Loving Women

Chapter 20

Then suddenly it was winter. The wind came howling down from Canada, and when we woke up the blankets weren’t warm enough and the showers were cold and we couldn’t tell the time of day from the morning light. We closed all windows tightly and changed white hats to watchcaps. The sky at noon was the color of slate, and thousands of gulls came in from the Gulf to huddle close to the earth. The helicopters were grounded. Gigantic gray clouds rose in the sky. And then one afternoon it began to snow.

We did cartwheels in the snow and threw snowballs at one another, while Becket took pictures with a little box Brownie. Liberty was canceled and we were handed shovels and put on work details to clear the streets of the base and the landing strips beyond the hangars. Out at the hangars, shoveling snow with Sal and Max and a dozen others, I saw the pilots up close, smoking, playing gin rummy, posing for photographs. They were all lean men in loose baggy flight suits. Sal pointed out a Marine who had just come back from Korea, where he’d flown 151 helicopter missions, 86 behind enemy lines, picking up the wounded or the dead. When I looked at his eyes they didn’t seem dashing and cocky, the way Clark Gable’s eyes looked in the old movies; they just looked sad and tired.

Most of the pilots wore patches on their flight suits, showing a goggled grasshopper with a rotor blade above its head and a figure eight below it. And as we scraped the snow off the landing strips I realized I was standing on a huge painted figure eight within a painted square. Max explained that this was a basic part of the training routine, the pilots learning to maneuver with precision, to hover, to land right on a mark. They called the helicopters pin-wheels, whirlybirds, or eggbeaters, and they hated flying them because the center of gravity was so low that they turned over too easily. And after flying jets, said Sal, who would want to play with these toys?

We cleaned the snow away and then the wind rose and blew more snow across the strips and covered them again and Max laughed and said, “Well, that’s the Navy.” I saw a Spanish-looking guy in a flight suit, his features clean, with a neat moustache and high cheekbones standing on the runway taking pictures, and he motioned to us to join him. His name was Tony Mercado, a pilot with the Mexican Air Force, taking copter training in the States. He handed me the camera and asked me to photograph him in the falling snow.

It was a Leica, the first real camera I’d ever held. Heavy, solid, somehow mysteriously beautiful and scary. In all the years since, whenever I pick up a new camera in a store, or heft one of my own for the first time after waking in the morning, I remember that snowy day beside the hangars of Ellyson Field. I’d never felt anything like it before: a piece of machinery that made pictures.

Mercado told me what to do and I looked through the viewfinder and saw him posing before the half-open hangar doors, his smile bright, looking dashing, the snow blowing around him. He had me cock the camera again and then posed squatting, coffee cup casually in his hand, and I realized that he looked more like Clark Gable than any of the pilots who had been to the war. He thanked me in an accented voice and strolled away and I wanted to get the camera back from him and take pictures of the windsock flying straight out in the wind and the snow gathering at the base of the palm trees and Red Cannon hurrying over from the administration building with his plastic face all flushed and Sal loping away to the head. But I said nothing. Max leaned on his shovel and said, “You’re a photographer now.” And of course he was right, but I didn’t know it for a long long time.

The next day the snow was gone. The sun burned its way back, high and dim in the clear cold sky, but it wasn’t strong enough to rid us of the bitter cold. Liberty was restored. I wanted to go to town and search for the curly-haired woman, but after the night at the Dirt Bar I had no money, and it was three more days until payday. Still, Dixie Shafer had erased my shameful secret and I felt triumphant and powerful except for the money. Harrelson and Boswell left for Montgomery and the big service for Hank Williams. When they came back two days later, full of details and white lightning, we were all tired of Hank Williams and nobody wanted to hear about it. I walked through the Panhandle afternoons, listening for Bobby Bolden. But all the windows were still closed against the cold. I thought about going up to see him, but I was afraid he’d play some game in front of the other blacks and tell me to get lost. I wouldn’t let him do that.

We worked long days, with the helicopters flying from 0500 until sunset, thirty of them in the air at once, catching up on lost time. Somewhere in those few days I started to know the difference between push-pull rods and irreversibles, swash plates and wobble plates, cuff and trunion assemblies. I wasn’t sure what a gimbal ring was, but when Sal came to get one, he said that for shit sure it wasn’t available at Macy’s.

All Navy nights resembled one another. Broke, confined, we sat around on the bunks and read the newspapers or listened to the radio. We exchanged what was called “the gouge,” another word for lore, or “scuttlebutt,” which was rumor and gossip. I learned how to spit-shine my shoes. My hair grew longer. I pulled another midnight-to-four, learning the password first, and signed the clipboard once more for Red Cannon. I learned that the best place for tailor-made uniforms was Anchor Tailors on South Baylen Street. The manager’s name was Marie. But I didn’t want tailor-mades. I wanted civvies. I wanted to be able to go into town in normal clothes, with some money in my pocket, and find that woman with the curly hair.

But I needed money for clothes and a locker. As an airman apprentice in pay scale E-2, just above the bottom, I would get a check for $80.90 after the taxes were taken out. A fortune. Finally we lined up one morning at 1020 in Hangar Two to get our paychecks. Everybody else got paid, but there was nothing for me. Maher was the duty yeoman and he said he was sorry, that this sometimes happened to new sailors while the paperwork was being sent back and forth to BuPers in Washington. He’d look into it and let me know. Sal, Max and Miles Rayfield offered to loan me some money; I said I’d wait.

I stayed on the base for more than two weeks, waiting for the paycheck. Sal and Max went out most nights. Miles remained on board, but went off most evenings to some destination on the base itself, saying nothing. The image of the woman began to fade. I was sure she was with a guy now, perhaps a husband, some Navy lover. The weather stayed cold, but there was no more snow. I read the art book, my head filling with Rembrandt and Goya, Leonardo and Botticelli. At the Supply Shack, I got better at my work each day, and the mechanics now knew my name. I heard other hillbilly singers on the radio, Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell, and began to know the words. If Bobby Bolden was playing his horn, nobody on the base could hear him except the mess cooks. One chilly night I was in the barracks reading the Pensacola Journal. Miles and Jones were there. A story on page one said that 40,000 American servicemen had deserted since the beginning of the Korean War and 36,000 had been recaptured. That was astonishing. “Who the hell blames them?” Miles said acidly. “What’s that goddamned war about anyway?” Jones bristled, said it wasn’t a war, it was a police action, and Miles said you couldn’t tell that to the dead, and Jones said that if we didn’t fight the Communists in Korea we’d have to fight them in San Diego, and at that, Miles laughed and shook his head. “Jonesie,” he said, “that’s the hoariest cliché of the decade so far.” Jones bristled again, said there’d always be cowards in any war, men who’d rather run away. Miles said: “We’re talking about two complete divisions of deserters, Jonesie. Doesn’t that tell you something? “Yeah,” Jonesie said. “It tells me this country’s getting soft.” And he walked away.

Miles and I were quiet for a while, and then he looked up at me and said, “Do you ever think of doing it?”

“Going over the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” I said, and meant it. “I made a deal. I have to keep up my end, even if I don’t like it.”

He stared at his hands.

“What about you?” I said.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I think about it all the time.”

One frigid afternoon, Miles showed me the base library, up one flight of wooden stairs to room 912, above the post office. “It’s actually not too bad,” he said, in an amazed way. “They’ve got some magazines and a few good books.” He was right. I remember the first time I went up those stairs. A middle-aged yeoman in a pea jacket was sleeping at a desk. He came suddenly awake, blinked at me with the sore eyes of a rummy, saw I was just a kid sailor and went back to sleep. The place was a kind of refuge from the Navy, with five aisles of books, a magazine rack, and a long table where you could write letters or just look out the three screened windows at the base.

I picked up Life magazine. On the cover, a model with blurry features peered through a beaded curtain. I remember that issue so clearly. It was the first Life I’d ever read, and it was full of marvels. I studied an advertisement for Philco television sets, equipped with the Golden Grid Tuner. A woman who looked like Joan Fontaine was turning the knob of a huge set. She was perfectly groomed, wearing earrings and a filmy dress.

We didn’t have TV at home yet, and in our neighborhood none of the women looked like Joan Fontaine. But that winter everybody I knew was buying television sets. They had already begun to change everything, something I noticed the summer before I went away. At night, there were just not as many people on the streets as there used to be. When you looked up, you could see a blue glow in more and more windows. They were in all the bars, too, and men now stood quietly, staring at the black-and-white images, while the bartenders made endless adjustments. I thought that when I sold my first cartoons, I’d get my father a set. Maybe he’d enjoy the Dodger games. The kids could look at cartoons and Westerns. But I just couldn’t picture myself sitting there with them.

I examined the magazine as if it were a papyrus discovered in some pharaoh’s tomb. There seemed to be a woman in every ad: standing cheek to cheek with a guy in the Chlorodent toothpaste ad, holding her head in the Anacin ad, dressed as a bride in the Kingston sewing machine ad, scrubbing the floor in the ad for Flor-Ever vinyl flooring and a smaller shot of a woman with a sheet wrapped around her, shoulders bare, as a nurse noted her weight on a scale. She was selling lemons as a diet aid. She didn’t look fat to me.

In the news part of the magazine, there were photographs of some quintuplets from Argentina and a lot of pictures of Republicans taking over the House of Representatives from the Democrats. Harry Truman was still president, and they showed him sitting with some senator named Johnson, who had big ears and was smoking a cigarette, his hair sleeked back. The pictures made me think of Tony Mercado’s camera, and I tried to imagine the photographers looking through their cameras at these events. How did they know where to go to take pictures? Did someone send them or call them? And did they take the film to a drugstore or develop it in some mysterious way themselves? Another story said that 1952 was the first year since 1882 without a lynching of a Negro in the United States, and that made me think of Bobby Bolden. How would he feel reading this news? Would he feel better? I didn’t think so. If I was colored, I’d want to go out and lynch someone back.

I stopped at a full-page ad for Kotex. There was a woman in a tailored suit the color of oatmeal, with dark brown shoes, reddish gloves, a hat and earrings. In her right hand she was holding a leather-trimmed bag. She touched her throat nervously with her gloved left hand. In the distance, a man in a business suit was waving to her with his hat; he had a briefcase and raincoat under his arm. Behind him was a small two-engine airplane. I wasn’t quite sure how Kotex worked, although I knew it had to do with a woman’s period. The ad didn’t exactly expand my knowledge. “Not A Shadow Of A Doubt With Kotex” said the headline. But the rest of the copy promised Protection, and Absorbency, and a Fresh, Dainty Feeling. What did all of this mean? And what did they mean by “no revealing outline”? Most of all I wondered about the nervous woman in the ad. Since this was a Kotex ad, she must have her period. But was this some secret she was keeping from the guy coming off the plane? If so, why? He looked like a husband, she looked like a wife. But she was wearing gloves, so I couldn’t check for a wedding ring. Was she somebody else’s wife? And had she made a date with this guy, only to discover that she had her period and wouldn’t be able to sleep with him? Life was full of mysteries.

A few pages later, I saw a woman on skis, soaring through the air up in the mountains. She was wearing ski pants and boots but no shirt. “I dreamed I went skiing in my Maidenform Bra …” A blonde. Tinted glasses. Good teeth. I imagined her coming into a small dark room to meet me, the heavy boots making a clumping sound, her tits shoved up by the satiny bra. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, and sat down on the edge of my bed. I put my hand on her back, the flesh soft, and pulled her close. The hard breasts pushed up against my bare chest, the bra making a satiny noise as her tits touched me … Without working at it, I had another hopeless hard-on.

I looked over at the yeoman, who was still asleep. But I tried to distract myself from the loveliest sight on the dreamscape. Through the window, I could see Captain Pritchett and two other officers walking slowly down the paths. The captain was looking at the lawns. They were browned from the snow and the cold. He squatted and ran his hand across the top of the grass, then plunged his fingers into the dirt. He stood up and shook his head sadly, like a man about to cry. I closed Life, and watched Captain Pritchett walk away, his body sagging. At that moment I liked him very much. No matter what else he might be, he was a man who loved something.

Eisenhower was sworn in, but there was still no sign of my paycheck. “Maybe Truman stole it,” Dunbar said. “Put it in a deep freeze. Put a down payment on a vicuña coat.” The Journal said that more than 10,000 people crowded into two inaugural balls, paying $12 apiece, and they were so crowded nobody could dance. Back home, Republicans were a separate nationality. But at least now, for sure, the war would end. Eisenhower had gone to Korea between the election and the inauguration. He was a general. He would end it. One way or another. Maybe it wouldn’t be like the last war. No celebrations, no V-J Day, with everybody running wild in the streets and block parties everywhere in the neighborhood and sailors kissing girls in Times Square. Korea was different. Nobody knew what Korea was about. But at least, if it ended, the men would stop dying, would stop being wounded, would stop being lost behind enemy lines. And that meant that there would be no need to train any more helicopter pilots. The Navy could close Ellyson Field. I could go to sea.

The weather turned warmer, but it was still not the hot weather of the day I arrived. During those weeks, I took seven trips to Mainside. Becket promised to teach me to drive. Most days, Sal and Max came to the Supply Shack, telling me that Dixie Shafer was asking for me at the Dirt Bar. I told them again that I wasn’t going anywhere until I got paid. They offered to try to smuggle her onto the base some night, disguised as a case of pontoons. I donated a pint of blood to the Bloodmobile and later Captain Pritchett sent around a notice congratulating everybody on the eighty percent donation rate, adding up to 478 pints of blood. Walking back from the library one afternoon, I saw Bobby Bolden and nodded. He said hello.

“I miss hearing you,” I said. “Maybe you could play some night at the EM club.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Too many crackers.”

“Ah, they won’t bother you.”

“They won’t serve a black man there. Why should a black man play for them?”

“You’d be playing for us, not for them.” I thought about the lynchings, and masked men from the Ku Klux Klan dragging Negroes out of their homes. “Most of us are from the North.”

“Forget it.”

I wanted to keep talking to him, wanted to get to know him. I thought that maybe Navy small talk was the best way. I gazed off at the helicopters, trying to be casual.

“You give blood yesterday?” I said.

“Are you a fool or what?” he said. “They won’t take our blood.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Wise up, chump. This is the Navy. You can’t integrate blood in the United States Navy. Spose one of them crackers learned he had a black man’s blood in him?”

“What would he care if it saved his life?”

“He’d rather fucking die.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You better learn, chump. This is America. They got laws down here.”

I felt awkward, but also pleased. At least Bolden was talking to me. I mentioned musicians I’d heard on the radio, Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, Roy Eldridge and Milt Jackson. He liked them all, talked about their best work, then said, “You’re pretty hip for an ofay motherfucker.” And laughed. It was as if he’d pinned a medal on my chest. I said I’d like to come visit him and hear him play. He said he’d think about it.

“I’m waiting to get paid,” I said. “If the Navy ever finds the check, maybe we could go out and spend a day at the beach.”

He made a blubbering sound with his lips. “Don’t you understand nothin, man? This is Florida. These beaches are segregated.”

“You mean you can’t go to any beach in Florida?”

“I can swim with the other niggers. That’s all.”

“You won a bunch of medals. Doesn’t that matter?”

“Not a goddamned bit.” He turned his head. “See yuh.”

On the comics page, there was then a beautifully drawn sequence of Buz Sawyer’s dumb brother, Lucky, walking into a Latin American revolution. Crane at his best. One of the Latin officers looked like Mercado, and I wondered if Mercado was learning to fly helicopters to fight in some future revolution. If so, I envied him. At least a revolution would be clear, not some blurry mess like Korea. But if there were a new revolution in Mexico, which side would Mercado be on? He would have to choose. And he would probably choose the side of the people who owned Leicas. Here, we never had to choose. Or so I thought then, at seventeen, and ignorant of most things.

Then one morning, the winter was gone. The sun came closer to the earth. We didn’t need peajackets to go to the chow hall. Windows were opened all over the base. I heard Bobby Bolden playing “It Might As Well Be Spring” and started humming the words. Starry eyed … vaguely discontented … like a nightingale without a song to sing … I was picked for the Mainside run and stood in the back of the truck. Becket was driving and said we had to go to the waterfront first, to pick up a crate. We moved slowly into town through the morning traffic, heading down South Palafox to the piers.

Then, as we passed Trader Jon’s, I saw the woman.

She was walking quickly toward Garden Street, her head down, dressed in dark maroon slacks, penny loafers, and a starched white blouse. Her face was masked with sunglasses, but I knew it was her from the curly hair.

“Hey, miss!” I shouted, as we rolled by.

She looked up, but there was no expression on her face.

“Remember me?” I yelled, pointing at my chest.

She looked up for a moment as Becket drove me away from her. Then she lowered her head and hurried across the street. I waved at her, like a desperate signalman semaphoring for help. At the door of Woolworth’s she looked up again and saw me waving. She paused, waved back and then ducked into the store.

Chapter 21

Segregate: v. 1 To separate or set apart from others or from the main body or group. 2 Isolate. 3 To require, often with force, the separation of a specific racial, religious, or other group from the general body of society; to practice, require, or enforce segregation, esp. racial segregation. Also, maintaining separate facilities for members of different, esp. racially different groups. Segregated education, segregated buses.

Is this country nuts? A guy wins all kinds of medals in Korea and he can’t swim on a beach in Florida? A white draft dodger, a white murderer on parole, the head of the Mafia, a white hooker with the syph — they can all swim on the beach, but Bobby Bolden can’t? What is this all about? How can Eisenhower and these people make all those speeches about freedom and how important it is to fight the godless Communists and then tell Bobby Bolden he can’t swim on a beach with white people? They sure didn’t teach us any of this in school. The amazing thing is that any Negro would ever fight for this country at all. And the white people that pass these laws — what are they afraid of?

The goyim are everybody else in the world who is (are?) not Jewish. I know that from the old rabbi on 14th Street in Brooklyn, that year when I was the Shabbas goy. So I’m one of the goyim and so is Charlie Parker and Eisenhower and William Holden and June Allyson. Sal is always breaking Max’s balls about the power of the goyim, but Max doesn’t seem to mind. Max is the first Jew I ever met that is my own age, but he never talks about some of the things that must drive him crazy. Like Hitler and the concentration camps. It was only eight years ago when all that happened. I mean, back home my father’s friends still sing songs about the Irish Famine, and that was in the 1840s or something. It’s hard to imagine that the thing with the Jews really happened. When I was ten years old and reading Captain America. Hard to believe that people could put other people in ovens and burn them alive or gas them. Not just a couple of people. But millions of them. Just for being a Jew. The newspapers say that six million Jews died. The weird thing is that there are people who still say things like: Hitler didn’t kill enough of them. Boy, there are some sick bastards in this world. I don’t understand how any Jew could believe in God after what happened. Any more than I can believe Bobby Bolden could pledge allegiance to the flag when he can’t sit where he wants in a bus or swim on any beach in the country or eat in any restaurant or go to any school.

I keep hearing the word gone. Over and over. My girl is gone. The guy’s wife is gone. But it isn’t just ordinary people that are gone. It’s everybody. They show up and you get to know them and then they’re gone. Roosevelt is gone. His picture was on the kitchen wall because my mother tore it out of the Daily News magazine. Then he died, and then she died, and after she died, my father took it down. I guess it reminded him of her. Or maybe he never did like Roosevelt. Anyway they’re gone. There was that Henry Wallace, who was vice president and then after the war—1948—he started his own party and ran for president against Truman and Dewey and some guy from the South, the shitkicker that started the Dixiecrats. Everybody was against Wallace. They said he was a Communist, even if he did use to be vice president of the United States, and he’s gone now, too. And so is La Guardia and Pete Reiser and DiMaggio and Dixie Walker. Gone. How does that happen? Why can’t these people just stay there? Why do things always change?

Sometimes I think about America (after looking at Life or The Saturday Evening Post) and it’s like a foreign country. I never went to any of these American things: sock hops, drive-in movies, homecoming games, pajama parties. I might as well be reading National Geographic about Brazil. I never saw a cheerleader with pompons on her ass. I never got laid in a car. I used to look at Archie comics like they were science fiction. Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica, with those oxford shoes and school letters on short-sleeved sweaters: Where did all those kind of people live? Not where I lived. Not even where I live now, at HTU-1 Ellyson Field.

Becket told me that the word Dixie came from New Orleans. The French word for ten was dix. And they had a ten-dollar (or franc?) bill with the word dix written on it and all those crazy men who worked on the Mississippi river would get drunk and say, “Got to get down to New Awlins and get me some of them Dixies.” I wonder if Dixie Shafer knows she’s named after money? I think it would make her happy.

Sal’s greatest ambition when he goes to town: to get screwed, blued, and tattooed.

Words for Jew: kike, yid, hebe. Hitler probably used them all.

Chapter 22

One morning, Maher called me at the Supply Shack and told me my check had finally arrived. All these years later I remember the great bright lightness of the moment, a kind of fierce exuberance, the sense that I’d just been released from jail. Donnie Ray told me to go cash it and take the rest of the day off, since I’d suffered enough for my country. Coming back from the yeoman’s office with the money in my pocket, I ran into Sal.

“For Chrissakes, get decent clothes,” he said. “And we’ll meet you tonight in the Dirt Bar.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

And went back to the barracks with a signed Liberty Pass in my hands and got dressed in a hurry.

