Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Della

  1943

  I ALWAYS LOVED THE NIGHT LIGHTS OF THE CITY. I LOVED THE blues and reds and hot white light that danced over the streets. Restaurants. Bars. Clubs. Stores. At times, I missed the wide-open western slope of the Rockies, but mostly, I knew that the time in my life in DC would come to end. That was the point, right, to end the war. And I didn’t think I could go back to teaching after what I had done in the war room, so I embraced it every night that I could.

  On New Year’s Eve 1943, I sat alone at a club and waited for Helen. I had come a long way since running in the fields of corn and wheat and wild grasses on the Colorado plains, but every time I tried to cross my goddamned legs in a dress that girl came right back to me. I felt uncomfortable alone in the bar and hated men’s eyes when they followed me. I wanted to slap their goddamned eyes right out of their shit-eating faces. But, as always, I found my strength in me. Like a movie, I replayed my journey in my mind, crossed my legs elegantly, and quietly said, “This is my world, and I will be comfortable in it, no matter what their eyes say when they look at me.”

  Helen had started her shift later than me and had to head back to the house to shower and dress for the night. I didn’t mind being alone. That’s for damned sure. I liked it, actually. I looked forward to 1944. Even though no one ever really told us so, we knew the war was coming to an end, and we knew that what we did in those rooms over the previous seven months played an important role in sinking the Japanese war efforts in the Pacific. We were happy, and we were proud.

  I ended every night with a smile on my face. Many times, it was a tipsy smile, but it was there, except for those nights when I thought about Ernie. But even those nights I felt like I was avenging his death every day of my life. More than that, he would have been proud of me. I figured since I couldn’t tell my mom and dad what I had been doing, since Ernie was in heaven or something, that he was the only one who could see what I had become. And I think he smiled too.

  I sipped on a martini and watched people. Some smiled and danced. Others, I could tell, were there to be sad, to fall into their drinks like the mugs of beer were tiny swimming pools that could somehow insulate them from the problems of a war-torn world and the politics that consumed the city. Couples held hands. Couples fought. I never envied any of them. I loved John, but I never truly wanted to be coupled at all. My life was mine, and I wanted to keep it that way, at least as long as I could.

  Smoke filled the room and drifted in the lights. I watched a man and a woman who sat on the other side of the bar in a dark corner. The woman leaned into him, placing her elbows on his knees, barely keeping her lips from touching his when she talked. He leaned back into the puffy vinyl chair and smiled. His long legs crossed in front of him, and her skirt fell off the pristinely pressed seam in the center of his pants.

  “What are you staring at, Della?” Helen said.

  She dropped down next to me and raised her hand for the bartender to bring her a Manhattan. Then she stood up and walked behind me, placed her head on my shoulder and followed my gaze with hers.

  “Holy shit,” Helen said.

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t really know why she said it. I figured she thought the same thing that I did, that the body language between the two people was captivating.

  “That’s Colonel Edwards,” she said.

  She dropped down behind me and pulled her seat around so her back faced them and her body blocked me from their sight.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “We got to get out of here.”

  “Yes, we do,” Helen said.

  He had told us we couldn’t go out and especially that we couldn’t drink in town, and he would see us doing both of those things—if he caught us that night—and we would lose our jobs for sure. “Loose lips sink ships. Drunk lips sink more ships.”

  Helen was not laughing.

  I downed my martini and scooted to the edge of my seat, ready to run for it, but Helen grabbed my hand and held me still.

  “What are they doing now?” she asked.

  “They’re still fawning over each other,” I said.

  The place wasn’t that big. There was maybe twenty-five feet between us.

  “If we both get up and rush out of here, I’m sure he’ll see us. We have to be covert,” Helen said.

  “Okay, I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll walk with my back to them toward the bar and then just slide out the door. You follow.”

  Helen nodded her head and pulled her collar up around her neck as if that would save him from seeing her there.

