Red Sky in Morning A Novel of World War II Page 3

  Connor said, “But what answer would we get? And how are we going to find a cruiser or destroyer that needs all four of us at the same time?” Leaning forward, Connor said, “Or are we just flappin’ our gums when we say we wanna play a bigger part in winning this war? Just hearing ourselves talk, and then comin’ up with excuses not to follow through?”

  Shrugging, Driscoll said, “Maybe we shouldn’t stick together. Maybe we should go after separate posts. Easier to manage.”

  “Yeah,” Connor admitted, “but we have this posting in our hands right now. . . . Dick, do you feel like you’re winning the war decoding messages in Crypto? Or you, Vince, is the base motor pool how you want to tell your grandkids you fought the war, playing grease monkey in San Diego? I’ve certainly had enough pushing papers and typing ten kinds of horseshit in the C.O.’s office. Personally, I think Pete’s right. We should grab this chance—we may not get another.”

  Driscoll said nothing.

  “I vote yes,” Rosetti said.

  “You know I’m in,” Pete said.

  “Me, too,” Connor said. “Dick?”

  All eyes turned to Driscoll. Looking like a tall Alan Ladd, he pushed back from the table, lighted up a cigarette with excruciating ceremony, and finally grinned at them.

  “I was just testing you girls,” he said. He exhaled smoke through his nose, a grinning dragon. “There are no other sons of bitches on land or sea I’d rather get blown to holy hell with. Where do I sign?”

  Chapter 2

  JUNE 6, 1944

  To Seaman Ulysses Grant Washington (Sarge to his friends), San Diego was a piece-of-shit city, sunshine be damned. Not that the South Side of Chicago was paradise, more like a ramshackle collection of wooden-frame houses; hell, when the wind came in off the lake, trash blew around like an ugly damn hail storm. But even at its worst, the South Side was big city, alive and full of itself.

  You could stand on the corner of Forty-seventh and South Park, smack dab in the middle of the Black Belt, and see nothing but shades of humanity: black, brown, yellow, olive, even white (store owners mostly). Bronzeville was a Chicago within Chicago, with colored lawyers and doctors and dentists and even coppers (like Sarge had been). From that corner you could see theater marquees with Lena Horne, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Hattie McDaniel headlining. And sooner or later, if you hung around long enough, every damn Negro in Illinois would pass along by.

  San Diego, on the other hand, was a goddamn retirement village—seemed like the only people on the street who weren’t sailors were elderly white folk. The downtown was tiny for a burg this big, despite some tall modern buildings, and the pace was slow, maybe a hangover from the old Spanish days. Of course, on the periphery, all sorts of nasty joints pandered to the Navy boys, tattoo parlors and shooting galleries and hamburger stands and chicken shacks and taverns. And taverns. And more taverns.

  Not that Sarge was welcome in any of them.

  Back in Chicago, when you left Bronzeville, you could time to time feel a chill in the air, sure; but nothing as outright bigoted as the signs posted all around downtown San Diego telling Sarge and his kind to keep out.

  Of course you didn’t necessarily have to be a Negro to find prejudice on these sun-splashed streets—one restaurant advised NO SAILORS, DOGS, OR COLORED ALLOWED. Sarge qualified for two out of three, but what really galled his ass was dogs getting better billing than blacks. Motherfucker!

  Back in Bronzeville, Sarge had been a man of respect, a police officer. And not just some lowly beat cop, hell no—he had risen to the rank of sergeant (he wasn’t called Sarge because of his Navy rank, that was damn sure!) and soon made plainclothes detective. He wore a suit and tie to work, a genuine professional man. Out here, even wearing one of Uncle Sam’s uniforms, he was in line behind the goddamn dogs.

  Six months ago, when he’d first arrived at the base, Sarge had asked other Negro sailors about the city, and they had told him it wasn’t much.

  Orville Monroe, a short, delicate-featured cream-in-yourcoffee complexioned seaman from New Orleans, had effeminately said, “This is no place for a God-fearing colored man, Sarge. You think it’s by chance they call it ‘Little Georgia’? I’ll say it ain’t!”

  Several other Negro sailors had warned Sarge the long-lashed little man was “queer as a three-dollar bill.”

