Jump school was pure hell.
Despite Father James and the sisters at the orphanage, Lincoln mostly made his own way on the streets of New Bordeaux during his childhood. Physical exertion and punishment weren’t new to him, but this was punishment on a different level. It was compounded by the fact that he had to squeeze a three-week course into a week, which meant that when others in the morning session got to use the afternoon to recover, Lincoln had to attend another session. After that, he got an hour for dinner and “recuperation,” then another four hours of individual instruction from the jumpmaster. He spent the first few days learning the principles of jumping from airplanes and performing practice jumps—seemingly hundreds of them—from platforms of varying heights. Once he had demonstrated that he knew how to pack a parachute, how to land, how to roll, and how to disentangle himself, he started going up in planes for the real thing.
His first jump was at the comparatively low altitude of 1,500 feet, barely allowing enough time for the chute to open—but plenty of time to worry about what would happen if it didn’t. He survived, so the jumps became higher and more challenging—he was weighted down with ever more gear, and he had to jump at night and into forests, swamps, mountainsides, and other difficult terrain.
Despite his doubts, he lived through it all and was declared a paratrooper. Then he was flown to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for the next step in his sudden advancement: three classes offered at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. He had most of a day off between landing at Bragg and starting school, and he had arranged for Sammy and Ellis to travel up from New Bordeaux for the occasion.
The men were escorted to the barracks Lincoln would occupy for the duration of his training. The building was empty but for Lincoln. Dust motes danced in sunlight slanting in through the windows, and despite regular cleaning, the air was thick with the smell of sweat from men who worked hard, then slept in hot, humid conditions.
Lincoln rose from his bunk when he saw his father and brother enter. The first thing Sammy did was hold out his arms and wait for Lincoln to come into them. After a long embrace, the old man backed off, patted Lincoln’s upper arms, and said, “You’re looking good. Strong.”
“I think I’m just shorter. All the jumping I’ve done the last few days has compressed me by at least three inches.”
“He’s right, Lincoln,” Ellis said. “You do look different.”
Lincoln hadn’t really noticed the changes, but looking at Ellis now, he realized his face was leaner than it had been back home, his stomach flatter, more cut.
“Guess it’s all that shitty food,” Lincoln said with a laugh. “I tell you, there’s no food like New Bordeaux food. I haven’t had dirty beans and rice or a po’boy in months.”
“They said we could take you out,” Sammy said. “Fayetteville’s no New Bordeaux, but they got to have some decent restaurants, n’est-ce pas?”
“You’ve always been able to pick ’em, old man,” Lincoln said. “I’ll follow your nose.” He turned to Ellis. “How you doin’, man? You got a girlfriend yet?”
“So many I can’t keep their names straight,” Ellis shot back.
“Any keepers?”
Ellis shrugged. “You know, just chicks from the Hollow.”
“Man, if it’s left up to Ellis,” Sammy said, “I’ll never be a grand-père. That’s another reason you got to hurry home from this war, Lincoln.”
“One of these days, brother,” Lincoln said. “One of these days, you’ll meet the right girl.”
“With any luck,” Sammy added, “she’ll be blind.”
Ellis’s jaw dropped open and he started to frame a retort, but Lincoln burst into laughter that precluded any response. “Come on,” Sammy said. “We got to find us some sustenance. Growing boys got to eat, non?”
• • •
“Business is okay,” Sammy said after the dinner dishes had been cleared and drinks poured. “Same ol’, same ol’, you know?”
“Business is in the shitter,” Ellis countered.
“Hush, you!” Sammy snapped.
“No. Why you want to hide the truth from Lincoln? He’s a part of this family; he ought to know the real deal.”
“Lincoln has bigger things to worry about.” Sammy sipped his brandy, made a face, drank some more. When he put his glass down, he said, “Boy’s going to be a hero.”
“I don’t know if there are any heroes in this war,” Lincoln said. “Not me, anyway.” He fixed Ellis with a steady gaze. “What’s going on at home?”
“Lot of heat from the Haitians,” Ellis said. “Feels like they’re thinkin’ about makin’ a play for some of our turf.”
Sammy wagged a finger at him. “Now, you know we put that down, Ellis. Don’t be telling tales out of school.”
