—for Zena Beth McGlashan
An Airman’s Goodbye
The Dakemans were untidy degenerates, including their children and pets, visit Pershing, and Pershing would I according to Mom. “Some people make their pets and children as trashy as they are,” she said, her voice hushed discreetly. “It’s a well-known fact of life.” She used me—in my crisp blue Air Force uniform complete with Expert Marksman medal and Good Conduct ribbon—and our dog, Pershing, as counterexamples. Pershing was a joyless yellow Labrador. We kept him tied to the mulberry tree in our front yard. He never barked or strained at his rope when cars, or people on foot, passed by. He was too intelligent, too dignified, to be ruled by the ordinary chaotic dog emotions. Several of the undisciplined Dakeman dogs would often come over to allow himself to be sniffed, nipped, teased, and sometimes mounted, without protest, until Mom rapped the window hard enough to make the uninhibited Dakeman mongrels realize her anger. The motley gang of dogs would then chase each other back across the street to their house, which looked like it had been plucked up out of some 1930s dust-bowl state by a tornado and deposited twenty years later in our clean and tidy, middle-class, scrupulously manicured east San Diego neighborhood.
I had just gotten back home after twelve weeks of basic training at Parks Air Force Base outside of Oakland. I had caught the flu in the damp northern California climate and had lost twenty pounds. I went into the Air Force skinny—six feet tall and one hundred and sixty pounds—and now, at one hundred and forty pounds, I looked like I’d just been liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. Still dizzy and weak, I spent my evenings watching TV and listening to Mom whisper complaints, as if she wasn’t in her own house and needed to be secretive. She complained about the Dakemans, about the rising price of meat, and, with tight-lipped bitterness, about Dad’s boss, who kept him on the road six to eight months a year. I didn’t mind listening to her. It was better than listening to a drill instructor scream a long list of your shortcomings into your face. And besides, the tedium I had to put up with was more than compensated for by her abundant, nonstop cooking.
“You need good, clean food, Miles,” she said. “I’m sure they fed you nothing but filth at the training base.” I ate the equivalent of six meals a day, hoping to put some bulk on my bones. My hair hadn’t grown in yet, and when I looked at myself in the full-length mirror, it seemed I was all nose and ears. The thought of looking up my old high school friends depressed me. They used to call me Nose-with-Legs—in just that way, like the title of a painting, as if I were a walking Picasso—and that’s exactly what I looked like at one hundred and forty pounds.
Mom’s specialty was meat loaf. I could eat six or seven slices of meat loaf at one sitting, along with a huge baked Idaho potato buried in sour cream, two or three steamed vegetables blanketed by a lava of yellow sauce, a quart of milk, and a hot wedge of apple or cherry pie for dessert. I was determined to get back the weight I’d lost before I had to report to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi for airborne radar training, and I would eat until a comfortable pain tightened my belly. Mom, a short, fat woman and a big eater herself, was delighted with my performance at the table. She liked her men beefy as lumberjacks. All her brothers had been lumberjacks in the forests of Oregon and northern California—big-bellied, thick-wristed, hearty men with fine personal habits and positive outlooks on life—and Dad was a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound medical-supplies salesman who loved Mom’s food so much he’d make small whimpering sounds as he ate. She connected my vulnerability to disease to my scrawniness, and now I was scrawnier than ever. She also saw evidence of a negative outlook in me, but this too, she believed, was a consequence of poor nutrition, the flu, and the influence of the riffraff who, she believed, joined the military only to improve their pathetic circumstances.
In the mornings, after my huge breakfast had time to settle, I’d go down into the basement and lift weights for an hour or so, tape-measure my arms, chest, and legs for signs of new bulk, then come upstairs to shower. I’d watch TV until early afternoon with a plate of meat-loaf or roast-beef sandwiches, then, in the evening, while Mom was getting supper ready, I’d sit out on the front porch and talk to Pershing. Pershing liked to be talked to. He would sit attentively on his haunches and study me with his big liquid eyes as I told him stories about life at Parks Air Force Base.
