Loving Women (4 page)

“More sugar, Fifi,” Harry said to the girl. “More! More! Pour it on!”

“I am ZO unhappy, Adolfo,
chèri
,” she was saying to the guy on
the other end of the telephone line. Fifi.
Chèri
. She must be French. “DINNER,” she said. Her right hand was playing with her blond hair. The left hand caressed the telephone. She had a star on her left cheek. Her breasts rose fiercely off her round compact body. “Just the two of us.…”

Then I heard the horn honking outside and I finished my coffee and folded the newspaper and hurried back to the bus.

“Happy New Year,” the driver said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Happy New Year.”

That year we still called black people Negroes, and there was a Negro soldier with pomaded hair sitting in the aisle seat beside mine. He stood to let me in and I nodded at him. He looked like an old welterweight named Tommy Bell, who once knocked down Sugar Ray Robinson. Five other Negro men were dozing on the wide back seat. Two leaned against each other. Another sat with his arms folded. The bus was now full.

I looked up and saw the driver standing beside the steering wheel, looking down the aisle. His lips moved as if he were counting passengers. He leaned forward and said something to the sleeping Negro in the first seat. There was no reaction. The driver squeezed the man’s shoulder, and when the soldier didn’t move, the driver shook him, and then the soldier was suddenly awake, backing away with his hands up, like a fighter. The driver shook his head sadly and whispered to the man. He stood up, blinking, and looked down the aisle. Now the driver was waking the large black woman in the third row. The soldier jerked a duffel bag off the overhead rack, slung it onto his shoulder and came stomping down the aisle.

“Now, where in
hell
my spose to sit?” he said loudly. “Huh?” He turned to the driver. “Answer me that! There ain’t no seats back here!”

“Jest a minute,” the driver said. The Negro woman was now in the aisle, like a giant plug. Her jaw was loose. She was mumbling. The driver lifted down two shopping bags from the rack.

“I ain’t gonna stand all the way to no Atlanta!” the soldier shouted. “I jest ain’t gonna do it!”

“Hold on,” the driver said. “Jest hold yer hosses.” He waited until the woman took the shopping bags, then he allowed her to lead the way down the aisle. The driver’s eyes squinted; his face seemed more yellow as he scanned the faces in the rear.

“This is boolshit!” the soldier said. “Goddam one hunnid pissent
boolshit
!”

The driver turned harder. “Take it easy, soldier. This ain’t my idea. It’s the law.”

“The law …”

The man next to me watched in silence. His hands clenched and unclenched. “We crossin’ the Mason-Dixon lahn,” he said to me. “Or like we calls it, the
Smith and Wesson
lahn.” He smiled in a bitter way. “Some country, ain’t it?”

The driver told a thin, redheaded white woman to get up and sent her to the third-row seat vacated by the large Negro woman. Then he helped the redhead take down a cheap plastic suitcase, tied together with a stocking. The redhead took it from him quickly, shielding it with her body as if ashamed of its condition. The driver turned to me.

“Okay, sailor,” he said. “You’re goin’ to the first row and this soldier’s takin’ your place.” I started to get up. The pomaded Negro shook his head. “Some shit,” he said. I reached up for my sea bag. I said to the driver: “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“The South,” he said wearily.

There was a white man sleeping against the window in the first row. He was an older man, maybe forty, with thinning blond hair, a long nose, a bony face. He was wearing a checked sport jacket. A black raincoat was drawn tightly up to his chin like a blanket. He had his shoes off and there was a flight bag at his feet. I sat down and the bus finally pulled out. Soon we were back in the rhythm of the road. Dark forests. Distant houses. I thought about Harry Sparrow and Fifi. In bed together.

All I needed was another useless hard-on. So I shook Fifi out of my mind, and watched the road and the ease and skill of the driver as he moved the huge bus around slower-moving trucks. I didn’t know how to drive. I was from Brooklyn, where nobody I knew had a car. Including my father. We used the subway to go places. In boot camp, guys laughed when I told them this.
You cain’t drahv? Shit, man, what’s yore p’oblem?
I tried to explain, but they couldn’t believe it; most of them started driving when they were twelve, thirteen. I guess I admitted I couldn’t drive to avoid talking about the more terrible failure: The dark secret of my virginity.

• • •

Somewhere near Greeneville, the driver picked up a small microphone clamped to the dashboard. He glanced at his watch, then flicked a switch.

In a hoarse voice, he said, “Ladies and gennulmen, in exactly ten seconds, it’ll be January the first, nineteen hunnid an fipty three.”