All the way into town on the bus, I tried to recover the image of the woman. For three weeks, I’d deliberately shoved her out of my mind; what I couldn’t have, I didn’t want to imagine. Now I wanted her back, the true goal beyond the pursuit of civilian clothes or a cold beer. But as I gazed out at the passing streets, the drowsing bars and forbidding churches, I found the process of recovery harder than it should have been. The woman had become like an out-of-focus snapshot. This alone confused me; how could I have a grand passion for a woman I could barely remember? So I looked for the woman as if seeing her would be the only way I could remember her clearly, or prove that she had existed at all. And I thought that maybe all I wanted was the feeling she aroused in me, and not the woman herself. The words of a song drifted through me: “Falling in love with love, is falling for make believe …”

I saw women of all sizes, shapes and ages, but not the woman of the New Year’s Eve bus. I knew she was in Pensacola; I’d seen her on South Palafox Street, walking into a store. She had waved at me as the truck rolled to the piers. But I started to erode that vision with doubt. Maybe I only thought I’d seen the woman that day. The woman I’d seen wore different clothes, hair tied up in a different way, eyes masked with sunglasses. Maybe my longing had created a mirage, a promise of lush green in a harsh desert. Maybe I’d waved to a total stranger. I wouldn’t know until I saw her. And there was some chance I’d never see her again.

I got off at Garden and Palafox. The sun was high and not very hot and a salty breeze was blowing in from the waterfront. I stared into the window of a men’s store on the ground floor of the Blount Building, across the street from the San Carlos Hotel. The clothes there were too expensive. I looked across the street at the hotel, thinking I’d like to walk around the lobby. Then, like a scene in some old movie, Tony Mercado, the Mexican pilot, came out on the steps. He had a blonde woman with him. He kissed her on the cheek and she disappeared in a taxi. The tall colored doorman in his white uniform said something; Mercado smiled and then another colored man drove up in a shiny blue convertible. He got out and backed up a step. Mercado handed him what must have been a tip, slipped behind the wheel and drove away. It was all done with ease and command and I envied him. I wondered what it would be like to spend a night with a woman in a big hotel. On silk sheets. With drinks in a bucket beside the bed. And enough money to order food brought to the room. Just like in the movies.

“Hey, sailor.”

Two Shore Patrol were standing there, each holding a club, each with a pistol strapped to his hip. One was tall, with square shoulders, dark sideburns. The other was short and compact.

“Let’s see your Liberty Pass, sailor,” the tall one said.

I gave it to him, and he studied it in a suspicious way, making me nervous. I knew what it said. I’d practically memorized it. Armed Forces Liberty Pass. With the name of the service, the date, my name, my service number, the card number, my rate and the name of the organization. Signed by Donnie Ray. I was here legally. But still, the SPs made me nervous. The tall one nodded to the shorter one and then handed me back the pass.

“Just checkin,” he said.

I asked them where I could buy civvies at a decent price and they directed me to Sears, down on South Palafox. I saluted and walked away. When I glanced back, they were strolling into the lobby of the San Carlos. Maybe they had some women stashed there too.

Sears was a long, narrow, badly lit store with signs everywhere advertising bargains. The men’s department was just inside the door. I bought a ghastly green Hawaiian shirt that wasn’t as loud as Sal’s but still made me feel as if I were in Florida. It cost $2.50. A pair of chinos went for six bucks. I told the man at the counter that I wanted to wear them out of the store and he showed me a dressing room. I took off the uniform and folded it neatly. Then, dressed in civvies at last, I brought the uniform back and asked the salesman to wrap it for me. The man nodded silently; his face looked permanently unhappy.

On the way out, I saw an area that displayed art supplies. I went over and looked at the pads, hefted some of the heavy tubes of oil paint, examined various chalks and pencils. I thought that on the long dead days and in the slow evenings I could start to draw again. Maybe I’d buy a sketchbook. Some pencils. I looked for a salesman and my eyes wandered and then, five aisles away, I saw her.

The woman from the bus.

She was behind the counter in the lingerie department. Right there. Across the room. She was wearing a gray Sears jacket over her street clothes and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. It was her all right. I hadn’t imagined her that day. When I rolled past on the truck, she must have been going to work. She was talking to a fat woman in a blue dress. The fat woman had a pair of panties in her hands, and as I drifted closer (my heart beating faster, my face damp), I could see my woman stretch the silken garment at the crotch, explaining its wonders.

I drifted closer, looking blindly at other counters, glancing at her as she waited on the fat woman. When she’s finished and the fat woman’s gone, I thought, I’ll just go over and say hello. Casual. Without showing that I care too much. Suddenly, a black man in his forties came up to me and asked if I worked there. No, I said, I didn’t. Damn, he said, looking frustrated, glancing at a cheap wristwatch. What’s the problem? I said. I got to get me some thread over by that notions countuh, he said. There was a thin pale woman behind the counter. I said, why don’t you just ask that salesgirl? You crazy, man? he said. That woman’s white. I must have looked like some dumb immigrant, just off the boat. The black man explained, No white woman’s ’lowed to wait on no cullid in this town. He walked away, looking for a white man who could wait on him. I thought: Jesus Christ.

I couldn’t wait any longer, and ambled over to the lingerie counter. I went to the right of the fat lady, my head down, stealing glances at the woman in the Sears jacket. A nameplate was pinned above the swell of her breasts. Eden Santana. A name. Her name. The name that would work its way into me for the rest of my life. Eden. Like a promise of paradise. The overhead fluorescent lights made her hair look darker, the highlights tinged with green. She had thick black eyebrows. And that aquiline nose, with a small bump in the middle, was the way I’d remembered it. Her upper lip was thin, but the lower lip was thick and pouty. She smiled at the fat woman as she handed her a bag and change and I saw dimples in her cheeks. In the harsh overhead light, she looked at least twenty-eight. Maybe even thirty. I wasn’t even old enough to drink in New York. And then she touched her face and I saw a wedding band on her left hand. Plain. Gold. And I thought: aw, shit. For a moment, I wanted the fat woman to come back, get involved in some complicated transaction, give me time to slip away.

“Can I help you—?”

It was too late for flight.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m the guy from the bus.”

“The what?”

“Remember? New Year’s Eve? You got off in Palatka.”

She squinted at me, and then smiled. That beautiful smile. “Oh, the bus. And you are the guy, awnt you? Sure enough. I didn’t recognize you in the Harry Truman shirt.”

“Just got it,” I said. “Right here in Sears.”

“And you got a bit more hair, too.”

I kept trying to sort out words in my head, to say things that were quick and witty and what was the word? Charming. And I wanted to do more than make brilliant remarks. For just a second, I wanted to reach over the counter and kiss her hard on the mouth and then lay her among the slips and panties. Just like that. Just do it. And be quick and witty and charming later.

“What can I do for you, child?” she said.

I turned my head. A few counters away, a heavy-set, balding white man was waiting on the Negro. I couldn’t tell this woman, this Eden Santana, that I’d gone on certain evenings to the highway near Ellyson Field hoping to see her pedal by. I couldn’t explain how hard I’d worked to erase her face from my mind. Child. She called me child.

“Well, I uh, well—” Get to it, just get to it. “I was wondering if you wanted to, well, go for a cup of coffee after work? You know, should auld acquaintance be forgot, and all that. Maybe we could even catch a movie at the Rex …”

And thought: Please don’t laugh.

Eden Santana looked at me and smiled in a warm sad way.

“Sure,” she said. “That’d be nice.”

Chapter 23

When she walked out of Sears that evening, the church bells of the entire town were tolling seven and for a long moment I just stood there looking at her. All afternoon I had rehearsed words, actions, scenarios: if she said this, I would say that. I wanted to be with her immediately and wondered what she was doing at precisely this moment or that. But I also was riddled with fear and trembling; I wished for some great sudden disaster, an earthquake or a hurricane, anything that might postpone our appointment.

I had a paper sack in my hand, and inside were pencils, chalks and a sketchbook. I didn’t even remember buying them. The blur was total. But I sat down by the waterfront, made sketches of the blackened stumps of some piers that had burned the year before and threw them away. I counted seagulls. I wandered streets where old Victorian houses were sealed against the day, all of them large and grand and facing the sea. I said her name, over and over again: Eden Santana. Like decades of the Rosary. Eden Santana. Like music. It didn’t seem possible that she was there, in Pensacola, and that she had agreed to meet me after work; at the same time, she filled me with dread. Perhaps she would make fun of me, toy with me, stand me up as her friends watched.

And then, suddenly, she was there, in the fading gray Gulf light. She was smiling at me. And then beside me, holding the strap of her bag with both hands, seeming almost shy. I don’t know what I said to her, the first words, the initial greetings: Hello and how are you? I suppose. But I remember how she looked: about five six, with thin arms and a yellow blouse and legs hidden by slacks. I must have stammered out my name. She must have suggested The Greek’s. I remember looking at our reflections in a window, as we walked to Garden Street. I was taller than she was. She looked beautiful. As we crossed Garden Street, she took my arm. My muscles tensed.

Then we were holding menus and facing each other in a booth along the wall in a bright side room of The Greek’s. A dumpy waitress waited with her pencil poised. I said, You must be hungry, and Eden said, Damn sure. I read the menu from right to left, from prices to food, and decided on a hamburger. Eden said she’d have a bacon-and-tomato sandwich and a Coke, and the dumpy woman wrote down the order and went away. Eden Santana looked at me and smiled.

“Dutch treat, okay?” she said. “You can’t be makin’ all that much in the Navy.”

“No, no,” I said. “I got paid today. It’s on me.” I smiled. “I mean, I asked you.”

I glanced away from her, trying to look casual. The two Shore Patrol men sat together on stools at the counter. A guy in a Jax beer jacket was two stools away from them. Four teenagers on a double date were drinking ice-cream sodas in a booth. Apart from them, The Greek’s was empty.

“They’ll go broke in here if this is all they get for customers,” Eden said, looking around.

“Everybody’s probably waiting to get paid,” I said.

She fumbled in her purse, took out the Luckies. She pulled a match from one of those “Draw Me” packs of book matches. I took it from her, struck the match. She leaned in and sucked on the flame.

“I thought I’d never find you,” I said. Like that. Blurting out some of the words I’d rehearsed all afternoon.

She exhaled, then smiled. “You don’t even know me, child.”

“I know I saw you on that bus and I know you were beautiful and I know I wanted to see you again,” I said. “I know how bad I felt when I woke up and you were gone.”

I couldn’t look directly at her after saying the words, afraid she would laugh. She didn’t. “Had to get off,” she said in a flat voice. “I — well, I wasn’t feelin’ too good.” Then I looked up. Her color deepened and she opened her mouth as if to say something else, then bit her lower lip.

“You should’ve woke me up,” I said. “I’d’ve stayed with you. I’d’ve gotten off the bus if you needed me.”

She looked at me in an amazed way. “You know, I think you just might’ve done that.”

The food came and she asked me what base I was at and I told her and she said that she lived out past there a few miles, out past Ellyson Field, you know, over the bridge, by the bayou. She asked me why I joined the Navy and I said, Oh, you know, to see the world. So you could have a girl in every port? No, I really wanted to see what was out here. There’s people out here’d like to see what you saw every day. Brooklyn? Sure, New York, all those buildings, Broadway. She ate quickly, but in a dainty way, cutting up the sandwich with knife and fork and using the fork to pick up the sections. And she asked me questions: Where was I from and did I have a girl and how many were in my family and what did I do in the Navy and what did I want to do with my life. I’ve heard these same questions from many women since then, the diligent and wary assembling of a profile; but Eden Santana was the first to ask me such things. She said all this in her low voice with its hoarse burr, eating as I was talking, never speaking with food in her mouth. She kept her left hand in her lap.

And at her urging, I talked too. Didn’t talk, rolled, great tides of nouns and verbs flowing out of me, in combinations that surprised me, phrases I hadn’t rehearsed in my wandering afternoon. I tried to explain about Brooklyn, how I loved it and missed it and sometimes longed for it but hated it too, hated the stupidity of some of the people, the insistence on conformity, the worship of the ordinary, the surrender of themselves to the Church: telling the truth because if I tried to fake it, I’d never be able to remember the lies later. I told about Prospect Park and the Dodgers and my father (but left out my mother’s long and painful dying); asked her if she’d ever heard of Charlie Parker and when she hadn’t, I said I’d try to get her one of his records and then talked about Hank Williams as if I’d grown up listening to him. No, I told her, I didn’t have a girl. Well, I had one, I said, but that was before I went in the Navy, that was long ago, that was last summer, and besides, she’s gone. And then (quickly, smiling, tentative) said I wanted to be an artist. Really? Yeah, when I get out. Why wait? Well, I didn’t want to be an artist, I wanted to write and draw a comic strip, be a comic-strip artist, telling stories and drawing pictures; I wanted to live in Paris or Rome or somewhere like that, using all those foreign places as backgrounds to the story. Oh, like Terry and the Pirates? Yeah, exactly. Maybe you can make me into the Dragon Lady. I was thinking exactly that. You’re lyin, now, child. Telling all this, I hoped she wouldn’t laugh.

She didn’t laugh. She looked at me, her brow furrowed, as I talked, saying things that made sense (and knowing Terry and the Pirates, knowing the Dragon Lady) and she seemed to be thinking: You’re a strange young man.

“Do you draw real people too?” she said.

“Sure.”

“I mean, could you draw, say, that guy in the Jax Beer shirt?”

“I could try.”

I took out the sketchbook and the pencils, and my hands went damp with nerves. Nobody’d ever asked me before to perform with a pencil (and surely this was a performance); I felt the way I used to feel when my mother was alive and we’d go visiting on Sundays and all the cousins would be called to the living room and each of us would be forced to sing. I was always afraid that if I forgot the words — to “Danny Boy” or “The Green Glens of Antrim” or that other cherished Irish tune, “The Marine Corps Hymn”—I would fail my mother in some terrible, final way or give my father the satisfaction of calling me stupid. I’d talked on and on about being an artist; if my hand went dead with clumsiness, if I botched the drawing, she would think I was just another talker. And maybe that’s why she asked: to give me a test, to see if what I said could be matched by what I did. So I had no choice. I looked at the man in the Jax Beer shirt and started to draw. The bulky shape of his body. The pouchy face. Trying to imagine how Caniff would draw him. The first few marks were gray and tentative and then I started drawing with a heavier line, smashing in great patches of black for shadows, seeing the man come off the page, working very fast, adding details (an ear, the hair in the nostrils) and then, at the end, lettering the words Jax Beer in a more delicate way across his back. When I was finished, I handed her the sketchbook.

“Now that is damn good, child,” Eden said. “You really do have some talent. I mean, you have a lot of talent.”

I mumbled something and she touched my hand.

“You’re blushing,” she said.

“Well, it’s, uh—”

“I hope I didn’t make you feel embarrassed.”

“Nah,” I said. “It’s just, you know … drawing is something I usually do alone. It’s funny, doing it in front of somebody.”

“Well, you did it,” she said, and looked again at the drawing and then at the man in the Jax Beer shirt.

“Now you’ve got to sign it,” she said. “And put the date.”

I signed it and tore it out of the sketchbook and handed it to her: gift, souvenir, elaborate hello: she rolled it and slipped it into her purse. “Someday, when you’re rich and famous,” she said, “that’ll be worth a lot of money. I can always say I knew you when.”

That chilled me. Was she making fun? Or was such a thing really possible? The waitress brought two coffees and cleared away the plates. Eden Santana rested her chin on the heel of her hand and stared at me for a long moment.

“Why’d you really ask me to come here?” she said.

“Because you’re so damned beautiful,” I said, then leaned forward to sip my coffee. She kept staring at me.

“You’re serious, awn’t you, child?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not some damn line.”

“No.”

She took out the Luckies, fumbled with the matches. I took them from her again and struck a match for her. As she inhaled, I examined the cover: Draw Me, it said. I could draw this woman on the matchbook with my left hand. Maybe that’s what I should do, send it in, see if I could win the free correspondence course. Didn’t Roy Crane learn from a correspondence course? But wait: I was in the Navy. Would they send the lessons to me here? And where would I work at the drawings? All this in a fraction of a second, and then I looked up at her. Something had changed in her face: she was more open, somehow younger, not quite as sure of herself, giving up some of her command.

“I haven’t felt beautiful in a long, long time,” she said.

“That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Come on — all you have to do is look in the mirror.”

She turned away and watched two sailors in civvies come in the door as the Shore Patrolmen went out. She was blushing again. Then she poked at her coffee with a spoon and took a drag from the cigarette.

“Well, I guess we better go down to that movie,” she said. And I noticed that she wasn’t wearing the wedding ring.

The movie was Seminole with Rock Hudson, all about a brave white man building a farm out in the wilds of Florida, until the Seminole War began and everything went to pot. I think Rock was a West Point graduate too, which made him an officer and made me root for the Indians. But in truth, I wasn’t paying much attention and had trouble following the story. We sat downstairs with a bag of popcorn she insisted on buying. When we finished the popcorn, she handed me a napkin and I wiped my fingers, and sat there, with my hands loose on my knees. And then when some Indians came crashing through a door to slaughter some white woman, she grabbed my hand and held it for the rest of the movie.

Her nails were short and the skin on her fingers was coarse. But there was a damp soft center in her palm and she wrapped her hand around my thumb, holding it snug in the damp core. After a while, she leaned her head against my shoulder and her hair smelled clean and there was a faint flowery odor to her too, soap or perfume, and I wondered what it would be like to kiss her neck and her back, and then I felt her breast against my arm, firm, slippery under the blouse from the silky material of a bra. Was the bra white or black? Did the straps leave marks in her skin? My cock was hard for most of the movie. But I felt something else, sitting there with Eden Santana: it was if we had known each other for a very long time.

Then the movie ended and the lights came on.

“Those poor damned Seminoles,” she said, separating herself from me, smoothing her hair. “All they ever did was let escaped slaves come to Florida to be free and the damned white man came down to get ’em and killed everything in sight.”

“I didn’t know that’s what happened.”

“Sure,” she said. “Read the history, child.”

Then I looked toward the exit and saw Turner leaving. He was in a sports shirt. Beside him was another sailor, also in sports shirt and slacks. Red Cannon.

“You okay?” she said.

“Uh, yeah. There’s a sailor there, you see him, going out? He’s from my base. A real jerk, name of Red Cannon. Let’s wait a minute, till he goes.”

She looked at me in a puzzled way. “You afraid of that man?”

“No. I just don’t want a hassle.”

We waited a bit and then went out. She took my hand and held it, and then we were in the lobby. Outside, standing on the corner, were Turner and Cannon. I hesitated for a moment, thinking: Go back inside, go to the john, let them wander away, avoid seeing them, keep them from seeing you with this woman and then, afraid that Eden would think I was a coward went on out. They turned to look at us.

“Hey, sailor,” Turner said, with a big grin. “See you settled in.”

“How are you, Jack?” I said. I didn’t introduce Eden Santana. I looked at Cannon, and nodded a hello. His eyes were slushy again. “I’ll call you next time I’m at Mainside,” I said to Turner. “Or if you get out to Ellyson, come round to the Supply Shack.”

I started to leave, and Cannon said: “Guess they don’t teach no manners in New York.”

I stopped and looked at him. His eyes were without emotion, staring at me, challenging me, judging me too, judging the whole North, coming on with some smirking kind of southern superiority that I didn’t understand. I didn’t care what Cannon thought, but I wanted Turner’s good opinion.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “This is my friend, Eden. Eden, this is Jack Turner. Wendell Cannon. Both sailors.”

She shook their hands in a formal way and there was a lot of pleased-to-meet-you and a knowing, admiring glance from Turner to me that said: You’re doin’ okay, sailor …

“Didn’t I see you over at the San Carlos bar last week?” Cannon said to Eden. “With that Mexican flyboy?”

“Not me, mister,” Eden said, and tugged my hand and started away.

“I could swear it was you,” Cannon said. “You got a twin sister?”

She didn’t answer. She led the way to the corner and turned left on Garden Street, away from the lights of Palafox. There were a few blocks of shops and then houses with white porches and swings and she was still walking, still holding my hand, silent until they were far behind us.

“That son of a bitch,” she said after a while.

“Now you know why I didn’t want to see him,” I said.

“With his plastic face and his dead eyes.”

“It ain’t his eyes that’re dead. It’s his heart.”

“Not dead enough,” she said.

We slowed and there was a little park, dark and deserted, with streetlights burning off in the distance through the trees. We sat on a bench. She smoked a cigarette, breathing hard. Saying nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For you having to hear that crap about the bar at the San Carlos.”

“It wasn’t crap. I was there.”

“With Tony Mercado?”

“Yes.”

She flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the darkness, where it glowed for a moment and then died. I looked at her, feeling her sudden bitterness and regret rising like an odor, and saw that her eyes were filling with tears. I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her to me, trying to comfort her. Or trying to comfort myself, holding her to me, to fend off the feeling that she was going away from me without ever having arrived. She pulled away.

“Men,” she said. The word hung in the dark air. I remember seeing myself suddenly like a character in a comic strip. A thought balloon hovered over my head as I sat on a bench beside a woman who was plunged into despair. Inside the balloon were words: “What does she mean by that? Men. Did she sleep with Mercado, the way that blonde obviously did this afternoon? Did she do it for money? Or does she love Mercado? And if she does love Mercado, what does that do to me? How could I compete with him? His looks, his skills, his officer’s bars, his age, his money? His Leica.” Men.

“Well, I’d better go get my bike,” she said.

The balloon dissolved.

“You’re gonna pedal all the way home?”

“No, I take the bus to Ellyson Field, and bicycle the rest of the way.”

She was up now, and I was walking beside her, back to Garden Street. For more than three hours she had been sweet, warm, intimate; she made me try to define myself and my life; she took a drawing that I’d made and rolled it up and put it in her purse; she held my hand in the dark. Now she was going away.

“You want to talk about this?” I said.

“No.”

Then she turned and looked at me. “Hey, listen, child. This’s got nothing to do with you. You’re nice. It’s not you, if that’s what you’re thinkin.”

“But I want to see you again.”

We were crossing the street, going toward Sears.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

“I do.”

