Loving Women

Chapter 35

Then began the time of my education. Miles Rayfield taught me the secrets of drawing. Bobby Bolden taught me about music. And Eden Santana taught me about everything else. Sitting here now, on a motel balcony facing the enormous Gulf evening, I try to reconstruct those hours, and although many have vanished into the blur, all seem accounted for, too. I know that I worked every day at the Supply Shack and stood my watches at the dumpster and was soon trusted with being the duty storekeeper. I know I did what I could to be a four-oh sailor and keep out of the way of Red Cannon. But I don’t have a series of sharp pictures of all those moments: What I saw and what I did are still at war with the way I felt.

And most of those feelings are tangled up with the time of Eden Santana. All those Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. And some sweet and timeless Sunday afternoons. I was always with her on Tuesday and Thursday nights, too, unless I pulled duty at the Supply Shack, because Eden didn’t work on those nights; even today, there is something oddly thrilling and poignant to me about meeting a woman on one of those weekday evenings. Eden worked late on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and though I could have spent each night with her, waiting at the trailer, she told me early on that it would be better if we didn’t fall into too rigid a routine. “You’re special, child,” she said. “I don’t want you ever to become ordinary.” And then touched my face and added, “Or me to be ordinary for you.”

That was never to happen. On some of those nights when I wasn’t with her, I began to feel the presence of what I called The Boulder. The true word was jealousy, but I couldn’t admit then that I could be shaken by a feeling that made me laugh when I saw it in movies or comics, or read about it in books. A real man wasn’t supposed to feel jealous of a woman any more than he could admit to being afraid. But on some lonesome nights I could feel The Boulder pressing up out of my guts, or coming down upon me from outside, filling the room like the giant orange in Miles Rayfield’s painting. I would hear a scrap of music, the rattle of the palms, smell the odor of the captain’s flowers, and Eden would appear in my mind. I would wonder what she was doing at exactly that moment. Sometimes I wondered if she was seeing Mercado, leading him (or someone else) into the holy precincts of the trailer. I would get physically sick then: nauseated, pouring sweat. I saw myself scaling the fence, heading into the night, jerking open the trailer door, confronting the two of them, the pictures of all this as vivid as a front-page photo, while my guts coiled and knotted until I fell into exhausted sleep. Then it would be a Tuesday or a Thursday or a Saturday night or a Sunday morning, and I would see her again, and it would all go away.

One night I told her that I loved her, meaning it, blurting it out. And she smiled and said that was the sweetest thing anyone had said to her in a long long time. I said it again, expecting an echo, and again and again. But all through those first weeks and months, she wouldn’t say that she loved me. She said everything else: You be good, child. You sleep nice, child. You sure are good to me, child. But never I love you, child. And I knew then that this was more complicated than it seemed, that it wasn’t like Steve Canyon or a movie, where you said the words and the women said them back and you lived happily ever after, more or less. She was as close to me as skin to skin, but there were places inside her that I couldn’t touch.

She wouldn’t talk about her life in any detail. If I pressed her, trying to discover where the line was beyond which I could not press, I heard a few things. The most important I learned early on: there was a husband somewhere. She was still married to him, but she said that was just technical. I’m here with you, ain’t I, child? she said and smiled. But after she told me this, there would be times, even when I was with her, when The Boulder would push up and out of me, and I’d ask her why she didn’t just divorce him, this man, this husband, and she’d say, “You can’t divorce a ghost.”

And I would think: The ghost who walks. Like The Phantom in the Sunday Journal-American. Her husband is The Ghost That Walks, this mysterious husband, out there somewhere, haunting us, haunting me, able at any time to come back. Because I could not see him, could not peer into his eyes (as I did with the photographs I now was copying in ink and wash for other sailors at two dollars each), he grew in importance and became more ominous, more of a threat. If I could look into his eyes, I could see whether there was fear there or uncertainty, swagger or evil. But in my mind he had no face and no eyes, and I was afraid of him.

The toughest times were when I was stuck on the base and the worst of all were when I was alone. Eventually I learned the trick of warding off fear with activity: If I just did something, if I got up off the bed or drew pictures in a fury, or ran slowly around the perimeter, I could drive away the phantoms. Sometimes I would simply walk over to the infirmary and hang out with Bobby Bolden or go up to see him in the evenings at the Kingdom of Darkness.

He loved talking about music; he did so with almost ferocious concentration, illustrating the complicated points on his horn. But it wasn’t always just talking. Every week or so, on a night when Eden Santana was working, I’d go down with Bobby Bolden to the black joints around West Cervantes Street. Places with names like Patti’s Bar and the Talk of the Town and the Two Spot and My Club and Mary Lou’s Tavern. They were hot and packed and sweaty, their doors open to the street, ceiling fans churning lamely at the Gulf air, the black faces gleaming in the heat and eyes darting suddenly at me and then at Bobby Bolden and the messcooks who came with us. Almost always there would be a wary, frozen moment, then recognition, and then it would be all right. There were almost never any live bands, but there were jukeboxes. Immense monstrous jukes, the biggest I’d ever seen, with 45s falling steadily off spindles, and bubbles and lights careening through tubes up and down the sides and always some woman with a small waist and a big ass and sturdy legs staring at the lists and someone shouting, “Honey, play B-four.”

“Watch these niggers move,” Bobby Bolden said to me on one of those nights. “Least you might learn to walk better, white man. You aint ever gonna learn to dance.”

The music pounded, the bass lines ramming into me, so that I’d be moving to them the next day and through the night too, moving even with Eden Santana to the dark and dirty song of Cervantes Street. The jukes were loud with a few of the same singers I heard in the Kingdom of Darkness: Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair, Roy Brown. But there were others, too: big-voiced black men, shouters, honkers, bluesmen: Lowell Fulsom, Percy Mayfield, Jimmy Witherspoon, Amos Milburn, Cleanhead Vinson. The names were all as new to me as Hank Williams had been when I landed in Pensacola, and yet I felt as if I now knew Hank Williams, had been drowned in his songs, and now I had to learn about another whole platoon of musicians. Back home, I thought I was hip. Hey, I listened to Sid. I knew Bird from Dizzy. But I’d been suddenly dropped into a world where I didn’t know anything, a dark dense gleaming world, where men at the bar first asked about New York and the Dodgers before asking if I wanted some pussy; big black men, grave men, surly men and sad men. All the while their music was pounding, and I was looking at their women.

“Chick over there got eyes for you,” Bobby Bolden said one night, six of us packed together at the bar of the Two Spot, his nod directed at a girl in a tight yellow dress at a table with two others. “But if her ole man catch you wid her, he cut you three ways, mothafucka: long, deep, and con-tin-uously!”

He laughed and slugged down some beer and I looked at the woman and she looked at me. She had cinnamon skin and full lips, an elegantly thin neck and squared shoulders, and I could see the shape of her full breasts, undressing her with my eyes (taking small short glances, not staring), drawing her in my head, wanting to paint her, wanting to get the color right, wondering all the while what her skin felt like, a black woman’s skin, wondering what color her nipples were and whether the hair on her pussy was straight or kinky and whether she’d laugh at the size of my dick.

“Ever sleep with a colored girl?” Bobby Bolden said.

“No.”

“Shit, you the first white man ever told me the truth on that one.”

“I tell a lie in here, I’m dead,” I said, sipping a beer, thinking of Wajeski’s line: I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl. “And I try to do anything about it, I’d be dead before I hit the sidewalk.”

“Here she come.”

The woman had to pass the length of the bar to get to the jukebox. Louis Jordan was singing “Somebody Done Changed the Lock on My Door,” while a half dozen couples danced in a small area behind the juke. The woman stood at the jukebox and slipped in a quarter and started punching tunes. Six of them. Thinking about each one. Standing on one high heel, curling the other foot around her ankle. She had beautiful tapered legs that came right off her ass. I wanted to draw her. No, that was a lie. I wanted to fuck her.

And then thought about Eden Santana. Where was she right then, at exactly that moment, while I stared at the ass of a strange woman? Home, I insisted. In the trailer. Alone. Maybe she was even thinking about me, imagining me in the barracks. She had no way of knowing where I was. And I thought: If I went with this woman, I’d betray Eden. I would be doing to her what I was always afraid Eden might be doing to me. That would be a betrayal. And then thought: No. It wouldn’t be a betrayal because there wasn’t anything to betray. We didn’t have a deal, did we? I’d told Eden I loved her but she’d said nothing back. I was with her when I was with her: that’s what she always said. What I did the rest of the time was my business, right? What she did was her business, too. That’s what she said. But if she knew, what would she think? Probably the same thing I’d think, if she slept with a colored guy. Why was it such a big deal anyway? Skin is skin. White people and black people must have been doing it together for centuries in the South. Otherwise, where’d Bobby Bolden’s green eyes come from? Not from Africa, for shit sure. And this girl at the jukebox, with her light skin: there was some goddamned white in there too.

She came back down the length of the packed bar, waved at a woman at one of the tables and then bumped into me.

“Uh, sorry, scuse me,” she said in a furry small girl’s voice. She was about my age. Maybe a little older. Maybe twenty.

“My fault,” I said. “Blockin the way.”

She looked at Bobby Bolden. “Whatchoo dune bringin this poor white boy here, Bobby Bolden?”

“To meet you, Little Mama.”

“You such a bad ole boy,” she said.

“What you drinkin?”

She asked for a rum and Coke and I looked at her face: curved nose, small hard nostrils, full lips. Her dress was cut low and her breasts looked solid and full. She was wearing perfume. Sweet perfume. Dark perfume. She asked me my name and I told her and she said her name was Winnie and where was I from and I said New York and she smiled and her eyes got brighter, and Bobby Bolden looked at the ceiling and the messcooks gave me a deadpan look and then laughed together. Winnie gave them a killer glare.

“Ahm jes trying to make the boy feel welcome and yawl ack like chilrun.”

“We jus admirin yo style, Winnie,” Rhode Island Freddie said. “Dats a lie,” she said. “Yawl is thinkin I want to take this boy home.”

“It snow the second time this wintuh if you do,” Bumper said. “White stuff in the chicken shack.”

“See the lowlife yuh bring here, Bobby Bolden? You and the white boy and six dumbass zigaboos.” She turned to me and shook my hand. “Well, please to met you, Michael. Come back sometahm, ’thout the lowlifes.”

“Hey, Winnie,” Bobby Bolden said. “Don’t—”

But she walked away and went back to the table.

“Saved,” Rhode Island Freddie said, draping a big hand on my shoulder.

And in a way I was. When Winnie walked away, I didn’t have to choose to go with her or even to try. I didn’t have to choose a betrayal.

Chapter 36

The truth was simple: after a few short weeks, Eden Santana had become a presence in almost everything I did. I filled pads with drawings of her. I sometimes had to stop myself in the middle of drawing the wives and girlfriends of sailors because I kept making them look like her: blondes, brunettes and redheads acquired her hair or her eyes or the mole on her cheekbone. When I read a novel from the base library, the women all resembled her, even Daisy Buchanan and Catherine Barkley. On those nights when I was the duty storekeeper, alone in the Supply Shack listening to dramas on Harrelson’s radio, the women characters all appeared to me as Eden. I drew her so much, in so many different positions, that I could recall her body at will, sitting at my desk, doodling on scrap paper with an Ebony pencil, and had to keep hiding the drawings so the others wouldn’t see her. They knew I had somebody out in that mysterious world called “off the base.” But they didn’t know who she was and I wouldn’t tell them.

On three straight Sundays she took me out to the empty parking lot at the beach and taught me how to drive. “You just gotta relax,” she said. “Just understand what you’re doing and then relax. No white-knuckle jobs holdin that wheel, child.” She sat beside me while I made circles around the lot, coming to abrupt stops, shifting gears, backing up in reverse, going forward again. “That’s good, that’s fine, just do that, watch what’s behind you, don’t look at the road, look up ahead, the distance, you’ll see everything anyway …”

There was a small hill leading over the dunes to Fort Pickens and I started up there on the second Sunday, brimming with confidence, when a truck came roaring over the rise, right at us, black, faceless. I panicked, and whipped the wheel around, driving it straight into the path of the truck, and then pulled it the other way, while Eden yelled “Right! Right!” We ended up stuck in the sand as the truck roared on. My hands shook. And I was so afraid I couldn’t move: frightened of taking this ton of rubber and steel in my hands again and ending up mashed in the grille of another truck. Eden lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She said: “Better get back on the horse, child.”

And I did. We got the car out of the sand, pushing and heaving until we got traction, Eden laughing through it and telling me I’d remember that moment all my days. And then I took the wheel again and went up over the rise, more slowly now, thinking right, go to the right, if someone comes barrel-assing down the road, go fucking right. But the road was empty and I shifted gears more smoothly and Eden laughed out loud and hit the dashboard with the palm of her hand. “Yeah! Good! Go do it!”

She let me drive back to the mainland across the causeway that day, and then switched seats with me for the ride home through traffic. “You got it, don’t you worry now,” she said. “You got it …”

I had some money from the drawings, and I said (trying to sound like a man) that I would pay for the food from now on (since that’s what men did). After all, she did the cooking; and another thing: when we went off in the car for drives or lessons, I should pay for the gas. “It’s only fair,” I said, and she shook her head in an amused way and said, “If you say so.”

Most of the time we went to Stop & Shop and picked up steaks at thirty-three cents a pound or shrimps for a quarter a pound and black-eyed peas for a nickel (ah, the fifties!) and with water, spices, salt and care, she’d turn these plain goods into food I’d never tasted before and have seldom tasted since. The process was as mysterious as art; casein wasn’t art, it was something you used to make art; peas in her hands were the same. She prepared for meals the way a painter might prepare for a new canvas, first studying the newspaper, reading the ads for bargains and in her quest often expressing high moral outrage. Look, she’d say, at this A&P ad: round steak has gone up to fifty-nine cents a pound! That’s a damn shame! And a five-pound bag of oranges is now thirty-seven cents (her voice rising). In Florida! But then she would see a twenty-eight-pound watermelon for $1.10 and Peter Pan peanut butter for thirty-five cents and her anger would ebb and we’d go off to the A&P, instead of Stop & Shop or Plee-Zing on T Street. She said she hoped I didn’t think she was cheap. But she felt responsibility, she said, ever since I insisted on paying for the food. “People work hard for their money,” she said, “they better spend it hard. Not easy.” And when the food was back home, she would begin the magical process of changing it. Food had never been so sensual.

