Loving Women

Chapter 61

Nothing matters.

Chapter 62

So it had happened to me, as it had happened to Turner and Sal and Maher, to all the other poor lost sailors I’d come to know: the thing I feared most: suddenly, after sickening violence, she was gone. The boy I was then went down to Sears and talked to some counter girls, and was told they hadn’t seen her, no, they’d seen no sign of Eden Santana. The boy I was then went to see the store manager, a fat pig-eyed man named Rudolph. “Damn woman never even called,” he said. “Just stuck me with her counter. Never called. And I got her pay check here for her too. Well, she comes to get paid, I’m gone to give her a nice fat piece of ma mind …”

On those nights in the fifties, when people all over America were sitting in their safe little houses talking about Gorgeous George and Howard Unruh, Miss Hush and pyramid clubs, I was searching the streets of a city that was not my own, trying to find a woman I was sure I loved more than anyone on earth. On the third night, I took a bus over to Roberta’s and told her what had happened. We sat together in the living room in the fading light. She cried twice. I comforted her. Then she put my hand on her breast and started to move to the bedroom. I shook my head no.

“You helped me when I was hurting,” she said. “Now I want to help you.”

“Only thing could help me, Roberta, was if she walked in that door.”

She started sobbing again.

“Me too,” she said. “Me too.”

She looked suddenly old, and now the trouble, the loss, the departure was all about her and no longer about me.

“My friend is gawn,” she said. “My sweet friend Eden is gawn.”

She was still sobbing when I left.

I drifted through an agony of days, desperate for a letter, a note, some proof that Eden Santana had existed, was not conjured or invented by the boy I was then. I wanted something that said at the end “love always,” like the picture of Captain Pritchett’s wife. In bed, in the woods, in rivers and on beaches, she had made me almost a man. And then, through the simple act of departure, she’d broken me down again into a child. Not a word arrived from her. Some sick bastards had come out of the swamp and scared her and she had run. And I couldn’t run after her. She had the car and the open roads of the great wide country. But I was trapped in the Navy, the prisoner of an easy oath.

And so, after those first few days, I went back to what I was before I met her. I didn’t have to explain to Sal and Max and Maher and the others. I just showed up one evening at the gate and then all of us were racing to O Street. And once again, Webb Pierce was singing on the juke and Tons of Fun showed up with their van and then Hank Williams was singing about how he was so lonesome he could die.

While Dixie Shafer laughed and opened bottles.

The whole gang was there and nobody asked where I’d been and why I was back. But I was sure they knew. I drank beer and talked about Bobby Bolden and the Navy’s great cover-up and drank more beer and said Harrelson had to be the finger man and then we all talked about what we should have done to save Bobby Bolden and then we chug-a-lugged more beers and then I was leaning against the concrete blocks outside, throwing up in the dirt while the night sky whirled around and the ground pitched and Dixie Shafer told us all it was time to go back to the base.

O Eden.

The next morning, my tongue was thick and slimy. My brains felt diced. I stood in the shower for a long time and when my brain started working again I still wanted Eden Santana. Instead of eating lunch, I went to the barracks and lay down on my bunk and tried to sleep and still I wanted Eden Santana. I went back to the Supply Shack and filled out forms and swabbed the deck and tried jokes with Becket and talked about college with Charlie Dunbar and still I wanted Eden Santana.

She had changed me. All those secret things we had done had changed me. A thousand images flooded through me and I was filled with such longing, such desperation, such need for flesh and hair and teeth, that I thought about going down to the black bars to find Winnie, to fuck her real good while my brain flooded with Eden’s face and Eden’s hair and Eden’s hoarse morning voice.

But I never did go after Winnie. I just went back and back and back to O Street and sometimes down to Trader Jon’s and after those first few nights we stopped talking about Bobby Bolden because we knew it was just talk, knew we couldn’t do anything, knew we couldn’t save him or Catty or anybody else, not even ourselves.

So we talked about ball games and fighters and the peace talks at Panmunjon and the shitheads from Washington whose pictures were in the papers. I never mentioned Eden Santana. And one of those nights, someone mentioned that Friday was Sal’s birthday and it was payday too and why didn’t we have a party? I don’t know who suggested the Miss Texas Club. I’d never been in the place. All I knew about it was that it was a strip joint out on the edge of Pensacola on the highway heading east. We’d chip in some money. We’d get through the door with the Navy ID, which meant we had to wear uniforms.

Yeah.

And we’d get one of those strippers for Sal. Pay her some money to pinch his nose with her twat.

O yeah.

And drink and shout and sing. On a summer night in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Fiftyfuckinthree.

Yeah, yeah.

And the next morning, Becket came into the Shack waving a letter at me and said, “Got something for you.” I trembled, thinking Eden. I stood there, thinking At last. And took it from him, looking out the window, until he moved away, and then stared at the writing.

It was from my father.

Christ.

A letter from the world I’d left behind when my heart was in a world I could not even prove had existed. I opened it slowly.

My son,

It’s hard for me to write a letter. You know I was never much for “words.” They always say the Irish have the gift of the “gab” but I just never had it. My father was that way too, may he “rest” in peace.

But your last letter made me proud of you. I know you are doing your part for your country. And even though the Korea war seems about to be over, we really need men like you. The “commies” are everywhere, son. Listen to this McCarthy. He’s wise to them. You might not ever get to Korea but I bet the “Reds” are down there too in the south of “good old” USA.

Your brothers are fine. Danny has your gift with “words.” He got two strate A’s on his compositions at Holy Name. Isn’t that hot “stuff”? I don’t understand his stories. They are sort of “crazy.” But he sits up all night and writes them like he was hipnotized. Something for a boy 11. He says he wants a typewriter for his birthday, in order to be a sportswriter, like “Dick” Young. He’s a real dreamer like you.

Rory seems to have your gift for “art.” He draws all the time. He loved the drawings you sent him from the Navy. He’s not as good as you but I think he has the gift from his mother and “then” he’s only nine.

Well I better finish this up. You sound happy son. How is the girl you “mentioned” in your last letter? You sound like your very serious about her. She sounds swell. I saw that girl you used to keep company with at church. Sad to say she looked fat. No “bargain” if you ask me.

Well try to write when you have time. Everything here is the same. We all hope you will come home soon.

He signed it “love always, Your Father.”

I put it down, folding and unfolding it. I had my “love always.”

And I suddenly wanted to be with him. I wanted to be in New York. I wanted away from the Navy and from people who broke the hands of a man who made music. I didn’t want to see any of the places where I’d been with Eden Santana. Not alone. Never again. I wanted to be in the third floor right at 378 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn 15, New York. In a place without orders or oaths or Red Cannon, without swash plates or palm trees or duty.

I wanted to be home.

The night before Sal’s birthday, I woke from a dream to hear voices out in the street. The barracks were empty. The night was very hot. One of the voices belonged to Miles Rayfield.

“Please,” he was saying. “Don’t do it this way.” I heard panic and fear in his voice. “Please, can’t you—”

I hurried to the door in my shorts and paused behind the screen. Across the street, Miles Rayfield was pleading with Red Cannon while two young sailors carried Miles’s things out of the Supply Shack and into a waiting panel truck. Paintings. Brushes. The palette and the tin water cans and the tubes of casein. The sketchbooks. Everything that had been a part of Miles’s secret studio, everything that made his life a life. I went back to my bunk and pulled on dungarees and shoes and a T-shirt and then crossed the street.

“Red, don’t let them slam the paintings around,” Miles said. Then he saw me and his eyes were a plea. They said Save me please save me now save me. He was trying to sound reasonable. “Come on, Red.”

“Shut up, sailor,” Cannon said. “You are already on report. Don’t make it worse.”

I said, “Hey, Red, what did he do that’s so wrong?”

“You shut up too. Or you’ll join him in the court martial.”

“Court martial?” I said. Miles looked ashen. “For what?”

“You seen them sketchbooks, sailor?” Cannon said. “If you have, then you could be a witness. All you artistes, you’re the same way, ain’t you? If you haven’t seen em, then you’ll never know what I mean.”

Miles leaned a hand on the wood frame around the door. His jaw hung loose. I went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He pulled away. I turned to look at Red Cannon. He smiled tightly and got in the truck, and pulled away. Miles Rayfield’s life and work bumped loosely in the back.

“I’m dead,” Miles whispered.

He sat down hard on the ground and leaned back against the wall in a heavy ruined way. I squatted and faced him.

“What’s he got on you?” I said.

Knowing the answer.

He didn’t say a word. He just shook his head slowly, then hopelessly, and then began to sob. The pain and grief rushed out of some scary place.

I sat down beside him and put an arm around him and pulled him close and hugged him for a long time.

Chapter 63

That night, I went to the chow hall with Miles. He didn’t eat. Later, we walked in the long summer evening, while I tried to get him to talk. But the brackets that framed his mouth had gone loose, making him look younger and more helpless, and words, which had been his defense against the world, had abandoned him. He stopped and wept three separate times. I waited until he was finished and then nudged him along and we walked some more. We even passed the hole in the fence, which I showed to Miles. He didn’t react. Near the end, he said again, as he’d done a million times since I’d known him, This goddamned Navy. Nothing else. Then I walked him back to the barracks in the dark and waited while he undressed and stood there while he fell heavily and without words into his rack. He closed his eyes and slept.

I thought about him for a long time as I lay without sleep in my own rack. In the morning I’d have to find Freddie Harada and warn him. Make certain that he didn’t say anything that would hurt Miles or himself. Tell him that Red Cannon and Chief McDaid were probably coming to interrogate him. Using guile or threats to get Freddie on the record, to nail Miles to the fucking cross. Sodomy, they would call it. Another word I’d looked up in the dictionary. I imagined them giving the news to the wife in Atlanta: Your husband’s a faggot, lady. And then to the mother: Your son’s problem is dick, ma’am. Whatever had gone on between them, Freddie had to deny everything. If he did, I couldn’t believe that Captain Pritchett would call a court martial for the monstrous crime of having a painting studio on United States government property. Sure, it was against the rules. But it wasn’t like Miles was selling secrets to the goddamned Chinese communists. This was strictly minor crap. Housekeeping. That’s all. Except for those sketchbooks. And later I thought that even if they court-martialed Miles and booted him out of the Navy, there would be some good in it. Miles would be free. He’d be out of the goddamned Navy, out of Anus Mundi, free to roam the world. He could just go.

He would, in fact, be freer than I was, because I couldn’t go anywhere. And then the notion blossomed in my mind: I wanted to go. Not simply home, to the safety of the third floor left. I wanted out of that place, out of the goddamned rules and regs, out of the boring prison of Ellyson Field. I wanted to find Eden. I didn’t care who she had been and what color she was and where she came from. I didn’t care where she was living or even what she was doing now or wanted to do for the rest of her life.

I wanted to be with my loving woman.

When I woke in the morning, Miles was already gone. His bunk was neatly made up, the sheets and blanket crisp in the lemon-colored morning light. I showered and dressed quickly and walked to the chow hall. Sal and Max were already there, full of plans for the party that night, already spending the payday money. But Miles wasn’t around. I saw Freddie Harada behind the servers in the kitchen and waved him outside. He slipped out the side door.

“Hey, man, I’m busy,” he said. “What you want?”

I told him about Miles Rayfield and warned him that Cannon and McDaid were sure to come looking for him. He looked scared. I asked him where Miles was.

“He was here when we opened,” he said, his eyes darting everywhere. “About six. He just had coffee and a roll and sat ’way in the back for a long time, writing letters.”

“He look okay?”

“Same as always.”

We went back inside. Sal was talking about a girl Max had met in the Dirt Bar the night before. Six foot three and ninety pounds.

“You could open a letter with her and Max falls right in love,” Sal said.

“It was lust, Sal, not love.”

“It must have been like banging a pair of scissors.”

“Worse,” Max said.

I asked if they’d seen Miles Rayfield.

“Yeah, matter of fact,” Sal said. “He was out on the steps of the barber shop. Oh, half an hour ago. Writing letters. Why? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Boswell came over and sat down and told us that Harrelson had been transferred to the U.S.S. Saratoga. “Out of Pearl,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, my, how I’d like to get one of them Hawaiian leis.”

“That’s a truly terrible joke, Bos,” Sal said.

“Yeah,” Max said. “Leave the jokes to the Jews.”

“Well,” Boswell said, “he’s gone.”

I thought: Good riddance, you rat stool pigeon.

After breakfast Sal and Max said they’d see us tonight and headed for the hangars, while Boswell and I walked together to the Supply Shack. Donnie Ray called muster. Everybody was there except Miles Rayfield.

“He was just at breakfast,” I said. “Let me go find him.”

“Make it snappy,” Donnie Ray said, sounding annoyed. “The man’s technically over the hill.”

I hurried out. But Miles wasn’t at the barber shop or in the barracks, the chow hall, the infirmary or the post office. Yeah, he’d been at the post office, all right, the civilian said. Bought two dollars worth of stamps. Quite a while ago. Nobody’d seen him at the other places. I went back to the Supply Shack and told Donnie Ray.

“Goddamn, I’ll have to mark him AWOL,” he said with a sigh.

“Why don’t you alert the infirmary first?” I said. “Maybe he got sick somewhere and they’ll find him.”

Donnie Ray sighed. “Yeah, and maybe he’s halfway to Mobile right now.” He glanced at his watch and chewed the inside of his mouth. “Well, you better start swabbin down, sailor. It’s your turn.”

He stared at the telephone. The aroma of fresh-cut grass drifted through the screened windows. Insects buzzed. Helicopters started chugging into the sky. I walked down to the closet where we stored the mops and buckets and soap, and opened the door.

Miles was hanging from a length of gray clothesline tied around a water pipe. His neck was bent at a right angle, the rope digging deep into his flesh. His face was blue.

Chapter 64

I guess Becket cut him down. Or maybe it was Donnie Ray. I don’t know for sure. I do know that Boswell and Parsons and Donnie all were shouting for an ambulance, for medics, for someone who could do mouth-to-mouth: Hurry now still a chance that’s it easy boy okay hold him soft. I remember hands reaching, then all lifting, then tearing open a shirt; rubber heels on the concrete floor; an empty wash bucket going over and men grunting. Jesuschrist now what in the fuck would he wanna do that for? And more shouts and doors slamming and the incessant ringing of a single telephone. All that happened: the logistics of death.

I remember staring at the gouged skin of Miles’s neck. I remember him lying on the painted concrete deck that he would never walk again or curse again or swab down again on a Friday afternoon. I cursed the Navy. And I cursed God. And I cursed Red Cannon. I cried too, cradling my dead friend’s head, feeling the heat drain away; just sobbed like a boy, until the medic came at last and tried to thump the dead heart back into life before saying that it was too late, the man was dead and hey, sailor, what was his service number?