“You’re eighteen years old, child. I’m thirty-one.”

“I don’t care.”

“I got two kids.”

“So what?”

“With you, I’m just rockin the cradle.”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned into an alley beside the Sears store and unlocked her bicycle.

“I want to draw you,” I said.

“There must be hundreds of girls your age, you could draw them,” she said, wheeling the bike out of the alley. “That’s what you need. Not an old beat-up lady like me.”

I put my hand around her waist and held her close and kissed her hard on the mouth. She didn’t move. I touched the side of her face and then she shuddered and let the bicycle fall against the wall and she put her hands behind my neck and shoved her belly against mine.

“You silly damn boy,” she said.

Chapter 24

I sit here in the car, the engine running, the radio silent. I am parked in an abandoned gas station, the pumps hauled away, a CLOSED sign hanging at an odd angle in the window. Down the wide street to the right is the entrance to Ellyson Field. Once this morning, I drove slowly along the familiar road and even more slowly back, but when I started for the motel, I couldn’t go on. I pulled over, to pause on the broken concrete slabs that once were a wilderness of palmetto weeds and scrub and seem certain to be so again. Billy’s old bar is gone. The locker club is gone. And so too is the airfield. The place is an industrial park now, and there is a school for truckdrivers out on the landing strips. I drove in and saw weeds breaking through the cracks in the tarmac. There was stunted summer-baked grass where the barracks once stood and the mess hall has been gutted and converted to a warehouse. The sky is empty and silent.

And I remember waking the day after my first evening with Eden Santana, hurrying into the gray mess-hall morning, wanting to tell everybody about her. There have been many women since then, but none who made me feel that way, made me want to trumpet the news of their amazing existence. I remember that as a Tuesday morning. She had agreed to see me again on Saturday night: a parenthesis in time, but a stretch of almost endless hours if you were not yet eighteen.

In the chow hall, I sat with Miles Rayfield. I’m sure we were both eating Rice Krispies because just as surely the hot dish was creamed chipped beef on toast, popularly known as SOS, or shit on a shingle. Sure, because I remember him turning to me and saying Snap, Krackle, Pop, you goddamned swabby reprobate. And then he went back to reading a letter. He said it was from his wife. I must have looked surprised (he’d never mentioned her existence), because he chattered away almost desperately about how women never knew what they wanted and his woman knew less than all the others. Now she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to move to Hollywood. She had given up ceramics and was studying Stanislavski from a book. She wanted to meet James Dean. She wanted to work with Kazan. Miles just shook his head. But when I suggested that he have her move to Pensacola, where they could get an apartment and he would pick up extra money from the Navy — they called it comrats — he just shook his head again and said, Ah, well … And mumbled about the terrors of taking a pretty woman to a Navy town. Then he said, Hollywood. Hissed it: Hollywood.

After a while, they all came drifting in: Max and Sal, Waleski and Maher, Harrelson and Boswell and the others, hung over, noisy, laughing. Max came over and told me they were going to the Baptist church on Friday night, to investigate ritual murders for the Anti-Defamation League, and Miles laughed, and Sal said that the two of us had to go with them, to protect Max from the insane Baptists and sinister Masons who infested the place. Miles just smiled and nodded until they moved on to another table, joking and grab-assing.

As always, Miles was holding a Pall Mall with his wrist bent, pressing the butt to his mouth in an almost dainty way. That didn’t matter much to me; Miles was Miles. I wanted to talk to him about Eden Santana, ask him whether I should try hard to find out if she was really married, if she really had two kids, and where the kids were. Or should I ignore all that? Should I press her to find out what happened in the San Carlos bar with Mercado? Was it wrong to feel jealous one minute, elated the next? Miles was twenty-three. He would know about such matters. But I didn’t say anything at all because I realized that I didn’t really know him. I was afraid he would use all those words of his, his scorn and contempt, to make fun of me. He was probably my friend, but I wasn’t really sure. I wouldn’t know until we’d been in some trouble together. I didn’t know yet if any of them were my friends.

Then Harrelson came down the aisle behind Miles. He was holding a coffee cup. He ran a finger across the back of Miles’s neck and swiveled his hips.

“Morning, Milesetta,” he said.

“Fuck you, redneck,” Miles snapped.

Harrelson walked on, as if he hadn’t heard Miles reply, and wiggled his ass again before sitting down. I looked at Miles and thought: If I were truly Miles’s friend, I’d smack Harrelson in the mouth. The stupid son of a bitch. But I said nothing.

“That redneck swine,” Miles said. A vein throbbed in his temple. He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

“Sticks and stones, and all that,” I said. “Don’t waste your energy.”

“I know, I know,” he said. But when I looked at him again, there were tears in his eyes behind the thick glasses.

“I’ve got work to do,” he said, and stood up abruptly, grabbed his tray and hurried out.

The morning seemed endless. The weather was warm, the hangars heavy with traffic. I handed out engine parts, filled in forms, entered requisition slips in logs. Harrelson hurried around, looking busy, whistling Hank Williams tunes. In front of me, Miles sat at his desk, typing grimly, speaking quickly on the phone, doodling with a thick black Ebony pencil. Late in the morning, he was sent on a run to Mainside. I got up and stretched and had started for the coffee pot when I glanced at Miles’s doodle. He had made a beautiful drawing of Becket. I called Becket over and showed it to him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Becket said. “We got us an artist here.” He wanted to take the drawing, but I said maybe he should wait and ask Miles and he said, Yeah, sure, of course, you’re right, Miles is sensitive about some things. He laughed.

“Too many things sometimes,” Becket said. “I wonder about him.”

Jonesie came over and said he thought my shoes looked better. The newspaper arrived and on the front page Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, a guy named Dulles, said we wanted peace but didn’t want to be encircled by the Russians and their allies. The big problem, Dulles said, was in Asia, where the Communists were trying to take over Indochina. I wasn’t even sure where Indochina was. The newspaper (and Dulles) said that the Communists had pinned down the French in Indochina and pinned down the United States in Korea, and they’d managed all this without losing even a single Russian soldier. He didn’t say what we should do about it, but his speech didn’t sound like the world was about to turn wonderful.

Just before lunch, I looked up from the paper and saw Mercado at the counter. I went over to wait on him. He smiled. My stomach flopped over. He was so fucking handsome I couldn’t believe Eden would choose me over him.

“Hey, how are you doing, fella?” he said.

“Just great,” I said.

He needed a swash plate and had the forms all filled out, neatly hand-lettered. I went to get the part and saw Becket again. He shook his head and said, “You know something? I’m fum New Awlins, but if I hear ‘Jambalaya’ one more time, I’m gonna throw something.” I came back to the counter. Mercado was reading the newspaper.

“Where you from anyway, Lieutenant?” I said, knowing the answer, but wondering what he’d say.

“Mexico City,” he said. “You ever been there?”

“Nah, this is the farthest south I’ve ever been. I’m from New York.”

“Ah, New York. I love New York. Well, if you’re from New York, you will love Mexico.” He pronounced it May-hee-koe. “It’s a beautiful city with many tall buildings, you know, the skyscrapers. Well, the truth is, not as tall as New York, not as many people. We have beautiful mountains all around the city, with snow on the top, volcanoes, and many beautiful women, and it’s like spring all year. You should come. You look me up and I show you around.”

“Sounds great.”

He signed for the swash plate. “I mean it. You come to Mexico, you look for me.”

He left and I thought: This is probably an okay guy. Open, decent, free of all the officer bullshit you get with the Americans. So why did the sight of him mess me up? I knew why. I’d seen him come out of the San Carlos with a blonde; but I really wanted to know what he’d done there with Eden Santana. I tried not to think about it, pushed back the details that ran through my mind, thinking: Forget it, you’ll go nuts. Two mechanics came in and asked for tools and bolts, and I went to get them. Isn’t Santana a Latin name? I thought. Yes, it was, of course it was. So maybe she was Latin, too. Even with that slurred southern accent. Maybe that was what would give him an edge over me. That and his age and his money and his looks. Maybe she loved him and he didn’t love her back. Yeah: I would see her Saturday. But who would she see tonight? Or tomorrow night? Or the night after that? Maybe he would offer to take her to Mexico with him. May-hee-koe. The country where all those American outlaws went, racing across the Rio Grande to freedom, a hundred yards ahead of the sheriff’s posse. Maybe Mercado was going to take her there. And here he was, only a few minutes ago, telling me to visit him. In a city where it was always spring and where there were many beautiful women. Mexico.

“Hey, stargazer.”

I looked around and saw Donnie Ray. I handed the supplies to the mechanics. The men signed their requisition forms and left.

“You look like you just left earth,” Donnie Ray said.

“Musta been the chow working on me,” I said.

Donnie Ray smiled and tapped the desk softly. “Listen, when Rayfield gets back from Mainside, grab some swabs and give the deck a good cleanin. It’s Miles’s turn. And yours.”

“Sure.”

Just after four, Miles and I went into the head and filled some large iron-wheeled pails in the sink. We poured in soap and extra pine scent. Each pail had a roller attached to the top. We wheeled the pails the length of the storeroom, to start at the counter and work our way back to the head. Everybody was gone now except Jonesie, who was the duty storekeeper, there for emergencies. I soaked my mop in the soapy water, then pulled it through the rollers until it was flat. Miles was in the next aisle, doing the same thing.

“Uck,” he said. “Filthy. Disgusting. Just the feel of this slimy thing in your hands. A billion microbes per ounce. Cholera. Polio.”

“All you have to do with it is wash the floor, Miles,” I said. “You don’t have to fuck it.”

“I know, but Jesus Christ …”

I mopped in wide broad strokes, covering the floor of my aisle in one stroke. I remember actually liking this job. It was dumb and simple, but it made me feel like a sailor. Miles was grumbling and I peered through the shelving between us and understood: He couldn’t move his body with any grace. None at all. He had his feet together, and was pushing the mop at the floor in small stabbing strokes, whimpering with each push. The mop looked oddly obscene in his hands.

“Miles,” I said, peering past a tray of ballpeen hammers, “you’re doing it wrong.”

“There’s no way to do this right!”

I leaned my mop against the shelves and came around to Miles’s side. “Here, watch,” I said, taking his mop. I didn’t know much about anything, but I certainly knew how to mop a floor. “First thing you do, spread your legs.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Don’t be a wiseass. Spread your legs and plant them, see? Like a baseball player at bat. Then—”

“I hate baseball.”

I paused. “You hate baseball?” I was amazed. “How could anybody hate baseball?”

“Bunch of grown men standing around in knickers trying to hit a little white ball with a stick.”

Then I understood. “You never played ball when you were a kid, did you?”

Miles assumed the batter’s stance, then grabbed the mop and started swabbing the deck.

“You never played baseball.”

“Fuck off.”

“You must be some kind of a Communist, Miles. A secret agent.”

He looked at me in a timid way. “So I never played baseball. So what?”

“Miles, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

He started to get into the rhythm of the mopping. I went back to my aisle, swabbing in broad quick steps. Then Miles said through the shelving: “Baseball isn’t everything, you know!”

“No, and neither is air. But you need it to live, man.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, learn about baseball, and learn to swab the decks,” I said. “Then you can explain it all to your wife. When you move to Hollywood …”

He laughed. “You’ve got a fresh mouth on you, boy.”

I swung the mop almost fiercely now, the moves punctuated by Miles grunting in the next aisle. A screen door slammed. I turned and saw Becket.

“Hey, Miles” he said. “That picture of me. Can I have it? I’d like to send—”

“What picture of you?” Miles said.

I glanced at his desk. It was bare.

“The picture you drew this morning. I saw it on your desk.”

“Not me,” Miles said. “I didn’t draw any picture of you.”

He was lying. Flat out lying. I’d seen the drawing. So had Becket. A good drawing. A beautiful drawing.

“Well, then, who—”

“Maybe someone was visiting,” Miles said. “It wasn’t me.”

Chapter 25

I stayed on the base for the rest of the week, reading books and magazines, saving my money for Saturday night and Eden Santana. One evening after dinner I went up to the barracks where the blacks lived, looking for Bobby Bolden. An older messcook met me at the door, blocking my way, and told me that Bobby wasn’t there. He looked at me as if I were a cop. “Okay,” I said, “just tell him Devlin, from the Supply Shack, came around to talk.” The man nodded in a way that might have been saying: Don’t bother. I went away, thinking: What’s with these goddamned Negroes anyway? Most evenings, I dozed. I wished I had a radio. I thought about New York. And on another evening, Red Cannon caught me asleep on my bunk with my shoes on. He smacked me on the soles with the club.

“Listen, shitbird,” he said, “what makes you think you can sleep wearing shoes on that fartsack?”

“They’re clean, sir.”

“They’re clean? You walkin around in shit all day, on dirt, on gas oline, you say they’re clean?”

I sat up and looked at my shoes. Slowly and deliberately.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

Cannon placed a hand on the overhead rack and leaned close to me. An odor of whiskey seeped from his body, though his breath smelled of toothpaste.

“What’d you say, boy?” he whispered.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ sir,” I said, standing now and looking him directly in the eyes.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Cannon said, his voice rising. “Maybe that fine dark pussy in town’s rottin your brain, boy.”

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ’, sir. I didn’t mention women.”

“You got yo’sef a mouth on you, boy.”

I was taller than Red Cannon by a couple of inches, but he looked like a puncher. So I turned sideways to him, ready to block anything he threw at me. Or try to. But I knew now I couldn’t back away from him. It was too late. The barracks were empty and this was between us. Just us. Without witnesses. If he tried to hit me, I’d hit him back. I must have wanted him to try. Just to get it over with.

“Tell me what you plan to do about it, sir,” I said. “Have me executed, sir? Call a General Court Martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, sir? For saying ‘Jesus Christ’ on my own time, and placing the heel of my shoe on a U.S. Navy fartsack? Sir?”

That was it. A direct challenge. And Cannon knew it. I pulled my mouth tight over my teeth in a tough guy’s mask, but my heart was pounding and I felt trapped in the old cycle. Challenge and reply, hurt, then retaliate. Right off the streets of Brooklyn. I didn’t like it back there either. But it was the way you lived: If you’re pushed, push back. That was the code. If you’re hurt, hurt back. When you’re leaned on, lean back, and I’d just leaned back.

Cannon glared at me. “Get that fartsack washed tonight, boy.” He stepped back. “And remember, I’ll be watchin you.”

With that he turned on his heel and walked out of the barracks. When the screen door slammed behind him, I exhaled loudly. My heart kept fluttering for a long time after that.

Then I saw Miles coming around from the other side of the row of lockers. He’d obviously been there all along. His face was beaming.

“Magnificent!” he said. “Glorious!”

He came forward as if to embrace me, then turned and grabbed a bunk and shook it.

“You faced down Red Cannon!” he said. “The jackass champion of the world!”

“Hey, I—”

“I’m going to call the Pensacola Journal. This should be on page one.”

“Come on—”

“Let’s get some tea at the gedunk.”

On Thursday night, I was back at the dumpster. But I didn’t really mind. If Red Cannon wanted to be the King of Chickenshit, I wasn’t going to let him know he got to me. Whatever chickenshit he threw at me, I would take; it was heavy shit that I wouldn’t. Besides, Donnie Ray let the guys on twelve-to-fours have the afternoon off the next day; so it all evened up in the end. Donnie Ray didn’t like Red Cannon any more than the rest of us did. Now I see myself standing out there under the stars, thinking about Eden Santana, and I want to hug that boy I used to be. He was nervous all week, but at the dumpster he couldn’t drive her out of his mind by reading a book. So he thought all the worst things: that maybe she wouldn’t show up or maybe she was just playing some joke or maybe she was going to meet him while holding hands with her husband, if she had a husband, or with her kids, if she really had those kids. I let all these maybes flower in my imagination, like a baseball fan trying to imagine some disastrous ninth inning or a kid rolling off a cliff.

The problem was simple; I didn’t know very much about her. Sitting with her in The Greek’s, I’d done most of the talking. She’d asked all the questions and I’d tried to answer, tried to sound older than I was, a more experienced man, a man of the world. But while I was answering her questions, she wasn’t telling me anything. Sure, I knew she worked at Sears, but I didn’t know where she lived, and I didn’t know where she came from. I didn’t know why she’d ended up on a Greyhound bus on a New Year’s Eve either, and most of all, I didn’t know why she’d agreed to see me this Saturday night. I was afraid to know. She was beautiful, as beautiful as any woman I’d ever seen. But because she was beautiful, I was scared. She could have all those other guys, veterans, guys with cars and money to spend, officers. Mercado. That was why I couldn’t tell anyone about her. Suppose I told them I had a date with this woman from Sears? The next thing I knew, Max and Sal and the others would probably go to Sears and find her and tell her I had the clap or something. Or they’d wait across the street when I showed up for my big date and if she didn’t come to meet me, they’d see me standing there like a goddamned fool, and I’d never hear the end of it. It would be back to the Dirt Bar and Dixie’s immensities. So I said nothing. The eerie thing was that after Mercado, only one other man on the base had seen her. And that was Red Cannon. Jesus Christ.

On Friday, the mail arrived just before noon and there was a pale-blue letter for me. My name, rank, serial number and address were written in the sharp Palmer method script the nuns taught all their young ladies. The serifs of the Rs and Ms were hooked and barbed like thorns protecting roses. Donnie Ray gave me my afternoon off and I went over to the barracks after lunch and took off my shoes and lay down on the bunk to read the letter. A few guys came in and out at the tail end of lunch, slamming locker doors. I read:

I lay back on the bunk and closed my eyes and for the first time in weeks, I was back in Brooklyn. I saw myself on a summer evening leaving the tenement on Seventh Avenue to walk to Maureen’s house on the far side of the hill. I walked past the red brick hulk of The Factory, where my father worked, and then past the bar Maureen’s father owned. I crossed the avenue at 14th Street and walked under the marquee of the Minerva (where Drums was always playing on a double bill with Four Feathers) and up along the brick ramparts of the 14th Regiment Armory and the synagogue on the other side of the street (where I’d served as the Shabbas goy one year). I passed the Syrian grocery store and walked under the trees along the street that ended at the park. I stopped there, dazed by the lights of the Sanders movie house, the crowded bars of Bartel Pritchard Square, the clanging of the trolley cars, the shouts of the men selling the News and Mirror, two cents each, and looked at all the crowded benches along the side of the park and felt the arctic blast of the air conditioning from the movie house, the coldest in all the world. The sight of this place always gave me a thrill.

For an hour, I’d stand there with my friends, joking, stalling, shadowboxing, hanging out. And then I’d move off, walking more quickly down the parkside to the other end of The Neighborhood (a separate neighborhood, really), where the houses were solid and safe and there were no tenements to block the sky or the breeze or change the light on summer afternoons. I went there in the uniform of Seventh Avenue, where I came from: pegged pants and thick-soled Flagg Bros, shoes. The way I dressed had nothing to do with Maureen’s neighborhood, its trimmed gardens and fancy curtains and polished cars parked in driveways. I certainly wasn’t one of them. Her family made that clear the first time they saw me. Her mother looked at my clothes, and retreated upstairs. And her father’s face said the rest: stony, blue-eyed, deeply lined, no humor in the eyes, no understanding, no passion. Only suspicion and contempt. It was the face of a man who might have worked for the English in Dublin, one of the people my mother used to call the Castle Irish. That first night, he studied me like a judge, knowing from my clothes and my posture that I came from the poor Irish of Seventh Avenue. On all later nights I would go up there to see his daughter with anger as strong in my heart as love.

And so the boy I was then, dozing in the Pensacola afternoon, her letter in hand, knew he would probably never take that long summer walk again. Maureen had told him in this letter one more time: What she felt for him was not what he felt for her.

And he thought: Well, the hell with it and the hell with you. Until your goddamned letter arrived, I hadn’t even thought of you, girl, for a couple of weeks. There’s a woman here named Eden Santana. I mean a real woman. More beautiful than you. So to hell with you, with your ignorant writing and your rotten spelling and your stupid grammatical mistakes. I don’t want to hear any gossip about the neighborhood from you anymore. Or this crap about friendship. I was in love with you. I didn’t want to be your goddamned friend. I have friends. I even have friends here, guys you’ll never know. I wanted to love you and for you to love me back … And then thought: Okay, good-bye, so long. See you, girl. Someday you’ll be sorry.

I must have slept then.

Until Sal shouted: “Hey, what’s this! Get up!”

And saw Max and Sal looking down at me.

“That must’ve been some letter,” Sal said. “Had you talking in your sleep.”

I sat up, tucking the letter into my dungarees.

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice letter.”

“Get dressed,” Sal said. “We’re going to church.”

Chapter 26

Sal led the way, words rushing from him in a torrent, Max and I behind him, carried along by the talk of God and blow jobs and beer and the Navy, words pulsing like blood. Friday night: all right! We left the locker club and crossed the highway, Sal’s long legs striding ahead, his crew cut at attention, like nails banged into his skull, the sky a lavender wash, cars pulling up in front of Billy’s, and Sal ignoring them, marching on down the highway, our fearless leader.

He turned right at the Baptist church, walking as if he’d been coming here all his life, pushing across a lumpy field to the unpaved driveway and past the white-painted church, until we could hear guitars and fiddles up ahead and a blurry voice on a bad microphone and we were following Sal across a lot to another low white wooden building: the Community Hall. A wide flight of stairs led to doors opening into the hall, the fiddle music louder as Sal led us closer, pointing at a sign saying SQUARE DANCE TONIGHT as if it were a caption to some exotic photograph. Off to the right were a dozen parked cars, a few pickup trucks, at least one hot rod. Behind the hall was a dense green wall of pine trees.

“Sal, I can’t go in here,” Max said. “I’m a Jew. It ain’t—”

“Come on, they got the greatest-looking broads in all of Pensacola in here—trust me!”

