Loving Women

Chapter 49

She’s back. I’m happy again.

Actors I like: Brando, Bogart, Cagney, Astaire. But I don’t get it about James Dean. Maybe the girls just like his red jacket. I see him in a movie and I ask myself: What kind of actor would this guy be if Marlon Brando never existed? He steals all of Marlon’s moves, and mumbles like Marlon sometimes does, but because he looks different they think he’s something new. I bet if he went up against Brando in a movie, Marlon would destroy him. (On the other hand, what would happen if Brando went up against Bogart or Cagney, or any of those guys that came out of the Depression? Maybe they would eat Marlon alive). Edward G. Robinson is the best of all. He looked scary as shit in Key Largo, sitting in the bathtub in the heat, waiting for the hurricane.

Just what does a movie director do? And what is a producer? Ask somebody.

I’m happy, yes. But also confused. She has so much more of a life to think about than I have. If I told her my story, it would be a couple of sentences long. She has everything: New Orleans, kids, guns, beatings. And I don’t think she’s even begun to tell me all of it. I want to teach her something, tell her stories, change her with the things I know. But what do I know? Not enough, maybe never enough. She will always have a head start on me. And there’s nothing I can ever do about that.

One thing I can do is learn more about the world out there. She never reads newspapers and I always do. So I can tell her about what is going on, if she is interested. Maybe that will keep her from thinking too much about her kids or James Robinson or New Orleans. Maybe she won’t think about leaving Pensacola either. Or leaving me.

Why did I feel sorry for Red Cannon the other night? I should hate his guts but … It’s got something to do with the way he belched as he was going out the door.

The second time he raped her, she got wet. She said so herself. So she liked it. She must have. Last night, I kept picturing her face as he did it to her, hating it and loving it at the same time. I couldn’t sleep.

They say that King Farouk is about to be kicked out of Egypt. There’s a picture of him in a bathing suit, walking along the beach somewhere with slippers on, so he won’t get sand on his royal feet. He looks disgusting. And I wonder again: How do these fucking shitheads end up running countries? Who would follow that fat turd into battle?

And I wonder too, reading the papers, just what Porfirio Rubirosa and Baby Pignatari do for a living. They are always described as “playboys,” but the papers never tell you where these playboys get the money to play with. One thing is for sure: It’s not from work.

E finally explained the difference between Kotex and Tampax.

Something hurt Red Cannon. Real bad. I’m sure of it. (But he’s still a prick.)

No wonder E never answers me when I talk about the future. She has this whole thing, over in N.O., kids, a sister, a brother, a house, a past, and this crazy husband roaming around someplace. How could she ever go off with me into the unknown? But then, how could I go off without her?

I don’t really get Marilyn Monroe, but I’d like to fuck her. If she’d promise to talk in a normal voice.

Chapter 50

The night beach is empty now, and the terrace doors shudder with the wind rising off the sea. I look at the telephone on its table beside the bed. With this steel and plastic instrument, I can choose to hear a hundred voices of the present. But I don’t want to hear them, for the same reason that I do not switch on the television set or go down and stand at the hotel bar.

I am hearing the voice of Eden Santana.

I am a boy trying to make sense of the world and of women and of love. I am feeling again the sense of shame and forgiveness, separation and reconciliation. I am learning to walk.

And I am once more in the warm Gulf spring, during the time when Eden and I were playing The Games. I work every day at Ellyson Field. I draw pictures for money. I see Sal and Max and Miles Rayfield and Bobby Bolden and the others, but I cannot say what we did or talked about together in that wet season. The reason is simple: I was too deep into The Games. Every evening in the months after she returned from New Orleans, I would go with Eden to the trailer. Sometimes we simply ate dinner and then made love and slept together a while before I returned to the base.

Sometimes.

Most times we played.

One evening she pulled up before the locker club and looked out through the car window at me in a funny way. Her eyes seemed to be boring a hole in me. I started to get into the car on the passenger side but she slid over. You drive, she said. She was wearing a raincoat and dark stockings and new red high-heeled shoes.

Sure, I said, a little surprised because Eden Santana loved driving that car. I pulled away. I knew she was staring at me but I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road to return the stare.

What do you think of me, child? she said after a while.

I mumbled.

Tell me, she said. Tell me what you really think of me.

I couldn’t find the right words. My head was too full of pieces of songs, scraps of dialogue from old movies. They canceled one another out.

I love you, I said finally. That’s what I think of you.

I was heading west into the open country that stretched away to Mobile Bay. She just gazed into the dusky light of the countryside. There’s something I always wanted to do, she said.

I waited.

She said: But maybe if I do it you won’t love me anymore.

I felt a tremor of fear. Did she want to tell me about some other lover? About Mercado? Some terrible news about her husband?

She said: Follow the railroad tracks.

The road was two lanes wide and moved along the side of the railroad cut. Off in the woods there were small houses, an occasional barn or gas station. The trees were in full leaf and I drove slowly under them. There were no other cars. After a few miles, the road dipped and the world was much darker. She touched my hand.

Slow down, she said.

The dip led to a crossroads. The other road went north under a trestle.

Quick, she said. Pull over and stop.

I did. We sat there for a few minutes in the dark. I didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t speak. She didn’t touch me. I pushed my fingers lightly through her hair but she didn’t react. Her body hardened, as if she were gathering herself into one huge muscle of determination. Then she was alert, hearing something that I didn’t.

Watch this, she said. I want you to get out and watch.

She climbed up the embankment, holding her red high heels in her hand, with me after her. When we reached the top, she slipped the shoes back on. She motioned for me to stay low beside the tracks, out of sight. Then I heard what she’d heard: the train whistle, away off, clearing the track, warning cars and children and animals to get out of the way, sounding mournful at first and then arrogant and commanding as it came nearer. I could see the train now. The light on the engine was cutting through the darkness. A half mile away. A quarter. Then a few hundred yards, the wheels clacking on the polished iron tracks, the whistle snarling, urgent.

And then, in the full glare of the light, Eden dropped the trench-coat. She was completely naked, except for the dark stockings and the red shoes. She placed her hands on her hips, her weight on her right leg, the wind lifting her hair, and I could see her nipples sticking out. So could the men in the cabin of the engine. The whistle paused, the train seemed to slow. And then Eden took her breasts in her hands, offering them to the railroad men. Great clouds of steam billowed from the engine, Brakes screeched, iron trying to grab iron. She picked up her coat, turned her back to them and came running to me, laughing and whooping as we slid down the embankment.

Did it, did it, did it, did it, she said, flushed with excitement. I did it!

She slipped on the coat and got into the car beside me, and I raced north under the trestle and then took a right on the first dirt road I saw. She whooped. She laughed. She squealed in a very young voice. And I laughed too. It was as if we’d just robbed the biggest bank in Pensacola.

Ho boy, she said: exultant. And then pointed toward a dark stand of trees in the woods up ahead, empty and unfenced.

In there, she said. I can’t stand it another four seconds.

She dropped the coat again, leaned against the rough bark of a sycamore tree and had me enter her standing up.

Tell me you love me, she said. Tell me. Tell me.

She always took those red high heels along on the days and nights when we played The Games. She never wore them for anything else. If they were on the table, or lying on the front seat of the car, it was a sign that we were going to play. Sometimes she would have me lie facedown, naked in a field, and slowly press a heel into my ass until I made sounds of pain. While she was doing this she would play with herself, and when she was about to come she would turn around, straddling me, rubbing her cunt frantically against the back of my neck while kissing the marks of her heels on my skin until she came. Sometimes, in movie houses, she would slip off the shoe in the dark and use the heel to play with my cock. Or while I was licking her she would flick the heels of the red shoes against her hard dark nipples.

One evening I came to the trailer and she looked at me in that odd drilling way. Neatly laid upon the bed were some women’s clothes. They weren’t hers. Or I had never seen them before. Certainly they were much larger than hers. A long flowered dress. Panties. A garter belt. A bra.

Put them on, she said.

I smiled, but I was very nervous. Miles Rayfield’s face flashed before me.

I’m serious, she whispered.

Then she was undressing me and my cock was getting hard.

Start with the panties, she said. I want to see you put them on.

The panties felt silky and feminine against my skin and my cock protruded against them. The bra fit tightly against my chest, the rayon straps digging into me, and she stuffed it with Kleenex. Then I added the garter belt, and she helped me slip the dress over my head. She told me to sit on the edge of the bed, and then, with her breath quickening, she started painting my face. Cream. Powder. Rouge. Pushing my lips apart with her lipstick. She put kohl around my eyes. Then produced a straw hat and tied it under my chin, her breath coming more quickly now. She pointed at a pair of low-heeled women’s shoes.

I’ll be right back, she said, and slipped into the john. I glanced at a mirror and saw a handsome young woman who happened to be me.

I was thrilled.

Then the door to the john opened and a sailor in dress whites appeared.

Eden.

She was completely without makeup, her hair hidden under a white hat, her breasts somehow flattened under the jumper. The pants were tight against her crotch.

Come on, bitch, she said sharply, and grabbed my hand roughly. She led me to the door. I’m taking you for a fucking ride, you dumb cunt.

I laughed out loud.

Eden didn’t laugh.

She drove very fast to Sham’s, a supermarket on the edge of town. We went inside together with me thinking: If I see Red Cannon now, I’m fucked for life. I was wearing the flat women’s shoes, but it was still hard to walk. Eden made me push the shopping cart down the aisle. She barked orders at me in a deep rough Louis Armstrong voice.

All right, she said, don’t fo’get the damn co’n flakes.

I thought I would laugh again but a heavy woman in jeans and a flowered shirt turned into the aisle. Eden reached past me and squeezed my tit so the woman could see and then I giggled in a girlish way and slapped her on the wrist.

Stop that, Horace, I said.

Eden grabbed my other tit.

Ah’ll do what I want wif you, woman, she said, and then grabbed my ass.

The woman in the flowered shirt looked panicky. She turned around and hurried away. Eden laughed and grabbed my ass again until it hurt.

Out in the parking lot, as I loaded the groceries into the trunk of Eden’s car, she pressed up against me from behind, pawing my tits and my cunt.

I thought: Couldn’t this goddamned sailor keep his hands off me in public? Couldn’t he wait? Couldn’t he behave like a gentleman?

I pulled angrily away from her, saw some startled people watching us from behind parked cars, and told Eden to take me home.

Now.

In the trailer, she came at me. I was washing my hands at the sink when she pushed up hard against me from behind, reaching up under my dress, until she had a hand on the top of my panties. She pulled them down and I could feel the garter belt digging into my skin. She was breathing hard and I heard her twist the top off an unseen jar. The breathing got harder, and I closed my eyes and then felt a stabbing pain as she entered me from behind. Her finger was all the way up inside me and she bit and chewed the back of my neck until I started to slide away from her to stop the pain. She took her finger out of me, and I went on all fours on the floor. Above and behind me, she dug the nail of her thumb into my ass and moved the other finger down, as if pressing at the back of my balls, and then slipped it into my ass again. She unzippered the back of the dress with her free hand. She pulled the dress up to my shoulders and I stretched out my arms and allowed her to pull it over my head. I felt naked in the bra and garter belt. She slid her finger out of me and I panted with relief. The pain had stopped. I gasped for air. Her breathing sounded choked. I started to turn, get up, and then I was spread wide open again by something cold and hard in my rectum. Still dressed in the sailor suit, she slid under me, and took my cock in her mouth, all the while pushing the cold smooth object in and out of my ass until I came.

Now, she said, sliding out from under me, holding a silver butter knife with a vaselined handle in her hand, standing above me as I tried to get myself back into the world.

Now you better eat me, honey.

One evening I met her down at Sears. We always met there when we planned to go to a drive-in or to the beach. This night she came out of the store chewing the inside of her mouth.

Let’s hurry, she said, sliding behind the wheel.

What’s the problem? I asked.

Roberta, she said.