I heard some applause, but when I glanced around most of the white people were asleep. It was hard to see the Negroes in the dark. Back home, everybody was celebrating, drinking and shouting while Guy Lombardo’s band played “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio. The worst band in the history of the world. The people were probably celebrating because they wouldn’t have to hear Guy Lombardo for another whole year. My father was probably down the block in Rattigan’s, somber and silent while the other men were singing loud and drinking hard; my brothers were banging pots on the fire escape and throwing snowballs at drunks.

And somewhere tonight
, I thought,
right this second, while this bus takes me where I’ve never been, right now Maureen is with her accountant. She’s at a party with him. Sitting on a couch. Tony Bennett is singing
“Because of You”
on the phonograph. She’s wearing her blue dress. Or maybe the white one. The accountant is holding her left hand. Or maybe the right. He stands up and she follows. The room is dark, a small lamp on in a corner, maybe thirty watts, maybe red. He starts dancing with her. She moves close to him. In the dark, does she think her accountant is me?

“Here, sailor,” the driver said, and passed me a pint bottle of whiskey without taking his eyes off the road. The dark-brown glass of the bottle was cool in my hand. There was no label.

“Thanks,” I said, unscrewing the cap and taking a belt. “Happy New Year.” I didn’t much like whiskey, the way it burned when it went down, the way it stayed in you so that you reeked of it for days after you’d drunk it. In that, at least, I was like my father. We both preferred beer. But I drank from the unmarked bottle anyway. It was a New Year’s gift. A long way from home. I felt it open like a warm blossom in my belly.

“Yeah, happy New Year,” the driver said. “An’ gib some to the gent nex’ to you, swabbie.”

The man next to me was now awake. He nodded in greeting as I handed him the pint. His hands were very thin, with veins standing up like blue ropes.

“Thanks, buddy,” the man said.

“Thank the driver. It’s his whiskey.”

“Maybe we oughtta git off this thing. All we need is a drunk bus driver.”

“He doesn’t look the type,” I said.

“They never do.”

The man took a second belt of the whiskey, then gave it back to me and I passed it on to the driver, thanking him.

“Hi,” the man beside me said. “I’m Jack Turner.” I told him my name and we shook hands in a cramped way.

“Where you headin’, sailor?”

“Pensacola.”

“Why, hell’s bells, so’m I.”

“You Navy?”

“Yeah, bo’,” he said. “Seventeen years, man an’ boy.” He dug into the bag at his feet, found another pint bottle and cracked the seal. “Three more years and I’m done. The Big Two-Oh. Twenty years in this man’s Navy. Then it’s back to the world.”

I waited; this was the first Old Salt I’d talked to man-to-man. In boot camp, the salts were all ball-breakers: yelling, shouting, marching us around the grinder till we dropped. Maybe it was because Turner wasn’t wearing a uniform. I don’t know. But he seemed okay.

“You must’ve seen a lot of the world,” I said. “In seventeen years, I mean.”

He handed me the bottle. Four Roses. I took a swig, but held it in my mouth for a while before letting it go down.

“Yeah,” he said. “I been some places. Seen some shit. But places ain’t the world. Not the real world.”

The whiskey was spreading out of the core of my stomach now.

“What is?”

Turner glanced out the window into the darkness. “A woman. Kids. A house. A car … All that boring shit. That’s the world … Pass that bottle on to the driver. He’s a good ole boy.”

I tapped the driver’s elbow and offered him the Four Roses. But he shook his head no and smiled. I handed the bottle back to Turner.

“You don’t travel in uniform?” I said.

Turner laughed. “Hell, no. Not if I got money to pay my way. Maybe hitchhikin’, the uniform’s an advantage. But you got the money, peel that sucker off,” he said, pinching the sleeve of my blue jumper. “I’ll tell you why. People see a sailor, they always
laugh. They think sailors are crazy and crazy people strike most people as funny. And you know sumpin? They’re right. Sailors
are
crazy. You’re out on some leaky tub, with all that goddamned ocean around you. For weeks, months, years, like we was in the war. I mean
years
. Nothin to see all around you but ocean and sailors. Crazy goddamn bad-ass sailors. All goin crazy. Some goin queer. Until finely, they come home to port, crazy and horny, and they go
ape
shit. Truly fucking crazy-ass apeshit. You ever see a sailor walking along sober on a Saturday night? You ever see one in church? Or in a lib’ry? Fuck no. You see sailors fallin down in the street, you see them laughin and pukin and rollin in piss and sawdust. You see them gettin locked up. And you know somethin? Nobody ever gets mad. They see jarheads doin this shit, they get pissed off. They see some army guy grab a girl by the ass, they want t’ lynch him, even if he aint a nigger. They see some flyboy gettin fucked up in public, they write to the gahdamned newspaper.” He took a belt from the bottle. “But they see a sailor with blood all over his whites, fallin on his ass in the gutter, with a hooker on his shoulders and puke on his fuckin shoes, and they
laugh
.”

