Jump into the Sky (2 page)

“But don’t be fooled,” Aunt Odella would always add. “That sweet voice of hers didn’t mean she was a sweet person. I don’t think that girl had a sweet bone in her whole entire body. After your daddy married her, he couldn’t do nothing right in her eyes. Couldn’t buy her the right clothes, couldn’t take her to the right places, couldn’t tell her she was pretty enough times.”

According to my aunt, Queen Bee Walker was the kind of wife who was always unhappy about something. “And then one night, just a few months after you was born squalling and crying into this sorry world, she up and left.”

I knew the rest of the story. How she drove my daddy’s old Ford jalopy to the club one night to sing, left me lying on the passenger seat like a loaf of bread, and disappeared.

But I figure the lady must’ve had some speck of human kindness in her stone-cold heart because even though it wasn’t a real chilly night when she left, she’d been careful to wrap me up in a fur coat my daddy had given to her as a present once. Heck, if she’d wanted to be mean, she coulda run off with that expensive fur coat and the old Ford too,
right? Next to me, she left a note written on a paper napkin from the club. It said
I AM LEVIN
in crooked black letters.

She didn’t have much education. “Couldn’t read much, I don’t think, and hardly knew how to write more than her own name,” Aunt Odella would tell me. “When your daddy found you lying there with that note in the middle of the night, it confused him for a minute. He thought she was giving you a new name: Levin. And then he realized, ‘No, by gosh, the woman is trying to tell me she’s leavin’, movin’ on, gone—’ ” My aunt would wave her hand in the air each time she told this part of the story, as if Queen Bee Walker had vanished into thin air. Maybe she did. “Never saw a hair of her pretty little head around this part of Chicago again.”

But the name stuck.

“Where’s that baby Levin?” folks in the family would ask, just joking a little because sometimes in life it’s better to laugh than to cry. And my daddy had enough of a mess in his life, with a wife who had run off and a new baby to take care of and all. He needed a good laugh, I guess.

As time passed, Levin turned into Levi.

Finally, according to Aunt Odella, everybody in the family just gave up using my real name of Chester, which had come from Great-Granddaddy Chester with the Paralysis. Aunt Odella herself had to admit I didn’t look much like a shriveled-up raisin of a man who’d been born during slavery times. “Guess your name is the one thing your momma got
right,” my aunt would say to end the story, “even if she didn’t mean to.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Because once those words were scrawled on a napkin, I believe that’s when leaving became a permanent part of my life. A curse I had to carry around like a pocketful of rocks.
I Am Levin
. How many times had I heard those words? First from my momma. Then from my daddy, who used them so often, he wore them out. Then there was Granny, who’d died and left me—not that she could be blamed for that fault entirely, being the age of ninety-two when she passed on. Now it was Aunt Odella bringing them up again.

Honestly, where did Aunt Odella think I could go to next? She was my daddy’s oldest sister—although no words had ever been whispered about how
much
older she was. His two younger sisters lived in Detroit, but they had their own families to worry about and couldn’t be bothered with me. Everybody else was busy with the war.

Still sitting on the end of my bed, my aunt nodded toward my father’s photograph on the shelf nearby. There he was: Charles A. Battle wearing his brand-new army uniform with a proud smile. Tell you the truth, he hardly looked real. He had one of those thin Hollywood mustaches, a neck the size of a football lineman’s, and shoulders that didn’t even fit inside the frame. His army cap was so crisp and perfectly creased, you’d swear it was made outta paper.

Aunt Odella gave a loud sigh and picked at some invisible
lint on her dress sleeve. “He’s been gone for a long time, hasn’t he?”

“Yes ma’am.” I nodded, wondering where this talk was heading.

“Probably wouldn’t even recognize you now, you’ve grown so much.”

“No ma’am.” Tried not to give an eye roll, but I never liked people talking about how tall I was. These days, me and Archie looked like David and Goliath walking around together—me being the big Goliath and him being the puny, tough David who would pop anybody in the knees for nothing. There were a couple of taller boys in our school, but the little grammar school kids still liked calling me “Big Man” whenever they saw me. “Hey, Big Man, come be our tree,” they’d say at recess, flapping their little hands in my direction. Their part of the schoolyard didn’t have any trees for tag, so if I was feeling generous, sometimes I’d stand there with my arms out, being their tree. Wasn’t much of a star at sports, anyhow.