I was telling Pershing how two DIs had beat up a half-retarded kid for not changing his underwear often enough when a muffled bang from across the street startled us both. This was normal; you expected noises of all sorts from the Dakeman house. A thud, a bang, or a scream, and a door would pop open and dogs or children would come flying out barking, crying, or laughing, or issuing blood threats. Mr. Dakeman was usually out of work, but when he did work, he made good money. I think he was a welder or boilermaker, and he would leave the family for weeks at a time to work in such exotic places as Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Galveston, Texas. Sometimes he was home for half the year or more, and toward the end of one of these forced domestications, he would become short-tempered, often relieving his frustration or boredom with bouts of mind-numbing drinking.
This was one of those stretches of time when Mr. Dakeman was between jobs. The soft explosion I’d heard had to do with Nola Dakeman, his teenaged daughter. Nola came flying out of the house, slamming the door behind her and cursing tearfully. At seventeen, she was a tall, long-armed girl with crisp black hair cut Cleopatra-style, and absolutely no sign of breasts. After she calmed down, she started walking up the street backwards, her hands shoved into her pockets, muttering to herself and scowling at the house she’d left. She was barefoot, and wearing cut-off Levis and a yellow football jersey with the number 99 on it in big blue letters. It belonged to her brother, Eldon, an awkward giant of subnormal intelligence who’d played tackle on the varsity football team in his freshman year solely because of his size. He dropped out of school a few months short of graduation to join the Navy. Eldon Dakeman was the object of a lot of jokes among my friends, none of which were repeated to his face.
When Nola saw me watching her, she turned quickly and started walking normally, and then, as if seized by a better idea, she spun around and waved. I swung my arm in a casual arc. Pershing raised his sad eyebrows expectantly. Nola smiled. “Hey, Miles, you’re back home,” she said.
“Affirmative,” I said, military-style.
She crossed the street. She was wearing makeup, a lot of it. The face she had painted on herself was pretty. I never thought of her as pretty—she was just a lanky Dakeman kid across the street—but three months away from home gave me a fresh perspective.
“So, are you a big jet pilot or something?” she asked, putting one long narrow foot on the first step of our porch, stretching her other leg behind her. Her calves rounded out nicely as they flexed; her haunches curved sleek as albino seals out of her skintight cutoffs.
“Negative,” I said. “I just finished basic training. I’m going to Mississippi in a few weeks to study at the radar school.”
“Eldon’s not in the Navy anymore,” she said.
“How come?” I asked. All the lights were on in the Dakeman house, even though it was still light outside. I could hear Mr. Dakeman yelling at someone, probably his wife, a slender, gray woman who always seemed distracted, as if she were trying to remember something important and couldn’t go on with the next thing she had to do until she recalled it. I saw Mr. Dakeman drag her across the yard once by her wrist, pulling her into the house so hard that she swung from side to side like a kite being yanked out of a windy sky by force.
“He got kicked out,” Nola said. “He did something weird, I think.”
That didn’t surprise me. Once during a scrimmage, Eldon pulled down his pants far enough so that his gigantic, ghostly-white butt was visible to the back-field. Mooning his own backfield was his idea of sophisticated humor. I was the third-string quarterback getting a chance to work with the starting backfield. We were in a T-formation set, and I was too busy staring
over the center at a pair of growling linebackers to notice Eldon at his left-tackle spot. When I turned to hand the ball off to Joey Butterfield, the fullback, Joey wasn’t there. I got creamed and fumbled the ball. Joey was on his back, laughing hysterically. I was facedown and writhing in the grass, taking late hits even though the wind was knocked out of me and Coach Stuckey was blowing his whistle so hard it hurt my ears even under the insulating pile of bodies. Coach Stuckey made the entire football team take ten laps after scrimmaging for two more hours because of our attitude problem. We wanted to kill Eldon, but at six feet six inches and two hundred and twenty-nine pounds, he was easy to forgive. It was hard to believe all this had happened just the previous fall. High school seemed like a century ago.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He won’t say. I think he wanted to get kicked out, though. He hated it.” She sat down on the first step of the porch, the back of her head level with my knee.