  But Sarge didn’t give a damn about such things. In his experience as a copper, he’d come to feel pity for homosexuals like little Orville—they were high-strung, emotional types who got made victims by fifty-seven varieties of motherfucker. Long as Monroe didn’t try to mount his ass, Sarge couldn’t care less where the little man stuck it or got stuck.

  Orville’s kind was no different than nobody else: relations with other humans, sexual or otherwise, got frequently screwed up—all cops knew this. Black or white, homo or otherwise, relationships were hard; and no matter whose heart got broke, it usually boiled down to one or more of four things: drugs, money, sex, or love (love and sex weren’t always the same thing).

  Anyway, with the shit colored people faced, why should one Negro hate another over something as goddamn trivial as who the other wanted to bump bones with? Long as it wasn’t some other guy’s wife or other wife’s husband, who the hell cared? That was almost as stupid as displaying prejudice to another Negro because they were blacker or lighter than you were, though plenty of that went on, too.

  Like most cops (and even in Navy blues he remained at heart a plainclothes dick), Sarge had developed a world-weary acceptance of such absurdities, otherwise he’d have long ago gone Section 8 himself.

  Continuing on down the street as afternoon eased into dusk, Sarge—in an undertaker’s black suit and white shirt and black tie—gazed through the windows of shops and restaurants that brandished the usual signs warning him not to enter. He was just strolling along, getting the fish eye from white people, taking his time and waiting for his only real friend on the base, Willie Wilson, to catch up with him.

  He and Willie had met at Great Lakes Training Center, the sprawling facility near Lake Michigan, forty miles from Chicago. The two city boys (Willie was from St. Louis) were bunkmates at blacks-only Camp Robert Smalls, where they’d spent three months. Both had been struck by the strict segregation at chow time—whites in one line, blacks in the other, eating on separate floors of the mess hall—and also by the way the clothing of the colored recruits tipped off where they came from.

  Deep South boys arrived in coveralls; fellas from the West, sports clothes; and big city east-of-the-Mississippi types like Sarge and Willie wore suits.

  At first, their shared love of music had given Sarge and Willie something to talk about, and they’d spent rare liberties taking the bus into Chicago, where Sarge introduced Willie to the really hopping South Side jazz joints. Then in San Diego, after they’d learned their way around that city, they’d gone to the Logan Heights colored section, where the barbecue cooked in big ovens rivaled Willie’s hometown’s BBQ and little three-piece jazz combos cooked even better. Finally it had gone beyond talking about music and enjoying other people’s playing to where they could make their own noise— like tonight at the Silver Slipper, the only club outside of the Heights that catered to the Negro crowd.

  Soon Sarge glommed Willie coming out of a drugstore up on the corner, a small paper bag in one hand, a battered saxophone case in the other. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, Willie eased the paper bag into the side pocket of his charcoal suit coat.

  Willie stood maybe four inches shorter than Sarge’s own six foot three and weighed in at around one fifty, maybe one fifty-five, a good fifty pounds shy of Sarge. Willie’s white shirt contrasted with the dark brown of his complexion as well as the multi-colored tie that to Sarge looked like a big wide rag somebody used to wipe up with after several cans of spilled paint.

  The sax man’s hair was cut short to his scalp, making his high forehead seem even higher, his mustache of the pencil variety. Even though Willie had held only two
jobs in his life—horn player and (now) steward’s mate—his face was as somberly knowing as a country preacher’s.

  Sarge wasn’t much of a smiler, himself; part of it was his copper’s mask—if the people he encountered, from victims to villains, could read him, he was a dead man.

  Between growing up on the South Side and being a cop most of his adult life, Sarge had seen enough shit in twenty-eight years to fertilize motherfucking Kansas. The scars on his cheeks, ghosts of the knife used on him by a pimp named Abraham Hines, were not the only scars that Sarge carried; and he seldom spoke about any of them, visible or not. Some of the people involved, Abraham Hines in particular, weren’t

  talkative on the subject, either—Hines being dead.

  Willie caught sight of Sarge and waved.

  Sarge waved back and gave up a grin.

  Willie ambled up, a smile tickling his somber mug. “And how is Sarge doin’ on this beautiful evening?”