Becket walked me outside.

Just like that (I said to Becket, in some fumbling way), Miles Rayfield was gone. And now that it had happened, I realized that he had been going away for days. First they took his work away. The paintings, drawings, paints and chalks: all had disappeared. Then they took his tongue, forcing him into tears and silence. And now he’d done what they couldn’t do: removed himself from the Navy and the earth itself.

Miles you son of a bitch, I said out loud. Why’d you do this, you dumb fuck? Why didn’t you just run? Why’d you have to loop a rope around your goddamned neck?

And then finally Becket said “Okay, dat’s enough. Be a man, Michael. Right now.”

So I wiped my eyes and took a deep breath and straightened up and exhaled hard and then walked back to the Supply Shack. Becket let me go alone, and I reached the building just as the corpsmen were carrying Miles’s body on a stretcher to a waiting Navy ambulance. The body was covered with a blanket. The corpsmen looked vaguely puzzled as they heaved Miles up into the back, slammed the double doors, then drove away. I went inside and saw Donnie Ray looking at me strangely.

“Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off,” he said.

“No. It’s all right.”

He looked out at the field.

“It’s a tough thing, seeing somethin like that,” he said. “Combat’s a lot easier.”

“I said I was all right.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“He was my friend. I liked him. That’s all.”

“Okay,” he said. “But you can get lost if you want.”

“There’s some things to do. Like calling his wife.”

“His wife?”

“Yeah, he talked about her all the time.… A wife. Back in Atlanta. And he’s got a mother too. Same town.”

“Christ.”

“Someone’s gotta call them.”

“Yeah. Someone’s gotta call them.”

He picked up the phone on my desk and asked for Maher in the admin building. I heard him speaking about next of kin and turned around to examine Miles’s desk. There was no sign that he was thinking of checking out, just an ashtray, a pile of requisition forms, some pencils. I put one of the pencils in my pocket. Then stood there and looked out through the screened windows at the hot June morning. Nothing had changed. Sailors ambled down the crosswalks. Helicopters thumped in the sky. I tried to imagine what Miles was thinking a few hours earlier, his heart beating as he came to his decision. Whatever he thought, whatever pain or grief or shame he felt, it had ended forever.

Donnie Ray hung up.

“The captain’s calling his mother,” he said.

“What about the wife?”

He looked at me with pitying eyes.

“There was no wife.”

He turned to go to the counter.

“I think you better take the day off,” he said gently. “He was your friend.”

That was true. He was my friend. Not a friend of Sal or Max or Maher or any of the others. Except Freddie. Miles wasn’t part of the O Street nights. He wasn’t there on any wild evenings. He didn’t care when Hank died and didn’t know the words of any Webb Pierce songs. So I didn’t go first to Sal and Max to tell them the news. They were probably talking about Sal’s big birthday party at the Miss Texas Club.

I went to Freddie.

I found him sitting on the steps leading up to the shuttered doors of the Kingdom of Darkness. He looked at me when I reached the stairs but didn’t say anything.

“Freddie?”

“Yeah?”

“Miles is dead, Freddie.”

“What?”

“He killed himself this morning.”

Freddie rose slowly, carefully, standing three steps above me, looking at me as if I might be playing some awful joke.

“I’m not kidding,” I said.

“You better not be,” he said.

“He hung himself. In the mop locker.”

The phrase “mop locker” would have made Miles laugh. Maybe that’s why he chose it.

“He — he say anything? Like leave a note or whatnot?”

“Not that I know of.”

He seemed relieved and looked past me in the direction of the Supply Shack. Then he gripped the railing and sat down hard on the steps and began to cry.

By noon, his locker was empty, his sea bag packed, his transfer papers typed up by Maher and signed by Captain Pritchett, and he was on his way to Port Lyautey. He never said good-bye. And I remember thinking: Maybe Freddie Harada would get to see the Red Shadow. I knew that I never would. Nor, of course, would Miles Rayfield.

Chapter 65

We went out to the Miss Texas Club in a cab, all of us in uniform: Sal and Max whooping and joking, Maher sipping from Boswell’s bottle of white lightning, and the cab driver acting as if the ride was surely the most distasteful job of his life. On this day Sal was twenty-one; it was payday too and we were all going out to get drunk and get laid. There were no further ambitions. If the world thought we were just a bunch of goddamned lonesome sailors, then by God, we were going to act that way. If ya got the name ya might as well have the game.

Nobody mentioned Miles Rayfield. The silence wasn’t because they didn’t care what had happened to him. There just wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Not tears, revenge, or prayer. Squashed in the back seat of the cab, I remembered my mother’s wake, all the uncles and cousins drinking, singing, even laughing, and how enraged I was at them; yet riding through the Pensacola night, I forgave everybody. You might as well sing, and declare the existence of the living. And (here, down in the Gulf, with rain scattering on the motel windows) remembering my remembering, other bodies force their way into me, dead on meaningless hills in the Asian jungles, dead on blasted deserts in the Sinai, dead without mourning. Their deaths never chilled me nor attacked my bowels. For years it has been my pride that I can look at dead strangers and photograph them with the remorseless eye of an assassin. But I am like all other men on earth: wounded by the death of people I love. And of those, Miles Rayfield was the first. That night long ago, I churned with fear, anger, mystery and guilt. My friend was dead and I should have known it was coming. And now there was nothing to be done except get drunk, get laid, and remember.

There was a huge parking lot outside the place, which was a big red-painted barn with a red neon sign saying MISS TEXAS CLUB and a large suety bouncer posted at the door. We chipped in a dollar each for the cab, paid the man, and piled out. The bouncer was checking most IDs but we were all in dress whites, and he recognized that as sufficient credentials, took two dollars from each of us and waved us in.

“Enjoy yissef, boys,” he said.

And Sal whooped and said, “Yeah, brother, oh yeah. En-Joy. We want some joy!”

About five hundred people were already inside and the place was only half full. There were tables on the near side and a wide wooden dance floor and a stage where a country band was playing hard. Off to the right, people sat on stools at a large circular bar. I saw a few sailors dancing with young girls and wondered where Eden was.

We went to one of the tables and ordered three pitchers of beer from a round-legged blonde waitress dressed in a short buckskin skirt and sneakers. After half a beer, Max angled over to dance with a thin redhaired woman who was alone at the bar. Then Becket came in with Dunbar, and a little later Larry Parsons arrived too, and then a couple of guys from the hangars. Then Dixie Shafer arrived from the Dirt Bar carrying a box with a chocolate birthday cake and candles.

She yelled out to Max on the dance floor: “Get back over here, boy. Her tits are too small!”

I sipped some beer and looked up and saw Tons of Fun waddling through the room, each of them carrying delicately wrapped presents for Sal (a Hawaiian shirt, a leather belt) and Betty yelled at a table full of Marines: “Who wants a blow job in the parking lot?”

And Dixie Shafer said to me, “They’re so crude.”

And Sal said, “Me! I do!”

And Betty grabbed his cock as she sat down and Sal giggled and the band played the Webb Pierce song and we all began to sing:

And singing the anthem of O Street, I remembered the first time I heard it, almost six months before. And I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I remembered how lonesome I was that night and how then Eden Santana was only a nameless face glimpsed in a dark bus.

We shouted the chorus and the Marines looked at us and Dixie Shafer slid over beside me, her hair redder than a sunset, and Sal got up and went after a dark girl with a violet blouse and Maher started drinking straight from the beer pitcher and then I glanced at the door and saw Red Cannon coming in.

Ah Miles ah poor sad Miles Rayfield.

Red Cannon was wearing tan chinos and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He squinted through the smoke as if looking for someone and then he walked to the bar and leaned over and said something to the barmaid. If he saw us through the nicotine haze, he didn’t bother to let us know.

You killed him Red you put the nails in his coffin You son of a bitch.

Then the music ended and the lights dimmed and Sal yelled at us (the girl with the violet dress gone off): “They just executed the chef.” Dixie Shafer lit the candles and we sang “Happy Birthday” to Sal and the Marines booed and Sal told them to go fuck themselves and reached down and grabbed a handful of the cake and shoved it at Max’s mouth. We all cheered and Sal opened his presents and kissed Tons of Fun on the breasts and pretended to whip out his dick and then we heard a tom-tom beating in a Gene Krupa style and then a different band started playing “Caravan.” There was a sudden spotlight on the stage and a voice from a hidden microphone saying, “Ladies and gennulmin, the Miss Texas Club is proud to present one of the greatest dancers of her tahm, straight from a trah-umphant tore of Havana … Madame Nareeta!”

A tall red-haired woman stepped into the spotlight, dressed from chin to feet in a black satin gown. She wore white gloves up to her elbows. There was no expression on her face. I drained my beer and poured another as she began to move sensuously to the old Ellington tune. The light defined the hard mound of her belly and I forgot Red Cannon for the moment and wondered about the color of the hair between her legs. She did a few gentle bumps and ground her hips, and then she began to peel off the gloves and the crowd roared. Sal said, “It’s like she’s taking a rubber off a dick.” Madame Nareeta moved her naked fingers slowly to the tune, and did a few more bumps and then, still expressionless, put a hand behind her back and shook and shimmied until the gown fell away and she was standing there, still moving slowly to the music, dressed in black bra and black panties and black high-heeled shoes. A roar rose from the dark. My cock was hard. Madame Nareeta’s skin was very white in the pale-blue spotlight and she moved her hands over her heavy thighs, her belly, along the sides of her breasts, her eyes half closed, her tongue moving over her lips. Dixie Shafer whispered to me: “You look too damned sad, boy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I am.”

Now Madame Nareeta moved her hand behind her back again and the crowd roared and then she unhooked the bra and I wished that Dixie would slide under the table and open my fly.

“You got woman trouble on your face, boy,” she said. “And somethin’ else …”

“A friend of mine died.”

“I heard that.”

“He was my best friend, I think.”

“And what was the woman?”

The crowd roared as Madame Nareeta bent forward, shaking and shuddering, letting the unhooked bra hang loose, then wriggling out of it.

“I don’t know what the woman was,” I said.

“Then you’ll never get over it,” Dixie Shafer said.

Staring at Madame Nareeta I felt like crying. She had little red plastic stars pasted over her nipples, and was dancing with more movement, writhing and bending, while someone yelled from the dark: “What color is your hair, honey?”

And I turned to Dixie and kissed her on the mouth, running my hands through her piled hair, wanting to get lost in her abundance, my cock so hard I thought I would come. She whispered, “Happy Sal’s birthday, sailor,” and the crowd roared as Madame Nareeta stepped out of her panties, wearing only a G-string now, all glittery and promising more.

I glanced over at the bar and my hard-on vanished. Red Cannon was talking to a sailor in uniform. And I saw the man’s face as he turned. Jack Turner. From that first long lonesome bus ride from New York. They watched Madame Nareeta in a clinical way. She was now down on the floor, her legs bent back under her, her crotch aimed at the audience. I finished my fourth beer. And as Madame Nareeta played with her G-string, teasing the roaring crowd about the color of her hair, I got up.

I eased between the packed tables. A lot of sailors and Marines were standing along the back wall. I headed for the bar. Maybe this was foolish. Maybe it made no sense. But it was time for me to do something about Miles.

Jack Turner saw me first.

“Well, hello there, sailor. Long time. How are ya?”

I shook his hand and said hello at the moment that Madame Nareeta flipped the G-string aside. The roar was gigantic. Sailors and Marines stomped on the floor, beat hands and glasses against tables. I leaned past Turner.

“Red,” I said, “I want you outside.”

He didn’t even blink. “Get outta here, boy,” he said, “ ’fore I call yore momma.”

Turner put a hand on my forearm.

“Hey, what’s this all about?”

“It’s none of your business, Jack. This is strictly between me and Red.”

“What you mean?”

“Red killed a friend of mine.”

Red said, “You mean that damned queer?”

He sipped a drink casually and watched coldly as Madame Nareeta did a farewell bump for the crowd, which was standing and pleading from the hot darkness “more, more, more.” I wished I had words to use against Red Cannon, some amazing set of arguments and lines. I didn’t. So I reached over and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. Turner muscled his way between us, his face next to mine, and said in a hard way: “You better leave, sailor.”

Red smiled thinly and put a hand on Turner’s shoulder.

“Leave ’im be, Jack,” he said. “I think mebbe I’d better kick his gahdam ass.”

Then we were bumping our way through the crowd and out past the bouncer to the parking lot. I was suddenly afraid and feeling weak. But it was too late. I led the way. When I turned around to face Red Cannon, he hit me and knocked me down. I felt no pain. Just a whiteness. I rolled, expecting a kick and a stomp and I wanted to protect my balls. The kick never came.

“Better git up, boy,” Red said calmly, “an’ take yo beating.”

I got up and faced him and saw a short, hard-muscled man, his hands held at chest level, his face blank. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and was going to enjoy it; if I let him, he was sure to give me that beating. I moved away from him, feeling lightheaded, and raised my hands and tried to remember everything I’d ever learned in Brooklyn. I was going to need it all.

He came in a rush and threw another right hand and I bent at the knees to go under it and the punch glanced off the side of my head. I hooked hard to his belly, threw a right that missed, then hooked again and heard him grunt. That one hurt. Now I heard shouts and saw Turner’s anxious face and about six Marines coming from a car and then I got knocked down again. One of the Marines shouted, “Go Navy! On you ass.” And Red said, “Get the hell out of here, jarhead.” And then I was up and feeling panicky, afraid not of pain but embarrassment, and the fear drove me at Red and I got punched hard in the belly and bent over and punched in the upper arms and heard a voice say: “Kick his ass, kick his fucking niggerloving ass.” And was punched again and felt nauseated and hit again and then saw Gabree.

The Marine from the Mainside gate.

From the night I took Bobby Bolden to the hospital.

From the night Eden Santana got scared right out of my life.

He was leaning against the hood of a car, watching me take my beating.

I decided not to take the beating. I shoved Red off me and stood up behind a jab and speared him with it. Once. Twice. Again. Backing him up. Then as he came at me I slammed home a right hand, hitting him between the eyes. Blood spurted from his nose. He looked surprised. I stepped to the left and drove a hook to his body, stopped, twisted inside with an uppercut and hit him on the chin and knocked him down.

I wanted to finish him off right there, end my own fear by stomping him into the gravel. But he’d let me up; I had to let him up. There were more Marines watching us and they cheered as Red got up slowly, a small tentative smile on his bloodied face. He came at me and I hit him, knowing now that I had to time my punches to his rush, and then he paused, turned as if quitting, then suddenly rushed again. I stepped aside and he plowed past me into the group of Marines.