Roberta was her blond friend from Sears, the woman I’d seen months ago leaving the San Carlos one morning with Mercado. Eden talked about her from time to time, relating episodes of the woman’s life. Usually it sounded like a soap opera. The thing with Mercado hadn’t worked out, of course; Mercado wanted sex and Roberta wanted marriage. So Mercado smiled, kissed her, said good night and went away. After Mercado she’d met an ensign named Larry. Since Larry was an officer and a gentlemen, and I was an enlisted man, the four of us never went out together. It was forbidden by the rules of the democratic Navy. Sometimes we would see them in a drive-in or at the shrimp place, and wave hello. I was introduced just once to Larry. We were both in civvies. He was tall and thin and looked at me as if I were a shoeshine boy. I never said another word to him. And I never really got to see Roberta, although Eden talked to her every day at Sears.

She says she’s gonna kill herself tonight, Eden said, as she drove through the back streets.

Why, for God’s sake?

Larry jilted her. But not for another woman. Turns out he already had another woman. Little wifey back home in Ohio. Turns out Roberta is the other woman. And she can’t stand it.

Aw, hell.

I tried to tell her; I said, Roberta, no man is worth killin yourself for. Not one of them. No matter how much you think you love him.

I thought: What about me? Would you kill yourself over me? But I said nothing.

Gotta get her thinkin’ right, Eden said. Gotta save her life.

She drove fast until we came into a middle-class white section just beyond Mainside. Roberta lived in a small complex of new apartments, two stories high with stucco walls and tile roofs and cars parked in the driveways. The stairways were on the outside of the buildings. Eden led the way to Roberta’s apartment and rang the bell. No answer. Eden listened at the door.

God, I don’t hear a sound, she said.

She rang the bell more urgently, and this time we heard shuffling footsteps coming to the door.

Roberta’s voice asked us who we were.

Eden and Michael, ’Berta, honey. Better let us in.

Go away.

Eden said, If you don’t let us in, honey, we gonna knock the damn door down.

There was a pause, then the lock turned and the door opened and Roberta was standing there. She was wearing a white flannel bathrobe and she looked terrible. Her hair was wild and matted. There were splotches of makeup on her face and dirt under her fingernails. Her eyes were sore from crying and her face was swollen.

I don’t want to hear your damned sad story, girl, Eden said, taking Roberta’s arm and leading her into the apartment. I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Ain’t nothin to tell, Roberta said.

Sure there is, Eden said. All about a low-life lying conniving son of a bitch flyboy. Lots to tell about him. But we just don’t wanna hear it tonight, girl. We gotta get you lookin human.

She led Roberta to the bedroom. I wasn’t sure what to do. This was something that happened in the country of women and I didn’t know how they acted there. I looked around. There were gin bottles everywhere, overflowing ashtrays, dirty plates and glasses, mounds of clothes on the floor. Eden saw them too. She turned to me at the door of the bedroom.

Maybe you can clear up this mess, she said, while I clean up Roberta.

I nodded and she closed the bedroom door. I moved quickly around the small apartment, putting the gin bottles in garbage bags, emptying the ashtrays, folding the clothes and setting them on an armchair. I opened the windows to let the sour hangover smell drift into the damp night air.

All the while I heard the shower running and wondered if Eden had been forced to climb in with Roberta just to hold her up. And as I straightened the chairs and the couch, the apartment changed its character. The dirt and disorder had made it Roberta’s place; now it seemed to belong to nobody. There were no photographs of friends or relatives or lovers anywhere in sight. Like the place where Bobby Bolden stayed with Catty Wolverton, there were no books on the shelves and no pictures on the walls. It was an empty space. Maybe, I thought, Roberta made it her own with chaos. I’d made it look like a hotel room.

The water had stopped running in the shower, but I heard nothing from the bedroom. Navy jets raced through the sky. Their sound must drive Roberta mad, I thought. One of them could be Larry. I heard a radio playing a Tommy Edwards song:

Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all …

The door opened. Eden was standing there with a towel wrapped around her and nothing under the towel.

Come on in, she said.

Roberta was still wearing the bathrobe, but her hair was brushed straight back now, and her skin was shiny and her fingernails clean. She smiled at me like a kid arriving at a surprise party. Then she went to the large bed and, still wearing the robe, slipped under the covers. All the while, she was looking at me.

I turned to Eden.

She nodded at the bed, and then went past me, turning off lights.

I undressed and got into the bed beside Roberta, engulfed by the odor of soap and fresh perfume. Roberta looked directly at me and touched my face. Her skin shimmered whitely in the dim light.

Hello, Roberta, I whispered.

Take my robe off, she said, in a small frightened voice. If you take it off, then it’s all right.

I turned and saw Eden suddenly naked, getting into the bed on the other side of Roberta. She nodded at me. I untied the belt of the robe. Roberta sat up and I slipped the robe off her shoulders and saw her pink nipples and lush breasts and she shifted her weight and I slid the robe out from under her and dropped it on the floor.

I been so unhappy, she said, and suddenly began to cry.

I held her close to me, one of my hands reaching past her for Eden, for her arms and breasts and face. Roberta turned her face up to me and I kissed her and tasted salt. Eden sucked one of my fingers.

And so Eden and I began to make love to Roberta, trying to console and heal her, taking her out of Pensacola, far from flyboys and liars, away from her loneliness, into some place where things would happen that she might remember after everything else had faded. We kissed her mouth together, lips and tongues moving against each other, twirling in a single movement. Then I kissed and sucked one of Roberta’s breasts, while Eden kissed and sucked the other and then I put my cock in her and Roberta groaned and Eden kissed her mouth and played with her nipples.

Roberta whispered, Don’t come in me, Michael. Please don’t come in me.… That’s just for Eden. Don’t come in me and it’ll be okay.

I eased out of Roberta and entered Eden, trying not to come, not to end this until Roberta was consoled, and while I was in Eden, Roberta covered Eden’s face with kisses and sucked her breasts and dark-brown nipples and said, Oh, honey, you are my own true friend. You and Michael. My only friends …

Then Roberta was behind me, pushing hard against my ass as I drove into Eden, our double weight flattening Eden against the bed, Roberta’s breasts against my back, her hands under me kneading Eden’s breasts until I could hold back no longer and exploded. I rose like a horse bucking and Roberta pulled on my hair and Eden moaned until we all fell back on the bed.

That wasn’t the end. We dozed together, Roberta holding my limp cock, my hand on her pussy. Eden brought in large cold glasses full of Coke and ice. We listened to the night sounds. We hugged Roberta between us. We dozed again. When I came fully awake, Roberta was sucking my cock. Over on a chair, facing the bed, watching us, a hand between her legs, Eden was transported. I couldn’t come right away. Eden could. She groaned loudly. Roberta came off my cock and turned to Eden.

She said, Come here.

Half bent over, still coming, Eden rolled off the chair to the bed and then Roberta plunged her blonde head between those dark thighs, offering her own pink ass to me, her cunt a thick gorged red, the blonde hairs almost invisible, the lips slippery and her asshole tiny and tight, with dozens of little lines vanishing into the hole. I wet myself in the cunt and then eased into the other hole and her body shuddered and rose and trembled and pulled away and then pushed back at me to take me into her while Eden’s dark hands gripped her blonde head.

We slept for a few hours and when I woke up, Roberta was gazing at me.

Thank you, she said.

Eden woke at the sound of Roberta’s voice and saw the look on her face and smiled.

I guess we better go, Eden said.

We started to dress, with Roberta watching us, the covers pulled tight to her chin. I felt strange, as if this all had happened to somebody else. Certainly nobody would believe me if I told them about it at Ellyson Field. But here I was, pulling on my shorts over a cock that was not soft and not quite hard. The room smelled of perfume and pussy. Eden went over and kissed Roberta gently on the brow.

No more crazy phone calls, okay? she said.

Okay.

You promise?

I promise.

We’ll see you soon.

I hope, Roberta said softly.

We drove away. I was late, and would have to go through the fence. It didn’t matter. I held Eden’s hand, but neither of us spoke for a long time. Then I started to think about the things we’d done with Roberta and my cock got hard again. What we’d done was supposed to be wrong, was supposed to tell me that Eden was some kind of strange and perverted woman: a woman who goes with women? But I knew that I felt better and it wasn’t just the sex: we’d helped a woman live who might have died. And Eden was here, with me, not with anyone else, man or woman. Flashes of Roberta’s bedroom played in my mind. And they must have filled Eden’s too, because after a while, she reached over and gripped my thigh.

I can’t stand it, she said. We’ve got to pull over. Before you go back. Right up there. In the parking lot. Behind that church.

Chapter 51

That was the way it was with us, in the time of The Games, as spring moved into summer. If we could imagine something, we’d try to do it. In a way, she was more like someone my own age, or younger, than a woman fourteen years older than I, a mother with two children. Sometimes she would lead the way; sometimes I did; and soon we were doing things without plan, instantly joining in some new unscripted play. There was a strange innocence to it too; neither of us had done these things before, so we were discovering them as we did them. The past, her history, the chilly sermons of priests: all receded as we lived in the fierce present tense. The Games were ours, inventions of the imagination; and I remember even then thinking that in the distant future I would remember this as the season when I did most things for the first time. And I also knew that this fresh wildness might never happen to me again, with any other woman. And about that I was right.

But our time together wasn’t always games, costumes, scenes. Sometimes Eden just wanted to be still, to lie beside me in the silent trailer, listening to the night sounds of the lake and the River Styx. Other times, she wanted to make love quickly and brutally, explaining later that she had thought about it all day and had exhausted all the preliminaries in her mind. In a choked voice, she would blurt out the hardest words she knew and make me say them to her: words as hard as my prick. And on some strange nights, usually on the weekend when time was no consideration, we engaged in a kind of dance, an erotic version of the Mass, with a familiar sense of slowness and ritual; I would hear Latin phrases like ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum, and hum them in that dead language whose coded words were ground into me, echoing around in my skull like a dream that always comes back. In those moments I felt engulfed by sin. I wasn’t violating Eden; I was negating my own past, my Catholicism, my enforced subservience to a tyrannical code that was not of my own invention. Embracing sin, I ceased being a Catholic. Sweet sin. Sin, dark and unflowering and delicious.

Neither of us asked if what we were doing was right or wrong. We just did it. Music always seemed to be playing somewhere, even when the radio was off, even deep into the night when no sounds drifted across the lake; the music of sin, of crossing frontiers, of changing ourselves by what we imagined and what we did. We listened to that music and moved to it, invented to it, made love to it. I asked her to sit at the table, looking prim and reading a newspaper, a proper housewife, my little sweet Doris Day Blondie wifey, with Bing Crosby singing nice wholesome songs on the radio, and then I would get under the table and slide my head between her thighs until she lost all control. But music wasn’t always there. We made love once in the trunk of the car, in the parking lot of the Federal courthouse, with her panties keeping the trunk from locking. Once we found a small Catholic church out in the Alabama wilds, a building seemingly abandoned in the Protestant sea; we whispered in the emptiness of the nave and then went behind the rotting velvet drapes of a confessional, where she took me in her mouth. That was sin. And yet it didn’t seem wrong. Sin was made up of violation, license, the breaking of the rules; but with Eden it never felt wrong. It just felt.

Sometimes, of course, sin wasn’t easy for me. I would glimpse my mother’s face and her austere Sunday morning Catholic piety and I would pause. A small fight would break out in my head; the child accused the man: would you do this in front of your mother? Invariably the man would win, arguing with vehemence: she had her life and she’s dead and gone and this is my life and I’ll do with it what I want. But sometimes the child was the temporary winner. The first few times we made love to Roberta, I was more upset than I let on. I thought (or the child did): Would I be doing this if Roberta was a man named Robert and we were both fucking Eden Santana? Suppose Mercado and I had Eden between us on this bed and came in her together? And what really was going on in Eden’s mind? Why did she seem to enjoy it so much? Going to Roberta’s house was one of the few things we did more than once. She truly did make our visits seem like corporal works of mercy, the healing of the sick, where flesh, tongue, cock and come closed all psychic sores in a churning of flesh. But back in the barracks, surrounded by men to whom I could confide nothing, I would think: Suppose Eden was some sort of a lesbian? How would I feel if she and Roberta made love when I wasn’t there?

But after we’d gone to Roberta’s a few more times, all those questions disappeared. It began to seem natural for the three of us to slide together into that bed. Roberta was dumb, but I liked her; she was a woman born to be lavishly fucked until she got fat and swamped with kids and could then cast sex into the past. There was no way I could fall in love with her, and I was sure that Eden didn’t love her either. For me, there wasn’t any mystery; she was what she appeared to be, all good-natured flesh and a sad sweet smile.