  “Fine, Willie,” Sarge said. “Just fine.” He began walking and Willie fell in alongside. “Go on—tell me how good you was with that woman. Let’s get that shit out of the way.”

  Willie swung his blank face toward Sarge. “What woman?”

  Sarge’s eyes narrowed in a sideways glance. “One above that drugstore. Big ol’ mama only a blind fool would even bother with.”

  “Man, you must got me confused with some other Willie Wilson. It’s a common damn name, you know.”

  “Ease up on the b.s., Willie. I’m a copper from way back. You know you can’t lie to me, son.”

  “Well, first of all she ain’t that old. Also, she ain’t that big, except in the places where I prefers them that way.”

  They walked some more.

  Then Sarge asked, “That all you got to say about it?”

  “You want me to kiss and tell? Doesn’t I look like a gentleman?”

  “Yes,” Sarge said, “and no.”

  They stopped at a light.

  Willie shrugged. “Truth? God’s honest truth? Man, she was great.”

  “Was she.”

  “Only . . .” Willie cackled, an infectious laugh that belied his somber mask. “. . . I was better.”

  Shaking his head, laughing despite himself, Sarge said, “You gonna be better, son, right up till her man comes home and catches you on Nookie Patrol.”

  “He ain’t gonna catch us,” Willie said, shrugging that off. “Fool’s on some damn island in the middle of the South Pacific.”

  Sarge slapped his friend lightly on the back of the skull. “You think you the only motherfucker ever get liberty?”

  “What’s he gonna do, swim home?” Willie asked with a sneer. “Anyways, you just jealous, Sarge. Probably ain’t had any quiff since you left Chicago.”

  “Not since yo mama,” Sarge said, slipping into the street game of “the dozens,” which dated back to when the least desirable slaves on the auction block were sold by the dozen.

  Willie took the bait. “Oh yeah? Yo mama’s so fat that when she jumped in the air, she got stuck.”

  “That so? Well, yo mama so poor? When I see her kickin’ a can down the street and ask her what she doin’? She say, ‘Movin’.’ ”

  Willie said, “Yo mama’s so dumb when she jump off the Empire State Building, she ask for directions on the way down. . . .”

  They kept up the verbal jousting as they ambled along, heading for a restaurant that would actually serve them.

  Of course, Maybelle’s was a restaurant only by the loosest of definitions. In the middle of a colored neighborhood, Maybelle’s was nothing more than a frame house where the furniture had been removed and replaced by mismatched tables and chairs in every room except the kitchen and bathroom. Butcher-paper tablecloths were simply torn away and discarded after customers finished. Nobody cared about the lack of niceties, because the food was downhome heaven— better than anything Sarge had eaten since his Grams had passed on in ’39.

  Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, and greens. Big bosomy Maybelle herself (or one of her girls) brought the food to the tables in huge bowls that you passed around. Maybelle didn’t bother with menus—you ate what they brought you or you went elsewhere.

  As usual, Willie seemed more hungry for one of the waitresses than he did the food she was serving—a high yellow gal of seventeen, maybe eighteen, name of Pearl. Willie spent more time chewing the fat with her than anything on his plate.

  When Pearl left to get them each a piece of pie, Sarge said, “One o’ these times, one of these girls is gonna have a boyfriend who is just gonna up and kill your sorry ass.”

  Preacher-man sober again, Willie said, “Better one of them than some damn Jap. Least I’ll have it comin’.”

  Sarge let out a laugh, and Pearl brought them their slabs of pie and they dug in. As evenings went, Sarge was having a pretty fair time . . . and they weren’t even to the good part yet—best thing about snagging a liberty on Tuesday night was they could play at the Silver Slipper.

  He and Willie had been at the Slipper half a dozen times and were both known as solid cats. Right off, they’d fallen in with a local rhythm section, a bass player named Roscoe Gregg and a kid drummer name of Marvin Hannah, who they had to smuggle in. Mostly, teenage Marvin hung close to Sarge in this rough company. Everybody knew that Sarge had been a cop in Chicago and the umbrella of his reputation seemed enough for all of them to stand under.

  Well, all but that first night, anyway. . . .

