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RAY JOHNSON WAS a pattern man. When his black man’s dream to be an architect smashed into a whitewashed wall, he moved on to improvise to the rhythms of the newly birthed Air Force. His training as a draftsman housed visionary talents. He could look at a plan in two dimensions and walk through the building as if it had been built in three. He could see in a thickened line the snafus it would cause as if it were an actual cinder block wall in front of him. He claimed he heard a wrong note and immediately knew the frequency of the right one. Move that one there, he would say, stabbing at the plans. His instant insight met with suspicion at first, but when he pulled over an adding machine and talked through the savings in time, money, and effort, even the most entrenched lard butt rushed to agree.
Ray read purchase orders and schedules and saw the storage, movement, and use of supplies as if he were watching a Technicolor movie. Shipments arrived at destinations before they were needed via means that were dismissed as impossible by lesser minds. A miracle worker, more than one CO called him. A few years before, back in the fifties, when Ray and Betty Ann arrived at his assignment on the outskirts of Washington, the base was rapidly expanding. Major Hamilton “Ham” Stone was in charge of doing it right. Ray was a pattern man, always was, but the major didn’t believe in his patterns at first. He had commanded too many airmen who wrote their own copy. And Ray talked crazy. Talked about hearing with his eyes. Answered “why” questions that way. Stone barked out strings of curses impressive in their crudeness, even for a soldier. Only then would Ray explain in proper logistics speak, in dimensions and distances and quantities per box.
Besides, Stone was a Dodgers fan who still grieved over their traitorous move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Ray was a Yankees man, proud of his Bronx Bombers, with little sympathy for a fellow New Yorker who backed the wrong team. As the two sought a working groove, the 53rd Wing was dropped into their laps. They had to execute plans to house the incoming group at the southern end of the base. Pronto. Neither of them had any say in said plans. They were drawn upstream by someone given a terrain map and a deadline. Someone who had never visited the actual site. The drawings of the south side arrived crisp and clean, the two required hangars set near the hills and the location of two more suggested by dotted line footprints.
Ray and the Major drove out there for the first time, out to the point where the air strips outran the last buildings and stretched past the scrub that foretold the rise of the surrounding hills. Ray sensed trouble right away in the steady buzz of the drawings, but he had no words yet to tell exactly what needed to change. So he yanked off his boots and socks and left them in the Jeep. One, two, unbuckle my shoe. His feet needed to see, he said. Stone strode away, his boots leaving a line of heel marks. Ray followed. He left no footprints at all. The crunch of Stone’s impatient step outranked the snick of his bare feet.
They traced a wide arc up to the base of the hills and returned to the Jeep to roll out the plans. Three, four, bomb the Corps.
That was it.
“Don’t build the hangars up against the hills,” Ray said. “Leave some space, I’ll tell you how much. Some will be like quarter rests; others will be whole bars of silence.”
“Nonsense,” Stone said. “You’re speaking in tongues again. The hills—”
“Are regular. So it’s not a straight line like Pearl Harbor. So what? Any pilot able to take off could hit every last one of them in one run. Take me up and I’ll show you if you don’t believe me.”
Stone pressed down on the plans laid out on the Jeep’s hood. Chances were that any attack that reached this base would be by nuclear missile—it wouldn’t matter how far apart they spaced the hangars since the whole installation could be destroyed in one strike. Even so, the military’s cumbersome logic always fought the last war. And plenty of people had lost friends or family at Pearl Harbor. It was just too fresh not to be a political force, even at the scrub end of the Maryland countryside. Stone turned his face upward, his gaze rising high and then swooping down over the field. Ray was right, he always was.
Stone conceded the point with a quick nod. “Okay. What do we do about it?”
“A little syncopation is all we need. Leave it to me.”
Ray devised, and the major fought. The higher ups, that is. Usually, he would be sloughed off as a pain in the ass. Couldn’t he see the box marked complete with permanent ink? But he knew how to play in the big leagues. “Don’t want another Pearl Harbor,” he remarked more than once while stalled in some outer office. Somehow the message got passed along, a door opened, and he carefully steered the ensuing conversation to the point where he was congratulating the desk jockey for catching the subtle flaw. The duo worked this out-of-date danger well and wound up slipping in extra storage space and a south-side field station for their own use. When the installation was complete, even General Hepplewhite could see that the modifications, while utilitarian, had a spare logic that rivaled that of Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.”
Ray received his due, even got a promotion to master sergeant, and Stone soon depended on him to see motifs that no one else did. As they dug into other projects and bonded over their favorite sport, Stone found creative means of compensating him for his unusual talents. It was a time when an enterprising Air Force officer could find military business near most Major League Baseball cities. The officer, if shrewd, would develop these opportunities in such a way that he would practically be commanded to take along an NCO as an assistant, and not just a tag-along but a logistical expert.
Stone took him to Cuba once, to Havana and out into the countryside. They went to a local baseball stadium where every single fan seemed to have a passion that reached infinitely deeper than his, and he a man hopelessly in love with the game. But that was an eon ago. Before the Revolution.
Stone’s roving schemes and fixation on baseball meant that for several seasons Ray left Betty Ann alone many a night to attend urgent “duty” near Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston. She pouted, pretty dimples ringing her full lips and pocking her apple-round cheeks, when he announced the latest off-base excursion.
“You have plenty of gentlemen friends to keep you company,” Ray said, as if she had voiced a complaint.
