Loving Women (10 page)

I opened the door to the dumpster. A foul odor rose from it. I stepped closer and objects began to reveal themselves: automobile tires, broken pieces of metal, a lot of paper torn in strips, dry palm fronds. But there was a wet jumble of other stuff that I couldn’t make out. The smells were suddenly more distinct: rusting iron, burnt paper, rubber, decay. Not city odors. But they didn’t make me feel I was in the country either. And I thought:
It’s a Navy smell. I’ll only smell this in the Navy. I’ll remember this mixture of smells all my life
. And I did.

Then I saw lights bobbing in the darkness on the far side of the field. They moved left, then stopped. I picked up the rifle. The lights moved again, stopped, then were moving again and getting larger. I could hear a car engine now, and then the lights were very bright and the jeep was fixing me with its high beams, stopping a dozen feet away. I held the rifle at the ready and tried to look tough.

“Who goes there?” I said. Like in a bad movie.

No answer. A man stepped out of the car on the passenger side, but I couldn’t see him clearly in the glare of the lights. He came forward. It was Cannon. Carrying a clipboard.

“You’d be dead by now, boy,” he said. He came very close, fixing me with those lashless eyes. “You sposed to ask for a password, boy, and if it ain’t forthcomin, you shoot.”

“Nobody gave me a password. Sir.”

“Then whyn hell didn’t you
ask
for one, boy?”

“I just got to this base.
Sir
. I don’t know the routine.
Sir
. I was—”

“Don’t explain, boy.
Admit
.”

“Admit what?”

“Admit you done fucked up, shitbird! You are tellin me you went to a United States military post, on
duty
, without askin anyone what you was sposed to do. You didn’t get a password. You didn’t do your
duty
, boy, cause you never did find out what it
was
.”

I said, “If you were a Russian, I couldn’t do my duty anyway. This goddamned rifle doesn’t shoot! So what’s the big deal?”

Cannon blinked. Then he turned to the driver of the jeep, still out of sight behind the glare of the headlights.

“You hear that, Infantino? You hear what this shitf’brains just said?”

“No, sir.”

“He said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”

I could see veins pulsing in Cannon’s neck.

“So it looks like we got us another wiseass punk from New York, don’t it, Infantino?”

Infantino didn’t answer.

“And when you scratch a New York wise guy, whatta you find trying to get out? You find a New York big shot. And all we need is some seaman deuce thinks he’s a big shot. Isn’t that right, Mister Infantino?” Then he got angry at Infantino’s silence. “Are you
deaf
, boy? Do you
hear
me, boy?”

“Yes, sir, I hear you.”

“Well, what should we do with this big shot, this Mister Wiseass Brooklyn New York?”

I’d never told him I was from Brooklyn, so I knew he’d examined my papers.

“That’s obviously up to you, sir,” Infantino said from behind the brights. His voice was raspy, familiar.

“I tell you what I’d
like
to do,” Cannon said. “I’d like to shitcan him right out of this man’s Navy. Couple years in the brig, a D.D., and gone.” He sighed. “But this new damned Navy, you can’t do it like that anymore.”

He handed me the clipboard and a ballpoint pen. “Sign here,” he said, and pointed to a box on a ruled sheet of paper. The form listed the various posts on the base and the times. Each of the other guys on duty had signed in a box on the right. I did the same. Cannon’s fingernails were neatly trimmed and polished.

“At ease,” he said. I relaxed. Then he squinted at me and changed his tone and barked: “Tain-SHUN!” I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. “Now you stay like that till yore relieved, wiseass,” he said. “You even
dream
about takin a rest, I’ll put you on report.”

He turned on his heel, walked quickly to the jeep and got in. They moved off quickly. Briefly, I glimpsed the other sailor: dark-haired and ruddy-faced. In dungarees.

It was much darker after the jeep left. I stood at attention until the lights of the jeep merged with the lights of the main gate, then I squatted beside the dumpster with the rifle on my lap. Fuck you, Cannon. I didn’t sleep, but I wasn’t awake either; my anger was like an extra pulse. I tried something I did back home when the furies got to me. I made my mind blank. Like a blackboard after it’s washed. I saw Cannon, the dumpster, even
The Bluejackets’ Manual
on the slate. Then I pulled a wet cloth across it. Twice. And they were gone. I stared at the empty slate. It was blank and pure, like peace.

Then I came suddenly awake. The lights of the jeep were moving again. I stood up and brushed off my dungarees. I snapped to attention, the rifle on my shoulder. My heart thumped. Maybe they had those field glasses that let you see in the dark. Maybe they had photographs of me goofing off. Then the jeep arrived with a squeal of brakes. Infantino jumped from behind the wheel without shutting off the engine. He came right up to me and handed me two doughnuts in a napkin and a cardboard cup of coffee.

“Fuck
him
,” he said, and then hurried back to the jeep without a word and drove away.

Chapter

11

I
t is morning on the Gulf and I’m at the window in a bathrobe I bought in Tokyo, staring out at the gray ocean. A storm is coming. There are some young people on the beach, spreading a blanket in defiance of the message from the sky. One is a girl in a flowery bikini, with long legs and beautiful breasts. A boy makes a fuss over her. I am sure he wants her to stay with him forever. But they each have a half century ahead of them now, full of perils and temptations. To survive at all is difficult enough. To run the course together will require a miracle. When they are my age I will be dead, and I wish I could go down there and tell them one sentence that they could carry as a talisman. Words so clean and perfect that they would protect those kids from all danger. But nothing comes. One couple runs into the surf. The girl in the bikini touches the boy’s face and he moves forward clumsily to kiss her cheek. It’s the morning of their lives. And then the sentence forms itself:
Watch it
.

