by Oakley Hall
“I’m afraid you didn’t raise your sons to be bookkeepers, Dad,” Richie said, being a good guy. What did “throat-cutting” mean?
* * *
Lunch was toasted tuna sandwices, an apple-and-nut salad, and iced tea. My father got started on the brand.
“You mean ‘that Commie rag’?” I said. Richie gave me a cool-down glance. “That’s how I’m getting through college,” I said. “Working there and at Perry’s.”
“Some people do look on it as a Commie rag,” our father said, frowning with his head canted.
“It’s Socialist-Labor,” I said, forking up apple and walnut. Anything you had to defend too often could get you overwrought. Weezie was tight-lipped, afraid this would get out of hand. Tully had promised to let me do some writing, one of these days.
“I know some of the fellows at the post are upset about it,” my father said. He belonged to an American Legion post downtown, which was bad, but he didn’t attend much, which made it better.
“The Red Menace is everywhere,” Richie said, straight-faced.
“This is a time when people feel especially tender about their country,” our father went on. “Sometimes your paper seems to threaten things that are precious to them. You can understand that.”
I could understand that, but I still felt ugly. My father hated Tully for having been one of my mother’s boyfriends, as well as for being a Commie, which he wasn’t.
“I just hope BuPers doesn’t hear about this when I’m up for lieutenant,” Richie said with a grin. “My brother a printer’s devil for a Commie rag!”
* * *
After lunch, when our father was dialing the radio for news, Richie and I took an outing on the boardwalk, past the high white swoops of the winter-closed roller coaster, the boarded-up baseball throws, and hot dog and saltwater-taffy stands. The air felt soft, with an off-the-ocean nip to it.
Storm surf smacked the beach, gray-green glassy backs bending to the spangled shore water in furies of spume.
Richie walked with his head down, sneakers scuffling on the sandy concrete walkway behind the seawall. We both knew the subject of the stuntman Hagen had to come up.
I said, “If someone asked you to help find an abortion doctor, what would you do?”
His face swung toward me. “You?”
“Not me! A friend.”
He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know this town anymore, Brud. You’ve got a job down south of Broadway. Don’t you know any of the hookers down there?”
“Don’t know any.”
“They’re not hard to get to know.”
“I know a pimp, actually.”
Richie made a that’s-it gesture. He frowned at me and said, “Have you been doing your reading in the Manual?”
“Sometimes,” I lied. A friend of Richie’s in LA had introduced him to The Pisan Manual, which was something like Machiavelli, by another ancient Italian. Richie regarded it as a kind of Bible.
“Important if you’re going to be a writer,” Richie said. The tightening of his jaw meant I’d better pay attention. “You ought to read a chapter a night.”
In fact, I considered the Manual Fascist bullshit. “‘It is the talent of the Great to agree with the Great,’” I quoted. “‘A Man of Insight and Judgment commands the World!’ That’s real Superman crap, Rich!”
“You can lead the kind of shit life Dad and Mom have lived,” he said. “Or you can try to be Someone. That’s what it’s saying!”
Of course our father going broke in the Depression had affected Richie, too. It had seemed to me that Richie had escaped the shit-storm by going off to USC on a scholarship. He had been a poor boy at a rich-boy school, but he had solved any problems he might have had by turning himself into a rich boy. Why wouldn’t my brother think himself a Superior Man, a Man of Insight and Judgment, when he had done everything right? I’d admired him tooling around San Diego in his slick Cord with the big chrome turbocharger pipes curving out of the coffin hood, with Liz—that year he was working in Hollywood.
Everything right but whatever it was Hagen had shouted at him.
“Listen, Brud,” Richie said. “You keep saying you want to write private eye stuff like Raymond Chandler. You don’t even know what you’re talking about! Private detectives are whores! If you want something really rotten done, you hire a private detective. Chandler’s just making those rotten whores romantic. I can tell you they’re not!” He stopped to wipe the back of his hand over his mouth. “Private detectives are shit!” he said, showing his teeth.
