty-dollar suit and three-hundred-dollar diamond ring were going to push it back further yet.

  chapter thirteen

  ANITA … OH, ANITA … SAY, I feel something!”

  “What you feel, Roy? The heat?”

  “No, I feel like blowing!”

  “Well, blow, Roy, blow!”

  And Roy Eldridge blew, taking the trumpet to heights only visited before by the divine Louis. Then the brumping brass section came in behind Anita O’Day’s husky contralto, leader Gene Krupa hurled himself into his trap set, walloping the bass like the naval fleet pounding Corregidor. The little wooden dance floor thudded under the feet of the jitterbugs, the boys in their canary yellow zoots playing leapfrog with the girls in their plaid skirts and bobby sox. Just like the Oriole, only there the dancers were white and the band was live. But the Wurlitzer was cranked up all the way, knocking dust down from the rafters and plaster loose inside the laths. If you closed your eyes you could see the line of golden horns pointed at the ceiling and the pretty girl swaying behind the microphone, giving you a flash of garters and white panties when she shook her skirts. “Let Me Off Uptown.”

  The Forest Club was jumping, especially for a weeknight. Saturdays there would be a local band, not quite Chick Webb but close. Dwight preferred the juke. It left money in his pocket that otherwise would have gone into the cover, and the music was just as good on somebody else’s nickel, although to his taste there was a shortage of Sidney Bechet and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He didn’t think that jazz was served by pushing it through three times as many instruments and adding strings.

  In any case he seemed to be in the minority. All these welders and riveters were determined to get as much out of their time away from the plants as their paychecks would support. The music wasn’t even loud compared to the decibel levels they were used to. Some of the young men probably didn’t work in the factories, were just waiting to be called up; Dwight knew them by the wild glaze in their eyes and their molar-exposing grins. There wouldn’t be much dancing in North Africa.

  He asked the lean, chestnut-colored youth in the red jacket behind the bar, plainly too young to be serving alcoholic beverages, for a gin ricky, paid for it, and moved off to an uninhabited spot where he could hear the music without distortion. The room was indistinguishable from many of the white clubs in town, if you didn’t figure in the Oriole and places like that; the rosy light over the bar and the pink-and-green shifting neon of the juke threw the exposed pipes into shadow and gave the bare brick walls a kind of dangerous ambience, like that movie Algiers. Charles Boyer might have felt right at home, sticking out his lower lip and talking about “Ze Casbah.” Right before one of these tough fuckers whose families moved north right after the Emancipation Proclamation slipped a blade between his Gallic ribs.

  Not that it was that kind of place. Located in Paradise Valley, the city’s most staunchly colored section, the Forest Club complied with most of the statutes enforced by the State Liquor Control Commission since Repeal, which included a ban on illuminated beer signs, batwing doors, and anything in writing referring to the bar as a “saloon”—bad memories of the sodden times that had given birth to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the eighteenth Amendment.

  There was even a yellowed bill, framed and forgotten on the wall above the back bar, reminding customers that it was unlawful to consume alcoholic beverages in a standing position. For all Dwight knew the law was still on the books, but even when there were vacant stools at the bar he’d yet to witness anyone connected with the establishment admonishing a drinker to find a seat.

  He looked around in vain for anyone he knew. Most of his acquaintances worked at Willow Run, and he didn’t get into town too often, by choice. Detroit was a pretty good old place, ugly as a ticky old hound dog but just as friendly, if you knew just where to scratch it. Its Negro population was well ensconced, the grandsons and granddaughters of freedmen and runaway slaves who had reversed directions on the Underground Railroad to Canada under Lincoln, and he didn’t feel as out of place as he’d feared. Most of the hostility; in fact, came from the scions of these old families, who looked upon the wartime newcomers as uncouth country cousins who threatened to upset the balance of eight decades; Dwight’s drawling speech had gotten him more than his fair share of rudeness from black merchants in town. The rest came up with the rednecks, newcomers themselves who had never before ventured any farther from their scrabbly little farms and flyblown hamlets than it took to do business with the local moonshiner, and couldn’t get used to the idea that Jim Crow didn’t travel.

  He could handle, or rather avoid them all right, and the worst he got from belligerent members of his own race was short change and the occasional bottle of milk that had started to turn. The reason he stayed out of Detroit was it was an excellent place to spend money. Dwight was his father’s son, his brother’s brother. Saving didn’t come naturally to him, and so he had to ride herd on himself all the time. That was a little less difficult in Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti was the dullest town this side of Eufala: neighborhoods of Victorian and Queen Anne houses and a three-block business section of hardware stores, family bars, pot-roast restaurants, and a great marble mausoleum of a bank with solid-oak tellers’ cages inside built to repel John Dillinger. The whole place might have been dug up by the roots anyplace between there and Alabama and transported by flatbed up 23, complete with rednecks. In Ypsilanti the challenge was to find something worth wasting one’s money on. He didn’t regret his choice of places to live.

