by Pete Hamill
“He’d prob’ly throw his skirt in the air,” Harrelson said.
And I thought of Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada walking alone on the beach beside Perdido Bay. And that made me think of Eden Santana.
At lunchtime, Bumper was serving at the messhall and Harrelson was behind me on line. Bumper looked at me, his eyes twinkling in his round black face, laid some extra French fries on my tray, then reached under the counter and found me a piece of coconut pie. Harrelson stared at Bumper.
“How bout some of that pie?”
“Last piece,” Bumper said, deadpan.
“You sure of that?”
Bumper held up an empty pie plate.
We moved on.
“Gahdam uppity niggers,” Harrelson said.
“Is there anybody you like, Harrelson?” I said.
“Yeah. Americans.”
We sat together at one of the tables. Boswell came over and joined us. He didn’t have any pie either.
“Captain’s runnin around like a duck without a dick,” he said.
“Ducks have dicks?” I said.
“Sure,” Boswell said, “but they ain’t what they’re quacked up to be!” He slammed the table and Harrelson laughed, shaking his head, and then Boswell said: “Where’d you get that fuckin pie?”
“Why you even ask, Bos?” Harrelson said. “The boy’s a damn Yankee niggerlover and the niggers love him back.”
“Ah, fuck you,” I said.
“It’s the truth, ain’t it? You upstairs in the slave quarters every other day.”
“Maybe he likes the smell up there,” Boswell said.
“Or the spearchuckin music.”
“You guys just take your asshole pills, or what?” I said.
“Maybe he goes to town with em to get some a that dark meat,” Harrelson said. I thought of Winnie standing at the jukebox, one foot curled around the other.
“Nah, he got his own stuff,” Boswell said. “Everybody knows that.”
“She ain’t stuff,” I said.
“Shew,” Boswell said, “you touchy today, ain’t you, boy?”
“Just lay off,” I said. I was poking at the pie, then slid the plate toward Boswell.
“Want some?” I said.
Boswell grinned. “Nah. I don’t even like coconut pie.”
Harrelson reached over with a fork and clipped off a piece of the pie. “I do.”
“Taste like creosote to me,” Boswell said.
“If it ain’t got grits with it, Bos don’t eat it,” Harrelson said to me. “What we gone do after the alert’s over, Bos?”
“Jackson, Mississippi,” Boswell said.
Harrelson turned to me. “He bin tryin to get me to go to Jackson Mi’sippi since last September.”
“Do the ducks have dicks there?” I said.
“Five fuckin hours in the car,” Harrelson said.
“We gotta go there,” Boswell said.
“Why Jackson, Mississippi?” I said.
Boswell’s eyes brightened. “ ’Cause it’s the insurance capital of the whole damn South!”
The words hung there for a long moment.
“So?” I said.
“Insurance companies, boy,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What does that mean?” Boswell said.
“I don’t have a fucking clue.”
“Secretaries, boy!
I got up, shaking my head, while Harrelson laughed. I started for the disposal room and saw Bobby Bolden coming toward me. There was a slice of coconut pie on his tray.
“Too bad about Stalin, huh?” he said.
Miles Rayfield and Dunbar came back around three. Rayfield’s eyes were wide and agitated in his pink sunburned face. Dunbar was smoking a cigarette in an amused way.
“You just can’t believe Mainside!” Miles said. “They’re running around like a pack of medieval lunatics with the plague! You’d think the Russians just landed in Mobile!”
“Haulin out anti-aircraft guns,” Dunbar said.
“They’re making sailors march!” Miles said. “With guns!”
“And officers are checking all IDs, case someone got a Communist Party membership card on ’im,” Dunbar said. “Tell him, Miles.”
“My wallet was in the truck!” Miles said. “Who carries around an ID?”
“They asked him for it,” Dunbar said, shaking his head in mock sympathy.
“And arrested me!”
“Marched him to the parkin lot to get the damned thing.”
“Under arrest!”
“They didn’t believe it was a Navy wallet cause it didn’t have a rubber in it.”
“And Dunbar here, this son of a bitch, he told them he hardly knew me,” Miles said. “One of the damned jarheads said I even looked Russian. And then the thick-headed dumb bastard started doing one of those scenes out of some rotten World War II propaganda movie. He started asking me about baseball!”
“Babe Luth, you die,” Dunbar said.
“And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked me about football! Or as he called it … footbowl. And I knew even less.”
“So they took him to security,” Dunbar said, laughing.
“And held me there, trying to get Donnie Ray on the damned phone,” Miles said. “And of course the damn lines were busy for two hours and then everybody went out to lunch except that damned Larry Parsons.”
“Dumbest white man in the United States,” Dunbar said.
“And he didn’t know my last name!” Miles said. “I’ve been here a year and he never learned my last name!”
“So what did you do?” I said.
“What do you always do in the damned Navy? We waited.”
“Watched the flyboys get ready for an air strike on downtown Palatka.”
Miles was laughing now at the absurdity of the whole world, smothering the laugh with a sunburned hand.
