USA Noir Noir

by Johnny Temple

  * * *

  Sometimes I wish I could have cried like Tiny did. After Chad and me hit that car, I didn’t even realize there were tears streaming down my cheeks. There were sirens and lights. Cops and paramedics sawing through car doors with their Jaws of Life.

  The last thing I remember was Chad sitting there, patting the dashboard of the Mustang and saying, “Guess we’re gonna have to take this one out and shoot it.”

  * * *

  The next day we all watched the fog swallow Second Chance whole. Freddie was onboard, being shipped out to “Plymouth Rock”—Plymouth County Correctional Facility, as it reads on the books, where all the child murderers go.

  Tiny was different after that. I guess DeShawn and me changed too. We helped Tiny dig a grave and bury all the chickens. Cunningham showed us some books in the school library where we read up on Indian funerary mounds. We gathered up some rocks and soil and covered the birds’ grave the Wampanoag way.

  Tiny, DeShawn, and me never talked about the chickens or how we became friends, if that’s what we really were. We didn’t talk about much. But we did our chores or whatever, and never said anything, which was like saying a lot because it wasn’t like being with someone you can talk to but don’t. It was pretty much all right.

  AFTER THIRTY

  BY DON WINSLOW

  Pacific Beach, San Diego

  (Originally published in San Diego Noir)

  1945

  Charlie Decker is a hard case.

  Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

  Charlie’s no good.

  He’s trouble and always has been. Drunkenness, absent-without-official-leave, brawling, gambling, insubordination—three stretches in the navy and Charlie’s been in and out of the brig and up and down the ranks. The navy probably would have thrown him out if there wasn’t a war on and they didn’t need a man who knew how to make an engine run. Give Charlie Decker thirty minutes and a wrench and he can fix anything, but you also know that he can wreck anything too, and just as easily.

  People tried to tell Millie this, but she wouldn’t listen. Her roommates saw it clear as day. One good look in Charlie’s eyes, that cocky smirk of his, and you knew. They told her but it went through one ear and out the other. Now she opens her eyes, looks at the clock on her bed table, and slaps him on the butt. “Charlie, get up.”

  “What?” he mumbles, happy in his sweet, warm sleep. They sat up and drank when she came home from her night shift at Consolidated, and then they did it and then drank some more, so he don’t want to get up.

  She shakes his shoulders. “It’s thirty days.”

  Millie knows the navy—up to thirty days it’s AWOL, after thirty it’s desertion. He’s been shacked up with her for almost a month now. Almost a month in the little bungalow that was already crowded with four other girls, and he said he was going back before the thirty days were up.

  But now he mumbles, “To hell with that.” And closes his eyes.

  “You’re going to get in big trouble,” Millie says. AWOL, he would get a captain’s mast, but probably no time in the brig because he’s set to ship out soon anyway. But for desertion he’s going to get a court-martial, maybe years in the brig, and then a DD.

  “Charlie, get up.”

  He rolls over, kisses her, and then shows her what trouble is. That’s the thing—she knows he’s bad news but he’s just so damn handsome and so good in the sack. She knew from the moment they met at Eddie’s Bar that she couldn’t keep her legs shut with Charlie.

  Charlie makes her see fireworks.

  * * *

  Charlie rolls off her, reaches for the green pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, finds his Zippo, and lights one up.

  “Go fix us some breakfast,” he says.

  “What do you want?”

  “Eggs?”

  “Try buying eggs, Charlie.”

  “We got any coffee left?”

  “A little.”

  Like everything else, it’s rationed. Coffee, sugar, meat, cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline of course. The girls swap ration coupons but there’s only so much and she doesn’t like it when Charlie deals in the black market. She tells him it’s unpatriotic.

  Charlie doesn’t give a damn. He figures he’s done his patriotic duty all over the Pacific, most recently on a tin can in the cordon line off Okinawa, and he deserves a little coffee and sugar.

  The first cigarette of the day is always the best.

  Charlie sucks the smoke into his lungs and holds it before letting it out his nose. It makes him feel good, relaxed, at ease with the decision he has to make.

  “Then after breakfast you’ll go back,” Millie is saying.

  “I thought you loved me,” Charlie says, flashing his smile. He’s proud of the smile—his teeth are white and even.

  “I do.” She does love him, despite everything. That’s why she doesn’t want to see him get into a really bad jam. He’s always going to get in a little trouble, Millie knows, that’s part of what she loves about him.

  “Then why do you want me to go?” Charlie teases. “You know we’re shipping out.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you wait for me?” he asks.

  “Of course I will.”

