Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Mr. Ford ain’t paying good enough, I guess,” Dwight said.

  Earl drank his beer and said nothing.

  “Elizabeth know?”

  “She does now. I heard everything you’re going to say from her. Hey, hey!” York and Bloodworth retired the side with a double play.

  “Where you selling ’em, Earl?”

  “Why, you want in?”

  “I want you out. I made a deal with the cops.”

  Earl turned his head for the first time since Dwight had entered the house. His eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t shaved since leaving police headquarters.

  “This is federal shit you’re mixed up in,” Dwight said. “Don’t you care who wins this war?”

  “What’s the difference? Whoever wins, we lose. Things won’t change for you and me, little brother. We still be black. And they still be on top.”

  “And you be busting up rocks in Kansas when Shirley Temple’s a old lady.”

  Earl thumped down his bottle and stood up. He caught his balance on the arm of the sofa and reached to hook his shirt off a floor lamp. “Let me know how the game comes out.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Anyplace else.”

  “I’ll drive. They won’t let you on the bus. You’re too drunk.”

  “Just don’t talk.” Earl gave up trying to button the shirt straight and left it open.

  Dwight kept his mouth shut in the car. His brother looked out at the scenery. Stopped for a light at Grand River, Dwight watched a pedestrian, blond and lanky in a blue work suit with company patches on the sleeves, start across. When the STOP sign swung up on the pedestrian signal he picked up his pace, then caught sight of Dwight’s face behind the windshield. He slowed to a stroll.

  “Fucking redneck.” Earl reached over and punched the horn button.

  Dwight actually saw the man flush to the roots of his fair hair. Almost clear of the car when the horn blatted, he spun on both heels, retreated two steps, raised both fists so high over his head Dwight could see the scabby, unwashed flesh of his elbows, and brought them down on the hinged hood, popping loose the latch on one side and making twin egg-shaped dents he could see from behind the windshield.

  “Step on it, Dwight! Run the fucker down.”

  He advanced the hand throttle, expecting the man to dodge when the car lurched forward. But he’d forgotten to downshift when he’d stopped; the frame clunked, the motor coughed and died.

  The man’s face now was purple. He lunged along the left side of the car. Dwight punched down the lock button just as he seized the handle. He wrenched the floor lever into first and tromped on the starter. The motor ground, ground, caught, ground, ground, ground, caught and held. Dwight let out the clutch and pushed down on the throttle. The man’s hand was still on the door handle, and Dwight felt the jolt when the Model A shot, forward, yanking the man’s arm straight out from the socket. In the rearview mirror a moment later he saw a lanky figure standing in the traffic lane with legs spread and a middle finger thrust skyward.

  “You got to move faster than that, little brother,” Earl said.

  “Any faster and I’d of run right over him.”

  “What I said.”

  Dwight looked over at his brother. He couldn’t tell if Earl was serious. He hadn’t been able to tell much of anything about him since they’d come north.

  “Look what the wind blew in. You boys thirsty so early?”

  Beatrice Blackwood was behind the bar of the Forest Club, mixing Bloody Marys in a big pitcher. Her ingredients were lined up along the bar’s glossy varnished surface: a fifth of Smirnoff’s; Tabasco in a quart jug, available only to wholesalers and professional furniture-strippers; four small cans of Del Monte tomato paste; a fifth of Teacher’s; a jar of hot peppers; a pint of Old Grand-Dad; and a tall stainless-steel container filled to the rim with liquefied tomatoes, blended from scratch.

  “Born thirsty, sugar. Highball for me, rye and Vernor’s. Strawberry milkshake for my little brother.” Earl swung a leg over a stool cowboy fashion.

  Dwight slid onto the next stool. “Coffee, if you got a pot on.”

  “It’s percolating. Hold on till I get this right.”