“Put it down for now,” Ellis admitted. “But for how long? Seems to me when it takes a show of force to get someone to back off, eventually they forget what you showed ’em and they come back for more. Plus the Dixie Mafia’s been making noises about expansion, too.”
“Turf wars are always gonna happen,” Lincoln said. “That’s all Vietnam is, really. A turf war, just on a bigger scale.”
“I don’t want you to worry about us, Lincoln,” Sammy said, banging his brandy snifter on the table for emphasis. “You got to have a clear head out there. We’re fine, really.”
Ellis made a scoffing noise, but a glare from Sammy silenced him. Lincoln didn’t like it. Sammy had always been straight with him, whether the news was good or bad. There had been plenty of the latter, from Perla’s death to the ins and outs of the family “business.”
He had never tried to hide the nature of that business from Lincoln, or apologize for it. Yes, he admitted, he was a crime boss. But the reasons for that were complex, and mostly beyond his control. In the American South in which Sammy had grown up, opportunities for men of color had been limited at best. He could have toiled at a menial blue-collar job like a janitor or garbage man, or worked in some white farmer’s fields, or he could have joined the crew of a fishing boat.
But Sammy had been born just more than a half century removed from slavery, and his own father had been a sharecropper. He wasn’t interested in an occupation that smacked of that evil institution in any way. The occupations whites had decided were good enough for the descendants of slaves were meant, he believed, to keep black men in their “proper” place and to limit economic advancement and the choices that came with it—choices like where to live and with whom to associate.
Sammy didn’t want to be limited in those ways. He wanted to take what he could, and if it meant breaking the white man’s laws, that was a bonus as far as he was concerned. So he had turned his back on those “acceptable” professions and instead used his wits and his cunning and an occasional ruthless streak to make his own way in the world. Now he was one of the wealthiest black men in New Bordeaux, with legitimate businesses—like Perla’s Nightclub, the jazz club he owned in the Delray Hollow district—that he ran alongside his illegal ones.
Lincoln remembered the first time Sammy had explained these things to him, with a solemnity resembling that with which Lincoln had heard some parents explained the mysteries of sex. He had taken Lincoln into his study and sat him down in a chair that dwarfed the boy, and he’d explained that there were activities, like lotteries, that were frowned upon by white society, even though when nobody was looking just as many white folks were drawn to them as black folks. The Robinson family fortune had, Sammy explained, been made by catering to those desires. He was quick to stress that there was nothing wrong with that. “We don’t have anything to do with products that hurt our own,” he’d said. “Putting down a dollar in hopes of making a thousand, well, that’s not gonna deprive a family of a roof over their head or food on the table. Might just put more food on the table, in fact, and patch some holes in that roof in the bargain. Some men got the urge to gamble; some got the urge to cat around. As long as none of our own folks are getting hurt, we help them enjoy those things they’re gonna do anyway.”
Lincoln had learned, as the years passed, that the business was a bit more complicated than that. In that first conversation, Sammy hadn’t said anything about taking a competitor who’d dared to tread on Black Mob turf into a neighborhood slaughterhouse and feeding him through the meat grinder. Then again, those parents describing the wonders of human reproduction never went into detail about the nuts and bolts of it, either.
When the evening ended, Sammy and Ellis dropped him off at his barracks. Special Warfare School would begin the next day. He would take abbreviated classes in unconventional warfare, psychological warfare, and counterinsurgency—classes designed to make him the kind of soldier the Army needed in the decidedly unconventional landscape of the Vietnam conflict.
But that night, he hugged the only father and brother he had ever known. Both squeezed him tight, and Lincoln saw a tear in Sammy’s eye when he said, “You take care over there, Lincoln. Like I told you from the start, we need you back home. If wearing that Green Beret means you make a little more money and get back sooner, that’s okay, but I don’t want you taking any foolish chances. I hate having you over there in the first place.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Lincoln said with a chuckle. “I’ll get home just as soon as I can.”
“In one piece, I hope,” Ellis added quietly when he embraced his brother. “I’m not worried about you, but he frets like an old lady.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lincoln muttered. “He’ll whup you just to prove you wrong.”
Ellis and Lincoln had laughed at that, and then Sammy and Ellis were gone and Lincoln turned to walk into a barracks full of men he’d never seen before and who might well resent the fact that he was there for a few months instead of a full year.