At the top of the steps, two young women sat at a card table selling tickets. Looming behind them was a gaunt somber man in black somber clothes. Rimless glasses perched on his long knuckled nose. “Dig the preacher!” Sal whispered. “His nose looks like a prick!” The terrible thing was that it did, right down to its knobby tip, and we started giggling as Sal handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the girls and asked for three tickets. The preacher stepped forward. His extra prick quivered above his thin mouth.

“Excuse me, young man,” he said, holding up a hand to the girls before they could tear any tickets off the roll. “I must warn you. This is a Christian affair. Neither liquor nor beer nor rowdy behavior will be tolerated.”

“Reverend,” Sal said, in a smooth, radio announcer voice, “do I look like a drinker? A rowdy? Why, I read in the Pensacola Journal about how you’re helpin’ all the young people with your wholesome dances and I tell, you, Reverend, the things that go on in the Navy, they just would turn your stomach. My friends here, they feel like me, they want a little goodness in their lives, somethin’ truly wholesome and truly American.”

The extra prick quivered again, as if sensing the presence of the wiles of Satan, but unable to prove anything.

“Well,” the preacher said, “you’ve been warned.”

He turned around and went into the hall. Sal then leaned down to the two young women. One was about fifteen, her hair tied back in a ponytail; her grin was crooked from trying to hide braces, but her breasts rose impressively beneath a dark-blue cotton dress; I had a tough time keeping my eyes off them. The other was a woman: maybe twenty-two, a strawberry blonde, thin, with a disappointed mouth and hungry eyes. “Well,” Sal said to the younger one, switching to his Rhett Butler voice, “you sure are a dee-lahtful lookin’ youngun.” And then turned in a more courtly manner to the older one. “And you must be her baby sister.” She struggled against a smile. “Can I have the honor of the fust dance with you, my darlin’?” She giggled and the younger girl flushed. “Ah do hope,” Sal said, “that it will be a waltz …”

He took his three tickets, and turned to us. “Gentlemen,” he said and led the way into the hall. The younger one said, “Yawl have fun, y’heah?” And the older one stared after Sal.

The hall was very crowded and there were more women than men. “Will you look at all the ginch in here?” Sal whispered. “Am I smart or am I smart?”

“Yeah, but listen to the music,” Max said. “What do you dance to this music?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sal said. “Because the broads don’t care. All their guys are off at the war someplace, and they’re here. The guys write these stupid letters, all full of moony romantic bullshit from greeting cards, and the women are sittin’ around, living with their mothers, or worse, the guy’s mother, and so they go out … Looking … And how can they go to the Dirt Bar? Or Trader Jon’s? Where can they go where the old man won’t get pissed if he hears about it? So they go to church. I mean, just look at them: gettin’ wet just seein’ us walk in the door.”

“I still don’t know what to dance to this music,” Max said.

“It bothers you so much, don’t even try,” Sal said. “Just go out in the woods and fuck to it.”

We moved along the side of the crowded hall. The band was up on a raw pine stage, the musicians dressed in coveralls and flannel shirts and straw cowboy hats: two fiddlers, a bass guitar player, a balding man on piano. There was no drummer. I remembered reading in Down Beat that for centuries the drum was banned in the South because the old slave owners were afraid the slaves would use it to send messages. Messages like “Kill the fucking owners tonight.” So for rhythm, hillbilly music depended on bass players and the strong left hands of piano players. This band was playing “Jambalaya,” with the piano player handling the singing in a nasal Hank Williams twang; he couldn’t sing, but he did have a hard left hand.

We walked casually along the side of the hall, studying the girls. They were all sizes and shapes, big and fat, tall and skinny, short and round, and some with big-titted narrow-waisted long-legged big-assed bodies right out of the movies. The tall girls wore flats and the short girls wore heels. None of them wore makeup, the devil’s paint. They were clustered in small groups, their eyes darting in our direction, for a second locking into contact, then shying away, dissolving into giggles. And moving among their fleshiness, their hair and cheeks and breasts, their sweet milky odor, I thought about Eden Santana.

The following night I would be with her, but this was Friday, not Saturday, and there I was, out on the town with Sal and Max, looking at other women and aching for them. What was wrong with me? How could I feel the way I thought I felt about Eden and still want to take one of these horny Baptist women off to the dark woods? And then I thought: Why not? She could be out somewhere with Mercado: right then, as I stood alone in the crowded hall. And suppose she didn’t show up on Saturday night? Suppose she treated me like some dumb kid? Another sailor, to laugh at. Anyway, I just had a date with her. I wasn’t going steady with her, for Chrissakes. I wondered how she would look here at this dance and what I would think of her among all these young women. But that image just wouldn’t come. She was from somewhere else in the world, not New York, but not here either. And then (not yet eighteen, not yet an ex-Catholic, a virgin except for Dixie Shafer’s fleshy embrace) I felt oddly guilty, as if just being there was a kind of betrayal.

“Get’em while they’re wet!” Sal whispered, and hurried to a group of girls, peeled off a small stocky blonde and led her to the dance floor. “He’s nuts,” Max said. “Committable.” Sal was dancing with the blonde in a wild foot-stomping hee-hawing style that made the girl laugh and forced other dancers to clear some room. A brown-haired girl came over to Max. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll show your friend!” And then a tall redhead took my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Evelyn” and we were all out on the floor, dancing and yelling, and following Sal’s moves, mixing them with Lindy Hops and jitterbug and a little bit of mambo, cutting one another with sudden moves, putting on a New York street show (I thought proudly) until the number ended. Evelyn was breathless. “Well, than kyew,” she said, and looked scared. I said, “A pleasure.” And she hurried away. I wasn’t sure whether it was my dancing or the word “pleasure” that scared her, but she vanished into the crowd.

I stood against the wall while another tune played, and Sal and Max exchanged girls; I wondered if this was the way people lived all over America, meeting in these places where nobody smoked or drank, where they all danced to corny music and drove home later or walked, where after a month or two they kissed and worked their way up to feels in parked cars before they got married and lived happily ever after. Maybe that was the way the whole goddamned American thing really worked. The scene made me feel sad, knowing that I should want it, like all good red-blooded Americans did, but also knowing that somehow I might never be a part of it, or even truly want it. I could spend my life the way I was on that night: standing there watching the women, with their excited eyes and their soft and succulent asses and tits, full of mystery and power, able to put out, as we said, or to withhold, while I tried so desperately to find the words or the moves that would unlock the mysteries between their thighs. And if that was my fate (I used such words then), I might end up as I was at that moment: alone.

Then, for the first time, I noticed the men. Maybe the same thoughts were moving through them; maybe they too were in thrall to the power of cunt and had no defense except to surrender to the power of God. If you had a fever in the blood, you could console yourself with life after death by postponing your life; heaven or hell might cool the flood. Gazing at them, I started drawing them in my head. They would be easy to draw, with their bony angular faces, no fat to disguise cheekbones or blur the jaws. Their mouths were mostly slits, turned down in resentment — of me and Sal and Max, maybe, or the Communists who were subverting America, or of women: women who’d gone off, women who’d said no, women who’d taken their money or their hearts: and if not women, maybe the resentment came from life itself. Drawing their eyes would be harder. Most of them were squinty, but the eyes themselves were hidden behind the squint, and I’d read somewhere that eyes were the windows of the soul; how could I draw them right? But as I looked closer I did find eyes buried in the squints, and saw coldness, anger, above all certainty, as if something had given them a faith I’d never found in New York; and that would be harder to get right. I watched them until they looked at me and then I shifted my eyes to the door, where more people were still arriving. The older ticket seller was now dancing with Sal. And then I saw a young woman across the hall and I wanted her.

She was standing alone, wearing a yellow dress, her hands entwined in front of her. Her hair was dark brown, her oval face very white and she seemed lonelier than anyone else in the hall. Except possibly me. I moved toward her, edging my way around the side of the hall. I tried to look casual, didn’t want her to see my interest, didn’t want to give her the power to say no. I wanted her to think I was as cool, say, as Clifford Brown, without the shades (knowing that she had never heard of Clifford Brown or his golden trumpet, but not knowing who she thought was cool). I would be — what was the word? — aloof. Hell, I was a man from the biggest city in America. And she was from Pensacola, Florida.

As I drew closer, I saw that she was one of the few women at the dance who was wearing makeup and the reason was obvious: beneath the powder, her skin was pitted with acne scars. The band rose into a Western swing groove, and she shifted her eyes to look at the musicians. And then turned back directly to me. Her eyes seemed to say: Please ask me to dance. Please. You’ve come across the room and if you see my skin and walk away, I’ll be humiliated. Dance with me. Please.

“Dance?” I said.

“Sure.”

Aloof.

I started doing a Lindy, but she was awkward, not knowing what to do with her hands, trying to keep up, watching my feet. But then the music changed again, this time to a ballad: “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” The girl’s hands were damp and she used them to keep me at a distance, not pushing me off, but holding me back from her. I glanced down and saw that she had full round breasts.

“Sure was a shame about Hank Williams,” I said.

“That’s the truth,” she said. “He just didn’t live right, I reckon.”

“I reckon not,” I said.

“Hope he got himse’f straight with the Lord.”

“Yeah.”

I told her my name was Michael (and glanced again at her breasts) and she said her name was Sue Ellen. I tried to press closer, just to feel the edge of those tits against my chest, and failed, and she looked up at me in a doubtful way. When I returned her look (thinking: her face, not her tits, look at her face) she averted her eyes. When I tried again to move her closer to me, she gave a few inches until I could feel the warmth of her flesh; she said nothing, but her hands were wet. I couldn’t see Sal or Max now on the crowded floor. The piano player was trying hard to sing like Hank Williams.

“This is some sad song,” I said.

“Yeah, it is. ’Course old Buddy Jackson up there, he ain’t no Hank Williams.”

“No, but he’s doin’ his best,” I said, trying to get into a southern rhythm. What did I call her? Sue? Ellen? Swellen? “You live around here?”

“Up the road a piece,” she said. She took a deep breath, as if trying to get up courage. “You in the Navy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Navy man, that’s me.”

“My daddy’d kill me, he knew I was dancin’ with a sailor.”

“That so?”

“Same with all the other girls here,” she said. “Sailors ain’t too popular in these parts. Hope I don’t hurt your feelin’s, but I reckon you know that anyways.”

“No,” I said, “I guess sailors aren’t ever too popular. Except when they’re dying in some war.”

It was shameless bullshit. But she looked at me and frowned.

“I’m not sayin’ I feel that way, Michael. I’m saying’ some folks, well, they—”

“I’m not just a sailor, Sue Ellen. I was a regular human being until I joined up.”

“Yeah, well, I guess people should keep an open mind.”

“And I won’t be a sailor all my life either,” I said. Thinking: Come on, man, be cooler than that. Leave it alone. Go for the pussy. Don’t lay this Navy crap on too thick. The tips of her tits are brushing your chest.

“No, I reckon that’s the truth, Michael. Still, you’re a sailor right now and if my daddy walked in this minute he’d have me whupped.”

“No!”

“He sure would.”

“Can’t believe he’d whup someone pretty as you,” I said. “A grown-up woman.”

She paused, then her eyes examined me, a puzzled furrow on her brow. Maybe grown-up woman was the password. She was about five four, and when I glanced down at her, I could see her breasts heave anxiously as she hit me with the big question.

“You a Christian?”

I smiled. Cool. The man from New York. Experienced. A traveler. Aloof. “Well, not really,” I said. “I mean, I was raised as a Catholic, but—”

“You were raised as a Catholic?”

Fucked.

She backed up, as if I’d told her I had the mange. “Yeah,” I said, “anything wrong with that?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, uh — I never did meet a Catholic before.”

I’d fumbled, then tried to recover. The band played harder now. I heard nothing, saw nothing; I needed words.

“Well,” I started to say, “I was raised one, but I don’t think I’m one anymore. You a Baptist?”

“Methodist.”

“See, I can’t tell the difference,” I said. “Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, First Reformed, Second Reformed …” I suppose I was trying to give the impression that none of these distinctions mattered to me, and the only distinction being made was by her. “It’s all a little nutty to me …”

She stopped dancing and squinted at me, her eyes vanishing the way they did in the slits of the men.

“What’d you say?”

“I said it all seems a little nutty to me. You know, religion.”

“Religion seems nutty to you?”

“To tell the truth: yeah.”

“Well, I never—”

We were near one of the poles along the edge of the dance floor. I had seen people say Well, I never in comic strips and heard the words on the radio; but she was the first live human who ever said them to me. Well, I never— I thought the next word I’d hear was “pshaw.” She looked flustered, and that made me feel like an even bigger man of the world. Something I’d said had actually made her react to me. She’d think I was sophisticated, fearless, a rebel. And instead of shutting up, or telling lies, bending my knee to Jesus the better to see up her dress, I went on talking.

“I mean, here’s this Jewish carpenter, Jesus, who died two thousand years ago, and all over the world people are still arguing about what he said, and killing one another over it. Does that make any sense? And—”

“You better mind what you’re saying.”

“They’re all Christians, aren’t they? So why are they all split into a hundred different groups? It’s nuts. Jesus—”

“You said he was a Jew! You said the Lord was a Jew!”

“Well, he was. He was born in Nazareth, he went to the synagogue, he—”

“He wunt no Jew! The Lord wunt no damned Jew! The Lord was a Christian!!”

She turned abruptly away from me, pushing people aside, heading toward the front of the hall. I went after her, sorry I’d talked so much, saying: “Hey, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Sue Ellen!”

Then I saw that some faces were turning to examine me or gaze after Sue Ellen. A few dancers stopped. I saw them talking, nodding at me, and wondered where Sal and Max had gone. Then I saw a heavyset man in a tight shiny blue gabardine suit go to Sue Ellen. I came closer, still hoping to recover my lost moment, take back the words, try to find my way to those luscious hidden tits. He took her hand, as if about to bow and kiss it. Then he turned to face me. He had small abrupt features bunched together in a large round face. Staring at me, he said to her: “What’s the problem, Sue Ellen?”

“Buster,” she said, “this sailor said the Lord was Jew!”

“Now, hold it,” I said. “What I said was—”

Buster said to me, “You said the Lord God, our Savior and Redeemer, was a Jew?” Then louder, as he dropped her hand: “A Jew?”

I tried to smile and turned slightly, keeping Buster in my sight, and saw Sal coming through the crowd. The band was playing loudly now. Then I saw Max coming over too. I relaxed (or grew braver, knowing I wasn’t alone). And then saw that Buster was no longer on his own, either. Two, six, then a dozen young men were assembling behind Buster and Sue Ellen. In this sudden formation, they looked like some odd football team where the quarterback had big tits and a pockmarked face; she looked at me now as if possessed, suddenly realizing that she could call the signals. Ah, the power of cunt.

“What’s going on?” Sal said in a flat even voice.

“A little theology discussion,” I said, performing my cool part as much for him as for the others. “I was explaining that Jesus was a Jew. And—”

“See?” Sue Ellen said, as if I’d just snapped the ball from center. “He said it again!”

Then Max stepped in and raised his hands with the palms out, like a referee separating fighters.

“Please, please, folks, please,” he said. They waited, looking at him in a puzzled way. “I happen to be an expert on this subject. And I have to say that my friend Devlin here is right. It’s a fact of history, beyond any question, that Jesus was a Jew. I know. Because I’m a Jew myself.”

A stunned moment, and then Buster said: “You’re a Jew?!”

“Born and bred, my friend. A card-carrying New York Jew.”

Suddenly the preacher was there, pushing through Sue Ellen’s brawny backfield, his face ashen, and I thought: Holy Christ, his nose has a hard-on!

“What is this all about?” he said.

At that point, we could have bowed, shook hands and gone off to the Dirt Bar. But Sue Ellen then changed the terms of the debate. She pointed at Max, her eyes wide.

“This boy … this boy’s a Jew!”

Her face was all snarled up now, her eyes indignant.

“And this one, that I made the mistake of dancing with, this one says that the Lord was a Jew!”

The preacher turned to me, his erect nose throbbing. But before he could say anything, Sal stepped in. He began to speak in a British accent, even drawing on some secret supply of phlegm.

“Reverend, reverend, with all due respect, dear boy, I think I’d better explain some of the theological ramifications and deep secular philosophical roots of the discussion between this barbaric young man and this lovely Christian lady.”

He touched the side of his nose, as if raising spectacles. Everyone looked at him.

“You see, it wasn’t, ahem, a discussion of phenomenology or epistemology they were engaged in, old chap.”

He cleared his throat. “Nor were they involved in the historical roots of the Hebraic-Christian traditions and the shared tenets of all Mediterranean civilization including Christianity.” He pursed his lips. “You see, dear reverend, what they were actually discussing was—” a pause—“pussy.”

For one long moment, nobody moved. Buster’s jaw dropped. The preacher’s nose wilted. Sue Ellen widened her stance, as if trying not to swoon.

And then Sal turned, grabbing Max and me with each of his hands, and we were running and laughing through the hall, with Buster and the football team after us. Chairs went flying, a table toppled over with a crash, there were shouts and screams while the band blasted harder than ever. We burst into the cool night air, Sal laughing and leaping, and Max turning, raising both muscled arms at the sky, shouting at the doors of the hall: “I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew Jew Jew!”

And then we were running and I could feel my blood pulsing and the muscles bunching in my legs and pain spearing my side as we raced for the highway. We could see the bus pulling around from the base to the bus stop and Sal started yelling for it to stop, as we went over a low fence and across a lumpy field. We could make it! We’d get on board and ride away to town and finish our night at the Dirt Bar, with Tons of Fun arriving in the van and Dixie Shafer telling me tales of the vanished hills. Yeah. Simple. And then I turned and saw Max fall and four of the rednecks coming over the fence, Buster leading the pack.

“Max! Come on, man! We can make this goddamned bus!” Sal shouted.

But Max got up and turned to the oncoming rednecks and planted his feet. It was as if he were saying, to us and to the world, that he was a tough proud Jew and he just wasn’t going to run. Not from these morons. Not from anyone. So we stopped running and let the bus leave and joined Max. The first man came in a rush and Max bent low, twisted, let the right hand fly and the man went down. A second one came at me, a guy who looked like an auto engine in a shirt, and I threw the right hand hard and straight and felt the impact all the way up in my shoulder and the man’s face seemed to explode in blood and he fell to his knees. I kicked him over on his side.

But then Buster was there, his rage ferocious, and I wasn’t so lucky this time. I threw a punch and it glanced off Buster’s head and then I was slammed, and lifted, suddenly without breath or bone or strength, and then was on my back. Time stopped. And sound. I saw the sky. Black, with pinwheeling stars. And thought: I’m knocked out. He knocked me out.

And then sound came rushing back in and I heard grunting and then a phwocking sound and a man’s wordless high-pitched voice yelping in pain. And started to get up, and saw Sal on my left, swinging a gnarled tree branch like a club, hitting Buster on the arms and elbows and hips, while Max grappled with a fourth man, and still another came on a run, to leap on Max’s back.

I got up, my heart pounding wildly, and dived for the man on Max. I grabbed his jacket, which tore down the middle, and then I stepped to the side and punched as hard as I could to the man’s ear. He let go of Max’s neck, holding his ear in pain, and staggered away. I bent him in half with a kick in the balls and then Sal came up, slowly and deliberately, Buster now on his face in the dirt, and hit the big man with the three-branch club and finished him off. We looked at Max. He had another man above his head now, like a strong man at a circus. And he ran forward and rammed the man against a tree.

It was over.

We stood there, panting, dirty, battered, and looked at what we’d done. Five huge men were unconscious on the dark field.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Don’t start,” Sal said.

We could hear the sounds of insects again, filling the night, and the band still playing a way off. Nobody seemed to have left the hall; the preacher must have held them back. And there was no sign of Sue Ellen.

Max said, “You know something? These guys might be dead.”

Sal looked at him and then at the tree branch in his own hand. His eyes were still wild, as if he wanted more, and I thought for a moment that he looked like Alley Oop. He swung the branch like a bat and hurled it into the trees and then began to laugh wildly.

We hurried back across the highway to the locker club and were changing clothes when we heard the distant sound of a siren. “Jesus, it’s just like the movies,” Sal said. “The killer’s in the building and he hears the cops coming, the sirens and all, and he starts to yell down at them — at Charles Bickford, who always has the fuckin bullhorn — and he says, ‘Up your hole with a Mell-o-roll, coppers, you ain’t takin’ me alive!’ ” Max laughed, pulling on his whites, and said, “Why do they do that in the movies anyway? To warn the bad guys? The cops must be amazing schmucks …” I said it might just be an ambulance out there. “Those guys are pretty fucked up,” I said. And Max said again that they might even be dead. Sal didn’t want to wait around to find out. “Come on,” he said, and with Sal leading the way, we slipped out of the locker club in our dress whites. The sirens went past the locker club toward the church, but we were out back, walking in the shadows of the palm trees to the main gate of Ellyson Field. Then a car pulled into Copter Road and Sal jumped out and waved at it.

“Hey, we need a ride, man.”

The car stopped. A shiny new red Mercury. Max and I hurried over. Mercado was alone behind the wheel. He looked at us and smiled.

“Get in,” he said.

Chapter 27

In the early sixties, after my first wife died, I went out for a while with a red-haired stripper who loved to see me fight. She did an act at the Hudson Theater, undressing herself in a giant wine-glass filled with dirty pink water. She believed in Rosicrucianism and lived like the guy in the Rosicrucian ads, who slept each night on the edge of a cliff. To her, danger was a religious experience. Wherever we went she caused trouble, giving various men the eye, then getting indignant when they came on to her, and stepping back to watch me fight for her outraged honor. I got so mad at her one night on the East River Drive, my hands raw and my suit ruined, that I pulled the steering wheel right off its shaft while screaming at her and had to grab the naked top of the shaft with both hands to keep from dying. As I sat there panting, she just laughed and then started to play with me. That was the last time I saw her and I heard later that she’d been shot to death by a female lover in a hotel room in Baltimore. There are women like that, and when I look back, I realize that little Sue Ellen was surely one of them.