“Too bad,” I said, trying to imagine hulking Eldon in a tight-fitting sailor’s uniform.
Nola nudged Pershing’s flank with her naked toes. “Hi, Pershing,” she said. “Hi, you silly old zombie.” She put her hand out, and Pershing leaned toward it an inch, his eyes melancholy in the waning light. Then Mom cleared her throat. She’d been at the screen door for a while, listening. “Miles,” she said in that soft, confiding voice. “I have your pork chops ready, dear.” I left Nola on the porch talking to Pershing and went inside to eat.
Mom gave me free use of her car, a bright yellow 1950 Hudson Hornet. I loved its low-cut lines and power. When you got into it, you stepped down, as if into a private basement apartment. The upholstery was a dark beige plush and the dashboard held big, generous instruments and a chrome-plated push-button radio. Mom vacuumed it out once a week, as if it were part of her house. The car was clean and it still had a showroom smell to it, even though it was over five years old. Sometimes I’d have her pack a lunch—four sandwiches, pie, thermos full of milk—and I’d drive out to the beach. The surf at LaJolla Shores was perfect for body-surfing, and I’d spend an entire morning swimming out to where the big waves were breaking and then riding them in. I worked up a terrific appetite doing this, and by noon I was ready to eat my four-sandwich lunch. Then I’d drive around town for a while, looking at the sights, taking the long way home—through Balboa Park, past the zoo and Navy hospital, and then out onto the highway that ran through Mission Valley, where I’d open the big Hudson up and watch the red speed indicator dance on 90.
About two weeks before I was scheduled to take the train to Biloxi, Nola Dakeman asked if she could come to the beach with me. In spite of myself, I glanced quickly at the kitchen window of our house, knowing that Mom would be squinting out at us and wondering what Nola Dakeman wanted from her clean-cut airman. I told Nola she was welcome to come, but would she meet me on El Cajon Boulevard—four blocks away—in fifteen minutes. She shrugged— probably guessing what was behind my strategy—and said, “Sure.”
In the car, she said, “What’s the matter, don’t you want your ma to know you’re taking me to the beach?”
I glanced over at her, a nervous twitch of a smile trying to sabotage the cool, regulation military expression on my face. She sat close to me, and I realized that she smelled. It was a strong, domestic smell, a mixture of sweat and kitchen odors—the Dakemans were known to fry everything in deep fat: a haze of grease fogged their kitchen day and night—but under this was a rich, tropical smell that was as exotic to me as the air of an equatorial seaport.
By late afternoon I was in love with Nola Dakeman. I didn’t realize it until a few days later, but thinking back on our day at the beach I saw that was when it started. After we swam and body-surfed for a few hours, we came back to the blanket to have some lunch. But I couldn’t eat more than one sandwich, and even several hours later the undigested sandwich felt like a twelve-pound shot in my stomach as I saw again, in my imagination, her water-beaded face, the long strands of her wet black hair pasted to her neck and shoulders, and her electrifying eyes that seemed able to transfer some of their blue voltage into mine.
I lost my appetite. I began to meet Nola out in the street after dark, and the anticipation of these meetings was so intense that I had a hard time swallowing my supper. Mom thought I was having a relapse of whatever it was I’d caught in basic training. She wanted to call a doctor, but I begged her not to. “I’ll be all right, Mom,” I said. “All I need is to rest my stomach a little. I think I’ve been eating too much. Maybe I have a little indigestion.”
She regarded me with a wounded look. Cold tears glazed her eyes. “My food does not cause indigestion,” she said gravely.
I’d go outside when it was dark and give Pershing some leftovers, and then Nola would come out and stroll across the street. We’d talk casually until Mom left her vigil at the kitchen window to watch one of her favorite TV shows. When she was gone, Nola and I would slip around to the side of the house and kiss each other to exhaustion, each grinding kiss lasting minutes.
I loved her smell and would dream about it at night, and the dreams eventually became erotically specific. Mom began to regard me with a kind of shy disgust when she changed my bedding. I’d never been in love before. I’d gone steady twice in high school, but that was part of an expected routine. Nola and I met every evening at the same time and would wind up necking heavily either in our side yard, between the house and the garage, or in her backyard.