As the days grew longer and warmer, she moved some of the plants and flowers outside, making a small garden beside the trailer. She bought two folding chairs at Sears, and we’d sit outside sometimes and look at the small lake that fed the River Styx, with the trailer like a silver wall between us and the bumpy dirt road that ran through the colored district.

“I saw your friend, that Bobby Bolden, around here the other night,” she said one Sunday afternoon. She was quiet for a long moment. “He’s got a white woman in a house back there in the woods.”

“That bother you?”

She gave me a funny look. “Well, I wonder about it.”

“It’s their business, I guess.”

“Yeah. Till someone makes it their business.”

“Like who?”

“Oh, hell, anybody.… Some black lady jealous of a white woman. Some damned redneck. You never know …” She looked at me. “This is the South, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

We didn’t talk about it any longer that day.

In the spring she taught me the names of the world. She named the trees in the swamps, mostly cypress and tupelo, and the great hardwoods in the bottom land, oak and sweetgum, hickory, magnolia and red maple. I’d pluck leaves from each new tree, discovering that I could always draw a tree if I followed the basic structure of the leaf. In the higher land, she showed me the difference between slash pine and longleaf pine, and the dogwood and wax myrtle that grew at their base, and sometimes we would just sit there in the stillness and she’d point out warblers and woodpeckers and we’d close our eyes and hold each other and listen to the soughing of the wind through the longleaf pines.

One Sunday we drove west on route 98, hugging the sparse coast until we ran out of road. We moved inland then on a two-lane blacktop and parked the car under some live oaks hung with moss. We carried a picnic basket deep into the woods. When we were out of sight of the road, we heard a snapping sound and saw a white deer scamper away, and then Eden pointed out a possum and the tracks of a bobcat. “There’s prob’ly some black bear in here too,” she said. “Now they could kill ya … But not to worry, they been most hunted off.”

The woods had a deep loamy smell that seemed to enter her, slowing her movements, making her more languorous, her voice more raw. She took my hand and made me bend under low-lying branches, then shoved me away from a pile of leaves (“Copperheads love them leaves”) and made me walk around a fallen log (“That’s where the cottonmouths live”) and laughed at my city ways of walking and told me the names of the bugs: ticks and fire ants, chiggers and deer flies and black flies all mixed up with the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums. If you got a tick under your skin she said, patiently, quietly, you had to smother him, cover him with nail polish, force him to fight his way back out. Chiggers made a little tube under the skin and you had to scrape them away, tube and all, gouging them right off the surface. “Chiggers love the leaves too,” she said. “Best thing you can say about a copperhead is they eat the chiggers …”

Just knowing the snakes were around made me feel creepy. But Eden talked about them in a casual way. “There’s hardly any rattlers around here anymore,” she said. “Nobody knows why. They just moved away, went someplace else.… Coral snakes could hurt you a little. They’re tiny things, a real pretty color, but you’d have to be tryin to kiss one for it to do you any damage. The cottonmouth, well, you don’t want to mess with him in any shape or fashion. He’s big, color of gunmetal, fat and ugly with a head like a triangle. Stay away from that sumbitch.” She smiled. “Mostly, snakes are harmless. Don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. Just cause the poor things ain’t got legs, ain’t no reason to kill em.”

Then the darkness of the forest began to lift and bright yellow shafts of light cut through the trees; we suddenly saw a red wall, and she told me that was because the red buds had bloomed on the slash pines. And when we moved past them, we came to the river. It was about thirty feet wide, gurgling over smooth stones, and was the reddish color of tea. A red river! I thought, remembering the old Gene Autry song about remembering the Red River Valley. And she said it was that way because of the tannin in the cypress trees. Clean brown sand lined the river banks, and in the center of the river there was a wide flat boulder, the water coursing around it. The air was free of insects now, and I could see fish in the river, lolling in the eddies along the banks or moving without effort against the current. Catfish, she said, and bass and perch.

For a long while we stood there in the stillness along the bank, saying nothing, hushed by the solitude. Then we walked to the sand along the banks. Eden looked at me and put down the picnic basket and pulled her blouse out of her trousers. I did the same with my shirt. She wriggled out of her blouse and laid it flat across the top of the basket. She unzipped her jeans then, and I was undressing too; she laid the jeans and her panties across the basket and then breathed deeply and removed her brassiere.

“Come on, child,” she whispered hoarsely.

We waded into the cold river. I held the basket and clothes above the water, my feet slipping on the stones. The water was up to her breasts and her skin was pebbled with the chill and her nipples hard, but she moved to the boulder, which lay like a dry, bone-colored island in the middle of the river. She slipped and almost went under and made a yelping sound and then giggled and righted herself as the swift water pushed against us. She reached the boulder first and pulled herself up, dripping and glistening, the muscles taut under her skin. She took the basket from me and I heaved myself up. We lay there side by side for a long time, her legs apart, her black V drying in the hot sun, the two of us engulfed by the sounds of unseen insects and animals and birds and the gurgling rush of the river. Only our hands touched. My cock felt thick and lazy. I let one hand trail in the cold river.

After a while, she sat up and looked at my face and ran her fingernails over my stomach and then leaned forward and took me in her hot tight mouth.

Chapter 37

One chilly Wednesday evening in April, when Eden was working late, Sal, Max and I waited outside the locker club for Bobby Bolden. Traffic moved quickly down the highway. The lot in front of Billy’s was almost full.

“Can you imagine the balls on this guy?” Sal said. “Inviting us to dinner at his chick’s house?”

“He’s got a death wish,” Max said. “Or we do.”

I saw a lot of Sal and Max around the base, but after meeting Eden Santana, I’d only been back to the Dirt Bar twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drinking and the noise and the fun; I loved all that, the recklessness of it, the lack of rules. I just wanted Eden Santana more. To be with her, I had to have more money than I made as a sailor, so I usually spent Monday and Wednesday nights drawing my little ink portraits. Sal and Max (and most of the others) knew I had a woman and kidded me about her, but I didn’t care. On this evening, Sal was insisting on a invitation to my girl’s house too, promising he would even wear socks for the occasion and use a knife and fork. I was glad Eden was at work; we wouldn’t see her at the trailer on the way to the place in the woods where Bobby Bolden lived with his white woman. I didn’t want them to inspect her; I didn’t want her to think I was just another crazy kid sailor.

Then a blue ’49 Mercury pulled into Billy’s parking lot. Bobby Bolden was behind the wheel. He honked and we hurried across the highway. I glanced at Billy’s window and saw Red Cannon and Chief McDaid staring at us from beyond the neon sign. I got in the car beside Bolden. Sal and Max slid into the back.

“What the hell are you doin with a lowlife good-for-nothing Mercury?” Sal said. “I thought spades only drove Buicks and Cadillacs.”

“We use these when we gotta leave a body in the trunk,” Bobby Bolden said in a dry way. “Don’t wanna waste a good set of wheels on the dead.” He was driving up the highway, away from town, toward the lumpy dirt road where Eden and I had picked him up in the rain.

“Should we lie on the floor?” Max asked.

“Won’t help,” Bobby Bolden said. “They kill black men aroun’ here just for leanin on a Mercury.”

“If they stop us,” Max said to Sal, “start singing ‘Mammy.’ ”

On cue, they started singing the old song, trying to sound like Al Jolson, and were up to the part about the sun shining east, the sun shining west, and them knowing where the sun shone best when we bumped over the gravel road and went under the live oaks and past the silver trailer. The evening light was fading now. The lake looked black. Bobby Bolden glanced at me. And I glanced to my right and felt The Boulder suddenly fill my stomach. This was Wednesday. Eden Santana was supposed to be working at Sears. But the car was parked in front of her trailer. She was home. With the lights out.

“ ‘Maaaaaaa-uh-uh-me, Maaaaaaaaaa-uh-meeeeee …’ ”

“Now you gonna get us killed by the niggers,” Bobby Bolden said.

“It’s the Klan we don’t want cutting up our ass.”

“I wunt talkin about ya color,” Bobby Bolden said. “I was talkin bout ya fuckin singin.”

We all laughed, but I glanced back at the trailer as we followed the gravel road into the woods and I wasn’t thinking about the Ku Klux Klan or anything else. The car was there. I imagined her in the half light with some man. Some man. Showing him my drawings. Laughing at his remarks. Through the woods I saw small unpainted houses, some with the doors wide open and lanterns inside on tables. Black kids moved around in the fading light, playing ball or running through bushes. There were no streets. She’s making him shrimp with the red sauce and a salad. She’s bracing her feet against the roof of the trailer. Bobby Bolden pulled the car through an opening in the bushes and down a narrow path and stopped in front of the house: one story with a front porch and a peaked roof. In the darkness, I could make out peeling traces of white paint. The shades were drawn and the front door closed. She’s got the door locked and his trousers are folded over a chair and there is ice clunking in a glass. They will whisper for a long time. We got out of the car.

“Try to behave yourselves,” Bobby Bolden said. “You in a civilized neighborhood now.”

“ ‘The sun shines east, the sun shines west—’ ”

“Sal, you better shut yo mouf, boss,” Bolden said, sounding like Rochester from The Jack Benny Show.

I realized then that Bolden was dressed entirely in black: shiny black shirt, black tapered trousers, high black shiny boots. He looked as if he’d painted himself in silhouette. The eyes seemed greener. He glanced behind us at the road, as if expecting someone. All he saw were a couple of black kids staring without visible emotion at the visiting white men. Then he led the way to the front door and knocked: one-two, one-two-three. Footsteps. Bolden said, “It’s me.” Two locks were turned and then Bobby Bolden’s white woman was framed in the light. I couldn’t see her face. She hugged Bolden warmly and then he casually introduced her as Catty Wolverton. She shook my hand, then stepped aside to let us in. She locked the door behind us.

“Ugliest group a strays I ever seen,” she said.

“Saved them from a vagrancy arrest,” Bolden said.

Catty was about twenty-five, with brown liquid eyes and a red-dish tint in her hair. She had a short pert nose and an overbite that stopped just short of bucked teeth. Some people might think she was homely. But she had a dark smoky voice and heavy breasts above a narrow waist and a drowsy manner and a dirty laugh and I thought: Yeah, I see.

“Help yourself to the booze, guys,” she said, and waved us toward some bottles, glasses and an ice bucket perched on top of a nearly empty bookcase. She went back to the stove. Inside, the house was very bright and clean, the walls painted white, but it was essentially one very large room that felt as if someone had just moved in or moved out.

A bed was shoved up against the far wall, with a braided rug beside it on the plank floor, flanked by two unmatched pinewood bureaus, and on one of them there was a phonograph and a stack of records. The kitchen was larger than the sleeping area; a wide round table was placed in the middle, covered with a red plastic tablecloth and set with dishes and silverware, and there was a new gas stove that contrasted with the plainness of the room. A small refrigerator huddled beside the range and next to it was a stainless-steel sink. There were no pictures on the walls and no flowers. He will smell lilac and begonias and myrtle. He will stare out at the dark lake. He will hear insects droning on the River Styx. Sal poured Jim Beam bourbon into three glasses, added ice, handed them to Max and me.

“So what are you three jackoffs up to?” Catty said, stirring something in a black iron pot. Smelled like gumbo.

“Chastity,” Sal said. “Only thing that works every time.”

“Not for Jews,” Max said. “Go ye forth and multiply, saith the Lord.”

Catty laughed in a dirty way and stirred the pot, then built a drink for herself and Bobby Bolden.

“Hell, chastity don’t work for anybody,” Catty said.

Bobby stacked some records on the record player and a man with a deep throaty growl began to sing:

Catty hummed along with the chorus, talking about the Navy and being stationed at Mainside (touching the small of Bobby’s back) and her stupid son of a bitch of a chief yeoman (pinching his neck) and how as bad as he was, he wasn’t as bad as that total butternut muffdiver out at Ellyson, Chief McDaid. She knew McDaid from Dago, she said. Son of a whoremaster (she said, brushing Bobby’s ass). Then she picked up the bowls from the table and went to the stove and ladled out the gumbo. Why lie to me, woman? Why say you’re working when you’re not? Hey, you got to reap just what you sow.… The Boulder rose and expanded and then I was sipping the gumbo, made with chicken and vegetables, and it was good but not as good as the first gumbo I’d ever had, down the road, under the live oaks, facing the lake. Then as quickly as it had arrived, The Boulder began to fade.

“Great,” Sal said. “The best. Redneck minestrone.”

“I figured I shouldn’t give you pussyhunters anything too solid,” Catty said. “Ruin your routine.”

“Is this chicken kosher?” Max said.

“Is Chief McDaid?” Bobby Bolden said.

“That cunt,” Sal said. That was the first time I’d ever heard any man use the word in front of a woman, but Catty didn’t react the way I thought she would.

“Sal,” she said, “please don’t demean a perfectly beautiful piece of human anatomy by using it to describe that prick McDaid.”

“You mean that cunt is a prick?”

“You ofays sure talk dirty,” said Bobby Bolden.

“This is strictly a discussion of nomenclature, Bobby,” Sal said. “Catty says a cunt is a beautiful thing and obviously I agree. Nothing has brought me greater happiness in this vale of tears. But then she implies that a prick is bad and dirty. So I say, if you can’t call McDaid a cunt then you can’t call him a prick either.”

“Is he circumcised?” Max said.

“Only from the ears up,” Catty said, and slammed the table. The bowls of gumbo all bounced.

Sal turned to me and said, “Welcome to the Pensacola chapter of the Holy Name Society.”

Bobby fixed himself another drink and Max went to the stove for more gumbo and the blues man sang again about his lovin woman. There was no inside bathroom. A rotting outhouse stood in the woods behind the building but it looked so bad that the first time we all had to piss we just stood on the back porch and let go.

“Ooooh, wow,” Sal said. “This gotta be the closest man can ever get to God.”

“Do it downwind, will ya, wop?” Bobby Bolden said.

“Mine aint big enough to feel the wind,” Sal said. “Where’s downwind?”

“Toward me,” Max said, “so aim for the tomatoes.”

“Aaaaaahhhhhh,” Sal said, shook himself vigorously, and zipped up.

The moon was out now, and through the trees we could see its silvery reflection on the lake.

“God, it’s beautiful,” Sal whispered.

“It sure is,” I agreed.

“Twenty years from now, we’ll all be old men and there’ll be houses and supermarkets on the lake and a bunch of assholes flyin around in speedboats,” Max said. “And we’ll remember this night.”