That’s when the fight changed.

One of the Marines shoved him. Then another. They formed a circle around him, trapping him, punching him on the shoulders and back, shoving him. He seemed suddenly small and bedraggled and sad. I saw blood leaking from his brow and dripping from his nose.

I looked at Turner.

We didn’t wait.

We rushed at the Marines, and I went crazy, a roar coming from inside me, fighting now without rules, a sailor leaping on jarhead backs to break the circle around another sailor named Red. I ripped an elbow across Gabree’s face, bent him over with a knee in the balls, then kicked him hard on the side of the face. Someone knocked me down with a punch from my blind side. I grabbed a thick-soled boot and pulled and a Marine went down and I stood up and stomped him hard. Red Cannon was fighting two of them, his face a ghastly smear, his shirt torn off his back and I knocked one of them down and then saw Turner on his belly on the ground, not moving, and then there were more Marines coming at me and Red, and I was heaved through the air and bounced off the hood of a car.

I got up slowly.

Everything hurt.

I leaned on the car and saw three Marines trying to hammer Red Cannon into the gravel. I couldn’t move. It was as if I were watching some movie. Red stood with his legs spread apart and his hands up, refusing to let them knock him down. Then they stopped for a moment. One of them stared at him, measuring. Another slipped off his garrison belt, wrapped it around his hand. They started taking shots at Red. First one. Then the other. Red sneered.

Finally I moved, climbing up on the car hood. I screamed and jumped toward the nearest Marine and brought him down. Suddenly Gabree was coming at me, swinging his belt too, the buckle huge, and then behind him I saw Sal.

And Max.

Maher and Dunbar and Parsons.

And Dixie Shafer too, reaching for something in her bag.

The cavalry.

Gabree turned. I got up. And saw more Marines and other sailors coming out of the Miss Texas Club and then we were fighting all over the parking lot.

I trapped Gabree between two parked cars and grabbed him by the hair and beat his head against a fender until he fell away. Thinking: for Bobby Bolden. Thinking: for Miles Rayfield. Thinking: for Eden Santana. Until I was spun around and whacked in the head by a tall freckled Marine and then saw him pulled back, turned, and hit by Sal. The freckled Marine went down. Sal stomped on his ankles and went back for another Marine, looking joyous, laughing like a maniac. I saw Max about forty feet away, holding a Marine by the wrists and whirling him around and around, faster and faster, as if playing a kids’ game. Then he let him go. The man sailed about ten feet and made a sick thumping sound against the side of a pickup truck.

Sailors and Marines were fighting everywhere. Dixie was cracking fallen Marines on the head with a short blackjack. There were sailors down too. Jack Turner hadn’t moved yet. I started for him and then a Marine sergeant pulled me around. I felt as if I couldn’t lift my hands.

“Freeze there, sailor,” he shouted. “Don’t move.”

I threw a punch at his face, and he blinked, and then he threw a punch, and I went under it and took a deep breath and ripped a punch into his belly and he went down to a sitting position, his hands out on either side of him as if looking for something to grab on to, and I kicked him in the face.

Then I heard Sal yelling, his voice wild and urgent.

“Here they come!”

The Shore Patrol.

Three jeeploads of them were racing down the highway, heading for the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club.

The fight was over.

I looked at the woods beyond the parking lot and started to run. Then I heard a voice on a bullhorn.

“Everybody stop where they are. You are all under arrest. Don’t move or you’ll be shot!”

Nobody obeyed. Sailors and Marines started running in various directions. I stayed low, moving between the parked cars, heading for the woods. I heard a gunshot. Then another. I was very scared now but kept moving. There was a third gunshot, far behind me. Muffled shouts. A trace of music from the Miss Texas Club. And then I was in the woods.

I stopped behind a tree and looked back. Two Shore Patrolmen were leading Maher to a waiting jeep. Jack Turner was up, looking hurt, a Shore Patrolman talking to him. Dixie was shaking her fists. I had a stitch in my side from running and my hands hurt and there was a dull throb at the base of my skull. I heard sirens in the distance. An ambulance or more Shore Patrol. I moved deeper into the woods. The others would find their way back to Ellyson. I’d have to do it too.

Soon everything was dark. I could smell salt on the light breeze. The night was cooler. The ground rose and the woods thinned, the trees more frail and the earth sandier beneath my feet. Up ahead, through the thin stands of trees, I could see the sky brightening. I climbed up a sandy ridge and stopped.

Before me lay the sea.

The empty beach was silvery under the quarter moon. I stood there for a long moment, gulping the salt air, listening for pursuers. My nose was tender, clogged with blood. My side teeth were loose. My hands throbbed. I started walking toward the sea, pulling my jumper over my head, stripping away my T-shirt. I wanted everything off me, the clothes, the dirt, the blood. And by the time I reached the sea, I was naked.

I made a pile of the uniform, my shorts and T-shirt, socks and shoes. I had seventy-eight dollars in my wallet, the great payday haul. I pushed the wallet into the sand under the uniform. And then I turned, walking quickly, and plunged into the cold waters of the Gulf.

Weightless now, turning in the sea, feeling it against my balls and back, the pain seemed to leave me. I dove under the surface, where there were no Marines and no Red Cannon, no musicians with broken hands, no painters with broken necks, no sailors with broken hearts, except me. I wanted to stay there forever. And realized suddenly how easy it would be to die. To just stay there until everything turned black and I was gone too. I would be at peace. There would be no scandal, as there was with Miles Rayfield, and no shame either; they would all just believe that I drowned. Exhausted from the great fight at the Miss Texas Club. Sad. A tragedy.

Good-bye. It would all be over. And then, plunging deeper, my lungs hurting, I panicked.

I didn’t want to die.

Not in the dark of the roadless sea.

I wanted to see Eden Santana at least one more time. Just once. To say what I’d never had a chance to say. A final plea. Or a proper good-bye.

I kicked and pushed against the sea, and felt a current dragging at me, and pushed harder, and felt my lungs bursting, and a whiteness blossoming in my brain; kicked harder, pushed, heading for the surface, panicked again when I thought I was going the wrong way, that I was plunging deeper, suddenly afraid that I’d never make it, that I would die without choosing, without saying good-bye, and then burst to the surface, gulping air, treading water, staring up at thick clusters of stars.

I lived.

And living, floating on the water, eyes closed, hearing the roar of the surf and a distant foghorn, I wanted to be finished with the Navy. I had two years to go. More. An endless time. And I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to float here, weightless, naked, forever. Thinking of dying and how easy it was, I was no longer afraid of the Navy. If I went to find Eden, what could they do? Kill me?

Suddenly I was exhilarated and began to swim to shore. I came up on the beach and clasped my knees and sucked in air. I could feel the sea salt drying on my naked skin. I stood up straight and then immediately crouched low. There was someone about fifty yards down the beach standing where my clothes were piled.

For a moment I was full of fear. It could be the Shore Patrol, tracking me from the woods and the parking lot. Maybe some Marine was dead. Stomped to death between parked cars. I considered slipping back into the sea. I thought about running. But I was naked. I wouldn’t last long on a highway trying to get back to Ellyson Field. And my money was there, tucked into the sand under the uniform. I had no real choice. If it was the Shore Patrol, my ass had had it. But it could be just a beachcomber, some rummy washed up on the Gulf. Either way, I had to get my clothes and money. Whatever the risk. I started walking through the sand toward the person who was standing beside my clothes.

When I came close I saw that it was Red Cannon.

I stopped.

Jesus Christ.

Now, sore and naked and exhausted, I’d have to finish what had begun in the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club.

Red was waiting for me, battered, unbeaten. Three great waves of exhaustion moved through me. I wanted to lie down naked in the sand and go to sleep. I didn’t have any strength left to fight him nor will to beat him. I would have to contrive some rage and use it as fuel. So I thought about Miles Rayfield. His face blue and swollen. The cord digging into his flesh. But the anger wouldn’t come. And I still needed those clothes.

I walked closer, on an angle, giving him a smaller target if he came at me in a rush, protecting my cock and balls. He was shirtless. His face was a mess of caked blood, dried by the Gulf breeze. He smiled, but I couldn’t see his eyes. The surf broke on the shore. I stopped six feet away from him and waited.

“I need those clothes, Red,” I said.

“Come and get em.”

“I don’t want to fight you for them, but I will if I have to.”

“It’s your gear. Whut the hell do I want with it?”

I took a step forward and so did he. Then we both stopped. I could see his eyes now. One was almost closed and was turning purple. The other just looked sad.

He held out his hand.

I shook it.

“You’re okay, Devlin,” he said.

“And you’re still a prick,” I said and released his hand and went for my clothes and started dressing. I looked at Red. He was gazing out at the sea. And then he toppled over and fell face down in the sand.

I went to help him.

Chapter 66

I shoulda seen they was shit the day they showed. Green snotnose shit, enlisted men and officers both. We were in the buildingways up at Mare Island near San Francisco. They was fixin everything that was ripped up by the kamikazes at Okinawa, the hull and the water supply and the bridge, every damned thing on the ship. This was the summer of ’45, just before the war ended, and I was a third-class gunner’s mate on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Bet you never heard of her, right, Devlin? Well you ain’t alone. Most nobody ever heard of her, then or now. The Navy don’t want it out, what happened to her. The goddamn politicians don’t, either.

But she was a death ship, Devlin: a great big heavy cruiser, that was what we call tender. That means she was about as heavy above the waterline as below, loaded down with all sorts of shit that wasn’t there when they built her. Just walkin the deck, you knew it wouldn’t take much ocean to tip her over. The Navy brass didn’t give much of a fiddler’s fuck. All those Annapolis boys loved cruisers cause the next stop was usually a battle wagon and that was the top in them days, before the carriers became the big deal. So they gave you a big So What? if you told them the ship didn’t right itself too quick after a sharp turn. They didn’t care she was tender. They even made her the flagship of the Fifth Fleet, and did all kinds of ceremonial shit whenever Admiral Spruance came aboard. And they gave her a captain, McVay was his name, a gray-haired guy with coal-black eyes, always smilin like a goddamned politician.

Yeah.

The Indianapolis.

A nice big cruiser.

They thought it looked good in pictures, I guess, though it wasn’t worth a fuck at sea. So in July, we were gettin her ready, the war over in Europe, thinkin we was all gonna be part of the invasion of Japan. I wunt too big on that. I seen the way the Japs fought at Okinawa and figured theyd take a lot of us with them in Japan. Say what you will about the Jap, but he’s a fightin man, sailor. Still although they was beat, and must’ve known it, the Japs wouldn’t quit, so there was nothin to be done except invade. It was a war and we had to finish it and in the Navy, on the Indianapolis, we’d play our part like everybody else, tender ship or no tender ship.

The trouble was most of the old crew was dead now or scattered around, and one bright morning along comes this new crew. Talk about haulin green shit. Two hundred and fifty wiseass kids fresh out of boot camp and thirty officers out of the Academy and I knew right off we gonna have us some trouble. They made up almost a third of the crew and they showed up like they was goin to a Fourth of July picnic, instead of a war against a real tough son of a bitch. I knew we’d have to break their asses real good. But almost as soon’s they were piped on board, we got orders to get ready to ship out. In twenty-four hours. The ship wunt ready. They wunt enough chow. The livin quarters wunt finished. Didn’t matter. We had to go. And it was all because of the goddamn bucket and the goddamn box.

They swung them on board in the morning, usin a giant goddamn gantry. The bucket weighed maybe three hundred pounds, cast iron, sealed, and we welded it right to the deck, holdin it down with straps. It couldn’t move or slide. If the ship went down, so did the bucket. The box was a crate really, eight feet high, and they took it below decks and wedged it in real tight. But then they called me and Big Nose Bernardi below decks and we met these two army guys, lookin like perfessers with guns, and they opened the box and took out a steel cylinder maybe three feet long and had us carry it into Captains Country, where Captain McVay gave us part of the mess, sealed off, and watched as we strapped this cylinder to the deck and welded the straps tight. The army guys never said a word. They stayed with the cylinder and never came above decks again.

Well, we pulled anchor at three ayem on July 16 and sailed out of San Francisco and started haulin ass. There was all sorts of scuttlebutt about the box and the bucket. Most of the crew thought they had to contain germs. That we was gonna use germs on the Japs. Or some kind of gas that would paralyze every last Jap in the country, something we captured from the Germans. It wunt till well after the war that I learnt that the bucket and the box was full of parts of the atom bomb.

Now out at sea, we were supposed to break in the new crew. Not for any atom bomb. For war. Suppose to do it right off. Dont give em tahm to think. That was the general plan. Real simple. Well, we didn’t get to break em in. There wunt tahm and the ship was a complete fuckin mess. Somehow we picked up a bunch of hitchhikers, officers mostly, all tryin to git to Pearl, which was our first stop. Their luggage was all over the damned deck. Worse, some of em was Army and didn’t know shit from shinola about livin on a ship. And the green kids was the real problem. Some of em was moonin over women. Some even cried for their mommas. They got lost and dint know port from starboard. Real green shit.

Things got so bad, there was a fire on deck cause these green shitbirds left suitcases next to one of the stacks. Suitcases! On a Navy ship. And they was no room in the chow hall, so people ate all over and left food and plates layin around and I seen roaches too. I swear. Cockroaches. On a flagship of the United States Navy.

Nobody paid much attention though. That was just housekeepin. And Captain McVay was haulin ass for Pearl. The Indianapolis was thirteen years old and beat up. But he got her doin twenty-nine knots. We tested the systems. Radio. Radar. There wunt any sonar, though, and that hurt us later. There just wunt time to install it. We was haulin ass with the atom bomb. When we hit Pearl that Monday morning, we discovered that we broke the damned record. Two thousand and ninety one miles in seventy-four-and-a-half hours. I’m still amazed.

But there wunt tahm for celebration in Pearl, for taking pictures, and bragging to reporters. We let the passengers off, and then we were told to get ready to git under way. And seen again that we could have bad trouble. I actually seen some of that green-shit crew start to cry. They wanted to get off. They wanted to call their girlfriends or their mommas. They wanted liberty when they haddin even done nothin yet. They dint want to hear we had no tahm. They dint want to hear we were going to fuckin war.

So we lifted anchor and started out for some little goddamn island called Tinian.

I yelled and hollared, I said we gotta do basic drills, we gotta do abandon ship and fire and rescue and anti-aircraft and man overboard. Nobody listened. I think maybe the captain thought he was gonna be part of history and all he had to worry about was posing for the pictures. And besides, we were in safe water. There wasn’t a Jap for a thousand miles, everybody said. We’d do the trainin later. After Tinian. When we got to Leyte in the Philippines … Well, I did whut I could.

