Loving Women

1987

I am on this bed in a cheap motel listening to the growl of the Gulf. My cameras remain in their silvery Halliburton case. I have hung the shirts and jeans in the closet. On the wall there is a fading photograph of the Blue Angels flying in tight formation over Pensacola. There is no room service and I am hungry, but I don’t care to move. It is a week now since my third wife left me, and I am 1,536 miles from home.

It was easy to pack my bags and drive down here, to the places I had not seen in more than thirty years. I was weary of many things: New York and the people I knew there. Photography. Myself. We were in a time of plague. All around me people were dying, as a fierce and murderous virus spread through their blood and destroyed all those immune systems that had made them so briefly human. Each day’s newspaper carried the names of the previous day’s body count. I knew some of them. Their names filled my head as I remembered them in life and tried to imagine their painful final days, but after a few hours they just became part of the blur.

In restaurants with my wife, Rose, in the final weeks, I heard other names staining the air around me: Bernie Goetz. Donna Rice. Ivan Boesky. Fawn Hall. Oliver North. A hundred others. They were chewed along with the food, their squalid tales consumed like everything else in the city that season. I would gaze around, and see the young in their West Side uniforms talking about junk bonds and arbitrage and leveraged buy-outs and treacherous partners, and I would feel suddenly old at fifty-one. I smoked too much, and most nights was growled at in restaurants by the lean young men with the health-club tans, while their women pawed self-righteously at the smoky air. The cigarettes marked me as part of another generation, my style and attitudes (though not my work) shaped by Bogart and Murrow, Camus and Malraux, those once-living icons who jammed cigarettes in their mouths as signals of their manhood, inhaled a billion of them, and died. Worse, I was twenty pounds overweight in a time when eating was paid for by hours at a Nautilus machine. I was not yet old and no longer young, and on the night of my birthday, Rose leaned over and asked me in her gray-eyed, direct way: “Michael, what is it that you want?”

I was quiet for a long while, looking out at the spring crowds parading on Columbus Avenue. I told her: “1953.”

She didn’t understand. In 1953, Rose Donofrio was not yet born. In the months when we were, as they used to say, courting, she would have smiled, and asked what I meant and tried to pry some answer from me. But that night she didn’t really care. That night, Rose had other matters on her mind. That night, Rose blinked at me and shook her head; her gaze drifted away, and when she came back, she told me that she’d met another man and wanted to go and live with him. Her eyes were suddenly liquid, as if she expected some melancholy response from me or some explosion of protest. I couldn’t give her either. That was the problem. That had been the problem for a long time. Rose gave me this fresh information, this trembling admission of betrayal, and it merely drifted like my cigarette smoke into the great blurry fog of other information, along with the contras and the calorie count of sushi. I waved at the waiter and asked for a check and Rose and I walked home in silence. By midnight, we’d agreed that she could keep the loft and I would get the country house. She packed three bags and said she would spend the night at a girlfriend’s house, a fiction to spare my feelings. We’d call the lawyers in the morning.

“You never loved me, did you?” Rose said at the door.

“Yes, I did. More than you’ll ever know.”

She closed the door, all teary now, and I looked at my watch and thought: I’d better go down soon, and buy the Times. Rose had a gift, inherited from her Italian mother, for the melodramatic gesture and the venomous aria, the cutting word and the slammed door. In a way, that was what had attracted me to her when we met, four years earlier at a party on East 71st Street. But I didn’t, or couldn’t, respond any more. There was nothing left in me of such theatrics. Maybe I was just too old. Maybe I had seen too many real bodies in too many real places for too many years. Passion had killed them all. Political passion, or religious passion, or personal passion. And I had known for years that the greatest occupational hazard I faced as a photographer was indifference. So I never plunged into her dark Sicilian storms. And I felt nothing about her abrupt and treacherous departure. It had been a long time since I’d felt anything at all.

But late on that first night alone, emptying my file cabinets and packing cartons in one of the sad ceremonies of departure, something shifted in me. I had little interest in the old tear sheets of my work, the yellowing pages of magazines (some of them dead), the folders full of birth and death certificates, licenses and diplomas. I was too old to be moved by the snapshots of people I’d once loved, and I couldn’t bear to read again the letters from vanished friends, postmarked Saigon or Lagos or Beirut. And then I came up short. Lying flat on the bottom of a file drawer was a thick, dog-eared folder. It was marked in large tight lettering, done in India ink with a Speedball pen, Personal Stuff. There were some letters inside, a group of drawings held together with a rusting paper clip, a few slips of paper bearing phone numbers, and The Blue Notebook.

I was seventeen years old when I had first started writing in The Blue Notebook — a kid in the Navy. And here it was, intact. Improbably, that sweet and serious boy I used to be had survived in its pages into the years of manhood. I set the Notebook aside. I finished packing the files and stacked the cartons along the wall beside the door. I took some pictures off the walls: a drawing by José Luis Cuevas, a painting of city rooftops by Anne Freilicher, a watercolor of Coney Island by David Levine. Over the fireplace was a nude photograph of Rose Donofrio, her hair streaming forward, her features obscured. I left it there. I filled a steamer trunk with winter clothes. I packed three more cartons with records — all those people Rose could not bear to hear: Charlie Parker and Sinatra and Dinah Washington and Wynonie Harris. A hundred others. I sealed the cartons with masking tape, then went down and bought the Times.

But toward morning, lying alone on the futon, staring at light patterns on the ceiling, listening to the slow murmur of the early-morning traffic, my head began to fill with long-gone images. Faces. Sounds. I heard the clatter of palm trees in the Florida night and Hank Williams singing on a jukebox. I smelled great tons of bacon frying in a mess hall. I saw the faces of men I used to know. And a woman I once loved more than life itself.

When I woke that afternoon, I thought I had better go South.

Journey. n. 1 Travel from one place to another, usually taking a rather long time. 2 A distance, course, or area traveled or suitable for traveling. 3 A period of travel. 4 A passage or progress from one stage to another.

Aunt Margaret asked me when I came home from boot camp what it was that I wanted. I couldn’t tell her. It would have felt as if I were asking her for something, and I don’t want to ever have to ask anyone for anything. But there were some things I wanted: a Parker 51 pen. A television set for my brothers and sister. A telephone too. Rooms with doors. I wanted Craftint paper so I could draw like Roy Crane. A set of Lionel trains. Every one of the Bomba the Jungle Boy series. I wanted to wake up one morning and discover that I looked like a combination of Wiliam Holden and Chet Baker. I wanted a new girl. But when she asked me, I just shrugged and said, “Nothing, Aunt Margaret. I don’t want anything at all.” A complete lie.

Love. n. 1 The profoundly tender or passionate affection for a person of the opposite sex. 2 A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child or friend. 3 Sexual passion or desire, or its gratification. 4 A person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart. 5 A love affair; amour. 6 A personification of sexual affection, as Eros or Cupid. 7 Affectionate concern for the well-being of others. 8 Strong predilection or liking of anything (the ~ of books). 9 The object or thing so liked. 10 The benevolent affection of God for His creatures, or the reverent affection due from them to God.

Chapter 1

And so, early one chilly spring morning, the sky still purple, I drove out through the Holland Tunnel. Slowly, then vividly, the images of an old journey began to emerge, like a photograph in a developing tray. I began to hear voices and music and the sounds of travel. And then I was on a Greyhound bus. It was New Year’s Eve, 1952, the bus was heading South. I was desperate for the love a woman.

I stared at my reflection in the window and wondered again how women saw me. My white Navy hat was pulled rakishly (I thought) over one eye, the collar of my pea jacket was up high, and I kept trying to set my mouth in the weary, knowing way that Flip Corkin used in Terry and the Pirates. To be sure, my hair was still too boot-camp short, my nose too long, my teeth in need of work. I would never be mistaken for a movie star. But I looked at myself a lot then, and it was not just some adolescent exercise in narcissism. I simply wondered how I looked to others, especially to women.

The snow was falling steadily when the bus reached the iron of New Jersey. The boy I was then stared at the fat wet flakes and wondered how everything had gone so wrong that Christmas, with a girl named Maureen Crowley (the name living on for years in my head when so many others had joined the general blur), and why all the guys he knew had girls, even wives, and he had none. The boy wished his mother was alive, sure he could ask her questions about such matters. He couldn’t ask his father anything. My father was big and gruff and strong, with eyebrows that met over his nose; he knew a lot about electrical wiring and radio circuits and the construction of lamps. He just didn’t know how to explain anything to me about the mysteries of the human heart. Or so I thought on the last day of 1952. The old man was from Ireland and my mother was from The Bronx, a mick and a narrowback joined in holy matrimony, and if he never said anything sweet or tender to me, well, in my presence he never said anything human to her either.

I was sure then, as only young men can be sure, that he didn’t even say much of anything when she was dying in the public ward at the hospital. The doctors wouldn’t let me watch her die, because I was only fourteen and tuberculosis was contagious and there were other people dying there too and I could never be expected to understand any of it. Not yet. Sex and death in those days were only rumors and whispers. And besides, I was the oldest and had to mind my brothers and my sister every night while my father went to visit her. I stayed with them each night, listening to Gangbusters or The Inner Sanctum or Jimmy Durante on the radio, hearing the voices of cops and gangsters and comedians, when what I most truly wanted was to know what it was I was supposed to do to make a woman love me. My mother would know. But she was kept hidden as she died, and my father was silent and I was full of questions, right up to the evening he learned that he didn’t have to visit her ever again. I do know that he cried in his bed that last night of my mother’s life. I heard him. But he never said a goddamned thing to me.

So I sat in the dark on that empty bus, the uniform identifying me as a man prepared to die for his country, and told myself that 1952 had turned out to be rotten but maybe 1953 would be better. Neither could ever be as bad as the year my mother died. And in some way, I was happy to be on the road, going out of New York, away from Brooklyn. This had nothing to do with the new president; Dwight Eisenhower was a famous general with a baby face and a simple smile, and he told everybody he would go to Korea and end the war. But the truth was that, in our part of Brooklyn we never cared much for generals and didn’t care at all for Republicans. Even when Douglas MacArthur came back after Harry Truman fired him, and they kept playing “Old Soldiers Never Die,” and there was talk about impeaching Truman and making MacArthur president, we sided with Truman. So when the radios played MacArthur’s song in the bars, most of the men answered it with “Anchors Aweigh.” There were some soldiers from our neighborhood and a few Marines, but mostly we were Navy. When our people fought for their country, they went to sea. So it was no big deal that when I was old enough to go, I dropped out of high school and went to boot camp in Bainbridge. Like almost everybody else.

Deep into Virginia that long-ago New Year’s Eve, the snow was still falling thickly. I remember staring through the steam-glazed windows at the white world, thinking that the storm would never end. For miles, I followed the traceries of telephone lines. And saw, off in the distance, snug houses behind screens of skeletal trees.

Those houses. In blue icy fields. Blinking with Christmas lights. Inside, men had women who held them tight, who talked to them about life and kids and music and the weather. They slept under thick blankets while the snow fell steadily, and when the moon played its light over the frozen world, they fucked. I wanted a woman who would hold me, too. Who would talk to me. Laugh at my jokes. Fuck me good as I fucked her. The boy I was then didn’t really want the houses. Out in the country, far from the cities of the world: that wasn’t my life. But I wanted the woman.

By noon, the heater had surrendered to the storm and it was very cold in the bus. And I remember saying to myself: Pensacola. Then again. Pensacola, Pensacola, Pensacola, like beads on a rosary. I had never even heard of the town until the Navy assigned me there in a thick packet of orders issued before Christmas leave. But when I got home, I looked up the town in Nelson’s Encyclopedia (worn red bindings, double columns of tiny type, bought a book at a time by my mother, clipping coupons from the New York Post) and tried to imagine the place from the volume’s few lines. Sitting in the living room, on the frayed couch beside the kerosene heater, I felt Pensacola come to me across 1,536 miles in bright pastel colors.

Pen-sa-co-la I whispered on the bus (and repeated it now, in the Datsun 280-ZX, following myself South). And saw rounded forms, brown and glowing from the sun, smooth, polished. Pensacola. Brown breasts and brown thighs and brown bellies, too. Women glistening with oil. Hot to the touch. For surely Pensacola was a woman’s name. Pensacola Brown. Yeah. The name was full of lazy hills and the Pensa seemed buttered to the cola, not locked hard and bolted tight, like Stuttgart or New York. It was a name very much like Florida. Hi, I’m Florida Brown and I want to fuck you … Except that Florida was green with drooping palms and the sounds of spring training on the radio and blue with the sea. And it was too short and smooth and familiar to be a woman’s name. Pensacola had hard little bumps in it, like tits.

I looked out at the blizzard and closed my eyes, and saw palm trees withering under the snow and a gigantic glacier shoving the beaches into the sea and heard the north wind howling, claiming victory over the sun. I opened my eyes in a moment of panic. There were a half dozen other passengers in the bus, most of them sleeping. I remember the driver’s back. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled in a weary way. And I closed my eyes again, and invented a world of heat — to help the driver, to defend Pensacola, to warm myself. I was on the beach at Coney Island, on Bay 22, under a hammering sun. I was on the rooftop of our house in Brooklyn, gazing at the Manhattan skyline in a sweltering August stupor. It was too hot to sleep, and down on the street old people sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves with the Daily News, drinking hot tea because they all believed that it cooled you off and its leaves cured sunburn. I thought of The Desert Song, the movie that made me volunteer in boot camp for the naval air station at Port Lyautey in Morocco. I was Dennis Morgan. The Red Shadow himself. Riding across the sun-baked desert. Leading the Riff against the hated French, singing:

“You’d better go, go, go,

Before you’ve bitten the sword …”

In my tent, a masked woman in silky pajamas. Deep black eyes. Huge golden earrings. Jeweled rings on her toes. Her toenails painted. She opened her arms and touched my face. “Michael,” she whispered in some exotic foreign accent. “You must do it to me now.…” Later, I fell asleep in her arms.

Ah, youth.

When I woke up, everything had changed. The snow was gone. Purple light spilled down valleys. I could not afford a watch, so I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d slept, but the land was black now, and there were few lights. The bus was fuller, too, although the seat beside me was empty. I heard a woman’s phlegmy snoring in the dark. And then smelled the thick fatty air of the bus, a mixture of farts, cigarette smoke, and engine fumes. I felt vaguely sick. Then addressed myself: You are Michael Devlin, USN 4640237. You are almost eighteen years old, not a child. You cannot get sick in a bus. And I didn’t.

But I could see Maureen again. I stared out at the dark forests, trying to get rid of her. But there she was, pale and beautiful, standing among the trees. She would not go away. I was far from Brooklyn, but I could see her (as I see her now) wearing a maroon coat and turning around, her back to me, snow melting in her hair. Oh, Momma, let me talk to you. I was calling her name as she walked quickly down the snow-packed path in Prospect Park. Her head lowered against the wind. Hands jammed in her pockets. Maureen, I called. But she chose not to hear me. Maureen. And once more: Maureen. My voice was muffled, but I knew she could hear me. And then at last she turned. I came closer, moving clumsily in the snow. And saw the fear in her eyes. Fear, for Christ’s sakes. Her face trembled. And then she started to run. Out of the park. Out of my life.

The Greyhound was moving with fresh power now, and I thought: That was only nine days ago and it seems like ancient history. I didn’t run after her. I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t beg. Not for her. Not for anybody. But I saw her again on crowded beaches, on the empty slopes of summer hills. She was on the subway with me, coming back from a movie in Manhattan, her head burrowed against my shoulder. “Maureen,” I whispered on the bus, and thought about her skin. And then, hundreds of miles from her and going farther away by the minute, she gave me what she had given me so many times in that long ripe crazy summer before I joined the Navy. Off to the side along my thigh, forced there by the tight crotch of the Navy blues. Once, when I was still an altar boy at Holy Name Church, I imagined God in possession of a hard-on counting machine. That was the beginning of the loss of faith. He was up there in heaven, seeing all, knowing all, and He would spot my hard-ons, logging them in His gigantic counting machine along with billions of other impure hard-ons all over the world. In His rage, He looked to see if I touched myself. Or far worse, whether I played with myself. And certainly He would need another, much larger counting machine to keep track of all the jacking off, one that would have to handle billions of entries in Brooklyn alone. And thinking about this (on the altar of the 8:30 Saturday Mass) I laughed. That was the way faith must always end. After all, if there was a God, why would He care about my hard-ons anyway? Was he nuts, or what? A grown man, counting hard-ons? But I was also still a Catholic, and naturally, after I laughed, I felt guilty. For about a minute. And then felt certain that I’d never stop burning in Purgatory and was already too far behind to ever get even with God, so I might as well enjoy sin. I was fourteen. The year my mother died.

So within a few weeks I went forward to the worst sin of all. I was serving as altar boy at a Saturday afternoon wedding. The bride was a hot-eyed Italian, with creamy skin and gigantic tits and I could see when she looked at the groom (as Father Kavanaugh was rattling on about sickness and health until death do you part) that she wanted to fuck him right on the spot. And I realized that within a few hours he’d have his cock in her, and those huge tits in his face. And I got a hard-on right there on the altar. I was wearing a cassock and surplice, so nobody could see it, but it wouldn’t go away. Even when I thought about Jerry Lewis. Or a Spanish Main movie. I kept seeing the bride’s hot eyes. And after the wedding, when the priest went down the aisle to say good-bye to the happy couple and pick up his tip, I hurried into the empty sacristy, lifted the skirt of my cassock, trembling with the certainty that God would blast me with a lightning bolt, and jerked off down the flower chute.

There were no lightning bolts. Not that day. Nor on other days and nights. But I couldn’t do that now. Not in a bus. Not in Navy blues, for Christ’s sakes. So I laughed then, and the hard-on vanished and so did my image of Maureen. She was part of my most shameful secret. I was old enough to die for my country, but I was still that most rare and suspicious kind of sailor: a virgin. I could tell this to nobody. But it was true: I’d never slept with a woman. Any woman. I’d fallen in love with a few girls, most terribly and drastically with Maureen Crowley. But because I loved them, I couldn’t sleep with them. And I couldn’t sleep with anyone else, because that would be a betrayal. So I looked out again at the countryside, plunging into America, a sailor without a ship, assigned to shore duty when all my friends were going to sea, a warrior without a war, now that Eisenhower was in and the generals were meeting in Korea to end the fighting. And I felt like a child. But after a while, I felt better: Somewhere down this road, somewhere in the mysterious South, lay my salvation. Here, far from home, I would find my woman.

Chapter 2

I remember waking up in the dark, with the bus stopped outside a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I used the john. I sipped a cup of coffee. Nothing else. I had nineteen dollars left after Christmas leave, and they would have to last me all the way to Pensacola and for a couple of weeks after that, until I’d get paid. At the counter, I tried to get a red-haired waitress to look at me by wearing a wounded look on my face. Like Bogart. But she was too busy for my secret wound, so I picked a newspaper off a stool and read the comics.

I didn’t see Steve Canyon, which I was sure was the greatest comic strip in the world. But the paper did carry Buz Sawyer, the other great one. I’d clipped Canyon and Sawyer from the Mirror and the Journal-American since I was twelve, filing them neatly in #10 envelopes. I filled sketchbooks with copies of the characters, trying to use a brush the way Milton Caniff did on Canyon (and on Terry and the Pirates, which I’d collected in the comic-book editions), trying to draw women the way Roy Crane did in Buz Sawyer. Crane used a special paper called Craftint that I’d read about in a book about cartooning. You used one chemical on the special paper and got a gray tone made of lines going one way. You used the other chemical and the lines came out crosshatched and darker. So Crane’s panels were beautiful, with the two shades of gray, the dead whites, the juicy blacks. But Caniff had better characters. His dialogue was hipper. His women were smarter and sexier, real women who knew the world. Not just the Dragon Lady from Terry, who everybody knew about. Or Burma, singing the “St. Louis Blues.” But Copper Calhoon and Deen Wilderness and April Kane and Feeta Feeta and Fancy, too. Oh yeah, I loved the girl called Fancy. I wanted to go to a movie or a dance with Crane’s women or give them a feel on a beach somewhere. But I wanted to fuck the women drawn by Milton Caniff.

