Dead Lock (6 page)

“Jack’s right,” said G.P.. “If you’re Churchill and you know where they’re coming, evacuating the towns would tell the Krauts you’ve broken their code.”

“I’m sure it haunts him every night,” said Crawford.

“But what good is the breaking the code if you can’t use the information?” I asked.

“If the Brits broke the code,” Crawford said, “and it’s a big if … the information they gather would be used on every battle front the Allies are involved in.”

“That’s right,” said G.P.. “Details in areas like troop strength, weaponry and strategy would be priceless.”

I was stunned and started to speak, but G.P. held a finger over his lips for silence. Mrs. Miller was coming down the hall again.

“Dinner’s ready,” she said, peeking around the corner.

I had lost my appetite.

20

I left G.P.’s house soon after supper. All the driving I’d done over the past two days had wrung me out and my body craved sleep. There was a full moon, which made the walk in the darkness of the night’s blackout drill much easier.

I didn’t see Shirley that evening, and saw little of her the entire weekend. She spent both days working at Blades’ restaurant.

Time went quickly as I settled into my new surroundings. The room Shirley had assigned to me was twenty by twenty or so, big enough for a double bed, a chest of drawers with an attached mirror and a comfortable chair. The closet had more than enough space for my clothes. My two empty suitcases went up into the attic.

I walked the four blocks downtown on Saturday, enjoying the sunny day and checking out shops and restaurants to see if things had changed much since my senior year at Soo High. And since the Army had moved in a little over a year ago.I noticed a number of familiar faces, and stopped for short conversations.

There’s something special about a small town. People you don’t even know smile and say hello as you pass on the sidewalk. I had forgotten how much I missed that openness living in a big city. There were plenty of new buildings but the main difference was in the population. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere: on the sidewalks of Ashmun and Portage Avenue, shopping at Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penny’s and crowding into the American Ice Cream Parlor next to the Soo Theatre. Their presence gave me a bit more confidence that a Nazi attack could very well wreak more havoc on the Germans than on the locks.

If G.P. and Crawford had been correct about the possibility of a raid, hopefully they were just as right about the chances of repelling it.

I stopped at a newsstand outside the Ojibway Hotel and picked up a copy of the
Soo Morning News
. The front page was heavy with news of the Allies chasing the Nazis across northern Africa. The sports section reported the woes of the Detroit Tigers who, with their best player Hank Greenberg in the Army Air Force, seemed resigned to going through the motions in a season of mediocrity.

But those stories had come off the wire services. I wanted to read the local news, the work of the News staff. There was plenty of it, and from the stories I read, my uncle’s paper still held its own among small town dailies. The reporting for the most part was excellent.

I spent most of the next day kind of lazing around the house. Shirley arrived home that evening just after ten to find me in the bedroom. I had been listening to a broadcast of Fred Allen’s
Texaco Star Theatre
that featured Brooklyn Dodger player/manager Leo Durocher. Hearing Durocher talk about the Dodgers’ current success made me feel even worse about the Tigers’ doubleheader loss earlier in the day.

The sun had gone down and a floor lamp beside the chair and a lamp on the table beside my bed provided the light. Mick lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, his head resting on his paws. Shirley had brought a six-pack of Pfeiffer’s home from Blade’s place and popped open a beer for each of us. I sat cross-legged on the bed; Shirley lay across the overstuffed chair, legs dangling over the side, foot pumping to the strains of the Andrews Sisters’
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B
.

It was as if we were teenagers again.

21

Shirley told me she had heard about Ronny, and expressed condolences, saving me the pain of going through a story I had already told far too many times.

Soon, we were talking about the “good old days:” boyfriends, girlfriends and our teachers at Soo High. The conversation flowed easily and I was beginning to relax. I started to light up a Rameses, an off-brand of cigarette, when I noticed Shirley taking a pack of Old Gold from her shirt pocket.

“Where did you get those?” I asked. “All I can seem to find are Rameses or Pacayunes.”

Shirley’s forehead squeezed into a frown. “Jeeeze. You might as well try smoking a rope.”

“Where did you find Old Gold?”

“At the Red Owl.”

“All I saw there were Rameses.”

“You’ve got to ask Jack Casey for ‘stoopies’,” Shirley said.

“Stoopies?”

“With the good brands so scarce, they stock cigarettes like Chesterfields and Old Golds under the counter. They save them for regular customers. You’ve got to know how to ask for them.”
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
ended and Glenn Miller and his band were playing
That Old Black Magic.
Shirley’s foot continued to keep time.

She shook a couple of cigarettes out of her pack and, sitting up, offered me one along with a light. I took a deep drag, thankful for a decent smoke.

I also took a pull from my bottle of Pfeiffer’s. The evening was exactly what I needed after what I had been through back in Detroit; maybe Miles had been right about my getting away.

Shirley leaned back across the padded arm of the chair and blew a stream of smoke that nearly reached the ceiling. “Tell me something,” she said, looking at me with a grin, “Do they ever call you Scoop Brennan downstate at the Times?”

Scoop was the nickname I’d picked up working on the Soo High newspaper.

“Not a chance,” I laughed. “No one knows about that, and I’m sure not going to tell anyone. What about you? I don’t remember you having any nicknames in high school.”

“I didn’t. But I had a doozey when I was young.”

“What was it?”

“I’m not saying.”

“Come on.”

“Promise me you won’t laugh.”

“Promise.”

“After my parents died, I lived with my uncle and aunt in Negaunee.” Shirley paused to take a sip of Pfeiffer’s and a drag from her cigarette. “I was about seven, I guess; I’d have these terrible nightmares. I’d wake up at night and climb in bed with them. It earned me the wonderful nickname of ... Snuggles.”

“Snuggles,” I laughed.