We made Tinian on Friday. It was one of those islands I used to see in the fillums at the Mosque Theater in Montgomery during the Depression. You know, fine ladies in grass skirts and some rummy doctor layin in a hammock with a bottle under the palm trees. There was a landing strip for airplanes but no dock for ships the size of the Indianapolis. So we had to unload the box and the bucket onto an LCT out in the open sea. We cut the straps on the cylinder and put it in the box and started the job. But the wire was too short and I remember that goddam box swingin around in the breeze, six feet above the LCT. And then all them snotnose kids started jeerin. But we got it done. The mission was finished. At least that’s what we thought. We delivered the goddam box and bucket, and now all we had to do was beat Japan.

We sailed west, with a stop at Guam before going on to Leyte. And at last I started bustin balls on the housekeepin. Some shitbird of an officer had ordered 2500 life jackets for a crew of twelve hundred and they was layin all over the deck so I had them tied and stacked against the bulkheads. I had them clean up all the dirty food. I had them paintin and chippin. But most of the time it was like shovelin shit against the tide.

Wait till Leyte.

That’s what they all said.

We’ll get shipshape after Leyte.

Yeah.

After Guam we passed a spot called The Crossroads and went into the Forward Zone. That meant we were no longer under the command of Pearl Harbor. Now we reported to Leyte. And I dint like the conditions out there. I felt it from the minute we went through The Crossroads.

To begin with, we was alone.

Usually, a heavy cruiser sails with four or five other ships, and that was specially important with the Indianapolis cause she was tender. But we was alone. In the Pacific. That’s a big fuckin ocean, Devlin. Another thing I didn’t like, there was a rule that when you wuh in the Forward Area, you could only do sixteen knots. To save fuel. The third thing was the basic thing.

The crew.

That damned green crew.

Well, we left Guam at nine in the morning on Saturday and even at sixteen knots we should’ve reached Layte about eleven in the morning on Tuesday.

A weekend cruise.

Yeah.

Saturday was peaceful. I pulled a twelve to four and on Sunday morning I slept in. I remember lunch wunt half bad. Hamburgers and mashed potatoes. I couldn’t finish the potatoes, and in the next few days I thought about them uneaten potatoes a lot. A lot, sailor. In the afternoon I sat in the shade on deck while the green kids got cholera shots for the Philippines. In the afternoon, the weather changed. There was a haze on the sea now and a heavy chop. We were followin the normal zigzag pattern — normal that is in the Forward Zone, where you want to fuck up the other guy’s listening devices, just in case he’s around somewhere.

I wished we had sonar.

I wished we wunt alone.

That night I had an eight to twelve. It was fuckin hot. I remember walking through the quarters when I went on duty and noticin a lot of watertight doors open. I wondered who in the fuck was in charge of them and I went up on deck, pissed off, needin a smoke, followin the smell of the coffee pot. The deck was disgustin. Sailors had pulled mattresses and cots on deck and were lyin around bullshittin and sleepin. Hundreds of them. There was only one air conditioner on board, down in sick bay, and the Captain didn’t give a rat’s ass where they slept, I guess. I saw some guys shootin craps in a compartment and told them to make sure the light dint show and kept thinkin: There’s too many doors open.

I went up on the bridge and looked out for a while, standin on the side. For some reason, we had stopped the zigzag. We were going due west. The sea was pretty calm. There was a quarter moon. I smoked half a pack of Camels, goin up and down and around the ship, fore and aft, port and starboard. The guys on deck stopped their bullshittin and grabassin and went to sleep.

And maybe cause it was quiet, maybe cause we wuz alone, I don’t know why: for the first tahm in years, I started thinkin about home.

I had a wife back home once, married when we were both sixteen, and we used to talk all the tahm about gettin us a little house somewhere beside a lake so we’d always see a piece of water. I wondered what happened to that woman that was once mah wife, whether she married someone half decent, whether she had kids (we didn’t), whether some new fella gave her what I never could give her.

You see, she was a good lovin woman. It wunt her fault we split. The truth was, I just couldn’t take her lovin. Somethin in me. Dont’ know what. Couldn’t take her huggin and kissin and lovin. And besides, I couldn’t stay put. I couldn’t stand the idea of plowin them Alabama fields every spring and every fall for the rest of mah fuckin life. I always felt that way. Saw them fields kill my daddy and my uncles and make my momma old. When I married that lovin woman, I thought I wouldn’t feel that way no more. But I did. The feelin just never went away. I’d see the dirt fields and feel already dead. Even now, close as we are to Alabama from Pensacola, I never go home. Never. Never want to see it again.

So one night while my lovin woman slept, I packed a bag and took a bus to Mobile and joined the Navy and never seen that lovin woman again.

But sometimes she’d come to me in the night. And out there on the Indianapolis, doing the eight to twelve, I wondered about her and whether she ever thought about me and I was tryin to remember all the details of her face and the way she smelled on them hot Alabama nights, rich as dirt, and what her hair felt like, and all the things about her body, I was thinkin all them things when the first Jap torpedo hit.

The goddamn thing just tore the bow off the fuckin ship. Forty feet ripped right off, anchors, capstans and all. The niggers all lived up there, stewards and messmen, and not one of them lived. Thirty-two of em. And the fleet Marines. Thirty of them just died. The ship rose up in the air and fell hard with a bright red flash and a column of water as high as the bridge and I was holding on to a rail and then someone was screamin and then, maybe three seconds later, the second one hit.

Midships.

Right about where the bridge was on the starboard side, and that knocked me to the deck and then everyone started goin apeshit.

I pulled myself up and grabbed a phone off the bulkhead, but it wasn’t working. Nothin electric was workin. No lights, no sound, and I thought: Please God make sure the radio aint hit, make sure Sparks is gettin out the location, make sure someone knows we been hit, cause we’re out in a great big fuckin ocean. I saw a kid run by bawlin and then knew we were still plowing ahead, eatin the fuckin ocean through that hole where the bow used to be and I immediately saw all them open doors in my head and knew that belowdecks sailors were dyin.

There was gray smoke everywhere now, smellin like burnt paint. Then I saw Captain McVay comin at me through the smoke. He was ballsass naked, carryin parts of his uniform and tryin to get to the bridge. He didn’t say a word to me, but he looked at the sea and the green kids runnin all over and up ahead where the bow was already underwater and fire was runnin across the deck and I knew what he was thinkin: We’re gonna have to give her up.

I felt us list a few degrees and heard some godawful noises from belowdecks and then the Captain was gone into the smoke and I could hear him yellin, shut the engines down, shut down the goddamned engines.

While we kept plowin ahead.

I pulled on a kapok life jacket and tied it tight and started moving aft. There were scared kids everywhere, not knowin what to do, where their battle stations were, but knowin, like sailors do, even green-shit recruits, that they were goin into the sea.

I turned some of them around, told them to get to the fan tail, tie on life jackets, get ready to go. I tried to help some guys get the whaleboats out of the chocks, but then we listed another six or seven degrees, and one of the guys lost his grip and went into the sea and the boats were hanging beyond our reach. And I could see others jumpin in, some without life jackets, some just in skivvies, cause they’d been sleeping when the Japs whacked us. A guy sat on the deck, his whole body black and burnt. A corpsman was giving him morphine, but then we listed again, and the burned guy started slidin away.

There were maybe five hundred sailors on the fantail, now, all half dressed. None of them had flashlights or guns or knives. And the ship was still driving forward. There were a lot of officers runnin around now, all the green shitbirds from the Academy, and they were all yellin about stoppin the ship, like it was a truck on a road someplace. They were useless. Most of em didn’t even know how to find the fuckin engine room never mind go down there and shut off the engines. A few kids started going off the fantail. I yelled to the others to get the floater nets ready, these great big nets with floats attached. Then there was a big jolt. The whole fuckin ship just twisted, and we went over another twenty-five degrees, the port side high up in the air, and kids were fallin all over the ocean. Along with equipment and bunks and all that loose gear that had littered the deck. The number 3 screw was still turnin and I saw two kids hold hands and jump off the fantail and get chopped to pieces by one of the propellers. The company bugler went into the sea, holding the goddamned bugle.

It was a mess.

A real fuckin mess.

Then I started climbin up the deck. It was like the whole world turned on its side. What I used to walk on was now a wall and I had to get up the wall. I pulled myself over the top and found I was standin on the side of the ship. There was maybe a hundred other sailors doing the same thing. Later I learned we got hit at 12:02 and the ship went down at 12:18.

Sixteen minutes.

It seemed a hell of a lot longer than that.

I stood on the port side, and then just walked straight ahead and stepped into the sea.

I started swimmin hard, trying to get away from her, afraid of suction. I’m a good goddamned swimmer, but I could barely move in the water. And then I knew why. It was full of thick black fuel oil. I tried goin under the oil and made some time and came up and looked back. The Indianapolis was layin real low in the water. I could hear shouts. A few screams. And I thought I was still too close. That the suction would pull me down. I didn’t know. I’d never had to abandon a ship before. But I looked back and all I could hear from her was the lappin of waves against the steel hull and then she just slipped away under the sea.

No suction.

No whirlpool.

She was just gone.

Then … hell, I aint afraid to admit I was scared. I was alone in the sea, covered with oil. I was afraid the SOS never got off the ship. I was afraid the Japs would come to the surface and shoot the shit out of us. I was afraid of being alone in the biggest goddamned ocean in the fuckin universe. I didn’t know if any rafts had been cut loose and I didn’t know how many others were in the sea with me and whether I’d find them.

Then somethin hard bumped into me. I grabbed for it. A crate of potatoes. I held on to that and then a part of a desk floated by and I held that too, an arm on each one, just floatin, savin my strength. I could hear voices everywhere but I couldn’t see anyone. I heard a kid screamin for his momma. Someone was prayin too, the good old Baptist shit. Then a kid come along, swimmin, no life jacket. I told him to grab the piece of desk.

It ain’t enough, he said. I ain’t strong enough.

Grab the motherfucker, I said.

And he did and drifted off. Later I found the desk but not the kid.

I held on to that potato crate as long as I could. But the potatoes must’ve started takin on water and it started ridin lower. I tore a slat off and started dumpin the spuds, shoving a few inside my shirt. I didn’t think after that. I just floated for the rest of the night.

In the mornin, I could see other sailors. Maybe a hundred and fifty of us, scattered all over the ocean. And not a raft among us. I learned later that about eight hundred went in the water and some of them had rafts, including the captain. But we were scattered over miles of ocean because the ship kept goin after she was hit. We were so low in the water we couldn’t see where the rafts were and nobody had flares. Nobody had food either. I saw an orange float by and grabbed it and shoved it in my shirt along with the two potatoes. I was looking for the rest of the potatoes when a guy bobbed right up to me. His face was black from the oil. And worse. He was fuckin charred, boy. His eyelids were burned off his eyes and he couldn’t see anything. He said to me, What is this?

And slipped under the sea.

In the daylight, it looked like a sea full of niggers. Everybody was covered with oil. Some guys were in uniform but others didn’t have shirts or even pants. We started movin toward each other. And I saw that some guys didn’t have life jackets either. The sun started risin, the biggest hottest most orange sun I ever saw.

Then I heard a guy scream, looked over, saw him tear off his life jacket and go under. That was the beginning.

I started yellin at them all: Don’t drink the sea water. Whatever you do, don’t drink it. I knew that drinkin sea water was death. First you go crazy and then you get sick and then you die. I told the ones closest to me to pass it on: Don’t drink the fuckin sea water. And then I started trying to calm the ones near me. Sure, I said, the wireless must’ve gone off. And if it didn’t, as soon as we don’t show on Leyte, they’ll come lookin for us. Don’t worry, I said. Stay calm, I said. Don’t use up your energy. Most of all, don’t drink from the sea.

I gave two of them a potato.

Then the strange shit started.

First of all, guys started goin blind. Later on I heard this was called photophobia. Comes from the sun, the oil, the reflection on the ocean, all combined. I saw three guys screamin they couldn’t see anything. Then I thought about myself. With my skin, I wouldn’t last the day. I was covered with oil. But if I didn’t do something the sun would still get me. I saw a guy float by face down in the water. The back of his head was shredded. I unleashed his jacket and then tied it over my head like a bonnet. It didn’t work perfect. You see my skin here? You see these scars? You see where the nerve ends was just burnt off? Well, I didn’t get that jacket for a bonnet, it mighta been worse.

Late in the afternoon that first day, Monday, the sharks came.

We saw the fins, just like in a movie. Three of em. Circlin around us. The first thing they hit was one of the dead guys out on the edge of the group. Just smashed into him and pulled him under. But they wasn’t finished. One of the kids suddenly screamed, the goddamnedest bloodcurdlin scream I ever heard, and then he was gone. Blood mixed with the oil. The others started thrashin around, splashin and kickin, but I remembered somethin from some magazine saying the best thing was to just lie on your back very still. The shark sees you kickin and he thinks you’re already done for and you’re an easy kill. I told this to the ones near me and flopped over on my back. I felt somethin bump me and then go away and then another godawful scream and I just lay there for a long time.

I was layin there when I saw the plane. Not too high. Maybe three, four thousand feet. Everybody else seen it too. And we start shoutin and yellin and beating on the oily ocean. But the plane just kept on goin. It never came back. And I thought: The SOS never left the ship. And I was scared. Never said a word to the others, never said that if the message got off, there’d be a dozen planes here, circlin in the sky. Never mentioned any of that. But knew it.

The day was scaldin. I sealed my mouth, afraid of the sea water. Held it so tight my muscles hurt. The sharks must of been full. They didn’t come back either. We all lolled there in the water, just taking it. That night, we heard another plane. Then I saw star flares fired from somewhere on the ocean. That was the first time I knew for sure that there were others out there. And if they had flares they had Very pistols and if they had Very pistols then somebody had found a raft. The pistols were part of the gear on every raft. And I thought, the planes had to see that. Durin the day, maybe the ocean was like some big mirror if you looked at it from the sky. But at night, the flares meant that people were down here. They couldn’t miss us. Now they’d come for us. I bobbed in the sea and heard someone start to sing.

Pardon me boy

Is this the Chattanooga choo-choo …

And someone else said, Track Twenty nine, and another, Well, can you give me a shine. They were happy. They’d seen the flare and heard the plane and they were sure now we’d be found. In the morning. As soon as it got light.

But the plane didn’t come back in the mornin, or the mornin after that. And then people started going crazy. They must have been drinkin the sea water. Or if they wunt, the sea water was gettin into their mouths anyway and down their throats.