“They’ll pave the road,” Sal said.

“They’ll get rid of the niggers.” Bobby Bolden laughed.

“They ain’t gonna wait twenty years for that.”

“They’ll have to bring guns,” Bobby Bolden said.

“They will,” Max said.

“They got them,” Sal said.

“So do we,” Bobby Bolden murmured. “So do we.”

Back inside, we drank some more and took turns dancing with Catty and played more records. Catty wanted to know why I was so quiet and I said it was because I was so full of good food and Sal said, no, it wasn’t that, it was because I was in love, and then he shifted to a Stan Laurel voice and said, “You can tell by the silly sloppy grin on his face.” And I laughed and wondered if he could really tell from my face. I poured another drink.

Then there was a sharp single knock on the door.

We all stopped talking and Bobby Bolden put his hand up to quiet us, reached under the bed and came up with a big.45 caliber automatic. His face completely changed. The looseness turned hard. The green eyes were wary. He tiptoed to the door, motioning all of us to get down low and away from the windows. Sal picked up a carving knife.

Then Bobby positioned himself to the side of the door, the gun ready. I put myself in front of Catty, crouched down near the sink. Max picked up a chair. My heart was pounding.

Bobby Bolden unlocked the lock, then flicked off the lights, squatted and jerked open the door.

There was nobody there.

We hurried through the woods and saw nobody and checked the car engine for bombs and went down to the edge of the lake to see if there were any boats speeding away in the moonlight. Whoever had knocked on the door was gone. But when it was time for Bobby to go back with us to the base, he wouldn’t let Catty stay alone at the house. “Some mothafucka was out there,” he said. “Maybe a kid. Maybe someone playin trickster. But maybe somebody else, too.” So he locked up the house and we all crowded into the Mercury. He’d drop us off at the locker club, take Catty on to Mainside, where she could stay in the bachelor women’s quarters. “Just can’t take no chances.”

For a moment, I thought maybe Bolden was putting us on, that he’d arranged for someone to knock on the door, just to let us know that he had the gun and was ready to use it. And to show off for his white woman. But that didn’t make any sense; wouldn’t he rather spend the night with Catty Wolverton? The whole thing felt unreal. What was real was the gun. Bolden slipped it under the front seat. I asked him what he’d do if the cops stopped us and found the gun and he said he’d tell them it was Sal’s. “They believe anything about a wop,” he said. Sal said, “Except that he had a gun in a car with a spade and didn’t use it on him.” Catty giggled. We pulled out onto the gravel road. Max said, “Hey, we never had dessert.”

Bobby drove quickly past the silver trailer, throwing up gravel. And when I looked, the world tilted. Eden’s car was gone.

Bolden dropped us in front of Billy’s and drove on to Mainside. I suggested a nightcap. Sal said, “Why not?”

There were about a dozen men in the place being tended by a middle-aged blond barmaid. Seated on a stool in his dress whites was Red Cannon. McDaid was gone. Cannon’s head turned when we came in, but his body didn’t move. He stared at us, but we ignored him, laid our dollars on the bar and ordered beers.

“Jesus Christ, that was spooky,” Sal said, turning his back to Red Cannon. “Someone knockin’ on the door like that.”

“The guy’s nuts,” Max said.

“She’s worse,” I said. “The blacks could do her in, the rednecks could—”

“What you say, boy?”

I turned and looked at Red Cannon. He was very drunk, but holding himself still.

“You call me a redneck?” he said in a surly way.

“I didn’t say anything about you,” I said.

“I heard you say redneck, boy.”

“He wasn’t talking about you,” Sal said, “or to you. So cool it, Red.”

“Don’t tell me to cool it, sailor,” Cannon said, sliding off the stool. The barmaid moved down to him. She didn’t say anything, just touched his hand and stared. He turned to her. And never said another word.

“She must be a fuckin hypnotist,” Max murmured.

“I hope she makes him forget our names,” Sal said.

“He never knew them,” I said. “All he knows is our numbers.”

“That’s all he needs.”

Then Sal started doing his version of Senator Claghorn. If Cannon was going to listen to our conversations, Sal was going to give him something to hear. “Well, FRANKLY, I think the future of NATO is a question of STRATEGIC priorities. The Mediterranean must be CONVERTED into an AMERICAN LAKE. We can’t allow the damn RUSSIANS to THREATEN OUR NATIONAL SECURITY!”

“No doubt about it,” Max said.

“Make no MISTAKE! They are out for WORLD DOMINATION! They plan to CONQUER AMERICA and CLOSE THE BAPTIST CHURCHES! They will come in and make MISCEGE-NATION THE LAW OF THE LAND! Turn us into a NATION OF HALF-BREEDS! They will let the COLORED RACES go to school! There’ll be NIGGERS IN THE ORCHESTRA OF THE REX THEATER! Mark my words!”

Max rolled his eyes at me. Red Cannon stared at the bottles behind the bar, then stood up, holding himself very erect, and with a kind of wordless dignity walked straight to the door and went out. We all got very drunk. At closing time we slipped through the back fence onto the base. We found Maher on duty at the dumpster. He was drunk, too.

Chapter 38

Oh, child, she said, what’d you let get in your head? I took the damned bike to work. When I come home last night, I needed to pick up some groceries; couldn’t do that riding the bike, could I? So I took the car. Went all the way back down the road to Sham’s and got some fresh milk and some bread for breakfast. Simple as that. You can’t let that crazy stuff get in your head. You won’t get me close to you that way, child. Just drive me off.

I’m sorry, I said.

Don’t you be saying you’re sorry, hear me? Just don’t let some devil eat your brain. You’re here now, with me, on a Thursday night in 1953. This ain’t some damn movie. This is us. This is here. We got this. You and me. I never thought I’d have this and here it is. And we don’t need to have evil stuff eating up brains. Not your brains. Not mine.

You’re right.

So come over here.

I went where there were always new things to learn. Maybe the only things that mattered. We lay side by side in the cool evening, and she kissed my neck and then sucked on it and pinched my skin and then pressed gently on my head, moving me to her breasts. She pushed them against my cheeks and then I had the wet tip of my tongue against the dry tip of a nipple, the aureole pebbling as I flicked it. But she pressed again, moving me away, and I was at her navel, kissing it, pushing my tongue into it, and her whole body writhed, her breath changing, the inhaling high pitched, the exhaling deeper, the sound beyond her control, and then my head was between her legs. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I thought if I was her what would I want me to do, and I kissed the inside of one thigh and came up to the great black hairiness, breathing on it, afraid, unsure, and then kissed the inside of the other thigh, nibbling at her skin with my teeth, my hands sliding under her bottom and squeezing. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing, of moving to the wrong place out of stupidity, and then she put both hands on my head and guided me to the crevice, and I inhaled the damp female smell, the earth smell, the tidal salt, and I placed my tongue in the center of it, and moved gently and uncertainly along the closed lips, down into the wetness and then lightly dragged my tongue gently upward until everything else opened like a dark flower. She made a deep moaning sound, a sound almost detached from her and yet most deeply from her, a pleasured sound but sad too, as if life itself were leaving for just that moment and I did it again, and felt for the first time in my life that hard hidden slippery little nipple under my tongue and she said there and I flicked it and she said Right there and I flicked it again and then again, and her voice dropped deeper than I’d ever heard it before, it came from some deep underwater canyon, and she said Oh Gawwwwwddddddddd there. Her hands leaving my body now, and gripping the side of the narrow bed, while I eased the flat of my tongue along the tiny tit, very lightly, then suddenly darting it into her as deeply as I could. My tongue become a cock: I glanced up once and saw her kneading her breasts, pulling them up to a point, and then I pressed my mouth on her and sucked the little tit as if it were a tiny cock, sucked her cock the way she’d sucked mine, doing it over and over, until at last a high-pitched plea came from her, all full of fear and resistance, saying do it, stop, saying don’t stop, followed by a trembling lost wordless sound, and I kept doing it in rhythm to her breathing and mine, to her sounds, to her deep flooding need, until she just came apart. Her legs shot out the length of the bed and locked and she grabbed my head with both hands and then pressed her muscled thighs together and started to scream, up and high and down and low, like a flamenco singer, all in one long uncontrolled sound, and she arched up from the bed and then slammed back down hard at the shoulders, doing it again and then more weakly and then one final quivering time. She rolled to one side, then the other, and then took my head and moved me up and kissed my face that was wet from her. Licking me. And crying. Just bawling. She cried as she guided my cock into her soaked center and cried some more as I pounded fiercely into her and cried when I came and cried until she fell asleep with my arms around her.

Chapter 39

BB gave me a book to read, by a guy named Richard Wright. The man is a Negro. There were things in the book that I’d never thought about before. For example:

“Among the subjects that white men would not discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women: Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the civil war, Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; Slavery; Social Equality; Communism; Socialism; the 12th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.”

It made me think that I should discuss all this with the Negroes but I don’t know much about any of it. It’s like a lot of other stuff: I feel ignorant most of the time, not just when I hang out with the Negroes. It’s with everybody. The dumbest thing I ever did was dropping out of high school. I thought nobody from Brooklyn could ever get to college and now I meet guys like Dunbar and they tell me college isn’t that hard, that I could go when I get out. But I can’t wait that long to learn about everything. I keep thinking I should just read the whole damned encyclopedia from A to Z. In a way, that’s what they really mean by “hip”—knowing everything.

The Boulder. Do I really feel it? Or am I imagining it? And if I only imagine it, is it real? I know the feeling is real but it makes me feel ashamed, like I can’t control myself. I hate the way feelings just take over. But if I didn’t feel anything, what would I be? A rock. A plant. There’s gotta be some way to have both.

Vagina. The passage leading from the uterus to the vulva in certain female mammals. A sheathlike part or organ.

Vulva. The external female genitalia.

Uterus. The portion of the oviduct in which the fertilized ovum implants itself and develops or rests during prenatal development. The womb of certain mammals.

Clitoris. The erectile organ of the vulva, homologous to the penis of the male.

(Where did all the street names come from? Cunt, pussy, snatch, box, furburger, muff, crack, quim, crevice, twat. The glory hole. The bearded clam. And cunt. Always cunt. Cunt and cunt and cunt.)

“But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view.” —Vasari on technique. (In the base library.)

Why are so many goddamned countries run by old men? Eisenhower’s already old and he just started the job, and there’s Churchill in England and Adenauer in Germany and Chiang in Formosa and this prick Syngman Rhee in Korea. The papers say the war could be over by now, that we have a deal for this peace treaty, but Rhee won’t sign. Our guys keep getting killed and Rhee doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He wants it his way. So he will keep the war going as long as there’s enough Americans to do the fighting. We ought to shoot the old bastard. How do they do it? How do they get people to obey them? They couldn’t beat up anyone in a street fight. How do they make young people go places to die?

I find myself reading more and more of the front of the newspaper. Now there’s a new thing, the French in Indochina, and it seems like it’s getting worse. Dulles says it’s all tied up with Korea, but from the papers you see right away that the French shouldn’t be there. The place is a colony, and the Indochinese want the French the fuck out. The French won’t go, so the Indochinese are trying to shoot them out. When does this shit end? They also say there is a Communist govt in Guatemala. At least that’s closer to home, though I’m not even sure where Guatemala is. Gotta check the atlas.

(I also find myself forgetting about the comics sometimes, and I worry about it. I still read Sawyer and Canyon, and I glance at Li’l Abner and Joe Palooka. But I used to read everything on the comics page. I told people who laughed at me, Hey, this is just like a lawyer reading law books. Since I was eleven I wanted to write and draw a comic strip. But suppose I’m losing the urge? I mean, suppose I don’t care about comics anymore? Then what happens to me? What can I become?)

I checked the atlas. Guatemala is just south of Mexico.

From The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (great book lent to me by MR):

“Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.”

That’s so true. Henri is talking about music in order to make a point about art. But it’s also true about singing. I listen to the blues guys singing and the power comes from the fact they are singing about what’s important to them, even if it is pain. Henri also says:

“… Most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do.”

(My father: it’s true of him. It was probably true of my mother. True of most of the people I know back in the neighborhood, even most of the people in the Navy.)

And Henri says:

“The self-educator judges his own course, judges advices, judges the evidence about him. He realizes that he is no longer an infant. He is already a man: has his own development in process. No one can lead him. Many can give advices, but the greatest artist in the world cannot point his course for he is a new man. Just what he should know, just how he should proceed can only be guessed at.”

Jesus Christ.

When I say the word “I” what do I mean?

Chapter 40

One evening we went to the empty beach facing Perdido Bay. I loved the name of the great wide bay because of the loud honking record of “Perdido” by Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips. They’d taken a simple tune by Duke Ellington and made something insane of it, a sound without control. The bay didn’t look at all the way the record sounded, but I felt some kinship to it because I’d at least heard the foreign word. Eden told me “perdido” meant “lost” in Spanish.

“What does Santana mean?” I said.

“Big holy one,” she said, and laughed sarcastically.

“You don’t think you’re holy?”

“No.”

We walked along the beach and talked about the history of the whole area, the fleets of French and Spanish sailors who washed up on its shores, to die of strange new diseases or to stay too long and die of an aching loneliness. The histories at the base library were vague and sketchy, written for high school students. Which one of those men first called this bay “lost” and why? Eden squeezed my hand. I asked her when her family had come to the Gulf and how and why. She gazed out past the bay and said, “Centuries ago.” Explaining nothing about the how and the why.

And then we stopped. Two men were walking barefoot on the beach far ahead of us, their trousers rolled to their knees. One was short, the other much taller. But even at this distance, I recognized them. The tall one was Miles Rayfield. The other was Freddie Harada.

“Let’s walk back,” I said.

She looked at me, puzzled. “How come?”

“I know those guys up ahead. I don’t really want to have to talk to them.”

“Okay,” she said, “we’ll go to the shrimp place.”

Chapter 41

I ate one morning in March, Sal burst through the double doors into the Supply Shack, leaned forward on the counter and sobbed: “Joe’s dead!” His laid his forehead flat on the counter, pounded with balled fists, said “First Hank, and now Joe! Long live the proletarian revolution!”, then whirled and hurried out. That’s how we learned that Stalin had died.

Harrelson got out the radio and Jonesie said, Good, I hope the son of a bitch suffered, and Becket said, Gee, dat makes Choichill de only one left outta da Big Tree. The news bulletins were somber, but not sad. The words were all virtually the same: Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union, ferocious dictator, killer of millions, once an ally and then our most implacable enemy, was dead. To which Donnie Ray shrugged and said This is all fine, but we still gotta swab down at four. After a while, he took a phone call at his desk, nodding, grave. He talked a long time. A Marine pilot at the counter said Maybe now we can get the goddamned thing in Korea settled.