I sipped my coffee at the counter and stared at Buz Sawyer, and tried to enter the story. There were no newspapers in boot camp, so I’d lost track of most of them. I’d asked my father to save the strips for me, but he couldn’t understand why a man old enough to be in the United States Navy would care about such things, so he didn’t bother. He couldn’t even imagine why I wanted to be a cartoonist. That was something like aspiring to be the Pope or the president of Argentina. He didn’t get it. I was Irish. I should be a cop. A fireman. An ironworker. Like the sons of every other donkey who ever landed in Brooklyn.

So I looked at Buz Sawyer as if I were engaged in a monumental act of defiance, hoping that somehow my father would walk into this diner in the middle of America and get furious at the sight. The comics were what we had instead of rock ’n’ roll. I didn’t know the story, but I did recognize the character in the first panel. His name was Harry Sparrow. He had a large bald head, like Doctor Huer in Buck Rogers, and a monocle hanging from his right eye and he was dressed in a cutaway tuxedo complete with striped pants. Harry Sparrow was an international crook. A hustler. A guy who dealt in guns. Somehow he was now involved in a plot to run guns to a Central American country called — I remember the name — Salvaduras. Crane was always putting Sawyer or Easy in some Central American country and owned the region the way Caniff owned China. And in 1952 Central America was still a comical place made up of banana republics, where the revolutions were lots of fun. Nobody called the bad guys the moral equals of the Founding Fathers. Nobody shot peasants or nurses or schoolteachers and called it liberation. Certainly not in Buz Sawyer. In the strip (which I tore out and slipped into The Blue Notebook, where it yellowed for thirty-five-years), Harry Sparrow was listening and smirking as a sexy woman named Fifi talked on the telephone to one of the Salvaduran leaders. Behind them was the gilt frame of a painting.

“More sugar, Fifi,” Harry said to the girl. “More! More! Pour it on!”

“I am ZO unhappy, Adolfo, chèri,” she was saying to the guy on the other end of the telephone line. Fifi. Chèri. She must be French. “DINNER,” she said. Her right hand was playing with her blond hair. The left hand caressed the telephone. She had a star on her left cheek. Her breasts rose fiercely off her round compact body. “Just the two of us.…”

Then I heard the horn honking outside and I finished my coffee and folded the newspaper and hurried back to the bus.

“Happy New Year,” the driver said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Happy New Year.”

That year we still called black people Negroes, and there was a Negro soldier with pomaded hair sitting in the aisle seat beside mine. He stood to let me in and I nodded at him. He looked like an old welterweight named Tommy Bell, who once knocked down Sugar Ray Robinson. Five other Negro men were dozing on the wide back seat. Two leaned against each other. Another sat with his arms folded. The bus was now full.

I looked up and saw the driver standing beside the steering wheel, looking down the aisle. His lips moved as if he were counting passengers. He leaned forward and said something to the sleeping Negro in the first seat. There was no reaction. The driver squeezed the man’s shoulder, and when the soldier didn’t move, the driver shook him, and then the soldier was suddenly awake, backing away with his hands up, like a fighter. The driver shook his head sadly and whispered to the man. He stood up, blinking, and looked down the aisle. Now the driver was waking the large black woman in the third row. The soldier jerked a duffel bag off the overhead rack, slung it onto his shoulder and came stomping down the aisle.

“Now, where in hell my spose to sit?” he said loudly. “Huh?” He turned to the driver. “Answer me that! There ain’t no seats back here!”

“Jest a minute,” the driver said. The Negro woman was now in the aisle, like a giant plug. Her jaw was loose. She was mumbling. The driver lifted down two shopping bags from the rack.

“I ain’t gonna stand all the way to no Atlanta!” the soldier shouted. “I jest ain’t gonna do it!”

“Hold on,” the driver said. “Jest hold yer hosses.” He waited until the woman took the shopping bags, then he allowed her to lead the way down the aisle. The driver’s eyes squinted; his face seemed more yellow as he scanned the faces in the rear.

“This is boolshit!” the soldier said. “Goddam one hunnid pissent boolshit!”

The driver turned harder. “Take it easy, soldier. This ain’t my idea. It’s the law.”

“The law …”

The man next to me watched in silence. His hands clenched and unclenched. “We crossin’ the Mason-Dixon lahn,” he said to me. “Or like we calls it, the Smith and Wesson lahn.” He smiled in a bitter way. “Some country, ain’t it?”

The driver told a thin, redheaded white woman to get up and sent her to the third-row seat vacated by the large Negro woman. Then he helped the redhead take down a cheap plastic suitcase, tied together with a stocking. The redhead took it from him quickly, shielding it with her body as if ashamed of its condition. The driver turned to me.

“Okay, sailor,” he said. “You’re goin’ to the first row and this soldier’s takin’ your place.” I started to get up. The pomaded Negro shook his head. “Some shit,” he said. I reached up for my sea bag. I said to the driver: “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“The South,” he said wearily.

There was a white man sleeping against the window in the first row. He was an older man, maybe forty, with thinning blond hair, a long nose, a bony face. He was wearing a checked sport jacket. A black raincoat was drawn tightly up to his chin like a blanket. He had his shoes off and there was a flight bag at his feet. I sat down and the bus finally pulled out. Soon we were back in the rhythm of the road. Dark forests. Distant houses. I thought about Harry Sparrow and Fifi. In bed together.

All I needed was another useless hard-on. So I shook Fifi out of my mind, and watched the road and the ease and skill of the driver as he moved the huge bus around slower-moving trucks. I didn’t know how to drive. I was from Brooklyn, where nobody I knew had a car. Including my father. We used the subway to go places. In boot camp, guys laughed when I told them this. You cain’t drahv? Shit, man, what’s yore p’oblem? I tried to explain, but they couldn’t believe it; most of them started driving when they were twelve, thirteen. I guess I admitted I couldn’t drive to avoid talking about the more terrible failure: The dark secret of my virginity.

Somewhere near Greeneville, the driver picked up a small microphone clamped to the dashboard. He glanced at his watch, then flicked a switch.

In a hoarse voice, he said, “Ladies and gennulmen, in exactly ten seconds, it’ll be January the first, nineteen hunnid an fipty three.”

I heard some applause, but when I glanced around most of the white people were asleep. It was hard to see the Negroes in the dark. Back home, everybody was celebrating, drinking and shouting while Guy Lombardo’s band played “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio. The worst band in the history of the world. The people were probably celebrating because they wouldn’t have to hear Guy Lombardo for another whole year. My father was probably down the block in Rattigan’s, somber and silent while the other men were singing loud and drinking hard; my brothers were banging pots on the fire escape and throwing snowballs at drunks.

And somewhere tonight, I thought, right this second, while this bus takes me where I’ve never been, right now Maureen is with her accountant. She’s at a party with him. Sitting on a couch. Tony Bennett is singing “Because of You” on the phonograph. She’s wearing her blue dress. Or maybe the white one. The accountant is holding her left hand. Or maybe the right. He stands up and she follows. The room is dark, a small lamp on in a corner, maybe thirty watts, maybe red. He starts dancing with her. She moves close to him. In the dark, does she think her accountant is me?

“Here, sailor,” the driver said, and passed me a pint bottle of whiskey without taking his eyes off the road. The dark-brown glass of the bottle was cool in my hand. There was no label.

“Thanks,” I said, unscrewing the cap and taking a belt. “Happy New Year.” I didn’t much like whiskey, the way it burned when it went down, the way it stayed in you so that you reeked of it for days after you’d drunk it. In that, at least, I was like my father. We both preferred beer. But I drank from the unmarked bottle anyway. It was a New Year’s gift. A long way from home. I felt it open like a warm blossom in my belly.

“Yeah, happy New Year,” the driver said. “An’ gib some to the gent nex’ to you, swabbie.”

The man next to me was now awake. He nodded in greeting as I handed him the pint. His hands were very thin, with veins standing up like blue ropes.

“Thanks, buddy,” the man said.

“Thank the driver. It’s his whiskey.”

“Maybe we oughtta git off this thing. All we need is a drunk bus driver.”

“He doesn’t look the type,” I said.

“They never do.”

The man took a second belt of the whiskey, then gave it back to me and I passed it on to the driver, thanking him.

“Hi,” the man beside me said. “I’m Jack Turner.” I told him my name and we shook hands in a cramped way.

“Where you headin’, sailor?”

“Pensacola.”

“Why, hell’s bells, so’m I.”

“You Navy?”

“Yeah, bo’,” he said. “Seventeen years, man an’ boy.” He dug into the bag at his feet, found another pint bottle and cracked the seal. “Three more years and I’m done. The Big Two-Oh. Twenty years in this man’s Navy. Then it’s back to the world.”

I waited; this was the first Old Salt I’d talked to man-to-man. In boot camp, the salts were all ball-breakers: yelling, shouting, marching us around the grinder till we dropped. Maybe it was because Turner wasn’t wearing a uniform. I don’t know. But he seemed okay.

“You must’ve seen a lot of the world,” I said. “In seventeen years, I mean.”

He handed me the bottle. Four Roses. I took a swig, but held it in my mouth for a while before letting it go down.

“Yeah,” he said. “I been some places. Seen some shit. But places ain’t the world. Not the real world.”

The whiskey was spreading out of the core of my stomach now.

“What is?”

Turner glanced out the window into the darkness. “A woman. Kids. A house. A car … All that boring shit. That’s the world … Pass that bottle on to the driver. He’s a good ole boy.”

I tapped the driver’s elbow and offered him the Four Roses. But he shook his head no and smiled. I handed the bottle back to Turner.

“You don’t travel in uniform?” I said.

Turner laughed. “Hell, no. Not if I got money to pay my way. Maybe hitchhikin’, the uniform’s an advantage. But you got the money, peel that sucker off,” he said, pinching the sleeve of my blue jumper. “I’ll tell you why. People see a sailor, they always laugh. They think sailors are crazy and crazy people strike most people as funny. And you know sumpin? They’re right. Sailors are crazy. You’re out on some leaky tub, with all that goddamned ocean around you. For weeks, months, years, like we was in the war. I mean years. Nothin to see all around you but ocean and sailors. Crazy goddamn bad-ass sailors. All goin crazy. Some goin queer. Until finely, they come home to port, crazy and horny, and they go ape shit. Truly fucking crazy-ass apeshit. You ever see a sailor walking along sober on a Saturday night? You ever see one in church? Or in a lib’ry? Fuck no. You see sailors fallin down in the street, you see them laughin and pukin and rollin in piss and sawdust. You see them gettin locked up. And you know somethin? Nobody ever gets mad. They see jarheads doin this shit, they get pissed off. They see some army guy grab a girl by the ass, they want t’ lynch him, even if he aint a nigger. They see some flyboy gettin fucked up in public, they write to the gahdamned newspaper.” He took a belt from the bottle. “But they see a sailor with blood all over his whites, fallin on his ass in the gutter, with a hooker on his shoulders and puke on his fuckin shoes, and they laugh.”

I laughed too. “I see what you mean.”

But Turner wasn’t laughing. “You see, I don’t like people to laugh. Because sailors aint funny. Sailors are the saddest, most fucked-up, most lonely-ass people on God’s pore lonesome fuckin earth.”

He look a longer swig this time, swallowing it slowly.

“So I travel in civvies,” he said. “Wherever I end up stationed, I get me a locker club first thing, and when I go ashore, I change into civvies. I don’t want anyone laughin at me.”

Neither did I. I liked Turner for that and I wished he was going all the way to Ellyson Field with me. I’d have someone to talk to, to show me the ropes. He was an ordnance man, first class, going to Mainside to show young pilots what guns looked like. He was happy about the billet too. It could’ve been Shit City. Norfolk. Or it could’ve been another aircraft carrier and he hated aircraft carriers. There’s four ways of doing things in this man’s Navy, Turner said: The easy way, the hard way, the Navy way, and the Midway. The Midway was his last aircraft carrier.

He was quiet for a while and then he asked me if I had a girl. I said no, and he looked at my face and saw something there, I guess, and said, “That bad, huh?” I told him that the truth was I got a Dear John letter while I was in Bainbridge and he passed me the bottle and I sipped and my stomach burned and I was very hungry and he said, well, it was better to get a Dear John early than late and I shouldn’t feel so damned bad because everybody gets one, sooner or later, every sailor gets one, and he took a sip and so did I, and he told me he had gotten five Dear Johns in his life and three of them were from wives. I said that was terrible and he said Nah, wasn’t so terrible, they were right, probably, I was no bargain, no sailor is. But I loved them all. Right up to the minute it was over. Tell me about them, I said. And he did.

Chapter 3

Judy, she was the first, sixteen and red-haired and saucy and hot. Damn she was hot. Rub that gal’s elbow and she’d come. Hot, brother. I married her in 1938 in San Diego, just before they shipped me to the Far East. She was from Shreveport, down Luziana way, staying in Dago with her sister, who was married to a bosuns mate. The bosuns mate was out at sea and I met Judy in a sailor joint with her sister and we went home together, the three of us, and we woke up together too. But Judy was mine from the gitgo and I had some leave for a week and we got married. I was on a cruiser passing Guam when I got a letter saying she was knocked up and I should start picking out baby names. I shoulda known better, I guess. Because she tole me she was too damn lonely there in San Diego and she wanted to go home to this little place near Shreveport where her folks sharecropped, go home there and have the baby there, and I wrote back, Sure, okay, that sounds fine. Well, that Pacific tour was eighteen months. This was before the war and we just went all over the damned place, and when I got home and took the bus from Dago to Shreveport, the little boy was crawlin and Judy was sleepin with the sheriff. Everybody knew it too. They knew it in the town. Her folks knew it. And when I went into that little shitass town, six miles from Shreveport, everybody looked at me, like theyuz wonderin what I was gonna do, and they had this look on the face, pity, hell, tell it true, contempt. And when I went to Judy with what I saw, with what I felt from everybody, when I said Hey, woman what is this shit? She looked at me and turned her back and said, I want the sheriff. I want him, she said, not no long-gone forty-dollar-a-month sailor boy. She wanted the damned sheriff and the damned sheriff wanted her, and if I didn’t like it why didden I go down there to the courthouse and tell the sheriff what was on my mind? So I drove around all night in her Pa’s car, with a shotgun in my lap and drinkin white lightnin. And I stopped in some honky-tonks and listened to the damned jukebox. And I watched the goddamned courthouse. All the time thinkin, I’ll just drive over to that whorehouse halfway to Shreveport and get me a piece of ass and then I’ll go shoot the goddamned sheriff. And that’s what I started in doing. But after I got laid I went out to the car and fell asleep with the shotgun in my lap and when I woke up I left the car there and the shotgun and I hitchhiked into Shreveport and got me a bus and went all the way back to San Diego. I only heard from her one last time. She sent me a letter, saying, Here’s your copy of the dee-vorce, Sincerely, Judy. I always loved that word. Sin-cerely. Everytime I hear that goddamned word I think of Judy. She had the roundest sweetest ass in Shreveport, boy.

My second wife’s name was Ginger, and right off I shoulda known better. You fuck girls named Ginger. You don’t marry ’em. She was a hostess in a dancehall in Honolulu when I met her. A long-legged high-hipped woman in a flowered dress like they all wear out there, and small titties and a big ass and skin that glowed like gold. I think maybe there was a little Jap in her, the way she had them high goddamned cheekbones and small little titties, but if that was so, well, her ass sure wasn’t Jap. No sir. She tole me she was nineteen and I believed her and she sure looked great in that dim light in the hall with the smoke and everything and Glenn Miller playin and all of us sailors drinkin hard and the weather so damned hot that her dress with the flowers on it stuck to her ass like a tattoo. Oh I was in love, boy. Right there. Took me about nineteen minutes and I wanted that woman for the rest of my life. Later on, I learned she was really twenty-seven (I was twenty). Later on, I learned she’d been married once before and had two kids she never tole me about. Later on, I learned she had the goddamned clap, too — this while I was two months out at sea and married for three, and I knew this because she gave it to me. I had some dose, boy. I was dripping with it during the battle of Midway and after I talked to the medics in sick bay I went to the yeoman’s office and told him I wanted to stop sendin checks to dear wife Ginger and I filled out all the forms and sent her a letter with one damned sentence it. Dear Ginger, I said. I got yore clap, bitch. Sincerely. I put that in. Sincerely, and signed my name. The next time I was in Pearl was 1943 and she was workin in a whorehouse and I had her blow me for three dollars before talkin about the de-vorce. A real sincere woman, Ginger.

There was a lot of other women too. Yeah. Young girls and old girls, and colored and Chink. But the third wife was the one. I thought she’d make the whole damn thing come together. Her name was Susan and I met her in San Francisco after the war. Small dark-haired girl who worked in a bank and lived alone and wore glasses cause she was nearsighted. Lived in this small house on Mission Street. She didn’t want to have nothin to do with me, me bein a goddamned sailor. She just give me the brush. Right off. When I went into the bank to get change for a twenty-dollar bill. I aint no Errol Flynn but I had my share and so when she gave me the brush naturally I wanted her so bad I hurt. So I stayed on her, every day, sometimes twice a day, while the ship was in drydock, and I plain wore her down. I married her, I guess, just to prove to her I was serious, not some horny damned swabbie. Why not? Hell, she didn’t have no sheriff, she didn’t have the clap. So I tried one las’ time to live the life of a married man.

Right off I seen she was a nut about neatness. She had a million rules for everything, all that shit about a place for everything and everything in its place. At first this didn’t bother me. Hell, I was Navy. I’d lived a long time in little tight spaces and I obeyed the rules cause sometimes the rules saved your life. So at first I thought it was terrific. She was kinda military, you know? But then I found out she was a Christian too. A Godfearin Bible-readin black-hearted Christian. And that type of a Christian is all rules, boy. She wouldnt let me smoke cigarettes in the house cause it stunk up the wallpaper. She wouldn’t drink whiskey with me. She got mad if I didden go to church with her and if I was late for dinner. If I got stuck at the ship or stuck in traffic or stopped for a few whiskeys with a couple of sailors, she’d go nuts. In the closets in the house in Mission Street, she put everything in little cellophane bags and gave them all labels, like panties or slips or bras. The inside of the refrigerator looked like something in a supermarket with everything in rows. And if I put a milk bottle on the vegetable shelf, she’d scream at me. She wouldn’t have sex during her period, of course, and for four or five days before her period she was nutty and pissed off and I wasn’t interested. Naturally, she thought a blow job was a sin. Naturally, using a rubber was a sin too. She would only fuck me in the bedroom, with the light out, between nine and eleven at night. She wouldn’t fuck any later than that cause she needed her rest to get up on time for the bank. I said to her, You don’t work at the bank on Saturday or Sunday, baby! But on Friday night she was too tired from the whole week of workin and on Saturday night she was restin to get up for church on Sunday.

Well, after a while I started coming home late. And some nights I didn’t come home at all. Then I was there one Friday night and after dinner I was sittin in this big chair beside the fireplace, just like I always saw men do in pictures in magazines, and the fire was burnin cause it gets cold there in San Francisco. And she started screaming at me for leavin the newspaper on the floor. You always make a mess, she yelled. You can’t do anything without makin a mess. Yellin at me, the top of her lungs.