  I shifted my weight, stood up, and then walked as casually as I could toward the bar. I placed my hand on the railing that lined the wooden top and then slid my body along it toward the exit. When I turned to walk out the front door, Colonel Edwards stood in my way.

  “Ms. Chavez, why don’t you join me with your roommate for a moment. I think we need to talk,” he said and then led me back to where Helen sat with her collar up around her neck and her eyes as wide as our two empty glasses.

  Helen stood up. Then she sat back down. Then she stood up again. She didn’t know what to do. I think she wanted to run, to be honest. I could see it in her eyes. It was his word against ours. If we ran, could he prove it? I think Helen thought no.

  Then she sat down again and pretended to take a leisurely sip from her empty glass. She fooled no one.

  Colonel Edwards pulled a seat out for me and motioned for me to sit. He did not waste time. That would not have been his way. Instead, he leaned on the table, crossed the fingers of his hands, and said, “Loose lips sink ships. Drunk lips sink more ships. Your drunk lips. Our sunken ships. Do you remember me saying this, ladies?”

  And that was it. That was the last straw. Helen lost it. She blurted out in a fit of laughter that she couldn’t control. “Drunk lips” sealed her fate. She would never be able to regain her composure, so I thought.

  “Ms. Brigance, I don’t expect you to be completely quiet, but I do expect some level of respect from you, even if we are away from the war room,” he said. In his entire military career, I don’t think anyone had ever laughed at him the way Helen did.

  “Sir, it’s not her fault,” I said. “She laughs when she’s uncomfortable. She can’t control it. I promise. It’s not disrespectful. It’s just her body’s natural reaction to awkward or uncomfortable situations.”

  Helen placed her hand over her mouth to hold in the laughter and nodded her head at Edwards.

  “It’s true,” she said, the words muffled behind her hand. “I don’t mean any disrespect.”

  He nodded and then continued, “I have to suspect that if you are out tonight that this is not the first time, and, therefore, I have to suspect that your drunken lips have put our ships and our mission in danger.”

  Helen turned to the wall to avoid eye contact with Edwards and to do her best to hold in her laughter. She did pretty good.

  “No, sir,” I said. “First, we never drink to get drunk, and we never talk about work.”

  Helen nodded, her hand still over her mouth.

  “I don’t believe you. I’m not in a position to take you at your word or give you the benefit of the doubt. I can’t. You will both be asked to vacate.” He got interrupted by a soft voice from behind him.

  “Karl, are you going to join me again, or would you rather spend the evening with these two beautiful women?”

  The woman who had been sitting with him, placed her hand on his shoulder, and then leaned down and whispered in his ear.

  I stared at her in the light. She was tall, brunette, and beautiful, just like his wife in the photo on his desk, but here’s the kicker, she was not Colonel Edwards’ wife.

  Colonel Edwards looked at both Helen and me. He was assessing the situation, trying to figure out if we had put two and two together. And that’s when I winked at him, that’s when I let him know from the slight twitch of my eyelid that yes, in fact, I knew that he was o
ut that night with a woman who was not his wife and that by the way they touched, this was not the first time. They were close, intimate.

  I said, “What were you saying about vacating?”

  He looked at me. He looked up at the woman. He looked at Helen.

  “So, you’re telling me that you have never spoken to anyone about your mission?” he asked.

  Helen finally found her voice, “No sir, we have never spoken a word, and we never will.” Then she too winked at him.

  He stood up, put his arm around the woman, and returned to the corner booth across the room.

  Chapter Fifty

  John

  1943-1944

  WE HEADED BACK TO PEARL HARBOR FOR SOME REST BEFORE our fifth patrol. I climbed up out of the submarine, headed to the shower, and found a letter from Della in the mail cube with my name on it. My heart jumped up. I hadn’t heard from her since a phone exhchange before I left port. I called her to say goodbye, ringing her apartment.

  “Hi, Della, it’s John, I just wanted to call to say hello and that I will write you when I can. I leave for Pearl Harbor tomorrow. I love you,” I said.