“This is sho nuff big shit,” Harrelson said. “The whole damn shootin match could fall apart.”

“Or start,” Jonesie said. “Goddamn Commie bastards.”

Then we saw Captain Pritchett hurrying around outside in a jeep, with a Marine driving and Chief McDaid and Red Cannon in the back. Donnie Ray finally put down the telephone.

“That’s it, boys,” he said gravely. “We’re on full alert. The base is being secured right this minute. All liberty and leave is canceled.”

And all I could think, while a near-panic swirled around me and the telephones started ringing crazily, was: How am I going to tell Eden? I’m sure now that men thought the same things at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and the Battle of Hastings. She was supposed to pick me up at the locker club at six and we were going to the Warrington Drive-In to see Moulin Rouge. Miles had described the movie as pure hokum, full of lies and mistakes and stupidities about this French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, but even so, it was still the best Hollywood movie ever made about an artist. I wanted to see it badly, wondering if I was anything like Toulouse-Lautrec; Eden said she wanted to check out this José Ferrer, find out if he was anything like me. But now all leaves were canceled and we’d have to wait. I was eighteen and I didn’t want to wait. Besides, there was no telephone at the trailer and no way to call her at Sears. I hoped someone in the store’s appliance department would turn on a radio and she’d discover that all the bases in Pensacola were secured, so we could hold off the expected assault of the vengeful Russians. She would know that I was joining all the other brave American boys who would protect the country from a dead man.

“Are they kidding?” I said to Donnie Ray.

“Fraid not. Our troops are on alert all over the world.”

“But why? The guy’s dead.”

“Maybe he was murdered, sailor. Maybe there are some guys worse than him, want to blow up the damn world. Maybe they’ll blame us. Who knows?”

“You mean there’s a bunch of guys in the Kremlin saying, ‘Okay, now’s our chance. We can get Ellyson Field.’ ”

Donnie Ray laughed. “Could be.”

All through the day we saw jets screaming high across the sky. We heard that there were plans to move the American government to Cuba if the Russians invaded. We heard that SAC bombers were in the air over Europe so they couldn’t be destroyed on the ground. All of them were carrying hydrogen bombs. Everybody talked about the death of Stalin. Uncle Joe, some of them called him. Worse than Hitler, a few said. A monster. Becket said Stalin was a Catlick who started out to be a priest and then saw the light and became a bankrobber and a Bolshevik and someone else said he was born in Georgia, and Harrelson said, Yeah, near Macon. We drank a lot of coffee. Customers arrived in a stream because the sky was dense with helicopters, and that meant that parts were breaking, failing, wearing out. Becket said he was glad that Miles Rayfield was off at Mainside with Dunbar because if he was at Ellyson when the Russian bombs started dropping that would really piss him off.

“He’d prob’ly throw his skirt in the air,” Harrelson said.

And I thought of Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada walking alone on the beach beside Perdido Bay. And that made me think of Eden Santana.

At lunchtime, Bumper was serving at the messhall and Harrelson was behind me on line. Bumper looked at me, his eyes twinkling in his round black face, laid some extra French fries on my tray, then reached under the counter and found me a piece of coconut pie. Harrelson stared at Bumper.

“How bout some of that pie?”

“Last piece,” Bumper said, deadpan.

“You sure of that?”

Bumper held up an empty pie plate.

We moved on.

“Gahdam uppity niggers,” Harrelson said.

“Is there anybody you like, Harrelson?” I said.

“Yeah. Americans.”

We sat together at one of the tables. Boswell came over and joined us. He didn’t have any pie either.

“Captain’s runnin around like a duck without a dick,” he said.

“Ducks have dicks?” I said.

“Sure,” Boswell said, “but they ain’t what they’re quacked up to be!” He slammed the table and Harrelson laughed, shaking his head, and then Boswell said: “Where’d you get that fuckin pie?”

“Why you even ask, Bos?” Harrelson said. “The boy’s a damn Yankee niggerlover and the niggers love him back.”

“Ah, fuck you,” I said.

“It’s the truth, ain’t it? You upstairs in the slave quarters every other day.”

“Maybe he likes the smell up there,” Boswell said.

“Or the spearchuckin music.”

“You guys just take your asshole pills, or what?” I said.

“Maybe he goes to town with em to get some a that dark meat,” Harrelson said. I thought of Winnie standing at the jukebox, one foot curled around the other.

“Nah, he got his own stuff,” Boswell said. “Everybody knows that.”

“She ain’t stuff,” I said.

“Shew,” Boswell said, “you touchy today, ain’t you, boy?”

“Just lay off,” I said. I was poking at the pie, then slid the plate toward Boswell.

“Want some?” I said.

Boswell grinned. “Nah. I don’t even like coconut pie.”

Harrelson reached over with a fork and clipped off a piece of the pie. “I do.”

“Taste like creosote to me,” Boswell said.

“If it ain’t got grits with it, Bos don’t eat it,” Harrelson said to me. “What we gone do after the alert’s over, Bos?”

“Jackson, Mississippi,” Boswell said.

Harrelson turned to me. “He bin tryin to get me to go to Jackson Mi’sippi since last September.”

“Do the ducks have dicks there?” I said.

“Five fuckin hours in the car,” Harrelson said.

“We gotta go there,” Boswell said.

“Why Jackson, Mississippi?” I said.

Boswell’s eyes brightened. “ ’Cause it’s the insurance capital of the whole damn South!”

The words hung there for a long moment.

“So?” I said.

“Insurance companies, boy,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“What does that mean?” Boswell said.

“I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“Secretaries, boy!

I got up, shaking my head, while Harrelson laughed. I started for the disposal room and saw Bobby Bolden coming toward me. There was a slice of coconut pie on his tray.

“Too bad about Stalin, huh?” he said.

Miles Rayfield and Dunbar came back around three. Rayfield’s eyes were wide and agitated in his pink sunburned face. Dunbar was smoking a cigarette in an amused way.

“You just can’t believe Mainside!” Miles said. “They’re running around like a pack of medieval lunatics with the plague! You’d think the Russians just landed in Mobile!”

“Haulin out anti-aircraft guns,” Dunbar said.

“They’re making sailors march!” Miles said. “With guns!”

“And officers are checking all IDs, case someone got a Communist Party membership card on ’im,” Dunbar said. “Tell him, Miles.”

“My wallet was in the truck!” Miles said. “Who carries around an ID?”

“They asked him for it,” Dunbar said, shaking his head in mock sympathy.

“And arrested me!”

“Marched him to the parkin lot to get the damned thing.”

“Under arrest!”

“They didn’t believe it was a Navy wallet cause it didn’t have a rubber in it.”

“And Dunbar here, this son of a bitch, he told them he hardly knew me,” Miles said. “One of the damned jarheads said I even looked Russian. And then the thick-headed dumb bastard started doing one of those scenes out of some rotten World War II propaganda movie. He started asking me about baseball!”

“Babe Luth, you die,” Dunbar said.

“And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked me about football! Or as he called it … footbowl. And I knew even less.”

“So they took him to security,” Dunbar said, laughing.

“And held me there, trying to get Donnie Ray on the damned phone,” Miles said. “And of course the damn lines were busy for two hours and then everybody went out to lunch except that damned Larry Parsons.”

“Dumbest white man in the United States,” Dunbar said.

“And he didn’t know my last name!” Miles said. “I’ve been here a year and he never learned my last name!”

“So what did you do?” I said.

“What do you always do in the damned Navy? We waited.”

“Watched the flyboys get ready for an air strike on downtown Palatka.”

Miles was laughing now at the absurdity of the whole world, smothering the laugh with a sunburned hand.

“The Navy,” he said. “The goddamned Navy …”

We were at our desks, filling out forms. And then Larry Parsons came back from a late lunch. His face was all tensed up, his eyes wide.

“Hey,” he said, “did you hear about Stalin?”

Dunbar fell on the floor and groaned.

A half hour later, Miles suddenly turned in his chair and faced me.

“Jesus Christ, I almost forgot!”

He took a letter from his jeans pocket.

“There was a woman out by the gate, waved us down as we were coming in,” he said. “Asked us to get this to you.”

He handed me the letter. Blinked. Turned back to his typewriter, pecking out numbers on a form. The letter had my name written on it in a small careful hand. I opened it.

That was all. There was no phone number for me to call her, and no address. Even the city was something new. She’s never mentioned it to me, never told me that her children lived there, and I’d been afraid to ask. There were a million things she never said, and that I never asked. So as I studied the note as if it were a sacred text, I thought it was very much like Eden Santana, full of holes and confusions. She didn’t say how sick the child was, or with what; she didn’t mention how long she’d be gone or how she’d get in touch with me when she got back. All I knew for sure was that she was gone.

“You okay?” Miles Rayfield said.

“Yeah … Why?”

“You’re the color of newsprint paper.”

“No. I’m okay.”

At least she’d signed the note “love.” I got up and went to the counter and waited on customers. Move, I thought. Do something. That way you will not have to think.

After a while, Miles left with Becket and Dunbar for the hangars, the three of them hauling an engine on a truck. I went looking for a pontoon part in the back, taking my time, trying to imagine Stalin’s last hours, anything to push Eden’s face from my mind, and then slipped into Miles Rayfield’s studio. On the easel, a deserted beach was taking shape on a piece of Masonite. The colors were muted, the colors of dusk. But there were only large rough forms, no details, no drawing. I picked up the sketchbook and leafed through it. Miles Rayfield had made many more drawings.

The last five were of Freddie Harada. His face was beautifully captured in pencil from two different angles; his features looking boyish and innocent, but there was something new in his eyes and the set of his mouth, an aspect I’d never seen before on my visits to the Kingdom of Darkness. He seemed to be flirting with me. Or with the artist. The other pictures were of Freddie standing, looking directly off the page. He was naked. Late in the afternoon, I strolled over to the hangars to see Sal and Max. They were working together on the electronic system of a big HUP. I looked around for Mercado but didn’t see him.

“Trouble with these goddamn things,” Sal said, “if you use them, they break.”

“The guys that design them don’t have to fly them,” Max said. “That’s why they’re so lousy.”

“You guys seen that Mercado around?” I said.

Sal looked up. “He’s off for a week. Went home to Mexico.”

Jesus. She’s gone. He’s gone. At the same time. Max and Sal tried to explain to me what they were doing, but I couldn’t follow it.

Chapter 42

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Around midnight I went outside and sat on the stairs, breathing in the warm air, looking out at the thick clusters of stars. Then I saw Miles Rayfield coming around the side of the Supply Shack, walking fast, his head down. He didn’t see me until he reached the stairs.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, his manner oddly stiff. “Oh, hello. What are you doing here?”

“Can’t sleep. Nice night.”

He relaxed and took out his Pall Malls and lit up. “I thought maybe you were waiting for Lavrenti Beria to take over the base.”

“Who’s he?”

He told me and I laughed (too hard) at his little joke and felt stupid again. There were at least five hundred names of people in this world that were known by everyone except me. My head was filled with useless knowledge. But I didn’t know Lavrenti Beria was the head of the Russian secret police. I didn’t know a lot of things. I asked Miles if he’d just finished painting. He hesitated, then went rushing ahead.

“Hell, no,” he said. “If there was ever a day they’d catch me, it’s today. Imagine getting caught doing something secret on the day Stalin died? Oh, hey, I wanted to show you something.”

I followed him into the barracks. The racks were full of sleeping men. Miles Rayfield went to his locker and I met him in the head, where the lights were still burning. He handed me a folder crammed with reproductions of paintings torn from magazines. “Study these,” he said. “Copy them if you want.” A lot of the pictures were by his own favorite, a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi. At first (conditioned by Caniff and Noel Sickles and Crane) I thought the drawing was clumsy, the postures awkward, the heads too big or the hands too small. Sometimes Kuniyoshi’s people seemed to be falling out of the picture. But standing with Miles in the head, looking at the pictures while Miles smoked, I began to see in a new way. There was one painting of a fat big-headed kid with crazy eyes holding a banana in one hand, reaching with the other for a peach in a white bowl. The table was a dark orange and tilted so that we saw it from the top. A window was open to an empty landscape: two buildings, two clouds, the view empty and scary like the desolate buildings I’d seen in Renaissance paintings.

“Look at that kid’s eyes,” Miles whispered, pointing at Kuniyoshi’s fat boy. “He’s a monster. All appetite, all need, all want. Look at the way his hair is parted down the middle.… And see, he’s got a little sailor boy’s shirt on, but it’s not blue. It’s the color of dried blood. And the blue walls, the blue dead sky, you know he’s living in a cold bleak world and eats to make himself feel alive.…”

Suddenly a door behind us opened and closed. And Harrelson was there, drunk, his eyes small and glittery. He looked at Miles and then at me.

“Well, looka this.”

“Fuck off, Harrelson,” Miles said. “The Russians are coming.”

“Two of you … in the shithouse. In the middle of the goddamn night. Ain’t that cute.”

I stepped forward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You and honeybunch here,” he said and grinned. “Couple of the year.”

I grabbed him by his jumper and slammed him against the wall. I came within an inch of his face, smelling the souring booze on his breath.

“You say another word,” I whispered, “and I’ll break your fuckin head.”

Someone yelled from the darkness of the barracks. “Knock it off!” And another: “Go to fucking bed!”

I waited for them to be quiet and released my grip on Harrelson. I was trembling. Not in fear of Harrelson. I was afraid of my own sudden rage. I might punch myself into the brig.

“You’re a real fresh boy,” Harrelson said coldly.

“And you’re a sick bastard,” I said. “Make any more remarks, to me or Miles and I’ll knock your dick stiff. He’s my friend, got it? Friend.”

Harrelson said, sarcastically, “Excuse me.” He swished past me to the urinals and pissed for a long time, humming “I Can’t Help It if You’re Still in Love With Me.” I almost laughed. He was such a relentless bastard. And the fury seeped out of me. Harrelson was mean, and I’d just slammed him around; but I had to love him for this. Hank Williams all the way. When he was finished, he looked at us in an offended way, and walked into the dark slumbering barracks. I exhaled a little too loudly. And then chuckled in a forced way. Miles Rayfield wasn’t laughing.

“Thanks,” he said, and walked quickly to his bunk.

