Up in Honey's Room

Fifteen

Carl phoned Louly every week at Cherry Point, North Carolina, the marine air base, so he wouldn’t have to write letters. He’d listen to her get on a subject like marching, how marines loved to march and had their own snappy way of calling cadence, more like sounds than words, not making any sense. She said, “Why is marching so important? In boot you march everywhere you go. Even now, visitors come up from Washington, congressmen, we’re out on the parade passing in review, doing right and left obliques, to the rear march, showing the visitors, goddamn it, we’re marines.”

Louly sounding like a dedicated jarhead.

“We even marched a lot,” Carl said, meaning the Seabees. “You’re in the service, it doesn’t matter which one, they march your ass off. I think it’s to get you doing what you’re told on the beat. You’re in combat, you get ordered to move, you don’t stop and think, you move.”

So his wife would think he was as Semper Fi as she was.

Toward the end of the conversation Louly would say, “You staying out of trouble?”

Carl would say, “I don’t have time to get in trouble. How about you?”

“We stay in the barracks we play hearts or read. We go out, we have a few beers and listen to gyrines try their dopey lines on us. The officers who’ve been in combat think they’re hot stuff and act real bored. I tell them my husband’s shot more people who wanted to kill him than any of you, without even leaving Oklahoma.”

“What about the two Nips I got? On an island supposed to be secured?”

That time Louly said, “Don’t worry, I tell them about your scoring a couple of Nips.”

He’d feel good after talking to Louly. Her enlistment was up in the summer and he’d tell her he couldn’t wait to have his sweetie home. He’d start looking for an apartment in Tulsa.

This time, talking to him in Detroit, Louly said, “You staying out of trouble?”

He said what he always did about not having time, but with pictures of Honey Deal flashing in his mind, Honey wearing her black beret, in the car and at dinner, Honey’s eyes on him as she sipped her dry martini, straight up.

Louly said over the phone, “I love you, Carl,” and he said, “I love you too, sweetie,” remembering not to call her honey.

There were two anchovy olives in Honey’s martini.

She said, “I take one of the olives in my mouth, like this, crush it between my teeth and sip the ice-cold martini, the silver bullet. Mmmmmm.”

He said, “They get you feeling good in a hurry.”

“Yes, they do.”

“If you aren’t careful.”

She said, “Even if you are.”

Her eyes smiling at him.

He dropped Honey off at her apartment after they had supper. She thanked him. Hoped she’d see him again sometime. She didn’t ask if he wanted to come up.

See?

She was fun to be with, that’s all. She flirted a little bit with her eyes, certain things she said, but that didn’t mean he’d ever go all the way with her. He had a good-looking wife who’d shot two men in her time and taught twelve hundred gunnies to love their .30-caliber Browning. Louly was all the girl he had ever wanted, and had sworn at the time to remain faithful to her. He had no intention of ever committing adultery with Honey. If that’s what she was game for and it looked like it might happen, Honey being what you’d call a free spirit, with bedroom eyes and that lower lip waiting there for him to bite, the girl acting like there was nothing wrong with free love.

Carl told himself there was no possibility of his ever going too far. Even if he’d be seeing more of her now. Pretty much every day, now that he’d lost his guide to Detroit, Kevin Dean reassigned to bars blowing up.

He phoned Honey from the FBI office where he’d spent most of the day. She sounded busy but calm answering questions thrown at her by salesgirls, sounding like she was in charge over at Hudson’s Better Dresses; so all he said was his plans had changed and he would like to talk to her about what they’d be doing. He could give her a ride home after work, save her taking the streetcar.

Honey said, “Carl, you’re my hero.”

He said, “Shit,” once he’d hung up.

At the hotel cigar counter he picked up a copy of the Detroit News and went through the paper until he found Neal Rubin’s column. Carl saw the heading and said “Jesus Christ” out loud and then read about himself.

Neal Rubin filled the rest of his column with Esther Williams, telling what it was like to have lunch with Esther at the London Chop House. He called it “The next best thing to going swimming with her.”

Honey got in the Pontiac saying, “Did you see Neal Rubin’s piece? I think he’s great, his style is so . . . conversational. He doesn’t act like he knows everything, the way most of those guys sound, with their inside stuff. You notice you were the lead item? You upstaged Esther Williams.”

“I saw it,” Carl said.

“Does it blow your cover?”

“I never had any to begin with.”

“I could tell it was you in the picture.”

“How? The guy shot me from behind.”

“The way you wear your hat,” Honey said, and sang the next lines to him in a low voice. “‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me.’ What’s the new thing you’ll be doing?”

“It’s Kevin. They put him on an investigation that came up.” Driving out Woodward in traffic, he told her about it.

“If a bar owner doesn’t want to do business with these guys that supply jukeboxes, mob guys, they try to intimidate the owner, blow up his bar. They aren’t experts at handling dynamite, they leave clues. The mob also tries to sell the bar Canadian whiskey they’ve heisted, no tax stamps on the bottles in violation of federal law. The FBI gets on it and that’s what Kevin’s doing, poking around in bars that were blown up and smell awful.”

Honey said, “Are we going to have dinner?”

“Yeah, if you want.”

“Let’s have a drink and talk first, at my place.”