Loving Women (59 page)

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

I
t 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.