Afterward it was even harder to sleep. Harrelson was now my enemy and I didn’t want enemies. Not here. Not anywhere. I didn’t want to have to watch my back. I didn’t want anyone working against me in secret. I’d defended myself: yes. And I had defended Miles Rayfield. But suppose Harrelson was right about Miles? What did that mean about me? Miles was my friend. He didn’t hoard what he knew about painting and drawing; he shared it with me, and nobody in the world had ever done that before. And he was pushing me to be better, to grow out of comics and childhood, to look at real art, to try it myself. His friendship was a challenge. He’d already showed me how to make money. In a way, he had turned me pro. But if I liked him and he was queer, did that make me queer too? It was so goddamned confusing.

I got up again and went back into the head and studied the other pictures in Miles’s folder. Painters named Adolph Dehn and Aaron Bohrod, Anton Refrigier and Arnold Blanch. Maybe Miles had handed me his folder of painters whose first names started with A. None of them were in the same league with Kuniyoshi.

And then I saw Ben Shahn for the first time and I said out loud, Jesus Christ. These were pictures I understood. Ben Shahn. He had to come from the kind of places I came from. Here was a picture called Handball. A high handball court with four players in front of it, one of them a Negro wearing a hat. There were two men watching in the foreground. One in a cap, his hands jammed deep into his baggy trousers. The other’s hands were folded. Beyond the handball court stood a row of tenements. I felt as if I’d played on that court, stood on that street. I was certain I knew the guy with the cap. In another Ben Shahn picture called Vacant Lot there was a boy in a sweater and knickers just like those I wore until I was eleven. A white shirt collar rose above the sweater and he was playing ball alone against a brick wall in a vacant lot. The boy was totally isolated. Sitting there in the john, in Pensacola, Florida, on the day Stalin died, I thought of long Saturday mornings in Brooklyn, up early to serve Mass at Holy Name and how it felt when Mass was finished and it was still early and the neighborhood was silent because the men weren’t up yet and I would go down to the Ansonia Clock Factory and play ball alone against its dirty brick walls. I looked at the picture thinking: This could be me.

Then I heard a door open and slam and someone bouncing off a wall and a giggle and a new stirring in the barracks. I got up. It was Sal. He saw me and excused himself and went past me and pissed in the sink.

“Had to do that since I left the Dirt Bar,” he said.

“I thought all leave and liberty was canceled,” I said.

“Nah, just a rumor. Stalin’s still dead.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Blow job.”

“What about you?”

“Too broke up about Joe,” he said, and went off to bed. One of these nights, I thought, I have to really talk to Sal.

And I did.

Chapter 43

My father is a baker, I like to say: he bakes cars. He owns a body shop in the South Bronx and fixes cars from all over the borough. He never asks anyone for registration papers. A guy wants a black car painted pink? Why not? You want certain numbers filed off the engine block? Step right up. The old man does good work. He has a good eye for color, and he can do anything with his hands. He could’ve been a sculptor in another life. I guess when he was young he didn’t have the choices a lot of people get in this world. Before he got the body shop he worked in a gas station, and before that he fought World War II.

But in a weird way I always thought that my father’s father was my real father. He lived three blocks away from us, in a tiny apartment packed with books and magazines and old brown photographs. Their family was from Florence, in Tuscany, and they were always Reds. They didn’t mean what we mean by a Red. Grandpa was some kind of socialist anarchist. He thought everything in the country should be shared by the people. Food, the ports, oil, big industry, every fucking thing. Nobody should starve. Nobody should be unemployed. Everybody should have a doctor. You know, real terrible disgusting stuff that would destroy the United States if we had it. But then Grandpa also felt that if there was a government, he was against it. “Ideas are wonderful,” he would shout, in the apartment, with his books everywhere, pulling on his white beard, his arms flying around. “Abstractions are wonderful. Love is wonderful and justice is wonderful and the common good? Most wonderful of all. But the son of a bitching politicians will always sell you out or put you in the dungeon.”

He married a woman from Siena. I don’t remember her. She died in the early thirties, after my father was born. There were pictures of her around, though, and she seemed thin and a little afraid, standing in Coney Island or out at the Statue of Liberty, her eyes looking at you like she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing in this country. Grandpa himself would never say exactly why he came to New York. There was some trouble in the Old Country, he’d say, that’s all. I could never find out what it was, but it must’ve had something to do with him being a Red.

He had beautiful handwriting when he was young. They call it calligraphy now. Just beautiful, done with goose feathers, he said, and with special black inks he bought from some Chinaman on Chatham Square. When he and his wife first came here, he worked in a horse-and-buggy place during the day, and at night he would write these beautiful business cards for rich people — wedding invitations and diplomas, all that kind of thing. His wife was always mad at him because he spent all the extra money on books instead of clothes or things for the house. I’ve seen a few of them, on cardboard that’s yellow now, ones he did for his sample case, that he’d take around to these mansions on Fifth Avenue, him with his lousy English, and they’d laugh and say hey, a Wop who can write!

Then he got hurt in an accident and his hand, the one he used to write with, was all smashed up and the doctors amputated his forefinger. It must of broke his fuckin heart. Just telling you this, it almost breaks mine. But when he told me about it, a half a century later almost, he just shrugged. It was meant to be, he said. If it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another. I guess he was what they call a fatalist. But I didn’t really believe him when he just shrugged it off. I used to see him sometimes in a corner of the apartment, just staring at the hand.

He worked in a garage during the twenties; I guess that’s where my father got his thing for cars. But when the Depression came, Grandpa opened a grocery store in The Bronx, moved from the Lower East Side to Pleasant Avenue uptown and finally to the Bronx. “With the store, I knew we would always eat,” he said. “In the Depression, nobody drove cars.” After my grandmother died, the heart went out of him (everybody said) but he kept the store going. He lived upstairs and he always had something for me when I went over there, ice cream, tea, little pastries. And he would tell me about the books. Most of them were in Italian, but he told me I had to read them, that nobody who claimed to be civilized could live without these books: Dante, Machiavelli (The Discourses, he said, read them, the plans for a republic, and remember that The Prince was really a job application) and Leopardi and Manzoni and Guicciardini. He talked about these guys as if they were his personal friends. “Like Dante said once …” He knew Latin, and when I went to Cardinal Hayes he would get me to read Caesar and Cicero and Virgil out loud, telling me how to pronounce the words with passion, as if they were written by living breathing men, not dead guys, not professors. He made me love Latin. When it was my turn to read, the brothers and the priests didn’t know what the fuck I was up to. They were used to Latin sounding like a chant from the mass and not like a language that people used for giving orders and fucking women. I was good at it but I could never get the hang of Tacitus. Even Grandpa bitched about the man’s style.

He hated Mussolini with a passion and that is what caused all the trouble in the family. My father married a woman whose parents were from Sicily. The Siggies hated the old Garibaldi people, because when Garibaldi conquered Sicily he got rid of all the old fucks, the Mafia, the hustlers, the guys bleeding the poor, the landlords. My mother’s family thought people from Firenze (that’s what we always called Florence because that was its name) were snobs, faggots, commies. My other grandfather wouldn’t speak to Grandfather Infantino.

The families barely talked. Me and my sister were like prizes, passed back and forth from one family to the other. My mother was one of nine kids, so her side of the family acted like my Grandfather Infantino was some kind of faggot for only having two kids. But nobody had a monopoly on common sense. Grandpa couldn’t stand my mother either. I heard him call her “that Arab” once and didn’t know what he meant until I read how the Arabs were in Sicily for hundreds of years. They were opposites, those families; the Florentines were very clear about most things, a little cold, able to talk about subjects besides themselves. The Sicilians were hot, silent, and devious; I always felt there was something else going on, always; and then there would be those sudden explosions, screaming, yelling, even flat-out violence. It was like once a week someone got punched out. For staying out late. For flirting with some bad guy. For fucking up the toast. Anything would do as an excuse. My Aunt Marie got her jaw busted for going out with an Irish cop. My Aunt Marie was beaten with a belt for saying she didn’t believe in God — by the other grandfather, who didn’t even go to church. They were nuts.

But all during the war, we ate good. I gotta say that. We had my grandfather’s store and there were two of my uncles on my mother’s side who came around sometimes with steaks. They wore striped suits and pinkie rings and when they were there everybody whispered. I guess they were connected. Wise guys. I don’t know. Nobody ever explained. Even today, my mother just says, “They’re in business.” I know one thing: they didn’t go off and fight in the war.

My father did. That’s why I barely knew the guy. He was gone almost from the time I started remembering things. Then in ’44 he was in a place called the Hurtgen Forest and had part of his leg blown away. He came back home in the spring of ’45. He never told anyone he was on his way, just came home, two days after Easter, in uniform and on crutches. And when my mother went to the door to answer the knock and she saw him she started bawling. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. My sister Fioretta started bawling too; she’s three years older than me so she remembered him. They sent me over to get my grandfather and wow! That night! That night! There musta been two hundred people in the apartment, coming from all over, my mother’s people too, with trays of spaghetti, lasagna, ravioli, sodas, beer, whiskey. One guy had an accordion and they all started singing in English and Italian and every once in a while my mother would start bawling again. She never left my father’s side. Not once. The noise was beyond belief. I wanted it to go on forever, for a week, a month, a fucking year.

The next day, my father slept until three in the afternoon, like he was catching up on three years’ worth of sleep. My mother brought him breakfast in bed, pancakes and bacon and cold milk. And then she led him to the bathroom for a hot bath and that’s when I saw how he needed help, he needed to lean on her, he couldn’t walk without a crutch. He didn’t say anything to me or my sister. He didn’t complain. He just said to my mother, Okay, it’s okay, thanks, it’s okay.

He’d put on weight while he was away and didn’t fit into his civvies, so that first day we called Ralph the Tailor to come up the flat and he made measurements, all of them talking in Italian, and then the tailor went away and for the next four hours my father just sat by the window in the living room, in the big chair, dressed in a bathrobe, looking out at the street. He didn’t say a word to me. Not a fucking sentence. I was only eleven but I knew he had gone through some bad shit. I went to see my grandfather, to find out what I did wrong, whether it was my fault my father didn’t talk to me, and Grandpa said to me, “He will never be the same, so you better get used to it.” Now I meet some of these bullshitters in bars who tell you how they won the fucking war and I always think of my father on that first day, staring out the window, and I want to punch someone out.

I was getting pretty angry myself then. I was the top student in my class in grammar school, but the fucking Irish priests and nuns never encouraged me to do anything more. I was some kind of freak to them. I was Italian, so I had two choices: the Sanitation Department or the rackets. Somehow, around that time, I discovered that if I hit people on the chin they went down. That’s what got me some respect. Not that I could read Latin or I knew who Leopardi was, but that I could beat the shit out of somebody. My mother’s family began to approve of me at last. Some of my cousins saw me belt out two Irish guys at Orchard Beach one day and thought I was the next Rocky Graziano. They wanted me to start going to the gym, go in the Gloves; the two wiseguy uncles said they would take care of everything. I started to feel I was hot shit.

Then in 1947, when I graduated from grammar school, my grandfather sold the grocery store to a Puerto Rican and took me on a trip to Italy. He must have seen that I was on my way to being just another guinea hoodlum. He told me the trip was a gift for my good grades, but I always thought it was to save me from myself. And it was also a gift to himself. He hadn’t been back since 1900. More than half of his life. Part of it was, he wouldn’t go there while Mussolini was in power, part, he didn’t have the money, part, some kind of crazy pride (he wouldn’t go there as poor as the day he left). Now he wanted to see the Old Country. Just one more time.

I loved that fucking trip to Italy. Jesus Christ, I loved that trip. We went on a ship called the Genoa; it was all white and everybody spoke Italian and there were some war brides on board, and I thought they were the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life. Even the ones with the moustaches. I could understand most of what they were saying (from my father’s Italian and the Latin) and they made me so horny I whacked off five times a day, at least. At night, I would go out on deck with my grandfather and we’d stand next to the lifeboats and look out at the Atlantic with the moon shining and the waves slapping the hull and a band playing somewhere and I guess that’s where the Navy thing came from later.

On that trip, I started to think that Grandpa knew everything. He talked about the Mediterranean as the place where civilization came from, and he woke me up and dragged me to see Gibraltar when we went by in the night and showed me where Africa was and pointed toward where the Alps were and explained about the way all the rivers of Europe came from them. When we came into Genoa, he started to cry. Home at last.

Florence was pretty much a mess that year. There’d been some fighting there during the war and Grandpa’s old house on the Arno was gone. They were still repairing the bridges and the museums weren’t open yet because they were trying to figure out what was hidden and what the Germans stole and what had been destroyed. Most of the people he knew were dead or off to America or Argentina, but he didn’t seem to care. He showed me the house where my grandmother lived. It was a pension now, filled with students. And he showed me the place where Savonarola was burned at the stake. We sat at a table in a outdoor café and had coffee with a slice of lemon and he looked out and said, Leonardo walked here, and Michelangelo and Machiavelli. He talked like they were there when he was young. He told me to look at the light, too, the way the shadows fell. Clarity, he said. Always clarity. The clear light of Firenze. That’s why they painted that way he said, with passion. And he told me to look at the faces of the people. And he told me, no matter what anybody says, no matter what you feel when they call you Wop or Dago or Guinea, remember this day. Remember this place, remember where you came from.

We were back home three months when he died. And there ain’t a day goes by I don’t miss him. I graduated top of the class at Hayes and I wanted to go to college. But Korea broke out. We had no money (my mother blamed my grandfather for wasting the store money on the trip to Italy and my father wouldn’t ask the wiseguy in-laws for a dime). I had a girl at the time, an Irish girl from Brook Park. Her father didn’t approve of me, but at least I was white. She’s still my girl, I guess, but it seems like a long time ago. I decided if I went into the service I could go to college on the Bill when I came out. Study history or Latin. Teach, maybe. I know you don’t believe that, seeing me fuck around the way I do sometimes. But I mean it. Fucking around keeps me from going crazy. When I told my father I wanted to enlist, he said, Go in the Coast Guard, go in the Navy, go in the Air Force. Go anyplace, but don’t go in the goddamned infantry. And I thought of those nights with my grandfather, standing on the deck looking at the moon over the Mediterranean, and it wasn’t even a choice.

Maybe, when this Navy bit is finished, I’ll make that trip to Italy. Sometimes, just before I go to sleep, I see myself coming down a gangplank and there are people from customs and signs telling you where to go and a band playing music and everybody crying and laughing, and there, right down there in the crowd, waiting for me in Italy, is Grandpa.