  “Hi, John,” she said. “Don’t be an asshole and get killed, okay?”

  And then she hung up the phone. That was it. That was all she said, but I knew her, and it didn’t hurt me. Honestly, it was the most real Della I knew.

  The letter, however, hurt bad.

  Dear John,

  I just wanted to write you to let you know that I have moved to Washington, DC. I got your letter. Thank you for it. I hope you are safe. I have a new job. It pays good money. I am a secretary for a nice man. I believe he is a contractor for the military, but he doesn’t tell me much about his business. Like I said, it’s good pay.

  As of right now, I hope to keep this job indefinitely, so I am not quite certain I can meet you in Hawaii after your tour.

  All my best,

  Della

  Where were the goddamnits and holly hells and the sons of bitches and, most importantly, the I love you too. The letter, though not cruel, broke my heart. It felt the same as getting my parents swiped out from my life by the hating rains of the high plains. It felt like watching Maria drive away in the priest’s car, my jaw broken and hanging from my face. It felt like finding out that Manuel had been killed at sea. It felt like all of them wrapped up together.

  When I lay there in my tiny bunk, when I swam back to the boat after the initiation rights, when I sweated in the kitchen and then in the torpedo room, I dreamt of Della, I relived our time together in Hartford, and I hung onto the richness of the few words, “I think I love you too, John.”

  “Motherfucker,” I said.

  “John?” Noakes asked.

  “Let’s go get drunk. Let’s go get laid,” I said.

  Noakes shook his head.

  “How about we spend the weekend on the beach. We can hula dance. We can flirt with girls. We can go surfing. We can drink beer and eat lo mein. What do you think, John?”

  “I’m getting laid,” I said. “And I’m sure as hell not going to Washington, DC, to find Della so she can keep a secretary job. First, I can’t believe the way she coolly dismissed me. Second, she’s smarter than that, smarter than falling in love with a secretary job. She found a man. That’s the only reason she would be content with a brainless job like that. And tonight, I am going to find a woman.”

  Noakes shook his head and just followed me out into the night.

  With my mind set to erase Della by finding another woman, Noakes and I stood at a bar in downtown Waikiki. Other sailors stood around us. We looked like a bunch of Popeyes throwing back cans of spinach as fast as we could. Our spinach, however, was liquor. As his forearms would grow, so did our egos and aggressions. Fights always broke out, and now that Noakes and I had survived four patrols across the deadly Pacific Ocean, we too had heads the size of pineapples. Add that to the fact that Della had coldly told me that she would rather be a secretary in DC than meet me in Hawaii after the war, and I wanted to hurt someone.

  “She could be a secretary in Hawaii,” I said to Noakes after my fifth beer and same number of shots of rum. “She could be a fucking secretary anywhere in the world. She could be a secretary in fucking Trinidad, Colorado. She didn’t have to get a fancy degree to be a secretary. I can’t believe it, Noakes. I can’t believe the whole thing. And I think she loved me. I really do. Not just in Hartford but for all those years when we were kids. I think she loved me while I was gone. I could see it in her face, Noakes. I could see it in her face.”

  “Who? Your Indian girl?” Indian came out “engine” from a sailor who sat next to us. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up about her? Or just fuck and move on? Jesus Christ.”

  I turned my body around to slug the guy in the face, but Noakes beat me to it. His big fist slammed hard against the sailor’s face, right across the temple, and the sailor fell backward and onto the floor—out cold. The sailor’s friends backed up and found seats behind them without looking away.

  “Thanks, Noakes. You’re a great friend and even a better person,” I said.

  “I don’t like to hit people, John. My mother frowns on violence,” he said. “So let’s get you to bed so I don’t have to do that anymore.”

  “I want to get laid,” I said.

  “Okay,” Noakes said. “I’ll take you to the district. Then we’ll see.”

  I stumbled out of the bar. We walked down the road toward our hotel in Chinatown.