So after a bit, I stood up. I lit me a cigarette and blew the smoke on the wallpaper and she yelled What are you doin and I put the butt out on the rug, mashin it in real good. Then I lit another and walked past her smokin and opened the refrigerator and messed everything up and then I pissed in it. Right into the goddamned fridge. I remember the butter meltin in the butter dish. Then I got a pint of whiskey from my coat and chug-a-lugged it and got sick and puked on the doormat. Never said a word all the time. Well, little Susan ran right outta there.

She didden come home that night, or the next one either. So I wandered around the house with the radio blastin, smokin and drinkin and takin shits with the bathroom door open. On Sunday morning she still wasn’t back. I got drunk twice that day without leavin the house and even to me the place was beginnin to stink. On Monday morning, I took a long cold shower and got all dressed real neat in civvies and went down to the bank. She wasn’t there. Called in sick, her boss said. Lookin at me funny. Sick of me, I reckon. So I hit the bars, feelin lower than whaleshit and playin the jukes and callin home every hour. She never answered the phone and I realized that I didn’t really know much about her, didn’t know where she came from, where she might of run. I didn’t know her folks. I didn’t even know the name of the damned church. All I knew was she was gone. And I was through. By sundown, I was loaded. I couldn’t hardly walk, but I got on a bus and went to Mission Street and went to the house to pack my clothes. I kept writin a note to her in my head, all about how I was goin back to the Navy where I belonged and I was sorry I was so rotten to her and she should find a nice guy for herself and let him put the papers on the floor once in a while. And of course I was gonna sign this letter sincerely. I opened the door with my key. And heard a noise from upstairs. From the bedroom. Not the kind of noise a burglar makes. I tiptoed up them stairs and when I opened the door, she was naked on the bed, goin down on a fat bearded guy I’d seen one day at the bank. The fat guy looked scared shitless, but Susan didn’t stop. She looked at me with her eyes all crazy and her mouth full of dick and kept goin at it with the fat guy. I went out in the hall and packed my clothes and never saw her again. A week later I got a good-bye letter from her, typed and neat. It was like the charges in a court martial. Or a bank statement. She never said nothin in it about the fat man.

Chapter 4

I hear his voice now. Hear the warnings. Hear the Old Salt telling that boy something about the price of love. Or sex. Or both. And the boy thought: That’s his story; those were Turner’s mistakes, and I won’t repeat either. I’ll find my own woman. I’ll know. Such courage makes the young fight old men’s wars. But the woman was not far away, waiting in the shadows of the South. I remember that we changed buses outside a large, badly lit bus station in downtown Atlanta. We had about an hour to wait. And then Turner said it would be better if we got on board the second bus and found window seats. That way, he said, if it ain’t a full bus, we can stretch out and sleep the rest of the way. I thought he must be right. He had been on a lot more buses than I had. And a lot more women too. I found a seat in the seventh row, Turner in the second. There were more Negroes sitting in the rear, and a lot more empty seats. Pensacola. I was almost there.

She got on just before we left.

I first saw her standing beside the driver, her skin almost olive in the diffused light from the terminal. In all the years since, that simple image has remained in me. I’ve photographed models standing in empty buses, bathed in that oblique light. I’ve tried to capture the same mood on buses in the hills of Nicaragua, or the highlands of Kenya, or moving around Washington Heights. It’s never worked. The pictures in your head are always more powerful than the ones on paper. But there she was, with curly black hair and an oval face and the sort of long, thin nose that I’d once seen described as aquiline. She was wearing a black turtleneck and blue jeans and she was lugging a small, beat-up suitcase. Come to me, I thought, trying to send messages to her through the dark air of the bus. Sit here, woman. Sit beside me and learn to love me and I will meet you every night and you can wear a veil and look at me with dark eyes and I will love you more than all the earth. Here. In this empty seat. Beside me. Please. She started down the aisle, looking left and right, and stopped at the empty seat beside me.

“This taken?” she said. There was something scared in her hoarse voice. If she was wearing makeup, I couldn’t see it. Her lips were full, and she had a mole on her left cheekbone.

“No, it’s open,” I said, standing up. “Need a hand with that?”

I took the suitcase and heaved it up into the baggage rack. The bus was moving now.

“Thanks, sailor,” she said. I sat back down and she seemed to collapse in the seat beside me. She put a large leather purse on her lap. Her legs were clamped together but I could see strong thighs under the jeans. Go ahead, I thought. Talk to her. Say something. Say anything. Speak. She is here. You wanted her here. Speak.

“Goin’ to Pensacola?” I said. Oh you dumb kid. You asshole. Asking a dumb-kid question.

“I guess,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I hear it’s beautiful.”

“I wouldn’t know. Never been there before.”

Her accent was Southern, but the rhythm was odd. It wasn’t like the corn-pone accents I’d heard in the movies or on the radio. Her voice was more slurred, like the voice of Billie Holiday. I looked at her face again. There were tiny lines around the corners of her eyes and a little pad of fat under her chin. The skin was pulled tight across her cheekbones. I couldn’t tell how old she was. And that excited me even more. All I was sure of was that she wasn’t a kid.

“I never been there before either,” I said. “I’m looking forward, you know. See it …”

“Well, you’ll be comfy there, I reckon. It’s all sailors, so I hear.”

“One of the biggest bases in the country.”

“Imagine that.”

She was curt, in a polite way, but she wasn’t freezing me out. She just seemed to have something else on her mind. Then, without willing it, my eyes drifted to her chest and she must have felt my look and turned slightly to the left, pulling the leather bag close to her body. Even then, she didn’t cut me off.

“You’re a Yankee, right?” she said.

“Yeah. Well, I’m from New York. But we’d go nuts where I came from if you called us Yankees. I’m from Brooklyn and we hate the Yankees. The ball team, I mean.”

“Well,” she said, and smiled, “you’re in the right part of the country f’ hatin’ Yankees.”

Please, do that again. Smile like that again. And say “part” like it was pronounced “paht.” And smile that wide smile, with those hard white teeth. Please.

She turned to me. “Mind if I smoke?” Saying it mahnd.

“No, no, go ahead.” She took a pack of Luckies from the purse and lit one. The movement was pure Ida Lupino. But in the match’s flare, I saw that she had ugly hands. The skin was raw and her veins jutted up and she had chewed her nails down close. Then she took a drag and exhaled and the smoke drifted up into the darkness and I forgot the hands and wanted her to teach me everything she knew.

“Sure don’t feel like New Year’s, does it?” she said.

“It sure doesn’t,” I said, wondering What does my voice sound like? “How’d you get stuck on this bus tonight, anyway?”

She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were dark brown and lustrous and she looked straight at me. Really looked at me. None of that flirting stuff that a thousand generations of women had been taught back home. “How did you?” she said, a little annoyed curl in her voice. I smiled and told her I was assigned to Pensacola. That they gave me a Christmas leave but insisted I report to Pensacola on New Year’s Day. She smiled and glanced at my body and turned away and took another drag on the cigarette. I was right: she wasn’t wearing lipstick.

“Who knows?” she said. “Who ever knows?”

She tamped out the cigarette and put her head back and closed her eyes, holding the purse tightly. When her face relaxed, the lines at the side of her eyes widened. Under the eyes, there were bluish smudges. Fatigue. Or age. I couldn’t tell. The bus was moving into open country now and I could see her only in glimpses of light from passing cars. Suddenly, I wanted to draw her, defining her hair with a million pen lines, all curling, twisting, moving, making the shadows with a brush fat with ink. I wanted her to take off the turtleneck and stand before me and let me draw her. On paper, she would be mine. Her eyes opened.

“Why are you starin at me, child?”

“ ’Cause you’re beautiful. I guess.” And wished I hadn’t added that “I guess.” I didn’t need doubt. Or qualification.

She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “How old are you?”

And I said (taking it from a movie or a story or from somebody else), “Old enough.”

She smiled again, showing those teeth.

“Old enough for what?”

She giggled when she said that, and I thought of Turner: People laugh at sailors.

“Old enough to tell you you’re beautiful.”

She fumbled for a fresh cigarette and sighed. “Well, I sure don’t feel beautiful. But I guess I’ll take the compliment. Thank you, child.” She lighted another Lucky and offered me the pack and when I shook my head, she tucked them away. She held the cigarette in her left hand, which was bent almost at a right angle to her arm. “You got any vices, child?” I hated that “child.” It sounded as if she was playing with me. Keeping me at a distance by treating me like a kid. And I thought: Give her the worldly look, the Flip Corkin set of the mouth. I assumed it, and shrugged off her question in a weary way. She said “You got somethin wrong with your mouth?”

Shit.

“No. Why?”

“Never mind.” She took a deep drag and leaned back and blew a perfect smoke ring, then a second smaller one. Just like the Camels sign in Times Square. And I thought, She’s performing for me. Maybe she’s trying to act as cool for me as I am for her.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” I said.

“A sick damn cousin of mine. And I mean sick in the head. That girl knew everything bad there was to know. Started me smokin when I was eight.”

“You’re kidding. Eight?”

“Well, I tried it when I was eight. Just puffin and like that. I really started serious when I was nine.”

I laughed and so did she.

“Where you from?” I said.

She paused. “Down here. From the South.”

“Any special place?”

“No.”

She was avoiding an answer, pushing me back. She stared at her cigarette. Then in the back of the bus someone started to sing: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot …” She turned, as if to listen, then took a small nervous drag. “And ne’er be brought to mind?…” Others were joining in, and I was humming, and she started to sing too, very quietly, and tamped out the cigarette and closed her eyes. “For auld lang syne, my dears, for auld lang syne …” The bus was loud with the song now, with New Year’s Eve, with the sadness of the old words in a sad bus heading south. “We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet …” She opened her eyes. They were brimming. When she closed them, tears slipped down the sides of her face. “For auld lang syne …”

She didn’t open her eyes again. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Then they were still. The bus grew quiet. We passed through an endless region of blackness. Then, on a long wide turn, she fell gently against me. Deep in sleep. And didn’t move. I could smell her hair. Clean and washed. She smelled a lot better than I did. There was a slight snore coming from her. Her right arm was flat and still on my thigh, lying there for a while, and then her hand took hold, hugging my leg in the dark. My heart moved quickly, pumping excitement through me. I was sure this was a signal, a moment of intimacy, a display of confidence and safety. I was desperate for the love of a woman. And here she was. We’d met in the dark on a New Year’s Eve and she was telling me from sleep that there were joinings that did not depend on words. I could feel her breath against my arm, the rhythmic rise and fall of her body. Old enough, I thought.

Chapter 5

Almost as soon as she had appeared in my life, she was gone. I woke up suddenly in a world full of morning green. The woman’s seat was empty. I turned and saw other empty seats on the bus, and a black man with gray hair looking at me in a knowing way and Turner four rows in front, sleeping with his head against a window. But the woman wasn’t on the bus. She’d talked to me and slept against me and had gripped my flesh and now she was gone. Like that. While I slept. I didn’t even remember falling asleep and cursed myself for weakness. And then thought: Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I made this up. Maybe my desperation for a woman had invented her, brought her on board this bus on a lonesome New Year’s Eve, with her oval face and rough veined hands and wild hair. But I checked the ashtray. And like one of those scenes at the end of a fairy-tale movie, there was physical proof of the angelic visitation: her crushed Luckies.

So I gazed around, full of her leaving (even now, all these years later, I fear a woman’s departure during sleep). And angry with myself. I was such a goddamned kid that I didn’t find out where she was from and where she was going. I hadn’t even found out her name. I stared at the passing country, my eyes drowned in a billion shades of green. Dark, bright, rich, glossy. On all sides of the road as the bus rushed along on its ribbon of tar. She’s out there somewhere, I thought, as the meshed greens rose like walls when we picked up speed on a downslope, and then separated as the bus settled. I could see foliage at the edge of the road and beyond that a swampy river, and, away off, a haze hanging in the branches of the forests. She’s here in the green southern world.

This was before I knew the names of the natural world. But I was looking at broom grass and blackjack oak, elder and sassafrass, honeysuckle and sycamores and water oak and willows. And in a blur I felt her hand move in the drowsing dark, holding my cock, her voice small and fearful, my hand led under the black turtleneck to the fullness of her breasts. That was real. Or it was a dream. I’m uncertain even now. I looked for reassurance to the Luckies in the ashtray. And turned away to see the river moving sluggishly in its swampy channel, and saw (but did not recognize) banks of abandoned sugar cane, Spanish moss draping live oaks, sudden movements in the darker green, insects hovering like helicopters and then suddenly jabbing the surface of the opaque water. Her veined hand, her breasts. I saw abrupt saddles of dry land covered with shivering grass as her voice shivered in the blur and then we were again in the darkness of the swamp. Trees rose monstrously, blocking the sky. There were mangrove trees among them, their roots plunged into the water, gnarled and knuckled, like huge hands frozen while searching for some smooth and agile quarry. I will find her.

And then the swamp was gone and the bus moved into a zone of luminous blond light. The earth itself was lighter, sandier, the grass bleached, and I began to see houses off in the distance, made of silvery unpainted boards, with plumes of blue smoke drifting up from brick chimneys. In the lee of a small hill, three crumpled-looking cows lay under a giant shade tree and beyond them a white boy galloped bareback on a chestnut horse.

I had no sense that any of these things were real. The woman who had sat beside me in the night: Was she real? And were these real rivers and trees and swamps and insects, real shacks and cows and horses? I wished I could stop the bus and wander around in this strange new morning world. This South. Wander until I’d found her. Please stop the bus, driver. Let me touch the South. Let me find my woman. I wanted to see it with her, understand it, read books and maps, ask a million questions, find out the names of the trees and the towns and the people. I wanted to know what armies had fought across the landscape and who the heroes were. And the villains. And the explorers. And the wild men. The South. I’m in the South.

I swore that I would find her. Track her down. Discover where she got off and retrace the steps. Just like a detective. Like Canyon. Or Buz Sawyer. Like Holmes or Philip Marlowe. Ask people and describe her. And finally meet her at dusk somewhere, and she’ll say, How old are you? And I’ll say, Old enough. And she’ll say, Don’t you have a woman back home? And I’ll say, Not anymore. And she’ll say, Well, you might as well spend the night. Yes. Like that.

Then up ahead there was a gigantic brightening, the sky suddenly fuller and whiter. The bus heaved up a long sloping rise and the trees became sparse and then at the crest of the rise I could see the land falling away for miles, and the smudged air of many chimneys and the first gas station and a restaurant called Mom’s and a sign saying BAIT and then groups of Negroes, men and women, walking along the sides of the road and cars falling in behind the bus and flatbed trucks moving toward us in the other lane. I opened the bus window and was slapped by a hot, damp wind. And then, beyond the buildings and the smoke and the scrubby mottled surface of the land, out past the trucks and the Negroes, I could see the wide blue waters of the Gulf.

“Well,” Turner said, standing in the aisle beside me, stretching the muscles of his face, cracking his knuckles, “we’re here.”

Chapter 6

One night, after we had made love, my third wife asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I laughed and said she didn’t want to know. Turning in fury, slamming the pillow, she insisted. She was in the stage of our marriage when she was demanding some abstraction called intimacy, the most favored word that year of women’s magazines and the self-help industry. “If you don’t tell me,” she hissed, “I’ll never ever know you.” Rose had a genius for making small talk seem like a stickup. I reached for a cigarette and sighed and started to calculate. But my long pause filled her with the grief she must have been seeking; she sobbed, she cursed, she pulled a pillow over her head. And I tried to remember all those faces, the blurred flesh of three decades and five continents, blond hair and brown, pale skin and olive, bodies thin and thick. Furious, she got up, slamming the door on her way to the bathroom, and was gone a long time, and when she came back, I said I thought the number was around twelve hundred. But then, I added, I couldn’t be expected to remember everything. She fell back as if wounded and lay in a theatrical state of trembling shock. I knew almost immediately that I should have lied; some truths are always unacceptable. To say that she had asked for this information — had demanded it — wasn’t sufficient excuse. Actually telling her was cruel, even stupid. So then I lied. In the name of peace. I told her that I was only kidding, that I’d slept with only twenty-odd women, including wives, and none were as good as Rose was in bed and she smiled through tears and looked grateful and in an hour was talking about Elizabeth Taylor’s diet. But as I lay beside her in the dark, and then made love to her again (another lie), with my brain flooding with the images of other women, I remembered the first. The woman I’d seen so briefly on a bus. The woman named Eden Santana. And tonight, close to the Gulf again, I am full of the aching loneliness I felt the first time I thought I had lost her forever. Eden Santana.

We had arrived in Pensacola at last, the bright sun hurting my eyes. There was no bus station. The Greyhound pulled up at a curb and I saw signs telling me I was on the corner of Garden Street and North Palafox. “Pensacola, folks,” the driver said, and there was a wheeze of doors opening and then people were pulling luggage from racks. Turner went ahead. I stopped and talked to the driver.

“There was a woman sitting beside me,” I said. “Got on in Atlanta, got off somewhere between there and here.”

“White woman?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember. Yeah. Pretty woman. Got off with some cullid folks in, oh, hell, musta been Palatka.”

“Where’s that?”

“Oh, fipty mile back. She figget somethin?”

“No. Nothing. I was just …”

He smiled. “She was a looker, awright.”

“Yeah.”

That was all. I’d met her, felt her body against mine, was sure somehow that she had touched me in the night, felt all other women vanish from me, felt all things to be possible; and she was gone. In some place called Palatka. I got off and saw Turner drinking from a water fountain shoved against a wall in the shade. It was marked “White.” The water dribbled steadily into a white ceramic dish. A pipe ran five feet from the white fountain to the right, connecting to a smaller fountain labeled “Colored.” None of the Negroes used their fountain.

“Taste like seawater,” Turner said, pulling a face. “Maybe they’re tryin to get us feelin at home.”

“Should I try it?”

“Seawater drives you crazy, sailor.”

“I guess I’ll wait.”

“You can watch a while and see if I go crazy.”

“By then I’ll be dead of thirst.”

The local buses were around the corner of Palafox, engines idling in the sun. A group of sailors waited in single file to board a bus marked Mainside. The Greyhound driver came around the corner with a bundle of copies of the Atlanta Constitution and dropped them in the lobby of a movie theater called the Rex. The Glass Menagerie was on the marquee, but the doors were locked, the box office dark.

“Well, I’ll see you, Devlin,” Turner said. “There must be another bus goes to Ellyson. I gotta jump this one to Mainside.”

I told him I would see him around and we shook hands and said good-bye. I felt strange. I’d heard about the man’s wives on the long ride. I’d drunk his whiskey. Now he was vanishing. Just like that. And I thought that as I went around in the world more and more people were like characters in movies: You saw them on the screen, you got to know them, and then they were gone. Turner was like that. And the woman with the curly hair. All the guys from boot camp. The guys I knew in high school. Buddies to the death. And then gone. At the door of the Mainside bus, Turner shook my hand, nodded good-bye, then turned on the steps and said, “Happy New Year.”

I waved, and the Mainside bus pulled away from the curb and moved out of sight. I stood there alone for a long while. Tonight, arriving here for the first time in more than thirty years, I drove into the center of Pensacola again, to get my bearings, and found that exact spot. I was thrown instantly back into that first day-bright arrival when I was some other person. Neat careful rows of palm trees seemed to be at parade rest all the way up the broad sloping street. About four blocks up, I could see three churches plugging the avenue, staring down at the town in a gloomy stone-faced way. They gave me a chilly moment, pebbling my skin; in 1953, churches always seemed to be saying No. So I turned my back on them that morning and looked around the empty sunbaked corner. There was a hotel called the San Carlos across the street, and as I waited for the Ellyson bus I counted floors. I did the same thing again tonight, gazing up at the shuttered hotel, its boarded doors and begrimed windows. Nine stories, including the ground floor. Tonight a wino slept where a Negro doorman in a white uniform once stood on the steps. There was a bar and restaurant on either side of the entrance; the polished glass of both were now hidden behind sheets of plywood. A thick-bodied man in a sleeveless undershirt stared out a third-floor window that first day, and though back then there were few other signs of life, tonight there were none at all. That first day in Pensacola, I thought the usual guests must all be home for the holidays, sleeping off hangovers, getting laid. Tonight I thought they must all be dead.