Yeah.

Chapter 44

They buried Stalin, and a fat little guy named Malenkov took over. He had a high unlined forehead with a spear of hair falling over his brow. After one look at him the whole country calmed down. Even the Navy. Liberty and leave were restored. Sal organized a Josef V. Stalin Memorial Service at the Dirt Bar and we all got drunk while he tried to teach us the words of the “Internationale.” Even Dixie Shafer gave it a try. Joe McCarthy got on the radio to warn us that Malenkov was worse than Stalin and had agents everywhere in the United States. Nobody believed him. In the mornings on the base, Captain Pritchett supervised the flowers of spring. Business at the Supply Shack was brisk. In the late afternoons, Bobby Bolden played the blues again, with the shades up and the windows open in the Kingdom of Darkness. I did seven portraits of women I didn’t know. And there was still no word from Eden Santana.

I started to write her a letter, telling her how much I missed her and how I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about her and how I wanted her now and next month and for the rest of my life. But there was nowhere to send it and so I destroyed it without finishing it. One afternoon, I walked all the way to the lake. Nothing had changed; the car was still gone, the trailer still locked up. I sat on the front step for an hour, breathing in the jasmine and honeysuckle, sweet alyssum and magnolia, the aromas of our days together. When the no-see-ums arrived at dusk, I walked back.

On Friday, Miles Rayfield asked me if I wanted to go with him to the Rex to see Moulin Rouge. He wanted to see the movie again before it left Pensacola forever. I hesitated, mumbled about how I was waiting for my girlfriend to come back, and Miles said: “When a movie leaves the Rex, they burn the prints.” The truth was that I was a little afraid of going to a movie with Miles Rayfield. What if he put a hand on my leg during the show or something? He was my friend and I didn’t want anything to ruin that friendship. But what if Harrelson was right? And what about those drawings of Freddie Harada and the way they walked along Perdido Beach. Then I thought: Jesus, you are letting Harrelson do your thinking for you. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”

We took the bus downtown. I remember thinking the movie was amazing, with color that I’d never seen before, and lovely music and even a great performance by Zsa Zsa Gabor, who until then I’d thought was a joke. It turned out that I didn’t have anything in common with Toulouse-Lautrec; but sitting there in the dark, I wanted to live the way he did, in a studio in Paris, prowling around the cafés and whorehouses and music halls at night, making drawings. But even that vision reminded me of Eden. After all, how could I spend the nights in whorehouses and bring Eden along? How could I live that way and still go home to her at night? I watched the movie while another movie played in my head. Until Zsa Zsa Gabor’s shimmering white skin forced me to embrace her. Good-bye, Henri, she called to me. I have a rendezvous with a Russian guard.… While her breasts pushed up out of her silky gowns. When the picture ended, I felt like crying. Miles Rayfield, as they say, never laid a hand on me.

On the way to the Ellyson Field bus, I bought a copy of Life with Stalin and Malenkov on the cover. The story inside had a headline, FALSE GOD DIES, CRISIS IS BORN, with pictures of the Kremlin at night, snow on the ground, a few lights burning, Russia in darkness. A guy named Edward Crankshaw said in an article that Malenkov and Beria had overthrown the Politburo within twenty-four hours of Stalin’s death. He didn’t say how he knew this. He certainly wasn’t there. I read a paragraph to Miles: “The men who have carried out this revolution, Malenkov and Beria, now work together. But the very violence of their first joint action has set the tone for times to come.…” In other words, the Russians would be worse enemies than ever.

“How do you figure they pull this shit off?” I said. “Do they go in the room with their guns out and say, We’re the boss now?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s sort of like a primary in Mississippi …” And turned away and closed his eyes.

The bus moved slowly, past the honky-tonks and the churches. I read a little story about a guy named Raymond who worked for the Voice of America, which was being investigated by Joe McCarthy. Nobody had accused him of being a Communist but he’d thrown himself in front of a bus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving a note for his wife that said, “Once the dogs are set on you, everything you have done since the beginning of time is suspect.”

Jesus Christ.

That poor bastard.

The driver stopped at the locker club and we got out, went in and changed clothes. Then we walked slowly down the road to the main gate. Miles was quiet for a long time.

“Back to Anus Mundi,” he said at the gate.

Chapter 45

By Saturday afternoon, there was still no message from Eden. I was trying to sleep when Bobby Bolden came to the barracks. He told me to get dressed. They were all going to a club that night to hear a blues singer named Champion Jack Dupree. Out in the boondocks somewhere.

“Catty loves this guy,” he said. “So she’s your date, if you get what I mean.”

He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go. He seemed to know that Eden wasn’t back from New Orleans and that I was feeling lost or abandoned or wasted. So he told me to go with them. And at dusk I was driving Bobby’s Mercury, with Catty beside me, Bobby next to the door, and Bumper, Rhode Island Freddie and Tampa crowded into the back seat. We drove northeast out of the city, along roads that Bobby Bolden knew, through a thousand acres of longleaf pine. He pointed out small clusters of unpainted houses, part of the turpentine camps where blacks had worked since slavery days. Tampa argued about the true name of the pine. His folks called it loblolly pine or sand pine, and Bumper said it didn’t matter, did it? Tampa said it sure did, ’cause after the Civil War, most of the cotton plantations closed. “Didn’t have no free labor no more,” he said. “So they planted the land with loblolly and sold it to the timber men. So it do matter, don’t it?”

“In Africa, they be callin it Mau Mau pine ’fore long,” said Rhode Island Freddie, and they all laughed. Catty glanced at me.

“We should’ve checked these damn local Mau Maus for guns,” she said to me. “Before we got in the car.”

“Not guns, woman,” Bobby Bolden said. “Knives. Long knives. As in the Night of the Long Knives …”

“It’s the Night of the Long Dicks everybody’s afraid of.”

They all laughed and then Catty pointed out a hawk circling over the pine forests and Bobby Bolden said, “Now that’s free. No guard duty. No salutin’. No racist bullshit. Free …”

The hawk suddenly dove out of our sight, and then Bobby Bolden directed me into a side road, through darker country, plunging across bogs where the odor was suddenly sweet and musky and we could see hundreds of shrubs blooming like white walls.

“Jesus, that’s beautiful,” Catty said. “What is that stuff, anyway?” Nobody knew the name of the shrubs, and I wished Eden was there, she would know, she knew everything, and Catty said she’d like to find a perfume that smelled like that, and then suddenly it was dark. I turned on the lights, and we were moving down a back road, unable to see much except the trunks of pines and a few black people walking slowly on the shoulder. Bobby Bolden leaned forward, peering into the darkness. He took Catty’s hand.

And then we began to hear music. It was way off, a thumping bass line at first, and then the tinny distant sound of brass, and now there were cars on the road, red taillights ahead of us, and more people walking in groups of four and five, all dressed up, and then we could see the lights of the club.

“Up there,” Bobby Bolden said. “Slow down. Real slow. Crawl, man. There’s people everywhere.… You see that white post? Take a right just past that.”

We pulled into a dirt field serving as a parking lot, and we all got out and stretched. Before us stood the Blackhawk. It was a long, two-story building with a neon sign glowing in the humid night, and music pounding from its open doors. And I realized that there were hundreds of black faces all around us in the dark, and black laughter floating on the night air, and the sibilant sound of black women shushing men and deeper voices answering with words I couldn’t hear.

“Better hold her hand,” Bobby Bolden said. “Never know who might be watchin from the woods.”

I took Catty’s damp hand, and Bobby Bolden led the way to the door, with Tampa, Bumper and Long Island Freddie behind us. I saw eyes fall upon us, looking at Catty and me, our white faces, then turning away, neither the men nor the women making eye contact with us, with the music louder and Bobby Bolden paying for us all at the door. A huge black man was taking the money, wearing a dark jacket and sunglasses, nodding as Bobby Bolden whispered something to him, then calling a thin light-skinned black man over, saying something to him. Catty’s hand was sweating now, and I wondered if she saw this as the future, barred from white clubs, excused, introduced, explained in the black world. I thought: No wonder your hands are wet. They might be wet for the rest of your life.

The light-skinned man led us to the last empty table in the large smoky room, and we sat down, I to Catty’s left, Bobby Bolden to her right. I glanced around and saw the silhouttes of men and women against a bar along the far wall. At the tables beside us, all the faces were black, some shiny with sweat, the men dressed in suits, the women wearing flowers in their hair and bright dresses, bottles and ice buckets in front of them, a few people turning to look at the white faces, then turning back to the music. On the bandstand in front of us, seated at a piano, was a small neat man. Champion Jack Dupree. Singing.

The crowd roared.

Another roar.

Bobby Bolden laughed and said we wouldn’t hear this on the radio, a song about being a junkie, and then told me to watch the way Champion Jack played the piano with the thumb tucked under the fingers of his left hand, to make the bass notes jump, told me the man was a legend back home in Naptown, where he’d played for years in the thirties, told me he came from the same New Orleans orphanage where Louis Armstrong lived as a kid, was a boxer during the Depression, later played at the Cotton Club. Bolden glanced at the door then and looked around sternly at the other black faces, as if saying to them, Be cool, don’t start any shit, these white folks is my guests. And Dupree sang on: Please write my mother, tell her the shape I’m in …

Then Rhode Island Freddie waved in the direction of the door, while a waiter set up ice and a bottle and glasses for our table. I turned to look at the door and three black women were moving through the room, men looking up at them with greedy eyes, the three women all round and their hair piled up high and their dresses fitting them like tattoos. One of them was Winnie. In a white dress.

“Yo, yawl,” she said, and Bobby Bolden covered his mouth with a finger and nodded toward Dupree. No talking, the move said, until the man finishes. Winnie sat next to me, and leaned close, her breasts pressing against my arm, and whispered in my ear. “Member me? Ah’m Winnie.” I said I sure did remember her and she reached past me for the ice and the bottle.

Dupree smiled widely as the crowd yelled, stomped, banged on tables. Winnie squealed and then tried to introduce the other two women, Velma and Cissy, and then Rhode Island Freddie was moving on Cissy and I saw Bobby holding Catty’s hand below the table and Bumper had moved beside Velma. Champion Jack Dupree was finishing, the whole room cheering and standing, the little man nodding and smiling and walking off in a hurry.

“Sure do love the way that man sing,” Winnie said. “Whad you think?”

“Great.”

Her eyes were fixed on me as if I was the only man in the place. She looked even darker in the dim light of the Blackhawk, her skin offset by the white dress, and she wore a lot of black makeup around her eyes. Her lips were thick and full, covered with glossy coral lipstick. She asked me again about New York, while Dupree’s musicians left the stand and some burly men in T-shirts began to set up for another act. I tried not to look at her too hard or to stare at her breasts. I didn’t want her to say, Ain’t you never seen no cullid girl before? Recorded music played on the sound system, slower stuff, some of those records I’d heard up in the Kingdom of Darkness. Lowell Fulsom. Roy Brown. The small dance floor was immediately crowded. Rhode Island Freddie led Cissy away by the hand and Bumper took hold of Velma and Tampa went away somewhere and came back with a bony woman with scared eyes and slipped past us into the dancing crowd. Winnie said, “Dance?” I glanced at Bobby, thinking: What is this? Is she some gift? Bobby said, “Why in the fuck not, man? Go ahead …”

Winnie led the way, holding my hand, and I felt strange, wondering if this was the way black men felt when they were in a place where everyone was white. I was sure everybody was looking at me or looking at Winnie, or both. Just waiting to see if I made a grab at one of their women. Just waiting for a sign of arrogance. So I held her hands in a formal way, hoping everybody would think I was polite, that I was a visitor, a friend of the girl and the guys at our table, just a guy passing through. But the floor was packed now, bodies jammed against bodies, and Winnie pulled me close and said, “Relax, man,” and we began truly to dance. I could smell soap in her kinky hair and felt her breasts against my chest and her syrupy belly against my crotch and I thought about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, I thought about Robert Henri and John Foster Dulles, but nothing worked: I got a hard-on. Not a mild run-of-the-mill Saturday afternoon hard-on. Not the hard-on you get from the shaking of a bus or seeing some luscious pearly-skinned Zsa Zsa Gabor in a movie. Not some piddling venial sin of a hard-on. This was a throbbing mortal sin, iron hard, thrusting right out my shorts and pressing for release from my trousers. She felt it. She squeezed my hand. Her voice was a growl.

“Least you aint no queer,” she said. “Least Ah know that.”

“I — uh—”

“Hush, now,” she said, grinding into it, the heat coming off her, while I tried to keep my back to the people at the tables, so nobody could see what had happened to me but feeling that everybody had seen it already, that it was like Pinocchio’s nose, getting bigger and longer by the second.

“We should take a walk,” she said.

“I can’t walk now,” I whispered.

She eased away from me an inch or two. “Nobody can see you. Look aroun. Yawl see any other mens?”

I could barely see the couple next to us in the hot warm darkness.

“Where to?” I said.

“We got us a borried car. Outside.”

And I knew then that she wanted it as much as I did, that maybe I was the first white man she’d ever been that close to, that I was as new and strange and dangerous to her as she was to me. We started to leave. And then the room got brighter, and the dance floor started to clear, and there was someone on the PA system talking in a blurred voice. The hard-on vanished. “Later,” I whispered. She looked annoyed, but said, “Aw right … later.”

I had to piss and said I’d be right back and started walking toward the entrance. Over the microphone, I heard the word “… Upsetters” and turned around and Rhode Island Freddie was right behind me.

“Don’t wantchoo getting lost,” he said, and smiled. He guided me away from the entrance and along the back wall and down a corridor. There were a couple of bare forty-watt bulbs hanging from electric wires strung along the ceiling. I could hear a roar from the main room. Then in front of me I saw Champion Jack Dupree arguing with the large black man with the sunglasses.

“Ah, juss wunt muh fuckin money, man. Tha’s all.”

“You play you second set, you get the green.”

“Shit,” the old man said, turning away. “Shit.”

Freddie and I went into the john. There was a shallow trench along one wall, and we stood there and pissed into it.

“Po fuck cain’t get his bread,” Freddie said. He stuck a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He lit up, finished pissing, took a deep drag, then passed it to me.

“Little reefuh?” he said.

“Nah. Hey, what’s with this Winnie, man? How come none of you guys want her? I feel funny, you know—”

“Doan feel funny, feel her.”

