Loving Women (64 page)

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.

Each time I see a crowd of people

Just like a fool, I stop and stare

I know it’s not the proper thing to do

But maybe you’ll be there
 …

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.”

Someday when all my prayers are answered

I’ll hear a footstep on the stair
 …

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.

FICTION

A Killing for Christ
The Gift
Dirty Laundry
Flesh and Blood
The Deadly Piece
The Guns of Heaven
The Invisible City

NONFICTION

Irrational Ravings

To the Memory of
SAL COSTELLA
NICK OCHLAN
AND
MILTON CANIFF

About the Author

P
ETE
H
AMILL
was born in Brooklyn in 1935. He has been a professional writer since 1960, when he gave up a career as a graphic artist to become a general assignment reporter for the
New York Post
. He has since published six novels, one collection of short stories, one collection of journalism, and has written many movie and TV scripts.

He is the father of two daughters, Adriene and Deirdre, and is married to writer Fukiko Aoki. They live in New York City.