But I loved seeing Eden’s dark skin stretched against Roberta’s shimmering whiteness and the paler areas of both bodies that had been covered with bathing suits. There were 150 million people in the United States and I was one of the few people who had seen those parts of their bodies. I never asked Eden or Roberta why they allowed me to do the things I did with them. We never used condoms, and sometimes I came in each of them, each holding my ass tight when I started to pull out, silently insisting that I should finish what I had started. I knew there were secret things they did to avoid getting pregnant but I didn’t ask what they were. They just went separately to the bathroom and I would hear water running for a while and then we’d be dozing together in the cool Gulf dark until a hand touched a thigh and we’d begin again. I knew just one thing for sure: they felt safe with me and I felt safe with them.

They were not, however, mere interchangeable bodies that gave and took heart-stopping pleasure. I enjoyed Roberta’s plump coarse whiteness, and the open way she let me use it. I got even hotter when she urged me on in that little girl’s voice. But in my eighteen-year-old arrogance I was sure there was nothing to know about Roberta beyond that bed, the hot shower, the light-blue veins on her breasts. There were a million things yet to learn about Eden Santana. And the challenge of that mystery, that place in her without maps, that undiscovered country, was what love was about. I was sure of that. Loving her was the name I gave to the process of unraveling her secrets. And as we moved around from one evening place to another, with feverish stops at Roberta’s, I began to tell Eden that I loved her.

How can you say you love me, child? she’d say. You don’t even know me.

Maybe that’s the point, I’d answer. Maybe I love you cause I don’t know you. Maybe won’t ever know all of you.

She’d shake her head and say, That’s damfool talk.

No, it’s not, I said one night. If I don’t know you—all of you — maybe I can spend the rest of my life finding out about you.

She looked at me for a long time. Then she lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and said (not to me, but to the room and the night and the past):

One thing I sure done learned about life. Don’t plan on anything.

Chapter 52

Late one afternoon I decided to walk all the way from the locker club to the trailer. The day was ripe with early summer.

I was on the bridge over the River Styx when I saw the pickup truck: pale blue, with a toolbox across the back behind the cab, Alabama plates. It was parked in front of a bait shop that was built on a hummock of scrubby land overlooking the river. Behind the bait shop a path led through swamp grass down to a boat dock. Three men were standing beside the pickup, drinking beer. One of them looked familiar. I hadn’t seen him since the great brawl outside the Baptist church during my first week in Pensacola.

It was the one called Buster.

For a moment, I was afraid. That January night had been quick and violent and for Buster and his friends, humiliating. But it was months ago (I told myself), hundreds of days behind both of us. I was living a different life now, centered on Eden. Buster couldn’t possibly remember me. But then, tensing, nervous, I wondered if I remembered him, why wouldn’t he remember me?

I paused, looked casually down at the river without seeing it, my back to the pickup and the bait shop and Buster. I glanced up and saw a hawk wheeling in the sky. And when I turned, Buster was coming across the road.

One of the others was reaching into the cab of the truck.

I froze.

“Hey, you!” Buster shouted. “Sailor boy!”

I started to run.

Back down the road to Ellyson Field.

“We gone git you Yankee ass!”

I was running flat out now along the shoulder of the empty road. I turned and saw the pickup backing away from the bait shop and Buster climbing on the running board like a guy in a gangster movie. I passed a small launderette, its doors already locked, and a closed shop advertising mufflers. I stared around for a weapon: a board, a brick, any goddamned thing to use against Buster and his boys.

And then I went down, falling forward, scraping my left hand as I tried to break the fall.

Brakes screeched. I rolled over and looked up, expecting Buster and a beating.

Buddy Bolden was there in the Merc. He pushed open one of the back doors.

“Get in!” he shouted. “Come on, man …”

I dove through the open door onto the floor. Bolden pushed me down and pulled the door closed.

“Stay down!”

I could hear him breathing in short pulls, a truck roaring by.

“They just went by,” he said. “Don’t know if they seen you. They’re up higher in a truck so maybe they — Shit! They hangin’ a U. Fuck! Hold on!”

He floored the accelerator, turned, then turned again, then went speeding down a smooth hardtop road, ripped suddenly to the right, passed under trees I could see from the floor, whipped around again, the road going from smooth to rough, stones and pebbles hammering at the bottom of the car.

“The gun’s under the front seat. You can reach it from back there …”

The.45, cold and wrapped in oilcloth, was heavy in my hand.

“I don’t see the mothafuckas any more but—”

The gun felt cool and solid. I might have to use it. That came to me then: I might have to shoot these fucking guys. I might have to blow this Buster’s head off.

Jesus Christ.

Then I was hurled against the opposite door and twisted around, and then we were moving very fast.

Yeah, I could kill one of the bastards.

And hey (I thought but didn’t say) if it’s Buster or me, it’s gonna be Buster.

I got a woman to live for.

Then we were in a damp cool place, the sky blocked by trees, moving slowly. Bolden stopped the car. I listened in silence for the pickup truck, and heard only insects chirring and the sound of startled birds. Bolden turned off the engine. I sat up.

“Gimme that thing,” he said. “I think we lost them.”

I handed him the gun. We were on the far side of the lake in a dense grove of magnolias. The smell was thick and sweet, almost sickening. Bolden was very still, listening to the evening sounds like a hunter, trying to sort out one from a million others.

“We’re okay now,” he said softly.

“Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“Now you know why I have a car.”

“Down here, we need tanks.”

“Who were those mothafuckas?”

I gave him a short version of the dance back in January and what Sal and Max and I did to Buster and his friends and why. When I finished, he grunted.

“It’s the dancin that did it,” Bolden said. “When white folks try to dance, they’s always trouble.”

He got out of the car, still holding the gun, and I looked out across the lake to where he and Catty had their little house and Eden and I had our trailer.

“You can’t go walkin on no roads alone no more,” he said. “Not while you down here. No more than I can. You do, you go talking shit about this being a free country an all that shit, they gonna grab you some night and drop you in a fuckin swamp.” A pause. “Max and Sal too.” He wrapped the gun carefully in the oilcloth. “These cracker mothafuckas ain’t dumb. Now they know you still around Pensacola, prob’ly right there in Ellyson Field, and so they gonna watch for you. Watch the roads. The bars. The base. So if you don’t have no car to carry you where you going, then don’t go …”

I pictured myself sneaking through the woods for the rest of my time in Pensacola. And then I got angry. Three of us had fought Buster and four of his friends and kicked the shit out of them. That should’ve been the end of it. I was so young that I still thought the world had rules, that men fought and someone won and someone lost and then it was over. And Bobby Bolden was saying it wasn’t the end of it. That some things in this world didn’t end until someone was dead. That down here, anyway, they’d come to you in the night, memory as fresh as morning, and take back the blood they shed. That year, Bobby Bolden knew this better than I did. He knew where we were.

In the South.

The goddamned South.

“They try that, we can do the same,” I said, almost bitterly. “We can go chasing after them too, man.”

He looked at me in a sad way. “Wise up, kid. This is their country. Not yours. Definitely not mine.”

“Well, we’ll see what happens,” I said.

He shoved the gun in his belt. “You better hope nothin happens at all.”

Chapter 53

The light was on behind the blinds when I finally reached the trailer. I knocked and heard Eden’s muffled voice telling me to come in. She hadn’t given me a key and never would. I pushed the door open and she was facing me, a faint smile on her face, her back to the sink. She had never looked so beautiful. Her hair was pulled straight back and her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. She was wearing a black turtleneck and a short white apron. Her legs were bare and she was wearing the red shoes. I locked the door behind me.

You’re late, she said in a husky voice.

She was smoking and flicked ashes behind her into the sink without taking her eyes off me.

Had a little trouble, I told her, but I’ll tell you about it later. You look good, child.

So do you, I said.

This too was part of the dance: the soft words and compliments, all part of saying hello. Tonight was different. Her eyes were unfocused as if she were thinking four moves ahead of me. I started to get hard, and reached for her and pulled her to me, kissing her. I ran my unscraped hand down her body and discovered that, except for the turtleneck, all she was wearing was the apron.

Gotta surprise for you, she whispered hoarsely.

Yeah?

Hope you like it.

She dropped the cigarette in the sink, and then she pressed both hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. I kissed her breasts, taking each in my mouth with the cloth of the sweater between me and her nipples and breathed hotly on her. Her voice sounded choked and she pressed again more firmly and then I was on my knees in front of her and she lifted her apron delicately and there in front of me was the surprise.

She had shaved.

Every last hair was gone and I was facing her beautifully formed cunt, which was very pale, looking like those perfect pubic mounds I’d seen on the classical statues in the art books. Except that this wasn’t art made by hand from marble, bronze or polished wood. This was packed with muscle and blood, and it was in front of me now as I kneeled before her, and I thought the word cunt, and saw the crevice clearly defined and tightly shut, thought cunt again, saw no evidence of clitoris or entry to the dark channel within and whispered loudly, like a prayer for mercy from the position of worship: Cunt.

Eden took a small step to the right, braced against the sink, gripped my head with both hands and pulled me to her.

It was as if I’d never been there before, the hairless lips suddenly parting, slippery under my tongue, the opening at once tighter and wetter. I put my brow against her pelvic bone and pushed hard, pressing her now against the cold metal sink, while playing delicately with my tongue in this new bald place. Almost from the start she was trembling and moving, her legs straight out, drawing up on the heels of those red shoes, the legs hardening and locking, then loosening, then hard again. She eased away, then squatted hard against my tongue, pulling fiercely on my hair, as if trying to suck me up into her, the nude wet cunt demanding more and more tongue, her voice rising and shuddering, until she was suddenly completely crazily coming: tearing away the apron with both hands, then yanking again at my hair, pumping forward, then slamming her hard hot bottom against the sink, standing on the heels of her shoes, until she seemed to rise over me, twisting straight up and screaming. And then flopped forward.

Exhausted.

Panting.

Limp. With her belly pressing against my head, her hands holding the back of my belt, her cheeks spread loosely against the sink. I blew gently against her hairless curves and clefts. And then she shuddered again and slid away and rolled onto her back on the polished floor. She lay there with her eyes closed. I entered her without undressing.

I never want this to end, she said, bathing my raw left hand in Epsom salts, as I lay on the bed where she had placed me, drained and empty. Never. Never, never.

Neither do I, I whispered.

And I know, she said, I shouldn’t oughtta be saying that. We’re here. We could be here lots of nights. I want it never to end. Even though, well, you know …

Don’t say even though, I said.

She said nothing.

I want us to last forever, I said.

She rubbed my hand in the warm water, but she was looking at the wall.

We won’t last forever, you know, she said gently. One fine day, you gonna meet a girl your own age. Probly younger. And she’ll want to go to Paris with you and help make you a painter, and all that stuff, like you say you want. And she’ll want to have kids and so will you. And she’ll want to meet your friends and read the books you’re reading and see you at breakfast every day of her life. You’ll see her like she just came into this world, all beautiful and sweet and fresh and new. And you’ll fall in love with her. And then you’ll feel bad because you won’t know how to tell me. You’ll walk around in a fog, you’ll pick fights with me, you’ll see the lines in my face for the very first time and the way my titties are droppin and you’ll see my kids go off and have kids of their own and you’ll think that it’s very strange, you being with a damn grandmother, and so you’ll screw up your courage and come to me and tell me you love another woman. And maybe you will love her and maybe you won’t, but in the end, you’ll go away.

I won’t, I said (the words still clear and fresh in my ears now). I swear it, Eden. I won’t ever go away. I won’t ever leave you.

Please don’t say those words, she said. I hear them words in every rotten movie.

I said, my voice rising with the panic, I don’t know any other words. But I gotta say them. Especially to you. I mean them.

You mean it now, she said calmly, but you won’t even remember what you just said to me … When it’s time to move on.