“The Navy,” he said. “The goddamned Navy …”
We were at our desks, filling out forms. And then Larry Parsons came back from a late lunch. His face was all tensed up, his eyes wide.
“Hey,” he said, “did you hear about Stalin?”
Dunbar fell on the floor and groaned.
• • •
A half hour later, Miles suddenly turned in his chair and faced me.
“Jesus Christ, I almost forgot!”
He took a letter from his jeans pocket.
“There was a woman out by the gate, waved us down as we were coming in,” he said. “Asked us to get this to you.”
He handed me the letter. Blinked. Turned back to his typewriter, pecking out numbers on a form. The letter had my name written on it in a small careful hand. I opened it.
Dear Michael,
Something has come up and I can’t see you tonight. One of my kids is sick and I have to go to see her in New Orleans. I know you’ll understand. Please take care of yourself and I’ll see you as soon as I get back.
Love,
Eden
That was all. There was no phone number for me to call her, and no address. Even the city was something new. She’s never mentioned it to me, never told me that her children lived there, and I’d been afraid to ask. There were a million things she never said, and that I never asked. So as I studied the note as if it were a sacred text, I thought it was very much like Eden Santana, full of holes and confusions. She didn’t say how sick the child was, or with what; she didn’t mention how long she’d be gone or how she’d get in touch with me when she got back. All I knew for sure was that she was gone.
“You okay?” Miles Rayfield said.
“Yeah … Why?”
“You’re the color of newsprint paper.”
“No. I’m okay.”
At least she’d signed the note “love.” I got up and went to the counter and waited on customers. Move, I thought. Do something. That way you will not have to think.
After a while, Miles left with Becket and Dunbar for the hangars, t
he three of them hauling an engine on a truck. I went looking for a pontoon part in the back, taking my time, trying to imagine Stalin’s last hours, anything to push Eden’s face from my mind, and then slipped into Miles Rayfield’s studio. On the easel, a deserted beach was taking shape on a piece of Masonite. The colors were muted, the colors of dusk. But there were only large rough forms, no details, no drawing. I picked up the sketchbook and leafed through it. Miles Rayfield had made many more drawings.
The last five were of Freddie Harada. His face was beautifully captured in pencil from two different angles; his features looking boyish and innocent, but there was something new in his eyes and the set of his mouth, an aspect I’d never seen before on my visits to the Kingdom of Darkness. He seemed to be flirting with me. Or with the artist. The other pictures were of Freddie standing, looking directly off the page. He was naked. Late in the afternoon, I strolled over to the hangars to see Sal and Max. They were working together on the electronic system of a big HUP. I looked around for Mercado but didn’t see him.
“Trouble with these goddamn things,” Sal said, “if you use them, they break.”
“The guys that design them don’t have to fly them,” Max said. “That’s why they’re so lousy.”
“You guys seen that Mercado around?” I said.
Sal looked up. “He’s off for a week. Went home to Mexico.”
Jesus. She’s gone. He’s gone. At the same time. Max and Sal tried to explain to me what they were doing, but I couldn’t follow it.
Chapter
42
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Around midnight I went outside and sat on the stairs, breathing in the warm air, looking out at the thick clusters of stars. Then I saw Miles Rayfield coming around the side of the Supply Shack, walking fast, his head down. He didn’t see me until he reached the stairs.
“Oh,” he said, surprised, his manner oddly stiff. “Oh, hello. What are you doing here?”
“Can’t sleep. Nice night.”
He relaxed and took out his Pall Malls and lit up. “I thought maybe you were waiting for Lavrenti Beria to take over the base.”
“Who’s he?”
He told me and I laughed (too hard) at his little joke and felt stupid again. There were at least five hundred names of people in this world that were known by everyone except me. My head was filled with useless knowledge. But I didn’t know Lavrenti Beria was the head of the Russian secret police. I didn’t know a lot of things. I asked Miles if he’d just finished painting. He hesitated, then went rushing ahead.
“Hell, no,” he said. “If there was ever a day they’d catch me, it’s today. Imagine getting caught doing something secret on the day Stalin died? Oh, hey, I wanted to show you something.”
I followed him into the barracks. The racks were full of sleeping men. Miles Rayfield went to his locker and I met him in the head, where the lights were still burning. He handed me a folder crammed with reproductions of paintings torn from magazines. “Study these,” he said. “Copy them if you want.” A lot of the pictures were by his own favorite, a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi. At first (conditioned by Caniff and Noel Sickles and Crane) I thought the drawing was clumsy, the postures awkward, the heads too big or the hands too small. Sometimes Kuniyoshi’s people seemed to be falling out of the picture. But standing with Miles in the head, looking at the pictures while Miles smoked, I began to see in a new way. There was one painting of a fat big-headed kid with crazy eyes holding a banana in one hand, reaching with the other for a peach in a white bowl. The table was a dark orange and tilted so that we saw it from the top. A window was open to an empty landscape: two buildings, two clouds, the view empty and scary like the desolate buildings I’d seen in Renaissance paintings.