  But even Dwight got the awfulest kind of lonely. The thought of spending another evening like last night, stretched out on the bed in his little narrow coffin of an attic room leafing through magazines with the radio on, made him feel bleak. He’d hoped he’d run into Earl in the Forest Club, or someone he knew from Willow Run. Instead, alone in this room full of strangers and loud music, he felt as isolated as if he’d stayed home. He resolved to finish his drink and catch the last bus. His brother still had the Model A. “What’s the matter, Jackson, shoes nailed to the floor?” He blinked. He’d been off in the middle ground, looking right at Earl coming his way through the crowd without seeing him. His brother had on his hundred-and-forty-dollar suit with what might have been a pink shirt—it was difficult to judge colors in the Forest Club—and Elizabeth was with him. “Hello, Dwight. Where you been keeping yourself?” He told Elizabeth hello. He kn
ew the question called for a clever answer, but he was not a clever man. He only regretted it when he was in her presence. She was a striking girl, more handsome than pretty, in a way that would only improve with age. He liked her regular features and wide-set eyes, her ginger coloring, her hair cut short after the fashion established by women who wanted to avoid snagging it in the machinery of the defense plants, although she was too young for such employment. In her platform heels and yellow calf-length dress with padded shoulders she was as tall as Dwight and could pass for twenty-one anywhere in town. He liked the way her face shone when she greeted her brother-in-law. She genuinely liked him. She pecked him on the cheek and he smelled the brief light citrus scent she wore, clean and pleasant. She was wearing the ring Earl had bought her.

  “Ain’t you heard, sugar?” Earl said. “Dwight’s working undercover for the eff bee eye. Dyes his hair yellow and puts flour on his face and goes to Bund meetings. Got him a teeny little camera in his belly button. He don’t answer to nobody but old J. Edgar hisself, or maybe Pat O’Brien.”

  Dwight smiled; indulgently, he hoped. Elizabeth punched her husband’s shoulder. “You let your brother be. It wouldn’t hurt you to stay home some nights.”

  “Maybe when I’m as old as old Dwight.” He tipped up his glass. Dwight caught a sharp whiff of pure grain alcohol. He hated vodka. It was their father’s drink.

  “Through with the car?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow. We gots to get home tonight.”

  “Put oil in it? It burns oil.”

  “You know I don’t know nothing about that.” Earl was bouncing to the “One O’Clock Jump.” “Let’s dance, sugar.”

  “I can dance with you anytime. I want to dance with your brother.”

  “I don’t think they got the minuet on the juke.”

  Dwight said, “He’s close to right. I can’t jitterbug.”

  She opened a little clasp purse and thrust a nickel at her husband. “Find something slow.”

  “Wayne King? Sammy Kaye?”

  “Try Dorsey,” Dwight said. “I’m not dead.”

  “These Detroit boys going to string me up.” But he took the coin and moved off.

  Alone with his sister-in-law, Dwight took a long pull at his ricky.

  “Can I have a sip of that?”

  “I might be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

  She pouted. He handed her the glass. She sipped at it, made a face, and handed it back. “Too much Coca-Cola.”

  “I’m not a big drinker.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Sometimes I can’t believe you and Earl are related.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, partly because the same thought had crossed his mind many times. The manic Harry James record came to an end. In the silence he took another drink and said, “Congratulations on your anniversary.”

  “Oh, that. That was Earl’s idea.” She twisted the ring. “I told him we couldn’t afford it.”

  “I guess it cut into your savings.”

  She looked up at him quickly. Then a new record dropped down and a trombone started playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” Dwight glanced around, found a horizontal surface for his glass, and took her hand. The floor was crowded, for which he was grateful. No one knew you were a bad dancer when there wasn’t room to show it.

  Elizabeth’s hand in his was cool. He held it loose for ventilation, because he knew his was moist. The feel of the small of her back against his other hand gave him butterflies. He hadn’t danced with a woman since the Piggly Wiggly episode. This close he could smell the warmth of her skin beneath the citrus scent. He wanted to press her on the subject of where Earl had gotten the money to buy her the ring, but he was afraid it would spoil the moment, end the dance; and that would likely lead to a scene between him and his brother. Maybe the question hadn’t really startled her, as he’d thought. Maybe she was surprised at him for prying. He resolved not to bring it up again pending evidence. And he despised himself for his cowardice.

  The music stopped in the middle of a phrase. There was a burring among the crowd. Dwight and Elizabeth separated, craned their necks, but from where they stood they could see neither the entrance nor the jukebox, whose plug had obviously been pulled. He wondered if it was an air-raid drill.

  Somebody read his mind, because a deep male voice with gravel in it announced, “Simmer down, boys and girls. We ain’t Japs or Germans. We want all the women over here and all the men lined up there along the bar. Now.”