Champion Jack Dupree walked in and went to the trench and pissed in silence.

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

“Her husbin’s on the Midway,” Rhode Island Freddie said with a sigh. “Mos’ of us, we know the dude. Wouldn’t be right, us knowin him and all. But it seem lak such a waste, hear? And you don’t know the man.… Hey, Champion,” he said to Dupree, “want a toke?”

Champion Jack Dupree zipped up his trousers and reached for the reefer. “You hear that fat mothafucka?” he said. He inhaled, held it, let the smoke out slowly. “If he still in the county when I finish the second set, itd be a fuckin miracle.” He looked at me. “What the fuck are you dune in this shithouse?”

“Came to hear you,” I said.

“Don’t bullshit a bullshittuh, white boy,” he said. “I hoid yiz talkin. You here for da fine brown pussy …”

Rhode Island Freddie giggled.

“Know what I’m saying to you?” Champion Jack Dupree said. “But ya better watch it, white boy. Pussy drive men into da valley of fuckin deat’.”

He took another toke, then sang a few lazy bars:

We all laughed, and started back to the hall. The place was going crazy. Women were standing, screaming, shouting, and the men were shaking their heads, and laughing, and tugging at the women. And up on the stage was the craziest looking black man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t very big, but his hair rose high over his head in a pompadour, all greasy and wild, and he had on a long draped baby-blue jacket and red shoes and he was standing up at the piano, banging hard while horns and saxes honked behind him and his eyes rolled around, out of control. I couldn’t hear the words. But words didn’t matter. He came to a crashing windup and whirled, and did a double split, stood up, and bowed. The crowd went wild, calling at him, shouting for him. He had the mike in his hand, gazing in a glassy-eyed way around the room, and then saw me about to sit down again next to Winnie, who was very sweaty now, with deep stains under her arms and down her back.

“Why, hello, Miss Thang!” he said, and pranced toward me, and raised his eyes as the room laughed, and then abruptly turned around, furrowed his brows, stared into the darkness and started another song:

Chapter 46

Winnie had a room on the first-floor right of Miss Harper’s Boarding House on East Dancer Street. We lay together on the small bed.

Where you learn to do such a thang? she said.

I said I just learned, but I didn’t say where.

She said, No black man ever did that.

No?

She said, He just be worryin bout his own sweet self.

I said she was beautiful. But she knew that. Beautiful women always do.

She said, You do such a thang, word get around, black ladies be lining up side yo house, boy.

I said she must have men lined up at her house too.

Winnie said, No, they all know mah man. Caint do nothin round here.… That’s why when Ah saw you, Ah said, him, Winnie, grab him.

I asked her if she’d ever slept with a white man before.

She said, Hell, no.… Not that these crackers don’t come own to me.… Oh no, they come own. But Ah wunt sleep with one of them, if they paid me a hunndid dollahs.

She looked at me, her breast dark against my chest. Her hand was playing with me.

Winnie said, It ain’t really white anyway, is it? More like pink.… Hey, what about you? You slepp with a black woman before?

No.

That’s not whut Ah hear, boy, she said, and laughed in a dirty way. You damn sailors.

I said, Don’t believe every thing you hear about sailors, Winnie. She sat up and dragged the tips of her breasts across my face. She said, Kin you do that thang again?

Chapter 47

All day Sunday, I ached with shame. Not guilt. This was old-fashioned shame, as raw and pulsing and systemic as a toothache. In a way, of course, making love to Winnie was a corporal work of mercy, as they called it in the Catholic catechism. She’d been alone too long, trapped in a neighborhood where everybody knew her and her husband, growing old every minute. Or so I told myself (a lie I would tell myself all my life). I had given her pleasure in the here and now, while Winnie was young, while she needed it. We hadn’t hurt anyone. Her husband didn’t know and probably never would, unless that winter Winnie presented him with a blue-eyed boy. And yet I was ashamed of myself. The shame wasn’t about screwing the wife of another guy, a sailor I didn’t know. Nor was it about sleeping with a black woman, becoming at last, for a couple of hours, what Harrelson called a “nigger lover.” No, the shame was about something else. Out of weakness, in a moment of opportunity, I had betrayed Eden Santana.

Yes, she had gone away and I didn’t know when she’d be back. Yes, we had no deal, no verbal or written contract. But I knew that I couldn’t tell Eden what I’d done. I was ashamed of that. And I hadn’t used a rubber. Suppose Winnie gave me the clap? Suppose she’d given me a good dose of something her husband picked up somewhere? I could give it to Eden. And what if Winnie was pregnant? Nine months from now, her husband would show up at the hospital and a nurse would bring out the baby, which would have my eyes and skin that was lighter than Winnie’s and lighter than his and the smile would shift into rage. And if the child was mine, wasn’t that my responsibility too? A son. A daughter … my flesh and blood. I couldn’t go around and say to Winnie, I’ll give the child my name, I’ll send some money. If I did, the husband would cut me (in Bobby Bolden’s phrase) long, deep, and continuously. But if Winnie did have a baby, and it was mine, then all my life I’d wonder how that kid was doing, my kid, raised black in the back end of a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t tell Eden about that either. Or anyone else.

And the odor of my shame would cling to me all my days.

On Monday, I drifted into routine and the shame began to ease. Harrelson wasn’t talking to me. Not since the night I’d slammed him into the wall. I always said hello when we passed each other, but he kept walking, his eyes not even seeing me. It was as if I were black. Sometimes he and Boswell would look across at me and Miles Rayfield and something would be said and they’d giggle. I asked Boswell about this once, and he said, “Aw, you know Harrelson. He’s just a redneck. Don’t take his boolshit too serious.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But he does. He thinks Miles and I are queer or something.”

“Shit, he thinks Eisenhower’s queer. Don’t let it bother you none.”

At lunch time that day, I walked over to the hangars to see Sal and Max, and there was Mercado just inside the hangar, looking dashing in a flight suit. He held a cup of coffee and was staring at a large blackboard that listed pilots and flight times.

“How are you?” I said.

“Ah, Mister Devlin. ¿Como estas?”

“How was your trip to Mexico?” I said.

“Ah, hell, I didn’t go,” he said. “The last minute, I hear there was a flight to New York. From Mainsi’. So I take that instead. But you know what? I end up in Philadelphia. I think I am the first Mexican in history to ever go to Philadelphia. I wait three hours for a plane, then at last I give up and got a bus to New York …”

“What did you think?”

“I was there before with my father, when I was twelve,” he said. “So I have seen it before, New York. My father was then working for the Mexican government. It’s a great city, no? Life! Energy! But now, it looks a little more bad. More dirty. More crowded. And expensive ¡Ay, caray!” He smiled. “I should have gone to Mexico.”

My stomach was turning over. He took her to New York! That’s all Eden ever wanted to see and he took her! Anger shoved my shame away. Anger at her, anger at myself for being such a goddamned jerk. Go ahead (I said). Ask him. Ask him did he take her there!

“You go alone?” I said (trying to be casual, gazing off at the list of flights and landing strips and aircraft numbers) …

“Yes, what a sin! You ever try to get a girl on a Navy plane? Easier to get a Russian to come with you. But there were plenty of girls there, oh, boy. They got some beauties in New York, no kidding.” He laughed. “All giants, too. What the hell they feed those women in New York? All big, like lampposts, those girls. And one disgusting habit: they all chew gum.”

“ ‘Meet me in New York some time,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to some short girls that don’t chew gum.”

“They got any medium size?” he said, and we both laughed.

I was near giddy as I walked to the mess hall. Captain Pritchett’s flowers were rioting happily against the walls of all the buildings on the base, red, yellow, violet. Sprinklers played brightly on the lawns and the grass looked green and plump with spring.

“Hey, lover man.”

Bobby Bolden came up beside me, the two of us moving toward the mess hall.

“I don’t know what you did Saturday night, man, but that Winnie done gone crazy.”

I was scared for a moment, then saw Bobby Bolden’s dirty grin, and smiled in what I thought was a cool way. That was one of the moments in my life when I truly felt abruptly older, as if some ability of mine had been ratified and granted approval. And I felt somehow bigger. I said (trying to underplay it), “She’s some woman.”

He looked at me and shook his head. It might have been in pity.

In late afternoon, I wrote a letter to my father, telling him the usual bland lies about life in the Navy. I didn’t tell him about Eden Santana; Red Cannon; Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada; Kuniyoshi or Ben Shahn; Winnie; the Blackhawk Club; the Dirt Bar; Dixie Shafer; the Kingdom of Darkness; Captain Pritchett’s lost wife; Mercado; Sal’s grandfather; or the way to use vine charcoal. I told him the weather was nice and the food okay and the beaches beautiful. I sent him a picture of me under a palm tree with the snow coming down, taken by Becket. I asked my brothers to write me. I was sealing the letter when the telephone jangled on my desk. I picked it up and said hello.

“It’s me,” Eden Santana said. “I’m back.”

Chapter 48

You’ve never had a child, so you don’t know. But I have two girls, real pretty, one fifteen, the other ten. But just saying it that way doesn’t explain anything. I could be describing someone else’s kids, I could be talking about dogs or canaries. You see, having children’s different from anything else on this poor earth, and maybe you can’t ever explain it to people that never have had them. But those girls come from me, from my body, I held them in me, I gave them life in blood and pain, and then nursed them and watched them learn to walk and say words and ask for more than food, hear me? You ain’t ever had that, child, so you don’t know why I up and went when I got the word. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe no man ever could.

Those girls been part of me for half my life, since when I was younger than you are now, the oldest one anyways. I never had a time after I was sixteen that I didn’t have a little girl pulling on me, followin me from room to room, callin for me scared in the night. Never. Maybe that’s part of why I’m here and not in New Orleans. To be free of that love, that need, for just a little while. That and James Robinson. Maybe you don’t want to hear about James Robinson but I better tell you, child, because if you’re talkin to me you’re talkin to someone who is part of James Robinson. As James Robinson sure is part of me. There’s no getting round it. He is there. In my life. Important as those little girl children.

I was fifteen when I met him, the summer of thirty-eight. He came walking down Burgundy Street in a white suit and white shoes and the sun was on him and he was more than six foot tall and I thought I was seein some kinda god that come rising up outta the swamps and the morning and landed in New Orleans and came walkin right at me, so close I could reach out and touch him. He walked in a rollin way, on the balls of his feet, like he knew all kinds of things and had been everywhere and he looked at me and paused and then kept on walkin, headin for Esplanade and the Faubourg Marigny. At the corner, he stopped and looked back and he had me.

I didn’t know him and neither did anyone else. He just came from nowhere and then I was pregnant and then he married me, dressed in that damned white suit, and we set up housekeepin. My daddy didn’t talk to me for three months after the wedding, cuz he didn’t like James Robinson from the startup. I was a girl and Robinson was a man and my daddy saw things I didn’t see, I guess. Robinson wouldn’t tell me what he did, he said it wasn’t women’s business, but he brought home money, lots of it, and my family helped me with the furnishing and the cooking, cause he had no family and this was the Depression still and everybody was tight, even them that had. James Robinson would bring me flowers, and fancy hats, and pretty clothes, and once even a pink silk parasol to hold off the sun. But most days he went to work in the evening and slept late in the morning and when I said to him at last that I wanted a body beside me at night, when I said I wanted him to do with me what he wanted to do, when I said I wanted to do with him some things too, that I had urgings, that I had wife need in me, James Robinson just smiled and said, Yes, my dear. That was all: Yes, my dear.

So I followed him one evening, me all swollen up with the first girl, feelin fat and watery and ugly, afraid that he had some other woman, some life that I didn’t have a part of. And he went into a club on Rampart Street, with men and women at the door, all of them nodding at him when he went in, some dark place where they all knew him and I felt a chill then in August, a cold breeze upon my heart, knowing that James Robinson must be a man who was living off women. Just like that, just watching him, I wondered too did he have something, a disease or something, that made him scared to come to me in the night. And I was terrible afraid, not of that, not catchin something, but afraid that when the baby was born, he would take me to that place on Rampart Street and make me work for him.

But knowing that, knowing where he went, I couldn’t come to askin him about it. It was his secret and it was mine, but I never told him of my knowing of it. I didn’t sleep with him for the rest of the time of the waiting. I felt the baby’s life in me, the stretching and pushing, that other heartbeat, that new need for room that the baby wanted: and that was what I had instead of James Robinson. We called the first baby Nola after New Orleans Louisiana. Nola Robinson. He thought she was the cutest thing and he held her in his arms and was sweet to her and brought her all silk and satin clothes, but he never did come to me in the night, not for months, saying to me I had to heal long after I was healed, saying it wunt a good thing to have too much of that too soon and then I got mad and asked him did he get what he needed in the house on Rampart Street and that was the first time he beat me.

He put the baby down and tore off my clothes and took a strap to me, puttin welts all over me. And when I was bent over on the floor, weeping and hurt and the baby cryin, he just dressed and went out the door and walked away. He come home that night and run his hands over the welts and heard me cryin and then he finally came to me. And finished quick, with me all achin and unfilled and everything in me all coiled up and ready to burst, but not bursting, ready to be lost but not losing, ready to die but not dying, and he said, Yes, my dear. Like that. Yes, my dear.

So I knew that was what it would always be like with him and I kept it secret. He would come to me only when he caused pain. He would beat me and hurt me and then come to me. So that I hated it, the bed part. I didn’t want it, the loving part. I erased it, the wife part. I watched movies and when people kissed I thought Yes, my dear. And waited for the beating to begin. I’d read a novel, and when it got to the point where they would sleep together, I began to tremble, afraid for the person in the book, afraid for me, thinking, Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear. I put everything into Nola, I touched her, squeezed her, kept her too long at my breast. And James Robinson, with his long body like a god, with his fine wild eyes and white suits, he just kept leaving for Rampart Street.

My mother must have picked up the grieving, knew there was an emptiness, a thing not happening. She knew just about everything about me anyway, cause I’d come from her the way Nola came from me, I’d been her extra heartbeat. And she started visiting in the afternoons, after James Robinson rose from his bed, and she would look at me and then hold the baby, then look at me and change the sheets, then look at me and go to the garden, then look at me and touch my face and say, finally, the last time, tired of looking, tired of not saying what she wanted to say, held my hand and said, You a woman now. You got to get you a man.