  “Let’s check in first, so we have a place to come back to after the night,” Noakes said.

  “Good plan,” I said.

  The streets of Waikiki were crowded with sailors. Just like us, they had come off a boat—a freighter or transport or cruiser or sub—and their sea legs, mixed with alcohol, made the whole bunch of them look like a warbling crowd of sloths moving through the street.

  We walked into our hotel.

  Nam greeted us both with a hug.

  “John here wants to get laid,” Noakes told Nam.

  “So you do, John. Sit down first. Let me get you some coffee,” Nam said.

  “Beer,” I said.

  “Fine, fine, let me get you a beer,” he said. “Noakes, would you like a beer too?”

  “Yes, please,” Noakes said.

  “Have a seat here in my office,” Nam said. He pointed behind the reception desk of his small hotel and waived us through.

  We walked in and sat down on the most comfortable couch I had ever sat on. Noakes seemed to think so too because he kept pushing down on it with the palms of his hands to test how soft it was.

  Nam came back with three beers, one for each of us. He sat in a rotating chair next to a desk covered in neatly stacked receipts.

  “The couch isn’t so comfortable,” he said. “But I suppose you’ve just been living in a metal tube since I last saw you two boys.”

  “I love it,” I said. I did. I loved that couch right then.

  “John, how’s Della?” Nam asked. The way he said it made me only want to share everything with him.

  I told Nam about the letter, about how cold it was, and about how I suspected another man, and Nam leaned back in his chair and took a long sip of his beer.

  “So now you want to go have sex with a prostitute in the district just like every other sailor that just gets off the boat, eh John?” Nam asked.

  Noakes shook his head next to me.

  “Can I ask you something, John?”

  “Of course, Nam,” I said. I could feel the calmness take me again, the way I felt when I cooked chilies or harvested them in the in garden, first with my family, then with Manuel, and then with Noakes beneath the water.

  “Do you think sticking your little dick in some Polynesian girl is going to make Della come to Hawaii? Or is it going to make you feel better or worse? Take a drink of beer, let it flow coolly into your stomach, and then take a big breath before you answer me.”

  At first, I felt the rage come back, the
rage that came with hating my grandfather, but Nam was not my grandfather, so I did what he said. I took a long sip of beer, let it flow down my throat, and let it sit there for a moment. Then I took a big, deep breath. By the time I finished this little ritual, my head felt warm and a little dizzy, but it also felt a little clear. I didn’t answer him. I thought about sleeping with a woman. I thought about how I would feel afterward. I imagined it. And the only thing that flooded through me was a feeling of guilt and shame.

  “No,” I said. “No, it wouldn’t make me feel better.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Nam said.

  We sat there that night with Nam. We drank beer. We helped him with soldiers who came in too drunk to stand.

  The next night was New Year’s Eve, 1943. We stayed with Nam again. We cooked for him. He told us the wildest story about how he came from Vietnam to Hawaii and how he lost his young wife to tuberculosis right after they moved to Oahu.

  “I wish I could just kiss Della again before we head out to sea,” I told them both after midnight.

  “I wish I could give my mom a hug,” Noakes said.

  “I wish I could give my wife a hug,” Nam said. “And I’ve never gone to the district to replace her because I knew I never could.”

  We clinked our beers.

  We hugged.

  We stayed in Waikiki at Nam’s for the next week. Noakes and I would head to the beach during the day and just lay on the sand.

  On January 5th, the day before we were to ship out on our fifth patrol, Nam gave us both a hug and said, “Thank you, boys. Be safe.”

  He handed us both a tiny conch as gifts.

  And we said goodbye to our old friend.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Della

  1944

  THE NEXT WEEK AT WORK WAS WORRISOME, TO SAY THE LEAST. I expected Edwards to walk in, push my stuff off my desk into the trash can, and have me escorted out and tried for treason. I kept my head down. I deciphered codes. I handed them off. I went home to an empty house and watched the people walk by outside.