The craziness came in waves. Some ensign said that there was an island only a mile away, with palm trees and freshwater streams and beautiful girls like Dorothy Lamour. He got a dozen guys to follow him and they all started swimmin away and we never saw them again. Another guy said that he could see the Indianapolis right below us, about thirty feet down, and there was fresh water down there, hundreds of gallons of it, and Betty Grable was on the deck and everything was beautiful. I told him that the bottom was 10,000 feet down. He said You’re crazy, man, said, Look, said, There it is, the ship! He stripped off the life jacket and started swimmin down and three other guys did the same and that was the end of them too.

A lot of guys started fightin each other, they’d be punchin and thrashin around and beatin at the ocean and each other and then this brown shit would start burblin up from their mouths, and they’d be dead. Some guys had knives. They used them to keep the food for themselves. They used them to get fresh life jackets. They threatened officers with them. There was no discipline, no rules, no Navy regs, no feeling of being in this thing together. It was every man for himself, for four fucking days and nights. You think human beings are decent? You think human beings love their neighbors? Go out in the ocean with them sometime. Eight hundred guys went in the water when the Indianapolis went down. At the end, only three hundred were left.

It went on and on. I ate the orange but was afraid of the salt water on the potato and threw it away. By the second night, the kapok lifejackets were gettin waterlogged. We were ridin lower and lower in the sea. I started playin mind games, trying not to go crazy, tryin to stay alive. What time was it? Yesterday today was tomorrow. Right this minute was yesterday’s future. Night will become dawn. But when does dawn become morning and what makes afternoon different from morning and when does it happen and why are we all here in this fuckin ocean which has no beginning and no end except when the fuckin sharks come to get us? I thought like that.

Finally I thought if I didn’t want anything then it wouldn’t matter if I died. So I said to myself over and over, I don’t want anything, I don’t care for anything, I don’t love anything or anyone or anyplace. I’m nothin. I’m just here on the ocean. A speck. Bein alive, that was nothin. Dead, I’m nothin.

And that way I was able to live.

We saw more planes high in the sky and they never came back and that was nothin. We saw a squall in the distance comin across the ocean and we thought we’d have fresh water in our mouths and then the squall turned and the rain went away to the west without coming near us and that was nothin. I saw guys keel over and die and that was nothin. I saw a guy with a knife cut another guy’s throat for his life jacket and that was nothin. Prayin was nothin and day was nothin and singin was nothin and night was nothin.

And then on Thursday, a PV–I flew over and circled and circled and finally landed on the water, bouncin, skiddin, hittin the tops of waves and settlin.

We were saved.

And even that was nothin.

I couldn’t cheer. Only my nose was above water. I couldn’t get excited.

I was saved.

I was alive.

Nothin.

Only later, after we were picked up and taken to a can named the Doyle, only then did I want to live. They took us to Peleliu and the hospital. I drank too much water and puked and ate too much food and puked. I slept for eighteen hours. And when I woke up I knew that if I stayed in this man’s Navy, I wouldn’t ever again be in a place where green snotnosed kids panicked and died and got other people dead.

You think I’m a shit, don’t you, Devlin?

Maybe I am.

Maybe I’ll always be a shit.

But I wunt born a shit. Maybe I left somethin out there in that fuckin ocean. Maybe I’ll never find it again. I know I sure ain’t gonna find it on land. Hey, git your ass up off the sand, sailor. We gotta git back to the base.

Chapter 67

It was gray and chilly when we got back to the base. Sunday morning on the Gulf. The sky empty. Red Cannon left me without a word, as if he had no words left, or was vaguely ashamed that he had used words at all. My uniform was filthy. My body hurt. I showered for a long time. My mind was as blank as the sky.

Then, clean again and most of the aching gone, I climbed into the sack. Longing for sleep. I shoved my hand under the pillow and found the letter.

Dear Michael,

By the time you read this, I’ll be dead. They’ve taken everything away from me at last. My work — my pride — my need for love. There’ll be a court martial and they’ll say all sorts of filthy things about me and make filthy jokes in the corridors and write filthy things into my record. And all of that will follow me everywhere. Well, I don’t want any of that. I don’t want the shame or the tears or the cheap laughs. I want out of Anus Mundi. Forever.

All my life I had to hide what I was. When I was young, it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. But when I was twelve or thirteen, I started to think I was a woman in a man’s body. It wasn’t a sudden thing. I just looked at boys instead of girls. I wanted to dress in women’s clothes. I had urges — desires — they weren’t what boys were supposed to feel — weren’t what I saw in the movies — weren’t what I heard on the radio. I can’t explain it all. I die, not understanding it all.

But once when I was in art school I loved a boy and he loved me and I understood for the first time how hard my life was going to be. You see, we couldn’t ever do what other people did. Not in Atlanta. Not in the South. Maybe not anywhere. We couldn’t walk down the corridors at school, holding hands. We couldn’t kiss each other in the balcony at the movies. I couldn’t sit in the living room with him at his parents’ house, necking, while they slept upstairs. We had to hide and sneak around. Until there was a big school party out at a lake and we all got a little drunk and one of the advertising people — a designer — a real shithead — found us in the woods. Maybe that’s why I joined the Navy. To get away from that boy — to get away from the shame and the talk — to get away from Atlanta. But I loved that boy. He was my wife. That bitch. And it’s been a long long time since he loved me. Or since anybody loved me.

But it turns out that running away and joining the Navy was a terrible mistake. The Navy was just too tough for me. I’d see bodies in the showers — muscles and asses and cocks — have you stopped reading this? have you thrown it down in disgust? — and I’d want to touch them — kiss them — hug them — and have them hug me back and make love to me as if I were one of those women whose bodies were taped inside their lockers. To tell the truth, I’d see you like that sometimes. Do you understand why I could never go with you to O Street? I didn’t want to see you dancing with your sluts. And I was afraid that I’d have too much to drink and then I would do something or say something that I’d be sorry for later. I loved you. But you were my friend too. Maybe the only one I had in this goddamned Navy. I didn’t want to love you so much that I lost the friendship. Do you understand?

So I was a coward and that’s why I went with You Know Who. He was small and beautiful and didn’t care about anything except money. He couldn’t find a girl in the great American South. Too dark. Too small. So he found me. Or I found him. I’m not sure now who started it, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. He let me draw him at first (and how jealous I was of your woman when I saw your drawings of her). He posed for me for money, of course. And then he let me take photographs of him, for money (Cannon must have those now). And then later he let me do what I wanted to do with him, and that was for money too. I had a crush on him in some ways, because he was so perfect — so small — like a doll.… But he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him. I couldn’t — because I loved you. Does that embarrass you? Will you burn this letter? I guess you’d better.… But you knew it, didn’t you? You’re a damned innocent in a lot of ways, for all your Brooklyn crap, but you aren’t a fool. You must have seen …

But I knew that it was never to be. Nothing ever was to be. I had poor little amoral You Know Who. And what broke me — after Cannon took away everything — was that I would be disgraced over a tart. Someone I didn’t even love.

Well, I just don’t want to live anymore in a world without love.

I don’t want to live alone.

I used to tell myself that maybe art was enough. That I’d put everything into my painting and that would give me a life. But the truth is — my work just isn’t good enough. I have craft, but no art — an eye, but no vision. There’s always been something missing right from the start — some center — something that would focus the vision — bind all the elements … and I guess that the name of that thing is love.

So I’m going out of this. I want you to have all my stuff — my paints — pads — books — if the Navy will give them to you. If you ever get to Atlanta, go to see my mother. But don’t tell her everything you know and don’t show her all of my work. You know what I mean.… I’ve written to her to explain everything in a way that she will accept.

But I can’t give you anything else. You know what you have to do. You have to go and get love. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life. I go. But I hope that some day, years from now, when you’re a famous painter or a father of six, when you have met ten thousand new people and seen the great cities of the earth, you will pause on a summer morning when there’s a wet wind like the wind off the Gulf and you’ll remember me.

Love,

Miles

Aw, Christ.

Aw, Miles.

I slipped the letter back into the envelope, folded it, thought about tearing it into a thousand pieces but didn’t. I opened my locker and slipped it into Miles’s copy of The Art Spirit. Then I lay down. Wanting to answer him. Wanting to go to his bunk and wake him up and tell him to take some more time, to outlast the Navy and then go to New York or Paris or some other gigantic place where nobody cared what he was and he could find someone to love.

I wanted to say some magic words to him that would save his life.

But it was too fucking late.

I fell into a deep, exhausted, trembling sleep.

I slept through breakfast. I slept through lunch. I woke at last around three, my hands and head hurting. I was in the shower before I remembered the letter. And thought: What if someone finds it? Suppose they came to search all the lockers, looking for evidence of something or other? A board of inquiry. An investigation. And I felt instantly ashamed, as if I were betraying Miles even after his death. Then, still showering, scrubbing my teeth under the nozzle, letting the water drill into my mouth, the fragments of the night moved through me. Red Cannon in the endless Pacific at the end of the war, with dead men everywhere. Dixie Shafer’s abundance. Madame Nareeta. The fight in the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club. You have to go and get love. There were too many men without women in this world, fighting and hurting one another. And I’m one of them again.

I dried myself and dressed in clean whites and hurried out. I was very hungry. I went to the EM Club. Becket was sitting at a corner table. He looked up in a grim way aand told me that Sal, Max, Dunbar and six Marines were all in the brig. There were seven Marines in the Mainside hospital and the scuttlebutt said that one might die. A guy named Gabree. If he did, everyone would be charged with manslaughter.

“Manslaughter?”

The word sounded huge, scary.

“I’m going to Mass,” Becket said. “Wanta come?”

“No.”

“You’re a Catlick, right?”

“Retired,” I said.

Becket smiled and tapped me on the shoulder and went out through the door into the hot afternoon. I ate a burger and drank a Coke and added a cup of coffee. I wondered if the Marine guards were banging around Sal and Max and Maher. The way I’d booted and stomped Gabree, who had called me a niggerloving swabbie. I thought about Bobby Bolden in the ice hills of Korea and the way the Marines marched back, hurt and wounded and crippled with frostbite, and how much Bobby loved them for that and how stupid the endless rivalry was between sailors and Marines. It was a fight between uniforms. If we’d gone to the Miss Texas Club in civvies, the brawl might never have happened. It would have been a simple fair one: me and Red Cannon.

I looked out through the screened windows and saw Captain Pritchett staring at his flowers. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want to talk to him about what happened the night before or what was going to happen. I got up and slipped out the door and walked across the base, my T-shirt clinging to my back in the heat.

Back in the barracks, I read the letter from Miles again. You have to go and get love, he whispered from the grave. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life. I went outside and glanced into the brightly lit chow hall. Red Cannon was sitting alone, staring at his soup, his face lumpy, the skin shiny from the Pacific sun.

It was time to go.

I packed a small flight bag with the Thomas Craven book, The Art Spirit, The Blue Notebook, socks and underwear and shaving stuff. Nothing except my shoes would say Navy. I left the packed bag in the locker and waited until everyone was asleep. Then I slipped out the side door. The base was very quiet. I crossed to the Shack and went along the side of the building and stopped just before the window that opened into the secret studio where Miles Rayfield had tried to live his life. For a moment, I hoped that none of this had happened and if the shade was up I’d see the stacked paintings and the brushes and tubes and tins of turpentine laid upon a sheet of glass. I’d see Miles Rayfield’s furrowed face. I’d see an orange filling a room.

The shade was up. But all I could see were crates.

I moved carefully along the perimeter of the field. I saw no guards. Not even at the dumpster. I went out through the hole in the fence into the woods, circled to the highway and slipped into the locker club. I hung my uniform on a wire hanger. Then, dressed in sport shirt and chinos, carrying the small bag, I went behind the locker club and stayed in the shadows, moving west. There was a river to cross, a chance of capture, and I was afraid. I was doing something now that would change everything. Doing this, I could land in the brig or become a fugitive for all the years of my life.

But there was no real choice.

I was going to New Orleans.

To find my loving woman.

Chapter 68

I stopped at the gravel road that led to the trailer and for a moment considered staying there for the night: to sleep one final time in the tight small bed where Eden changed me and maybe I changed her. But then I saw lights burning dimly beyond the trailer, and I moved on, safe in the darkness. By dawn, I wanted to be far from Ellyson Field.

I walked for a long time. I trudged past the railroad trestle where Eden once stood in her red shoes and tempted or terrified some railroad men. For the moment, hitchhiking was out; I couldn’t risk being picked up by Buster and his cruising friends, didn’t want to be spotted by anyone who might recognize me from the base. If that Marine died from his beating, they’d want me for more than being AWOL. The word manslaughter chilled me again. And I wished I could just disappear. If I was never seen or heard from again, what difference would it make to the world? I was nobody. Nameless. Faceless. Walking to New Orleans, with seventy-eight dollars in my pocket. What was important to me didn’t matter to anyone else in the world except Eden. Possibly not even to her. But I would get there. I would find her. Even if I had to walk all the way.

The hours went by. The lights of a thousand cars flashed past while I moved behind a screen of bushes and billboards. Then up ahead I saw a road sign saying Foley and I knew I’d walked into Alabama. My legs felt heavier. My feet hurt. Enough. Now I’d have to take the chance of hitchhiking. I stepped out on the road, trying to look like a sweet all-American boy and not some trunk murderer. After a while a dark-blue pickup stopped, the engine racing. An old man was behind the wheel, thin and toothless and smiling.

“Hurry up, sailor,” he said. “I ain’t got all goddamn night.”

I got in and he put the truck in gear and started tearing down the road, wavering from time to time, heaving up gravel from the shoulder. The radio was tuned to a black station. Hank Ballard. Work with Me, Annie. They used to sing it in the Kingdom of Darkness, everybody stopping to shout the chorus.

“How’d you know I was a sailor?” I said.

“Hitchhikin in these parts, you ain’t no Royal Canadian Mountie. Course, I ain’t no Sherlock Holmes either. Just, I drive these damn roads all the time and that’s who I see. Sailors. Most you people look the same. Where you fum?”

“Miami,” I lied.

“Lots of Jews down there, ain’t they?”

“Some.”

“Hell, they’s Jews all over nowadays. I seen them even in Memphis. Can you beat that?”

“Amazing. Memphis …”

“Where you bound fer?”

“Mobile. The bus station.”

“I’ll drop you off.”

We were on a four-lane road now and all around us I could see marsh grass writhing under the graying sky. The air was thickening with heat. A mosquito landed on my arm and I slapped it and the old man laughed. “Skeeters down here big enough ta play basketball with,” he said. I laughed too. Then we were on a causeway, shooting out over the swamps. “Six miles long hit is,” the old man said. “One of the longest damn bridges in the world.” He told me his name was Woods. I said my name was Lee. I was surprised how easy it was to make up names and places and histories.