  He knows she won’t. Millie needs it, like most women. The story is that men need it and women just put up with it, but Charlie knows better. Maybe not virgins, maybe they don’t, but once a woman’s had it, she wants it again. And Millie wants it. Takes a couple of drinks to loosen her up enough to admit it, but after that, hell, look out.

  If he ships out she’ll be with another guy by the time he gets back. He knows this for a fact because she was cheating on some poor jerk when she went to bed with him. Anyway, Charlie knows she won’t wait and tells himself that’s why he’s not going back. She’ll find another guy to sleep with, another guy’s back to scratch with her nails, another guy to tell that he makes her helpless to stop him.

  That’s what he tells himself most of the time, and when that story doesn’t sell—usually in those cold gray hours of the early morning when he’s so drunk he’s almost sober—he tells himself a different story—that he doesn’t want to go back to the brig.

  Charlie has felt an SP’s baton in the kidneys, along with the metallic taste of his own blood when they decided it was more fun to bust up his face, and he don’t want any more of it. They do whatever they want to do to you in the brig, and then hose it down like that washes it all away. Thirty days AWOL, the captain might send him to the brig and it’s not a chance he wants to take.

  That’s what Charlie tells himself, anyway.

  Now he watches Millie walk into the kitchen and likes the way she looks in the little white silk robe he bought her.

  Millie’s a looker, all right.

  That Saturday night he had liberty and headed down to Eddie’s because he heard that’s where the factory girls go. The ship had just limped back for repairs so they had a lot of free time, and after what they’d been through they were all ready to for it too. The scuttlebutt was that Eddie’s was the place to go, so he skipped the usual dives in the Gaslamp and headed to Pacific Beach. The joint was crowded with sailors and Marines all after the same thing, but he saw her and gave her that smile and she smiled back.

  Charlie went up to her and talked and then she let him buy her a drink and then another and they talked and he asked her a lot of questions about herself and found out she came out from a little town in North Dakota because she’d always wanted to see the ocean and she wanted an adventure.

  “I heard there were jobs for women in San Diego,” she said. “So I got on a train and here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Charlie smiled.

  “In Pacific Beach, California,” she said.

  “Do you like it?”

  She nodded. “I like the money and it’s fun living with the other girls most of the time.”r />
  They talked some more and then he asked if they could get out of there and she said okay but where did he want to go?

  “Can’t we just go to your place?” he asked. “You said you have a place.”

  “I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to go right away. A girl likes a little romance, you know.”

  Oh, hell, he knew. He was just hoping this one girl didn’t. But if she didn’t, she’d be the first ever. At least of the ones you didn’t pay. The whores, they didn’t want romance, they just wanted you to get your business over with as soon as possible so they could get on with theirs. It was like eating on a ship—hurry up and finish because there’s a sailor waiting for your chair.

  But Millie, she looked at him with those dark blue eyes and he decided that a walk along the beach would be just the thing. You expected blue eyes with a blond girl, but Millie’s hair was jet black, and cut short, and she had these cute lips that made you think of Betty Boop. When he walked close to her she smelled like vanilla, because, she told him, perfume was hard to get.

  But the vanilla smelled good behind her ear, in her hair. She was small, what did she call it—petite—and fit nice under his arm as they walked on the sand under the pier. A radio was playing somewhere and they stood and danced under the pier and he held her tight.

  “You feel nice,” he said, because it was all he could think of to say and because it was true too.

  “So do you,” she responded.

  Now he remembers how nice she smelled and how good she felt under his arm and how life was the way he always hoped it would be. There were no flames that night, no acrid smoke that burned his nose, no screams that seared his brain, and the waves touched the beach like kisses, and if he told the truth he would have stayed there forever with her on Pacific Beach and not even taken her back to her place and her bed.

  But he did and they made love and he slept through his liberty. He meant to go back that day, he really did, while it was still no big deal, but it was just too good with her in the little bungalow.

  Millie shared the bedroom with another girl from the factory, a girl named Audrey from Ohio, and they’d run a rope across the room and draped a blanket over it for a little privacy. Sometimes Millie didn’t want to make love if Audrey was home because she felt shy with the other girl just across from the blanket. But Audrey worked the day shift and was gone a lot of nights with an airman, and sometimes Millie did it anyway with Audrey there and Charlie suspected she liked it because it made her feel dirty.

  The bungalow was crowded, but so was all of Pacific Beach since they built the factories and all the people came for work. There was hardly any place to lie down—some people lived in tents in backyards—so Millie felt lucky to stay there even though it was hard to get into the bathroom sometimes and there were two girls sleeping in the living room.

  Charlie liked it there too, that was the problem, even though it often felt as crowded as a ship. But it was quiet in the morning with the girls gone on their shifts, and he and Millie got up late and had the kitchen to themselves and they’d take their coffee and cigarettes out into the tiny yard and enjoy the sun.