I laughed too. “I see what you mean.”

But Turner wasn’t laughing. “You see, I don’t like people to laugh. Because sailors aint funny. Sailors are the saddest, most fucked-up, most lonely-ass people on God’s pore lonesome fuckin earth.”

He look a longer swig this time, swallowing it slowly.

“So I travel in civvies,” he said. “Wherever I end up stationed, I get me a locker club first thing, and when I go ashore, I change into civvies. I don’t want anyone laughin at me.”

Neither did I. I liked Turner for that and I wished he was going all the way to Ellyson Field with me. I’d have someone to talk to, to show me the ropes. He was an ordnance man, first class, going to Mainside to show young pilots what guns looked like. He was happy about the billet too. It could’ve been Shit City. Norfolk. Or it could’ve been another aircraft carrier and he hated aircraft carriers.
There’s four ways of doing things in this man’s Navy
, Turner said:
The easy way, the hard way, the Navy way, and the
Midway. The
Midway
was his last aircraft carrier.

He was quiet for a while and then he asked me if I had a girl. I said no, and he looked at my face and saw something there, I guess, and said, “That bad, huh?” I told him that the truth was I
got a Dear John letter while I was in Bainbridge and he passed me the bottle and I sipped and my stomach burned and I was very hungry and he said, well, it was better to get a Dear John early than late and I shouldn’t feel so damned bad because everybody gets one, sooner or later, every sailor gets one, and he took a sip and so did I, and he told me he had gotten five Dear Johns in his life and three of them were from wives. I said that was terrible and he said Nah, wasn’t so terrible, they were right, probably, I was no bargain, no sailor is. But I loved them all. Right up to the minute it was over. Tell me about them, I said. And he did.

Chapter

3

What Turner Told Me

J
udy, she was the first, sixteen and red-haired and saucy and hot. Damn she was hot. Rub that gal’s elbow and she’d come. Hot, brother. I married her in 1938 in San Diego, just before they shipped me to the Far East. She was from Shreveport, down Luziana way, staying in Dago with her sister, who was married to a bosuns mate. The bosuns mate was out at sea and I met Judy in a sailor joint with her sister and we went home together, the three of us, and we woke up together too. But Judy was mine from the gitgo and I had some leave for a week and we got married. I was on a cruiser passing Guam when I got a letter saying she was knocked up and I should start picking out baby names. I shoulda known better, I guess. Because she tole me she was too damn lonely there in San Diego and she wanted to go home to this little place near Shreveport where her folks sharecropped, go home there and have the baby there, and I wrote back, Sure, okay, that sounds fine. Well, that Pacific tour was eighteen months. This was before the war and we just went all over the damned place, and when I got home and took the bus from Dago to Shreveport, the little boy was crawlin and Judy was sleepin with the sheriff. Everybody knew it too. They knew it in the town. Her folks knew it. And when I went into that little shitass town, six miles from Shreveport, everybody looked at me, like theyuz wonderin what I was gonna do, and they had this look on the face, pity, hell, tell it true, contempt. And when I went to Judy with what I saw, with what I felt from everybody, when I said Hey, woman what is this shit? She looked at me and turned her back and said, I want the sheriff. I want him, she said, not no long-gone forty-dollar-a-month sailor boy. She wanted the damned sheriff and the damned sheriff wanted her, and if I didn’t like it why didden I go down there to the courthouse and tell the sheriff what was on my mind? So I drove around all night in her Pa’s car, with a shotgun in my lap and drinkin white lightnin. And I stopped in some honky-tonks and listened to the damned jukebox. And I watched the goddamned courthouse. All the time thinkin, I’ll just drive over to that whorehouse halfway to Shreveport and get me a piece of ass and then I’ll go shoot the goddamned sheriff. And that’s what I started in doing. But after I got laid I went out to the car and fell asleep with the shotgun in my lap and when I woke up I left the car there and the shotgun and I hitchhiked into Shreveport and got me a bus and went all the way back to San Diego. I only heard from her one last time. She sent me a letter, saying, Here’s your copy of the dee-vorce, Sincerely, Judy. I always loved that word. Sin-cerely. Everytime I hear that goddamned word I think of Judy. She had the roundest sweetest ass in Shreveport, boy
.