The black radio station faded and Woods fiddled with the dial and found another one. Lloyd Price. “Love that damned nigger music,” he said, as Lloyd Price shouted his delight with Miz Clawdy. “Ho, boy!” He slammed the dashboard with the palm of his hand and moved against the rhythm as he drove. Up ahead was the Bankhead Tunnel. He slowed down and fumbled for change to pay the toll. I handed him a dime.

“Thanks, sailor,” he said, palming the coin.

I could see cops around the change booth. And I thought: They could be looking for me. For killing that Marine guard, that Gabree. I thought about feigning sleep but decided it was easier simply to look casual. The cops were bored and tired, with big sweat stains under their arms. Woods handed over his dime and we eased into the traffic as Billy Ward began to sing Sixty-Minute Man. I wondered where Bobby Bolden was and whether he did much thinking about the rest of his life.

The tunnel was two lanes wide, with a few cars coming at us in the other lane. Woods moved the truck smoothly, both hands gripping the wheel. He didn’t drift. Not down there. Then he started to pick up speed. The tiled walls were dripping with summer perspiration. I had a feeling that we would come up on the other end in Manhattan. I’d see the Hudson behind me and the docks of the ocean liners and the Empire State Building off to the left. The faces would be familiar. There would be plenty of Jews. And black people too. And Puerto Ricans. I’d thank Woods and get out of the truck and go to the newsstand on the corner and buy the News and Mirror and the Journal-American. Maybe I’d take the train to Ebbets Field. The Dodgers would be playing the Cardinals. And when the game was over, I’d go down to Coney Island and buy some hotdogs at Nathan’s and walk out to the beach and look at the girls in their bathing suits, their skin still white with winter, and I’d call my father and tell him I was home, and I’d be there soon and none of this would have happened.

But when we came up out of the tunnel we were still in Alabama. Going farther and farther away from New York. And then I felt light, boneless, runny with fear; in a few hours, what I had done would be irreversible. Donnie Ray would call the roll and I would not be there. He would run through the motions, as he had the morning that Boswell didn’t show; but when he was certain I was gone, he would mark me AWOL. And I knew that I might never be able to go back to New York. I would never see my father and brothers, except from the shadows. I felt like crying.

Over on the left, jammed around the flat mouth of the Mobile River, I could see cargo ships tied to docks, being loaded with bauxite. The air smelled of salt. It was very hot and there was not yet a sign of the sun.

“Ugly goddamn place ain’t it?” Woods said.

“Depends,” I said.

“On what?”

“On whether you’re from here. Maybe if you’re from here, it’s beautiful.”

“I’m from here, sailor. And I say it’s ugly.”

Then we were passing summer houses with bicycles lying on the lawns. The trees were plump and green. I saw at least one swimming pool. Woods made a series of turns and we were suddenly on Government Street, a main drag full of grand houses. We drove a few blocks under a high canopy of live oaks. We turned again, into a seedy treeless district, with For Rent signs in some of the stores. An abandoned car rusted in a side street, its tires gone, the windows punched out. And up ahead I could see the sign for the Greyhound station.

“There you are, sailor.”

“Well, I certainly appreciate the ride.”

“Ah preciate the comp’ny. Hey, you ain’t in no trouble now, are ya?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You don’t look too damned good.”

“Just tired. I’ll be all right when I get to where I’m going.”

“Won’t we all.”

He pulled over to the curb across the street from the bus station. I opened the door and got out.

“See you, bub,” he said, and then drove away, a crazy white man who listened to nigger music and thought Jews were weird. I took a breath and started across the empty street.

My heart stopped.

Two Shore Patrolmen in dress whites were standing in front of the newsstand. Their backs were to me. They were looking at the newspapers and I suddenly imagined myself on page one, along with Sal and Max and Maher and Dunbar, all of us charged with manslaughter. Bigger than our pictures was the photograph of the dead Marine.

I turned around and walked slowly away from there. Down the side streets. Left. Right. Left again. Expecting to see the Shore Patrol hurrying after me. Expecting a jeep to come screaming around a corner. Sweat poured down my face. My hands were wet. Up ahead, I saw a heavy black woman in a violet housedress come out on the porch of one of the houses. She had a yellow rag over her head and a cigarette clamped in her mouth. She was barefoot. I slowed down to a stroll, trying to look cool, as she bent over for a milk bottle. There was a cardboard sign in the window behind her. Rooms.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Which way’s the main drag?”

“You mean Gubmint Street?”

“The one with the big live oaks.”

“Ova yonduh. Bout three blocks.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell you doin roun heah?”

“Tryin to get to New Orleans.

“You look tebble.”

“Just tired.”

“You tahd, you betta sleep, white boy.”

“Gotta go.”

“Ah gotta room, you needs it. One dolla.”

She flipped the cigarette into the street.

“No, I better get to New Orleans.”

“Mah bruvva-in-low, he be goin that way this aftanoon …”

“Can I get a bath?

“That be a quota extra.”

I woke up soaked in sweat. I could see wallpaper peeling above me in the small cramped room. Beside the bed, a green painted bureau was greasy with heat. Old cooking smells hung in the air. I pushed my hand under the pillow. The wallet! I’d placed it there before falling off to sleep. Now it was gone. I sat up straight, my heart pounding. My clothes were draped over a chair. Then I looked at the door, thinking that I might be trapped here, locked in, my money stolen, like a traveler in one of those old fairy tales who went to spend a night at a country inn and ended up as meat pie.

I went to the door.

And sighed in relief.

It was open. I could see a landing and stairs going down to the first floor. I closed the door and got down on my knees to look under the bed. There was the wallet. The money was still inside. For a moment, the wallet and money had been the most important things in my life; now they seemed without any value. Now I would have to gather myself and start moving again. AWOL. Over the hill. Into the scary world.

Then there was a knock at the door and I jumped.

The door cracked open. I tensed.

And saw the black woman.

She had a large yellow towel for me and a pitcher of ice cubes and lemonade.

“Yo baff is ready,” she said. “Next door.”

“Thanks.”

“You look ready too,” she said and smiled.

“Your brother-in-law here yet?”

“Oh hell, boy, I dint mean you looks ready for him. I mean you looks ready fo, oh … somefin else.”

“I better just take a bath and go.”

“You sho?”

The brother-in-law’s name was Roderick. He was thin and knuckly and forty-two-years old and he had a load of pipe to deliver to Pascagoula. I didn’t know where Pascagoula was, but he sure did. And he wasn’t happy about going there.

“Anything I can do,” he said, “I stays outta Mississippi. They crazy ovuh there.”

“What about New Orleans?”

“Oh, that’s a different matter, all-to-gether. They crazy too. But crazy diffrunt.”

There was no radio in the one-ton truck, which Roderick said he’d bought as war surplus in ’46. We drove in silence through dark pine forest which gave way to groves of what Roderick said were pecan trees, drooping in the heat. We cut down a two-lane blacktop toward the Gulf. A breeze began to rustle the trees and I could hear a clacking sound. Roderick said it was the pecans. Smacking each other in the wind like a million castanets.

The sound of the pecans followed us most of the way to Biloxi. When we came into the town, Roderick said nothing. This was Mississippi and he damn well didn’t like it. Directly in front of us, planted in the middle of the highway, with the eastbound and westbound lanes swerving around it, was a giant whitewashed lighthouse.

“You think they planned this lighthouse this way?” I said.

Roderick laughed.

“Hell, no. This used to be the water. All this be landfill we drivin on.”

To the left now was the Gulf. Charter boats, docks, bait shops, food stores, souvenir places, a long crowded white beach that seemed to go for miles, and beyond the beach, out in the water, about five hundred shrimp and oyster boats riding at anchor. It looked like a postcard and I wished I could get out of the truck and enter the postcard and have a vacation the way ordinary people did. The streets were packed. Girls in bathing suits. Rednecks. Cops. Air force guys from Keesler. What looked like college boys. Their bodies were tanned and oiled and some of them were gliding in and out of the motels and all of them were white.

I looked at Roderick.

His eyes were fixed directly ahead of him on the slow-moving traffic.

Then the honky-tonks were gone and giant white mansions rose on a bluff: rich, smug, defiantly facing the sea. They all had tall white pillars holding up the roofs, like great houses in Civil War movies, and vast rolling lawns, and on the distant porches I could see tiny people in rockers watching the road and the ocean and the horizon. Biloxi vanished and Gulfport appeared, quieter, with a divided highway and palm trees and more grand houses, but no bait shops or charter boats or oiled blondes drifting to motels. I saw some odd-shaped trees. For the tung nuts, Roderick said.

“Years ago, buncha crazy peoples all tho’t they get themselfs rich wid de tung nut. Befo that, they tho’t the same wif the awnges. When I’se a boy, they’s awnge trees all up and down the damn coast. But the awnge trees died and so did the tung nuts. So now peoples still gotta make money the way they always done. Fum the damn Gulf. Fum the big blue water.”

Roderick drove quickly through Gulfport. The light was almost behind us and the Gulf looked large and scary. We could hear the ding-dinging of buoys and see the fishing boats cleaving through the water as if going to battle. Then up ahead we could see giant shipyard cranes rising off the flats, looking odd and disjointed against the lavender sky. Signs appeared, directing trucks with deliveries for the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation to make the next left. Roderick pulled over on a wide shoulder. Marsh grass swayed on both sides of the road. A sour smell rose from the baking earth.

“Ah don’t go no futhuh,” Roderick said. “You gotta git you the rest of the way to New Awlins on you own.”

“Thanks for the ride,” I said. I felt clumsy. He held the wheel with both hands. “It sure is beautiful country along here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it sho is.”

I walked about a mile and saw a gas station with a small seafood store attached to the office. I bought a pound of shrimp for a dollar and crossed the highway and sat down on a damp log. I peeled the shrimp and ate quickly and wanted more. Thinking: They know I’m gone now for sure. I imagined Donnie Ray calling Red Cannon and asking if I was locked up somewhere and Red saying, Locked up? Hell, no. He came home with me on Sunday morning.

I was AWOL.

They’d come after me for that.

And maybe worse.

Maybe murder.

I finished the shrimp and looked back at the gas station across the road. The sun was now gone. A blue ’49 Chevy was parked at the pump with an Air Force sticker in the rear window. Two guys were at the Coke machine. Another came around the side of the building where he’d obviously just taken a leak. A tiny man in coveralls was gassing up the car. One of the three young men went into the shrimp place. I walked over.

“Hey, can I hitch a ride with you guys?” I said.

The tallest one squinted at me. He was wearing a starched sleeveless white shirt and chinos. He went around to the driver’s side, and started to get in, without giving me an answer. The other one paid for the gas. The third came out with a large bag of shrimp.

“Where you goin?” the tall one said.

“New Awlins,” I said, trying to pronounce the words the way Roderick did. Not New Or-leeens.

“You got a couple of bucks for gas?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Get in.”

They were all enlisted men, stationed at Keesler, and were starting a ten-day leave. All were from Texas and they were going home. Dave, the tall one, was from Austin, and he drove as if trying to establish a speed record. Harry, who bought the shrimp, was from Fort Worth. Jake was from Dallas. He was the crew’s paymaster and after I got in beside him in the back seat, I gave him three bucks. As Dave drove with ferocious concentration, passing trucks, dodging oncoming cars, the others pulled the shells off the shrimp and threw them out the open windows into the steaming air and then passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Have a belt.”

“I better not.”

“It’s Mister Daniels.”

“I got some business in New Awlins. I don’t want to get there plastered.”

“Suit yisself.”

It was hard to see them in the dark. I huddled in the back seat in a corner behind the driver, feigning sleep or staring into the darkness. I was Miller from Miami but I didn’t want them to know me, to catch me in some dumb little lie. The bottle moved around. I thought: Be sharp, be cool. Get drunk and you’ll lose control. You’ll get caught. You’ll see a brig before you see New Orleans. Before you find what you’re looking for. And you can’t tell these guys. They’re not your friends. They’re just Air Force guys going home.

We stopped five times. Someone had to piss. Someone wanted sandwiches. Someone had to puke. Once I came suddenly awake as the car swerved, spun around on the empty road, came to a coughing stop. Dave had almost rammed a wandering cow.

“Open range!” Jake shouted. “Bounty hunter!”

We got out and they all laughed and passed around the bottle and this time I took a slug. The bourbon was hot, burning, good. We all pissed into the dark.

Then a vast swarm of mosquitoes found us, thick, dense, silvery in the moonlight, filling our noses and mouths, and we were slapping our faces and arms and running to the car. Dave pulled away, cursing and slapping, the windows wide open to blow the rest of the mosquitoes out. My arms and neck were bumpy from bites. Harry said we should rub whiskey on the bites and Dave said that was a hell of waste of good bourbon and Jake said, Well, let’s try it a little. I didn’t do it. Where I was going, I didn’t want to smell of bourbon. I didn’t drink anymore after that.

The night air smelled different now: hot, salty. I saw patches of black water, then great open swatches like lakes, with shanties up on stilts over the water. We crossed a steel drawbridge and then we saw a sign. Chef Menteur. Two gas pumps, some fishing shanties and a bar.

“Goddamn, a real metropolis.”

“Named after a chef!”

“You know you in Louisiana now.”

“Wuddint that the Pearl River?”

We all went into the bar. I was hot and thirsty, because of the bourbon. Inside, there were two guys playing a shuffleboard machine and a red-haired woman behind a small bar. She looked up when we came in. She was wearing a lot of makeup and her tits were too pointy to be real.

“You boys old enough to drink?” she said.

“We’re old enough to die in Korea,” Dave said, laying two singles on the bar.

“Then you’re old enough to drink,” she said and smiled and gave her tits a little shake.

There was a crude map on the wall between the two windows, with a sign above it saying: DON’T ASK WHERE YOU ARE. YOU’RE HERE. The arrow pointed at Chef Menteur. We were on a kind of island, and at the western end there were a lot of little streams called the Rigolets and a half dozen places marked SWAMP. Using the map as a guide, I looked out in that direction. In the distance, the sky was glowing. I turned to the barmaid.

“How far are we from New Awlins?” I said.

“You’re in it, boy.”