Then the words came pouring out of me, she lying beside me now, her head on my chest, my hand playing with her hair, the smell of soap and cunt in the air, mixed with the thick scent of magnolias from the lake. I wanted her beside me for the rest of my life, I said, the two of us, Eden and Michael Devlin, and her kids too, and so what if she became a grandmother, what the hell difference would that make? I knew I couldn’t be a father to her kids, they had a father, a real father, but I could be good to them, and maybe teach them a few things, and show them good books and take them to museums and if we all went to Paris, they could learn French while we were learning French and we’d all be happy. If I couldn’t make money as a painter, and couldn’t live on the GI Bill, I’d get a job, any kind of work to bring in the bucks, lots of them, and feed the kids and Eden and clothe them too and raise them up right and save what was left and … I could paint at night and on the weekends. And then, hey, sooner or later I’d have a breakthrough and I could give up the job and paint all the time. I knew I could do it, with Eden beside me, helping me make my way in the world while I was learning my craft. I needed her (I told her). I wanted her. Now. And later. When we both were old.

I couldn’t stop myself. The words just kept coming, the foolish and pathetic words. The words of an eighteen-year-old boy who was far from home. She listened in silence, never moving; if anything, her body seemed slowly to stiffen. Then at last I ran down and finally I stopped talking. I turned to kiss her and saw that her face was wet with tears.

Nobody ever said things like that to me before, she whispered (she who had once forced me to tell her I loved her, in the woods beyond the railroad track). You damn crazy child.

I love you, I said, as if maybe she didn’t yet understand me completely, and as if that ancient phrase explained everything. I love you …

She was silent. The insects droned. A loon made a crazy laughing sound.

I said, When your hair grows back — down there—it’ll be mine. That hair, that new hair, that fresh-grown hair: nobody in the whole world will ever see it except me.

And she laughed.

Oh, Michael, child, of all the people in the whole wide world, only you would ever think such a thing.

I smiled, trying to be cool. But I was embarrassed, pleased only that it was too dark for her to see me blush. She had laughed at me!

But it’s true, isn’t it? I said. Nobody else will ever see it.

As soon as I’d said it, I was sorry. It was as if I were forcing her to say what I wanted so much to hear.

Who knows? she said casually.

I want it to be true, I said.

Then maybe it will be.

She was up on one elbow now, staring at me.

You ain’t a man yet, she said. But you’re gettin there, child.

I love you, I said one final time.

She sighed and touched my mouth with cool fingertips and said, I guess I love you too.

Chapter 54

She lets me enter everything except her mind.

Red Cannon was in a fight somewhere. When I saw him in the chow hall this morning, his hands were raw and skinned, but his face was untouched. Whoever the guy was, he never laid a hand on Red. Sal said the gouge on the base was that Red beat the shit out of some cracker down at Trader Vic’s. After Red finished beating him senseless, the Shore Patrol came. They were all friends of Red’s, so when the cracker came around, the SPs beat the shit out of him too. Will I have to fight Red some day? I have to admit, it scares me; Red is a man, tough and hard, and there’s something dead in his eyes, like he’s seen too many people die. I don’t know if I can go up against that kind of man knowing I might have to kill him if it looks as if he’s going to kill me. I guess if I ever fight him, I have to get off first; can’t give him time to get set, to gather up all his craziness and anger and hatred. Take it out of him real fast. Still, it’s scary.

E.: a stubble returns. She says it’s itchy.

Stories about Dodgers going to Los Angeles in newspaper clippings sent by my father. Horace Stoneham is mumbling about taking the Giants. The majors won’t let one team go because it wouldn’t be worth all the cost of flying out there on the road to play one team. So the Giants gotta go with the Dodgers. Possible, they could both be gone: just like that. Next year, year after. O’Malley wants the big television bucks, the papers say. Can’t believe it. In the papers here, the sports news is all stuff from Associated Press (that’s where Caniff worked when he first came to NY, drawing cartoons). The Los Angeles Dodgers? Sounds ridiculous.

But …

Great pictures by a guy named Titian in a book MR owns. You can see the figures glow. All old cardinals and popes, with cruel faces; but the glow, like gold, comes off them. How does he make that happen with just paint and oil and turpentine? Gotta ask M.

I made 46 bucks this month drawing pictures. MR suggested I switch to chalk and charcoal, so the women’s faces would be softer. He’s right. I love smearing the chalk with my hands, grading it. It’s almost as if you were rubbing your hand on a woman’s face. With the money, I bought two more shirts, and a book called The Great Gatsby for E. I read the book when Dunbar told me about it and it’s a great book, even though I don’t understand people like that, except Wolfsheim, the bootlegger. I was going to buy E. some earrings, but I couldn’t do it at the end, because I didn’t trust my own taste. Actually ran out of the store …

The comics go on, but I don’t care much about them anymore. I’d rather see red shoes.

Chapter 55

The Navy went on like a lumpy road beside a swift river. Routine and habit made it easy; my true life took place at night. I still visited with the blacks, doing their portraits for free and eating when I wanted. I even made a point of entering the chow hall with them, knowing it would drive Harrelson nuts. But I didn’t go into town with them very much anymore. I made excuses about being too busy with my drawings or needing to see my girl or having the duty.

But the truth was I didn’t want to see Winnie.

The truth was I didn’t want to hear that she was pregnant, or in love with me, didn’t want her to start hanging around the gate, the knocked-up black girl crazy for a white man. Most of all, I didn’t want her confronting Eden. I didn’t want her to throw a scene, didn’t want to have to sit down with Eden later and explain what happened that one night when she was in New Orleans. I was also afraid of my own feelings.

The truth was that sometimes, making love to Eden, Winnie’s syrupy body came into my head. I was on the floor again in her little house, betraying Eden while Winnie betrayed her husband. I could hear her furry innocent voice, the sense she gave me of being abandoned. At least once, making love to Eden, I came again in Winnie. And I was afraid that if I saw her I would want her again, in some powerful way that seemed to transcend my feelings for Eden. I loved Eden, I was sure, but Winnie’s hot desperate body wouldn’t leave my mind.

And there was one further truth: I was afraid that if Eden found out about Winnie, she would use the knowledge like a permit, and would go out and play around with other guys the way I had with Winnie. I had convinced myself that there was an unspoken agreement binding me and Eden Santana. I didn’t want it to break. I told myself that I needed her the way I needed food and sleep and air to breathe.

Meanwhile, the war in Korea was grinding down and so was the activity at the base. The Navy had stopped all new enlistments, so there were no new arrivals among us, no sudden transfers to sea duty in the waters of Asia. We were trapped at Ellyson Field: officers and enlisted men, Yankees and Shitkickers. Each of had to deal with the increasing boredom. Max and Sal applied for sea duty and were told they’d have to wait. Dunbar filled out the forms for an early discharge. I started going to the gym each afternoon with Max.

My hair filled out. I did a lot of drawing and some awful painting (the colors muddied up and I could never get the light right). I read more books. I weighed myself one afternoon in Bobby Bolden’s office in the infirmary and was certain the scale was wrong; I’d gained twelve pounds without getting fat. At night sometimes, Eden would dig a thumb into my biceps, and when it began to hurt, I’d grit my teeth and harden the muscle and pop her thumb out of my flesh. I even grew a half inch taller.

Late one afternoon, I was walking with Miles Rayfield along Copter Road on the base. He started talking about his wife. I remember feeling that I had a part in some play and Miles was really an actor reading some other guy’s lines. He talked about her in a bitter way. She hadn’t written to him in two weeks, he said, maybe three, he wasn’t ever sure anymore; maybe he should just get a divorce. It was as if he were asking me to support him, to advise him. I was trying to sort this out, when we heard someone tap a car horn. It was Mercado, in the tan full-dress uniform of the Mexican Army. He was behind the wheel of his convertible, the top down, the back seat full of suitcases.

“Hey, I’ll see you guys,” he said, smiling widely, waving. “I’m off.”

We went over and Mercado told us that he’d finished the helicopter training and he had his certificate, signed by Captain Pritchett and the Secretary of Defense. Now he was going back to Mexico.

“But stay in touch,” he said, and handed us each a business card, with the name of a company printed on it in Spanish, an address, a phone number. “You can get me here most of the time, if you ever come to Mexico. Actually, it’s my father’s company. But they always know where I am. Mi casa es su casa, as we say. My house is your house …”

Miles said, “If everybody you’ve invited comes to Mexico at the same time, you’ll have to rent a stadium.”

“My father owns a stadium,” Mercado said, and smiled. “So what the hell …”

We shook hands and he waved and drove on to the gate. I felt sad. Mercado was decent. He wasn’t one of those officers who acted like pricks. And then I felt a different emotion. Relief. Relief that began shifting into happiness.

Mercado was gone at last.

Now I’d never have to worry that Eden Santana was off somewhere with Mercado on the nights when I was a prisoner of the United States Navy.

He was gone.

And I was happy.

For about thirty seconds. Then a small commotion arose in me. Suppose Mercado was making one final stop in Pensacola before vanishing into Mexico and the future? Suppose the friendly goodbye was just an act, to make me relax before he went off for a few hot hours with Eden Santana on the silk sheets of the San Carlos Hotel? She might do it for one reason: curiosity. A tempting word from Roberta, who had slept with Mercado. A look at him in the passing convertible. He would be gone by nightfall anyway, and I would never know, so why not?

“Jesus Christ, what’s with you?” Miles said. “Your face is jumping all over the place.”

“Nothing. Nothing. I was thinking about something else.”

“It must have been a bitch.”

“Yeah.”

That night, Miles had the duty in the Supply Shack. Eden was working late. I knew if I lay around the barracks my head might fill with still more unhappy visions, so I decided to work. I owed drawings to almost a dozen sailors and I needed the money. I took a nap after dinner, to store up strength for a long night’s work. I awoke in the dark. And then, my face freshly washed, I took my chalk, pad and photographs over to the Supply Shack. A soft rain was falling but there were a few helicopters in the sky. The lights burned warmly in the shack. Miles was probably busy; his bitching would be good company. Between Miles Rayfield and the work, I wouldn’t think about Eden Santana.

But when I walked into the Shack, Miles wasn’t there. Nobody was. I went to his desk and saw cigarette butts in an ashtray and a Navy white hat plunked on the chair, with Rayfield stenciled inside the brim. But there was no Miles Rayfield. I went to my desk, stared at the vapid face of a young blonde and started drawing. Then the front door opened and a mechanic walked in waving a requisition slip.

I took the slip, exchanged some small talk, and then walked to the back to find a swash plate, wondering where the hell Miles was. As soon as I stepped into the storeroom, I heard voices. Low, murmuring. Coming from the secret studio beyond the wall of packing crates. One of them belonged to Miles Rayfield. The other was the voice of Freddie Harada.

I gave the mechanic the plate and had him sign the forms, but when he was gone, I decided not to stick around. I left the signed slip on top of Miles’s hat and then packed my stuff and hurried through the soft rain to the barracks. I worked there in the dim light, sitting on my bunk, trying to draw what I could see and not what I could imagine.

At lights out, I moved into the head and kept working, sitting on a toilet seat with the drawing pad in my lap. Various sailors came in and out, handling the usual ablutions before going off to sleep. They were used to me by now; they didn’t even bother to kibitz. Then I was alone for a long time in the quiet. I was working on my third dark-eyed blonde; she was too pretty to be interesting, and blonde hair was always harder to draw than black. But the chalk worked for me; I kept repeating the tricks I’d learned from Miles Rayfield and they were beginning to feel natural.

Then I heard a screen door open and close, followed by footsteps. I looked toward the sleeping bay and saw Captain Pritchett and Red Cannon staring at me. I started to get up. Cannon took a step into the head and held up both hands, palms out.

“Stay there, sailor,” he said, his voice soft but his eyes angry. It was as if he were making an arrest. “Captain wants to talk to you.”

Pritchett stepped into the head.

“Thank you, Cannon,” he said, his voice a dismissal.

“Good night, sir,” Cannon said, snapping off a salute. He walked out quickly but was careful not to slam the door. Ass kisser, I thought. Bullshit artist. The captain waited until Cannon was gone and then he turned to me.

“So you’re the guy doing those portraits I see everywhere,” he said, looking at the unfinished drawing on my pad.

“I guess so, sir,” I said.

“They’re in lockers, the damned pictures. They’re in the hangars. They’re even turning up in officer’s country.”

I wanted to say: Yeah, so what? But I kept my mouth shut.

“And they’re not half bad,” Pritchett said.

He looked closer at the blonde on the pad.