All through the next day I hung out in the barracks, expecting the imminent arrival of the Shore Patrol. They would take me off to the Pensacola jail and little Sue Ellen, prim and clean, would breathe hard, making all the cops look at her breasts, and pick me out as the man who said that Jesus was a Jew. Then she would leave for Buster’s funeral and I would spend the rest of my adult life in Portsmouth Naval Prison, or take a shorter trip to the Florida gas chamber.

But the Shore Patrol never came for me, and on Saturday evening I went out and changed clothes at the locker club and took the bus to town, slouching low as we passed the Baptist Church. It was too early for my date with Eden Santana, but I didn’t want to be late, so I sat for almost an hour on a bench on Garden Street. I was uneasy: I didn’t know where I would take her or what we would do; she’d just smiled and told me she would meet me. I said her name out loud: Eden Santana. Then whispered it: Eden. San. Tana. A beautiful name, I thought, shuddering at the hard ending of the first name and its promise of paradise. The second name was made of all those female vowels (for surely consonants are male) and rolled in a wave when you said it, like the name Pensacola itself. I wished I had a hundred dollars to spend without care for tomorrow or next week or the rest of the Navy month. Then, if I could sort out the words, I’d ask her to go with me to the San Carlos. To sleep with me between silk sheets. I’d whisper her name at midnight. First name and last, paradise and vowels. Eden Santana, Eden Santana. Like a decade of a wicked rosary.

She was due to finish work at six and ten minutes before the hour I got up and crossed Garden Street and walked slowly down the street toward Sears. I stopped at the alley and felt a sudden attack of hopelessness. Her bicycle wasn’t there. And if her bicycle wasn’t there, she probably wasn’t there either. I dawdled past the store and glanced through the windows, as casually as possible. I didn’t see her inside. Maybe she’s gone, I thought, feeling lost and alone in a town that wasn’t mine. Maybe she’d realized it was ridiculous to be seeing a kid like me on a Saturday night in a town full of men. Men with money. Fliers. Officers. Men who’d been around the world and back, flown combat missions, faced death. Men like Mercado. Down the street I saw the neon blinking on outside Trader Jon’s, but in my mind, I imagined her waking up on Saturday morning, thinking, “Oh, that damned kid,” and lying there deciding to call in sick so she wouldn’t have to see me. Maybe there was a guy lying in bed beside her. Smoking a cigarette, while she phoned in her lie. Speaking to her in Spanish later. She touched his face and smiled, saying, “I can’t go to town today.” Then lighting a cigarette. Then adding, “I have to stay here.” And the man did not protest because the man, of course, did not want to leave her. He reached out, touched her nipples, whispered her name.

I stopped at the corner just past Sears, and leaned on a lamppost, looking up and down the street. I hoped none of the gang would see me. I didn’t want them asking me what I was doing standing on an empty street in Pensacola. They’d think I was a degenerate or something. Or they’d drag me down the street to Trader Jon’s, or out to the Dirt Bar. And I didn’t want to go to either place; this little hour belonged to me. Most of all, I couldn’t tell them the truth. “I’m waiting for a woman named Eden Santana.” I couldn’t say that, admitting with my tone that I cared for the woman and was disappointed in her absence. We were sailors. Ah remember the days (the Old Salt said) when men were men and women were carpets and all the ships was wood. Anchors Aweigh, my boys. Bell-bottom trousers, suit of Navy blue, I love a sailor boy and— No. I couldn’t say anything to them.

The clock on the Blount Building said it was ten after six. And I thought: I’ll wait five more minutes. If she’s not here in five minutes, then she’s not coming. Maybe the whole thing was stupid. She was telling me something. I should take the hint. Just get out of here. Hell, I’m freshly shaved and smell good and have money in my pocket. I don’t have to wait here like a goddamned fool.

A car horn honked. Once. Then again.

I looked across the street at the sound. Eden Santana was behind the wheel of an old dark-green car, smiling at me and waving. I felt like doing cartwheels, shouting, punching street signs. I went around to the passenger side and she leaned across and opened the door.

“Get in,” she said. “You want to drive?”

“No, no,” I said. Closing the door, trying not to slam it, to show I was anxious. “You drive.”

She started driving again, making a left into a side street.

“I’m sorry I’m so damned late,” she said. “Every girl in that place had a damned date tonight and the ladies’ room looked like a football stadium. Then I had to go get the car, out in the back, and all the streets go the wrong way, and … How are you, child?”

“Great,” I said. “Just great.”

I could smell her now, all flowers, fields in the spring. She had done something to her hair; it was a controlled pile of a million curls. She was wearing a lavender dress and stockings with a seam down the back and high-heeled white shoes, which I watched as she shifted gears and pushed the car down dark streets.

“So, what d’you think?” she said.

“You look amazing,” I said. “I love the dress. And your hair. And—”

“Not me! The car!”

“It’s—”

“Cost me seventy-five bucks, up at Bargainville on West Cervantes. A 1940 Ford. Runs pretty good for a thirteen-year-old, don’t you think?”

“It sounds good,” I said (thinking: When this car was new, I was four and she was nineteen). And then glanced at her, as she turned the wheel, straightened out, went down another street. “But you know something? I gotta tell you the truth.”

“You hate Fords.”

“Worse. I don’t know how to drive Fords or anything else.”

“Say what?”

“I can’t drive a car.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

I explained why, and she listened and nodded and then reached for her purse and her Luckies.

“Anyway,” I said, “I feel dumb about it.”

“Don’t feel dumb,” she said. “You got good reasons. Up in the country, folks all learn to drive young ’cause it’s so far from one place to another. Still see people walkin’ everyplace they need to go, and once in a while you see an old cart, like in the old days, a cart with a horse. Now they mostly got them cars. Have to. But you didn’t need to do that. So don’t feel dumb.”

She was talking very quickly, and it never occurred to me that night that she was throwing the words at me because she was nervous, too. I couldn’t imagine Eden Santana being nervous. Not over me. She put a cigarette in her mouth, but couldn’t strike a match without taking her hands off the wheel. I took the matches and tried to do it for her. The breeze blew out two matches and then she handed me the cigarette.

“Light it up for me, will you, Michael?”

The smoke tasted sour as I inhaled and handed the cigarette back to her.

“And hey, what the hell,” she said, pausing to take a deep drag. “I can teach you how to drive. I used to — I’m a pretty fair driver, and I could teach you.”

“I’d love that.”

Thinking: I’ll be sure then to see you again. During the week and on weekends, too, maybe. You’ll explain gears and shifts, gas pedal and accelerator. You’ll place my hands on the wheel. I’ll smell your hair, hear you laugh. This night is not the end. We begin. There was water on my right, all the way to the horizon, and lights on small boats and a lighthouse away off. The sea was black.

“Where we going?” I said.

“The beach,” she said. “Out the causeway to Santa Rosa Island. There’s a little shrimp place there I found the other day. Just shrimp and beer. Nothin’ else. And cheap too. All you can eat for a dollar.”

“You’re kidding?”

“You better like shrimp.”

“All I can eat.”

Then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow two-lane bridge out over the water. The breeze was cooler off the sea and I looked at Eden Santana, her brow furrowed slightly in concentration, her hair blowing, the lavender dress lifting and settling on her tan legs. And thought: My life right now, at this moment, with this woman beside me and the breeze blowing, riding over the sea, is truly beautiful. And I was right.

We ate great mounds of boiled shrimp: dozens hundreds millions of them, sitting at a metal table beside screened windows overlooking the dark beach. We filled a bowl with the shells and drank Jax beer while I looked at her and she asked questions and I tried to answer. The lipstick came off her mouth. The sea air made her hair frizzier than ever. People came in and sat down and ate and left and we were still there. I drew pictures on napkins, and signed and dated them and wrote “Pop’s Shrimp Place” beneath the dates: pictures of a chief gunnery officer in uniform and a fat lady with a thin bearded man and a grizzled guy who looked like a fisherman. Then we ordered more shrimp and went on eating. When we were finished, Eden leaned back, a grin on her face, and rubbed her stomach.

“Gotta walk some of this off, child,” she said.

I stood up, smothered a belch, and left a dollar tip, wondering if that was too much, and she would think I was showing off. But she took my hand and led the way out through the door to the beach. She took her shoes off and held them in one hand. Then she took my hand, lacing her fingers between mine, and we started to walk. The sand was very white, and the surf a long way off. Eden gazed up at the bunched thick stars. We left the lights of the shrimp place behind and soon were alone in a great emptiness.

Then she saw a piece of driftwood, huge as a tree but bone white, and we sat on its trunk while she smoked a cigarette.

“You said you had a husband,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.

“Yes,” she said, without turning to me.

“What happened to him?”

“He’s home.”

“But you’re not,” I said, trying to be light.

She turned to me. “No, I’m not. I’m here, child. With you. Or didn’t you notice?”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s just … well, you said to me the other night that I didn’t know you. And that was true. That is true.”

“The details, they don’t matter, do they? This is me. Right here, sitting on this piece of driftwood. Nothing else to me. Just what’s here.”

“I’ve told you all about me,” I said.

“Maybe there’s less to tell,” she said curtly.

I was quiet then. She was right: I had less to tell. For a simple reason: I was a kid and she wasn’t. When I was two years old, she was sixteen. She was ready to fuck guys when I was learning to walk. She might even have been married then. At sixteen. Just a year younger than I was when I went in the Navy. They married younger than that down south. Yeah, she had a lot more to tell.

She squeezed my hand.

“Did I hurt your feelings, child?” she said softly.

“No, no—”

“I did, didn’t I? Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I hope you know that. Just, I got me some bad habits. Someone says somethin’ hard to me, I want to answer back. I wasn’t always like that. I was a nice quiet little girl for a long long time. But then it got so I had to answer back.”

“To him? The husband?”

She smiled in a knowing way. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you all about that. Not tonight. Not now. It’s just too damned beautiful out here for that.”

She stood up and looked at the moon and the stars, and then said, “Don’t look now. Don’t watch me.”

I stared at the sea and heard her moving behind me. And then she came up beside me and handed me her stockings.

“Couldn’t stand them one more minute,” she said.

The stockings were silky and feminine in my hands and I rubbed them slightly as we walked, thinking that they’d been where I’d never been. For a second, I wanted to put them in my mouth. And then rolled them and slipped them in my pocket.

“Look, you can see the sea oats, up on the dune. See? The dark stuff? That’s what holds the dune together. They got deep wide roots, and they move under the sand, like steel in concrete, you know?” She led me over to look at the dark clusters in the light of the moon. “You ever see anyone pullin’ them up, you give ’em a good quick hop in the butt, hear? Lose them sea oats, you lose the whole damned beach.”

“I’ve never seen them before.”

“You have a beach in New York, don’t you?”

“Yeah, a bunch of them. Coney Island and Rockaway and Jones Beach, a bunch of others.”

“Well, if they don’t have sea oats, you’re gonna lose them.”

We climbed the dune. The island was all dark, the nearest lights a mere glow across the bay in the town, and the wind was rising and she looked up at the stars.

“There’s something I’m gonna do. Something I wanted to do all my life,” she said out loud, as much to the night or the wind as to me. “Gonna do it.”

She turned her back and reached up under the dress and peeled off her panties. She looked at me as she stepped out of them, then smiled faintly, and handed them to me.

“I want to feel the wind,” she whispered.

And faced the sea, lifting her dress, her legs spread and planted to the ankles in the sand. She threw her head back and closed her eyes and shivered. The wind moved between her thighs and I could see her dark roundness and then she shivered again. And then again. The wind was sighing and a buoy was ting-tinging away off and a moaning sound rose from her throat.

I held her panties to my face. They smelled of salt and the dark sea.

Chapter 28

She drove me back to Ellyson Field.

“I’d rather go home with you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to fool you.”

“I don’t think you’d do that.”

“I might.”

“Just tell me the truth,” I said. “Even if it hurts.”

“That’s a deal. If I can’t tell you the truth, I won’t say anything at all.”

“Deal.”

We moved past bars and car lots and churches. I felt the lump of her rolled stockings in my pocket and slipped them out and laid them on the seat.

“You get awful quiet sometimes, child.”

“Maybe I can’t tell you the truth either.”

“You better not bottle too much up. Lots of people do that, and it drives em crazy …”

The lazy drawl rose at the end, as if she had more to say. But she just shook her head in a rueful way. She was driving slowly now behind a fat squat truck. She looked out at the side, trying to see ahead, started to move once, suddenly darted back in lane as a car roared by in a blaze of light. “Gah-damn.” Then she looked again and gave it the gas, biting her lower lip, and roared past the truck, honking her horn, half in anger, the rest a tease. Then another car was in front of us, lights very bright. She whipped into the right-hand lane, missing the other car by a foot. She laughed like a teenager and shook her head and then slowed again. I was beginning to love the way she did things: she was confident, sure, enjoying risk and escape. Who was she anyway? I turned to her.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Why did Red Cannon get you so upset last week? You know, about seeing you in the San Carlos bar with that Mexican pilot? That Tony Mercado?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath.

“Okay … I went over there with a woman from work. A friend of mine, Roberta Stone. Just to have a drink. After work. That’s all. Real innocent. Not to pick up men, hear? Just a drink on payday. I hadn’t had a drink since I got to Pensacola, savin’ my money for this car … We sat at a corner table. That fella Tony Mercado was standing at the bar and he saw us, and sent over a drink, and smiled at us. Roberta thought he was cute. She thought more than that, the truth be told … Well, maybe he saw it in her eyes. Anyway, he came over. The trouble was, he started makin’ moves on me, not Roberta. And she got all upset and drank too much and though she was comin’ on strong, this Tony Mercado backed away. Anyway, he had a key on him. A room key. For upstairs there in the San Carlos. And he slipped me the key. Well, I hadn’t been with a man … It’s been a long time. For good reasons …” She lit a cigarette with a small Zippo lighter, let the smoke drift out the window into the cool air. “But I didn’t want him. I didn’t like the idea, guy comin’ over, slippin’ you a room key. And besides, Roberta more or less staked her claim. I wasn’t gonna do that to her. I mean, the guy was handsome, and was charming. But just like that? Picked up in a bar? No thanks. There were a lot of sailors and Marines in there, including, I guess, your Mister Cannon. So I gave Tony Mercado back his key and said, No thanks. You know, slipped it to him under the table. Well, he smiled in that charming way, real polite, and then turned to Roberta.” She took a deep drag, let it out slowly. “Roberta took the key and then he left and then she left to go upstairs and then I left.”

She flipped the cigarette out onto the highway. The locker club was less than a mile away.

“So that’s the whole story. Pretty damned long-winded answer to your question, wasn’t it? Why’d I get so upset? Cause that red-headed sailor with the dead face — he acted like I was some whore who works the bars. And I’m not.”

“You don’t even have to say that.”

“But Roberta isn’t either. Some women do for loneliness what they’d never do for money.”

“Is she a blonde?”

“Why, yes … A real bright blonde.”

“He’s still seeing her.”

“You’d make a good cop, child.”

“I wasn’t looking for her or for him, Eden. It was sheer luck.”

“Well, here’s the locker club.”

She pulled into the lot. I gazed around, hoping Buster and his friends weren’t waiting in ambush. There was nobody in sight.

“I want to see you again,” I said.

She looked away, out at the highway and the traffic.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Can’t tomorrow.”

“The next day.”

A pause.

“Okay.”

“Maybe we’ll go to another movie.”

“No. I want you to draw me.”

“Serious?”

“Like artists do in the movies. I never done that before.”

When I reached my locker, I had her panties in my pocket. Once more I held them to my face.

Chapter 29

I feel that time of my life in fragments now; then I stand back and glibly impose narrative upon it to give it sense. I am driving tentatively through side streets off the highway, feeling as if the next left turn might lead me deep into the past, the right into some scary bleak future. If I can remember that time without the gauzy editing of memory, maybe I can make sense of all the years that followed, the stupid deaths I later saw and recorded, the friends I lost, the women I loved too carelessly or too well. But memory does not exist in any orderly progression, following the clean planes of logic. That’s the scary part: If there is no logic, no sense, what meaning could it possibly have?

I remember clearly the day after she told me she wanted me to draw her, the day after she opened her naked cunt to the breeze of the midnight Gulf. It makes me tremble even now. All that morning, I was like a bundle of jumbled wires. I needed to get to an art supply store, to buy a pad and some chalks. Eden Santana had challenged me, as if she could forgive my youth, my stumbling uncertainties, my awkward poses only if I had talent. So I wanted real tools: chalk, good paper. But I couldn’t go to Sears, couldn’t slide into their art supply section without Eden seeing me. If she saw me buying supplies only for this occasion, she might think I was a fake. Or a dumb boy. Or spying on her. There had to be another place that sold art supplies. In the Pensacola phone book, I found one: Art Land on West Cervantes. I called the store and a woman with a cracker voice told me she closed at five. There was no way I could get there in time. I wasn’t even certain where West Cervantes was. I knew the downtown streets and I could find O Street, but the rest of the city was a blur.

Then Becket came over.

“Take a run to Mainside?” he said.

And I wanted to hug him.

Becket double-parked while I ran into Art Land. The chalks, paints and pens were in drawers behind the counter.

“Kin ah hey-elp yew?” a woman said, coming from behind an aisle. She had a dusty face and weak blue eyes and a disappointed look on her face. A sailor. In dungarees. What could he want?

“Yes, yes,” I said, trying to remember the names of the materials. “I need some charcoal and some of that stuff, you know, the harder stuff, it’s brown or reddish brown?”

“Conté,” she said, bumping around behind the counter.

“And a pad,” I said.

“They’re behind you, right they-uh,” she said. The store was empty of customers and most of the lights were off. From inside, the street was a blinding sun-baked white. “Yew want charcoal paypuh o’ newsprint?”

I didn’t really know. But I looked at the pads, and the prices, and a large newsprint pad was seventy-nine cents and the charcoal paper was two dollars. I picked up the newsprint pad and took it to the counter. “I’ll take this.” She had boxes of Conté crayons and sticks of vine charcoal on the counter. The charcoal looked fragile. She also shoved at me a box of something called compressed charcoal. I picked them up, a stick at a time; the compressed charcoal was heavier and blacker.

“I’ll take two of each,” I said.

“Two of each?” she said.

“Please.”

“Usually we sell them by the box.”

“I know,” I said, “but I don’t really have enough cash on me. I’ll come back and buy the rest of the box, I promise. But I need these right now.”

She sighed in a disgusted way and picked out two each of the vine charcoal, the compressed charcoal and the brown Conté crayons, and made an elaborately sarcastic ceremony of wrapping them. I could hear Becket honking for me. She took her time filling out a bill, listing each item, and then slipped them all into a bag.

“I guess you don’t have enough money for fixative?” she said.

“No,” I said. I didn’t even know what fixative was. The bill was $1.90. I gave her two dollars, waited for my dime and then rushed out to the truck.

“Maybe you drew my picture dat day,” Becket said. “Not Miles.”

“No,” I said. “It was Miles.”

He went roaring down West Cervantes, making up time on his way through midday traffic to Mainside.

“So you’re an artist too?” Becket said.

“Well, sort of,” I said. I explained about cartoons and comic strips, trying to make cartooning sound like an occupation for adults and not something for kids who stayed too long with the funny papers. Milton Caniff made more than a hundred thousand a year, and some guys earned even more. Becket listened and nodded.

“You know,” he said, “you could prolly make some money around the barracks. I remember a guy in Norfolk, he could draw, and he started makin’ pictures from photographs. Two bucks apiece. You know, of different guy’s goirls. Or da guys themselves. And he made him some good money. Not no hundid-thousin a year. Dere wasn’t dat much money in da whole state of Virginia. But good beer money.”

“How’d he start?”

“I guess wit’ one guy. Like da guy dat makes a better mousetrap. The woid gets around.”

“I oughtta try that.”

“Start with me, you want,” he said, as we slowed at the approach to the Mainside gate. “I’ll give you my goirl’s picture later.”

Two dollars a drawing. Until then it had never occurred to me that I could earn money making pictures; that was something for the scary future, when I was out of the Navy. Becket saw things in the present tense. My head teemed with visions of riches.

Late that afternoon, a grizzled mechanic came into the Supply Shack looking for a joy stick. Only Donnie Ray and Harrelson were still at work, filling out forms. I walked to the storeroom, past my desk (where my new art supplies lay flat in the top drawer) and went looking for the joy stick. The storeroom felt gloomy in the fading light. I moved aside pallets and boxes, and found a joy stick in a crate. I went for a dolly, lifted the crate, placed it on the dolly and started to leave. Then, through the new space in the wall of crates, I saw the easel.

There was a painting leaning on the easel, which stood in a tiny room made from improvised walls of stacked crates and boxes. A low crate served as a chair and a second was topped with a sheet of glass upon which were laid tubes of paint and tins of liquid. There were a dozen brushes in a jar and more paintings stacked against the wall. Someone had created a secret art studio here in the Supply Shack. I knew it must be Miles.

I felt as if I’d just entered Aladdin’s cave, piled with treasure. I lifted another crate to fill the space of the one I’d taken and hurried back to the counter with the joy stick. Miles is an artist. I thought about that at my desk, with my own secrets in the drawer, wondering when Miles would be back — he was off to Mainside with Jones and Boswell — and why he had lied to me about the Becket drawing. I waited on a few more customers. Typed forms. Read specification books. All the while anxious to return to the back room, to verify what I’d seen (was this what they meant by a mirage?) and waiting for Donnie Ray to leave. Harrelson had the duty. And he could be a problem; I certainly didn’t want him to discover the studio and invoke the fierce laws of Chickenshit. So at closing time I left, too, and went across the street to the barracks and stood inside the door until I saw Donnie Ray leave.