Aunt Odella’s gaze returned to the picture of my father. “The war’s gonna be over soon and you’ll want to be with your daddy when that happens, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “When he gets back, I guess.”

He was stationed at an army post in North Carolina, but I hadn’t been dwelling on him much lately, I gotta admit. The army moved him around so often, you couldn’t really blame me for not worrying about where he was every minute
or when he was coming home. Only place he hadn’t been sent to was the war itself. Which was one of life’s eternal mysteries. All these big battles were happening over in Europe and the Pacific, and he hadn’t seen a single one of them as far as we could tell.

My aunt continued, “Well, I been doing a lot of thinking and praying about your daddy, and I decided the time’s come for you to see him again.”

What?
Flat-out shocked, I stared at Aunt Odella.

“With the war ending any day now, I think it’s time for you to go and stay with him for a while.” Her voice was stubborn. “I done way more than my share of raising you. It’s his turn to take over. That’s what I decided. There’s a train leaving for North Carolina today.”

Good grief almighty, was she out of her mind? Did she remember my daddy was still serving in the U.S. Army? And our country was still in a big war? And nobody had surrendered yet?

Everything was so quiet, you could hear the people in the next apartment listening to the radio and the sound of their teakettle wailing away. I think Aunt Odella was waiting for me to say something, to break the frozenness of the air around us, but there were no words. Just the sound of that fool teakettle. Leaving was one thing, but sending me to my father was something entirely different. I kept thinking to myself,
How in the world could she just up and decide to send me to North Carolina? Was she expecting me to stroll down
there and show up on my daddy’s doorstep at an army post with no warning?

My aunt’s determination melted a little around the edges the longer the silence went on. “I’m only looking out for what’s best for you and him,” she said in a softer voice. “Don’t you want to see your father too?”

I didn’t answer because I couldn’t even conjure up a picture of what seeing him would be like—to know how I’d feel. Heck, it’d been more than three years since he left. Always told my best friend Archie that missing people in the war was like picking a scab—once you started, you’d wish you had left it alone.

“Boys need their fathers and fathers need their sons in this world.” Aunt Odella stood up as if that was her final word on the subject. Tugging on the sides of her sturdy dress, she straightened out the wrinkles that had bunched around her middle and wiped her hand across the little beads of sweat that had gathered along the top of her upper lip. “Well, it’s getting late. We better get your things packed up.”

When I was little, I used to wonder if my life woulda been any different if I’d stuck with the plain old name of Chester instead. Maybe I woulda had an ordinary family like Archie’s, with a momma who cooked beef roast on Sundays and a daddy who cranked homemade ice cream when it was hot and told jokes. Instead, I had a family that had taken off more times than a B-17 bomber.

I think that’s what Aunt Odella was afraid of too.

Afraid of being stuck with me if my daddy didn’t come back after the war ended. Before I’d come to live with her, she’d taken care of Granny during her illness, and before that, Great-Granddaddy with the Paralysis. So maybe that’s why she wasn’t wasting any time getting rid of me, you know what I mean?

Not even two hours later, I was walking outta her apartment carrying one suitcase and a paper bag of fried chicken speckled with grease. The suitcase held just about everything I owned in the world—which wasn’t a whole lot by the looks of it. From what I could tell, my daddy had no idea I was coming.

I
t’s strange how many dumb things you notice about a place when you’re leaving it. For instance, as me and Aunt Odella headed out of her apartment building that morning, I noticed for the first time how much spit there was on the steps. There was years, maybe decades, of people’s spit on the worn gray stones. Those steps were a spit mosaic. A lot of it was mine and Archie’s, no doubt. We enjoyed letting a nice wet bomb hit the pavement now and then. Strange to think how I had to leave but my spit got to stay, you know?

I remember how it was a pretty morning for Chicago too. Sunny. Warm. Big yellow dandelions had sprouted up through the cracks in the sidewalk, and I swear I never noticed dandelions growing there before. You could smell the coffee beans roasting at Hixson’s Grocery across the street and hear the faint sound of a saxophone playing, even at that early hour. Probably from the all-night clubs a few blocks over.

