With that, with dad in my mind, my resolve came back again.
“So I have to get on a train to Mount Holyoke now,” I said.
“Okay,” John said. He didn’t fight me. He sat back down. He waved. He knew. He saw. He got it. The second that I told him that me getting on that train would save my father’s hope, he backed down.
“Goddamnit, John, you son of a bitch,” I said. “Fight, John, fight! Why don’t you fight me? You fought your grandfather. It sounds like you won. Why won’t you fight me?”
He looked up at me. His eyes fell on me again, “Because I love you.”
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.
I hated him right then. Two minutes before he stopped me on the platform, the only thing I wanted to do was get to the university, find the library, and read, read, read until my goddamned eyes fell out.
“I think I love you too, John,” I said.
And I realized, for John, by sitting back down and not asking me to stay, he was fighting for me too.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
John and Della
1942
THEY WERE ALMOST THE PEOPLE THEY WANTED TO END UP being during those days in Hartford, Connecticut. But they weren’t there yet. They pretended though, knowing that they had to leave each other in two days, one of them jumping on a train to New London and the other to Mount Holyoke.
They changed their tickets to forty-eight hours later and walked down Main Street to find a hotel. They really didn’t know what to say when the man at the front desk asked if they wanted one or two rooms. They asked for two rooms, but the hotel only had one left, one with two twin beds. In a shared glance, they nodded. Both sets of eyes hesitatingly blinked an okay to each other. The air felt thick with the decision, but they signed the agreement, paid the money, and walked together toward their two twin beds in their shared room.
They took bags up to their room, dropped them off, and sprinted out the door of the hotel. The room, together, scared them. The last time they had seen each other, they were practically children. Now, they had become adults with no one to chaperone them. They ran out onto Main Street and walked to the end of town.
On the other side of town, campers and tents and temporary housing formed slums. Men and women and children lived in them. Behind the slums, factories rose up, all making war-needed equipment and supplies. It reeked of garbage and sewage and body odor in the late summer, the smell drifting across the bridge to the edge of Main Street. They turned around.
“This is war,” John said.
They walked back into town and found a cafe. When they walked through the front door, no one stared. They expected them too, but no one did. Instead, a kind woman seated them. She complimented their dark, shiny hair and caramel skin. She was darker than them.
They asked for something fancy. They were on the East Coast and had dreamed of living a life away from the dry fields of the high west and dirty faces of the mines.
“Something fancy?’ she asked.
“Yes, something fancy,” they said.
“You’ll have to find it,” she said. She handed them a menu.
They scanned it and found exactly what they were looking for. They ordered Manhattans and fancy finger sandwiches, but when the waitress gave them odd looks for their choices, they changed their orders to cheeseburgers. They faked as if they were just kidding around with the sandwiches and cocktails, both embarrassed. The waitress walked away. They smiled. The cheeseburgers were good, but the Manhattan tasted like sweet corn the moment it came off the stalk.
They had four more before they realized how much whiskey was in them.
“We should stop,” Della said, and they walked out into Main Street to stand in front of the grand theater whose marquee hung over them like the mountains of their childhood.
They bought tickets that were more expensive than their hotel room, but they had money, enough to splurge, more than either of them had ever had before, and the liquor ran through them and made them brave.
They sat in the seventh row. The hall grew up, tall and elaborate, around them, like they were in a dream. School didn’t exist. The Navy didn’t exist. Only John and Della existed in the ornate world of the theater. They had never imagined they could sit there in the plush seats. Their hands intertwined. They thought, for a slight moment when they left the train station, that all that time apart would make this strange, but it didn’t.
The lights dimmed. The man sang. His voice was like butter, smooth and rich and thick. They kissed for the first time in the dark at the edge of the singer’s voice. Someone nudged their seat from behind Della and John and whispered, “This isn’t the place for that.”
But the man onstage felt differently. He waved the spotlight to fall down on them. Between songs, he asked, “Are you going to war, young man?”
They nodded, not knowing what to say, red and pink covering their faces. “Give her one more kiss, and then I’ll sing again.”
They did. The whole crowd clapped, and the person behind them stood up and left in frustration and his own embarrassment.
They stumbled out of the theater, drunk on love this time. Very slowly, they walked back to their hotel room. Decisions would have to be made there, ones they weren’t quite sure how to make.
When the door closed behind them, they turned on the lights. They sat on one of the twin beds and leaned their backs against the wall. They shared stories of the last eight years and fears of the years to come. They kissed between the stories. They held hands. They fell asleep in their clothes and didn’t wake up until midday.
“I love you,” John said.
“Will you meet me back here?” Della asked.
“They’re sending me to Hawaii. That’s where I’ll be stationed between my tours.”
“I’ll meet you there. I promise. When I’m done with school.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“Stay safe. Don’t die.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
John
1943
AT THE TOP OF MY CLASS IN NEARLY EVERY CATEGORY, RISING up to receive my Sailor’s Bible and the assignment that came with it, I stood in the front of the line of newly made sailors, expecting to have my pick of any job on the submarine, although I’d already put in my formal request.
