Loving Women (8 page)

I know that I turned left into a street without sidewalks. And I remember how the grass came right down to the curbs, as precisely cut as my boot-camp crewcut, uniformly green and flat and perfect. A rich, creamy earth smell rose from the grass and little jewels of water sparkled among the blades. That odor is one of the memories I can never reclaim in the way buildings can be revisited, and streets; my senses have been blunted by too many cigarettes. Everywhere I go, the American air is now stained with the fumes of gasoline and chemicals. That day I inhaled the fresh wet air and thought:
I’m in Florida, goddamnit, and nobody I ever knew has been here before me
.

Three raked gravel paths were cut through the grass from the street to the barracks doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering which door to choose, hearing the chirring sound of insects in the close, drowsy air. The Bachelor’s Enlisted Men’s Quarters were in
a wooden building almost a block long, painted a shiny white. Birds clung to the peak of the tar-papered roof. I couldn’t see through the screened windows. The entire building was three feet off the ground, on concrete blocks the color of mice.

I turned and looked around at my new slice of the world. Most of the base was blocked from my view by the low white building right across the street. My pulse quickened when I saw a sign saying
Supply Department
. That’s where I’d be working. And I felt as if I’d put something over on the Navy Department. I could sleep late and still make muster in less than a minute.
Right across the street
. Beautiful.

From where I stood, the building seemed to be divided in two. There was a door in the center, and through the windows on the left of it I could see the rough wood of packing crates. Nothing was clear through the screened windows on the right.
That’s where they must work
, I thought,
and all the gear must be stored in the section on the left
. I was standing there for what seemed a long moment, trying to imagine what might happen to me on the other side of those doors, when I heard from a great distance the sound of a saxophone.

He was playing the blues. A slow, mournful tune, drifting from somewhere on the empty base. Long sad lines. And then a pause. And then more long lines. A tenor, probably. Little phrases breaking and curling around themselves and then a longer line, and then a pause again. Sounding as lonesome as I was. Like a broken heart. Or hunger. Or jail.

Then it stopped. I waited and listened. But there was no other sound except the insects and the muffled engine of a lone helicopter:
chumpchump chumpchump chumpchump
.

I lifted the sea bag and started up the path to the barracks, my feet crunching on the gravel. I opened the screen door, and went through into a cool gray room with a picture of Harry Truman on the wall. He was still president; Eisenhower had been elected the previous November, but wouldn’t take office until January. To the right was a corkboard covered with Navy bulletins; a small wooden table and chair were shoved against the wall. Through an archway, I could see double-decker bunks divided down the center by a row of high metal lockers. The floor was scrubbed almost white. Sunlight knifed through the windows, making glaring patterns on the floor. I laid the sea bag down and stepped into the room. There
wasn’t a single person in sight. I remember feeling like a burglar.

“Hello?” I said. “Anybody home?”

There was no answer.

Then I heard a toilet flushing at the far end of the row of bunks and walked toward the sound. Names were stenciled on some of the lockers. Each bunk was made up like the next, the mattress covers pulled taut and rough Navy blankets folded at the foot. I heard water running, then stopping. And then someone whistling: “Cry.” By Johnnie Ray. A big hit in ’51. Even if you hated the singer or the song, there was no way to avoid the words, because for most of a year you heard it everywhere:

If your sweetheart

Sends a letter of good-bye
 …

A man in faded blue dungarees suddenly walked out of the head, whistling the tune. He stopped and smiled. Lank brown hair, freckled skin, crooked smile.

“Hey, whatta ya say?” the man said.

I fell into the response: “Airman apprentice Michael Devlin reporting for—”

“Jack Waleski,” he said, shaking my hand. “You just get assigned here?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do wrong?”

“Well, I didn’t ask for it,” I said. I didn’t mention Port Lyautey; that might truly sound weird. “They—”

“Yeah, nobody ever
asks
for Pensacola.”

He took out a pack of Chesterfields, laughing to himself. He offered me one and I turned it down. He lit a cigarette.

“The thing to know,” he said, “is that about the time you realize this
is
the asshole of the earth, it gets worse.”

He laughed in a wheezy way. I asked him how bad it could be, and he shook his head.

“Look, I got the watch here today,” he said, cupping the cigarette to keep the ashes from falling on the floor, “but I’ll tell you what: Get out of those blues and into a shower. Then pick yourself a rack. When you’re settled, come down to the office and I’ll give you the gouge on Pensacola.”

“It didn’t look too bad coming in.”

“Pal, It makes Shit City look like Paris.”

I smiled as he walked away. Okay. This guy was okay. The place was gonna be okay. Waleski stopped and shouted:

“I was you, I’d get in that shower real fast, sailor. You’re a little ripe.”

“I sure am,” I said, and thought about the woman with the curly hair.

Away off, I could hear the saxophone again, playing the blues.

Chapter

8

I
picked an empty top rack on the shady side of the lockers. I unlocked my sea bag and found a pair of whites. Then I stripped off the gummy woolen blues and for the first time felt the hot damp air of the Gulf on my skin. The horn player’s sadness drifted through the screened windows of the barracks. He was playing “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” in a jazzy, middle-of-the night way. I wiggled my hot sore feet into rubber thongs, humming:
I walk along the street of sorrows …

In an empty locker opposite the bunk, I hung up the pea jacket, then stacked my skivvies, T-shirts, socks, dungarees. The locker was narrow but deep. I turned my blues inside out to let them dry and laid them across the striped uncovered mattress. I still had my ditty bag from boot camp, lumpy with shaving gear, Pepsodent, deodorant, and I laid that on the rack too, along with a standard-issue Navy towel.