“Look at that kid’s eyes,” Miles whispered, pointing at Kuniyoshi’s fat boy. “He’s a monster. All appetite, all need, all want. Look at the way his hair is parted down the middle.… And see, he’s got a little sailor boy’s shirt on, but it’s not blue. It’s the color of dried blood. And the blue walls, the blue dead sky, you know he’s living in a cold bleak world and eats to make himself feel alive.…”
Suddenly a door behind us opened and closed. And Harrelson was there, drunk, his eyes small and glittery. He looked at Miles and then at me.
“Well, looka this.”
“Fuck off, Harrelson,” Miles said. “The Russians are coming.”
“Two of you … in the shithouse. In the middle of the goddamn night. Ain’t that cute.”
I stepped forward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You and honeybunch here,” he said and grinned. “Couple of the year.”
I grabbed him by his jumper and slammed him against the wall. I came within an inch of his face, smelling the souring booze on his breath.
“You say another word,” I whispered, “and I’ll break your fuckin head.”
Someone yelled from the darkness of the barracks. “Knock it off!” And another: “Go to fucking bed!”
I waited for them to be quiet and released my grip on Harrelson. I was trembling. Not in fear of Harrelson. I was afraid of my own sudden rage. I might punch myself into the brig.
“You’re a real fresh boy,” Harrelson said coldly.
“And you’re a sick bastard,” I said. “Make any more remarks, to me or Miles and I’ll knock your dick stiff. He’s my friend, got it? Friend.”
Harrelson said, sarcastically, “Excuse me.” He swished past me to the urinals and pissed for a long time, humming “I Can’t Help It if You’re Still in Love With Me.” I almost laughed. He was such a relentless bastard. And the fury seeped out of me. Harrelson was mean, and I’d just slammed him around; but I had to love him for this. Hank Williams all the way. When he was finished, he looked at us in an offended way, and walked into the dark slumbering barracks. I exhaled a little too loudly. And then chuckled in a forced way. Miles Rayfield wasn’t laughing.
“Thanks,” he said, and walked quickly to his bunk.
Afterward it was even harder to sleep. Harrelson was now my enemy and I didn’t want enemies. Not here. Not anywhere. I didn’t want to have to watch my back. I didn’t want anyone working against me in secret. I’d defended myself: yes. And I had defended Miles Rayfield. But suppose Harrelson was right about Miles? What did that mean about me? Miles was my friend. He didn’t hoard what he knew about painting and drawing; he shared it with me, and nobody in the world had ever done that before. And he was pushing me to be better, to grow out of comics and childhood, to look at real art, to try it myself. His friendship was a challenge. He’d already showed me how to make money. In a way, he had turned me pro. But if I liked him and he was queer, did that make me queer too? It was so goddamned confusing.
I got up again and went back into the head and studied the other pictures in Miles’s folder. Painters named Adolph Dehn and Aaron Bohrod, Anton Refrigier and Arnold Blanch. Maybe Miles had handed me his folder of painters whose first names started with A. None of them were in the same league with Kuniyoshi.
And then I saw Ben Shahn for the first time and I said out loud, Jesus Christ. These were pictures I understood. Ben Shahn. He had to come from the kind of places I came from. Here was a picture called Handball. A high handball court with four players in front of it, one of them a Negro wearing a hat. There were two men watching in the foreground. One in a cap, his hands jammed deep into his baggy trousers. The other’s hands were folded. Beyond the handball court stood a row of tenements. I felt as if I’d played on that court, stood on that street. I was certain I knew the guy with the cap. In another Ben Shahn picture called Vacant Lot there was a boy in a sweater and knickers just like those I wore until I was eleven. A white shirt collar rose above the sweater and he was playing ball alone against a brick wall in a vacant lot. The boy was totally isolated. Sitting there in the john, in Pensacola, Florida, on the day Stalin died, I thought of long Saturday mornings in Brooklyn, up early to serve Mass at Holy Name and how it felt when Mass
was finished and it was still early and the neighborhood was silent because the men weren’t up yet and I would go down to the Ansonia Clock Factory and play ball alone against its dirty brick walls. I looked at the picture thinking: This could be me.
Then I heard a door open and slam and someone bouncing off a wall and a giggle and a new stirring in the barracks. I got up. It was Sal. He saw me and excused himself and went past me and pissed in the sink.
“Had to do that since I left the Dirt Bar,” he said.
“I thought all leave and liberty was canceled,” I said.
“Nah, just a rumor. Stalin’s still dead.”
“Where’s Sam?”
“Blow job.”
“What about you?”
“Too broke up about Joe,” he said, and went off to bed. One of these nights, I thought, I have to really talk to Sal.
And I did.
Chapter
43
What Sal Told Me
My father is a baker, I like to say: he bakes cars. He owns a body shop in the South Bronx and fixes cars from all over the borough. He never asks anyone for registration papers. A guy wants a black car painted pink? Why not? You want certain numbers filed off the engine block? Step right up. The old man does good work. He has a good eye for color, and he can do anything with his hands. He could’ve been a sculptor in another life. I guess when he was young he didn’t have the choices a lot of people get in this world. Before he got the body shop he worked in a gas station, and before that he fought World War II.