To the right of the San Carlos there was (and is) a small red-brick building, and beside that a cream-colored church whose cross and steeple were level with the hotel’s sixth floor. The brick building must be the rectory, I thought. And the church bore a cross, so it must be Catholic. Looks Spanish, too, I thought. Or Mexican. Like pictures of churches in National Geographic in places where the sun was hot and clear and blinding. And I remembered the brief lines in the encyclopedia, about Pensacola being called “The City of Five Flags.” The book said it had changed hands thirteen times in twenty years. Obviously, the name itself must be Spanish. Pensa-cola. Cola-cola. Pepsi-Cola. Nickel-nickel, ta-rootie-da-dot-tah.…

I was sweating hard and could smell my own stink rising out of the thick wool winter uniform that I’d worn from the North. Thinking then (as I would later, with other women) that maybe that was why she’d left. The odor of my body, unwashed for two long days, glazed by other men’s cigarette smoke and farts and whiskey breaths: it must have driven her out of the seat and then out of the bus. Maybe she thought all sailors smelled like me. For all I knew, maybe they did. Maybe she had been nauseated by the possibility that Pensacola would be a whole town full of stinking sailors and she would rather get off in Palatka with a bunch of colored people than keep on going. Or perhaps there was some other reason. Something more mysterious, scary, female.

Then a battered gray bus pulled around the corner from Garden Street and stopped in front of the Rex theater. A piece of cardboard was jammed between the windshield and the dashboard. Ellyson Field, it said, hand-lettered in a tight, awkward way. The door opened. A civilian driver got out and stretched.

“This go to Ellyson Field?” I said.

“What’s the sign say, sailor? Brownsville, Texas?”

I got on and sat in a front seat, feeling stupider than ever. Where was Brownsville, Texas, anyway? And why didn’t I say anything back to the man? I wished I could react like the bus driver did. Quickly. Sarcastically. And then thought I never learned her goddamned name. I shifted around, as if expecting her to step off some other bus, maybe the local from Palatka, and saw three sailors in soiled whites hurrying around the side of the San Carlos hotel. They were waving frantically at the bus, mouthing words I couldn’t hear. The driver was behind the wheel now, and looked at them in a blank disgusted way. Then two civilians came down the street, carrying lunch in paper bags. They all got on the bus. The sailors were in their late twenties. I could see from their shoulder patches that one of them was a gunner’s mate, another a second-class radioman, the third a machinist. They were cursing and laughing, bleary from a long night’s drinking. They went all the way to the rear and sat down hard. The civilians eased into a seat across the aisle from me. They said nothing, as if by their silence they were issuing a judgment of the drunk sailors in the rear. As for me, a hairless kid in dress blues, I didn’t exist. The driver came back and glanced at his watch and then looked at me.

“What’s the fare?” I said.

“No charge in uniform,” the driver said. “You jest comin aboard, boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful when you get to Ellyson. The excitement’s libel to kill ya.”

Then he slid in behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, closed the door and moved up Palafox Street. This route was to become a permanent part of my life, one of those templates that are engraved on the mind forever. I’ve lost all traces of offices where I’ve worked, houses where I’ve lived with women, the terrain of battlefields where my life came close to ending. I’ve never forgotten the road to Ellyson Field. I saw a luncheonette, a clothing store, a jeweler’s; then a large United States Courthouse, a restaurant called the Driftwood, a deli. The names were different when I cruised the block tonight, but the basic structures remained the same. There were the three churches, which on that day long ago revealed themselves to be Lutheran, Baptist, a Masonic temple. In the New Year’s Day sunlight, while snow choked the northern cities, people stood outside each of the churches, keeping to themselves. There were men in dark suits, looking hot and alien in the brightness, and a lot of what at the time I called older women, at least in their thirties, wearing long dresses and straw hats and white gloves and low-heeled sensible shoes. All were carrying Bibles. I looked at the women, searching for my lost night woman with the curly hair, thinking that her hair would be wild in the heat, that she might have exchanged her jeans and turtleneck for a yellow summer dress. But she wasn’t there; they were all strangers. Not one of them knew me. She called me child.

We moved into a rougher area. One-story buildings made of raw concrete blocks. Jumbled scrapyards full of rusting, anonymous iron. Auto-repair shops with greasy sidewalks out front. A few cheap luncheonettes, closed for New Year’s. There were telegraph poles everywhere. And still no people. The light here was less intense than it had been on Palafox. Across the aisle, the civilians sat like statues. But I could hear mumbling and sudden laughter from the sailors in the back, as if they were recalling what had happened during the night. I wished I could tell someone what had happened to me during the night. O curly-haired woman without a name.

Then we were out of the ugly district, moving into open country. The fields along the highway were ruled into neat rows of vegetables, and there were more Negroes walking along the edge of the road and more churches: smaller, made of wood or concrete blocks, with white steeples on the larger ones, signs calling to sinners: CHRIST IS RISEN NOW IT’S YOUR TURN and CHRIST IS ON THE WAY and WHAT DOTH IT PROFIT A MAN?

The bus slowed as we passed a row of honky-tonks on both sides of the road, flat-roofed one-story buildings with cars parked outside. The Circle O and Good Times and Jack’s Port ’o’ Call and The Palms Away and The Fleet’s Inn. Some had signs in the windows saying PACKAGE STORE or FISH FRY or BURGERS. The bus stopped at a red light. Cars darted out of the side street. Then a sailor in dress whites came hurrying from a place called The Anchor Inn. The driver opened the door. The man climbed in, a machinist’s mate, third class, breathing hard, his eyes runny and sore. He needed a shave. The sailors in the back all started applauding. One of them shouted: “You didn’t get the clap this time, Roscoe, you oughtta shoot yisself in the foot!”

“Fuck you bastards,” he said.

“You now got yisself the only discharge you’ll ever see!”

He laughed and went past me to join the others in the back. From the open door of The Anchor Inn I heard a fragment of music from the jukebox. Guitars. A woman’s sad and wounded voice. It could have been in another language. At home, when I heard pieces of music, the whole song would play through my head. But this was hillbilly music, music out of the South, and I didn’t know any of it. The tavern door closed. I realized it had been days since I’d heard any music at all. Just “Auld Lang Syne” on the Greyhound bus. Today, every time I hear it I remember that New Year’s night on the bus. And when I hear country music, I’m back in the South, moving along those roads.

The driver turned right at a cross street, and there ahead of me was a long avenue, with unkempt fields on each side and small stunted palm trees planted along the shoulders. Eight-foot barbed-wire fences bordered the empty fields. Then I could see a brick building getting larger as we came closer and a sign that said HTU-1 ELLYSON FIELD and Marines with tan uniforms and white belts and pistols on their hips, watching the approach of the bus. And beyond them I could see this place where I was going to live for a long time: hangars, a lone helicopter the size of an insect rising from a hidden landing strip, and then barracks, white and silent, on green lawns off to the left. Ellyson Field. Where they trained helicopter pilots for the Navy and the Marines, men who went from here to Korea and picked fliers right out of the sea after they’d been shot down. I knew nobody. Nobody at all. I was very hungry and my stomach tingled and then turned uneasy and I wondered who was here to try to break me and who wished me harm. I took out my packet of orders and got my ID card ready and then wondered why I was there at all.

The bus made a slow half turn and stopped parallel to the gate. I was the only passenger with a sea bag, so I waited for the others to get off, then stepped out and saw the others presenting their ID cards to a Marine sergeant. The civilians nodded to the Marines, the sailors saluted. I went up to the sergeant.

“Airman apprentice Michael Devlin reporting for duty, sir,” I said and saluted. The Marine’s face was a formal grid. He looked at the papers and the ID card and then at me. He returned the salute.

“Welcome aboard, sailor,” he said.

Chapter 7

With the sea bag on my shoulder, I walked down the main street of the base, following the Marine’s directions to the barracks. I tried to walk in what I thought was a rolling, sea-duty gait, just in case anyone was watching, an affectation so heavily practiced then that it became in fact my adult walk. In the years that followed, women sometimes laughed at it, and so did I, but it is now too late to make a change. Sometimes you actually become what you want to become. But on the first day of 1953 I was not yet formed as a man, and was still anxiously trying on the various styles of the world. Perhaps that’s why I still see myself so clearly, walking for the first time into Ellyson Field. Anxiety sure does sharpen focus.

I know that I turned left into a street without sidewalks. And I remember how the grass came right down to the curbs, as precisely cut as my boot-camp crewcut, uniformly green and flat and perfect. A rich, creamy earth smell rose from the grass and little jewels of water sparkled among the blades. That odor is one of the memories I can never reclaim in the way buildings can be revisited, and streets; my senses have been blunted by too many cigarettes. Everywhere I go, the American air is now stained with the fumes of gasoline and chemicals. That day I inhaled the fresh wet air and thought: I’m in Florida, goddamnit, and nobody I ever knew has been here before me.

Three raked gravel paths were cut through the grass from the street to the barracks doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering which door to choose, hearing the chirring sound of insects in the close, drowsy air. The Bachelor’s Enlisted Men’s Quarters were in a wooden building almost a block long, painted a shiny white. Birds clung to the peak of the tar-papered roof. I couldn’t see through the screened windows. The entire building was three feet off the ground, on concrete blocks the color of mice.

I turned and looked around at my new slice of the world. Most of the base was blocked from my view by the low white building right across the street. My pulse quickened when I saw a sign saying Supply Department. That’s where I’d be working. And I felt as if I’d put something over on the Navy Department. I could sleep late and still make muster in less than a minute. Right across the street. Beautiful.

From where I stood, the building seemed to be divided in two. There was a door in the center, and through the windows on the left of it I could see the rough wood of packing crates. Nothing was clear through the screened windows on the right. That’s where they must work, I thought, and all the gear must be stored in the section on the left. I was standing there for what seemed a long moment, trying to imagine what might happen to me on the other side of those doors, when I heard from a great distance the sound of a saxophone.

He was playing the blues. A slow, mournful tune, drifting from somewhere on the empty base. Long sad lines. And then a pause. And then more long lines. A tenor, probably. Little phrases breaking and curling around themselves and then a longer line, and then a pause again. Sounding as lonesome as I was. Like a broken heart. Or hunger. Or jail.

Then it stopped. I waited and listened. But there was no other sound except the insects and the muffled engine of a lone helicopter: chumpchump chumpchump chumpchump.

I lifted the sea bag and started up the path to the barracks, my feet crunching on the gravel. I opened the screen door, and went through into a cool gray room with a picture of Harry Truman on the wall. He was still president; Eisenhower had been elected the previous November, but wouldn’t take office until January. To the right was a corkboard covered with Navy bulletins; a small wooden table and chair were shoved against the wall. Through an archway, I could see double-decker bunks divided down the center by a row of high metal lockers. The floor was scrubbed almost white. Sunlight knifed through the windows, making glaring patterns on the floor. I laid the sea bag down and stepped into the room. There wasn’t a single person in sight. I remember feeling like a burglar.

“Hello?” I said. “Anybody home?”

There was no answer.

Then I heard a toilet flushing at the far end of the row of bunks and walked toward the sound. Names were stenciled on some of the lockers. Each bunk was made up like the next, the mattress covers pulled taut and rough Navy blankets folded at the foot. I heard water running, then stopping. And then someone whistling: “Cry.” By Johnnie Ray. A big hit in ’51. Even if you hated the singer or the song, there was no way to avoid the words, because for most of a year you heard it everywhere:

A man in faded blue dungarees suddenly walked out of the head, whistling the tune. He stopped and smiled. Lank brown hair, freckled skin, crooked smile.

“Hey, whatta ya say?” the man said.

I fell into the response: “Airman apprentice Michael Devlin reporting for—”

“Jack Waleski,” he said, shaking my hand. “You just get assigned here?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do wrong?”

“Well, I didn’t ask for it,” I said. I didn’t mention Port Lyautey; that might truly sound weird. “They—”

“Yeah, nobody ever asks for Pensacola.”

He took out a pack of Chesterfields, laughing to himself. He offered me one and I turned it down. He lit a cigarette.

“The thing to know,” he said, “is that about the time you realize this is the asshole of the earth, it gets worse.”

He laughed in a wheezy way. I asked him how bad it could be, and he shook his head.

“Look, I got the watch here today,” he said, cupping the cigarette to keep the ashes from falling on the floor, “but I’ll tell you what: Get out of those blues and into a shower. Then pick yourself a rack. When you’re settled, come down to the office and I’ll give you the gouge on Pensacola.”

“It didn’t look too bad coming in.”

“Pal, It makes Shit City look like Paris.”

I smiled as he walked away. Okay. This guy was okay. The place was gonna be okay. Waleski stopped and shouted:

“I was you, I’d get in that shower real fast, sailor. You’re a little ripe.”

“I sure am,” I said, and thought about the woman with the curly hair.

Away off, I could hear the saxophone again, playing the blues.

Chapter 8

I picked an empty top rack on the shady side of the lockers. I unlocked my sea bag and found a pair of whites. Then I stripped off the gummy woolen blues and for the first time felt the hot damp air of the Gulf on my skin. The horn player’s sadness drifted through the screened windows of the barracks. He was playing “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” in a jazzy, middle-of-the night way. I wiggled my hot sore feet into rubber thongs, humming: I walk along the street of sorrows …

In an empty locker opposite the bunk, I hung up the pea jacket, then stacked my skivvies, T-shirts, socks, dungarees. The locker was narrow but deep. I turned my blues inside out to let them dry and laid them across the striped uncovered mattress. I still had my ditty bag from boot camp, lumpy with shaving gear, Pepsodent, deodorant, and I laid that on the rack too, along with a standard-issue Navy towel.

At the bottom of the sea bag were three books, and I took them out, too. One was The Bluejackets’ Manual, navy blue and compact; it was a kind of catechism for sailors, full of rules and regulations. The second was a book my Aunt Margaret had given me for Christmas. She was my mother’s sister and was married to an undertaker and lived in Manhattan. She was always giving me books. This one was called A Treasury of Art Masterpieces. It had been put together by someone named Thomas Craven. On the cover, there was a beautiful yellow-haired woman rising naked from the sea, one hand covering a breast, the other holding the long hair over her crotch. The third was The Blue Notebook. I slipped it inside the art book and put the books deep into the back of the locker.

Waleski came back with a blanket, a pillow and a mattress cover. “They say every man in this man’s Navy is guaranteed three squares a day and a dry fartsack,” he said. “Here’s the fartsack.”

As he turned to leave, I asked him who the horn player was. Waleski cocked his head, listening. “You mean Bobby Bolden? He’s a bad ass, a war hero, a prick, and a whoremaster. But he sure can play the saxophone, can’t he?”

“Sure can.”

“Want some advice? Stay away from him.”

I remember shaving for the first time in the deserted head with its shallow sinks and small mirrors, urinals and doorless toilet stalls. In a corner there was a metal trashcan fitted with a large white laundry sack. A hand-lettered sign said: LUCKY BAG. In the Navy, that was where you threw stray or worn-out clothing, and you were free to take anything that you might use. I glanced at it and thought: She smoked Luckies. She was out there somewhere. Probably with a man. A man who knew what he was doing. Who didn’t have a kid’s smooth face or have to submit to the discipline of the Navy. She was out there. In Palatka. A breeze lifted the palm fronds outside the screened window, rattling them against one another. And I thought: Until this day I’ve never seen palm trees. Except in movies and comics and National Geographic. And here I am, shaving at a sink, and they’re right outside the window. I can hear them rattle. I can hear them sigh. I could walk outside and touch them. In Florida. Pen-sa-co-la. I’m here. I’ve come a long way from Brooklyn to this special place. I’ve done it. She smoked Luckies with her left hand.

In the shower, I turned the hot-water knob as high as I could, hoping the hurting water would wash away the long trip, the three different buses and drivers, perhaps even the fragile memory of the woman with the curly hair. I didn’t want to leave the scalding luxury of the shower. Until I went into the Navy, I’d never showered alone. To stand under a shower alone, your hair squeaking and your skin pink and red: paradise. I felt that then; I believe it now, and to hell with the Freudian interpretations. I remember confessing this once to a guy in boot camp. Told him I’d never taken a shower alone. And he didn’t believe me. He had grown up in a house, not a railroad flat in Brooklyn. I couldn’t explain about our flat, with its L-shaped bathroom — the tub crammed into one arm of the L, the toilet in the other, with a sink in between. In the years since, I’ve tried to explain it to women who wanted to know why I spent so long in the shower, telling them how there was barely room to turn around and the water pipes were scalding hot in all seasons so you could never relax and lean against them, and the roaches fattened in the dampness and the single window was sealed by generations of paint. Women didn’t get it. Nobody gets it. And on that first day in Ellyson Field, even I was sick of the images of my old life. Hey, man (I said to my young self): Stop this! You’re here. You made it. You’re in Florida, and it’s snowing in New York.

I was drying myself with a towel when I heard Bobby Bolden playing again. A quick jump tune. The words moved through my head: Jumpin with my boy Sid in the city. He’s the pres-i-dent of the deejay committee … Lester Young wrote it and King Pleasure sang it. For Symphony Sid’s radio show on WEVD, the ethnic radio station. I used to listen at night, fall asleep, and wake up to a lot of singing Hungarians. The weirdest station in New York. They had a Hungarian hour and a Russian hour and an Irish hour and a Lithuanian hour. And every night at midnight, Sid showed up to play jazz. I was then so young that I actually cared about being hip or square, and I knew that Sid was hip. I was also sure that Bobby Bolden was hip, even though I’d never met him. And I thought: I gotta meet this guy. I finished drying myself, wrapped a towel around my waist and wriggled into the shower shoes. I picked up the ditty bag and soiled skivvies and flip-flopped back to the bunk

I paused in the archway. An older sailor was standing at my bunk, a billy club attached to his wrist with a leather thong. He was tapping it gently on his thigh. A first-class gunner’s mate. In dress whites. He was shorter than I was, but his back was very straight and muscles rippled under his tight jumper. There were three hash marks on his sleeve, each standing for a four-year hitch. He looked like a battering ram. And I felt suddenly afraid. Not of the hard body. Or the billy club. It was his face. Pale red sideburns. The white hat precisely two fingers above where his brows should have been. Except that he had no eyebrows. And no eyelashes. His eyes were a slushy pale blue and he didn’t blink. His mouth was a slice. Lipless. Without color. Bracketed by two lines that seemed etched into his cheeks. The skin on his face was shiny. Like plastic. This was my first sight of Red Cannon.

He moved a few feet to his left and stood beside the locker I’d chosen. His eyes never left me. He didn’t speak a word. For a moment, I felt as if I were looking down from the ceiling at the two of us. I saw the empty barracks, the palm trees outside, and felt the breeze coming through the windows. And the young man facing the Old Salt. We locked eyes for a long time. Two seconds or an hour. Even now I can remember the feeling, the knowledge that if I broke the stare I was doomed. Fear entered my belly like a piece of ice.

Finally, without taking my eyes off him, I said: “Excuse me.” I reached for the locker but the gunner’s mate didn’t move. I would have to go though him to get to the locker.

“That’s my locker,” I said.