  Beatrice was a tall Jamaican, fine-featured and light-skinned, with blue-black hair permanent-waved over to one side like Lena Horne’s, and she prided herself as a mixologist, fussing with her pourers and siphons like an artist with his brushes. Ordinarily, Dwight liked to watch her measuring out her portions with a jigger and an eyedropper, pouring sea salt and cayenne pepper into her palm, dusting it into the pitcher, and stirring the contents with a long-handled glass spoon. Today, those fine details only irritated him. For distraction he looked around the room, which seemed smaller by daylight, the naked pipes and old-fashioned exposed wiring shabby in the extreme. The jukebox dozed in the corner, uselessly garish when not engaged in its purpose. The floor hadn’t been swept of last night’s litter. Cobwebs hammocked in the rafters.

  “I needs that drink, darling. Dwight and me just fought the Battle of Gettysburg all over.”

  “Who won?”

  “Come in here on our own legs, didn’t we?”

  She used a funnel to empty the pitcher into a big Mason jar, screwed on the cover, gave it three vigorous shakes, and put it in a boxy Westinghouse refrigerator with the compressor coil on top. Then she cleared the clutter from the bar and mixed Earl’s highball. A two-gallon blue enamel coffeepot stood with its lid rattling on a hot plate on the back bar. She wrapped a bar rag around the handle and poured Dwight a cup. “You want a nail in it?” she asked.

  “Just some cream.”

  She added cream from a container in the refrigerator and set the thick white china cup and saucer in front of him. “Who’s buying?”

  “Shit. I done left my roll at home.” Earl sipped his drink.

  Dwight got out his wallet. “What’s the damage?”

  “For you, eighty-five.” Beatrice showed her brilliants.

  He laid a dollar on the bar and told her to keep the change. She rang it up in an old-fashioned brass register and slipped a nickel and a dime into her apron pocket. “I hear I missed some excitement the other night,” she said.

  “Just a roust,” said Earl. “Cops won’t stop till we’re all on our way back to Africa.”

  She fitted a cigarette into a jade holder and lit it off a slim matching lighter. She was the only woman outside the movies who Dwight thought looked natural smoking that way. “I heard they were looking for that Kilroy character. What you think, colored?”

  “They thought that, they’d turn out every joint in Paradise Valley.” Earl drank. “They’d take a torch to the whole fucking street.”

  “What’s Dwight think?” She was smiling at him.

  Dwight concentrated on his coffee. He was shy around Beatrice. He could never tell if her interest in him was genuine or if she was making fun of the new kid. She was ten years older, and she’d been around. He knew she’d worked the streets, both here and in Jamaica, and the rumor was she kept her hand in when rent time came around. Even if it turned out she liked him, he doubted he measured up.

  “I think it don’t matter what I think,” he said.

  “I bet you got a theory. You’re the thinky type.” She put an elbow on the bar and rested her chin in her hand. Smoke coiled out of the cigarette in its holder clamped in the corner of her mouth. Earl, who never missed an episode of Terry and the Pirates, referred to her as the Dragon Lady when not in her presence.

  Dwight said, “My theory is he’s going to step in a hole and the cops are going to fill it in.”

  “That’s the cops’ theory.”

  “No, that’s their plan. It ain’t the killing, they don’t care about that. It’s the stamps. That’ll bring in the feds. They’ll bury the guy if it means using the army and stretching the war out another year.”

  “You called it right the first time,” Earl said. “It don’t matter what you think.”

 
; Beatrice said, “It makes sense to me.”

  “That’s ’cause you think he’s talking about Kilroy.”

  “Oh. Forgot. You got a call.”

  Earl grinned. “Count Basie looking for a road manager?”

  “If he was, I’d take it. I got a big heart for that Joe Williams. My, my.” The smile stayed in place. “Gidgy wants you to call him.”

  Dwight said, “Who’s Gidgy?”

  “Search me, little brother. I never heard of the man. It was a mistake, sugar.”

  “I make a lot of those.” She came up off her elbow, tapped ash into a tin embossed L&Ms tray on the bar, and touched her hair with a slim hand with red-lacquered nails. “Freshen that cup, Dwight?”

  He looked at the Burma-Shave clock. “Better not. I got to get Earl to the plant.”

  “Soon’s I take a leak.” Earl drained his glass, hopped off the stool, and took the narrow sloping hallway to the rest rooms in back. He was whistling “Let Me Off Uptown.”