The Dakeman backyard looked like a graveyard for the Industrial Revolution. The shrubless, grassless yard was strewn with the massive hulks of old arc-welding generators, compressors frozen with rust, and gutted prewar cars waiting patiently to be repaired or further cannibalized. Unidentifiable fragments of machines grew out of the sterile soil like exotic rust-colored wild-flowers.
We made love for the first time in the rotting, mushroom-sprouting backseat of a prewar Buick that sat wheelless in a far comer of the Dakeman yard. It was a passionate, flailing, short-lived attempt, charged with the sort of desperation people who leap from the windows of burning buildings have, but it was the real thing: sex. “I love you! Oh dammit, I think I love you!” I said, joyous and amazed. I hugged her hard and rocked her from side to side against the mildewed mohair as disturbed moths banged into my face and neck.
She drew back, putting some distance between us. “It’ll be way better next time,” she said. It was a thin-lipped declaration of superior knowledge. It was my first time, but it was not Nola’s. “It won’t be such a great big deal for you next time, Miles.”
We took a walk through the neighborhood. The nearly full moon transformed lawns and sidewalks into pewter, and the sparse fronds of the date palms that lined the streets seemed like the motionless wings of astonished angels. As we passed the dark windows of my house, I sensed Mom’s unhappy, vigilant eyes watching us. I put my arm around Nola’s bony shoulders. “You’re really kind of okay,” Nola said, as if she had heard strong arguments to the contrary. “You remind me of some movie actor.”
“I do?” I was thrilled, because just that morning, while studying myself in the bathroom mirror, I’d thought that I had something of Rory Calhoun’s looks—a blade-thin but muscular body; sharp, crafty face with a handsome, hawklike nose tilting out of it.
“Who?” I asked. “What actor?”
“Jack Webb,” she said.
I tried to hide my disappointment. I laughed. “Dum-da-da-dum,” I sang, thinking that the stupid Dragnet theme would haunt me for the rest of my life.
“You remind me of a movie star, too,” I said.
This seemed to startle her. “Really?” she said eagerly. “Who? Tell me.”
I almost said, because I was still smarting from the Jack Webb comparison, Lassie! But then my devotion to her overcame my anger and I quickly blurted out, “Debra Paget.” And it was true, she did look like Debra Paget, the beautiful actress who played Indian princesses almost exclusively, except that Debra Paget
had a magnificent body with powerful, coppery breasts that looked like they could punch holes into sheet metal. Nola had no breasts at all.
“Oh, you’re crazy,” she said, obviously pleased.
We returned to the prewar Buick after a while and did it again. When we finished, Nola said, “See? That was a thousand percent better than the first time, Miles, wasn’t it?” She patted the back of my head. I’d seen her pat Pershing, whom she regarded as an emotional cripple, in this same encouraging way.
“Affirmative,” I said.
I began to think that I could not bear to go to Biloxi, Mississippi, and leave Nola Dakeman behind. Life without Nola seemed like no life at all; it seemed like death. Nothing that would happen from now on could excite or motivate me if Nola was not at my side sharing every detail of the experience. I’d be no better than a zombie, sleepwalking through the world. Mom knew something was wrong, and she probably knew what it was, but she couldn’t bring herself to dis-cuss it. At best she would whisper abstract complaints, to no particular sympathizer, about the endless housecleaning, laundering, and cooking she had to do for little or no thanks.
In my lovesickness, I had become a slob. My hair was growing back unevenly in scruffy patches, but I wouldn’t go to a barber shop. I didn’t shave for days at a time. In the mirror, to my disgust—despite my general lack of grooming and military neatness—I began to look more and more like Jack Webb. I twisted what forelocks I had into curls, greasing them and making them hang on my forehead, hoping for a dashing, Rory Calhoun effect, but I only looked like a Picasso caricature of Sergeant Joe Friday. I even started smoking, because I had never seen Jack Webb with a cigarette in his mouth.
“I won’t have you leaving filthy cigarettes around my house,” Mom said, a new coldness in her voice.
Borrowed Hearts Page 25