Noakes stood next to me, his skin in even more contrast to mine against the whites of his Navy dress. He had done everything well. He even beat me at a few things along the way, and we had become friends, talking on the long runs in the front of the rest of the guys and whispering about our families and our homes before lights out. He too had put in a request. He wanted to be an engineman, to work on the diesel engines that drove the ship forward. We weren’t officers. We knew we wouldn’t be on deck, but enlisted sailors got to shoot the gun and run the engines. We put in for exactly what we thought we deserved.
Noakes and I stood in front of Chief Kelly right after the year had turned from 1942 to 1943, just six months after I had gotten to spend the most amazing weekend with the woman I planned to marry. Kelly nodded. He didn’t speak. Then he placed his hand out to shake both of ours in turn. I remember how rough it felt, like he’d been rubbing it over sandpaper for days, the surface of his skin prickly and uneven, hardened blisters on his palm and fingers.
He led us in to receive our assignments. At New London, they had trained us for the duties we could do as non-commissioned officers. All the hard work. I wanted to sit in the gunner seat and shoot the five-inch-twenty-five-caliber gun, to watch it hit the Japanese men that killed my brother, to see the bullets pierce their skin, and to follow them as they fell into the monstrous depths of the Pacific Ocean.
“Good luck, sailor,” Chief Kelly said when the door opened that led to a table of officers who would decide what I would be doing on the submarine for the next four years of my life.
The officers called Noakes and me in at the same time. We stood in front of a long table. They confirmed they
had the right sailors in front of them by asking us to state our names. They read over their notes, all of our boot camp accomplishments and failures, and then they handed us two envelopes with our assignments tucked inside of them.
“Thank you, sir,” we said in unison before saluting and turning and walking out the door, excited to find out where we would land in the next twenty-four hours, what boat we would climb aboard, and, very importantly, if we would be assigned to the same ship. We both walked with purpose and patience out the front door of the barracks. We stood in the morning sun, looked at each other, and in the restrained way we had been taught to move, we slid our dark hands into the crease and pulled our assignments out.
The first thing we saw was the name of our ship, the USS Snook.
“Que perfecto,” I said.
“Snook?” Noakes asked.
“The blue fish,” I said.
We hesitated to look down again. The next line would tell us our assignment.
“Cook.”
“Cook.”
Again, we both spoke together. This time, however, our voices rose together at the end of the word, a one-word question leaving out lips, “Cook?”
I turned to Noakes that day, and I saw his full blackness, not the friend and perfect recruit that I had become so close to but a black man who had been assigned to cook for all the white officers and all the white enlisted men.
He looked down at me. And I could see it in his eyes too. He saw my dark brown skin that wrapped itself around me. We were no longer the two highest scoring Boots in our class. We were the spic and the black. We were everything we thought we escaped when we left Nevada and Chicago. We were cooks no matter how well we did at running, at packing our bags in the middle of the night, at ascending to the top of the water tank faster than any other sailor did. We weren’t those men. To them, we were men who ate beans and picked cotton.
“Fuck this,” Noakes said. It was the first time I had heard him swear in the year that I’d known him. He’d taken racial slurs from other Boots and let them slide right off his back because Chief Kelly always defended him, making the boys from Alabama and Mississippi run so hard after calling Noakes a “Negro” that they were scared to open their mouths to say anything at all. They called me wetback and spic and bean-eater, and I too just let it go and watched as Chief Kelly would throw those boys to the ground and wear their arms out with push-ups. It didn’t happen much after that first week. Chief Kelly had our backs.
But this was different. This came from those in charge. The men that sat behind that table in the other room, even having read how high our marks were during camp, gave us an apron and hair net and some cigarettes to ease the burn.
“Pendejos,” I said. “Pinche pendejos.”
I hadn’t spoken a lick of Spanish since leaving Reno. Hell, before that, my grandpa barely let me speak it without wrapping me across the face with the back of his knuckles, doing his best to make my tongue as light skinned as him, my grandma, and Paulo.
We had no choice but to report to duty. It was March 1943, the USS Snook waited for us in the New London dock, and if we didn’t board the submarine at 8:00 a.m. the next morning, we would be AWOL, and we would be court martialed.
So that night, Noakes and I went to a bar in downtown New London to drink. We went there to fill our guts with whiskey and beer. We went there to hate the world. And we did it damned well.
Walking up to us and ribbing us for where we got placed on our boat was not a good idea after we had put down four shots of whiskey and four beers to chase them down our throats, but a young redneck from Arkansas felt the need to do so.
“Hey, cooks, why don’t you whip me something up to soak up my drink. I’ll take a steak and eggs, and, as a courtesy, don’t sweat that dark, dirty sweat on my steak,” he said. His words slurred out of his mouth. He leaned his elbow down on the bar and spoke to the bartender, “Get this Negro and this wetback a hair tie and give them a spatula. They might as well get started now.”
Noakes turned and flattened him with one fast and hard punch to the nose and blood splattered the man’s forehead when he hit the ground. The impact of his head hitting the back of the floor knocked him out cold.