Then I crossed the street again and opened the middle door, closed it quietly and tiptoed into the back room. I found I could enter the “studio” by flattening myself against the wall and sliding between it and the packing crates. Inside, a single window was covered with a shade tacked to the sill. It was a kind of nest, sealed off, special, private. I felt oddly safe, the way I did when I was a kid hiding under a bush in the park. There was another feeling too: of being in an empty church. I didn’t believe in God, but there was something about the hushed solitude of an afternoon church that always got me. That little cave of packing crates provoked the same awed mood.

The painting on the easel wasn’t finished, but I could see the blocky outlines of a ruined house, a blasted tree, endless green fields moving to a distant blue horizon. It was painted on some kind of heavy board, smooth on the painted surface, coarse on the other. So were all the other paintings. There was a harlequin in a beaded multicolored suit, blue eyes peering from a mask, neither male nor female. Another showed an old woman at the end of a country lane, trees rising above her in a menacing way, her back to the painter. In a third, a man in navy jeans held his head in his hands while a giant orange crowded out everything in the room. The room had screened windows, like the barracks, but there were prison bars beyond the screens, and a small black mask hung from a peg on a wall. There were two pictures of a middle-aged woman with youthful eyes glistening from her sagging face. And a painting of four sailors in Lone Ranger masks standing at the end of a ruined pier with their backs to the sea. I’d never seen pictures like them before. They weren’t like illustrations in Cosmopolitan or McCall’s or like the drawings of Crane and Caniff.

There was a black sketchbook on the floor, and I looked through it, recognizing Becket and Harrelson and Boswell, and Chief McDaid and Red Cannon, all drawn very delicately with a pencil, the shading done with hundreds of tiny lines. They were not photographic likenesses; they seemed to go deeper than that, to express Becket’s good nature and Harrelson’s cruelty and Boswell’s blurry drunkenness, and the malignant core of Red and McDaid. There were also drawings of women, nude, heavy-breasted, with faces like crones, a drawing of a black man wearing a jock, his skin glistening as if he’d been oiled. A detailed study of a tree. The wreck of an old car. Ruined piers like the one in the painting. Many careful but unfinished drawings of oranges. And detailed renderings of masks. They were wonderful drawings, but they made me uneasy. Not simply because I couldn’t do them, but because of the subject matter. I’d always been the best artist in my class but I couldn’t draw like this; worse, I couldn’t imagine like this. My own drawings were usually of fights and brawls, the stuff of the comics; these were pictures you saw in museums and art books.

There were a few blank pages and then I stopped short. The next three drawings were of me. In one of them I was sitting at my desk, my back to the artist, my face in profile gazing out at the Florida day. My jaw was slack and I seemed lost in thought. In the second, I was swabbing the deck. My body was bent at a violent angle and I was wielding the huge mop as if it were a blunt instrument. The muscles of my back and arms were perfectly drawn, taut and charged with tension. The third was an unfinished portrait. Some tentative overlapping lines defined my cheekbones and jaw. The incomplete nose was gouged with erasures.

But the eyes were my eyes.

And they looked scared.

Suddenly I felt almost sick: the next day I was supposed to draw Eden Santana, but these pictures showed me that I just wasn’t good enough. If this was indeed Miles’s work, Miles should be drawing her. She deserved a better artist than I was. And I felt ashamed and envious too. Somehow, in spite of everything, in spite of all the same kind of crap that I had to put up with, Miles found a way to do his work. He even found time to draw me. He was serious. In six weeks at Ellyson, I’d made a dozen drawings in a couple of restaurants, showing off to a woman who must have seen me as an amusing amateur; certainly if Eden Santana could see Miles’s drawings, she would know how crude I truly was. I was wasting my life. I was hopelessly behind and could never catch up.

I heard footsteps out in the supply room. Someone grunted and a crate fell. I heard Boswell’s voice. “Shit. Goddamn.” Then another grunt. And then he was walking away. He and Miles were back from Mainside. I heard Harrelson’s voice in the distance, the words unclear, and a door slamming. Boswell was finished for the day.

I should have left then, but I was held by the things I saw and afraid of being spotted sneaking out of the back room. So I waited. Five minutes. Ten. Miles wasn’t coming back. I could stay a while. I felt the way I used to when I showed up early for a Mass and the priest wasn’t there and I touched all of his garments and the chalice and the Hosts, running my hands over the forbidden holy objects. Part of that was defiance; if God existed, then let Him show himself, let Him strike me dead. Part of it was awe of the beauty of the objects. I could play at being a priest. In the same mood, I picked up the tubes of paint. The label said “casein.” I opened one, sniffed it. Almost no smell. Or rather, a milky smell of some kind. Once I’d walked into the lobby of the Art Students League on 57th Street to see if they had courses in cartooning and the smell of oil and turpentine was all through the building. Casein didn’t smell like that. The tins were filled with water, so I knew it must be something you diluted.

For a moment I thought about picking up a brush and leaving a mark on the unfinished painting. Let Miles know that somewhere in the building there was another artist who knew what he was doing. Just take one little section, I thought, paint a brick into the concrete wall, make the sun begin to lift over the horizon. Then thought: No. Don’t do that. Suppose someone did that to one of your pictures? And thought: Go ahead. I picked up the largest brush and hefted it, surprised at its weight.

And then heard a door clicked shut. Silence. Then footsteps treading lightly down one of the aisles. The footsteps stopped. A grunt. A shuffling sound. And there before me, shocked and a little scared, was Miles Rayfield.

“What in the fuck are you doing here?” he said, looking angry and invaded.

“I was wondering what this was doing here,” I said, waving around the tiny studio. “I moved a crate and here it was.”

Miles didn’t budge from the narrow passageway beside the wall. His eyes glanced over the paints, pictures, easel. His voice dropped to a whisper:

“Did you tell anybody?”

“No. I replaced the crate to keep it hidden.”

“The truth. I have to know.”

“Why would I tell anybody?”

He stepped into the tiny room, seeming to fill it. He picked up a brush, tapped his thigh with it.

“I could really be in the shit if they found this,” he said. “Deep shit.”

“Only if they find it.”

Miles sighed. “That’s inevitable. One fine morning, some asshole like Harrelson or Boswell or Jones will move a crate and it’ll be all over. They’ll arrest me. Arrest the paintings. Send me to the god-damned brig and the pictures to that fucking dumpster you’re always guarding …” He smiled in a trapped way, then looked at me. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

I struggled to say the words. “Well, I’m kind of an artist, too.”

Miles blinked. “We’d better take a walk.”

We walked around the base in the fading light. I tried to explain about being a cartoonist and Miles said he thought that if I had any talent at all, that was the way to waste it. I told him I was going to meet a woman the following night and make some drawings and he said he’d like to see them and asked me if she was a nude model and I said I didn’t know, she was a woman I knew and he said that was the worst kind of model, because you want to flatter them, make them pretty when they’re not. He wished there was a life class somewhere in Pensacola, so he could draw from a model again, but there wasn’t ’cause all these goddamned Baptists would raid the place, and I asked him why he didn’t have his wife come down and the two of them could live off the base and he could paint in the apartment and use her as a model and he just shook his head and said, No, that wouldn’t work.

“She’s gone to Jesus,” he said, as we headed for the mess hall. “The last thing the goddamned Christians will let you do is see their bodies.”

“If she’s your wife …”

“She’d sit there thinking of spending eternity in the depths of hell.”

He shifted then, explaining that casein was make of milk products, and you did dilute it with water. He liked the way casein covered a surface, but it was nowhere as subtle or juicy as oil, and you had to treat the boards, which were called Masonite, with a white primer called gesso. Some artists mixed the primer with a little sand to give it a rough texture; Miles preferred it smooth, using the brush to create textures. He mumbled when I asked him what his picture meant, saying he wasn’t really sure. The sailor in the room with the orange obviously thought he was in a jail, with Florida filling the room and crushing him. But he wasn’t sure who the old woman was on that country road and didn’t much care for the picture.

“It’s too simple, too easy,” he said. “Those goddamned trees are stolen right out of Snow White.”

“What’ll you do with it?”

“Burn it,” he said. “Or give it to Red Cannon. He’ll think it’s his mother and love it to death.”

I told him I’d bought a newsprint pad and the chalks, and he said newsprint was all right for sketching, but the paper was so frail you couldn’t work it, couldn’t erase or manipulate the chalk very much. “You’ve got to be right the first time,” he said, “and almost nobody is.” We went into the mess hall and sat down with slabs of gray pot roast. “You see, you couldn’t draw this piece of dead animal,” Miles said. “You have to paint it. To get the revolting dead color exactly right. If a man had this color, you’d rush him to the hospital.”

I laughed and he ate slowly, cutting the pieces small, and chewing with the front of his mouth. “Fuel,” he murmured, “just think of it as fuel.”

There were some books about art that I should read, and he could loan them to me, he said. But if I were serious, I had to draw every day. It didn’t matter how many books I read or how many pictures I saw in museums. You learned to draw by drawing. Scribble drawings, doodle them, go off and make pictures. And look at everything. “You’d better feel something about what you see, too,” he said. “If you don’t feel anything about your drawings, they’ll be as dead as this disgusting pot roast.”

After a while, I said: “Could you show me how to make paintings?”

“Sure,” Miles said, as I felt myself swelling with new ideas, images, ambitions, and the sense that I’d made a friend and met a master. “If you don’t try to teach me about that fucking baseball.”

Chapter 30

I became an artist to keep from going crazy. It was as simple as that. My father killed himself in 1930, leaving my mother to take care of me. I was fourteen months old. We lived in Marietta, Georgia, a boring little suburb just outside of Atlanta, and my father was in the furniture business. I don’t remember anything about him. The son of a bitch. After he killed himself, Mother hid all the photographs of him, all his letters, the documents that made up his shitty little life. She put them away in an old steamer trunk that she’d never taken anywhere (poor Mother) and I didn’t see them until I was what is laughingly called Grown Up. By then, I could have been looking at pictures of George Washington.

Mother did her best. I give her that. This was the Depression, and it was hard on everyone, I suppose, but even harder in the South. The furniture company was gone before Father died; that’s why he died (or so Mother said, telling me about him later, in bits and pieces, and stopping always at the part where she found him in the chair with his thumb in the trigger guard of the shotgun and his face blown off, stopping there until the last time she started the story and then, saying it, telling me, she was rid of it and never told about it again). His relatives stayed away from Mother, afraid, I suppose, that they’d remind her of him, or she would ask for money, or maybe they blamed her in some way, the miserable shits. I just don’t know why they stayed away and I don’t give a goddamn. The fact is they treated us like lepers. I wish them painful deaths. There’s a blur there somewhere. Even now. Mother and I lived in a house where some things were never said.

But we had that house, bought and paid for when Father was alive. He left her that, paid for when he and the country were riding high. A great gabled house, with porticoes and parquet floors and a piano in the living room and bad pictures hanging everywhere. I always had my own room, and after I started drawing (I was seven and the pictures always showed me with a father and mother, O Sigmund Freud, please do not puke!). Mother outfitted one of the other rooms as a little studio. I had my own table and lots of paper and crayons and watercolors. I would sit up there and draw and listen to Mother downstairs, giving her goddamned piano lessons. When she played, the music was nice. When the others played, I hated it; they couldn’t do it right; they were flat or off-key, and this made me draw in the same way, losing whatever it was that I had.

Mother did more than give piano lessons. She had to, to survive, to feed us both, to heat the house, to keep from losing it to the tax collectors. So she took in sewing too, although I don’t know where she went to get it. She certainly didn’t pick it up in the neighborhood. Not Mother. She was too proud for that. Right through the Depression, she still had a colored woman come in once a week to clean. A thin bony woman named Mahalia, who would come to the house when Mother was out and play the colored stations on the radio and dance around. Thin as she was, she had the eyes of a fat woman. Just scared hell out of me. Maybe outside every thin woman there’s a fat one trying to get in. Those damned eyes were greedy, defiant, alarming. You couldn’t make our Mahalia do anything she didn’t want to do and once when I used the word nigger to describe someone else, she slapped my face. Good and hard. I cried and cried, not knowing what I’d done, and then knowing, slowly, when our Mahalia said that she was a woman, a person, colored, but not some damned nigger. I was about ten then, and I didn’t tell my mother ’cause I knew Mahalia was right. I didn’t want Mother taking my side.

Mother kept saying the Depression would be over soon, and then we’d be all right again, but I still don’t know what she meant. It didn’t matter. The Depression never ended, and all she talked about was how hopeless it was, and how even Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal couldn’t end it. Finally, when I was oh, twelve, she took a job in a restaurant. With a pink uniform. Five nights a week. I knew she thought this was a comedown, but she never talked about it; it was as if the humiliation wouldn’t be real if she didn’t mention it. She supported us with the waitress job and the sewing and the piano lessons, although as the Depression went on and on, fewer and fewer little bastards came over to assault the piano. That was good news to me, but terrible for Mother. She even thought it was an aesthetic judgment of some goddamned kind.

She took that waitress job because of me. She was convinced that I had talent, thought I was the greatest artist since Leonardo, or at least since Norman Rockwell. She saved all my drawings and made me date them and framed some of them. She bought me supplies. Nothing was too good for her darling little Miles. And then she enrolled me at the Art Institute in Atlanta, in the kiddie class every Saturday morning. She had to come up with bus money and charcoal and paint money and lunch money. That’s why she started waiting on tables, just telling them at the restaurant (which I never saw, another mystery to be imagined and not touched, smelled, felt or seen) that she could work any day except Saturday.

All through this time, I started to feel odd. Out of it. Weird. You know how I feel about baseball. Well, even then, a kid, I didn’t care for the game, never learned it, never played it with the other kids. I don’t know why. Maybe it was timing. The summer I got scarlet fever, I had to stay home while the other boys were learning and by the time I could go out to the street again, I was already behind. Also, I felt strange, ugly even, with this damned big head, and I couldn’t throw right or something … So I decided I didn’t like the game. But I knew I was ahead in at least one goddamned thing and that was drawing. I had that, and the others didn’t. So when football season came around, I felt the same way as I did about baseball. The same for swimming, too. Mother kept telling me that all the public swimming pools were just filthy breeding grounds for polio, and in some ways she was right. And she warned me that if I played football, I could break my drawing hand, my arm, my shoulder. I wouldn’t be able to do this … thing, this magic thing. This thing of putting marks on paper that made human beings and places and light come to life. She was afraid for me and I was afraid of her being afraid so I never learned any sport. I don’t know how they’re played or how I’m supposed to watch them. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s very sad. But I don’t care. I don’t miss sports at all. They’re of no interest to me.

But I did grow up feeling very strange. No father. No sports. No friends. And this mother who lived to feed me and please me and guide me, this mother who kept a big drafty house just for the two of us.

That Saturday art class changed everything. For the first time I met people who were something like me. The school was a community of oddballs, loners, kids who stayed home to draw instead of throwing rocks at buses or putting pennies on railroad tracks like every American kid is supposed to do. They were from all over the city and some of them had parents who were divorced and one had a father who was dead and another a father who’d just disappeared. We began to feel that people who didn’t make art or have screwed-up families were the real odd ones in this world.

My mother slaved to help me. You know all those clichés about wearing your fingers to the bone? They were true about Mother. The most expensive things were art books. They still are. But our public library was truly rotten, because good art books always have nudes in them and the goddamned ignorant Baptist idiots wouldn’t allow nudes to be shown in a public place. Afraid the whole male population of Marietta would whack themselves into a coma. So Mother bought the books for me. There was hardly a week when she didn’t come home with at least one book or an art magazine. Always on payday. I used to get excited when I woke up on a Friday morning wondering what she’d bring me that night. I suppose when most boys my age were reading the sports pages or comic books, I was reading Walter Pater and the journals of Eugène Delacroix and books about Rubens and Leonardo and Degas. I was copying pictures from these books, trying to discover how they had done what they did. And I was drunk on books about Bohemias. Dreaming about the Left Bank in Paris and Greenwich Village in New York and garrets everywhere. I wanted to leave the town of Marietta, the state of Georgia, the whole goddamned backward South, and join the real artists in some country of art.

When I graduated from high school, I went right into the Art Institute. By then, Mother had saved some money, don’t ask me how. I guess the war changed it. I guess the damned Japanese ended the Depression when they bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, Mother became the most unlikely goddamned Rosie the Riveter in America, but she did it, working at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Marietta, her hair tied up in a kerchief. When the war ended she was hysterical for days. At first I thought it was just panic, that she was terrified that she was going to lose her job and the Depression would come back with all its goddamned horrors. But it wasn’t that at all. Mother had learned that the Enola Gay was built by Martin and so she was sure she’d helped drop The Bomb on Hiroshima. It was as if she’d killed every one of those people, just by slamming a rivet into a tail section. She cried about taking blood money. She told me that now everything would be different, that The Bomb was something new in the world. And then she cried again.

But she saved a lot of the blood money, and when I was ready to go to art school full time she had enough for all the extra expenses. I was doing oils, tempera, learning about casein and gouache, and all of that cost a lot. There were some amazing students there, and plenty of fakers, too. Abstract Expressionism had just been given its name, with a big glossy spread in Life magazine, and every second painter was talking about space and the picture plane and trying to paint like Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. I went my own way. I liked faces, bodies, mood, weather, atmosphere. I loved drawing, not dripping. Maybe I was just afraid to take risks. But I kept going, doing it the older way. It was strange to be out of fashion at eighteen. Still, it was the South; they didn’t really care about all this newfangled stuff from New York. So I had my first show in June of 1950, while I was a junior at the Institute. At a small gallery in Marietta. The pictures were still hanging when the war started in Korea. I was terrified. And furious. I’d grown up believing that World War II would be the last war in the history of the world. Or at least the last American war. I really believed all that crap. And here on this lovely summer day, with my whole life ahead of me, another war had started. In some goddamned place called Korea. Men were dying again, and soon it would be my turn too.

That changed everything, I knew it, and I cried myself to sleep that night in late June when the war began. I felt such a goddamned fool. I’d tried to plan my life. The Depression was over, the war was over, and now we’d have peace forever and live like human beings again. I had it all in the plan. I even wrote it down: art school, then Paris for a year or two, then on to Florence, to embrace the work of the Renaissance masters, learning their secrets. I’d get brown in the sun of Rome. Then, around 1962, I’d return in triumph to the Village and the New York galleries and see my pictures in the museums and the art magazines … I had a plan. Only a stupid romantic fool ever does that.

By winter, men were dying by the thousands and I was ready to be drafted. I started to think about the Navy. I’m not sure why. Probably from looking at all those paintings by Winslow Homer and Turner. Once the notion got into my head, I couldn’t leave it alone. I would lie awake in Marietta, and hear my mother playing the piano (for herself now, the students gone, the money not a problem) and start creating seascapes in my mind. Out at sea, on the bridge of some sleek ship, I would examine the architecture of waves. I would memorize the tones and colors of the sky. Miles Rayfield: on the deck of a great ship.

But it wasn’t just fear of the infantry and the Yalu that pushed me to the Navy. There were other things going on. Some trouble with people at school. And my wife. The details are none of your goddamned business. But one morning I joined the Navy, thinking that it was better than the infantry. Thinking it would get me out of the goddamned South. Thinking I would end up on the bridge of that great ship. It was the stupidest fucking thing I ever did. Now I paint like a pack rat. Hiding in a dark hole. I don’t think I’ll ever see the sun of Rome.

Chapter 31

About four o’clock that afternoon, it started to rain. The sky darkened, all helicopters were grounded. I wrapped my pad and the chalks in some butcher paper and sealed the package with masking tape, and then hitched a ride to the locker club with Larry Parsons. He was big and blond and friendless; he was married and lived off the base and seemed always to be about three beats behind everybody else.

“Where you going with the package?” he said.

“A friend’s house.”

“You have friends down here?”

“Sure, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I guess I do,” he said, in a puzzled way. “To tell the truth, my wife has more friends than I do. She’s real active in the church, so there’s always something doing. Baking contests and clambakes and stuff like that.”

“Sounds great,” I said, and hurried away from him when he stopped at the locker club. I changed clothes quickly and combed my hair in front of the mirror above the sink. I waited inside the door, watching the rain come in from the Gulf in great slanting sheets. Across the highway, Billy’s neon sign seemed to sizzle. Eden Santana. I started rehearsing what I would say to her and what I would do. And then cut myself off. I couldn’t come to her with a lot of rehearsed lines and moves. She’d know. She’d been around longer than I had and she was just too damned smart for me to play-act with her. I remember thinking then about drawing, and how it might make her just an object of my skill, and therefore less scary and unpredictable. I think Miles had shown me how to use the side of the chalk to create form and volume, how to lay out the figure. But I’m really not sure. Had he told me those things before I went to meet Eden? Or was it after? Now: years later: sitting in a parked car, watching the sky darken and older trees heaving and settling in a wet Gulf wind: am I remembering the feeling of that young man standing inside the locker club, or am I inventing him?

There was a sudden honk. Of that I’m certain. I peered out through the rain, and Eden Santana was waving at me through the steamy windows of the Ford. That sight of her still thrills me. She had kept her word. I held the pad close to my body and ran through the spattering mud.

“I didn’t really expect you to be here,” she said, smiling as she opened the door. “This kind of weather … But I decided to come on by anyways. No way to call you. No way for you to call me.”

“I’m glad you came.”

