Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman

From there the center section went to Assembly, where they were attached to the fuselage and the outer wings were added, expanding the span to 110 feet. After acquiring flaps and ailerons, engines, propellers, and a coat of camouflage paint, the finished B-24 bomber took on fuel and was flown to its destination, either in the United States or England, by female and male pilots of the Ferry Command in Romulus. He bet the Krauts and the little yellow fuckers in the Philippines shit when they looked up and saw the shining tidal wave coming their way.
    But aside from such patriotic deviations the finished airplanes meant nothing to Dwight, who almost never saw one. He was concerned only with filling the little holes with rivets. The holes were made by the man who stood next to him with an electric drill. They had worked side by side for five months and had never spoken a word to each other. The other man was white except for his cherry red neck, and Dwight was black on both sides of his family going back to before the Civil War, which was still being fought in Alabama, and apparently in Kentucky, too, where the fellow who worked the drill was from; he’d overheard him talking to another Kentuckian in the locker room. The man’s name was Boyd. Since he wasn’t openly hostile, Dwight had ceased to think of him. The little holes were more significant, and since the fellow never missed making one Dwight had no reason to think of him at all.
    It was the loudest place he’d ever worked. Against this solid wall of high-pitched whines, whomping drill presses, pinging hammers, and constant shuddering rumble of the great unfinished engines of war moving down the conveyors, he looked back on the noises of his previous employment as silence. All the air horns on all the packet boats and all the cursing of his fellow dockworkers bucking bales of cotton off the barges on the Chattahoochee didn’t answer. The place stank of oil and raw metal and rubber and sweat, but he didn’t smell these things anymore and wondered sometimes if his olfactory sense had sustained as much damage as his hearing. Already his friends who didn’t work at Willow Run complained when he chose a table too near the jukebox at the Forest Club; when they made the selection he could scarcely tell the woodwinds from the brass. But hearing was overrated. The job could have his as long as it continued paying him more in one week than his entire neighborhood in Eufala had made in a month.
    He could do without having his head shit on, though. The symbolism was just too heavy.
    When the whistle screeched, signaling the shift change, Dwight Littlejohn stripped off his goggles and stopped work on his five hundredth bomber that month. His replacement passed him on the stairs to the catwalk without greeting—he, too, was white—and stepped into the hole inside the coil of electrical cord Dwight had just vacated. Time elapsed between the last chatter of the rivet gun on the nine-to-five shift and the first on the five-to-one: forty-six seconds.
    “Hey, buddy, mind?”
    Dwight, standing at the time clock, looked around for the owner of the piping tenor, then down. He’d learned not to grin when he saw a diminutive version of himself, scarcely three feet tall, in coveralls scaled down to a child’s size; the dwarves hired to climb inside the wing assemblies to buck rivets and seal fuel cells didn’t appreciate amusing their full-size coworkers. Dwight gripped the little man under his up-stretched arms, lifted him, and held him while he slid his time card into the slot and pulled down the handle.
    “Thanks.” Back on his feet, the dwarf hurried toward the catwalks with a rocking gait, dripping with dignity. Dwight figured there were tougher breaks than being born black.
    Earl was already at his locker and dressing for town. He had on pearl gray peg tops belted just under his sternum and was tying a tie with silver saxophones on a bright blue field. At his brother’s