“You got a knack, Devlin. Maybe even a gift.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“ ’Course, I been around so damned long now, I’ve seen all sorts of artists come and go and come again, in this man’s Navy. Usually they pick up a discharge and go out into the civilian world thinking they’re the next Picasso. They go to art school. They try to get jobs in their art racket. And then they find out they’re not all that good, or they gotta make a living, or worst of all, they get married. And you never hear about them again. And then, a lot of times, they even re-up, come back to the Navy, where they can be big wheels again. You understand what I’m saying, sailor?”

“I think so, sir.”

“No, you don’t. You’re too damned young to understand anything.”

He sighed and then took his wallet from the back pocket of his suntans. He started flipping through a plastic insert. He took out a photograph.

“But you do have a knack,” he said, handing me a photograph of his wife, the woman whose picture was in his office. “So try this. A nice big one, if you can do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you charge?”

“Uh, well, any thing, sir. I—”

“Stop the crap, sailor. I’ll pay what the others pay. I don’t want a deal, just cause I’m your commanding office.”

“Five bucks.”

“Do a nice job and I’ll get you ten.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good night, sailor,” he said, and turned on his heel without saluting. He walked out to where his beds of flowers were drowsing in the soft Gulf rain.

I stared at the woman’s face. A round head, crisp features, the cheeks a little dimpled, clear eyes. She was younger in this picture than in the one at his office. On the back, she had written: “For Ensign Jack Pritchett, Love Always, Catherine.”

And I thought: I’ve made hundreds of drawings of Eden Santana, but I don’t have a single photograph, nothing at all, that says on it, “Love always.” All I had was her hurried note, scribbled before she left for New Orleans. That did say love but didn’t add always. And I wondered how I would feel if Eden died on me, the way Pritchett’s wife had died on him. What would I carry around for the rest of my days that would remind me of the way love for her once drowned my heart?

I slipped the picture of the captain’s wife inside the pad and finished drawing the girlfriend of a man named Schlesinger, who was stationed at Mainside. Then Miles Rayfield came in.

“I thought you were going to come over,” he said.

“I did,” I said.

“Oh.” He looked embarassed, and then walked quickly to the sleeping bay.

I gazed at myself for a moment in the mirror, remembering that first day so long ago when I showed up here, still loving a woman in Brooklyn whose face I no longer clearly remembered. Now I wanted Eden to appear behind me in the mirror, her eyes out of focus. I would turn and she would be wearing the red shoes.

The screen door slammed. Then slammed again. Nobody came in. I walked to the door and slipped the hook and closed the main door too. Outside, the streets glistened with rain. I remembered standing at the door to the roof in the house in Brooklyn, watching the rain on summer afternoons. That rooftop seemed a million miles away. I thought: I’d better write to the boys, too. My little brothers. I’d better tell them what I’m learning about the confusions of the world. They should learn it too.

And then thought: No.

They’ll have to learn about it for themselves.

Chapter 56

The next night I tried to explain to Eden about Miles Rayfield. About his talent and kindness and generosity. About how much he’d taught me but how the other part of him made me uneasy. I told her about the wife Miles claimed to have. About Freddie Harada and the nude drawings I’d seen in the sktetchbook. I didn’t think that such talk would take me where it did. That night changed everything.

We were in the trailer, facing each other across the small table. She was smoking a cigarette, her eyes as blurry as the smoke.

She said, Say, this Miles really is, you know … funny.

She took a drag.

But you don’t really know, do you, child? I mean, you never seen him do somethin with a man.

No.

But say he is, say he’s that way. Say he got somethin goin with that Filipino boy.

She paused.

Well, if that’s the case, why, maybe you’re jealous.

I felt jolted. I said, Hey, come on.… You know better than that—

She went on, a small smile on her mouth: Suppose he decided to run off with that Filipino boy? What would you do?

Nothing. I don’t—

You sure of that? You sure you wouldn’t miss him just a little bit? You sure you wouldn’t wish he’d come back?

I didn’t answer.

Why, you been jealous of me with no good reason, child. Why wouldn’t you be jealous of this Miles fella?

Cause he’s a man. And I’m not—

A faggot? she said.

Damn right!

She smiled and reached over and touched my hand.

She said, Child, you better learn quick that human beings are complicated. You hear me? Every woman got a little man in her. Every man got a little woman in him. Nobody’s all one thing. Your friend Miles Rayfield is not one thing. Most people ain’t.

I hated the way she was looking at me. Smiling. Self-satisfied, like a grade school teacher instructing an infant.

Okay, I said, with heat: Say that’s true. Why should I be jealous, for Christ’s sakes?

She tamped out the cigarette.

Cause the way you talk about him, if this Miles fella runs off, you’ll be heartbroken.

You saying I’m queer?

No. Just saying maybe you want Miles in your life for a long time.

Oh bullshit, I said, in an annoyed way.

She made a small A with her hands and peered at me over the point.

Why you talking like that? she said.

Cause you’re talking bullshit!

Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed.

Don’t raise your voice to me, she said in a cold flat voice.

It was there again. The tone of authority. I slammed the table with the palm of my hand. The ashtray bounced and fell to the floor.

I’m not queer.

I never said that!

Well, what the fuck did you say?

She tried to reply, but I was standing now, the words rising.

I said, You should talk. You! The way you act with Roberta. Are you kid—

She looked at once furious and terrified, standing up too and backing away.

Shut up.

I knew I’d gone too far, and mumbled something, a lot of maybes and who knows, and reached for the ashtray and pawed at the cigarette butts on the floor. The anger was gone; but I couldn’t get the words back.

She said, Maybe you better go off to the Navy, child. Maybe you better sleep this anger of yours off. Maybe you better go. Right now.

What?

The words then came rolling out of her too. Her face was creased and contorted. For the first time, she seemed ugly to me. And old.

She screamed: I said, go back to the base. Right now. Back to Ellyson Field. With all the other sailor boys. I don’t want trouble. Not with you, not with no one. I had enough trouble to last me ten lifetimes. And you look like you want to hit someone, Michael Devlin. Fact, you look just like another man I knew once. Man didn’t want to hear no hard things. No difficult things. So I don’t want you here tonight. Go.

I threw the ashtray against the wall.

Jesus Christ! I said, panting. Jesus fuckin Christ.

I jerked the door open, slammed it behind me and went out.

I walked down the road toward the highway. And then felt nauseated. We’d never argued before. Never even raised our voices at each other. And here we were … Screaming. Smashing things. Or at least I was. I’d said cruel words. I’d gone out of control. Here we were … breaking up. Over words. Over the word queer. The word faggot. Not over Mercado or a husband or another lover. Over Miles Rayfield. A possible faggot. What the hell did she mean? Trying to tell me I had some faggot in me? With that smug schoolteacher look on her face. Why’d she start this crap? I’m trying to explain about Miles and she turns it around, makes it about me. And when I object, she gets harder. She pushed me and like always, I pushed back. Yeah. That was it. She couldn’t take the way I pushed back. She thought I was this sweet boy. Child, she always called me. Well, I wasn’t a child. Maybe she knew that now. Push me and I push back harder. Like a man does. She should’ve know that and she made one big goddamn mistake. Does she think she can find someone as good as me? Hey, come on … Or maybe I made the mistake. If I did, then she’d never let me back. If I made the mistake, it was over, just like that. Over? The way it ended for all the men I knew. All the men who loved women and weren’t loved back. No. Jesus, no.

I stopped, started to go back.

Thinking: I can still beg her forgiveness.

And answered myself: No. I can say I’m sorry for losing my temper. For saying the rotten things about Roberta. For breaking the ashtray. But I won’t beg. Maybe I can even say she was right about Miles Rayfield. I would miss him if he went away. But not because I’m interested in his prick. She doesn’t know everything. But I just can’t run off like this. I have to go back. Even if I have to plead with her. But suppose she says no? Suppose she won’t even open the door? And what if she was just looking for some excuse to break up? Maybe that’s why she started all this. And she started it. Not me. Eden. She started the whole goddamned thing. Fuck her. No, I want her. I want her. No. She started it. Let her come to me, call me at the base, beg me to come back. Right now, I thought, I’m going to 0 Street. To the Dirt Bar. See Sal and Max and the others. Get a blow job from Dixie Shafer. How do you like that, baby? Get drunk. Who needs you, lady?

I stopped.

There was something in the bushes beside the road. Something moving. I reached down for a rock and eased into the shadows. Another movement. Then I heard a thick grunting sound, full of pain. Then shoes scraping on gravel, as if trying to get traction. I hefted the rock. Then moved closer to the sounds of pain.

And saw Bobby Bolden.

He was facedown in the gravel, his shirt torn off, deep bleeding wounds sliced into his back. His arms were stretched out in front of him, his hands flopping loosely at the wrists. He was digging his elbows into the gravel, trying to move forward. His face was so consumed with pain that he couldn’t recognize me or anyone else on this earth.

I turned to the trailer.

Eden!

His body writhed as I reached under his arms and started to lift him. He was bigger and heavier than I imagined. The gouged skin was slippery with blood. Eden took his legs and we heaved and got him into the back seat of her car and laid him face down across the floor. His hands flopped loosely. His jaw moved and words came out but no sentences.

Mothafuck. The House. Get me. Hey you. Oh, you. Go ahead you. Catty. Oh you. Scrapple from the apple and a bottle of ocean. Oh.

We started to pull out and then Eden saw a glow through the trees. The house. I turned the car around and pushed hard on the accelerator, moving down the road away from the highway. The house where Bobby and Catty lived together was burning beyond the screen of trees. I saw black men running through the trees, most without shirts, all carrying buckets of water. Kids darted across the road and I slowed down. Eden shrunk low in the seat beside me, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide and afraid.

Then up ahead I saw something else.

By the side of the lake, only thirty feet away, tied to the branch of a tree with her hands above her head and naked from the waist up was Catty.

Her head was thrown back. She wasn’t moving. I could see her back had been split open.

Oh my God, Eden whispered.

Her hands became fists. She gnawed on a knuckle.

Oh Jesus God.

I pulled over and stopped the car and got out, but Eden stayed where she was. I saw an elderly black man coming through the trees carrying a shotgun. Six black teenagers were behind him. Their faces were blank.

“You kin keep on goin,” the older man said.

I pointed at Catty and said I had to get her to a hospital.

“You just leave her be,” he said. “She deserve whut she get. She come in here, dont care fo decency, cause nuthin but trouble. Things here is peaceful till this white trash show up. And look whut she do. She brung down the affliction on us. She brung down the damn Klan.”

The Klan. Like Bobby Bolden said. Like all the blacks said. The damned Klan.

“You can’t let her hang here,” I said. Catty’s bare feet were not touching the ground. She was hanging there, a dead weight. I wondered if arms really did get pulled out of sockets. The small black kids had moved around now to the far side of the tree for their first sight of a white woman’s bare breasts.

“Hey you kids, git away fum there!” the old man said. The kids looked at him, then at Catty’s breasts, then hurried away to see the fire. The orange glow had faded but the air was acrid with smoke. I glanced back at the car. Eden and Bobby Bolden were both out of sight. I turned my back on the old man and walked over to the tree. Two black kids were still huddled in a bush.

“Who’s got a knife?” I said.

One of the kids handed over a curved blade with a taped wooden handle.

“Leave her be, white man!” the old man shouted.

I stepped over to Catty and cut her down, trying to brake her fall with my shoulder. As she hit the ground, limp and hurt and bleeding, with her jaw slack and red welts noticeable now across her breasts, there was an immense ferocious roar.

I heard Eden scream my name.

I turned and saw the old man holding the shotgun. The stock was propped against his hip. But I felt nothing. He must have aimed at the sky. I stared at him. He stared at me.

“I’m gonna pick this woman up now,” I said. “Right now. If you want to kill me, go ahead. But I don’t think it’d be worth it.”

I bent down and lifted Catty, waiting to be shot. I carried her to the car. Eden was hunkered down low in the front and I put Catty beside her. The light of the fire was gone. There was smoke everywhere. Animals and humans crashed around in the woods.

“Git out now, heah me?” the old man said. His voice seemed old and worn and sad. “Don’t ever come back to these parts. Just go and leave us be. You come back, ah’ll have to kill you.”