Chapter 69

Whooping, hollering, calling to women and drinking from a fresh bottle, they dropped me off on the corner of Canal and Rampart and then sped away. In all the years since, I’ve spent too much time showing up in strange cities at night. None of them have ever looked to me the way New Orleans did that first time. I stared around me and for a long strange moment felt as if I were home. There were office buildings, all brightly lit, souvenir stores and camera shops and jewelry joints, restaurants and huge hotels and big-assed women with yellow dresses and pairs of cops smoking cigarettes in doorways. Just like New York. And there were trolley cars. That’s what did it to me, reached out, hugged me, promised me the salvation of the familiar. The trolley cars: their steel wheels clacking on steel rails, squealing as they turned from a side street into Canal, the conductors ding-donging their warning bells. They were the older cars, made in part of wood, with square Toonerville Trolley faces, the kind that ran along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, not the streamlined gray trolleys that now raced along the Seventh Avenue line. And I thought: I’m a long way from home.

And thought again: I’ll be all right.

So I started to walk. New Awlins. Almost midnight. The heat still rising off the sidewalks. The gutters soft from the blaze of day. I needed a place to stay but I knew the big hotels were beyond me; I just couldn’t spend that kind of money or risk a demand for identification. And I sensed that if Canal Street was like Times Square, then the Shore Patrol would be around here somewhere, picking up strays. I had to get off into the side streets to where ordinary people lived and there’d be a boarding house with no questions asked, a hideout where the Shore Patrol was never seen.

Suddenly I was at the river. There were people on line, waiting for a ferry marked Algiers. A line of cars too. Algiers? Jesus. Wasn’t that in North Africa? I walked past the waiting lines, out to the edge of the ferry slip and looked down.

The Mississippi.

Black and glossy and moving slowly.

I heard a deep voice behind me.

“Help you, son?”

I turned and saw a cop staring at me. Old guy. Maybe fifty. Fat. Pouchy eyes. His face shiny with the heat.

“Uh, no, no, I’m fine. Why?”

“Oh, just we get a lotta jumpers along here. Dey stand here and den dey go in da water and dat’s all she wrote.” He was closer now, looking into my eyes. “You aint thinkin of doin nuttin foolish, are ya?”

He sounded like Becket. Or Brooklyn. I smiled, trying to look like the All-American boy I wasn’t.

“Hell, no, officer. I’m just lookin for a boardin house. I’m headin for California. Start a new job out there next month.”

“Where in California?”

“Uh, San Diego. Ever been there?”

“Durn da war. I gotta sister in Santa Barbara. She loves it out dere. Me, I like here. Da food out dere — hey, eat before ya go.”

“What about that boardin house?”

He scratched the side of his cheek and then pointed me toward Decatur Street, where, he said, there were plenty of rooming houses. The fastest way was through the railroad yards, but I’d better be careful of the trains and the hoboes.

“The other way to get to da same place is go back down Canal, right here, to, say, Charters Street. Den cut right into the French Quarters, into the Voo Kuhray. On da right. You keep goin to Jackson Square and make another right over to the waterfront and—”

There was a sudden squeal of brakes, and the sound of rammed metal. Two cars angling for position on the Algiers ferry had smacked into each other.

The cop hurried over. I drifted back down Canal Street. At Chartres, I turned right. The street was narrow and badly lit, with high rough walls rising on either side and cobblestoned streets and a sickly rotting odor seeping from somewhere, as if the heat were boiling sewage beneath the streets. There were several winos sitting on the sidewalk, their backs to the walls. All white. One of them came over to me. His eyes looked scraped. His skin was loose. He put a hand on my flight bag and grinned. In the dim light, he had almost no teeth.

“Whatchoo got there, boy?”

“Hands off,” I said.

He jerked on the bag and I pulled it away and shoved him. He whirled and faced me, both hands poised, a blade in his hand.

Shit.

The other winos didn’t move. They didn’t even seem very interested.

This is stupid. This ain’t why I came here.

I backed up.

I don’t want to die this way. I don’t want to die at all. I have to find my loving woman.

The wino said, “You got somefin you wanna do, boy?”

I turned and ran.

Along Chartres Street, then right, then left again. I ran for a long time, until I got brave enough to look behind me and saw steam rising on the empty streets but no wino with scraped eyes. I slowed to a walk. There were more little bars, with yellow light spilling onto the sidewalks. Scraps of music filled the air. Distant Dixieland. Bebop. Black music. The notes came from here and the bass lines from there. I imagined people dancing in hidden rooms. I was very hot.

Then I saw the OTEL.

The H was out in the red neon sign and the place had no other name. It was on a corner. The front door was open, so I went in. There was a small lobby, with fluorescent lights on the high ceilings and a fan beating slowly and doing nothing to the thick hot air. A fat whore sat on a couch watching TV. There was no reception counter, only a booth, like the kind you see outside movie houses. A thin man with yellow skin looked up at me. He had a cigarillo stuck in his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“I need a room,” I said. “What are the rates?”

“Three bills a night. In advance. A buck extra if you bring in a broad.”

“Three nights,” I said, and gave him a ten-dollar bill. He handed me back a dollar and the key to room 127.

“One flight up,” he said, without removing the cigarillo. A staircase behind the Coke machine led upstairs.

The room was narrow, with a bare yellow light on the high ceiling. The furnishings revealed themselves in bits and pieces: a bed, a bureau, a night table; a 1952 calendar with a picture of Miami Beach; a small sink; a pale-blue spread over the bed, with little white wool balls all over it.

No telephone.

No bath.

I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.

I noticed a wire mesh over the windows. A stain on the wall looked like Italy. I was very hot. I leaned back and was soon asleep.

In New Orleans.

Where Eden Santana lived her life.

Chapter 70

For two days, I searched for her through the streets of the city. I started with the telephone book (none in the room, none in the lobby, found them hanging in a post office), looking up all the Santanas in New Orleans, calling each of them, receiving baffled replies as I begged for information. After each call, I left my name and the number of the hotel. I remembered old movies and detective stories and the way private eyes relentlessly tracked the missing. I went to the gas company, asking for records on Eden Santana or James Robinson. The woman behind the counter looked at me as if I were crazed and then called over a superior.

“That’s confidential info’mation, son,” a hairless blue-eyed man said. “Why you want that?”

I couldn’t tell him, so I fled. Then I thought of going to the newspapers, the Times-Picayune or the States-Item, and asking to look at their clippings for James Robinson. If he was so bad, there must have been stories about him in the papers. But when I called up and asked if I could look at their clippings they wanted to know why I needed to see them and I said I was a student writing a term paper and a woman said, “Well, honey, whyn’t you git yaw pifessor to write you a letter, and we see what we can do …”

And, of course, I couldn’t go to the police.

By noon of the first day, I was exhausted and hot, sitting on a bench in Jackson Square. I was very thirsty. I saw a guy selling shaved ice dyed with juice and asked for cherry. It was sweet and cold and when I finished, I ordered another. They were three cents each. I gazed around the square and saw painters with easels setting up under the arcade and I wondered what would happen if I did find Eden and then thought, Well, maybe we could just live here.

For I had come to think of New Orleans as the most beautiful city I’d ever seen. Hour after hour, I walked through the cobble-stoned streets of the French Quarter, peering into dark entryways to the gardens within, with their fountains and plants and birds. I was filled with a sweet sense that they were from another century, the time of the French and the Spaniards, sealed off and protected from the present by their heavy iron gates. Leaning on the rough plaster walls, my body burning from the summer heat, I gazed into the cool interiors and thought of Eden’s people long ago, coming down the river to find husbands here for their women, while white dandies went to the quadroon balls and picked out their own women and installed them in these houses. Upstairs, behind the balconies with their scrolled ironwork, I could see bedrooms with high ceilings and they must have lain there in the hot summer afternoons, naked to the breeze or the stirred air made by ceiling fans. The rooms made me think of a painting in the Craven book, a naked woman lying on a couch, in the company of a black cat and a black woman. Except that here in New Orleans, in my version of the painting, the naked woman was black and the cat was white and an even blacker woman was looking on.

On that first night I wandered everywhere, drawn not only by Eden now, but by the city itself. Before going out, I made a drawing of her face and carried it with me as I started visiting the bars. I went down to Bourbon Street, where Dixieland music blared from the honky-tonks, and I talked to bartenders and doormen and whores, showing the picture, asking if they knew her.

As the hours passed, the air grew thicker, more feminine. Around midnight, I stood for a long while at the corner of St. Peter’s and Bourbon, listening to a white Dixieland band, looking at faces. There were hundreds of tourists and locals moving down the packed street, speaking a dozen dialects of English, talking in French and Spanish and German. There were a stream of faces: flabby, compressed, blank, sharp, beautiful. None was hers. I could smell coffee somewhere, and came again to Jackson Square, and saw lights along the Mississippi. I was very hungry. Across the street, beside the river, was a place with outdoor tables and black waiters. The Café du Monde. I didn’t know French but thought about my high school Latin and figured it out.

The Café of the World.

I crossed the street and sat down at an empty table. It was cooler there, with a breeze lifting off the black river. There were only two items on the menu: coffee and beignets. I didn’t know what beignets were but when the waiter came over I ordered them anyway.

“Chicory in da coffee?”

I didn’t know what chicory was either, but I said sure, why not? He came back with a plate of doughnuts without holes, covered with confectioners’ sugar. Beignets. I sipped the coffee, which was more powdery than ordinary coffee, the taste somehow grainy, and it was delicious. I gulped down the beignets, waved for more, and ate them in a kind of frenzy. Then I sat back, belching, swollen, as if exhausted by the sudden gorging. A riverboat went by with its lights all dazzling and bright and a band playing and people on deck and I wished that Eden was with me, drinking that special coffee, watching that river, sitting in the Café of the World.

I woke late and everything was wet: my body, the sheets, the walls. I reached for the towel beside the sink. It was damp. I got out of there in a hurry.

This time I followed the black people’s faces through the city until I came to a district where the architecture was different, the houses low and tin-roofed. If the doors were open, I could see all the way through them into the backyards. Black people sat on the front porches fanning themselves, drinking cold tea or lemonade, laughing in growly voices. I started showing them the drawing of Eden, but most were suspicious. Who was this white man and what he want? And then retreated into icy lemonade and muffled laughter.

Toward late morning I felt heavier, damper, hotter, oddly drowsy, thinking: Maybe she just told me a mess of lies. Maybe she wasn’t from New Orleans at all. Maybe she was from Memphis or Texas or some other goddamned place in America. Maybe she wasn’t even from the South. And if that was true (I thought, moving into laundries and barber shops and bars), then I’d ruined my life for a lie. And for sure, I would never find her.

And then a woman with sad yellow eyes and heavy breasts and a long pink housecoat looked at the picture and said, “Why, dat’s Eden.”

I felt weak.

“Do you know where she lives?” I said.

“Oh, she moved away long tahm ago.”

“How long?”

“Two, t’ree years?”

“Do you know where she went? I said.

“Feared ah don’t. Her man Mist’ Rob’son in trouble again?”

“James Robinson?”

“Yeah … Big ole handsome fella. But bad news.”

“It’s Eden I’m looking for. Not him.”

“You trah da choich?”

“What church?”

“Da Catlick choich. Up by da square. Da St. Louis Cathedral. Where else a Catlick goil might be found?”

I told the woman that if she saw Eden Santana, to tell her I was in New Orleans. I tore a corner off the drawing and wrote down the address of the hotel on Chartres Street. I handed it to her and thanked her. And then started for the Cathedral.

The sky grew dark and tumultuous. Trees filled and bent in the wind. People started hurrying along the streets. A few shopkeepers began to lower their shutters. A storm was coming, but I didn’t care. This trip, this journey, was not the result of a series of lies. Eden Santana really was from here. She really had been married to a man named James Robinson. And I was sure she was still there in New Orleans. Somewhere. Maybe round this next corner.

Jackson Square was deserted when I reached the cathedral. The main door was closed, but I found an open side door and went inside. I could smell the familiar traces of incense and burning wax; the odor made me feel like a Catholic. There was no Mass being celebrated, but there were a lot of women in black scattered around the pews, and a few black men, all of them praying in solitude. Off to the right, men and women waited on line outside a confessional booth.

I walked slowly down a side aisle to the altar, glancing at faces, hoping to see Eden. She wasn’t there. I bought a candle for a nickel and lit it and knelt at the altar rail, wishing I still believed enough to pray. I didn’t but my face felt as hot as the flame of the candle. I tried to understand the layout of the cathedral, so that I could get back into the sacristy and find a priest. There was a door over to the right, as there was back home at Holy Name. I crossed the front of the cathedral, genuflecting in the center out of old habit, and went into the sacristy.

There were rotting flowers on a table, an open closet holding cassocks and surplices for altar boys, boxes of candles from Benziger Brothers, New York. I walked over to the dark passageway that led behind the altar and saw a figure coming toward me. I felt weak. Small. As if I was an altar boy again, serving in contempt and fear. I needed something cold to drink.

The figure came closer, his face obscure in the unlighted passage. And then emerged into the dim light of the sacristy.

An old priest, dressed in black.

“Can I help you?” he said in a soft voice.

“Yes, yes, Father. I’m looking for someone … A friend. She’s Catholic. And I thought maybe you might have some address for her, a telephone number.”

“Well—”

I took out the drawing, which was smudged now, and told him Eden’s name and a little about her husband. The priest’s voice was whispery and dry, like dead leaves.

“Both names are common in New Orleans,” he said, “although Santana is a lot more … Catholic than Robinson.” He scratched his scalp, then gazed at his nails. They were dirty. “I would have to look though church records. Is there any, er, trouble in this?”

“No. No trouble. I’m a friend. She knows me.”

“Because I couldn’t, well—”

“If you could find her, don’t even tell me where she lives, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just tell her that I’m here and where I am. She can come to me.”

He took a pack of Camels from under his habit and lighted one. It was the first time I’d seen a priest smoke.

“You know, last year, someone came looking for one of my a parishioners.… And I was taken in. I gave my visitor the address and my poor parishioner is now serving twenty years at Angola. That’s the prison farm.… You’re not from New Orleans, are you?”

“No.”

He waited for me to tell him where I was from. But I said nothing. Something in me made it hard to lie to a priest, even if I didn’t believe what he believed anymore.

“You don’t have to tell me where you’re from,” he said. He took a deep drag and then made a smoke ring and gazed proudly at its perfection. “But maybe you should tell me what kind of trouble you’re in.”

“I can’t.”

“Nobody will know.”

“I don’t believe in confession anymore, Father.”

“But you did once.”

“Yes.”

“I might be able to help.”

“Thank you, Father. But I don’t think you can …”

“Is the woman part of the trouble?”

“No.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I’m in love with her.… That’s all.”

“That’s everything.”

“Father?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have a glass of water?”