  Few months ago, not long after Sarge arrived at the base, Willie brought him to the Slipper to listen to the Nat “King” Cole Trio, whose “Straighten Up and Fly Right” had just got them a recording contract. He and Willie were in the middle of having a fine old time when Sarge saw a guy on the dance floor just haul off and punch a woman in the face. A young girl it was, and she went down, mouth a bloody smear. The music stopped, and the bastard bent over to grab her arm and jerk her up so he could maybe give her another one.

  Problem was, at least for the woman-slugger, the arm he latched on to belonged to Sarge, who had parted the crowd and bounded onto the dance floor and got himself between the bastard and his battered date.

  “What the fuck you think you doin’, boy?” the guy had said, through his teeth, the words like steam escaping.

  “I ain’t doin’ nothin’, friend,” Sarge said, removing the hand from his arm like a leaf that had drifted and clung. “Just makin’ my way across the dance floor in this free country.”

  The guy’s upper lip curled back. “I ain’t your friend, Scar-face.”

  Sarge’s eyes tightened but his voice stayed loose. “Man, that ain’t polite. Like hitting ladies ain’t polite. Your manners leave something to be desired.”

  “Does they?” The bastard brought out a switchblade from nowhere, like Bugs Bunny producing a carrot; he flicked it open with a nasty click. “Maybe you’d like to give me a lesson?”

  “Put that away,” Sarge said calmly, “and there be no need. . . .”

  The bastard lunged at Sarge, thin blade making a beeline for Sarge’s left ribcage.

  But Sarge elbowed his attacker’s arm, driving it (and the blade) down, coming around with a forearm that smashed into the wide-eyed, teeth-bared face, producing a satisfying crunch as the bastard’s nose busted.

  Sarge’s opponent yelped like a kicked dog, and the knife clattered to the hard floor. A wounded beast now, flailing, the guy swung a wild left that Sarge easily blocked to send a left of his own into the bastard’s belly, air whooshing out, doubling him over as if bowing to Sarge, who swung a hard right fist that caught the guy’s chin, lifting him off his feet and dropping him like a feedsack onto the dance floor.

  Of course, the girl the guy had punched was soon hovering over her fallen escort, glaring up at her savior with ingratitude, blood mingling with lipstick. “You hurt my Enos! You a bad man, mister!”

  Still, it worked out. The punched Judy’s beau turned out to have his own rep as a real bad ass . . . till that
night, anyway. After that, nobody at the Slipper ever messed with Sarge, his friends, or anyone else in the place when Sarge was around. Even the bartenders seemed happy to see Sarge come in—like having a free extra bouncer—and Enos and his girl had not been seen on the premises since.

  Night was settling over the city cool and breezy, riding a light wind that would’ve barely rated notice back in Bronzeville. But even so, Sarge felt a homesick pang. Still, he had Willie and he had his music and, for tonight anyway, that would have to do.

  They split the bottle of bourbon on the walk to the Silver Slipper. Wasn’t a big bottle and, especially after the big meal, got neither of them anywheres near drunk.

  The booze did give Sarge a nice warm feeling in his belly and, despite his confidence in every other part of his life, a little liquor was the boost he needed to give him the courage to take the stage. Once he got up there and the music started in, he felt fine, at home even; but until they got going, sailing along on a song, he’d rather face a hopped-up razor-wielding stickup artist.

  The quartet had gotten good, fast, in part because they found time to rehearse in the basement of the Baptist Church Marvin attended out here. Sarge didn’t spend a lot of time in church anymore—he’d lost his faith six years ago, after a little girl got raped and killed and dumped in Washington Park—but this church had a piano in the basement, so Sarge enjoyed his time there more than he did in most houses of God.

  Once they had started to improve, the fellas had talked about adding a trumpet or cornet player, but so far hadn’t had any luck. They tried two guys out, and one couldn’t play by ear and the other played in the key of Q, so fuck that. They made do without a horn.

  Sarge and Willie ambled up to the white-bulb-framed entry of the Silver Slipper and both shook hands with the big bouncer/doorman—a very dark-skinned Negro called Booger, who grinned as wide as a piano keyboard (with just as many black keys). Booger was dressed almost identically to Sarge—black suit, white shirt, black tie—only this boy used up enough cloth to outfit a planeload of paratroopers.