I drove quickly to Mainside, but not too quickly, afraid of bouncing Bobby and Catty. Eden threw a coat over Catty and cradled her in her arms. We had no choice but Mainside. There was no night corpsman on duty at Ellyson and no hospital in all of Pensacola that would accept a damaged black man and a hurting white woman in the same emergency room. Bobby talked in a slurred voice, his mouth bubbling with bloody saliva:

All the way hey. Yeah. They comin down the ridge. In the snow. You watch the snow. Yeah. Oh. In formation, gonna march, mothafucka. He got. No, he got. Bottle of ocean and two dimes plus her. Yeah. No. The house. Oh Catty. Yeah. Oh Catty.

Eden was silent all the way. I kept wondering if Bobby Bolden had paid the price for rescuing me from Buster and his friends; then dismissed that; thought if that was so, it was only part of it, a small part. He was a black man fucking a white woman in the South. He couldn’t expect to keep that a secret forever. The old black man was bitter, so even the blacks must have disapproved and the whites would have been crazy. I wondered too if there was some black woman out there by the lake who loved Bobby Bolden from a distance, and then in rage and jealousy made a call or sent a letter. I remembered that night months before when there was a sudden sharp knock on Bolden’s door.… But maybe someone came here out of Catty’s life. A husband. A lover. Followed her from Mainside. Watched where she went. Then called in the Klan. I remembered the photographs of the Klan in old newspapers and in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons: assholes in white sheets watching fiery crosses burn in the night. Degenerate white assholes. They always seemed funny to me, looking at them back in Brooklyn. What did they tell their wives and kids when they went out for the night wearing sheets? That they were saving the good old Yew Ess of Ay from the niggers and the Jews and the Catholics? Ridiculous. But they weren’t funny to me anymore. They had maimed and hurt two of my friends.

I glanced at Eden as we turned into the long avenue leading to the gates of Mainside. She was staring off in the distance. Her face was slack now, her hair disheveled. She looked older.

A Marine corporal blocked the gate when I pulled up. I pointed at Bobby and Catty and explained that they were sailors, one from Mainside, the other from Ellyson Field. The Marine’s name was stamped on his chest. Gabree. Blond and sunburned. He didn’t move or wave us on.

“This car doesn’t have a sticker,” he said. “You’re out of uniform. So are they. And this other—woman isn’t in the service.” He blinked his blond eyelashes. “You can’t come on board. Sorry.”

“Are you fucking crazy?” I shouted.

Gabree narrowed his eyes and gave me the all-purpose Marine Corps hard-guy look, taught daily at Parris Island.

“You better lower your voice, sailor. Or you’ll be in deep shit. Real fast.”

“Where’s your superior officer?” I said, getting out of the car. Gabree inhaled, trying to look more chesty. His hand went to his service revolver.

“He’s asleep, sailor. And besides, I don’t even have to answer you.”

“Then you better wake him up, jackoff. If these people die, I’m gonna hold you responsible.”

Gabree said, “You know something? I might just arrest you on general principles.”

I pointed at Bobby Bolden’s writhing body.

“This man was a Naval corpsman at the Chosen reservoir,” I shouted. “He saved more Marines than you’ll ever even meet. If you let him die, then you oughtta die too, fuckhead.”

“That’s a threat, sailor.”

“You’re fucking right it’s a threat. Just stop the bullshit and get these people to a hospital.”

He started to take the.45 from its holster. His face was cold. I heard Bolden groan. I couldn’t see Eden, who was behind Catty.

“You better kill me with that, pal,” I said. “If you don’t, I’m taking it off you and you’ll end up with an extra asshole.”

Then another car pulled up behind Eden’s and the horn beeped. There were two lieutenants in the car. I turned my back on Gabree and walked over to them and explained what was going on. They were both Marine pilots.

“Oh, these goddamned chickenshit assholes,” said the officer behind the wheel. He got out of the car and shouted: “Corporal, get your ass over here!”

They had that squinty-eyed pilot look, the shambling bony bodies. But they took over. They made Corporal Gabree help them lift Catty and Bobby Bolden into their car, then raced past us through the gate into the great slumbering base. I pulled Eden’s car around in a circle, stopping just short of the gate. Gabree was standing there.

“I’ll see you around, Corporal.”

He looked at me without blinking and then I pulled away. Eden huddled against the door, away from me. She didn’t speak until we were on the road back to Ellyson Field.

What a night, I said, trying to get her to talk.

She looked at me, shook her head.

I’m sorry for all those rotten things I said. I’m sorry I blew my stack.

Forget it, she said in a soft voice. I shouldn’t’ve egged you on.

It should have felt like a reconciliation; it didn’t. We passed a lot of closed bars and churches. Just short of the base, she asked me to pull over.

I can’t go back to the trailer tonight, she said.

I mumbled something about not letting the idiots scare her off and how she didn’t really have anything to be afraid of, since this was really about Bobby Bolden and Catty.

She said, Are you kidding?

I said, No. In a way, maybe Bobby brought this on himself, with the Klan and all. You know, having a white woman and all that. Even the black people there — well, you saw that old man.

Then Eden Santana began to sob, shaking her head, her body racked.

Oh you poor damn silly fool, she said, through tears. You poor damn kid. You poor child.

I put my arms around her and held her close and the hopeless sobbing got heavier and then slowly eased.

What is it, baby? I whispered. What is it?

She pulled away and looked at me with her eyes all wet and the tracks of tears on her cheeks.

Don’t you see anything? she said.

I looked and waited and then she said it.

I’m black, you damn fool. I’m black.

Chapter 57

I’m one of The People, child. And maybe you don’t know about them, and for sure you don’t know about me, so listen up, you hear? Don’t sit there with that damfool white boy look on your face. You should’ve seen. You should’ve listened. You should’ve thought: Who was this James Robinson and why are there no pictures of her children on the walls and why is there a kink in her hair and why does she live by the lake with the niggers? You should’ve known. Yeah, I hid it. The truth be told, I didn’t want you backing up, didn’t want you going away. But I knew that if you knew, you’d go away. I learned long ago that I could pass in the white man’s world. But I couldn’t do it forever, child. Sooner or later, the white man smells niggers and forces them to pay for the white man’s own degraded sins. That’s what The People learned, too. Though it took em quite a while before they paid for the sin of pride and for all their sad treasons.

I knew that from the beginning: when you touched my hand and when you entered my body: because it was all in The Story that was passed to me by my daddy and to him from his daddy, The Story passed down through all the generations, like a curse.

The People came from a place called Isle Brevelle, twenty-five miles from Natchitoches, way up in the northwest of Louisiana. This was long ago, you hear me? Before there was a United States, before your people came here, before everybody that was to come and fill the great empty land. Before all of them, The People was here. Americans from the start.

They were like two giant rivers joining to make a new one: the Africa river, the Europe river. The French were down here then, the whole damned Gulf was theirs and the big river too, all the way to Canada, and later the Spanish were here, and always the Indians were here, and together they brought to America the men and women of Africa. All of them made us, and later they called us the gens de couleur libre, the free people of color, the Creoles. We just called ourselves The People. We came from all those fucks of Africans and Europeans, fucks in the woods of the empty land, fucks in the August fields, fucks in slave quarters and masters’ beds, fucks at gunpoint and fucks freely given.

The white men looked at us, at the women most of all, and they wanted us. They had no women here, or their women were pale and scrawny things, their heads full of Christian damnation (though some of the women did wander to the woods with black men and add to The People and that’s in The Story too). The white man tried to label us, ignoring the fact that before we ever saw a white skin or a blue eye we had the names of Africa, where we had lived since time began, and where later the Arabs chained us and put us in the holds of ships to be carried across oceans. The white men labeled us as if we were goods, and of course, to many of the whites, that’s what we were. But late at night it didn’t matter how white we were or how black. The white men wanted us.

Maybe that was the beginning of the pride: their wanting us. Maybe that was why we went with them, to break them down, to make them love us, knowing that if they loved us, we owned them. Maybe that led to the pride. The true sin.

So you look at me now, here in this place in the fifties, and I guess you think I’m one woman walking in the world. But the truth be told, looking at me you’re also looking at people long dead and gone. Their blood’s in me. The blood of The People. I can’t even go all the way to the beginning of The Story. Can’t go to Africa, child.

But I know that in 1742, on a plantation near Natchitoches, a woman named Coincoin was born. Her parents were from Africa, slaves of a French family, they gave her a Christian name, Marie Thereze, but always called her Coincoin in the old language. In The Story, that’s the name that was always used.

That slave couple had other kids, but Coincoin was the smart one, the beautiful one, black and smooth and big-assed and ripe. She knew the language that came across the ocean in the slave ships, but she spoke French and Spanish too, and could read all the books in the master’s house. She also knew all the healing that could be done with the simple things of God’s earth, roots and herbs and plants and magic mud. And though she was Catholic and read the Bible and went to the church, she had the old religion too. She knew all about the gods of the rivers and forests and wind, the sun and the moon. By the time she was twelve, she was famous all over for healing. White folks came to her and black folks too.

But for all the respect they gave her, Coincoin knew one terrible thing. You hear me? She was the property of other men. She and her mother, her father and sisters and brothers did other men’s work: cooked their food, plowed their fields, picked their crops, nursed their babies. And because they were property they never got paid, no more than a mule got paid. And though the Code Noir said they couldn’t, the white men could grab the girl children and make them sleep with them. And then they could sell them off the way you might sell a saddle or a cart or a mule.

One night when she was sixteen, Coincoin found herself on her own. On that single night her mother died, her father died and the master died in an epidemic that ran through the whole area and killed hundreds. They tell how the master’s wife got sick too and how Coincoin drew on the old medicine and saved that woman’s life. They say her father on his deathbed asked her to look for the kee-ah root, and Coincoin went foraging in the deep woods, was gone for four days. But when she came back with the secret root, it was too late to help her own father and mother. The Story says Coincoin hated the master and let him die. But when she was certain the man was gone, she saved his wife.

When the plague was over, her slave family was split apart. Coincoin and a brother were given to the master’s son. And The Story says that he was kind to her; after all, she had saved his mother. But for all the kindness, she was still property. And in those days, the females were like brood mares to the damned masters. The more children they had, the more human beings the master could sell at a profit, or keep around to work the plantations. So the new master made Coincoin live with a fresh new slave from the old country. She must’ve felt something for the man because she had four children with him, one after the other, and along the way, started knowing better about the true world.

And then, so The Story goes, when Coincoin was twenty-five, the Frenchman came to Natchitoches.

Her Frenchman.

He was tall and blue-eyed and kind, two years younger than Coincoin, free of family and responsibility, come to Louisiana to make his fortune. His name was Metoyer. He met Coincoin. They fell in love. And within a few months, Coincoin’s black man was gone, sold off into the country, her children by him were sold, and Coincoin was living in the Frenchman’s house.

This wasn’t easy to do, child. She was someone else’s property, not the Frenchman’s. She couldn’t come and go when and where she pleased. But the Frenchman wanted her, and she wanted the Frenchman’s wanting. So the Frenchman went to Coincoin’s owner and made a deal. He rented her, like you might rent an ox to work your fields. And there, in the Frenchman’s house, the Frenchman and Coincoin began to make The People.

They stayed together for twenty-five years. She gave him seven children. The humiliation was always there, I guess, because though he leased her, all her children belonged to the original master. Still, they lived a moral life. She was his woman, simple as that, his black wife living in the house and taking him inside her and giving him children.

It wasn’t always easy. A Spanish priest came to Natchitoches and tried to break them up. But Metoyer loved his Coincoin, and he fought the authorities and they stayed together until, when the owner was on his own deathbed, Metoyer bought Coincoin from him. Bought her outright. And then, because the Code Noir said that no owner was allowed to father a child by one of his own slaves, the Frenchman freed her. And she stayed there in the house with him and their children.

Finally, Coincoin started to get old. And the Frenchman came to her one night and said he wanted to break up with her. This was after twenty-five years and seven children. See, he was rich now and prosperous, this Metoyer, the owner of more slaves than anyone else in the region and thousands of acres of land. He said he wanted to marry a white woman that he’d met in New Orleans. That was the only way under the law that he could pass on his lands to someone, because he wasn’t allowed to pass it on to black people. Well, we just don’t know what Coincoin said to him when he brung her this news. I like to think she looked at him across a table and said, Go ahead, Frenchman, go to your white woman, but you ain’t ever gonna find no woman like me again. Not in your bed. Not by your side. Not ever.