His three friends were on us fast. They swung long, slow slugs toward us, but Noakes and I ducked, and simultaneously grabbed our beer glasses and broke them over two of their heads. The last one stood alone for a moment and then walked backward toward his chair and mumbled something about how black and brown shouldn’t be on any naval ship that flew a red, white, and blue flag.
We both apologized to the bartender for breaking his beer glasses and offered to clean up the mess. The man leaned over the bar and placed his elbows on the shiny wood in front of us and said, “You’ll have enough cleaning to do on the submarine.”
He lifted his arm sleeve to reveal the same navy submarine tattoo I saw in Reno. He placed two beers down in front of us and walked away without taking our money.
The irony was that many nights, after we had gotten assigned to the Snook, they made us start cooking in the mess halls for practice cooking for so many men. When our shift ended, we would cook for each other. Noakes was a natural. He dipped his fingers in broth to test for texture or swirled a giant pot to eye the consistency of a rue. Me, I found the best peppers in the world in a market down the road from where we bunked. An old man who had a little garden had brought them to the flea market one day. Noakes and I lived at the flea market on Sundays, buying stuff for cheap, that to us, was something new. We’d never really bought anything in our lives, let alone be set free to wander and look.
The war was on. It was really on by that point. We knew where we were going. Soon enough, in the months to come, we would plunge into the depths of the Pacific and probably die, so we ate and drank. We had to live because we knew we could die.
We may have been assigned to be cooks against our will, but we were competitive, and if we were going to be cooks, we were going to be the best damned cooks in the Navy.
In March 1943, we took a transport bus to the Snook. She sat high in the water, the large gun on her metal back. I whispered my boat to myself over and over and over. My boat. And we set sail for Pearl Harbor.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Della
1943
IN THE SUMMER AFTER WE GRADUATED, I SAT IN A RESTAURANT that overlooked the Boston Harbor. I had rented a place there with Helen by the water. The thought of going back to Colorado crossed my mind and then it quickly left. In my head, I had served my time there, and I dreamed of the day that I could earn enough money to bring my mom and dad out east. The east would really send my mom for a loop. She would shit her pants with happiness at the sight of the water and bars and the people. I could hear her say, “Holy goddamned hell, I like it here. I’m not a drinker, but give me one of the goddamned spicy martinis. Dirty? What do you mean dirty? Okay, give it to me dirty.” My father, on the other hand, I don’t think he’d like it much, but I would make him come anyway, and I would buy him a huge ribeye and some lobster. That’s what I would do for him. He deserved a damn steak.
Graduation came and went. I graduated in the top one percent of my class, and missed out on being valedictorian by less than a percentile. Who got it? My bitch of a best friend Helen who rubbed it in my nose for days.
“If I didn’t get in a fight with that chauvinistic bastard of an English teacher over the merits of Whitman’s poetry, I would have won it, Helen. You know that,” I told her the day she walked into my room with the news.
“If you didn’t have a big, fat mouth, you mean?” she said. And she was right.
I got a job teaching high school freshman Latin, Spanish, and calculus at a boarding school for girls in the heart of Boston where I spent my weekends looking out at the harbor, drinking martinis, and avoiding the many, many men who tried to get my attention by buying me drinks or blatantly asking me to dinner from the boardwalk below. Sailors returning home for a short break were the wors
t. They crowded the docks. They catcalled us. They, without any shame, yelled up to us and asked for our hands in marriage. Being out on a boat or in a submarine with solely other men for months at a time made them animals. When they got back to shore, their young hormones boiled up inside of them and took the form of awful words that spewed out of their awful mouths. I wanted to slap the shit out of them, but, instead, I just ignored them, which hurt them more.
And for the men my age who stayed home from the war, I didn’t want anything to do with those rich boys whose parents somehow got them off the draft list. They were the worst kind of men, in my eyes.
I went out alone to a bar by the water one late afternoon. Helen had stayed home with a cold for the day, one of those that hit you hard in the middle of the summer, make you feel like you’re dying because it’s hot outside, and you can’t breathe.
Ships rolled in and out. Not too many Navy ships because they were docked a hundred miles north in New London, but freighters and a few smaller boats that were enlisted by the military and stamped with impermanent letters and numbers to signify their military consignment. The light was bright that day, damn bright. And though the war raged in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and there were supposedly U-boats somewhere out in the water in front of me, I couldn’t help but bask in the sunlight. My skin had become so dark from my days in the sun that I looked nice in my long, white dress that made me feel as if I were flying when the breeze brushed the soft fabric against my calves.
“Excuse me,” a man in a Navy uniform said to me. He was an officer. I could tell right away from his regalia.
“No thank you,” I said. “I’m quite comfortable. And I have a good job, so I don’t need anyone to buy me a drink.” I had been there a hundred times before and found that being polite but just a little aloof seemed to do the trick to ward off oncoming hits.
I turned my body toward the sun again.
This persistent bastard walked around my back and stood in front of me. He took his hat off and held it at his belt line.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 18