She drove up onto the highway, heading away from the city. It was hard to see. Out beyond the city limits there were no lights on the road and the car’s high beams seemed to bounce off the rain. The Ford’s engine coughed, stammered, but kept going. Eden was smoking hard, and in the gray light her face looked tired. She was wearing the black turtleneck she’d worn in the bus on New Year’s Eve.

“My hair must look like I stuck a finger in an electric socket,” she said, and glanced at me and smiled. When she smiled, she didn’t look tired. Her hair was all wiry and curly.

“It looks great.”

“I always wanted hair like that actress? Lizabeth Scott? Know her? Hair like that. But I guess I lost the hair lottery and there’s nothing’ I can do about it. And when it rains, this damned hair shoots all over the place. Doesn’t matter if I cut it long or short. It just ups and shoots off my head.”

She laughed (and now I hear the nervous trill in her).

“Dumbest damn thing,” she said. “Hair.”

We crossed a bridge over a dark river and then she made a right and the car started kicking up gravel and we were between trees on a one-lane road. The car jerked, rose, fell, slowed, spun its wheels, then moved again, Eden Santana setting her mouth grimly, her hands tight on the wheel. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Son of a goddamn bitch.” Then glanced at me and said, “Sorry.” And pulled into a cleared place, with tall trees rising high about us. “I’ll get as close as I can,” she said, pulling around to the left, then jerking gears, backing up. “This is the best we can do.”

She turned off the engine, and I could see better now. We were in front of a long house trailer. The body of the trailer was blue, the trim silver. Flowers sprouted in pots out front, bending under the rain.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ll make a run for it.”

She ran through the mud to the trailer, the Sears jacket over her head, stood on a step and unlocked the door. We went in, and she reached behind me to slam it shut, then turned the lock and flicked on a light.

“It’s not much,” she said, “but it’s cozy.”

There were flowers everywhere: in dirt-filled earthen pots, in ceramic jars, in glass milk bottles filled with water. They were on the counter beside the sink, and on top of the small regrigerator and on the window shelves, pressed against drawn blinds. There were geraniums in a jar on top of a small table that jutted out from the wall. The smell in the trailer was sweet and close, full of the rain.

“Some sailor bought the trailer after the war and then got sent to sea duty when Korea happened and he’s been rentin’ it out ever since,” she said. “Only thirty-five dollars a month. They wanted more but I got it cheap ’cause this is, well, mostly a colored neighborhood out here.” I felt thick, large, as I watched her take a hanger from a shallow closet, slip the wet Sears jacket on it, then carry it into a small john and hang it up to dry. I thought If I try to help, if I dare to move, I will knock down a flowerpot and make a mess.

“Hey, almost forgot …”

She turned a knob on the gas stove and moved a fat iron pot over the low flame.

“Made some gumbo for you last night,” she said. “Thought you might be hungry for some good home cookin’, after all that Navy stuff. Gumbo’s always best the second night.”

She looked at me awkwardly, and that relieved me; she was probably feeling as clumsy in her way as I was in mine. Then she excused herself and went into the bathroom. I stood there, waiting, uncertain; all I could hear was the rain drumming on the roof — a steady, lulling sound that was mixed with the drowsy odor of the flowers. I ran my hands through my hair, trying to make it stand up (I see that boy now, hair pasted to his skull, dripping, without sideburns or a beard, entering for the first time this special world). She came back from the bathroom and motioned me into a chair. Then she went to the small refrigerator and took out lettuce, onions, and tomatoes and started making a salad, her hands quick and strong, pulling the lettuce leaves apart, slicing the tomatoes, adding oil, vinegar, salt. She popped two slices of whole-wheat bread into a toaster. Her hands never stopped moving, and she talked briskly, even nervously (thus relaxing me more), now tossing the salad, then stirring the gumbo, while I looked at her bare feet.

She was smaller than I had first thought, and she had wide feet. I felt vaguely aroused by the padding sound they made on the linoleum floor. She fired questions at me, quickly, breathlessly, making me talk. She wanted to know where I went to school and what my parents were like and the names of my brothers; she was sorry about my mother. She seemed pleased that I was brought up a Catholic (“They sure do have beautiful music …”). She ladled the gumbo into white bowls, and the aroma was pungent, strong, thick with crab and shrimp and rice, and she pushed the toast down into the toaster and brought the salad to me on a plate, then did the same for herself. I waited until she sat down facing me and then began to eat in a greedy way. “Don’t use salt, child,” she said. “Everything’s salted. And besides, I noticed you use too much salt anyway.”

She had been watching and found a flaw; you use too much salt anyway. I’d never thought about salt before; I just used it, on eggs and meat and salad. I slowed down, glancing at her, trying to match her movements; I didn’t know much about what was then called etiquette. At home, it didn’t matter how I used knives and forks; in the Navy they had too many other rules and regulations to inflict upon us first. So I decided to follow her lead. I watched the way she ate the gumbo. I didn’t touch the salt. Somehow a faint odor of her perfume got mixed in with the fragrance of the soup, and the trailer turned all female and closed and lovely, the flower scents filling the air too and the rain hammering at the roof. She wanted to know about New York, and whether there really was a chance there for everybody to make good. I tried to answer, tried to sound casual; I didn’t tell her that I’d only been to two Broadway plays in my life, that Brooklyn was different from Manhattan, and that I didn’t know what chance anybody had to make good, since it hadn’t happened to anyone I knew. Including me. Instead, I started talking about the Paramount and the Metropolitan Museum and Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, places I’d read about in Walter Winchell’s column in the Mirror or heard about on the radio. She listened to my vaguely fraudulent answers and asked more questions, and all the time I was thinking about what would happen if she posed for me, and when I should begin the session by taking the drawing pad out of its wrapper. I wanted the meal to last for hours so I wouldn’t have to deal with the next move and its astonishments.

“I guess New York has just about everything you’d ever want to see,” I heard myself saying. “Everything.”

“Well, not everything,” she said. “I’d like to see the pyramids in Egypt.”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t you?” she said. “Imagine what it would be like to see where they found King Tut and all his treasures. See the Spinx.” That’s how she said it: The Spinx. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “You know, I’d like to see all the Seven Wonders of the World. All of them!” She paused. “I guess that’s pretty far-fetched. But I saw them in an encyclopedia once, all the Seven Wonders, and I couldn’t even name them now. But I could read up on them again, make a list, and even if I never saw them, I sure would like to dream about them …”

Do I see the boy relaxing at last? Michael Devlin has eaten, he is full, he has avoided all additional use of salt. And listening to her he thinks: She isn’t that much older that I am, is she? There she was in the trailer, talking straight to me, not performing on some date, not angling for some extravagant trip to a prom, certainly not trying to look like a movie star. She pushed her chair back, relaxed, crossed one leg over another, lit a cigarette.

And I had discovered I could hold my own with her in conversation. She was older than I was, but I was sure there were things I knew that she didn’t. I couldn’t name the Seven Wonders of the World either, but I felt as she talked about them that I was sitting with someone my own age, the two of us in awe at the unknowable mysteries of the world. She got up and made coffee and then I started feeling nervous again. She cleared the table, laid her cigarette in an ashtray and ran hot water over the dishes, her face very concentrated. She dried her hands on a dish towel and waited a long moment, her back to me, staring into the sink. Then she took a deep breath, exhaled, turned to me and smiled.

“Well, I guess I’d better get ready for the posing,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and reached for the package. “I have my stuff.” Panicking. “But you know, if you’re too tired or something, you don’t—”

“I never done something like this in my life before,” she said quietly. She turned and looked around the small crowded trailer, at the couchlike bed at the far end. “That’s why I want to do it.”

“Look,” I said nervously, “if you don’t want to—”

“You’re more nervous than I am, ain’t you, child?”

“Well, no, I just—”

“You ever done this before? The truth …”

“No.”

“Then I guess we both better go ahead, huh?”

She turned then, padding on her wide bare feet into the bedroom area. She closed the drapes behind her. I took out the pad and chalks and laid them on top of the counter that separated the dining area from the sleeping quarters. I had to dry my hands on my trousers. The rain hammered down and the air felt wetter and thicker. I thought: We’re using all the oxygen, we should open a window. Better: We should leave. We might smother. I can do this some other time. Suppose I can’t draw her? I could freeze, could lose what I think I can do, could botch it, could be exposed as a fraud. Before I even got to really know her, she could find me out. I certainly couldn’t draw her the way Miles could. But then, what does she look like? If I. If she. What if.

The curtain parted. She stepped out in an oversized man’s shirt. Her hair was wild and electric. She looked at me and her face darkened into a blush. She covered one foot with the other, and suddenly seemed very young.

“What do you want me to do?” she murmured.

“Well, maybe — why don’t you just sit there on the couch, and I’ll move this stool over here, and — You want your cigarettes?”

“No, I don’t want to smoke while I’m — how’s this?”

She sat on the couch bed, and pulled a couple of pillows up beside her and leaned one arm on them.

“Great, yeah, that’s it, nice and relaxed.”

“Should I take this off?”

Cool, said Michael Devlin to himself. You’ve gotta be cool. Like Doagie Hogan, like Canyon or Sawyer, like Charlie Parker. It’s like drawing bottles or fruit or a mountain. And answered, staring at the chalk, its blackness on his thumb and forefinger: “If you want.”

She unbuttoned the shirt and wiggled out of the sleeves and let it fall behind her. There it is, skin and tits, flesh and nipples and hair, her body before me. She crossed her arms over her breasts for a moment, almost instinctively. Then she lifted one leg and let the other dangle off the edge of the bed and shrugged her shoulders as if loosening her muscles. “There,” she said. No panties bra garter-belts girdles no slip no dress no trousers just her before me in this small tight place and the rain and the flowers too. “That should be okay.”

I stopped breathing. I didn’t want to exhale, to let her hear me reacting to her nakedness, her lush woman’s body. O Catholic boy: as if it were all right to take pleasure as long as it was not expressed. This was no boyish angular body like that of the girls at home (touched smelled brushed against but never feasted upon), or the body of a fashion model in some magazine, with all her bones sticking out. Womenflesh. I started to draw almost frantically, blocking in the ripe breasts, the strong lean shoulders, trying to get the taut skin stretched properly across her belly. Her breasts and hips were much lighter than the rest of her body. Except, of course, for her nipples. Face skin and back skin and leg skin and arm skin had been glazed by the sun. But now I was seeing clearly what I’d only glimpsed that night on the beach: the lighter skin, the indoor skin. She had a thick mat of jet-black curly pubic hair, curlier than the hair on her head, glistening in the light as if it were wet. Look boy look at her pussy her box her snatch her cunt. I was trying desperately to keep from getting an erection. Seven heads, I told my hand. Get the head right and the proportions will follow. Don’t make a big deal out of her breasts or she’ll think you’re obsessed with them. Jesus Christ her tits right here right there. Those full round breasts, with their dark-brown nipples. Get the legs right. Make it right. Make it beautiful. The arc of her instep. The long curving neck.

She was looking at me calmly now, the blush off her cheeks, watching me in a fascinated way. I used the vine charcoal for all the basics: the shape, the form, a thin outline. It broke three times in my hand, too frail for my ferocious pressure. Then I switched to the blacker charcoal, making her eyes, using the side of the chalk for shading, digging in for the black hair on her head and between her legs. I smoothed out the hard edges with my fingers, smeared her legs to try to get flesh tones, and then, looking at her, and looking at the drawing, I saw there was nothing more to add. One more mark and I would botch it. I tore the drawing off the pad and laid it on the kitchen counter.

“You can change positions,” I said, trying to sound like a cool-eyed professional. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to see the first drawing. She shifted, letting one leg fall flat, her back against the wall of the trailer now. She shivered. “Damn wall’s cold,” she said. “How’s this?” She put her head back. I could see a thin scar about three inches long under her jaw. White against her dark skin. There was another scar just above the great black V, smaller but more raw that the one on her jawbone. “Fine,” I said, but thinking that this time she was posing instead of being natural, as if remembering pinups she’d seen somewhere; still, I was afraid that if I said I didn’t like the pose, she’d take it as criticism, the way I reacted to her line about salt. Ah, the little lies … “Just swell,” I said, and she closed her eyes. I drew more carefully. She had very long lashes.

“What are you drawing now?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.

“Your neck,” I said.

She ran a hand down her neck as I was shading the same place in my drawing.

“And now?”

“Your clavicle,” I said. “You know, at the base of your neck? Goes across from shoulder to shoulder.”

She ran a single finger along the clavicle. Then paused.

She was breathing in a different way. Her eyes were still closed.

“What about now?” she whispered.

“Breasts.”

She ran her hand around her breasts, from one to the other, feeling their shape and form, caressing them as if they belonged to someone else. Then she took both nipples gently between her thumbs and forefingers. I tried to draw. Getting hard.

“And?”

“Belly.”

Her hand moved over her belly, eyes closed tight, examining the hard pads of muscle, the concave dip. And then she pressed the heel of her hand above the blackness.

“You better get over here, child.”

She guided me into the tight wet channel, the light off now, the rain pounding down, arms around my back, squeezing my cock inside her. “Don’t move,” she whispered. And squeezed again, as if wanting to remember the feel of it, its size and thickness and pulsing presence. I was afraid to move, and then she moved, pressing against me, and I moved, six, eight times, all the way into the tight emptiness, and once more, and then exploded, shuddering, a hoarse involuntary cry coming from me, with Eden Santana holding me tight and squeezing me, and pushing hard against me until I was done. I eased away from her, feeling the fool. A crude kid who couldn’t hold it back. A boy who shot his load faster than a man ever would. But she held my head in her hands and kissed me on the mouth and whispered “You’re so big.” And told me “You’re so strong.” And kissed me again and then slipped away and went into the bathroom. Water ran. I couldn’t believe I was there. This wasn’t Dixie with her savage old eyes and hungry mouth. This was Eden Santana. Who was beautiful. And then she was back with a hot washcloth, bathing my cock and my balls, the hotness of the cloth like a second cunt. We lay there side by side for a long time, her arms around me, saying nothing, the flower smell very strong and the rain falling. And after a while she turned my head to hers and kissed me again and then I felt her hand lightly on my chest and she pinched my nipples, little stabbing pinpoints of pain, and she touched my flat belly and then my cock and I was hard again and the rain still falling. She lay on her side with one knee raised and delicately rubbed the head of my cock against the lips of her cunt, her breath coming in short quickening gasps, and then she whispered, “Now” and I was in her again and her body was convulsing and I drove into her and she moaned and I rammed harder and she groaned deeply and then her voice was rising with the rain still falling and she dug her fingers into my ass, kissing me wetly, rubbing her tongue on my face and eyes, making panting sounds and then a long high-pitched sound and still I kept going, driving away into her, her legs up high now, the wide feet flat against the low roof of the trailer and I kept going and going and going until everything in me exploded and convulsed and I could feel each part of myself bone muscle fiber blood plunging down and out of me and she screamed one last triumphant time while the rain still fell through the dark sky.

She dressed quietly, pulling on high rubber fishing boots and a yellow slicker. I looked at her, wishing I’d drawn more, knowing now what was beneath the clothes and thrilled by the private knowledge but wishing I had a record. I liked her in clothes too, tossing her hair, about to plunge again into the storm to drive me back to the locker club. She turned to me and smiled. What do you think of me now woman tell the truth did I fuck you well or are you just being polite tell me tell me now tonight not tomorrow. Her face seemed to glow in the soft light.

“We better hurry, child,” she said hoarsely. “You’ll be late.”

She opened the door and the wind blew it shut again. I pushed against it, held it open. The rain was still falling in sheets, hurling itself loudly at the trees and echoing off unseen water. “That’s a lake out there,” she said, pointing at the darkness behind the trailer. “Little bitty lake, almost a pond, so small it don’t have a name … Runs into the River Styx, if you could believe that name.”

We dashed to the car, slamming the trailer door behind us. I got in on the passenger side and she slipped behind the wheel, dripping with rain. Go ahead ask her how was it how was the fuck the second fuck not the first one ask ask. She started the car.

“The River Styx?” I said (making talk instead of the real talk). “Isn’t that the river of death?”

“In Egypt, maybe,” she said, “Or Greece, but not in the goddamned Florida Panhandle. That’s for damn sure. I figure they just didn’t know how to spell sticks. S-t-i-c-k-s. That’s the way they should of named it, cause this is where we are. Out in the damn sticks.”

She laughed hard and it was tough for me to imagine her doing all these things, running to the car, starting it, getting the windshields wiping, joking about the River Styx, after what we’d done in the trailer. She behaved as if we’d just left a movie. But I felt different. Not just in my teeming head. I felt as if my body was heavier and lighter at the same time, as if my skin had been stripped off and replaced, as if I was twenty years older and had just been born. All at once. There was no sign of any such extravagant change on her face, but in the tight, packed air of the car there was one difference and I couldn’t define it.

“I smell like sex, don’t I?” she said, and smiled. She must have sensed my awareness and how little I knew. Certainly she told me what it was in the car. “Haven’t smelled this way in a long, long time.”

And (Michael you dumbass kid you former virgin you schmuck) I thought: Who made you smell this way last time? And where? And when? Husband lover sailor Mercado bus driver friend who? But said: “It’s a good beautiful smell.”

And believed it.

“I’m glad you think so.”

Now she was bumping up and down over the gravel road, the wheels spinning, the high beams trying to penetrate the driving rain. And then I saw a black man on the corner, before we turned out to the highway. He was under a tree, holding an umbrella. It was Bobby Bolden.

“Wait,” I said. “Pull over. That’s a guy from the base. Guy I know.”

She paused, as if thinking this over. Then sighed: “Okay.” And pulled across the highway onto the shoulder and waited. She rolled down the window. “He’s gonna know what we been doin’, child.”

But it was too late. Bolden came over, slowly and carefully, looking at the car, peering at us. “Prob’ly thinks we’re the damn Klan,” she said. “Come on, man.”

Then Bolden saw my face and nodded and began to fold the umbrella while I opened the back door.

“Thanks,” he said, getting in.

“She’s droppin’ us at the locker club,” I said. “After that, we’re on our own.”

“Just change your clothes fast, I’ll drive to the gate,” Eden said. “Otherwise you’ll turn into pumpkins.”

“Okay,” Bobby said.

We drove to the locker club in silence, Eden Santana leaning over the wheel, squinting into the rain. She pulled around in front of the club and Bolden and I jumped out. In the club, I remembered: I left the goddamned pad and the chalks in the trailer. That meant I couldn’t show the drawings to Miles. And thought: Just as well. They were probably terrible. And I didn’t want anyone asking who the woman was. None of them. This was secret. Mine. Private. In the small tight trailer with the rain and the flowers. I pulled on my whites, hung up the civvies. Bolden was already waiting inside the door in uniform.

“Sure you want this?” he said.

“Want what?”

“Some fuckin’ cracker jarhead libel to hassle our asses. Woman like that drivin’ a black man home.”

“Come on.”

She drove us to the gate. Bolden got out first and hurried into the gatehouse. It was a minute to midnight.

“When can I see you again?” I said quickly.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I gotta think about this, child. What happened tonight, well, it happened. But—”

“Saturday,” I said. “Please. We can talk about it then. I got about a minute left and then I’m AWOL. Please …”

“Sunday,” she said. There was doubt in her face but she squeezed my hand. “Ten in the morning. We’ll have us a picnic.”

I kissed her on the cheek and sprinted to the gate, showed my Liberty Pass to the guard. He glanced at the clock.

“Playin’ it fine, ain’t you, sailor?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Bolden came over.

“The man’s here, jarhead,” he said. “He don’t need no lectures from you.”

He took my elbow and opened the umbrella and we hurried into the rain, heading for the barracks. I glanced back and saw Eden’s taillights stopped at the highway. Going home. Bolden looked at me and shook his head.

“You are a sly motherfucker, boy,” he said.

Chapter 32

That night, with the world sleeping under the Gulf rain, Bobby Bolden took me to the Negro barracks above the mess hall, the great long room that they all called the Kingdom of Darkness. At the near end, inside the door, there were tables and chairs and a four-burner gas stove, pots and pans and dishes and a refrigerator. The bunks and lockers were at the other end. The room was crowded with black sailors and a few Filipinos and loud with music. The close, humid air smelled of frying bacon. Bolden explained that the messcooks had keys to the galley and the food lockers and did their own cooking upstairs. “They work when everyone else eats,” he said, “so they get to eat whenever they want to. Like now.”

There were heavy blackout shades on all the windows and weather stripping on the doors to keep the sound from flying around the base. A big noisy air conditioner filled one window. (“They chipped in f’that,” Bolden said. “Sounds like a C-47, don’t it?”) When I walked in, Freddie Harada looked up from a book and waved hello and went back to his reading (the Philippines only four years into independence and the Huks fighting in the mountains of Luzon while the Navy still treated them like colonial subjects, fit only to be messcooks or valets). Then Bobby Bolden introduced me to the others; there were a lot of oh-yeahs, heard-’bout-yous, so Bolden must have prepared them. I wondered what he’d said about me: The ofay that thinks he knows music, the white boy from New York, the storekeeper with the fresh mouth. But it couldn’t have been too bad. They smiled as we shook hands and I tried to use a mental shorthand, matching physical things against names so if I got the names mixed up they wouldn’t think I believed all Negroes looked alike.