Something like a smile showed on his face. But he didn’t move. For a moment his eyes clouded, as if a drop of milk had been added to the slushy blue. And then they were diving deep into me, probing for weakness or softness like a knife. And I broke it off. I turned to the side and fiddled with my towel and groped in the ditty bag for something I didn’t want. I felt humiliated. The gunner’s mate had faced me down. And I’d quit to him like a dog. In this strange and alien place. On New Year’s Day. A long way from home.

“What’s your name, boy?” the man whispered.

“Michael Devlin.”

“Your Navy name, boy.”

“464 0267.”

“464 0267, what?”

“464 0267, sir.”

There was a long, silent moment. He stared at me, and I tried to smile in a casual way to cover up my fear.

“Open it,” he said, stepping aside from the locker. His short arms were hanging at his sides. “Let’s see what y’ got heah, boy.”

I turned the combination lock. Six, for the month I was born.

Twenty-four, for the day. Thirty-five, for the year. I unhooked the lock and lifted the latch and opened the locker door. The gunner’s mate stared into it. Then, with his free hand, he grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it hard. The sound was explosive. He did it again. And again, the metallic sound caroming through the barracks. And then he did it once more.

“First off, boy, this ain’t your locker, heah?”

He snarled the words and then banged the door with the billy club.

“This heah locker is the property of the Yew-Nited States Navy.” He banged it again. “Second of all, you aint s’posed even be near this lockuh ’thout my p’mission. You unnastand me?”

He slammed the door again. His mouth was quivering but the glossy skin on his face didn’t move. Then he looked inside. He reached to the back of one shelf and pulled out everything: work shirts, dress whites, skivvies, socks. He cleaned out the second shelf. Then he dropped my pea coat on top of the pile on the floor.

“Now, heah this, boy. I am the M A A on this base. The Master at Arms, case you don’t know what I’m saying to you. I assign the racks in these barracks. Me! Nobody else. You got that? Me! First-class gunner’s mate Wendell Cannon, U.S.N.”

“Sir, I was told—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you was told, boy. I’m tellin you now. You don’t pick a locker, you don’t pick a rack, you don’t pick your goddamn nose, less I give you p’mission. You got me?”

His eyes fell to the clothes, then wandered back to the locker.

“What in the fuck?”

He lifted out the oversized art book with the long-haired Botticelli blonde on the cover. He blinked as he read the title. Then he turned to me.

“A Treasury of Art Masterpieces?”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“A Treasury of Art Masterpieces?” he screamed. He shook the book in my face. “What are you, some kind of gahdam faggot?” His voice rose another decibel. “What in the fuck is this doing in a locker in this man’s Navy?”

He whirled and heaved the book the length of the barracks. I saw it bounce off an empty rack and skid across the floor. The Blue Notebook fell out, but Cannon didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at me. Waiting. I stepped forward. A red film fell over everything. My body was bursting. I wanted to swing out and destroy him, but when my hands came up, the towel fell. I was naked before him. He had his jaw clamped shut, breathing hard through his nose. His eyes widened. I stepped forward. An inch from his face. The blue eyes didn’t blink.

“You thinkin of doing somethin, boy?” he said quietly. “Standing there with yo’ pecker hangin out? Huh? You want to do something?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well, I’ll tell you what you bettah do, boy,” Cannon said. He smiled thinly. I stepped back, still looking at him. His face didn’t move, didn’t sweat. I picked up the towel and covered myself. “You better get all your gear together and go down there to locker 211. Y’heah me? And then move your fartsack and your ass down to that rack there. You see the one I mean? Yeah, that one. Next to the head. Be perfect for you, boy. There’s lots of light all night long, f’ you to read about your art masterpieces. Easy for you too, ef you hafta shit your pants. Like you’re doin now. Save a lot of wear and tear on this good U.S. Navy beddin.”

He seemed cooler then, almost cold.

“And tonight,” he said, “I think you oughtta go out and stand watch at post three. At midnight. A good midnight to four, that’ll give you lots of time to think about your art masterpieces, boy.”

With that, Cannon turned abruptly and walked the length of the barracks to the far door, his polished shoes clacking on the hardwood floor. The screen door slammed loudly behind him.

I stood there for a long moment. On the Outside (as we called civilian life), I would have beaten his brains out. Or gone down trying. On the Outside, I would have made him eat the book. For sure, I’d have put some damage on his plastic face and made the son of a bitch sweat. But there in the Navy, if I did any of those things, I’d be sent to the brig. “Shit,” I said out loud. And then shuddered. The man had punked me out. Like that. With his sweat-less face and slushy eyes and the three hash marks on his sleeve. That was all it took. No punches. Just authority. And I was there because I asked to be there. I signed the papers. I joined the Navy. And this was the deal. For a moment I felt like crying, thinking of myself free on the streets of a city. And then I twisted and threw a punch at the locker door, slamming it one final time.

Chapter 9

ACQUILINE. AQUALINE.

I love the sound of a pen on paper. I’m writing these words with a Sheaffer fountain pen. It leaks and stains my fingers, but I love the skoosh sound it makes. I know that professional cartoonists all use steel crow-quill nibs, but I can’t seem to make them work. The nibs always break. Maybe my hand is too heavy. Maybe I don’t hold them right. I tried a Parker 51 once in a department store. It was beautiful. So smooth, and the nib was flexible, so I could get the thicks and thins I need for drawing. But it cost $20. One of these days, maybe I’ll be able to afford one. But not now. Not soon, the way the Navy pays.

I need to make some drawings, but I can’t right now. I don’t have my stuff, and anyway this guy C. would probably have me courtmartialed if he caught me drawing. I can just hear him saying it: Only a Gah-dam faggot would draw pictures like that.

Maybe we’re just something God dreamed. Or is still dreaming. If there even is a God. I used to believe in God, too. Like everybody else in the world. I prayed to him and worshiped him. Right up to the day my mother died. Then I said, What kind of God could this be who lets a good woman like that die?

Once I started thinking that way, I couldn’t stop. What kind of God lets Hiroshima happen? What kind of God lets six million Jews die in the concentration camps? What kind of God lets people be poor? Back home in Brooklyn, there were crooked cops and murderers and sleazeball politicians. How could God let them live while my mother dies? How could he put up with a guy that throws an art book against a wall? If there’s a God, then he’s responsible for art, too. He must of said once, Okay, now let there be art. But if He did, why put guys like C. on the earth to hate art? It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s nothing new. There were all those vandals in history, the Visigoths and guys like that, always sacking Rome. They destroyed all sorts of beautiful things, while killing and raping thousands of people. How could they be part of God’s plan? Unless He’s having a bad dream.

Or maybe it’s something else. Something simpler. Maybe God’s a mean bastard. Maybe that’s it. Maybe He’s just a mean bastard who likes to see people suffer.

Agnostic. One who holds that the ultimate cause (God) and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience. (That’s me).

Aquiline.

Chapter 10

At twenty to twelve that night I wandered out along a dirt road beside the fence and relieved a small Oriental kid named Freddie Harada at post three. He handed me a dummy Springfield rifle and an adjustable cartridge belt without bullets. In a thin singsong voice he told me to forget about sleeping on the post. Red Cannon or the goddamn Marines came around every half hour in a jeep. Then he hurried away into the darkness.

I was supposed to be guarding a dumpster, one of those metal bins that was filled over the course of a week with garbage and junk and then lifted onto a truck and taken away and emptied. It was big enough to hold a car. I’d seen them in boot camp, but even in that land of total chickenshit I was never asked to guard one. I walked around it, feeling foolish with my rifle that didn’t shoot.

There was a barbed-wire fence just past the dumpster and empty black fields beyond and away off lights moving on the highway. Obviously, I thought, feeling hipper than Cannon or the task before me, the Russians weren’t about to steal a giant garbage can. So this watch was really about staying awake. They called it Building Discipline. Usually that meant you did something useless just because someone commanded you to do it. You stayed up all night, watching for a patrol to come around in a jeep, and the patrol came around in the jeep just to make sure you stayed up all night. The Navy. The goddamned Navy.

But after a while I realized it took too much energy to stay pissed off. I started feeling good out there in the open, with the steady drone of insects coming from the fields and silvery clouds moving across the stars. The darkness smelled of the sea and was so humid I thought I could grab it and shape it, pack it like a snowball, throw it at the stars. There was no purpose to my being there, but in all the years since, as I’ve stayed up through the night working with purpose, developing film, making love, arranging tickets and passports and visas for my next stop, I’ve sometimes longed for those nights without meaning under the stars of Pensacola, when I was solitary and young.

I remember my eyes adjusting to the darkness and how I began to see the varieties of the color black. A green black beyond the barbed wire. The pale black of wild grass. The blacker black of tree trunks. I tried to imagine the way Roy Crane would draw it. All grays and blacks. He would probably add some palms to show it was Florida, even though there were no palms out here. Along the edge of the barracks, the trees were all pine. But I knew that an artist could change things to make them better or truer; in fact, it was probably his duty to make such changes. I was sure Crane always did. And so did Caniff: They made pictures that were truer than photographs. They made a lot of things neater than life. The world was a mess, and all the things they taught us in school were lies. But when an artist shaped the world, things always worked out better. An artist would have that curly-haired woman stay on the bus and take the young sailor home with her and make love to him and stay with him forever.

I opened the door to the dumpster. A foul odor rose from it. I stepped closer and objects began to reveal themselves: automobile tires, broken pieces of metal, a lot of paper torn in strips, dry palm fronds. But there was a wet jumble of other stuff that I couldn’t make out. The smells were suddenly more distinct: rusting iron, burnt paper, rubber, decay. Not city odors. But they didn’t make me feel I was in the country either. And I thought: It’s a Navy smell. I’ll only smell this in the Navy. I’ll remember this mixture of smells all my life. And I did.

Then I saw lights bobbing in the darkness on the far side of the field. They moved left, then stopped. I picked up the rifle. The lights moved again, stopped, then were moving again and getting larger. I could hear a car engine now, and then the lights were very bright and the jeep was fixing me with its high beams, stopping a dozen feet away. I held the rifle at the ready and tried to look tough.

“Who goes there?” I said. Like in a bad movie.

No answer. A man stepped out of the car on the passenger side, but I couldn’t see him clearly in the glare of the lights. He came forward. It was Cannon. Carrying a clipboard.

“You’d be dead by now, boy,” he said. He came very close, fixing me with those lashless eyes. “You sposed to ask for a password, boy, and if it ain’t forthcomin, you shoot.”

“Nobody gave me a password. Sir.”

“Then whyn hell didn’t you ask for one, boy?”

“I just got to this base. Sir. I don’t know the routine. Sir. I was—”

“Don’t explain, boy. Admit.”

“Admit what?”

“Admit you done fucked up, shitbird! You are tellin me you went to a United States military post, on duty, without askin anyone what you was sposed to do. You didn’t get a password. You didn’t do your duty, boy, cause you never did find out what it was.”

I said, “If you were a Russian, I couldn’t do my duty anyway. This goddamned rifle doesn’t shoot! So what’s the big deal?”

Cannon blinked. Then he turned to the driver of the jeep, still out of sight behind the glare of the headlights.

“You hear that, Infantino? You hear what this shitf’brains just said?”

“No, sir.”

“He said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”

I could see veins pulsing in Cannon’s neck.

“So it looks like we got us another wiseass punk from New York, don’t it, Infantino?”

Infantino didn’t answer.

“And when you scratch a New York wise guy, whatta you find trying to get out? You find a New York big shot. And all we need is some seaman deuce thinks he’s a big shot. Isn’t that right, Mister Infantino?” Then he got angry at Infantino’s silence. “Are you deaf, boy? Do you hear me, boy?”

“Yes, sir, I hear you.”

“Well, what should we do with this big shot, this Mister Wiseass Brooklyn New York?”

I’d never told him I was from Brooklyn, so I knew he’d examined my papers.

“That’s obviously up to you, sir,” Infantino said from behind the brights. His voice was raspy, familiar.

“I tell you what I’d like to do,” Cannon said. “I’d like to shitcan him right out of this man’s Navy. Couple years in the brig, a D.D., and gone.” He sighed. “But this new damned Navy, you can’t do it like that anymore.”

He handed me the clipboard and a ballpoint pen. “Sign here,” he said, and pointed to a box on a ruled sheet of paper. The form listed the various posts on the base and the times. Each of the other guys on duty had signed in a box on the right. I did the same. Cannon’s fingernails were neatly trimmed and polished.

“At ease,” he said. I relaxed. Then he squinted at me and changed his tone and barked: “Tain-SHUN!” I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. “Now you stay like that till yore relieved, wiseass,” he said. “You even dream about takin a rest, I’ll put you on report.”

He turned on his heel, walked quickly to the jeep and got in. They moved off quickly. Briefly, I glimpsed the other sailor: dark-haired and ruddy-faced. In dungarees.

It was much darker after the jeep left. I stood at attention until the lights of the jeep merged with the lights of the main gate, then I squatted beside the dumpster with the rifle on my lap. Fuck you, Cannon. I didn’t sleep, but I wasn’t awake either; my anger was like an extra pulse. I tried something I did back home when the furies got to me. I made my mind blank. Like a blackboard after it’s washed. I saw Cannon, the dumpster, even The Bluejackets’ Manual on the slate. Then I pulled a wet cloth across it. Twice. And they were gone. I stared at the empty slate. It was blank and pure, like peace.

Then I came suddenly awake. The lights of the jeep were moving again. I stood up and brushed off my dungarees. I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. My heart thumped. Maybe they had those field glasses that let you see in the dark. Maybe they had photographs of me goofing off. Then the jeep arrived with a squeal of brakes. Infantino jumped from behind the wheel without shutting off the engine. He came right up to me and handed me two doughnuts in a napkin and a cardboard cup of coffee.

“Fuck him,” he said, and then hurried back to the jeep without a word and drove away.

Chapter 11

It is morning on the Gulf and I’m at the window in a bathrobe I bought in Tokyo, staring out at the gray ocean. A storm is coming. There are some young people on the beach, spreading a blanket in defiance of the message from the sky. One is a girl in a flowery bikini, with long legs and beautiful breasts. A boy makes a fuss over her. I am sure he wants her to stay with him forever. But they each have a half century ahead of them now, full of perils and temptations. To survive at all is difficult enough. To run the course together will require a miracle. When they are my age I will be dead, and I wish I could go down there and tell them one sentence that they could carry as a talisman. Words so clean and perfect that they would protect those kids from all danger. But nothing comes. One couple runs into the surf. The girl in the bikini touches the boy’s face and he moves forward clumsily to kiss her cheek. It’s the morning of their lives. And then the sentence forms itself: Watch it.

I dress slowly, and move again into that first morning at Ellyson Field, when I awoke feeling drugged, my mouth sour, my bones rubbery after two hours sleep. I hear the sounds of all Navy mornings: shouts of reveille, reveille, groans of protest, and drop yore cocks and grab yore socks. And over and over, the slamming of those locker doors.

Then I was up, nodding at strangers, saying nothing, stretching and squatting to force some bone or muscle into my body. I showered and dried myself, the floor of the head wet and slippery and men at the sinks scraping at beards. They rubbed their faces, their skin, their bellies as if they were mad at their own flesh. Some hummed tunes, others grumbled in solitude. Some were tattooed. Many were matted with hair. I am sure I dressed in the uniform of the day: dungarees, black shoes, white hat. I am sure I made my bed, and felt ready for the challenge of the morning.

Then a short sunburnt muscle-bound man came over. His nose was peeling and he grinned in a crooked way.

“You’re from New York, I hear.”

“Yeah. Brooklyn.”

“I’m Max Pilsner. The East Side. You goin’ to chow?”

It was as easy as that. A hello in the morning and I had a friend. I don’t make new friends anymore. There have been too many fakers, too many disappointments, and too many real friends have died. Max Pilsner was my friend, and it is a measure of how far we’ve traveled that I no longer know if he is dead or alive. That morning, Max stepped out before me into the steamy Florida air. His arms hung straight from his shoulders. His waist was narrow. And he walked in a series of rolling movements, like gears shifting. He made walking seem like a brilliant performance. All around us, sailors hurried along in the half darkness, their cigarettes bobbing like fireflies. We walked beyond the Supply Shack to the chow hall, where the smell of toast and hash filled the air. Max told me he was a mechanic in Hangar Three, and had come here straight from mechanics school in Memphis and he was hoping for sea duty, anything, to get out of Ellyson Field.

“I’d even join the Fleet Marines,” he said. “And they’re fighting in Korea. The medics, anyway …”

The only good thing about Ellyson was that there were some decent guys here, he said, New Yorkers and shitkickers. “They’re all nuts.” He was telling me this as we waited on line under the eaves along the side of the chow hall. We passed a single piece of graffiti: Find it hard getting up in the morning? Slam a window on it. Through the window, I could see Waleski sitting with other sailors at one of the long wooden tables. Freddie Harada was with two other Orientals. The morning sounds were louder now: metal trays, silverware clattering against metal, cups clunking, coffee urns hissing, guys on KP yelling at one another in the steam, all mixed up with the sound of helicopters beating their way through the morning air.

“Who’s this Bobby Bolden?”

“The best,” Max said. “Greatest horn player in the Navy. Maybe in the whole friggin South. Now that’s a guy that was in the Fleet Marines. A medic. He got wounded, too, in Korea. Won a bunch of medals. Know what’s great about him? He doesn’t give a shit. Nobody can scare him. Nobody. So nobody bothers him. Bobby Bolden …”

He showed me the apartment above the mess hall, where Bobby Bolden lived with all the other Negro sailors, most of them mess cooks. And he pointed out a chief petty officer named Francis Xavier McDaid, standing near the door in starched suntans. Red Cannon was bad enough, Max said, one of those Old Salts who remembered when men were men and ships were wood, but McDaid was Red’s boss and infinitely worse. We had our trays full of scrambled eggs and bacon now. I looked at the chief. He had a broad flat face and a deep tan. He seemed to be staring right at me. I wondered whether Red Cannon had told him about me. Put me in some New York Wise Guy category. We sat down. I turned to look at the door. And saw a black man coming in, powerfully built, with coffee-colored skin. Even from the distance, I could see that he had green eyes. Max told me that this was Bobby Bolden.

“He’s only got one major problem,” he said. “Pussy.”

“Isn’t that everybody’s problem?”

“White pussy.”

I was eating quickly now. Max looked at me.

“That bother you?” Max said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it before.”

“Down here, they lynch colored guys for it. Maybe that’ll help you think about it.”

“Come on, they don’t lynch people anymore, do they?”

“Only when they catch them.”

Bobby Bolden passed through the line like some visiting prince. The black mess cooks cracked wise with him, heaped his tray with food. Then Bolden walked past us down the aisle, nodding at Max, and sat among a group of whites, without saying a word to any of them.

“See what I mean? There’s empty tables all over, but he sits with the worst rednecks on the base. Just to break their balls. Now watch.”

Without finishing their breakfasts, five men got up and left the table. Three of them moved to other tables. Two walked right out of the chow hall. Bobby Bolden showed no emotion. He just sat there eating.

“Does he have one white girl? Or a bunch of them?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, “I don’t follow him around. I’m allergic to gunshots.” He smiled. “But there’s a Wave who works out at Mainside, I know he’s got her. A real good broad, very funny. Not my type, understand? But truly tremendous tits.”

I laughed. “I guess you can’t blame him then.”

“I can blame him for being stupid,” Max said. “Down here, they kill colored guys for lookin’ at white broads.”

I sipped my coffee. It tasted brackish. I said, “You tell him that?”

“Hey, how you gonna tell him? What do I do? Go up to the guy and say, ‘Hey, Bobby, you’re a nigger, you know? And they have segregation down here. So it ain’t safe for you to be screwing a white broad.’ I mean, Bobby Bolden was a hero in Korea, two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, a whole shitload of other medals. How am I gonna tell him what to do?” He glanced around the hall. “Besides, he just don’t give a shit.”