And I knew she was right. I was a woman now. I’d had a child within me and a child at my breast. I had a right to have a man. But there was one big problem: I had made a holy vow. That promise meant something to me. The keeping of it. And there was another thing: I was afraid. Afraid that a new man would be just another James Robinson. Sometimes I would look at men, all lathered with sweat in the hot sun fixing the streets, or delivering ice, or sawing off limbs in trees full of Spanish moss and I would imagine how they’d feel beside me, on me, in me, and then stop: seeing in my mind James Robinson in white walking up the street like a god. And not trusting myself, I closed up, sealed myself. I didn’t even cry anymore, didn’t fall into grieving. My mother saw that too.

And then the war started and the army took James Robinson and I was happy. We closed the little house and I moved back home with Nola and my mother cooked and cleaned and I started to read. I read every kind of book from the library down on Burgundy Street. I read Gone With the Wind, but that didn’t sucker me in; I knew what Rhett Butler was, I seen my Rhett Butler go into a house on Rampart Street. I read Anna Karenina by this Russian Tolstoy, and that was better. He knew something about people. I read poetry. And I read books on nature. I learned the names of all the trees and plants, the birds and the insects and the animals. Readin those books, I was suppose to be teachin Nola, but I was really teachin me. My father was workin at the Higgins Shipyard then, making torpedo boats, and the money was comin in for the first time in his life and he bought a car and taught me how to drive and then when we had paid the car he bought a house out by the Atchafalaya River, an old house and small, but with plenty of room for us because my brothers and my sister were all grown up and gone by then. So my mother and I made that sweet little house into something. We planed the wood clean, we changed the windows, we painted everything white, inside and out, and hung pictures that she bought in the old markets in the Quarter, we scraped down the wide plank floors and stained them dark and shellacked them and kept polishin them until they were nearly black. And I was glad bein there, sweatin at the work and seein Nola walk. I was happy. James Robinson was gone. I hoped he’d never come back.

Nola learned to talk in that little house beside the river, and we had a Victrola and she began to sing too, learnin all the words of some songs before she could even make full sentences. My father loved her. Probably more than he loved me. On weekends he would take her fishing in the bayou, givin her a line, and they’d come home with buckets of catfish and sometimes my sister would come out with her children and we’d eat all night and sing the old songs and Nola would sing what she learned from the phonograph, and I was happy. Sealed up, closed, manless and happy.

I expected to hear some news from James Robinson, but I sure wasn’t eatin my heart out over him. The truth be told, I dreaded hearin from him, or seein him show up. There wasn’t a letter from him, not a call, and then I started hoping that one day someone from the army would come to the door, looking sad and proper, like all the scenes in the movies, and he would tell me that James Robinson had been killed in action. The truth be told, I came to want that. The truth be told, I wanted him dead. Every day, I read The Item and The Times-Picayune, lookin at the list of casualties, hoping in a shameful way that he’d be there among them and then I’d be free. I’d be through with the holy vow. I could start another life. The real one.

But the war ground on and there was no word about James Robinson, and Nola started school, and I didn’t even think anymore about a man beside me in the night. And then the war ended. There was a big celebration in New Orleans and we drove in, and my father said, “Well, now we see if the Depression’s really over,” and my mother looked at him in a funny way and there were soldiers and sailors all drunk on Bourbon Street and brass bands and girls dancin and people makin love in public and noise like the greatest Mardi Gras in history and we cheered and shouted and then went home. I lay in bed thinkin of all those young men I’d seen in the Quarter and how I could have had all of them that night, in cars or hotels or backyards, and didn’t want even one. And I couldn’t sleep, thinkin of their young hard bodies and sad drunk eyes, and got up and went outside, where it was hot and buggy, August it was, and my father was alone out there on a white chair, just looking off toward the swamp. He couldn’t sleep either. He said, I’ll have to look for another job tomorrow. He said, They ain’t gonna need no more torpedo boats. And, of course, he was right. The war was over and both of us were sadder than we’d ever been.

I was in the garden a few weeks later, with the first cool breeze of the autumn blowin and no sun under a haze, when I heard the car and looked through the loblolly pines and saw him. James Robinson. Walkin with a limp, dressed in an army uniform. I stood up. He saw me. I waited. I wasn’t gonna run to him. I waited and waited and he came to me limping and reached out his hands and I could see that he was much older now and he was cryin. So I hugged him and he hugged me and my mother came out and saw us and then took my father’s car to school to get Nola.

James Robinson cried and cried and said he was sorry for everything, for the way he used to treat me, for not writin, for being the way he used to be before the war. But he was different now, he said. The war had changed him. He’d almost died and knew when he didn’t die that there were things in his life that meant something and now he was home, had been home for three days, had walked the streets lookin for me, askin where we’d gone, and now he’d found me and now everything was going to be okay, now everything was going to be real truly fine, now everything was goin to be the way it should have been in the first place.

My mother arrived with Nola, and the father and the daughter regarded each other like strangers. Until the girl just started bawlin and James Robinson did too, and they hugged each other and took a walk down by the water and talked for a long time and I thought, Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s gonna be real truly fine. He came back holdin Nola’s hand, and then my mother said to Nola, well, we better go spread the word, girl, so your momma and your poppa can be alone.

Alone with me, he was desperate, comin at me like a crazy man, sobbin, apologizin, tellin me not to look at his leg, not to touch it, not to let that leg bother me. I laid with him, and he started saying the names of places, all in the Pacific, the names of strange islands and old battles, all the while askin for forgiveness. Until at last I gave him what he wanted. And renewed the vow, in the back bedroom where everything had for so long been sealed.

We moved out two weeks later, to another house in the country that he bought with cash. He said he won the money gamblin while he was in the Pacific and I believed him and maybe he told the truth. But he said he didn’t want to go back to the city, that he had no more to do with that life, that he would never even look at the house on Rampart Street again. He had money from the government too, he said and that helped when we needed paint and shellac and furnishings, and he kept busy all winter cleanin and fixin the house and choppin trees to make a path to a bayou, saying here we’d be happy, here we’d be safe. He didn’t much like goin to my momma’s house. He said he didn’t like people watchin him. Not even relatives. And maybe I should’ve known then. But I wanted to believe what he was, that he’d changed, that he was this new man, that he’d been made different by the war. Made good.

And soon I was carryin Jesse within me. I could feel her bumpin, and Nola came and laid her hand on my belly, her eyes fillin up with wonder, and she sung lullabies to the sister she couldn’t even see. And then James Robinson got silent again. I asked and he didn’t answer, just glared at me for the sin of askin. Soon he would say only what had to be said, little telegrams of words, and he would stare off at the road and if a boat came down the bayou he would hurry into the house or hide behind some trees. Once we were driving across the Huey Long Bridge, the back seat full of new clothes for Jesse, and he kept looking behind him in the rearview mirror, and then took a right into Algiers and went up and down side streets and pulled into an alley and just sat there breathin hard and never said a word. I asked what was the matter and he snapped at me, No woman’s business. I held his hand to calm him, and he pulled it away.

I was thirty-seven hours in labor with Jesse, in more physical pain than ever before in my life, my insides tearin apart, my every pore teemin with blood it seemed, feelin split, turned inside out. James Robinson come to the bedside later, looking down at me, his eyes all funny. I told him he had another little girl and we’d call her Jesse after my grandmother, if that was okay with him. He just nodded and looked out the window. And I could feel his goin away. Right there in the room.

He stayed with me when I came home cause I was sick still and exhausted and sore all over. I slept for almost three days. There was blood still leakin from me too and it was on the sheets and he took the sheets off the bed in a disgusted way and burned them and went to New Orleans for more and came back late at night, lookin at me in a scared way. I thought it was the blood, that maybe it reminded him of the war, and what had happened to his leg. But when I said that, he slapped me hard across the face and knocked me down and I knew then that it was beginnin again. I wouldn’t cry. I knew that if I cried that would set him on me, and I was still hurtin from Jesse. He kept hittin me and I started thinkin about escape.

He knew. He told me in the morning, You better not run, woman. I told him I was free, I could go where I wanted to go, and then he took a board and hit me with it. Right here, see? Under the chin. The scar. The blood was drippin off me and I was knocked to my knees. And that got him hot and he made me do something to him, with the new blood flowin off me and the blood from Jesse still leaking out of me, and I knew that was the end. When he had his way, he went out, leavin me there, and drove off somewhere in the car. I was all alone with the new baby — Nola was at my mother’s — tryin to fix myself; no phone, no car, my jaw hangin loose, broken so I couldn’t even brush my teeth, couldn’t rinse him away with water and salt, and the blood not stoppin and the baby at my breast, the blood mixin with milk and then I heard another car and it pulled in front of the house and it was the police.

The two of them came to the door and I yelled through that I was locked inside, and they smashed down the door and saw me there, ragged and beaten and bloodied, and the older cop said, Oh my god, and they took me out to the police car with Jesse in my arms and rushed me to the hospital and on the way they told me they were tryin to find James Robinson.

The doctors wired my jaw and called my mother and father and everybody came to the hospital and Nola saw me and cried because I looked like an eggplant, all bent and distorted and purple and yellow. And then I found out from Daddy that there had been no war, not for Mister James Robinson. I found out he’d been part of a robbin crowd that shot up a place while he was in the army, and he’d been shot up too, by the cops, all of this out in Texas, and they’d put him in the penitentiary, slammin him away for twenty-five years, because two cops were shot and another man killed. That’s what happened to his leg. And he’d spent the war there in prison, not in the Pacific Ocean fightin for his country. And then had escaped, comin back to New Orleans, looking for me, for refuge, for hiding. Until they picked up a trail, a stickup here, another one there; they smelled him like a hunter in Africa smells a lion.

And I cried and cried, not for him, but for the children, for Nola and Jesse, because they carried his blood, they carried the wildness, the anger, the lies, the need to inflict pain, and I knew that for the rest of their lives there would be a contest in their blood between me and James Robinson. The truth be told, I felt like such a damned fool too. For listenin to him. For believin him. For lying with him after what I knew. For renewin the goddamned holy vow.

The police pursued him, catchin him at last in Memphis a year later. By then I was back home at the house beside the Atchafalaya. This time sealed for good. I went to church every day, prayin for strength, wanting to resist everything now, hopin I would last long enough to cage the blood of my children, and then, when they were grown and decent and had found their way, I could be released. To Paradise. Yeah. That’s what I thought. My father died. My mother grew old. The girls grew up and played piano and spoke French and Spanish along with English, taught to them in the Catholic school. Last year, Momma died too. I thought: When will it be my turn?

I was alone in the old house beside the Atchafalaya one morning last November. I went down to the water, to look at the boats goin by, sittin on the little dock we had down there, feeling empty and content. And when I came back to the house James Robinson was sittin at a table in the kitchen. On the table he had a big.45 pistol. He was peelin an apple with a parin knife. He didn’t say anything to me. Didn’t even look up.

I backed up to go to the door and run. To just get away from there. From him. He picked up the gun and said if I ran he would shoot me down and then when the children came back he would shoot them too, because he didn’t care anymore, he wasn’t afraid of death, he’d just as soon go out that way as any. And I stopped then and he told me to lock the door and I did and he took me there on the floor, tearin at me, slappin at me because I was dry, because I wouldn’t move, because I wouldn’t cry or even speak. He did what he wanted for an hour. In every place and every way he could think. And then said he was going to be around again, that he was free of prison, that he would always be around for me, that he would come and have me whenever he wanted. And left.

I said nothing to the children. He stayed away for a week and then came again to me in the middle of the night with the girls sleepin and put that big gun on the table beside the bed. This time I was wet without wantin to be and hated myself for it and tried to laugh at him to stop him and he beat me again with the strap, exulted at my wetness, made me beg for more when I didn’t want more, and then pushed me face down on the floor and hurt me bad, and then started to dress. Don’t you come back, I whispered to him, or I’ll call the police. He smiled at me and shoved the big gun into his belt and said, Yes, my dear. And left.

That night I packed up the children and their clothes and took my father’s old car and drove to my sister’s house and hid there. For two weeks, I never saw the day. All the while, the children were wanting to know what was happening and why they couldn’t go home and my sister’s husband went out with a gun on his hip to the house on the Atchafalaya to pack up more things, all the old and good and personal things, and stored them in his place of business, while I trembled when I saw a shadow at the window or heard a board creak or a tree branch brush against the eaves at night. And then I discovered I was pregnant.

This time I knew what I had to do, knew I couldn’t pass on more of James Robinson’s evil blood. My sister found me a doctor in Atlanta. And before Christmas, I went up there and had an abortion and made the doctor tie my tubes. It was terrible. But when it was over, the truth be told, I was happy. I knew that I’d never have to worry, ever again, about life risin in my womb. That’s when I saw you, child. Comin back from Atlanta, on New Year’s Eve. Or more accurate, comin away from Atlanta. Because I wasn’t going home. Not with James Robinson roaming around free. My sister found a place in a Catholic boarding school for my daughters. She sees them every Saturday and I tried to explain to them that this was only for a while, that James Robinson was still out there, with his big gun and evil ways. The police were lookin for him. My sister’s husband had some people lookin for him too. And I came here, to Pensacola, to hide, to start to live.

I wasn’t even sure what that meant, child. To live. But I knew that I was tired of not feelin anything but fear. I was tired of not bein a woman. Of bein sealed up. Of bein alone. I have missed so many things in my life. And then I met you and you were sweet and you were like the boy I should have had, the boy that might have come down that block the next afternoon, instead of that man in the white suit that I thought looked like a god. You are so good to me. I want to be good to you. I want you to know what I know and for you to know it for the rest of your life.

So when I had to leave so sudden, I hoped you would understand. It wasn’t planned. I had called my sister to ask after the children and she said she’d been tryin to find me for two days because Nola hurt herself at the school, fell off a horse, fractured her skull. My heart just fell into my stomach. I went there as quick as I could, thinking: She could’ve been dead and buried and I never would’ve known. So I had to go. There just wunt any choice. The blood called me. Nola was so happy to see me and the doctors said she had a close call but would be all right and I explained and explained to the girl about where I was and what I was doin and how it would only be for a while (which is the truth) and explained again (tryin to find the words and not scare her too much about the blood of James Robinson that was coursin through her own sweet veins) and she understood, she’s smart, she said she would pray for me and have the nuns pray for me too. I stayed until she was up from the bed and all right, and spent the rest of the time with little Jesse. She doesn’t understand in the same way. She was hurt the most. But I think in the end that she understood too. I hope so. I hope you do too. Somewhere out there, James Robinson is movin in the dark. But I’m with you, child. So please be good to me.