Whatever was said, they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. He arranged to buy her some land on the banks of the Cane River. He gave her money. He made sure all their children together were free and that they carried his name and that they knew how to read and write.

And in spite of her years, Coincoin used her freedom.

She and her children, with their brown hair and blue eyes, set about making something of the wild land along the Cane. They planted tobacco, and loaded it on the boats that would take it to New Orleans and then to Havana to be made into cigars. She raised chickens and turkeys, selling them in the market at Natchitoches, and then bought more land, and planted indigo, which made the dye used in the uniforms worn by the soldiers of Europe. In the early years, she and the children acted like they had no money, lived off the land, and with the money they made, bought more land. Coincoin found empty land along the river and asked for it from the King of Spain (who now owned it all) and got herself a deed written in the king’s name. Because the king’s deed said they had to, they cleared the land, hunted off the bears, built roads and bridges during those hot and endless days.

Coincoin built two small houses, and saved her money and then went chasing through all the plantations until she found her lost black children, and she took her saved money to their masters and bought them back too. If she was free, she said, then her flesh and blood had to be free. And maybe, someday, they would all be free.

And then came the part that was like a curse, certainly a sin, because more than anyone else in the region, Coincoin knew what she was doing.

She began to buy slaves of her own.

I think of her sometimes deciding to buy that first slave. She who had been the property of others. She who had seen her black children taken off like puppies from a litter. And I wonder what she was thinking and I can’t ever get it right. She was a woman alone except for her children, and maybe she thought the only safety was in land: If you owned the land, they couldn’t take it from you. But you had to work the land to make it valuable, to defend it, see? And she was getting older, and would never have another man, and maybe she thought, well, just for now I’ll play the white man’s game, cause eventually this crime will end. I live in the white man’s world. I got no momma, no daddy, no husband, and I have to live and build and grow.

So she bought the slaves, and even had a jail built for slaves who didn’t do her bidding, she the queen bee now, the mother of the land. She lived on until 1816. It’s in the histories. You could look it up. But her slaves — well, when she died, they weren’t freed. And her children, held together so long by Coincoin, didn’t fall apart. They too wanted to grow and make themselves safe, and so they went down the river from Natchitoches and found the Isle Brevelle. It wasn’t really an island, just a giant hunk of land formed by the old and new channels of the Red River. The old channel was called the Cane. The children had been there with Coincoin (chasing bears through the unfenced wilderness) and she had showed them how deep and rich the soil was and how easy it would be to defend.

So even before Coincoin died, The People had begun to buy the land on the Isle Brevelle. They built houses of mud held together with deer hair or Spanish moss. They turned their profits into more land and more slaves, always telling Coincoin what they were doing, and listening for her approval.

And by the time Coincoin died, The People owned twelve thousand acres and more than a hundred slaves.

They knew they couldn’t exist on their Isle without fresh blood. But that too brought them up against the sin of pride. You see, they wouldn’t mate with blacks: they didn’t want to darken their skins again. Blackness, nothing more, had made them the property of strangers. So they wanted to be lighter and lighter. That made it all right to mate with white men. Or with men and women like themselves, part African, part European. But never with pure blacks, for that would be to go back. So they had to go looking. The young men traveled into New Orleans and saw there the beautiful women at the octoroon balls, parading their beauty for the rich young whites in hopes of finding lifelong protection. But not many octoroon beauties came to Isle Brevelle, because they too were part of The People, and would only mate with whites. The young men of New Orleans were something else, those poor lost men with mixed blood; nobody would set them up in houses, as white men did for their quadroon beauties. So some of the men came upriver to marry the women of Isle Brevelle. They had no money, no property other than their bodies and blood. But they were needed, and they came.

The Isle grew fat and rich. The land was turned to cotton and corn, the cotton sold in New Orleans, the corn for cash in Natchitoches. By 1840, The People owned the richest plantations in the parish, owned more slaves than the white men. King Cotton made The People rich. It allowed them to loan money to white planters, and invite them over to the mansions that had replaced the mud huts. It brought tutors from New Orleans to teach their children. It built a Catholic church where whites came to pray. It brought silk stockings and perfume and bands to play waltzes.

But cotton also came from oxen and mules and niggers.

I wonder now what happened sometimes in the evenings, when the masters walked out on their porches while the orchestras played. They could see in the distance the mud huts of the slave quarters. Did they hear forbidden drums playing? Did they hear Africa coming across the lawns?

You pay for your sins. You know that, child. You’re a Catholic too. Like The People were. Like me. Pride goeth before a fall. Right? And that’s what The People carry around with them to this day. The Story of the Fall.

It came in waves. The first was natural: there was only so much land, and when people died, they divided it among their children so that all the plots got smaller and harder to make money from. The Americans came. All of them Protestants, bony men with cold eyes. At first The People tried to ignore them, sticking to the old ways, speaking French and Spanish (the old language gone now), remaining Catholics as the Protestant tide flowed around them. They couldn’t believe that these pitiful river rats would forever replace the men of Europe. Paris was a thousand years old and Madrid was older. Washington was a village.

But the Americans kept filling the surrounding lands, then running the banks and businesses and imposing a harder, more heartless attitude about color. Some of The People tried to befriend the Americans. They invited them to their homes, they loaned them money.

But the Americans saw The People in a different way. Instead of marveling at what we had made with sweat and sacrifice, they envied it. And after a while they wanted to take it from The People without working for it as Coincoin and her sons had, plows strapped to their shoulders, hunting bear in the dark woods. So the Americans began to challenge the land grants given by the kings of France and Spain, scheming and cheating and calling upon God as their primary witness. They exhausted us in courtrooms. They sat down to play cards with our men, not for a few reales as in the old days, but for entire plantations. And sometimes they won: leaving families without land, and more women and children to be taken in by The People, further dividing the limited acres.

So when the cotton market collapsed, and the Depression came, and the banks failed and the whole country was full of starving people, the Americans were waiting like vultures. All the cotton planters, white and colored, lived on credit, taking money from the banks at the beginning of the season that was paid back at harvest time. But the Depression went on and on for almost ten years. Everywhere, land, slaves, and tools were taken away to pay the debts, everybody thinking: This is just for now, soon the Depression will end and we can go back and do what we always did. Our young men were still told to walk straight and proud. The People still worshiped each Sunday in the church on Isle Brevelle where half the parishioners were white. There were still parties and marriages and love affairs. But the Americans were chopping away at us.

So was God.

For then one spring the Cane flooded and destroyed half the crops and a horde of caterpillars came behind it and ate the rest. The budworms came the following year, and then the price of cotton collapsed again all over the world. The banks failed. Again the Americans grabbed what they could of the good land cleared and made abundant by The People. It was as if the great sin of pride had brought down the full punishing wrath of God.

And so when the last act of the tragedy began, they didn’t see it for what it was. The Civil War. The War Between the States. That was it, the final blow. And The People showed that they were no different in the end from other human beings. It was simple. They owned slaves. So they sided with the Confederacy.

And when the war bounced off the North and drove back deeper into the South and the Confederates retreated, The People helped. The Confederates destroyed much of what had been built by The People and their slaves. And then the Union army arrived, chasing the rebels, and destroying the rest. They raped our women. They tortured our men. For one long weekend there was no night in the land as everything from Natchitoches to Isle Brevelle was set to the Yankee torch. They called us niggers. And then they moved on. Talking about freedom.

Isle Brevelle never recovered. The slaves were gone, looking for the Promised Land, and The People had no money to hire new help. Crops rotted. Land went fallow. Families moved into the slave quarters, squatting on dirt floors, sleeping against mud and deer-hair walls. Reconstruction ended and the Americans made clear that all their talk of freedom was a lie. And The People learned permanently what they should have known from the beginning: to the white man, they would always be niggers.

Some stayed along the Cane. Most drifted moved on. My folks went to New Orleans. For a long time after the war, The People were still allowed to live there. I mean, really live. Not live the way the white man wanted you to live. But free. Marrying who you want. Eating where you want. That didn’t last long. The rednecks took the South. They used their damn Bible to keep people down, to make them feel inferior, denying them even simple education and honest work, denying them freedom. They made sure you knew that no damn Yankee ever won a war.

So here I am, child. You sittin there with your eyes wide open and your chin droppin. Sittin here with me. How’s it feel to know the damn Klan could do to me any minute what it did to Bobby Bolden? More: How’s it feel to know you been in love for a long time now with a nigger?

Chapter 58

She drove away in the chilly morning fog. I stumbled through the woods, heading for the hole in the fence, my head full of pictures that weren’t there a few days before: Bobby Bolden’s ruined hands with the music beaten out of them; Coincoin hunting bears in the dark woods and punishing her slaves; the Klan lashing at Catty’s flesh, eyes red from white lightning and fear; the old black man with the shotgun warning me off the land. Rage was everywhere: my own and the rage of others.

But most of all I was full of Eden Santana and The Story. My own small tale seemed puny by comparison to her tapestry of history, myth, forgotten languages, old crimes. How could she care for my own small ambitions, my little fairy tales of Paris and art, when she was one of the secret bearers of The Story? A few hundred feet from the base, I sat down in the dark with my back to a tree and started to cry.

I felt like such a goddamned fool. Why hadn’t I seen it? The clues were there from the moment I met her on that New Year’s Eve bus: the frizzy hair and the dark skin and the way she slurred certain words. I had refused to notice the absent things: pictures of family and children and friends. Drawing from photographs late at night, I arrogantly thought I understood the lives of other men from the evidence of wrinkled snapshots slipped from wallets. But I never clearly saw the woman who was there before me in all her nakedness. She didn’t have the black skin, broad nose or thick lips of a cartoon Negro. But Bobby Bolden must’ve seen what she was that time we picked him up in the rain. Maybe the blacks out by the lake always knew when one of their own kind was trying to pass in the white man’s world, and maybe they liked what they saw, knew she was making me hers as so many black women had done with so many white men across the centuries. But I would never know the answers to such questions and that’s what made me feel such a fool. I had made love to her and she to me; but James Robinson had gone there first. And I remembered Waleski’s maxim: I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl.

My body trembled, I shuddered, felt very hot, then cold. I tried to get angry, to use fury to force out the shame. Why didn’t she tell me? If she loved me, how could she keep such a secret from me? Was she waiting for some moment when she would sit me down and tell me and laugh at me, thus becoming my master, the owner of my broken pride? Did she make me love her as an act of revenge? But wait, I thought: you wanted her to keep some secrets. You told her that her secrets would keep you loving her for the rest of your life. That’s what you kept saying to her, right? So how can you get angry for going along with your desire? You want secrets, and then you learn a big secret and first get sick and then get angry. Come on.

But then I knew that I wasn’t crying simply because I felt shame or had been fooled. I was sobbing in the empty woods because everything I wanted to do with Eden Santana now seemed impossible. Say it straight, I said. And spoke out loud: How can I ever marry a nigger? Saying the word. The word that I knew had broken Bobby Bolden’s hands and sent the Klan to hang women from trees. I’d thought of myself as the hip New Yorker, who knew all about Charlie Parker and Max Roach and Billie Holiday, and here I was, saying the word. Nigger, I said out loud. You’re a nigger, Eden. And saw myself walking the streets with her nigger kids and our own kids with a touch of nigger in them. And people would stop us in restaurants and say, Hey, no niggers here, pal. And no niggers in this school. And sorry, but ain’t no room in this bus, you’ll have to sit up front, sailor, and put your nigger woman in the back.

Nigger, I said to the cold woods.

Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger.

The word lost all meaning and I stood up, walking slowly now, drying my tears on my jumper. And new pictures formed in my head. I saw myself in New Orleans, sitting in the parlor with Eden’s parents, the two of them looking at me the way that old man had looked at me when I went to cut down Cathy; his eyes cold and his shotgun cradled in his arms. There were photographs of The People on the mantel. The parents were looking at me very hard and saw that I was young. They stared at my Navy uniform and my poorly shined shoes and made their own labels, their own categories, and placed me in the bin for poor white trash. Her children were in the next room, closer to my age than Eden was to mine, the two of them coal black staring at the white boy and wondering how he could ever be their daddy. That vision made me laugh. But then I imagined Harrelson seeing us strolling together down Pala-fox Street on our way to Mass at the Catholic church. I saw him smirking. Heard him say something about pickaninnies. And then suddenly knew: It was Harrelson tipped off the Klan.