The summer storm hammered at the city, all water and wind, with garbage cans going over and awnings flapping and broken umbrellas careening away. Dozens of people huddled in the entrance of the Cathedral, making nervous jokes about hurricanes and disasters. There was a tremendous ka-pow and the square was instantly bright with lightning and everybody backed up, laughing and afraid. We were all huddled together, blacks and whites joined in a common need for safety.

But I had to get out of there. The rain was blowing hard and cold. A shower of hailstones clattered across the square. And yet I felt as if I were being boiled. I shivered. I thought I was going to throw up. Another bolt of lightning split the sky over the river. My eyes burned.

I had to go.

To run.

To get into the room and the bed.

I broke out of the dense packed crowd and ran into the pelting rain, the water above my ankles.

And then the water rose and the sidewalk came with it and hit me in the face and I was gone.

Chapter 71

The fog was the color of piss and it came through the window and under the door of the high white room. Miles Rayfield stood in the cloud, wearing his white hat and his horn-rimmed glasses, his lips a bright red smear. And behind him came all the others: Sal and Max and Winnie, Buster and the Red Shadow, Captain Pritchett and Steve Canyon. As someone shouted: Everyone meet at the Café of the World!

O Bobby Bolden!

O Buz Sawyer!

I remember them all, from that visit to the fever zone: Dwight Eisenhower was there, and Mercado from Mexico. Hank Williams entered with John Foster Dulles, and there was Tons of Fun … and Dixie Shafer too. They came in a smiling progression, looking down at me sadly and without pity. Roberta arrived holding blue-veined white flowers. Turner showed up in a Hawaiian shirt. And that was Chief McDaid and this was Tintoretto … Freddie Harada held hands with Harrelson … and there, advancing and receding, smiling and frowning, touching my face and then wide-eyed in fear: Eden Santana.

Did she whisper to me about Joe Stalin? Did she urge me to read Ernest Hemingway? In the piss-colored fog, there was no precision. Boswell wept for Hank Williams while Eden touched my hand and then released it. I tried to rise … to join her … to dance … but my legs wouldn’t move. My hands were thick tubes. My father wept for my mother. Miles Rayfield waved in the fog. Then Eden came close and spoke to me softly in some language I didn’t know. The language of The People. The language of the Cane River. The language of Africa. I turned away, trying to conjure a cool green world, plunging deeper and deeper, going for the fresh water, past the gnawed bodies and the sharks, down into the whiteness …

And then opened my eyes.

Eden Santana was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at me. Her hair was brushed back. She was wearing a black blouse and a white skirt. Her eyes were glittery, intense.

“Hello, Michael,” she whispered.

“Eden …”

She came around to the side of the bed and took one of my hands in both of hers. Her hands were very cool.

“You’ve got malaria,” she said.

“Malaria?”

I looked at the room, its whiteness and emptiness. Saw a chair, a bureau, a night table.

“Where is this?”

“Charity Hospital. They brought you here two days ago. You collapsed on Chartres Street in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

“Two days ago?”

“That’s what the nurses tell me.”

Two days ago?

“How’d you know I was here?”

“Father Bienville came to my sister’s house. That’s where I’m stayin. He told me you were in New Orleans. You gave him the name of your hotel, remember? I went there and they said you hadn’t been in. And you owed a day’s rent. I paid it and got your stuff.”

She nodded at my flight bag, on the floor against the wall.

“Then I started calling around.”

“You call the police?”

She blinked. “No. And I didn’t call the Navy either — if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I squeezed her hand. And whispered: “I’ve got to get out of here, Eden. I’m in big trouble.”

“I know,” she said.

The doctor was from Honduras and he wasn’t happy about letting me leave the hospital. But I told him I was in the Air Force and would go right to my base doctor and tell him what was wrong. He gave me some tablets to take every four hours and then I got dressed and Eden led me down the white corridor past the white nurses and the white rooms filled with white people. I felt very light. As if I could fly. And then stopped when we reached the elevator bank. Eden squeezed my hand, as if trying to keep me from running.

Red Cannon was sitting in a chair beside the elevators, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his dress whites with an SP armband. There was a.45 caliber pistol in a holster hanging off his cartridge belt. He put out the cigarette in a metal ashtray and stood up. He looked from me to Eden. Then back to me.

“You okay, sailor?” he said, his voice quiet, even soft.

“I guess.… It’s malaria.”

“Well, they got a lot of experience with that over at Mainside.”

I looked at Eden but she kept her eyes on the floor.

“I don’t want to go back, Red.”

“Neither do I. But we’re both goin.”

“What if I refuse?” I said. “What if I just run?”

“Then I have to shoot you.”

“You aren’t kidding, are you?”

“Hit’s my job. I’d ruther bring you back walkin than bring you back in a box. But I promised Captain Pritchett I’d find you and bring you back. I did, and I will. So we can go now, sailor, nice and quiet.”

Eden stepped between us and for a moment, Red bristled, as if afraid she was trying to help me escape. There were a lot of people looking at us now. Patients and doctors and nurses.

“Can we talk about this downstairs, Mister Cannon?” she said quietly.

“Suits me.”

We went down in the elevator and out through the main lobby to the parking lot. A gray U.S. Navy car was parked near the entrance. It was empty, so I was certain that Red had come alone. I looked out at the streets beyond the lot.

“Don’t even think about runnin, sailor,” Red said.

I shrugged, and stared at the ground, feeling small and trapped and vaguely ashamed. I’d made a mess of things. Eden put her arm around my back. When I looked up, Red was lighting a cigarette and staring at some giant magnolias beyond the lot.

“Tell you what,” he said, still not looking at me. “I’ll give you till tomorrow morning. Sunday. Ten o’clock. You meet me in Jackson Square, right at the foot of that statue of Jackson, you hear me? We’ll go back together …”

Then he looked at me, took a drag, let the smoke leak from his mouth, and said: “If you don’t show, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

Chapter 72

Eden had seventy dollars and I had thirty-five, an immense fortune; we pooled the money and checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel. She handled everything. She registered us and paid cash in advance and led us across the hushed lobby under the crystal chandeliers to the elevators. All the while, she acted as if she were escorting a prince instead of a malarial AWOL sailor in filthy clothes. At the door of room 401, she slid the key into the lock and looked at me in an odd way and then opened the door and waved me in first.

The room was large and dim with a huge double bed and French doors leading to a small balcony. She turned on one muted light and then pulled down a corner of the bed coverings. On the walls, there were dark-brown landscapes in gilt frames and whorling velvet wallpaper out of another century. Then she took my face in her cool hands and kissed me gently. I held her tightly for a long time, trying not to cry, and then we fell together to the bed: everything in me entering her, midnight bus rides, beaches, nights at the shrimp place, the trailer, the woods; again we were on the flat rock in the middle of a nameless stream, the water Alabama red and flowing around us; again we were in the time before she taught me the names of birds and trees, animals and clouds; we were among thorns, smoke, vines, sand, petals, stones, clay, in blood too and kisses and magnolia and fear.

Eden, I said, mouth to her ear, sweat of my belly mixed with sweat of hers. I want you forever, Eden.

And she said, No, digging nails into my flesh, No, there’ll be nothing after this, biting my lower lip, saying This is all this is everything there is only this and this and this.

Until we rose and fell and twisted, hissing each other’s names, and dug heels and nails into silk sheets; and fell back.

Empty.

Cool.

Drained.

We ate shrimp and steak from room service and drank a bottle of champagne (my first) and she laughed at the way I held the dainty glass and then she belched loudly for a joke and I laughed too and we didn’t talk, didn’t say what we had to say, didn’t accuse, account, define; and then were in bed again, more desperately than ever, full of loss and departure. I wanted to drink the darkness, the champagne darkness of Eden Santana.

You must go, she said. You must find out. With me you would live only a retreat. My retreat.

Then I was lost again, in some gray and chilly corridor, with the piss-colored fog seeping into my skull, hearing music, Charlie Parker and Gregorian chant, Webb Pierce and Little Richard, bagpipes from the Antrim fields and drums from the Cane River, and I knew what was beyond the fog: the endless cemetery where love was buried.

You must go.

Fear shaped itself in the fog, fear with the same dense volume as desire, fear that could grip me and smother me, and I was afraid then of dying the way love dies, to be placed in some stainless-steel drawer where there was no loving woman. The fog advanced.

You must find out.

And almost dying, I rose in final anger, and grabbed life.

It’s all right, child. Don’t you worry none.

Eden Santana: with a cool cloth to my brow, kissing me, handing over tablet and water, the glass cold in my hand. Gray light leaked through the shutters. I heard the thin distant sound of a saxophone, announcing closing time in a honky-tonk. She eased back into bed beside me and held my hand. Her dark skin felt very cool.

Don’t die, she said. Don’t die on your own. Don’t die of fear or doubt or darkness, child. You got too much living to do yet. You gotta go from here, from me, and remember that the going is the easy part. It’s the living that’s hard. I’ll be with you wherever you go now. You know that, don’t you? But you must go. Not go back. Go on. Put your hair beside the hair of a thousand women. Kiss a thousand mouths. Give them all what we gave each other. Love them all and let them love you back. Then you’ll know I’ll always be there. They won’t know, but you will. Because when it’s over and you have made love and she has got what she wanted and you have got what you wanted, you will still be alone, Michael. Still loving me. As I love you. Wherever we are.

Her voice was a whisper in the dark high-ceilinged room. She was certain: with me she’d finished things. I was no longer what I was the night I first saw her on the bus, and wanted her, and felt her hands in the dark. I wasn’t that boy anymore. But I was still only a perhaps.

So you’ll go from here like a man, she whispered. And you won’t be afraid. Not of the world, not of the Navy. They can’t do anything permanent to you, Michael, no matter how hard they try, just as long as you’re alive. So kiss me one last time now. You gotta go all too soon. Gotta go like a man. Got to go on and live.

Chapter 73

I am driving through the Gulf night, the radio playing in its permanent present tense. It is four in the morning. Pensacola is behind me. The news announcer says that the Attorney General of the United States has appeared before still another grand jury. The Challenger space shuttle has been delayed again because of shoddy work. A new strain of AIDS has arrived from Africa. The weather will be hot with scattered showers. Suddenly, the news is over and Frank Sinatra is singing. In the South once ruled by Hank Williams and Webb Pierce.

The song is old. Out of the fifties. When Sinatra was aching for Ava Gardner and proving that even artists can be fools. I begin to sing along, as if old dead skin is being peeled away, and for the first time in years, I can feel the emotions behind the banal words. The window is open to the warm night. I see houses, shopping centers and factories where there was once only emptiness. And I fill with the woman I loved across all the years, the woman who went with me to all those other beds, and into three marriages, the first and best loving woman among all the women I’ve loved.

I say her name out loud.

And again.

And once more.

Eden.

On this road, years before, Red Cannon took me back to the Navy. I went without struggle. For the first hour out of New Orleans, he drove in silence, the.45 slung to his hip. In Gulfport, I looked out at the pine woods and the little streams and the great stretches of swamp. I felt forlorn. As we turned down to the beach, we could see thunderheads over the ocean. Then Red said, “Need to take a leak?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“Figured. Those goddamned malaria pills do it to you.”

He pulled across the highway into a gas station and sat there while I went around the side to the men’s room. For a moment, I thought about running. But I’d given Red my word. And I knew that if I ran, I’d be running for the rest of my life.

When I came out, Red was leaning on the fender of the car, drinking a Coke. His back was to me. He must have known I wouldn’t run. I came around to his side. He was staring out past the beach at the sea. The SP band was off his arm and the cartridge belt and holster were gone from his hip. They were lying on the front seat, the.45 still in the holster. We had become two sailors heading back to base. He drained the Coke bottle and dropped it in a trashcan, still gazing at the Gulf.

“Wish I was out there now,” he said.

I smiled. “Me too.”

Red looked at me for the first time, and shook his head.

“You’ll get there,” he said. “Soon enough.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Not from where I’m going.”

He curled his lip.

“Where in the hell you think you’re goin, sailor?”

“Portsmouth prison?”

“Shit,” he said, and sneered. “You ain’t important enough for Portsmouth prison.”

He got in behind the wheel and I slid in on the passenger side. He lifted the gun and cartridge belt into the back seat, then started the car and pulled out onto the road. He glanced at me in a disappointed way, as if I were just another one of the people who had failed him.

“You’re lucky, sailor. That jarhead’s okay. Just a busted head, which won’t ever do a Marine no damage. You’re lucky for another thing too: the captain likes you, for some goddamned reason that’s beyond mah ken.”

I shut off the radio.

Remembering that Red was right. Pritchett called me before a captain’s mast, which was less than a court martial, allowed me to blame the malaria, restricted me to the base for a week. I shipped out a few weeks later and truly began my long hard run through the world. I don’t know what happened to Red Cannon. I never heard another word about Bobby Bolden. I don’t know what became of Becket or Harrelson or Boswell, Captain Pritchett or Chief McDaid. Max and I wrote to each other for a while, and I saw Sal once when I was on leave in New York. But then the addresses changed, as they do when you’re young, and we moved around some more, and we lost all contact. I started three different letters to Miles Rayfield’s mother, but never could get the words right and gave it up. Out at sea, waiting to go ashore in Cannes, I got one letter from Dixie Shafer saying she was selling the Dirt Bar because it just wasn’t as much fun anymore. I sent a card back, but she too vanished into the darkness. I suppose some of them are dead, casualties of the cigarettes or the whiskey or the Nam. The others live on, full of golden stories.

But as the years slipped by, I would sometimes hear a fragment of a forgotten song, or feel a breeze on a deserted beach; I’d see a river on a summer morning or a house trailer at the side of a road or a woman in red shoes — and I’d want to know what happened to Eden Santana. And across all those years I was afraid to find out. I never went back to New Orleans. I didn’t want to learn that she had grown old. I didn’t want to hear that she had made her peace with James Robinson. I didn’t want to believe that she was dead. But in a thousand places and a thousand dreams she lived on in me as she had said she would one fevered morning long ago, under the chandeliers of the Royal Orleans.

O Eden!

Suddenly, illuminated briefly in the high beams, I see a sailor in dress whites. I haven’t picked up a hitchhiker in twenty years, but I slow down, the car’s momentum taking me past him. I stop and wait and see him in the rearview mirror, running toward me, an overnight bag in his hand. I unlock the door on the passenger side.

“Hey, thanks, man,” he says. He has the two pathetic stripes of a seaman deuce, a sunburned face, crooked teeth. A kid.

“Where you going?” I ask, pulling onto the highway.

“New Orleans,” he says.

“It’s a good town.”

“The best,” he says. “My girl’s there.”

“So’s mine,” I say, driving fast across the dark tidal fields of the Gulf. My heart is racing. My palms are damp. I am no longer old.