At the bottom of the sea bag were three books, and I took them out, too. One was
The Bluejackets’ Manual
, navy blue and compact; it was a kind of catechism for sailors, full of rules and regulations. The second was a book my Aunt Margaret had given me for Christmas. She was my mother’s sister and was married to an undertaker and lived in Manhattan. She was always giving me books. This one was called
A Treasury of Art Masterpieces
. It had been put together by someone named Thomas Craven. On the cover, there was a beautiful yellow-haired woman rising naked from the sea, one hand covering a breast, the other holding the long hair over her crotch. The third was The Blue Notebook. I slipped it inside the art book and put the books deep into the back of the locker.

Waleski came back with a blanket, a pillow and a mattress cover. “They say every man in this man’s Navy is guaranteed three squares a day and a dry fartsack,” he said. “Here’s the fartsack.”

As he turned to leave, I asked him who the horn player was. Waleski cocked his head, listening. “You mean Bobby Bolden? He’s a bad ass, a war hero, a prick, and a whoremaster. But he sure can play the saxophone, can’t he?”

“Sure can.”

“Want some advice? Stay away from him.”

I remember shaving for the first time in the deserted head with its shallow sinks and small mirrors, urinals and doorless toilet stalls. In a corner there was a metal trashcan fitted with a large white laundry sack. A hand-lettered sign said: LUCKY BAG. In the Navy, that was where you threw stray or worn-out clothing, and you were free to take anything that you might use. I glanced at it and thought:
She smoked Luckies
. She was out there somewhere. Probably with a man. A man who knew what he was doing. Who didn’t have a kid’s smooth face or have to submit to the discipline of the Navy. She was out there. In Palatka. A breeze lifted the palm fronds outside the screened window, rattling them against one another. And I thought:
Until this day I’ve never seen palm trees. Except in movies and comics and
National Geographic.
And here I am, shaving at a sink, and they’re right outside the window. I can hear them rattle. I can hear them sigh. I could walk outside and touch them. In Florida
. Pen-sa-co-la.
I’m here. I’ve come a long way from Brooklyn to this special place. I’ve done it. She smoked Luckies with her left hand
.

In the shower, I turned the hot-water knob as high as I could, hoping the hurting water would wash away the long trip, the three different buses and drivers, perhaps even the fragile memory of the woman with the curly hair. I didn’t want to leave the scalding luxury of the shower. Until I went into the Navy, I’d never showered alone. To stand under a shower alone, your hair squeaking and your skin pink and red: paradise. I felt that then; I believe it now, and to hell with the Freudian interpretations. I remember confessing this once to a guy in boot camp. Told him I’d never taken a shower alone. And he didn’t believe me. He had grown up in a house, not a railroad flat in Brooklyn. I couldn’t explain about our flat, with its L-shaped bathroom—the tub crammed into one arm of the L, the toilet in the other, with a sink in between. In the years
since, I’ve tried to explain it to women who wanted to know why I spent so long in the shower, telling them how there was barely room to turn around and the water pipes were scalding hot in all seasons so you could never relax and lean against them, and the roaches fattened in the dampness and the single window was sealed by generations of paint. Women didn’t get it. Nobody gets it. And on that first day in Ellyson Field, even I was sick of the images of my old life.
Hey, man
(I said to my young self):
Stop this! You’re here. You made it. You’re in Florida, and it’s snowing in New York
.

I was drying myself with a towel when I heard Bobby Bolden playing again. A quick jump tune. The words moved through my head:
Jumpin with my boy Sid in the city. He’s the pres-i-dent of the deejay committee …
Lester Young wrote it and King Pleasure sang it. For Symphony Sid’s radio show on WEVD, the ethnic radio station. I used to listen at night, fall asleep, and wake up to a lot of singing Hungarians. The weirdest station in New York. They had a Hungarian hour and a Russian hour and an Irish hour and a Lithuanian hour. And every night at midnight, Sid showed up to play jazz. I was then so young that I actually cared about being hip or square, and I knew that Sid was hip. I was also sure that Bobby Bolden was hip, even though I’d never met him. And I thought:
I gotta meet this guy
. I finished drying myself, wrapped a towel around my waist and wriggled into the shower shoes. I picked up the ditty bag and soiled skivvies and flip-flopped back to the bunk

I paused in the archway. An older sailor was standing at my bunk, a billy club attached to his wrist with a leather thong. He was tapping it gently on his thigh. A first-class gunner’s mate. In dress whites. He was shorter than I was, but his back was very straight and muscles rippled under his tight jumper. There were three hash marks on his sleeve, each standing for a four-year hitch. He looked like a battering ram. And I felt suddenly afraid. Not of the hard body. Or the billy club. It was his face. Pale red sideburns. The white hat precisely two fingers above where his brows should have been. Except that he had no eyebrows. And no eyelashes. His eyes were a slushy pale blue and he didn’t blink. His mouth was a slice. Lipless. Without color. Bracketed by two lines that seemed etched into his cheeks. The skin on his face was shiny. Like plastic. This was my first sight of Red Cannon.

He moved a few feet to his left and stood beside the locker I’d chosen. His eyes never left me. He didn’t speak a word. For a
moment, I felt as if I were looking down from the ceiling at the two of us. I saw the empty barracks, the palm trees outside, and felt the breeze coming through the windows. And the young man facing the Old Salt. We locked eyes for a long time. Two seconds or an hour. Even now I can remember the feeling, the knowledge that if I broke the stare I was doomed. Fear entered my belly like a piece of ice.

Finally, without taking my eyes off him, I said: “Excuse me.” I reached for the locker but the gunner’s mate didn’t move. I would have to go though him to get to the locker.