Wartime Reno

Helen Ah Lum walked east on Second Street to the USO on a Friday evening in October 1943, the air sharp with the first cold of the year, the streetlights coming on one by one as she went. She was twenty-eight years old. Her father was Thomas, who kept the Joss House on First and Lake and ran a laundry, and her grandfather had been James, who had sold dry goods on Commercial Row, and her great-grandfather had been Wei, who had laid track for the Central Pacific in 1869 and stayed when others moved on. She had grown up four blocks from where she now walked, and she could not remember a time when she had not known the names of the streets in Reno better than she knew her own face.

The USO occupied the second floor of a building on Sierra Street, above a stationery shop. Helen worked there four evenings a week, pouring coffee and serving sandwiches to the soldiers who came in from the air base north of town. The air base had begun in 1942, ten miles up the highway in the north valleys, an Army base built fast on flat ground that had been only sage and rabbitbrush the year before. The Ferrying Division of the Air Transport Command had taken it over in the spring. Now the Curtiss C-46 Commandos were training there, twin-engine transports the men called fat, ungainly, and the men flying them were going to India when training ended, to fly supplies over the Himalayas to the Chinese forces, a route they had begun calling the Hump.

She did not know any of this when she had started in March. She had learned it from the soldiers themselves, who came down to town on weekend passes and sat at the small tables and spoke about where they were going as if the speaking would make the going easier. She had learned to nod and pour coffee and not ask questions she would not want answered.

The walk to the USO took her along the northern edge of downtown, past the Carnegie library that had become the post office annex, past the courthouse, and across a few blocks where the buildings thinned and the lots opened up. Beyond Lake Street, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony lay on its twenty acres south of the railroad tracks, the Numa families on the north side of the property and the Washoe families on the south, the federal government having bought the land in 1917 for six thousand dollars. Helen did not walk into the Colony. It was not her neighborhood. But she walked along its western boundary on Second Street, and she had known some of the children when they were children, and she nodded to the older women she recognized when she passed them on the sidewalk. The women nodded back. The Colony was a community of its own, with its own life, but the boundaries between communities in Reno had always been porous in the practical way that small towns required.

She climbed the stairs to the USO. The room was already warm and full. A piano player whose day job was at a hotel lounge had set up in the corner. Three women from the Methodist church were arranging cookies on a long table covered in a paper cloth printed with stars. Behind the counter at the back, the coffee urn was steaming. Helen tied on her apron and stepped into the place she had been stepping into for seven months.

The soldiers came in a steady stream. Most of them were young, twenty or twenty-two, from places she had never been: Iowa, Alabama, Pennsylvania, eastern Oregon, the small towns of the country pouring their sons into a base in Nevada to be trained for a route over a mountain range halfway around the world. They thanked her for the coffee. They asked where she was from. When she said Reno, they almost always smiled, as if they were surprised to find that anyone had grown up here, as if the town existed only as a way station and not as a place where people had been born and would be buried.

A pilot named Rawlings, second lieutenant, twenty-three years old, came to the counter for a refill at nine o’clock. He was from Tennessee and his hands shook a little when he held out the cup, not from fear but from a steady, unrelieved fatigue. He had been flying training missions every day for two weeks. He had two more weeks before they sent him to India. He had told Helen all of this on his previous visit, two Fridays ago, in a voice that had been perfectly even, as if he were reading off a manifest.

“You ever been east of Salt Lake?” he asked her, half smiling.

“No,” Helen said. “I’ve been to San Francisco once.”

“Some life, when an Army boy from Tennessee has seen more of the country than you have.”

“It’s not a competition,” Helen said.

“No.” He took the coffee and looked at her over the rim of the cup. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”

He went back to his table.

She did not see him again that evening. She did not remember when she stopped seeing him. Many of the men cycled through the USO on the same pattern: a few weeks of training, a few weekend passes, a final goodbye that was usually no goodbye at all because the men did not know which weekend would be the last one. They simply stopped coming. The piano player, who had been on the road for thirty years and had a long view of these things, told Helen once that the trick was not to count.

At eleven, the floor began to clear. The buses back to the base ran from the corner of Virginia and Plaza, and the men who needed to make the last one filed out in a slow tide. Helen helped the church women fold the paper cloth and stack the cups and wipe down the counter. The piano player put his coat on and tipped his hat to the room and went out into the cold.

By midnight she was the last person on the floor. She stood at the window for a moment and looked out over Sierra Street. The casino lights were on along Virginia, two blocks west. To the northwest, where the highway ran toward the air base, she could see the headlights of the last bus making its way out of town. The bus would carry men back to a base in the desert, where they would sleep a few hours, get up, eat, and climb into transports, and lift off into the dawn for another training run over the Sierra, learning a route they would not actually fly until they were on the other side of the world.

She turned off the lamp. The piano stood quiet in the corner. The coffee urn ticked as it cooled.

Helen put on her coat and went down the stairs.

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