  “War effort getting along without you today?” Beatrice scooped up Earl’s glass, mopping up the ring with the bar rag in her other hand. Her every movement was as graceful as a dancer’s.

  “Even Henry Ford gets a day off now and then.” He drank the last of his coffee. “I can’t remember if you got telephones in back.”

  “Seems to me we do.” She turned her back to plunge the glass into the soapy water in the double sink.

  “Who’s Gidgy?”

  She rinsed the glass thoroughly. “I don’t know him any better than your brother.”

  “I believe that,” he said.

  She wiped the glass dry with a clean towel, placed it bottom side up among the others on the back bar, and turned to retrieve her cigarette and holder from the ashtray. Her eyes were mahogany-colored. “God decides the order, Dwight. If He meant for you to be the big brother He’d have had you born first.”

  “I just asked who’s Gidgy.”

  She shrugged a padded shoulder, turned away, and looked over the collection of posters and framed pictures crowding the wall behind the back bar, searching with the concentration of a librarian looking for a particular book among stacks she saw every day. Finally she came to a framed newspaper clipping, brown and spotted, with a photograph of ten colored men in hats; cloth caps, and pinstriped suits, lined up against what looked like one of the wainscoted walls at Detroit Police Headquarters. The headline read TEN QUESTIONED IN NEGRO RACKETS WAR. She pointed to the third man from the left, standing with his hat in front of his face.

  “That’s Gidgy,” she said. “He’s just as camera-shy now as he was in ’31.”

  chapter nineteen

  GUNTHER LENZ APPROACHED HIS father with caution. The old farmer—he was eighteen years older than Gunther’s mother, having buried his first wife in Bavaria before shipping to the U.S. in 1909—was seated on the front porch in his hardrock maple chair, drinking his thick bitter coffee and scowling at the train like profile of the Willow Run plant on the horizon, backlit by the setting sun. His mood, always subject to sudden change, was never good when his thoughts rested on that architectural non sequitur in the midst of farm country. He had been in negotiation to buy a fine virgin wooded section for clearing and planting when Washington condemned it out from under him to make room for an employee parking lot. Baldur Lenz was the son of an old Prussian Junker, whose features, hewn out of straight-grained Nordwald and decorated with a white imperial, glowered out of a tinted photographic portrait in an oval frame in the dining room, and his sympathies in the current war were clear. He called the president “Rosenfeld,” blamed the surrender of Berlin on Jewish betrayal, and bore a hideous pattern of wormlike scars on his back from having been pulled into a field by hooded men in March 1918 and horsewhipped for his Germanism. Gunther looked with dread upon the day he must explain to his father that he had registered for the draft, and when called intended to serve. Right now he only wanted to ask a favor.

  “You fix that post like I told you?” was his father’s greeting.

  “Yes, sir. I took it out and sank a new one. It was all rotted.”

  Standing on the ground in front of the porch he tried not to look up at the old man, nor down at his feet either. At eighteen he was aware of the power of the word sir, but also of the self-loathing it cost him to use it.

  “Sink that wire good and tight? I didn’t buy good seed corn to feed the damn deer.”

  “Yes, sir.” He didn’t point out that the ongoing construction at Willow Run had frightened away all the deer for a generation at least. That would have turned the conversation in the wrong direction. “I thought I’d go into town tonight, if I can have the truck.”

  “Got holes in your shoes? Put in newspaper.”

  “I’m going to Detroit, not Ypsi.”

  “What’s in Detroit?”

  “I’m taking Susan to the Michigan.”

  “What’s wrong with the picture show in Ypsi?” His father had gone to see a movie only once since The Jazz Singer. He claimed the English came too fast for him to follow, but Gunther suspected it was the price of the ticket that kept him away. He’d bought one suit in his life, which he wore to funerals and meetings at the grange hall, and had stopped going to ball games when the price of hot dogs went to fifteen cents.

  “Jimmy Dorsey’s playing live at the Michigan. Susan likes to dance.”

  “She a jitterbug?” He pronounced the word in the tone he reserved for Jews and FDR.

  “No, sir.”

  He worked his mouth around his false teeth. His eyes were pale blue in a thicket of sharp creases that went all the way down to his chin when his face showed any expression at all. The irises were barely distinguishable from the whites. They were still fixed on the bomber plant. “What’s the picture?”