I dress slowly, and move again into that first morning at Ellyson Field, when I awoke feeling drugged, my mouth sour, my bones rubbery after two hours sleep. I hear the sounds of all Navy mornings: shouts of
reveille, reveille
, groans of protest, and
drop yore cocks and grab yore socks
. And over and over, the slamming of those locker doors.

Then I was up, nodding at strangers, saying nothing, stretching and squatting to force some bone or muscle into my body. I showered and dried myself, the floor of the head wet and slippery and men at the sinks scraping at beards. They rubbed their faces, their
skin, their bellies as if they were mad at their own flesh. Some hummed tunes, others grumbled in solitude. Some were tattooed. Many were matted with hair. I am sure I dressed in the uniform of the day: dungarees, black shoes, white hat. I am sure I made my bed, and felt ready for the challenge of the morning.

Then a short sunburnt muscle-bound man came over. His nose was peeling and he grinned in a crooked way.

“You’re from New York, I hear.”

“Yeah. Brooklyn.”

“I’m Max Pilsner. The East Side. You goin’ to chow?”

It was as easy as that. A hello in the morning and I had a friend. I don’t make new friends anymore. There have been too many fakers, too many disappointments, and too many real friends have died. Max Pilsner was my friend, and it is a measure of how far we’ve traveled that I no longer know if he is dead or alive. That morning, Max stepped out before me into the steamy Florida air. His arms hung straight from his shoulders. His waist was narrow. And he walked in a series of rolling movements, like gears shifting. He made walking seem like a brilliant performance. All around us, sailors hurried along in the half darkness, their cigarettes bobbing like fireflies. We walked beyond the Supply Shack to the chow hall, where the smell of toast and hash filled the air. Max told me he was a mechanic in Hangar Three, and had come here straight from mechanics school in Memphis and he was hoping for sea duty, anything, to get out of Ellyson Field.

“I’d even join the Fleet Marines,” he said. “And they’re fighting in Korea. The medics, anyway …”

The only good thing about Ellyson was that there were some decent guys here, he said, New Yorkers
and
shitkickers. “They’re all nuts.” He was telling me this as we waited on line under the eaves along the side of the chow hall. We passed a single piece of graffiti:
Find it hard getting up in the morning? Slam a window on it
. Through the window, I could see Waleski sitting with other sailors at one of the long wooden tables. Freddie Harada was with two other Orientals. The morning sounds were louder now: metal trays, silverware clattering against metal, cups clunking, coffee urns hissing, guys on KP yelling at one another in the steam, all mixed up with the sound of helicopters beating their way through the morning air.

“Who’s this Bobby Bolden?”

“The best,” Max said. “Greatest horn player in the Navy. Maybe in the whole friggin South. Now that’s a guy that was in the Fleet Marines. A medic. He got wounded, too, in Korea. Won a bunch of medals. Know what’s great about him? He doesn’t give a shit. Nobody can scare him. Nobody. So nobody bothers him. Bobby Bolden …”

He showed me the apartment above the mess hall, where Bobby Bolden lived with all the other Negro sailors, most of them mess cooks. And he pointed out a chief petty officer named Francis Xavier McDaid, standing near the door in starched suntans. Red Cannon was bad enough, Max said, one of those Old Salts who remembered when men were men and ships were wood, but McDaid was Red’s boss and infinitely worse. We had our trays full of scrambled eggs and bacon now. I looked at the chief. He had a broad flat face and a deep tan. He seemed to be staring right at me. I wondered whether Red Cannon had told him about me. Put me in some New York Wise Guy category. We sat down. I turned to look at the door. And saw a black man coming in, powerfully built, with coffee-colored skin. Even from the distance, I could see that he had green eyes. Max told me that this was Bobby Bolden.

“He’s only got one major problem,” he said. “Pussy.”

“Isn’t that everybody’s problem?”

“White pussy.”

I was eating quickly now. Max looked at me.

“That bother you?” Max said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it before.”

“Down here, they lynch colored guys for it. Maybe that’ll help you think about it.”

“Come on, they don’t lynch people anymore, do they?”

“Only when they catch them.”

Bobby Bolden passed through the line like some visiting prince. The black mess cooks cracked wise with him, heaped his tray with food. Then Bolden walked past us down the aisle, nodding at Max, and sat among a group of whites, without saying a word to any of them.

“See what I mean? There’s empty tables all over, but he sits with the worst rednecks on the base. Just to break their balls. Now watch.”

Without finishing their breakfasts, five men got up and left the table. Three of them moved to other tables. Two walked right out
of the chow hall. Bobby Bolden showed no emotion. He just sat there eating.

“Does he have
one
white girl? Or a bunch of them?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, “I don’t follow him around. I’m allergic to gunshots.” He smiled. “But there’s a Wave who works out at Mainside, I know he’s got
her
. A real good broad, very funny. Not my type, understand? But truly tremendous tits.”

I laughed. “I guess you can’t blame him then.”

“I can blame him for being stupid,” Max said. “Down here, they kill colored guys for
lookin
’ at white broads.”

I sipped my coffee. It tasted brackish. I said, “You tell him that?”

“Hey, how you gonna tell him? What do I do? Go up to the guy and say, ‘Hey, Bobby, you’re a
nigger
, you know? And they have
segregation
down here. So it ain’t
safe
for you to be screwing a white broad.’ I mean, Bobby Bolden was a hero in Korea, two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, a whole shitload of other medals. How am I gonna tell
him
what to do?” He glanced around the hall. “Besides, he just don’t give a shit.”

I looked down at Bobby Bolden again, remembering the sound of the horn. A human being playing the blues on a bright lonesome New Year’s afternoon. Telling everybody who’d listen about the boulevard of broken dreams. He ate slowly and deliberately, in what seemed to be permanent solitude.

Chapter

12