I looked down at Bobby Bolden again, remembering the sound of the horn. A human being playing the blues on a bright lonesome New Year’s afternoon. Telling everybody who’d listen about the boulevard of broken dreams. He ate slowly and deliberately, in what seemed to be permanent solitude.

Chapter 12

Somewhere in the South, the woman from the bus was walking along a street or driving a car or shopping in a market. She was naked in a shower. She was lighting a Lucky and smoking it quickly, holding the butt in her left hand. She didn’t know how desperately I wanted her. How I wanted her promise of female darkness and secret things in the night. How I wanted to know what she knew. But I was in the Navy. The Navy brought me South. Because of the Navy, I was on that bus. And before I could get to her, before I could start my search for her (locating mysterious Palatka on a map and going toward it the way desperate men once searched for El Dorado) I would have to deal with the Navy. And that turned out to be not very hard.

After breakfast, I walked into the Supply Shack and waiting for me at the counter was a first-class airman storekeeper named Donnie Ray Bradford. Not Donald. Or Don. Donnie Ray. He was a thin-lipped man in crisp tailor-made dungarees. His eyes were watery, with a wounded look in them. I told him who I was and he said “Welcome aboard” and then I joined a dozen other sailors at 0800 for the formal morning muster. This was to be the routine of every Pensacola morning, and it is built into me now; no matter where I am or who I sleep with, if I fall asleep at five A.M., I still rise to make the eight o’clock muster. On this first morning, Donnie Ray called each of our names, checked them off a muster sheet, then nodded in a generalized way at the group, dismissing us. It was very loose and casual and, I thought, grown up. A few shook my hand and welcomed me aboard, then quickly dispersed to various parts of the building. Some left to take a truck to Mainside. I remember all of them now, and will carry them with me to the grave, but that first morning, I still couldn’t match names to faces.

Donnie Ray took me on a tour of the Supply Shack. As I thought, the storeroom was in the rear, with crates stacked almost to the ceiling and narrow aisles running between them. A Hi-Lo was parked near the door. Inside the crates there were rotor blades, Donnie Ray told me, and engines and pontoons. They were all up on pallets to make it easier for the prongs of the Hi-Lo to lift them and also to guard against flooding. Sometimes the Gulf was hit with hurricanes. He explained the parts numbering system and told me twice that it was important to account for every piece. “If you forget something,” he said, “they go nuts in Washington.”

He showed me my desk, which was the last in a row of five desks set at right angles to the wall. There were neat trays of requisition forms, a dictionary, a telephone. “All yours,” Donnie Ray said. “The complete aviation storekeeper’s kit.” And then someone called his name and told him he had a phone call and he hurried away. I sat down at the desk. It wasn’t the same as operating twin.50s on a destroyer in the South China Sea. But it was mine. The place where I would work for a long time. I sat back, engulfed by the aroma of cut grass, the fronds of the palm trees clattering in the soft breeze, the sprinklers whirring. Even inside the Supply Shack, the air seemed thick and sensual. A picture of my lost woman scribbled across my mind, then vanished.

Through the screened window, I could see sailors in white hats walking in pairs in the distance, and more white-painted wooden buildings, and then the main administration building, all brick with white trim, rising three stories out of a plaza, a control tower on top, its wide windows made of green-tinted glass. Thinking: I’m here. On the first morning of a new life. This is. New York was. I found myself breathing the thick air as if it were food.

Donnie Ray Bradford came back. His face looked troubled but he said nothing and began to explain what I would be doing. Filling out requisitions for re-supply. Servicing the mechanics and electronics’ mates and even an occasional pilot. “We call them customers,” he said, “though they don’t pay for a damned thing.” They came here to the Supply Shack for their parts or for new tools. And they would wait to be served at the long wide counter at the front of the building. Usually they would have their requisition slips filled out, approved by a superior. “But they might not always have the numbers right,” Donnie Ray said. “So you’ll have to double-check the numbers in the book.” It wasn’t all tedious detail; there were housekeeping chores too. The storekeepers cleaned the Supply Shack once a day, swabbing it down on a rotating basis. And we weren’t imprisoned in this building; sometimes we had to go to Mainside on a truck to pick up new supplies. A bunch of the crew was over there now.

“You gotta watch this weather, too,” he said. “You think ’cause it’s Florida it’s always hot, like yesterday, today. But it sometimes gets goddamned cold. These big storms come down from Canada and take half of damned Alabama with them. Most of the time it’s too hot. All the time it’s too damp. So you gotta keep parts dry and clean. Otherwise they end up little blobs of rust. And get all the numbers right on the forms. You get one digit wrong, you end up with a jeep instead of a screwdriver …”

His voice was soft, but there was an edge underneath. It was as if he was reciting a set speech and had something else on his mind. He said other things; I didn’t really hear them all. I felt blurred. Ready for the sleep I’d missed while guarding my dumpster.

“You got a driver’s license, right?” he said.

“No, I don’t, Donnie Ray.”

“Really? How come?”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

He looked surprised. “You don’t know how to drive?”

“Never learned.”

“Hell, everybody knows how to drive.”

“We didn’t have a car in our family,” I said, already tired of the old explanation. “Nobody had cars where I grew up. So there was nobody to learn from.”

Besides, I wanted to say, but didn’t: I’m the oldest son. My father was born in Ireland and my mother’s dead and I’m the first American. I had to learn the American things first. Baseball and football. Sugar Ray Robinson. And Batman and The Spirit and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And Charlie Parker late at night on Symphony Sid. I guess I’ll have to learn to drive, too, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“Well,” Donnie Ray Bradford said, “you can load and unload till you get a license.” He glanced out a window at a lone sailor, then back to me. “Someone around here’ll teach you.”

He said all this in a quiet, even tone. No redneck bullying. None of Red Cannon’s malignant style. He talked to me as if I were a man, not a slave, not an inferior, not a boy. He ended by repeating, “Welcome aboard, sailor.” I liked him for that. I liked him a lot. He went off to use the phone again. Then another sailor came over. His name was stenciled above the pocket of his shirt: Harold R. Jones. A second-class storekeeper on his second hitch. He had lank blond hair that lay flat on his skull. Wary eyes. Dungarees so heavily starched they looked as if they’d crack when he walked. He was holding a requisition slip.

“Gimme a hand,” he said casually.

“Sure.”

We went into the back room together, and he led the way to a long flat crate that contained a rotor blade.

“Donnie Ray looks nervous,” I said. “He always that way?”

“Yeah, he’s a bit of a nellie,” Jones said. “But he’s extra nervous today. We got a missing sailor. Jimmy Boswell didn’t make muster. He’s Donnie Ray’s big buddy.”

“You mean he’s AWOL?”

“Who knows? I’m sure Donnie Ray didn’t report him yet. He just don’t know what the skinny is on Ole Boz. The man likes his whiskey, so maybe he got himself in a nice little car wreck somewhere. Nobody knows. Donnie Ray called the hospitals. But nothin turned up yet. Here, grab that end …”

I was surprised at how light the crate was. We lifted it and laid it on a dolly. Jones looked at my shoes.

“You better do something about those shoes,” he said.

My black shoes looked dull, but they weren’t dirty. Jones was wearing shoes brought to a high gloss.

“Man that won’t shine his shoes, won’t wipe his ass,” Jones said, as we moved the rotor blade to the front room. A man that won’t shine his shoes won’t wipe his ass? The wisdom of the ages, a certain entry for The Blue Notebook. At the counter, Jones showed me how to fill out the forms and had a mechanic sign for the rotor blade. Jones went back to his desk and I started for mine when I met another second class. He was coming out of the head. His name was Jean Becket.

“The shithouse looks like Poirl Harbuh t’day,” he said.

“You from New York?” I asked.

“New Awlins. Why?”

I tried to explain that in New York, particularly in Brooklyn, people said “poirl” for “pearl” and “terlit” for “toilet.” They could say things like “I dropped my poirls down the terlit.” If Waite Hoyt was pitching for the Dodgers, and something happened to him, they’d say, “Hert’s hoit.” They could also tell you that the men’s room looked like Poirl Harbuh.

“Just like New Awlins,” he said. He had a wide gap-toothed grin and eyebrows that touched, making him look wicked. “What’s your name again?”

It was that easy. Becket showed me the metal bins where smaller parts — tools, nuts and bolts — were stored. Donnie Ray gave me a new Navy coffee cup. The phones were ringing and traffic was heavy at the counter. I watched Jones and Becket work and then I handled a few requisitions myself, and during a lull I took a walk down to the coffee urn.

A bony man with a pinched face stood beside the urn, a cup in his hand. His shirt told me his name was J. T. Harrelson. He groaned softly, then again. I poured myself a cup. Harrelson stared bleakly at the empty morning. His hands trembled.

“You okay?” I said.

“Ah’ll never be okay again,” he said. “That gah-dam white lightnin eats you gah-dam guts out.”

“Maybe you need somethin to eat.”

“Ah’d rather swallow a can of worms.”

Harrelson looked at me, squinting. I must’ve been smiling.

“Who in the hell are you?”

I told him and started to shake his hand. But he was using both hands for his cup.

“And where you from, boy?”

I said the fatal words: New York.

“Gah-dam. Yawl got anybody left in New York? More gah-dam New Yorkers in this man’s Navy now than I seen in thirteen years.”

“Ah, well,” I said and walked away. I didn’t like the hint of coldness about Harrelson, the curl to his lip when he mentioned New York. I went back to my desk and studied the parts catalogs. The coffee cooled and tasted sour.

Suddenly the side door slammed open. A gangly sailor in dirty dress whites lurched into the room. Everything stopped. Donnie Ray looked up from the telephone, at once alarmed and relieved. The sailor was in his twenties and was wearing a third-class AK’s V-stripe. His eyes were wild and red. His big hands waved in the air, jerking, twisting, as if detached from his arms. His shoes were dirty and scuffed. The missing Boswell.

“Hank’s dead!” he screamed.

Donnie Ray came on a run. Becket emerged from the back room and hurried over, with Jones behind him.

Donnie Ray said, “Gah-dammit, Boz, I been looking all over for—”

“Hank’s dead!”

Donnie Ray took his arm but Boswell shook him off.

“Hank’s dead, gah-damnit! Hank is fuckin dead!”

“What are you—”

“Hank Williams! Hank Williams died, Donnieray! They found him dead in some car in West Virginia! Just dead. Dead in the back of a Cadillac!”

I’d never heard of Hank Williams. I thought: Why is Boswell so upset? What’s going on here? Then Harrelson was there, his face ashen. He said: “Hank Williams is dead?”

“Dead. He’s fuckin dead.”

Boswell’s eyes closed, then widened.

“Dead!” he screamed and sat down hard on the concrete floor. “It’s on the radio. In the fuckin newspapers. Hank’s dead. On New Year’s fuckin Day.”

Harrelson hurried to his desk, took out a small radio and started turning the dials. There were three sailors waiting at the counter now, staring down the hundred-foot length of the Supply Shack, watching us. Donnie Ray leaned over Boswell.

“Boz, you gotta go somewhere, get cleaned up,” he said. “How’d you get on the damned base anyway?”

“The back,” Boswell mumbled. “You know, the hole in the fence …”

Jones and Becket grabbed him under the arms and started to lift his dead weight off the floor. Donnie Ray nodded at me to help. I grabbed Boswell’s waist and together we got him to his feet. Donnie Ray glanced at the people waiting for parts. About five of them now. Boswell started sobbing. “Poor fuckin Hank. Poor skinny redneck bastard. Poor drunk sonuvabitch …” As if describing himself. Then he passed out in our arms.

Donnie Ray said, “Can’t even get him in a shower in this shape. Can’t lay him out in the barracks, or McDaid’ll find him.” He glanced around, then said: “Put him on a pallet.”

He walked quickly away to the front counter. We carried Boswell into the storeroom, with Becket leading the way through the rough wood tunnels formed by stacked crates. In an empty area against the far wall there were a half dozen pallets neatly piled on top of one another. We moved toward them and then Boswell was suddenly awake.

“What the hell you doin?” he said. “Where you takin me?”

“You’re drunk as a skunk, Boz,” Becket said. “We’re gonna let you sleep it off.”

Boswell looked angry and trapped. “You gonna make me?”

“Not if we don’t have to,” Becket said.

There was a pause, as if he were trying to remember something that was very important. Then his eyes widened again.

“Hank’s dead.”

“Yeah, we know that, Boz. It’s a terrible thing. But to be poifectly frank, it aint our business today. We got other things to do.”

Suddenly Boswell shook us off and kicked Becket hard in the stomach. He whirled and punched Jones in the chest with a wild right aimed at his face. Then he turned to me, blinking. He started another roundhouse right and I bent at the knees, went under the punch, and ripped a hook to his belly. He went hooooo. And sat down. He blinked again and then keeled over.

Becket looked at me: “Jesus. Where you loirn to do that?”

“I used to work out,” I said.

“You boxed?” Jones said.

We were lifting Boswell onto a pallet. “A little. I wasn’t very good.”

I didn’t say anything else. I was as astonished as they were at the way Boswell went out from one punch to the body. Anything I said would sound like bragging. Boswell was stretched on a pallet now, and Becket built a little fence of them to hide him. Then Jones laid Boswell’s white hat on his chest.

“Will you look at this man’s shoes?” Jones said.

Chapter 13

There are entire years of my life I can’t remember at all, and days that are as dense in memory as granite. That first day on the job at Ellyson Field was one of those. First, I learned about Hank Williams — which is to say, I learned about the American South. I knew only a few things about this vast region of my own country: In the 1860s, the North had fought a bitter, brutal war against the Confederacy, a war that we were taught was about slavery; colored people still were not complete citizens there; southern politicians were figures of fun on radio shows. Good baseball players came from the South and they played a lot of football. But I didn’t know anything about the people; my ignorance extended even to the lies, for I was probably the only person left in America who had not even seen Gone With the Wind. That day I learned that the South of Hank Williams was not the South of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. On the day Hank Williams died, the air itself seemed charged with emotion, packed with loneliness and loss, as the radio stations played the man’s songs over and over, the deejays sounding hushed, tearful, even reverent. At first I thought this was comical; I even turned away to smile as the corn-pone voices grieved on the radio. But then, as the words and voices accumulated, I knew they must be serious.

On the news shows, everything else was forgotten. Instead, we heard the governors of Florida and Alabama and Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, all saying what a great tragedy the death of Hank Williams was for the South, for America, for the human race. This all sounded ludicrous then; more than thirty years later, I think they were probably right. The radio reporters interviewed other hillbilly singers, and though their names meant nothing to me, there was something genuine about their heartbreak. We heard too from sobbing people in the streets of a dozen southern cities. By late afternoon, at least two women were claiming to be the true wives of Hank Williams and were described as shocked and in tears. I felt as if I’d arrived in a country where the king had just died and I didn’t even know his name.

At one point, an announcer said that a grand farewell to Hank Williams was being planned at the Municipal Auditorium in Montgomery, and Harrelson shouted: “Ah’m goin!” He slammed the desk with the flat of his hand. “Ah don’t care whether Ah got duty or not—Ah’m goin!”

And the details began to come in, too. A cop named Jamey was on the radio, explaining that he found Mister Hank Williams dead in the back of a Cadillac in Glen Burdette’s 24 Hour Pure Oil Service Station on Main Street in Oak Hill. That was in West Virginia, at five-thirty in the morning. There were two men with Mister Williams, the cop said. One of them was the driver of the Cadillac, the other a friend. They were taking him to Canton, Ohio, where he was supposed to sing in a concert that night. The weather was so bad they couldn’t risk a plane. “That’s it!” Harrelson shouted. “They killed him! The driver and that so-called friend. They killed him cause he was too damned good to live!” The cause of death, a coroner said, was probably heart failure. “But we’ll have to wait for an autopsy.” Harrelson didn’t have to wait: “They gave him some kinda shot, you wait an see. They killed him.” Hank Williams was twenty-nine. Only twelve years older than me. “Shit,” Harrelson said. “Shit.”

As the music played, Harrelson moved around in a distracted way, singing along with Hank Williams in a low, tuneless voice. She warned me once, She warned me twice. But I don’t take no one’s advice … Becket knew the words too, but only his lips moved, and he kept working, hurrying from desk to counter to storeroom, sometimes enlisting my help. He didn’t try to explain the spreading sorrow. That was another thing I learned: I wasn’t one of them, maybe never could be one of them, because the things that were deep in me didn’t exist for them, and the things that were deep in the southerners didn’t mean anything to me. I could be quiet, that was all. I could respect them. But I couldn’t truly feel what they felt. I was an outsider here, as they would be in the gardens of Brooklyn.

The customers were all talking about Hank Williams too. Musta been the whiskey, they’d say. A shake of the head: All them women. Then a glance out at the airfield and heads cocked as they heard the lonesome voice from the radio. The honky-tonks got ole Hank at last.

Then I heard a Hank Williams song I actually knew. I tried so hard, my dear, to show / That you’re my every dream … The tempo was different, the accents broader. But I knew that one. You’re afraid each thing I do / Is just some evil scheme. Backed by strings, sounding like South Brooklyn, Tony Bennett sang it all through the fall of ’51, his voice aching the way my heart did then, as I tried to convince a girl named Maureen I loved her. A mem’ry from your lonesome past / Keeps us so far apart … Until I met her in the back room of the Caton Inn on a Saturday night, held her close, whispered the usual lies into her hair. On a night of bitter wind. Why can’t I free your doubtful mind? / And melt your cold, cold heart?

That was when the death of Hank Williams finally touched me too. Hearing “Cold, Cold Heart.” After that, I listened more closely, imagining that the whole South must be full of men who remembered women they held in their arms, while Hank Williams sang from the jukebox or the radio. The man’s voice was so goddamned lonesome and hurt that I felt sure nothing could have saved him. He had six Cadillacs and a mansion in Nashville (the radio said) and a couple of kids and those two wives. But here he was: dead at twenty-nine. So I listened to all the rest of it, as Harrelson turned up the volume, and a crowd of customers began to gather at the counter. To me it was like the day Roosevelt died, when everybody in the neighborhood listened to radios and some cried and others wondered who the hell this Harry Truman was; later, when Jack Kennedy was killed and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and John Lennon, all the great public killings of my time, I was always working, professionally numb as I chased the faces of disaster. As a photographer, I was paid to focus deeply on the moment, but late at night, exhausted in a motel room in Dallas or Memphis or Los Angeles, I would remember the death of Hank Williams. I was seventeen again and looking over at the side of the counter in the Supply Shack in Pensacola, where a mechanic with grease-blackened hands was sobbing openly and another man was trying to console him. I’d never seen a man cry like that before. “Come on, now, Jimmy,” his friend was saying to the mechanic. “Don’t you cry, boy. Don’t you cry.” And then someone brought in a copy of the Pensacola News and there was a picture of Hank Williams on page one, and they all looked at it in silence, as if the picture and the print and the paper finally and irrevocably had confirmed what they’d heard on the radio but didn’t fully believe. Another man left in tears.

Suddenly the door slammed hard. Everybody stopped and turned. Chief McDaid was standing there, with Red Cannon beside him. All we could hear was the radio.

“Shut that goddamned thing off,” McDaid said.

Harrelson switched off the radio. It was quiet, except for one of the customers, who was blowing his nose.

“What in the hell is going on here?” McDaid said. Cannon searched our faces and his eyes narrowed. Nobody answered. I noticed for the first time that Donnie Ray wasn’t with us. He was the senior man. He should have been there to answer Chief McDaid.

McDaid took a few steps closer to the center of the counter, still on the other side. The customers eased away to give him room.

“This some kind of a prayer meeting?” he said. His voice was round and deep, like the voice of a radio announcer. “Is this a circle jerk? What is this?”