Of course.

It had to be him.

He’d seen us that day. Coming up out of the side road from the lake, going to the highway.

Harrelson.

You prick.

And then I began to hurry, brushing aside branches and pushing through wet shrubs. I found the hole in the back fence and slipped through. It was almost four in the morning. I moved through the emptiness of the landing strip, staying in the dark, then hugged the sides of hangars. I slipped into the barracks and went straight to Harrelson’s bunk.

He wasn’t there.

I felt cheated. I wanted to hurt him. I wasn’t going to waste time in any court of law. I knew and I was going to punish the son of a bitch. But goddamnit, he wasn’t there.

I got into bed and lay there trembling for a long time. In one night, my whole world had changed and I didn’t know how I was going to live in it.

Chapter 59

I never saw Bobby Bolden again. The scuttlebutt came in from Mainside about how they treated him at the hospital, his hands broken, ribs smashed, jaw fractured. The first morning, we heard about his concussion and how the brass came to talk to him about what happened and how Bobby Bolden told them to go away. We heard about how they stationed a Marine guard at his door, who turned away all visitors. Later we saw two MPs come to the Kingdom of Darkness and pack Bobby’s gear, taking everything with them, including the horn. Before the day was over, we heard they had flown him to Norfolk: out of Ellyson, out of Mainside, out of Pensacola, out of the South, and out of our lives.

We heard about Catty too. How they’d cleaned up her wounds and wired her broken shoulder and bandaged her ribs where someone had kicked her; how they’d listened to her as she made official statements; how the Navy brass had secured her hospital room too and then turned their backs as they transferred her to San Diego. They were shipping her as far from Bobby Bolden as they could send her. And as far as possible from anyone who might demand to know what had been done to her that night.

I was still so young that I was shocked when I discovered that there wasn’t a word about it in the Pensacola newspaper. As far as the paper was concerned, it had never happened. I called Maher in the administration building, since yeomen knew what was going on better than the officers did, and asked him why there was nothing in the newspaper. He was busy, but he said he’d try to find out. Twenty minutes later he called me back to say that it was very simple: the beatings had never been reported to the Pensacola police. And if there was no police report, the newspapers would never know.

“Why don’t we call the newspapers?” I said.

“You can,” he said. “But the first thing they would do is call the Navy PIO guys. And they wouldn’t confirm it. They’d just say that all Navy personnel records are confidential, or something like that.… And, of course, the Klan doesn’t give out press releases.”

I went over to see Sal and Max and they were in a fury. They wanted to hunt down Buster and give him the beating of his life, because they were sure that Bobby had been tracked by Buster’s boys after rescuing me that day on the road.

“Set him on fire,” Sal said. “Hang him on a meat hook.”

Max said, “Break his hands and ankles.”

But as we stood in the sunlight beside the hangar, we slowly realized that we weren’t sure that it was Buster. We didn’t know how many others had come in the night to beat Bobby Bolden and Catty Wolverton and burn their house to the ground. We didn’t even know what had happened to Bobby Bolden’s Mercury. The anger seeped out of us.

“There oughtta be something we can do,” Sal said. “There oughtta be some ass we could kick.”

Max shook his head: “It’s going after ghosts.”

After the MPs left with the artifacts of Bobby Bolden’s life, I went up to the Kingdom of Darkness. The door was locked. I knocked and Rhode Island Freddie answered. He looked at me and started to close the door without saying a word.

“Hey, man, wait!” I said.

“Git outta here, mothafucka.”

“Hey, I didn’t do it!” I said. “I drove him to Mainside. I cut down Catty. It wasn’t me. I just came up here to say I was sorry and—”

“You know somethin, boy?” he said. “You dumb. Dumber than shit. And Bobby, he was even more dumb. He take you as a friend. He take the white bitch as a friend. What it get him, huh? Answer me that? What it get him? You seen whut it get him. You seen it. Man never get to play that fuckin horn the rest of his fuckin life, that what it get him. Why? Answer me that. And you know why. White folks!”

“Yeah, but—”

“You all white. You and the bitch and the Klan and Abe Lincoln and the fuckin president and every fuckin officer in the Navy. All white. And all the fuckin same.”

He slammed the door. On me, on all whites.

And it didn’t end there.

At lunch time, the food was disgusting. Greasy, half cooked. The messcooks seemed to be wearing masks as they made their protest. I said hello. Nobody answered. They just looked past me. I gazed at the greasy vegetables and the pink half-boiled chicken on my tray. And then saw Harrelson at a table.

I went over to him.

“You prick,” I said.

He smirked at me.

“Oh, my,” he said. “We got us an angry nigger lover, don’t we?”

I reached across the table and grabbed the front of his jumper and lifted him toward me.

“Say another word and I’ll bite your nose right off your face, shithead.”

“You touch me, Yankee,” he hissed, “you might git what the nigger got.”

I let go of him but I wasn’t finished. The mess hall was quiet. I faced him, talking louder.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I said. “You fingered Bobby Bolden for the Klan.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sailor.”

“You knew he was living down there by the lake.”

“The whole damn world knew that, boy.”

“Maybe so. But the rest of the world didn’t care and you did.”

Harrelson got up and lifted his tray, still covered with uneaten food. He looked at me.

“You sure lookin to git yore ass whupped, nigger lover.”

I came around and grabbed his arm.

“Not by you, prick.”

I was ready to hammer him, make him eat the tray itself, and then Red Cannon was beside us, and I could see Chief McDaid standing at the door.

“Ten-shun!” Red barked.

We both came to attention, Harrelson still holding his tray. The chow hall was absolutely silent now, except for the whistling of a coffee urn.

“What’s this all about, Mister Harrelson?” Cannon said.

“The Yankee here’s got a big mouth, that’s whut it’s about.”

“Ask him about Bobby Bolden,” I said. “Ask him when he called up the Klan.”

“I wuddint addressin’ you, sailor,” Cannon said.

“You asked what it’s about. Well, it’s about Bobby Bolden. That’s what it’s about. This prick called down the Klan on him.”

McDaid came over, smiling in an oily way.

“At ease, sailors,” he said. He cleared his throat, knowing that others could hear him. “We all feel bad about what happened to Bobby Bolden. But you two aren’t going to help matters by fighting each other. Let’s both of you go back to work.”

He nodded at Red and then they walked across the chow hall and left. McDaid was clearly washing his hands of the whole matter and letting Red Cannon know it wasn’t his business either. Harrelson smiled thinly at me.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Not me,” I said. “Your mother.”

Harrelson turned his back and walked quickly to the garbage disposal as the room gradually filled with the murmur of conversation. None of the blacks behind the steam tables would look at me.

That afternoon, Harrelson was transferred to Mainside.

I had the duty in the Supply Shack that night and for once I was glad. I knew that Eden must have spent the night at Roberta’s. She certainly didn’t go back to the trailer. But even if I could find her, I didn’t know what I would say to her. So when Donnie Ray gave me the duty, I was relieved. I took my pad and chalks with me to the shack and worked on the portrait of Captain Pritchett’s dead wife for a few hours. There wasn’t much business at the front counter; it was as if the base had emptied so that everyone could go somewhere and mourn Bobby Bolden’s murdered hands.

I kept trying to get Pritchett’s wife right, but her face wouldn’t come off the page. I threw sheet after sheet into the trash basket. And I soon realized what was happening: the long-dead Catherine, the woman the Captain loved, the woman whose memory had been turned by him into banks of flowers, kept coming out looking like Eden Santana.

Around midnight, Miles came in. His skin looked yellow. His eyeglasses were dirty. He sat down at his desk and stared at his hands and talked about Bobby Bolden.

“I kept thinking about his hands,” he said. “Kept thinking how he used to play in the afternoon for us. For himself, first, I guess. But for us too. And then I thought of those shitass rednecks and how much they must have enjoyed smashing up the hands of a colored man who had more talent and brains and heart than all of them combined. They must’ve loved it.”

“You know they loved it.”

“But I could’ve warned him.”

“Everybody warned him, Miles.”

“Then maybe he wanted it to happen.”

“Don’t be stupid, Miles.”

“Maybe he did. Some people are so afraid of their own talent, they’d rather have someone else destroy it than have to do it themselves. They provoke. They make death happen.”

“Bobby Bolden wouldn’t have given these dirtbags that satisfaction.”

A mechanic came in and I waited on him and when I was finished, Miles Rayfield was gone. He didn’t know how crucial a part he’d played the night before; in a strange way, his existence might have saved Bobby Bolden’s life; if I hadn’t argued about him with Eden, I wouldn’t have stormed into the night and found Bobby writhing in the bushes. I looked at my drawing. Miles had made a few marks on it, a tuck here, an emphasis there. I saw clearly what I’d done wrong. I started over one final time and finished quickly. And when I was done with Catherine Pritchett, I did a drawing of Eden Santana.

In chalk on paper. She was sitting on a chair in the trailer, with one leg up over the arm. The hair had grown back between her legs, frizzy and thick. The hair on her head was more clearly the hair of a black woman, and so were her features, the nose slightly wider, the lips fuller. She was looking at me in a cool direct way, wearing the high-heeled shoes. And she was more beautiful than ever.

I closed the Supply Shack at twenty minutes after midnight. I walked slowly to the barracks and sat on my bunk for a long while before I knew what I had to do.

I had to go to Eden Santana.

Right away.

If I didn’t, I would lose her.

Chapter 60

There was no moon. I avoided the road, because it went past Billy’s where Red Cannon did his drinking, and past the boat shop where Buster’s presence hung like an evil smell, and past too many gas stations where the lights of pickup trucks could snap on suddenly and find me in the darkness. I chose the woods instead, and I was almost immediately lost, slowly moving forward, going around thickets and tangles of wet brush. I had never gone this way before; until this night, all I needed to know was the trail to the highway. But now I was alone, going the other way, into the unknown.

After a while my body ached and my shoes were soaked. But I plunged on. I wanted Eden and I wanted her tonight. I was going to tell her I was with her forever. I didn’t care if she was black, colored, Negro, nigger. I didn’t fall in love with her because she was black and I wasn’t going to stop loving her because she was black. I didn’t care what anybody else thought. Not her mother or her father or my friends back home; not old blacks with shotguns or whites with whips. On the subject of Eden Santana, the opinions of others didn’t interest me.

Speeches rolled around in my head, as I pushed through the brush and the thickets and bumped into trees, my arms and face scratched now, the words a kind of fuel, driving me on. We can’t quit, baby. They’ll win, the Klan will win. The rednecks will win. Harrelson will win. We gotta be together against all of them. Me, you, your kids, our kids. Wherever we go. Paris. New York. We gotta do it. We got to fight this out together.

Until at last I saw the lake. Black and sullen and silent.

I walked along the shore and found a flat-bottomed boat tied to a dock. The oars were leaning against a piling. I picked up the oars and untied the boat and began to row across the lake. I knew that I’d just committed the crime of stealing a boat. But I didn’t care. On the far shore was Eden Santana.

There were no lights anywhere, and no stars. But I was still afraid of being watched as I came across the lake: watched by the Klan or the blacks. Waiting there for me in the dark. I rowed softly on, trying to stay low. If they were waiting for me, I didn’t want to give them a good target. The oars seemed to make a sound that said Eden. Eden. Dip and pull and Eden.

And then I was at the far shore. The boat made a squashing sound as it drove into weeds and mud. I stepped into a foot of water and then pulled the boat up another foot into the mud until it was firmly wedged. I was about a half mile from the trailer, closer to where Bobby Bolden lived with Catty than to the place where Eden and I had played our games. I started walking through the woods in my soaked shoes. I saw the tree where Catty had been whipped into unconsciousness. I looked at the bushes where the old man had aimed his shotgun at me. It all seemed part of a dream I’d had a hundred years before. I paused, listened, heard nothing. And then moved ahead.

Soon I could see the trailer, small and silvery in the dim light. And my heart pounded. The car wasn’t there. I began to run. A few feet from the trailer, I stopped, listening again, afraid. And then tried the door. It was open, but when I flicked on the switch, nothing happened; there was no electricity. But I didn’t really need light.

From the moment I stepped inside, I knew that everything was gone and so was Eden Santana.