  Robbery, thought Dwight; but as the crowd began to migrate in two directions he spotted the blue uniforms. Half a dozen policemen were in the room, holding their nightsticks in both hands across their thighs. All of them were white. The one with the words was a sergeant with thick sloping shoulders and a carpet of blue beard covering the lower half of his face, like a gangster in an editorial cartoon. Dwight saw his kind every day on the line: knob-knuckled Poles whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers had turned the iron-hard soil of tenant farms in the Balkans for generations. Their fathers had come over when Henry Ford started paying a dollar a day to build Model T’s in Dearborn, and when the plants were filled had fanned out to fill the positions nobody else wanted. Boxer. Garbageman. Cop.

  “Dwight.”

  He blinked at Elizabeth. He’d forgotten for a moment she was there. Her face was pale beneath the ginger. He smiled and put a hand against her upper arm, giving her a little push. “It’s all right.”

  She stood her ground, but the swell had started. Bodies came between them and he turned toward the bar, where a ragged line of men in bright party clothes had begun to form. He looked for Earl but couldn’t find him.

  “Come on, boys, come on. You-all can shuffle faster than that.” The big sergeant stood in the middle of the floor, bouncing the end of his stick against a square palm. He had a big purple vein on the left side of his forehead and a fat neck that rolled like an inner tube over the edge of his buttoned blue collar.

  A younger officer, skinny as twine, with sad eyes, walked along the line of patrons, touching with his stick those who were facing him instead of the bar. “Hands on the bar! Lean!”

  Dwight obeyed before he got to him. “What’s the trouble, Officer?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Shut up.”

  Then came the frisk. A pair of officers working from opposite ends of the line patted down each man from armpits to ankles, not neglecting to pull back the cuffs of their jackets and run a finger around inside their collars and inspect the occasional hat. Whenever a switchblade or a revolver came to light, the owner was torn away from the bar and shoved stumbling into the arms of the officers by the door, who handcuffed him and took him out. Red lights throbbed against the door whenever it opened. Dwight guessed a van.

  “Well, what have we here?”

  Dwight risked a peek halfway down the bar. He recognized the bulbous end of the Hupmobile shifting cane sticking out of an officer’s fist. He couldn’t see Earl for the line of men leaning between.

  “What’s the matter, Rastus, lose the rest of the car?”

  “I take that out to keep folks from driving it off.” This was Earl’s voice.

  The big sergeant closed the gap between himself and the bar in two strides, swinging his nightstick in a short underarm arc. There was a loud grunt, ending in a wet whimper, and Dwight saw the back of his brother’s oversize suit coat as he sank to his knees. The other officer, the one who had found the weapon, caught him by his collar and dragged his sagging body across to the group in uniform. The toes of Earl’s saddle shoes made black skid marks on the floor’s varnished surface. Dwight heard a woman’s cry from the other side of the room, quickly stifled. Either Elizabeth had caught herself or one of the other women had silenced her. The unspoken, rule was not to draw attention to oneself.

  The officer working from the opposite end of the bar got to Dwight. He had never been frisked. The thoroughness of so swift an operatio
n astonished and humiliated him. He felt that this stranger, whose breath stank of some deep corruption that reminded him of his mother, knew all his physical secrets. He knew his crotch was damp with perspiration and hoped it wouldn’t be mistaken for urine. His wallet was squeaked from his hip pocket, gone through, and thrust back. He’d heard bills crackle and was pretty sure the man had palmed some of his cash.

  “That’s the lot,” someone told the sergeant; Death Breath, Dwight guessed.

  “Stamps?”

  “Not enough in the place to throw a barbecue.”

  “Shit.”

  “Close the joint?”

  “What for, listening to white bands?” The sergeant raised his voice. “You niggers can relax now.”

  There was movement along the bar. Dwight turned around. While he was being frisked, four more white men had entered the room, all in civilian suits. Two were big, one of them bigger than the sergeant, with scary eyes, bulged like in a cartoon. Dwight, who had an instinct about such things, looked to the smaller pair for the leader. One looked too young even to be a policeman. He decided on the other one, and congratulated himself when the Polack sergeant went up to him to report. He walked that way.

  “Where you headed, skate?” murmured one of the men at the bar. “That there’s the Four Horsemen.”

  “Yeah? Where their horses?”

  He had never heard of the Four Horsemen. All he saw was a group of white men in cheap suits a size too large in the coats to make room for their underarm rigs and gray felt fedoras too shaggy for summer. The one the big sergeant was talking to didn’t appear to be listening; his tired gaze roamed the room restlessly and he had his hat pushed back to keep the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth from parking itself under the brim. He had a large brainy-looking forehead. The tired gaze lighted on Dwight. He jerked his chin in that direction. Turning, the sergeant spotted the colored man approaching and stuck out his stick. Dwight almost ran into it. “That’s as far as you come, Rastus.”