Finally Harrelson said softly: “Hank Williams died, Chief.”

McDaid and Cannon exchanged a weary look that said: See what we have to put up with? Then McDaid pushed through the swinging door that separated our work area from the service area. One mechanic started to walk away, but Cannon blocked him.

“Mister Cannon, what would you do with a lot like this?” McDaid said.

“A little extra duty’d sure help, Chief,” Cannon said.

“How about a firing squad?”

“That’d probably help the most.”

McDaid stepped in among us, looking at our faces, uniforms, shoes. I hoped he wouldn’t go in the back and find Boswell. When he got to me, McDaid stopped.

“You’re new here, aren’t you, boy?”

“Yes, sir. Came on board yesterday.”

“You crying for Hank Williams too?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know his music, sir.”

“You don’t know his music.” McDaid paused. “Why not?”

“I’m not from the South, sir.”

“And where, pray tell, are you from?”

Cannon interrupted. “He’s from New York.”

“I see,” McDaid said. He looked at the stenciled name on my shirt pocket, then at me. The tan was perfect. I could smell aftershave lotion. “Are you a New York wise guy, Mister Devlin?”

“I’m a sailor in the United States Navy,” I said.

“You didn’t answer my question, boy.”

“No, sir. I’m not a wise guy.”

“Good,” McDaid said. “You’d better not be.”

Then he turned to the others.

“Where’s Donnie Ray Bradford?”

“Out at the hangars, Chief,” Jones said.

“You tell him to call me as soon as he gets back.”

“Yes, Chief,” Jones said.

McDaid separated himself from us and then coiled tightly and addressed us and the customers.

“Now all you sorry-ass son-of-bitches get back to work,” he said. “This is the United States Navy, not an amusement park. If the President of the United States dies, you still must perform your duties. You certainly don’t stop your work because some banjo player dies. I hope you understand me clearly.”

With that he strode ahead through the swinging door and out into the morning light, with Cannon behind him. Everybody at the counter breathed hard in disgust and started mumbling.

“Fuck you, pal,” I said.

“Forget it,” Becket said. “Dat’s da way he is.”

“Hey, the man’s right,” Jones said casually. “We don’t get paid to hang around and listen to the radio.”

Becket gave him a look. “You know, sometimes, Jonesie, you are a real sorry son of a bitch.”

He walked away and Jones shrugged. Away off, I could hear Bobby Bolden playing his horn.

“Cold, Cold Heart.”

A slow blues.

Chapter 14

Just before lunch that day, three more storekeepers returned from the Mainside run. One was a big, blond, muscle-bound guy named Larry Parsons, who always seemed to be two beats behind the rest of the world. He came in and shouted: “Did you hear about Hank Williams?” And didn’t understand why everyone laughed. The second was Charlie Dunbar. He was a small, precise man whose clothes were nattily tailored and perfectly faded to make him look more of an Old Salt. He had a quick smile, white teeth, a tanned face. He was the first man I’d ever met who’d actually gone to college and the only Republican. We didn’t see much of either breed in Brooklyn. Later, he told me that he only had one ambition: to become president of the United States.

The third man was Miles Rayfield, and he would become my closest friend, although I didn’t know it then. His face was blocky, with a long upper lip, thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses, deep lines around his mouth. His head was too large for his body and his fingers looked like tubes. He groaned, sweated, cursed as Becket and I helped him, Dunbar and Parsons move some heavy crates into the back room. We all stopped to looked down at the unconscious Boswell.

“Do you think we should take his pulse?” Miles said.

“Hell, no,” Becket said. “He might be alive.”

When we were finished, they scattered to the head, the gedunk, the barracks and I went to my desk. After a while, Miles came over. He told me his name and said he was twenty-three years old and from Marietta, Georgia and he didn’t know why he joined the Navy, so I shouldn’t ask.

“That’s the essential Navy intro, isn’t it?” he said. “I also have to say that I truly don’t give a flying fiddler’s fabulous fuck about Hank Williams either.” He smiled. “Welcome to Anus Mundi, the asshole of the earth.”

I laughed and told him my name and where I was from, saying New York instead of Brooklyn. His desk was directly in front of mine and he moved papers around in a busy way and opened his window to let in the breeze.

“They’re going absolutely completely apeshit over at Mainside about this Hank Williams,” he said. “Mencken is right. The South is the Sahara of the Bozart. You can see what passes for art down here: the cheapest, most maudlin, most sickeningly disgusting sentimental crap.”

I wasn’t sure what some of the words meant. I certainly didn’t know who Mencken was or even how to spell a Bozart. But I got the drift.

“You got in last night?” he said.

“Yesterday afternoon. I was on the midnight to four last night. Post three.”

“The dumpster!” Miles laughed. “So you must have met that great American intellectual, Wendell the Red Cannon. He sends everyone out to that dumpster the first night. I think he must have a former wife in there, chopped into bits.”

“What’s his problem, anyway?” I said.

“His problem is that he’s a reptile. A cretin. A disgusting red-necked toad. With the brains of an oyster. He’s a pig sticker and a turd, an arrogant simple-minded ignorant little lowlife despicable son of a bitch bastard.” He ran out of breath and paused. “In other words, he’s a Navy lifer.”

He sat down at his desk and gazed out the window. His large hands seemed to be operating on their own, lifting pencils, playing with paper clips.

“How do I handle him?” I said.

“Just tell yourself he’s got bubonic plague and act accordingly.” He rolled a sheet of blank blue paper into his Royal typewriter. He typed one word. Then turned to me. “But you know something? If Wendell Cannon ever did get bubonic plague, he’d probably thrive.” I rolled a sheet of paper into my Royal. Miles said: “Maybe we could turn him in to the McCarthy committee. If anybody on this base is converting people to the Communist cause, it’s Red Cannon.”

I’d never heard anyone talk like this, with all the sentences perfectly formed, and words rolling around in a rich crazy obscene way. Miles had a southern accent, too, a softness in the vowels that made the consonants sound even harder when he started firing his sentences like bullets. He looked at me through the thick glasses. Deadpan all the way.

“You think I’m kidding, don’t you, Devlin?” he said. “Well, I’m not. I’m just stating a fact that’s as obvious as a tit on a cow.”

Harrelson switched on the radio again. Hank Williams began to sing. Miles turned to the music and then to me.

“Let’s get some lunch,” he said. “If that’s what you can call that vile slop at the mess hall …”

As we got up to leave, I glanced at the sheet of paper in his typewriter. The single word was Help.

“Let’s scrape this disgusting crap into a garbage can and go to the gedunk for some tea,” Miles said. He looked down at the gnawed remains of his hamburger steak and mashed potatoes. I had eaten most of mine. “Why not?” I said.

On the way out, I saw Bobby Bolden. He was just ahead of us, scraping his tray into a can and shoving it at the faceless sets of arms and hands on the other side of the slot. When we went outside, I called his name and he turned. His hands were jammed in his pockets. Miles kept walking. Bolden looked at me warily.

“Hey, I loved the way you played ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ” I said. “This morning …”

“Do I know you?” he said.

“No, I just got here.” I told him my name and offered my hand, but he ignored it. “I heard you playing all day yesterday. ‘Jumping with Symphony Sid,’ that was great. I used to listen to Sid every night back home in New York. WEVD. Is that an alto or tenor you’re playing?”

“Tenor.”

“I thought so. You dig Charlie Parker?”

“He’s an alto player.”

“I know, but—”

“Whatta you want, man?”

“Hey, don’t get pissed, pal. I was trying to tell you I liked what you do. I thought maybe I could come over and talk to you about music. I wasn’t trying to ruin your day. So why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

I started to leave. He grabbed my arm. I turned, ready to slip a punch. Those green eyes narrowed, then he released his grip.

“Thanks,” he said. And walked away.

Chapter 15

Lonesome. Adj. 1 Depressed or sad because of the lack of friends, companionship, etc.; lonely; to feel lonesome. 2 Attended with or causing such a state of feeling. 3 Lonely in situation; remote, desolate, or isolated; a lonesome road.

One thing that separates me from most of the other guys here is music. They grew up with Hank Williams and I didn’t. As simple as that. And music is one of the ways I think we figure out time. Not with watches and calendars. With music. Music is time. They talk about 4/4 time and three-quarter time (a waltz). But also music freezes the time in the world, puts a given period of time into your head so you can’t ever get it out. So I remember the war whenever I hear the big bands. And it works the other way around too: I think of a year, and I remember the songs. If you say “1950” to me, I hear the Andrews Sisters singing “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Or junk by Theresa Brewer, Eileen Barton, and Phil Harris. While guys were getting killed in Korea that summer, we were standing on corners trying to sound like Frankie Laine singing “Mule Train” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” I sometimes wonder what they were singing in Korea.

I hear the music, and I think of myself in the kitchen trying to draw and the young kids yelling and how much we all missed my mother that first summer after she died. The junk is stuck in my head. Patti Page. The Weavers. Joni James. Mario Lanza. The Four Aces. Les Paul and Mary Ford, Nat Cole and Rosemary Clooney. All lies with music, and I’m carrying them around. In the fall of ’51, Tony Bennett showed up with “Because of You.” We heard it everywhere — in all the bars, at parties. The older guys were going to Korea then, and there were a lot of going-away parties and it was always “Because of You.” And right after that, “Cold, Cold Heart.” That’s what I shared with these guys in Pensacola. That song.

When I went to boot camp, the big song was “You Belong to Me.” Jo Stafford. All the guys knew it, guys from all over the country. We sang it in the barracks late at night. Maybe it was junk too, but I thought it was written exactly for me. So did everybody else. To me, that’s a great song, if it says what you feel. “See the ocean when it’s wet with rain …”

I sure did listen to a lot of junk (not even choosing to hear it, just being there in bars and other places when it was playing). But I also listened to Symphony Sid, Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Max, Horace Silver, Ben Webster — I know they are better musicians than the hokey mellow crap on WNEW. They seem to know they are doing something important, trying to make the music sound like something nobody ever did before. But they are never on the jukeboxes. They weren’t even on the radio in New York, except for Sid. Maybe if they were, I wouldn’t feel so bad now when I hear those other songs. Maybe I’d have all the notes of “A Night in Tunisia” (by Diz) in my head, instead of “You Belong to Me.” It didn’t work that way. And now I hear all the crap and I’m afraid I’ll never get rid of it. Because I hear those lousy songs now. All the time.

Who is Menkin? What’s a Bozart? (Listening to Miles Rayfield.)

Palatka is 46 miles away.

Steve Canyon is back home, working at some university. I like him better when he’s in the Himalayas with Princess Snowflower.

Chapter 16

That evening I waited for Max Pilsner and Sal Infantino outside the locker club on the corner of Washington Avenue and Jefferson Davis Highway. We were going into town, and they were inside, changing into civvies. I was in dress whites, wearing the two green stripes of the lowly airman deuce. I’d have to wait until payday to buy civvies or until my father could figure out how to send me a box of clothes in the mail. The line of palms leading to the base looked stately in the fading late-afternoon light. The weeds, pines and palmettos in the fields seemed more lush. Across the highway there was a place called Billy’s, with a sign in the window offering a Happy Hour From Five to Seven Ladies Welcome. There was a flag outside at half-mast (mourning Hank Williams, I supposed) and about a dozen cars nuzzled against the front wall. The town was down the highway to the left. About a hundred yards away, back in the pine trees, I could see the white spire of a church.

I watched the traffic. A few cars. A big truck. And then I saw a woman in a yellow T-shirt and dungaree shorts pedaling a blue bicycle. Her legs were lean and cabled with muscle and I thought vaguely about drawing them. She had a baseball cap pulled tight on her head and she was wearing sunglasses.

And I realized it was her.

The woman from the bus.

Here.

In Pensacola.

I was frozen for a few seconds and then started toward the highway. A garbage truck roared past me.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, miss …”

But almost as quickly as I’d seen her, she was gone. Around the bend of the highway, past the church and out of sight.

And then Max and Sal were there, Max in a tight-fitting T-shirt and starched jeans, Sal in a flowered rayon shirt, busy with palm trees and surf and beaches. I glanced at the highway again, tense and anxious but somehow feeling better. I wanted to chase after the woman in the yellow T-shirt, call a taxi, get on a bus. Too late. But at least now I knew she wasn’t in far-off Palatka. She was here. In Pensacola. Where I could find her.

“You must of gone for a pump, Max,” Sal said. He hit Max on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Your muscles got a hard-on.”

“Up yours, Sal.”

“Max works out,” Sal said to me, as we started across the highway, waiting for a break in traffic. I wanted to move fast, to get on a bus, to catch a glimpse of the woman, my woman. They moved too casually. “They got a gym on the base so small you can’t get three pairs of sneakers in it at the same time. Somehow Max gets in there and lifts dumbbells. When he wears a T-shirt, like tonight, he always goes for an extra pump.”

“Pump this,” Max said.

“Hey, Max, I know a girl that wants to suck your lats.”

Max growled as we hurried behind a slow truck to the far side of the highway, then said, “Hey, I’m so horny, I’d pay a dog to lick my hand.”

Sal and Max told me to stay out of Billy’s. It was the Old Salt’s bar, the headquarters for Red Cannon and his friends. We walked past the joint to a bus stop just short of the Baptist church. A painted billboard said: WHAT IS MISSING FROM JES S? U R. A smaller sign under the billboard advertised square dances every Friday night. I couldn’t remember what day it was. Thrown off by the holiday. I didn’t ask, afraid of their laughter. Devlin: So hip he doesn’t know what day it is. I looked at another sign, above a small white cross: GOD BLESS YOU HANK.

Sal pointed at the sign.

“You know what’s missing in Jesus, Max? You are.”

Max turned to me and shook his head. “It’s the water they got up in The Bronx.”

Sal said, “Now these are the real goyim.” He saw the notice for the square dance. “I gotta take you there some Friday night …”

“Not me,” Max said. “I hear they commit ritual murder in there.”

“Absolutely true,” Sal said. “But only on Jews and spades. They take you in back, tie you up, and check to see if you’re, one, circumcised or, two, can balance a basketball on your dick. You can do either, that’s enough, a sign from God. Then they beat you to death with Bibles wrapped in argyle socks. Whatever’s left, they sell as bait out in the Gulf.… So we’d have to disguise you as an Irishman. Teach you the words to ‘Danny Boy.’ Get you a plastic foreskin …”

The bus arrived and we got on. Max and Sal sat together and I took the seat behind them. All the way into town I looked for the woman in the yellow T-shirt and baseball cap, pedaling a blue bicycle. I didn’t see her. But I was certain I would find her.

Chapter 17

Dixie Shafer was just inside the door of the Dirt Bar when we arrived. She wasn’t very tall, but great piles of silky red hair rose off her face and made her seem gigantic. Her mouth and nose were small, and her skin was creamy, but she must have weighed three hundred pounds. A lot of that weight was in her breasts, which were round, full, straining against a flowered off-the-shoulder gypsy blouse. A gold cross on a chain lay between the breasts, sometimes turning on its side and flattening between them when she moved. Her eyes were blue behind oversized red harlequin glasses. Gold hoops hung from her ears and every one of her fingers was adorned with rings. I’d never seen anyone like her in my life.

“New man!” Sal yelled. “Mike Devlin!”

“First one’s on me!” Dixie shouted, jamming those huge tits against me and hugging me. “After that, you pay!”

“She means it,” Sal said, raising his eyebrows at me as Dixie moved behind the bar. He explained that Dixie had built the bar a year before on this empty lot on O Street. Land was cheap and Dixie saw something; she grabbed the plot, bought some concrete blocks from a chief ordnance man who robbed them from Mainside, and had the roof up in a week. A moonlighting shipwright built the bar and she moved in the jukebox and the shuffleboard machine and then ran out of money. She didn’t have a dime left for the floor. The sailors started coming, and she realized that sailors could get along without a floor — understood that Sal and some of the others actually loved the dirt — and that sailors could get along without almost everything except a bar and a jukebox, cold beer and warm pussy. So Dixie saved the money that should have gone for the floor and used it to build an extension: a place in the back, where she lived. And she did her best to give all her young men what they needed most. Beer and pussy. Pussy and beer.

“If heaven ain’t like Dixie’s Dirt Bar,” Sal said, “I don’t want to go.”

Dixie shoved three Jax beers at us, and we pooled single dollars on the bar and I could see other faces from the base in the smoky room and heard Hank Williams from the juke. “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie / And a filé gumbo.…” There were four men in civvies playing a shuffleboard machine and the door opened and two more came in to join the dozen at the bar. “Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun, on the bayouuuu.” The beer was full of little slivers of ice and I watched Dixie’s breasts move as she hurried around behind the bar, jerking tops off bottles with a church key and making change from a tray beside the icebox. I wondered what it would feel like to push my face between those creamy breasts.

“Hank ain’t dead!” Sal suddenly yelled, shaking both fists in the air like a Holy Roller. “Oh lord, no, Hank ain’t dead!” The shuffleboard players paused. Dixie gave him a look. “Don’t be telling me Hank Williams done died!” He was talking like a preacher now, with a little bit of Senator Claghorn too. “Just listen, brothers an’ sisters! You hear him? Do you hear poor Hank, poor Luke the Driftuh hisself? He lives, brothers and sisters! Right there on that jukebox! An’ I tell you, he’s gonna be there the rest of our lives!”

“Amen, brother,” one of the shuffleboard players said solemnly. “Amen, amen …”

“The Lord put him among us an’ the Lord done took him away, but brothers and sisters, we will be with him again in Paradise! I tell you! An’ right here, tonight, in this place, among us poor sinners, he is with us, because there ain’t a man among us who can’t say it loud and clear: Hank lives! Just shout it out, brothers.”

Two sailors at the bar yelled, “Hank lives! Yeah. Hank lives!”

“No, you gotta shout it! You gotta shout so the Lord kin hear ya! Do you know what I’m saying?”

I couldn’t tell if Sal was serious or what, but in seconds he had all of us chanting, shouting, pounding the bar, yelling Hank lives! Hank lives! Hank lives! While Sal threw his head back, chug-a-lugged the beer and then clunked the bottle down hard. While the words came from the juke: “Another love before my time. Made your heart sad and blue …”

Max said, “Sal, we can’t keep up with you like this.”

“You have to, mah man, mah Hebrew brother, cuz Hank would’ve wanted it this way.”

We chug-a-lugged together, in a kind of ritual, Sal moving us with the almost religious fervor of his sarcasm; Max let out an enormous belch, while Dixie opened three fresh bottles and Hank Williams sang “Ramblin’ Man.” Three more sailors came in, all wearing civvies, and the place was packed and full of smoke, with the bubbling lights racing through the columns of the great Wurlitzer against the concrete wall. I didn’t chug-a-lug the second beer, but I did manage a fat gassy belch as a kind of punctuation. Sal slapped me on the back and yelled for Dixie, who brought three more bottles. Her breasts were beautiful. They weren’t actually breasts at all, I thought, full of distinctions; they were tits. Real-life beautiful tits. Everybody was talking at once, with Sal roaring over them all and the talk was all Hank Williams.

“Hank ain’t dead,” Sal said, and finished a beer. “Hank lives!”

He had set the refrain for the night. Hank would’ve wanted it this way. Sal was making fun, I guess; I don’t think he truly felt very bad about Hank Williams. But, in his loud wild way, he was consoling the others, and maybe pitying them a little, too. So the night became a series of fragments: beer and new faces and change on the bar and bottles being smashed in a garbage can and Dixie’s creamy bigness, all of it held together by a poor lonesome dead man. Hank would’ve wanted it that way.