  Audrey had a car and sometimes they’d drive down to Oscar’s for hamburgers, or go to Belmont Park and ride the roller coaster, and Millie would scream and hold on tight to his arm and he liked that. One time when Millie got paid they went to the Hollywood Theater downtown to see the burlesque and she dug her elbow into his ribs when he gawked at Zena Ray, and they both laughed at Bozo Lord even though his jokes were corny. And afterward he got her to admit she thought the girls were pretty, and she was a pistol in bed that night.

  On the nights she worked, he’d stay home or hit the bars on Garnet or Mission Boulevard, keeping a sharp eye out for the SPs even though there were a lot of guys walking around in civvies—the 4Fs, sure, but mostly men who had served their bit, or been wounded, or were on leave. So the SPs didn’t look at him too hard and anyway they were busy keeping an eye on the sailors and marines who flooded the sidewalks and had fistfights that spilled into the street.

  Charlie would make sure he arrived back to the bungalow before she got home, tired from work but too jazzed up to go to sleep, and he thought it was funny that this tiny girl was building PBYs and B-24s.

  “You’ve probably killed more Japs than I have,” he said to her one morning.

  “I don’t like to think about that,” she said.

  The nights were fun but the days were the best. Most days they’d sleep in late, then have breakfast and walk down to Pacific Beach and swim, or just sit or lie down on the sand and take naps, or walk along the boardwalk and maybe stop someplace to have a beer, and the days just went by and now July has become August, and he has a tough decision to make.

  * * *

  Charlie comes into the kitchen in his skivvies and a T-shirt and sits down at the table.

  “Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.

  “The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.

  She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.

  He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.

  Has been for the past couple of weeks, if you want to know the truth. Since that night he woke up with Millie shaking his shoulder, telling him he was having a bad dream.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she was saying. “It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.”

  He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t a nightmare but real life, and she asked him, “Where were you?”

  “None of your damn business,” was all he said, and he felt that his cheeks were wet with tears and then he remembered that he’d been crying and moaning, over and over again, “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back . . .”

  She asked him, “Where? Where don’t you want to go back to, Charlie?”

  “I told you it was none of your damn business,” he said, and slapped her across her pretty little Betty Boop mouth. When she came back in from the kitchen she had ice in a towel pressed against her lower lip and there was a little streak of blood on her chin and she said, “You ever hit me again, I’ll call the SPs and turn you in.”

  But she didn’t throw him out.

  She knew he had no place to go, no money, and would probably get picked up by Shore Patrol. So she pressed the ice to her lips and let him stay, but nothing was ever as good between them after that and he knows that he broke something between them that he can’t fix.

  Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.

  “What?” he asks, even though he knows.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks.

  “Eat my breakfast,” he answers.

  “And then what?”

  He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to be hot—the summer sun is already pounding the concrete outside—and she should just let things slide so they can go down to the beach and enjoy the breeze and the water, maybe walk down to the end of the pier.

  But she won’t let it go. She sits down, folds her forearms on the table, and says, “You have to go, Charlie.”

  He gets up from the table, goes back into the bedroom, and finds last night’s bottle. Then he returns to the kitchen, pours some of the cheap whiskey into his coffee, sits down, and starts to dri
nk.

  “Oh, that will help,” she says. “You showing up drunk.”

  Charlie doesn’t want to listen to her yapping. He wants to get drunk even though he knows that no amount of booze can wash away the truth that no man can stand to know about himself.

  That he’s afraid to go back.

  Since that moment the Jap planes came crashing onto the deck, spewing fuel and flame, and he saw his buddies become running torches and smelled them burning and he can’t never get that smell out of his nose. Can’t get it out of his head, either, because it comes in his sleep and he wakes up shaking and crying and moaning that he doesn’t want to go back, please don’t make him go back.

  Charlie knows what they say about him, that he’s no good, that he’s a hard case, but he knows he ain’t hard. Maybe he used to be, though now he knows he’s as broken as the spine of the ship.

  But the ship is repaired now and will be steaming out across the Pacific, this time to the Japanese home islands, and if they think Okinawa was bad, that was nothing compared to what it’s going to be.

  It ain’t the thought of the brig and it ain’t even the thought of losing her, because the truth is he’s already lost her. He can take the brig and he can take losing her, but he can’t take going back.

  Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.

  Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.

  “You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.

  He stares into his cup and takes another drink.

  “If you go back today it will be all right.”

  He shakes his head.

  Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

  Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts her eye and splashes coffee all over her face and she screams and stands up. She wipes the coffee out of her eyes and feels the blood and then stares at him for a second and says, “You son of a bitch.”