I took one last backward glance at Aunt Odella’s building before we turned the corner. Never thought I’d feel sorry about saying goodbye to that old place, but I did. It was nothing special—just a plain old brick walk-up, three stories tall, with the usual rickety fire escapes zigzagging up the sides. Aunt Odella’s apartment was on the top floor. My window had faced the back and looked out over the tar roof of another run-down apartment building behind us. In the spring, you could see the reflections of clouds going by in the roof puddles, which was the only good part of having a rooftop as your scenery. Sometimes you could feel above the clouds.

Aunt Odella walked faster down the street, like she didn’t want to give me time to start dwelling too much. The handle of the suitcase kept sliding in my sweaty hands, and I switched sides every time we stopped. In Aunt Odella’s opinion, I’d brought along way more than anybody’d need. “It’s probably that winter cap and all those extra things you packed, making everything so hard to carry,” she said at one stop. “I tried telling you not to take so much.”

Maybe North Carolina wasn’t the Arctic, but the cap had been a gift from my great-uncle Otis and it was one of those nice leather aviator ones you see in the war movies. People always said it made me look like a mad African bomber pilot, so I couldn’t go and leave it behind.

Aunt Odella hadn’t backed down on my Speed Jaxon
comics, though. “You gonna be too busy where you’re going to read junk.” Even before I’d finished packing, the whole stack of them got yanked outta the suitcase and smacked onto the floor. My aunt said she’d give them to the scrap drive. Paper was in short supply in 1945, but seeing my newspaper comics get sent for scrap just about tore my heart out because they didn’t have a mark on them.

Still, I managed to slip in the scorpion when Aunt Odella turned around to fold up some of my shirts for packing. The scorpion wasn’t alive, of course—this was a dried-up one my father had sent two years earlier, thinking I’d get a kick out of it for my eleventh birthday.

Back then, he’d been training in Arizona for a big war assignment the army changed its mind about and never sent him to. Which was a story that seemed to repeat itself over and over when it came to my daddy and his service. Archie was convinced my father was a spy for the U.S. Army. Or a secret commando. “No other explanation for how much moving around and training your daddy does. Man oh man, I bet he’s a big-time top spy for the Allies,” he’d try and tell me. Archie’s father was too old to serve, so maybe that’s why he admired mine.

In some of his letters from North Carolina, my father had written about jumping out of airplanes with parachutes, and getting his “wings” and “jump boots,” but Aunt Odella had her own doubts about those details. There was no way my father—or any other sane Negro she knew—would jump
outta an airplane, she insisted. “I grew up with your daddy and he couldn’t even look over the railing of a porch two feet off the ground without feeling sick,” she said. She thought it was more likely he drove an army truck, or worked as a guard, or something dull and ordinary like that. “He just throws in a few big stories now and then to keep us entertained at home.”

Most of the time, I couldn’t decide what to believe.

Fortunately, I’d opened the mail the day he sent the scorpion—if it’d been Aunt Odella, she woulda had a holy flying fit. The scorpion had been pasted inside a folded piece of paper with the words
Don’t show to Odella. Happy Birthday!
written on the front.

For a couple of days, I was like Moses parting the Red Sea as I strolled down the hallways at school with that thing in my pocket. Everybody moved aside to let me and Archie pass by. All I had to do was wave the scorpion of death in the air and we could get anything we wanted to eat for lunch. Deviled eggs. A cheese sandwich. Some homemade ginger cookies. Wave it around again and the line for the school washroom would shrink down to nothing. Me and Archie were kings. It was one of those birthday presents you never grow up and forget.

Besides the old scorpion, there were a couple of other things I slipped past my aunt’s X-ray eyes while I was packing up my
suitcase. Took all my father’s letters and his army picture—although I don’t think she woulda complained about me bringing them along. And I couldn’t help throwing in a handful of buckeyes from the nice collection I kept under my bed.

It was a crazy habit I had, collecting those buckeyes. Even being thirteen and being too old for dumb collections, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from picking them up. Under my bed, there were boxes and boxes crammed full of the smooth mahogany-colored seeds—some as large as the palm of your hand—from the shady buckeye trees in our neighborhood. I could imagine Aunt Odella’s shocked expression when she stuck a broom under the bed and found the rest of them. Buckeyes rolling all over creation.