“You promised you wouldn’t do that.”

“Sorry. I just can’t picture you as a Snuggles.”

Shirley smiled in spite of herself. “Things sure seemed simpler when we were kids. We didn’t realize how good we had it.”

I agreed. “Kids have a way of magnifying their problems. Breaking up with a boyfriend seemed like the end of the world.”

“We always had Toad Hall.”

The words conjured up an immediate feeling of nostalgia. I hadn’t thought about Toad Hall in years. It was our name for an old abandoned cabin deep in the Minneapolis Woods, just outside of town. The name came from the Kenneth Graham novel,
The Wind in
the Willows
and the fact we found a town hopping around inside the place the day we discovered it.

Someone said the tiny cabin didn’t look much like a Hall with a capital “H”and that a name like Toad Stool might be more appropriate.Shirley, who had suggested the name Toad Hall in the first place, said Toad Stool sounded like Hell with a capital H.

The name Toad Hall stuck.

The cabin remained dark and cool inside even on hot summer days. The floor was wood and most of the windows were broken, but we didn’t care. There were five of us: Shirley, me, Mary Lapinski, Sue McChesney and Ellen Landon: the only ones who knew about Toad Hall. We’d meet there a couple times a week for animated discussions of boys, teachers and parents.

“Whatever happened to the other girls?” I asked. “Do you hear from them?”

Shirley shook her head as she took a last drag on her cigarette and stubbed the butt out on an ashtray on the table beside her chair. “Mary and I exchanged letters for awhile; but you know how it is. It seems we’re all too busy living our own lives.”

“I’m sorry you and I lost track of each other after high school,” I said. “You were headed for the University of Michigan.”

“Yeah. But I dropped out in December of my sophomore year. Same old story: I ran out of money.”

“That happened a lot in the Thirties,” I said. With both of us puffing on cigarettes, the room had gotten smoky. I got up, walked over to the window and pried it open, trying to fan some smoke out into the night with my hand.

Shirley went on. “I worked in a hardware store down in Traverse City, planning to save some money to go back to college. But I wound up here in the U.P. again instead.”

“Must’ve missed the winters and the ten-foot snow drifts.”

“Not exactly. I just got tired of the hardware store. I went to work at a restaurant over in Negaunee; stayed there a couple of years. I came back to the Soo last January.” Shirley motioned to our bottles which, by now, were both empty. When I nodded, Shirley grabbed my bottle and went out to the kitchen, coming back with two full Pfeiffer’s.

“What’s your story, Kate?” she asked as she handed me a beer. “What brings you back?”

I went through the details of my ordeal with the punk on the porch and Miles’ insistence that I leave town. Then I told Shirley about my uncle’s reluctance to welcome me to the Soo.

“Say, that’s not surprising,” Shirley said with a wave of her free hand. “Why, with all these GIs here . . . it’s not a great place for a young woman in her uncle’s eyes.”

“What do you mean not a great place?” I said. “You’re here with all these GIs.”

“I said in her uncle’s eyes,” Shirley laughed. “In my eyes it’s a great place to be.” That started me laughing, too.

“Have you met Scotty Banyon?” I asked. “He seems like a great catch for any girl.”

Shirley turned serious. “Stay away from him,” she said. “He’s bad news.”

“Why do you say that?”

Shirley paused a moment, then shook her head. “Just stay away.”

Her reaction surprised me. I steered the conversation away from Scotty but I couldn’t get Shirley’s comment out of my mind. Were they dating at one time? Had she been in love? Had he broken off their relationship?

We finished our beer and called it a night soon after twelve o’clock. I had no trouble dozing off.

Looking back, the evening had been so comfortable and the conversation so natural that I never would have guessed it would be the last Shirley and I would ever spend together.

22

Monday, June 21

20 days before the dedication

I made sure I showed up early for my first day of work, and dressed to kill. I wore a red pants suit that had begged me to take it off the rack at Crowley’s. I completed the look with a red purse and a pair of red shoes that I figured would knock their eyes out.

Little did I know that my outfit would be upstaged by the news story of the year out of Detroit.

As I strode into the
Morning News
office I spotted Andy Checkle, the young man I had talked to the day before, and walked over to say good morning.

“This one’s yours,” he said pointing to the wooden desk facing his. “Crawford wanted me to tell you . . . and to help you get situated. He’s over at the new MacArthur Lock checking things out. Said he’d be in a little late.”

“Thanks.” I set my red purse on the desk.

“Say, what do you think about those riots?” Andy asked.

Riots? What riots? “What are you talking about?”

“The race riot in Detroit; started last night on Belle Isle. It’s all on the AP wire.” Andy pointed to a paper scroll on his desk that had been torn from the Associated Press news wire.

I picked it up and read. Negro and white youths had battled each other the past evening on Belle Isle, the popular island retreat for Detroiters’ summer picnics and softball games. White sailors from the nearby Naval Armory had joined in the melee on the side of the white youths and police had been called to restore order.

Racial tensions had been simmering in Detroit for some time, but it was hard to believe that it would deteriorate into a confrontation like this.

I decided to phone Wells Mayburn at the
Times
; I hadn’t spoken to my city editor since I arrived at the Soo. His extension was busy, so the switchboard put me through to Jim Russell who manned a desk in the city room two down from mine.

“Jim, what the devil is going on down there?”

“The whole city’s in an uproar, Kate. The fighting that started on Belle Isle has spread downtown. The cops are trying their best to cool things down, but they can’t be everywhere.

“It’s gotten completely out of control, Kate, and there are rumors that Negro leaders are asking Mayor Jeffries to call in federal troops to restore order.”

My first day on the job and I was sure I’d be covering a huge story.

Even if it was for a small town paper three hundred miles from the action.