At one point, Dixie came up beside me and said, “You’re a quiet one, ain’t you?” And moved away. While Hank Williams sang:

In the blur I tried to sort out the members of what they all called The Gang. Brian Maher from Hartford. Pale Irish skin untouched by the Gulf sun. Slick hair as black as India ink. A yeoman so good Sal said he could take stenography like a pro. Brian drank his beer very fast and belched almost demurely, and talked to me in a soft secretive way about ice skating on the Merrimac River when he was a boy and how no other women in the whole world had such round firm eatable asses as the girls on that winter river. Beside him, Don Carter from Newark. His accent harder than any New Yorker’s. Long-nosed, gap-toothed, with big hands, a deep tan, working at Ellyson as a parachute rigger (and Sal yelling at him over the words of “Mind Your Own Business”: What are you going to do with PARACHUTE RIGGING on The Outside? Carter glancing at me, shrugging, pulling at his long nose, staring into the top of the Jax beer bottle: I don’t know, the rigging school was in Lakehurst, near home, and I just wanted to be near my girl. And Sal slammed the bar and shouted: And where in the FUCKING FUCK is the girl NOW, Carter? Carter whispered: Gone. Sal blinked, and said: Drink up, asshole. Hank would’ve wanted it that way.)

And here was Boswell arriving, bouncing off the shuffleboard, hearing “Jambalaya,” and bursting into tears. While Waleski turned to me, saying he liked the way New York looked in the movies and he liked New Yorkers, but Chicago was the real place, the great place, the best city. Hey, New York couldn’t have anything like Pulaski Boulevard on the Near West Side or a bridge named after Kosciusko (and I said, Hey, no, man, we got a Kosciusko Bridge too, and Waleski said, No shit?) and anyway, you couldn’t drive at night from New York to Calumet City, the way you could from Chicago, to see the guy named The Human Prick (“What’s that?” said Dixie), a guy they dressed up in a prick costume, who would then proceed to eat himself on the stage (“Did he look like Red Cannon?” I said) and in New York there wasn’t no place like Madison Street in Calumet, either. Five Bucks A Fuck. Black and White All Night (“You mean you fucked a colored girl?” I said, walking into it, and Waleski said, “I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl”) and slower now, staring at the beer, he told me how hard it was that year before he joined the Navy, getting up in the dark to drive to work at Inland Steel in Gary and his girl Sherry ragging his ass at night ’cause he could never get the black stuff out of his fingernails and so she would never let him play with her glory hole, and then I said: Where is this Sherry now? And Waleski said, as we all said, every last one of us: Gone.

We’d gone off first, of course. That was the worst thing. All of us knew it. We signed up for the messes we made of our lives. We went off to join the Navy because they needed us in Korea, or because we didn’t want to go in the infantry, or because our brothers were in the Navy in the last war, or because we heard Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” or we saw a movie called The Fighting Sullivans when we were kids, or They Were Expendable. Maybe we wanted a uniform. Maybe we just wanted to prove we were men. Whatever it was, we went, and the girls watched our backs, and they said to themselves, as we said later (watching their backs): Gone. There were going-away parties. There were feverish good-byes. Some of the guys got engaged to the girls. Some even got married, standing with the new wives while the photographers took their pictures in downtown studios, the guys in their rented tuxes, the girls in white gowns, the rented cars double-parked outside. They carried those pictures in their wallets and their sea bags, took them to boot camp, and to the training schools in Memphis and Jacksonville and Norman, Oklahoma, took them across oceans, looking at the pictures and trying to remember the feel of flesh, the sound of their woman’s laugh. And learned too late that all the girls were gone. They’d found other guys who were always around on a Saturday night, flesh-and-blood men of bone and cock, not addresses on envelopes; young men who could dance with them and drink with them and lie with them.

That’s what I heard in the smoke and noise and broken pieces of the night, in those murmured stories held together by the voice of a poor dead lonesome hillbilly singer. And I felt for the first time since leaving home that I was not alone. That I’d never been alone. That I too was part of this huge secret society of loss, and here in Dixie’s Dirt Bar I was attending a meeting of the Pensacola chapter.

Around ten, as they did every night, the whores arrived. “Look at em, God’s truest angels,” Sal said. Max shook his head and whispered about the clap, but Sal just laughed and grabbed a skinny girl and danced with her to “Cold, Cold Heart.” The other guys grabbed for female arms and waists and asses, and the girls were all weepy over Hank and buried their heads on Navy shoulders and some of them kicked off their shoes to feel the damp dirt of the Dirt Bar’s floor. “Go ahead, honey,” Dixie said, and I danced with a skinny gap-toothed girl from the bayous of what she called Luziana, washed up here in Pensacola four years before while trying to get to Miami. She called me “mate” and said she sure felt bad for Hank and asked me if I wanted to go out to the van and I said I was broke and she said it was only four dollars and I said maybe next time, and she said, Well, okay sailor, fair enough and when the tune ended, she went to Max and took him to the dance floor and after awhile they went outside.

Soon it was all sailors and whores, dancing on the hard-packed red dirt. There was a tattooed girl and a toothless girl and some rough girls with coarse skin and hillbilly accents. They called us “mate” or “sailor,” and I thought that must have been part of what they did. They couldn’t possibly remember the names of all the guys they fucked, so they called us mate or sailor or sport. Maybe they didn’t want to remember. I danced with some of them, but mostly I watched, trying to sort out the faces, thinking that I would like to draw them, that maybe I could make them more beautiful than they were and that would make them happy. For they were not happy, not one of them. And I realized then that I was at a wake. The corpse had been found in a Cadillac in West Virginia, but they were mourning other things: people forgotten and lost, lovers gone, broken promises, the past. Still, no matter what its object, it was a proper wake, like any other back home. And when the whores laughed when Sal yelled or grabbed their asses they were just doing that night what the Irish always did on other nights in Brooklyn. They’d even done it when my mother died. They started out weeping and mournful. Then got formal. And then drunk and singing the old songs. It was what the Irish had instead of the blues.

By midnight the place was a steady thumping roar, Hank Williams and beer and some white lightnin that Boswell brought in from outside, and then the door burst open and two jolly fat girls came waddling in, bellowing “yee-HAW” at the crowd. Sal yelled “Tons of Fun!” And went running at them, yelling “Hee-Fuckin-HAW!” And leaped, as the women, whose names were Betty and Freddie, made a cat’s cradle with their hands and caught him in the air, like a turn in a circus, like something they’d rehearsed. They began rubbing their breasts in Sal’s face, and Freddie grabbed his crotch and massaged it, while Sal screamed in mock panic: “Get me a priest! Get me a fuckin priest!”

I looked at Dixie and she shook her head at me. No. A sign. A message. No. Did they have the clap? No. And then Freddie and Betty let go of Sal and he fell to the dirt floor with his feet straight up in the air like the last panel in Mutt and Jeff and the whole bar cheered and more beers came slamming down on the bar and Sal grabbed my arm and said, “Come and meet my Fee-ahn-says …”

… And the girls were beside us at the bar, rubbing, pressing, Boswell sticking a tongue in Betty’s ear, Sal faking exhaustion, Maher paralyzed. And Freddie swore that she once sucked Hank’s dick and Betty said that was the truth and Freddie said that Hank had a tiny little dick and was built like a weed and Betty said, No lie, and Freddie said that when she heard the news she wished it had been her instead of Hank Williams and how bad he musta felt all his life about that itty-bitty pecker and how he never did get to use it all that much, what with the drinkin and everything. She poured some cold Jax down her throat without ever touching the bottle to her lips, which made Sal holler in delight. While Betty played with me. And Dixie Shafer shook her head again, No, saying with her look, Don’t dare, saying, Absolutely not. Saying No.

Until they all were gone, sailors and whores, Sal leaving with Betty and Freddie, shouting “Hank would want it this way!” And the others paired off or left alone, while the floor rolled under me like an ocean swell and the walls advanced and receded and the jukebox went silent at last. Dixie Shafer looked at me across the bar and then glanced at the corridor leading to the back room. There were no lights down there. She took off the harlequin glasses and slid them between her breasts, then reached across the bar and took my hand in hers.

“First one is on the house,” she said.

Chapter 18

I’m from Kentucky, originally. Breathitt County. Ever hear of hit? All mountains and forests and then the mines later on. My daddy was a Hardshell Baptist and in that little pineboard church of theirs, hit was real strict, I tell you. Women on one side the aisle, men on the other, and a lot of singin and tambourines but nothin you could call fun. There was a preacher came when I was eight year old, a Reverent Woodford, and he was somethin. That’s when they started the footwashin and the snake handlin. The footwashin warnt nothin, really, all of us there watchin, as theyd get down and wash each others feet.

But the snakehandlin, that was a different matter haltogether. They always did the snakes at night and I remember seeing everybody coming through the woods with lanterns and big shadows everywhere until we got to that little board church, just a sign in hit saying “Jesus is Comin” and a potbelly stove and kerosene lamps on the walls. The women almost all wore gingham in them days. And the men — by that time they uz miners — they hung their helmets on nails and got in the aisles and waited for the snakes.

The Reverent Woodford would start hit, holdin a rattler in his hands, and prayin to the Lord, and soon people started wailin, beatin them tambourines, speakin in tongues, and the Reverent uz tellin them that if they uz without sin the Lord would protect them and if they warn’t then they uz in big trouble. Well, my daddy never would do hit and my momma said that uz proof he uz sinnin, he must have him some woman down the hollow, he must be drinkin liquor in the damn mines. But he said, No, he warnt gonna do hit, no snakes for him. And he stuck by his guns, until one night, I uz about twelve, we were there, and Momma uz pressin him, and the music got to playin louder and louder, and someone shouted, and I uz up shoutin, cause they called that The Shouts, hit just come right out of you. And then all of a suddint, Momma had a rattler in her hands, in front of all of them, and Daddy uz a bit shamed, and they were shoutin louder, and then Daddy uz up there too, I guess to get rid of his shame, or maybe to keep Momma, and the shoutin got to be real powerful, and I got real excited, and then pow! I tell you, boy, I know now what happen to me. I came. I just plumb came. Without no cock in me. Without no help at all. I just came, boy!

I uz something else, then, boy. Not what I am now. Boys thunk I uz a lovely girl. And I uz risin again and Daddy had that four-foot rattler in his hands and I felt hit comin again, felt the explosion comin up in me. And then the rattler bit Daddy. First rattled. Then bit him right in the neck. Rattled. Bit him again. And Daddy dropped the rattler and backed up and he had this look in his eyes like he jest seed the Devil and then he fell back and the chapel become quiet and Momma just stood up, she dint cry, she dint run to him. I did. I dint care where the rattler went, I went to my Daddy. I cried at him, Daddy. I cried Oh Daddy get up. Oh Daddy, I love ya Daddy. But hit dint do no good. We buried Daddy two days later with the wind howlin down the hollows and Reverent Woodford singin and all of them lookin at me, and I could tell they uz thinkin, Poor child, her Daddy uz a sinner.

Momma kept on keepin on. She could weave. She knew how to shear a sheep and card the wool and spin hit into yarn. Then she sold the weavins to someone who brung them down someplace to the river and sold them. We lived in a little ole shambly place, a shack really, but hit had a good stone fireplace, and there uz always enough pumpkin and sorghum, gravy and onions, cornbread and shucky beans. Most days I watched the least-uns, while Momma worked the loom. She never did mention Daddy and his sin. She dint mention him at all.

And then one night I come home from the woods at night and hit gettin to be real dark cause we had no electrick in them days, not even radios, nothin up in them hills at all. And then I saw the Reverent Woodford in the clearin out back of the shack and hit warnt snakes he was handlin, hit was Momma’s titties. I stayed all night alone in the woods, cryin mostly for my Daddy, and began to thinkin about goin out to the world.

I knew there had to be a world out there, cause I seen hit in the Montgomery Ward catalogs. I couldn’t read the words, but Cousin Frances could. And I near memorized the names of the things you could get out in the world. Dr. Scott’s Electric Hairbrush, good for headache and dandruff. Don’t laugh, boy! And stuff called Mum and Kotex and Listerine and Odorono. Cuticura soap and perfume called Wild Rose and Shandon Bells and Ylang Ylang and Dr. Fuller’s Bust Developer and Food (I sure never did need that stuff). Most of all I wanted a gown called Moonlight Sonata. I remember what hit said in the catalog: “You, winsome and desirable in clouds of rayon net, your tiny waist sashed with whispering rayon taffeta.” For three ninety-eight. Oh, how I wanted to be winsome and desirable. Down there in the world.

I also knew about the world from Uncle Fred that was married to Aunt Mildred. He’d been down to the world. Actually seen hit, lived in hit, and told me all about hit. How people lived in brick houses and had roads with tar on them and stores with gowns in them better than in the Montgomery Ward catalogs and how everybody went to school and workin people owned cars. I made him tell me over an over about the gowns. And the jewlry. And he could really speak, Uncle Fred, so he made me see all the beautiful stuff of the world.

Then, I met Robert. I uz talkin to him a long time, and then he got to be laying with me crost a bed. Not doin nothin. Jest touchin. But we decided to get married. I said, Okay Momma, but I don’t want that Reverent Woodford to do no service, and she said Why, and I said, Because. So we got us a preacher from over the ridge. He come to the house and did a big praying service for us and later we had a big shivaree and then we moved into the hayloft. Robert war a big strong boy, a woodcutter by trade, but he had him a pindling little dick. That uz so sad. Momma gave me a poke o’ wheat to help me have babies, but hit dint do no good. Hit jest warnt to be. Poor Robert was so worried bout the size of his dick, he couldn’t get hit hard. So he moped all the time and drunk a lot.

He got worse when I started goin to the new school. This got to be round the time Roosevelt sent them teachers into the hills and there was a young man from up North, from Pennsylvania, from out in the world. Eli. He was a Jewboy. Like that boy Max comes in the Dirt Bar. Eli come among us and got us to put up the school. Just a plain board buildin with a tin roof and a stove and no electrick. The girls had to go to the outhouse four at a time to keep them boys out of there. But kids come six, eight mile to that school, and even ef I uz too old, I wanted to learn me something about the world, so I went to that young man from up North and I said I wanted to learn how to read and I’d help with the least-uns if he’d teach me. And he said yes.

Well, you couldn’t learn some of them boys nothin with a pistol in yore hands, but he did his best. Eli. The Jewboy. When there got to be snow on the ground, the kids dint come. When the creeks were up, they stayed home too. But Eli taught us, he showed us words, he had us make poetry, he showed us a great big map of the world. And I’d get all het up and go home and tell Robert. And soon he was sure I was layin for Eli, which I warnt. Robert dint believe me and one night he went down and burnt that school to the ground.

So Eli left and I walked around the hills for two days callin his name, trying to get him to stay. Them hills used to be so thick and beautiful. But then the loggin people come and they started cutting down the trees. They rolled them down to the creeks and floated them off to the mills where they were cut into lumber, and soon the hills were naked. But even in the naked hills, Eli warnt to be seen. And I thought: there’s nothin left for me in this valley.

So I went away. I jest left Robert and went to the town, walkin for days, waitin to see the place with the brick houses and the tar streets and the Moonlight Sonata gowns in the store windows that’d make me feel, you know, winsome and desirable. I couldn’t find hit. Cause that place never did exist except in my foolish damned schoolgirl head. But I did find Hazard and got me a job in a tool store, wearing shoes cause the streets was all mud. And I met some other girls in town and we started goin to these barns, jenny barns they called them, where people drank Cream of Kentucky whiskey out of Coca-Cola glasses and there uz gamblin in the back rooms, and I met other girls that worked in these places, that dint just come for the dancin, girls that were stayin there for the winter, followin the carnivals in the summer. The jenny barns was wild, with music playin and men from all over, down from the hills, comin to the towns, like the hills uz emptyin out. Which they was.

And one day the store I worked in closed from the Depression, which was all over the world by then. So I went to work in the jenny barns and I just dint care. The first time I uz scared and started cryin, sure I’d be slain by the Lord for my terrible sin. But I hadn’t et for three days and the Lord dint hear my prayers so I did what I did to live. After the first time, I dint care. Fact is, I liked hit. Those boys was crazy and wild and drunk and lonesome, but they was all better’n poor Robert. And they sure did love my titties. Trouble is, that’s when I started getting large. There was some shacks back in the woods and I’d go there with them, for three dollars apiece, which was good money in them days. I give the man that run the jenny barn a dollar but hit was all right. I dint care long’s I dint get the old rale, or a good dose, and I was lucky, I never did. I specialized in the other thing anyway. I guess after a while, I was knowed all over for hit.

And then one night, who comes in but Eli. My Jewboy. He couldn’t stand what I uz doin, and asked me to come away with him, and so I did. He uz organizin for the National Miners’ Union now, trying to get everybody to band together against the operators in Harlan County. He was a Communist, my Jewboy, and he lived stricter than some Hardshell Baptist. He only et once a day, so he was all skin an bones, jest pathetic, and he went around makin his speeches, usin a bicycle until someone came in from up North with a Ford car. The only place he warnt strict uz in bed. He got to be the hottest man I ever seed in bed. I even got skinny again. And I’m tellin you, you never heard anything like this boy when he was speechifyin. All about how we should own the fruits of our labor and how the bosses was usin our work to make themselves rich while men was dying in the bottom of coal mines and kids warnt learnin how to read an write. When he talked about readin and writing the tears come to his eyes and to tell the truth, they come to my eyes too, and to everybody that could hear his voice.

And soon they was a war right there in Harlan County. My Jewboy brung down a bunch of big writers from the North to see what was happenin and all the men come from around the hills, living in the streets of the town, in the mud, making tents, houses out of Coca-Cola signs, good men, hurt men, men that had families starvin, men that wanted their kids to learn how to read. It was so goddamned excitin, I tell you. They was guns everywhere. Rifles and pistols. And the women were the hardest, the women warnt so beaten down, and we got together and we war making speeches in the square when the sheriff locked us all up. Sixteen women in all. We sat in jail, singin all the songs that was written at the time. And we saw that the companies really did run the sheriff, jest like Eli said, the company men jest walked in and gave the sheriff his orders, we seed it, they brung in gangsters from someplace and made them all deputies. And then they let us out, cause they was so many bad stories in the newspapers, and there was another big meetin.

This time they got my Jewboy. They beat him vicious on the head with blackjacks and I seed them carryin him off and I was screamin at them, cause his face was all blood, and when I screamed they bashed him again and then grabbed me and dragged me off. So they took my Jewboy out to the county line and they dumped him in a ditch. Some of the men found him and got him to a hospital but hit war too damn late. Two days later he died. When someone asked the sheriff why they arrested poor Eli, the sheriff jest smiled and said quote unquote resistin assault. Some joke. They said too that Eli had run away, he escaped and that uz why he war in that ditch, and nobody got locked up for it, even though everybody in the county knew it was murder, plain and simple.

That was hit for me. I left then. Forever. I dint want nothin to do no more with no politics or with them damn hills. I found my way to New Orleans. I had my specialty. I married a man for a while, but nothin come of hit. I made some money in the war. Workin down by the Higgins shipyard. And I thought: I don’t ever want to need nobody ever again. Specially no man. And here I am, boy. You lookin at a free woman. You uz a virgin boy, warnt you? I could tell. Well, it jest got to be time. Get used to hit, boy. You gonna have lots more, all the rest of your days and nights.

Chapter 19

Dixie drove me back to Ellyson Field in her 1950 Plymouth in the gray chilly dawn. We had the windows up and I could smell her perfume. She didn’t say anything. I felt strange. I looked for a woman on a blue bicycle, with a yellow T-shirt and a baseball cap, but she was nowhere in sight. Dixie stopped a hundred feet from the main gate. I opened the door and thanked her for the ride. She looked at me and nodded.

“You’re a nice boy,” she said.

And then pulled away.