  “Lady of Burlesque.”

  “Sex show?”

  “Pa, it’s Barbara Stanwyck.”

  “You got four acres of corn to plant tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be home early. There’s a curfew.”

  “Put gas in it.”

  Gunther thanked him and went inside to clean up. He put on his suit, brushed his hair straight back, and teased forth a lock to form an apostrophe above his right eye, like Clark Gable. He couldn’t do much about his square jaw and beefy neck, which had German farm boy all over them, and wished he had the confidence to carry off a silk scarf tucked into an open shirt collar, Ronald Colman style. His mother paused in the midst of setting the table to kiss him. Her face wore a perpetual worried look these days. She shared the secret of Gunther’s draft registration, and had a brother in the marines, whose infrequent letters she couldn’t share with the family for fear of arousing Baldur’s ire. She had a beaten-down quality that filled Gunther with sympathy and contempt.

  The Model T truck stood in a bare patch of lawn, the grass long since killed by spilled oil from the crankcase. He advanced the spark, inserted the crank, being careful to align his thumb with the rest of his fingers to avoid breaking his arm, and wound the motor into life. By then his sweat had begun to attract mosquitoes; quickly he threw the crank onto the floorboards, swung into the driver’s seat, and slipped the clutch to lose the voracious insects in the slipstream. The night air felt cool on his face when he cranked open the windshield. It was heavy with the scent of turned earth and spread manure. He wondered if it smelled different in France and Italy.

  Susan Moller lived in one of Ypsilanti s oldest houses, a spike-gabled Queen Anne on a quarter acre lot, once painted in a rainbow of pastels but now white with gray trim. A new six-foot board fence, not yet whitewashed; stood between it and the house next door, nearly as old but recently divided into apartments to take advantage of the housing shortage among workers at Willow Run. Susan’s father was the latest in a family line of area pharmacists going back to the Civil War.

  She met Gunther at the door in a salmon-colored party dress with a white lace shawl over her bare shoulders. She was nearly as tall as her escort, but had formed the habi
t of standing with her head thrust forward to divert attention from her height. Tonight she wore her black hair pinned up. It struck off blue halos under the porch light. He helped her up into the seat, then slid in beside her and let out the clutch. Despite gas rationing he’d left the motor running. He hadn’t wanted to work up another sweat cranking it.

  The Michigan Theater was an art deco palace in downtown Detroit, illuminated from below with searchlights like a church steeple and crusted over with gilt cherubs and bunches of grapes inside. The local band opening for Jimmy Dorsey onstage was good but derivative, playing a medley of familiar hits in imitation of the styles of the various famous orchestras that had recorded them. A temporary dance floor had been erected over the pit normally occupied by house musicians before the main feature, and a few couples were taking advantage of it. Most of the five thousand seats were filled with patrons conserving their energy for the star attraction.

  The curtain rolled down on a spirited version of “Song of India.” Five minutes of murmuring conversation, anticipatory coughs, and suspenseful silence, then the unmistakable tootling of Jimmy Dorsey’s clarinet began the opening lick to “Contrasts,” the band’s theme; and as the brass and the rest of the woodwinds came in, the curtain rose on a cushion of music and thunderous applause. All the props used by the previous band had vanished, replaced by two rows of white music stands with the initials JD intertwined in gold on their faces.

  The footlights and overheads flared off shining brass, white dinner jackets, glistening hair oil. Jimmy Dorsey, jug-eared and amiable, stood several yards back from the microphone on its stand as if unwilling to monopolize it, waving his clarinet like a baton when the reed was not actually in his mouth. The dance floor began to fill. By the time Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell swept out from the wings to sing “Tangerine,” there was barely room to maneuver. Gunther and Susan danced to “Amapola” and “Green Eyes,” but when Ray McKinley on drums laid down the rumbling beat for “Cow Cow Boogie,” Gunther acquiesced to a plea from a skinny caricature in a Michigan letterman’s sweater to cut in. Susan loved to jitterbug, and his feet were too accustomed to busting clods to keep up.