So here was Tampa (red hair, thin arms, a swell of belly) and Lightnin’ (lone gold tooth, short, muscular, trim) and Rhode Island Freddie (big and fat with processed hair and a pencil moustache) and Bumper (thin lips and horn-rimmed glasses) and Little Elroy (bald, huge, a tattoo of a nude woman on his coffee-colored chest). Others were sleeping, drifting around the bunks or out on the town, but this was the basic crew in the Kingdom of Darkness. On that night, as on all the others that followed, Rhode Island Freddie was doing the cooking, his T-shirt very white against his skin, and the others resembled football players in a locker room before a game, jiving, shouting, saying terrible things about one another’s mothers and moving, consciously or not, and sometimes sitting down, to the music. A singer named Lloyd Price was calling:

And they were singing the chorus with him while I was handed a beer and a plate of bacon and eggs — I no longer felt gorged with gumbo; emptied, in fact, by what happened after — and Freddie Harada came down to me and asked how I was feeling and I said great, great (the smell of sex on me too, but nobody here knew except Bolden) and Rhode Island Freddie asked me did I ever go to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and I said no, never been there, wasn’t old enough, but I’d hung out on 52d Street, I’d heard Tatum play piano through the open doors of the Club Ibis and saw Billie Holiday once coming out of a limousine (with a white guy, but I didn’t say that) and then I looked up and Bobby Bolden was taking his horn out of its case and Rhode Island Freddie said, Here we go.

Bolden blew honking comments on the Lloyd Price tune (which they played again and then again), making dirty sounds in the lower register, his tone fat and sweaty, everybody singing now, and Bolden playing in and out of the words, Lawdy lawdy lawdy, Miss Clawdy and the record falling again on the thick plug of a 45-rpm player and I finished the beer and someone handed me another one and then the music changed and it was Fats Domino singing Goin home tomorrow. Can’t stand your evil ways … Goin home, tomorrow, Can’t stand your evil ways … (no picture of him in my head, ’cause this was the time of Patti Page and Joni James and Jo Stafford and Johnnie Ray, the last year of Tin Pan Alley, the last year of white-bread American music, the last year before rock ’n’ roll) and then the guy named Bumper said this was some song, black man up north working in some factory, tired of all the bullshit, wants to come home to the South. And Little Elroy laughed and said, “Shit, Bum-puh, I tho’t this was about the muthafuckin Navy!”

While Bobby Bolden played on.

They kept drinking and eating and making a hundred little moves to the music. There was a record called “She Aint Got No Hair” by a group called Professor Longhair and the Shufflin Hungarians (“He puttin on the world, man,” said Tampa. “Fess ain’t no fuckin Hungarian, he just a nigger lak us”) and a tune by Roy Brown and his Mighty Mighty Men called “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and another one, same guy, “Cadillac Baby,” and a sad, wailing, heartbroken song called “Trouble at Midnight.” I remember feeling instantly changed, the way I’d felt with Eden in the trailer; I was one Michael Devlin before and another Michael Devlin afterward. I’d never heard this music before; it was all about balling, drinking and fucking up and it worked off a back beat of some kind, not 4/4 time or the kinds of mixed tempos the beboppers played on Symphony Sid. “Don’t Roll Them Bloodshot Eyes at Me” another guy was shouting (Wynonie Harris, but I didn’t know that then), while Bobby Bolden honked, and I opened another beer, feeling like I’d been granted a passport into a different world. Someone brought a steak to Bobby Bolden and he stopped playing. He saw me sitting on the edge of a bunk and came over. The music was thinner without his horn.

He watched Tampa doing a tight, intricate series of steps to an up-tempo honking shouter. I told him I liked the music.

“It sure ain’t Ben Webster, but, you know, it’s alive, man. Party music. Fuck music. Right outta the blues, with a little sound of the church in there too. You gotta hear it in a club. Like in Biloxi, or a place like Macon. Or the Dew Drop Inn over New Orleans … Go to some black joints. Drink some corn likker. Smoke some reefer. Then you really hear it. These records, they don’t get it right. Sound like they playin’ in a field. No bottom. No breath. No feel …”

He leaned back, looking drowsy and satisfied. Fats Domino was playing again. I was trying to absorb what he was saying, to understand it, above all, to remember. And I felt cut off from other parts of my life. Eden. The Navy.

“What’d Red Cannon do if he walked in here?”

“He don’t come here.”

“Why not?”

“Cause we’d eat the mothafucka.”

He laughed.

“I’d pay to see that,” I said.

“Don’t take his shit,” Bobby Bolden said.

“It’s not his shit I worry about. It’s the Navy’s shit.”

“Don’t take that either.”

He was finished eating. Then he faced me, while the music pounded.

“How come you picked me up out there in the boondocks?”

“You were standing in the rain, man.”

“So what? You in a car drove by a woman and you pick up a black man … Could get yissef killed.”

“From what I hear, you could get yourself killed any night of the week.”

He was suddenly suspicious. “Who you hear that from?”

“You know, the general gouge around the base.”

“What they say, exactly?”

“I don’t know exactly. Just Bobby Bolden got himself a white woman …”

“You mean, that nigger Bobby Bolden got a white woman,” he said, his voice hardening.

“I didn’t hear it put that way.”

“Then you ain’t hearin’ too good, boy.”

“Let’s make a deal,” I said with some heat. “You don’t call me boy and I won’t call you boy.”

He looked at me as if he were going to strike me. And then he laughed.

“You got a mouth.”

“That’s what Red Cannon says.”

“Okay, man. I hear you.”

Chapter 33

I’m from Naptown, up north, Indianapolis, where we got all the seasons, includin winter. I grew up shoveling snow, sleighridin, slidin on trashcan covers down hills; just like a million other kids; just like you. But I love the South, spite of all the cracker bullshit, cause it’s hot. In the summer here, it’s so hot you can’t breathe. You see snow here every forty years, they say, and that’s all right with me. I don’t even like seein pictures of snow, I don’t even like ice in a drink anymore. I see snow now, I go to bed. When the snow’s gone, I rise from the dead. And that goes back to Korea. Everything goes back to Korea.

But shit, I’m gettin ahead of myself here. You want to know who I am and I talk about snow. Maybe Korea scrambled my brains. Maybe lots of things scramble your brains, though women do the best job of all.

Anyway, back home in Naptown we dint think much about color. Up to the war, the big war, we lived pretty integrated. They was white kids on my street. I played with them, they played with me. Played in the school band with white kids too. Trumpet then. The attitude was, you got red hair, I got black skin, so what? Then it start to change. Dune the war, lots more black people start comin up from the South, to work in the war jobs. They just wasn’t any new housin being built and black folks start doublin up in the black houses and then the whites start to move away. They never did say why, although my daddy said it was simple, that it was all right when they was more of them than they was of us, but when it started bein more of us than they was of them, they decided to move on outta there. And then the shit started. Little shit. Like we got our textbooks all marked up, used textbooks, while the white schools, they got them new. We cuddin get the streets fixed, the sewers, that kind of shit. Without even knowin how it happened, we ended up in a ghetto, except for a few real old white people that cuddin move.

So I start to thinkin about going away. I was the oldest of the kids, seventeen and a senior in high school, but I had a cousin, Charlie Neal his name was. And he was messcookin in the Navy and I liked the way he looked on leave, all sharp and shit, and one night at a party, I toked to him about joinin up. This was just after the war, ’47, ’48, and I was listenin to all the players on the radio and thinkin, Hey, man, I could go to New York and try and play at Minton’s with like, Bird and Dizzy, or I could go in the Navy and get the GI Bill and really learn the instrument, learn harmony and composition, become a great fuckin musician. I had to make up my mind. Just go for it, you know, go try to play with all these monsters in the Apple, which scairt me shitless. Or really prepare myself. Only way I could afford music school was the Bill. But when I thought about the Navy, I just dint like the idea of cookin for white folks for four fuckin years. Dint wanna be no messcook, no domestic in a uniform.

But there was another problem, you know what I’m sayin to you? At this same time, I got myself some trouble. A girl I knew got herself knocked up and her father and her brothers are lookin for me, comin around the block, lookin to shoot me or make me marry her. Either way, I’m dead. You see, I just dint love the girl. I felt sorry for her but I dint think that was too good a reason to marry a woman. So after Charlie Neal left and I had some more time to think (a couple of hours to tell the truth) I went downtown and walked around the block and then toked to the guy, the recruiter, and he says, you know, the Navy is different now, it’s integrated, you dont have to be a messcook, you could be a musician.… So I joined up.

Trouble was when I get through boot camp, they tell me all the music rates are filled up, there’s like a waitin list all the way to 1958, but if I dint want to go messcookin, hell, I could be a corpsman. Workin with doctors … I figure, Hey, why not? At least I’d learn something I could use on the outside, in case the music thing dint work out. And I could practice, keep listenin to the new music, keep readin my Down Beat and Metronome, maybe play with some bands wherever I ended up. Yeah.

So I go to corpsman school. I learn the job is the same as a nurse, but hey, what the hell, it’s a start. I mean, wasn’t Dexter Gordon’s father a doctor? And Miles Davis, his old man was a dentist. Maybe there was some connection.… I work in Jacksonville. A year goes by. I see a little of Gitmo and those fine Cuban women and some great mambo bands, great horn players. And then Korea happens.

Bam.

Like that.

They assign me to the First Marines, cause they’s a shortage of Marine corpsmen, they gettin the shit shot out of them, cause wherever there’s a medic there’s shooting and bleedin and dyin. By November, I’m the only sailor with this Marine company and we’re climbin through the snow and ice in X Corps. Up by the Chosin Reservoir. All of us freezin, strung out over forty fuckin miles. We couldn’t dig foxholes cause the ground was like iron. It was seventeen below zero in a place called Kato. And it got colder as we kept going, heading for the fuckin Yalu, heading for fuckin China for all we knew. I remember we come into a town called Yudan that the artillery wrecked, just blew the piss out of it. They was an old lady sitting there, cryin. Cryin and freezin and singing something in Korean, a gook blues, I reckon. And they was nothin we could do. We cuddin bring her with us, not where we were goin, and she cuddin go back. They was no back. So we just left her to die.

To fuckin die.

Alone in the cold.

We were wearin so much shit — long johns, hoods, parkas — that we’d sweat like hell, and when we stopped walkin the sweat froze. A few guys took they socks off and tore the skin away with them. In that cold, feet froze to boots. In that cold, if you touched the M-1 with your bare hands, the skin come off. Even the BARs froze. Some guys pissed on their guns to make them work and other guys started greasin them with Wildroot Cream Oil. Or Kreml. That fuckin Kreml was the best, all white and pearly and thick.

The night of the Big Cold, we’re in the dark on Hill 403 when we start hearin the voices, short quick voices, know what I mean? Not Korean voices, we knew them by now. Chinese voices. And somebody says, they can’t be Chinese, the Chinese ain’t in this thing and we ain’t in fuckin China. But a little after ten, they come at us. The Chinese. They lay down a mortar barrage and start blowing their fuckin bugles, all flat and out of tune, just blowing like crazy, and they was waves of them, all lumpy like, in their white clothes, comin through the fuckin snow. Comin over the ice. Comin at us.

The Marines shot them and shot them and shot them and they still kept comin. They was blood all over the snow and they still kept coming. One crazy fuckin Marine, his bolt froze and he stands up and throws the rifle at them and they shot him through the belly. And then they were on us, only nine of us left on that fuckin hill, and they wasn’t time to help the wounded, all you could do was try to live. So we fight them with everything. Trenchin tools. Spades. Knives. Bayonets. Them frozen fuckin unshootable fuckin guns.

Then one of their bugles blows and they all start to leave. Like that. Whoever that fuckin horn player was, I loved his ass. They was wounded guys everywhere and I did what I cud. The morphine Syrettes was frozen. The fuckin plasma froze and then the plasma bottles started explodin from the cold. We had fifty-four guys wounded, and a bunch of other guys dead. We went to scavenge among the dead Chinese for weapons. I almost shit when I saw what they had. They were fightin us with 1903 Springfields. We had the latest guns and they froze in that cold. They were fightin us with the equal of a bow and arrow. And kickin ass. Right then and there, I wanted to run. We all did. Just get off that goddamned hill and go somewhere. But we cuddin go anywhere. The orders were to hold the hill to keep the road open, down below us in the valley. That was it. Wait for reinforcements.

So we drag the Chinese bodies over and make a wall out of them and we fill sleeping bags with snow and lay them out on the slopes. The wind was blowing hard and it was colder. And that night they came again with their bugles and we just kept shootin and shootin. We shot them while they were bayonetin the sleepin bags. And we shot them when they came close to overrunnin us again. We just kept shootin. I think I shot nineteen of them. I never did see one of their faces. And then, just like that, they went away again. And an hour later here comes some more Marines, fifty, a hundred of them, another outfit cut off and fightin its way out. They were as fucked up as we were. It gets lighter, day coming, the sky gray as steel. An air-drop comes over at dawn and drops ammo and food and drugs, all we need, and I shoot up the worst wounded with morphine and bandage the others.

The Chinese stayed away a whole day and I began to think: maybe I’m gonna live. Cause for three fuckin days, I knew I was gonna die up there. Just knew it. And then I did die. Just let myself die. Knowing there was nothing to do about it. But now I got to thinking I was gonna live, and for the first time I got scared. Before I was just doin. Now I was thinkin. And I was afraid, I didn’t want to die, didn’t want to feel it, wanted to live and go home and play music and get laid. I didn’t want to freeze in my own piss, or wait for the fuckin Chinese to come and kill me. I heard later that’s what they did in their army. Fight two days, rest one. But we didn’t know that up on that goddamned hill. We shivered. We ate crackers. We ate snow. We waited to hear the Chinese bugles.

Then we hear we are leavin. A strategic withdrawal, they called it. Advancin in another direction, some Marine said later. But everyone knew it was a retreat. All up and down the line, the Chinese had beat the shit out of us and we were pullin out. We wunt going to the Yalu, we wunt going to fuckin China, no matter what MacArthur said. We were gettin the fuck out of there. And they was only one road, one way out, and we knew it and so did the Chinese. Somehow we buried the dead. Eighty-five of them. Still up there at Yudam. The men from Fox Company of the second Battalion of the Seventh Regiment. Still in Korea. Forever.

So we start out, with some trucks below us now on the road and more trucks comin and more and more fucked-up Marines staggerin outta the hills. We strap some of the worst wounded across the radiators of the trucks to keep them from freezin to death. Sometimes we cuddin tell who was dead and who was alive. You cuddin get a pulse, it was so fuckin cold. We cuddin change their dressins either. So right off, I learn that if the guy’s eyes move, he’s alive. If the eyes don’t move, fuck him, leave him.

The guys who were walking had diarrhea and they eyes was crazy but they kept movin. They wanted to live. To fuckin live. To get off the ice, to get to the warm, to go home. I cuddin feel my own feet. I just kept movin them. Tokin to them, sayin move, mothafucker, like Stepin fuckin Fetchit. Keep goin, feet, get me to the promised land, keep me alive.… We had some of the wounded on trucks on top of parachutes, tied on with primer cord. And we come to a bridge and start over and then the fuckin bridge collapsed. We all back up, but one truck went into the river. A half-frozen river, full of ice. And two of these crazy mothafuckin Marines dive into the river and rescued those guys. Cut em loose from the primer cord. Drug em up on the bank. Let them live. That’s why nobody can tell me no shit about Marines, man. I mean, I don’t take no crap from them, specially some rearguard asshole pullin guard duty in Florida. But I don’t give them no shit either. They dive into frozen rivers, man.

We got close to Hagaru on December third. That was a pretty good-size town. It was snowing like a bitch and we stop on a hill just outside the town. Then, through the snow, we see planes on a runway and an American flag and tents and trucks and so we know, shit, we fuckin made it, we might actually fuckin live. And then those crazy mothafuckin Marines got in drill formation. All shot up and hurt and frozen. And they march into that town, countin fuckin cadence. One captain had most of his fuckin jaw shot off. He had so many bandages around his head he looked like a mummy. But he walked, man. Marching. In step. Proud. The crazy mothafuckin Marines.

I dint even know I was shot till then. Frostbite, dehydration, shot in the left thigh, the hip. I don’t remember nothin about how that happened. I for shitsure wunt trying to be no hero. I was just trying to live, even that real bad coldass night I was sure I died. Yeah, I killed some guys. I must of. I don’t know how many. I dint take no names. I was just shooting, like every other poor mothafucka on the hill.

You think that changed me? Bet your sweet ofay ass it did. I come home knowin I wunt ever gonna take shit again. Never gonna be the white man’s nigger. Even if that meant everybody makes me to be a troublemaker. I went to Korea. I did my so-called fuckin duty to America. Nobody gonna tell me how to live anymore. No cracker. No bowin an scrapin Uncle Tom black man. Nobody. Whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, I’m an American and I’m gonna start livin like one. I got six months to go in the Navy. In September I go to school somewhere, on the GI Bill, a free man. Music school.

Somewhere warm.

Somewhere hot.

Chapter 34

The rain was over when I went out into the night to find my way to the barracks. I felt gorged: with food and with Eden; with this newer, raunchier, dirtier, music; with the intimate opening into the lives of what I still called Negroes. I was full of images of the frozen dead in Korea too. And with the rich loamy smell of the wet earth.

I walked along the footpaths and as the clouds moved on, I could see the stars. Men my age had died because plasma froze in bottles, but I was alive. Men slept here in these barracks, wifeless and womanless, but I had found Eden Santana. I felt as if I could reach out and gather the stars in my hand, pack them loosely like some cosmic snowball and release them again into the universe.

“Come over here, sailor,” a voice said.

A figure in officer’s suntans was squatting down at the side of the gedunk. His back was to me, but I knew it was Captain Pritchett. He looked up.

“Give me a hand, here,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and wondered if I should salute and decided not to. He was digging in the earth around a bush. There was a large empty earthenware pot beside him. He handed me a small digging tool.

“Now dig on that side, see? But don’t hit the roots. I’m gonna save this baby.”

I started digging carefully in the dim light, feeling with my hand for the roots of the bush.

“This is oleander. The goddamned snowstorm practically killed her.”

Then he started talking to the bush. “But I’m gonna save you, ain’t I, honey? You been such a good girl. You been so put upon.” His voice was crooning, as if directed at a baby. “We gonna get you up and into a pot and up to the control tower, where there’s lots of sun. Give you lots of water to drink and keep your ass warm. You gonna live, honey. You ain’t gonna die next to no brick wall.”

We finished clearing the roots. He picked up a small paper bag and poured pebbles into the bottom of the pot.

“Now throw some of that dirt in there,” he said, the voice abruptly full of authority. He went back to the bush.

“Yes, sir.”

“And bring it over here, close to me. Yeah. That’s it. Okay … Now, while I hold her up straight, pack some dirt in there. Not too hard now. Easy. The dirt from the top, the real black stuff, not that sandy clay crap at the bottom. Yeah. Okay, that’s it. Good!”

He stepped back and gazed at the plant, looking happy. Then he was suddenly aware of me again, and fixed on my face.

“What’s your name, sailor?” he said curtly.

I told him.

“Well, thank you, Devlin. What are you doing out anyway? After the base has been secured?”

“I was visiting with the messcooks, sir.”

“Visiting with the messcooks? You’re white, sailor!”

“I know, sir.”

“Well, what the hell you doin up there with that crazy bunch of galley slaves?”

“Listening to music, sir.”

He looked suddenly interested. “No kidding? What are they playing these days? I bet it’s not Glenn Miller or Bing Crosby anymore.”

“No, sir.”

“So what do they listen to?”

I smiled. “Well, there’s a group called Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Hungarians, and a guy named—”

He guffawed. “Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Armenians?!”

“Hungarians, sir.”

“Jesus Christ. What else?”

I told him the names of the other singers and groups, while he asked me to grab one side of the pot and help carry it to his office. He repeated every name I gave him, as if memorizing them for a test. I told him about Bobby Bolden and how he should be given a band to play at the EM Club. He grunted, and repeated Bolden’s name, as we carried the pot together up the three steps of the Administration Building, grunting and straining. A Marine private snapped to attention at the door.

“Open all those doors to my office, Private,” Captain Pritchett said. The private led the way down a corridor to a corner office. He flicked on the lights, saluted again, and backed away as we entered the office with the plant. The room was very clean and sparsely furnished, except for the plants. They were everywhere. And I thought of all the flowers at Eden Santana’s trailer.

“Over here in the corner, Devlin. We’ll leave her until the morning and then I’ll have her moved to the tower.” We laid the plant down next to a window. He started crooning to it again. “Now you get a good night’s sleep, you hear me? And tomorrow you’re gonna live in the sunshine. Tomorrow, and for the rest of your life on this planet. You hear me, honey? You can bet on it.”

I gazed around the office. There was a bookshelf with framed photographs of the captain on the deck of a ship, the captain with a woman, the woman alone, the captain and the woman coming under an arch of swords held by midshipmen. There were a couple of books: The Ops Officers Manual, The Bluejackets’ Manual, various books of rules and regs from Bupers, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. He glanced at the woman’s picture.

“That’s my wife,” he said in a flat voice. “She died.”

“Sorry to hear that, sir.”

“I was in love with her from high school and we got married during the war and after all that, all that damned worrying and me being torpedoed and all the rest of it, she went and died on me.”

He shook his head and turned to look again at the plant.

“She got me started on this stuff, the gardening,” he said. “When I came home from the war, she had the goddamnedest garden waiting for me. So I guess maybe, in some way, if I keep these things living, then she’s alive too. See that plant over there?” He pointed at a large green plant with leathery leaves. “That’s from our garden in Sausalito. After I sold the house, I took it with me. I know she’s alive in that one.”

He looked at me as if suddenly aware that he had revealed himself to me, that he was vulnerable. He saluted smartly. I returned the salute.

“Thank you, sailor,” he said.

It was a dismissal.

“And, sailor? If you say a word about any of this to anyone, I’ll ship your ass to the Fleet Marines.”

“I understand, sir.”

I started to leave.

“Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Albanians,” he said and chuckled. “Jesus Christ …”

“Hungarians, sir,” I said, and saluted again and went out into the night.