“Listen, Rich,” I said. “What was all that about on Flynn’s yacht?”
I could see his chest rise as he took a breath. He laid a hand there. “Val killed herself,” he said. “You remember Val.”
When I’d met her she’d been in a bathing suit, and I’d tried not to look at her smooth legs. I couldn’t even remember her face.
“Somebody hired a detective to find out about some bad stuff she had on her record, so she wrapped up some bricks in a kind of sweater thing and jumped into a swimming pool.”
“Jesus!” I said. “Who hired him?”
“Never mind,” he said. “People you don’t know.”
He leaned on the seawall, looking out at the ocean. “Some people blamed me, but that’s BS,” he said. “I guess Hagen knew her,” he added.
“He called you a throat-cutter,” I said.
“That’s bullshit!”
“Everybody wondered why you went off and joined Naval Air,” I said.
“I got sick of a lot of Hollywood shit that was going on. That was part of it. It was that December when I signed up,” he added.
I’d never heard any of this before. He fished a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and shook a cigaret from the pack. It took him several tries to get a light. I could see the white scar on his thumb, from some fight with a tramp he’d been in at SC. I felt the trembling of the concrete under our feet, from the slamming of the waves marching in from Asia.
“Listen, Brud, don’t fuss Liz about any of this, will you? She’s rattled already, with her father, and Gilliam on her back for the spring dance thing.”
“What’s it about her father?”
“He might do something so we can’t get married. It really gripes him that her mother left the estate to her, not to him.”
“Jesus!” I wondered aloud why Liz didn’t move out of her father’s house.
“He’s got control of the income till she’s twenty-five, though she may be able to get some of it when she graduates. I guess she loves him. He’s her father, after all.”
I’d seen Captain Fletcher once, with Liz, a stout, erect, florid man in his Navy uniform, with a lot of gold striping and his hair brushed so close to the scalp his head looked too small. He’d had a hand under Liz’s elbow as though supporting it, but holding it captive, too.
“She’s afraid he’ll rig it so I get sent out to the fleet,” Richie said. “He and Admiral Swenson were buddies at Annapolis.”
“Can I use that? It sounds like a terrific plot.”
“Fry head,” Richie said, grinning.
We started back. “Playing much tennis?” he asked.
“No time.”
“You ought to keep your game up. It’s a really great way to get to know people. You heard Flynn last night.”
“Did he really mean it when he asked us up there?”
“Sure he did!”
So he had steered the conversation away from Hagen and had not told me much. He had always been good at that.
3
Calvin King had played left halfback on the San Diego High football team, in what the San Diego Union sports page called the “Tutti-frutti Backfield.” The backfield had consisted of Calvin, Stan Takahashi, John Rodrigues, and Buddy Ruger. It wasn’t so tutti after John broke his leg and Payton Daltrey substituted at right half, but the jokes had continued, and we all got tired of the “frutti” part. I had thrown a pass to Calvin that won th
e game with Hoover High. Calvin, who’d been knocked down, caught the ball lying flat on his back. Calvin had a lot of style.
I hadn’t seen him since high school until a couple of months ago, when I’d encountered him zoot-suited on 3rd Street. “Workin for my Uncle Red,” he told me mysteriously. Next he cruised alongside me in a year-old Chrysler convertible with the top down. He wore a fuzzy stylish hat, and a cigar as pale brown as his face jutted from his jaw. He pulled over and directed me to the Fremont Bar, not far from the printshop, where we renewed acquaintance.
I was shocked when he told me he was a “player,” by which he meant that he was a pimp, with a white girl working for him.
It had been well known at San Diego High that Coach Garland had warned Calvin about messing with white girls.
“Told me I’d better leave the white meat alone,” Calvin had said, regaling the Tutti-fruttis. “Told him they wouldn’t leave me alone!” He crowed with delight, grabbing his leg halfway to the knee.
Coach Garland also warned the team of the dangers of sex to athletes. Calvin’s exchanges with him had become legends:
“How about just once on Friday night before the game, Coach?” Calvin asked, before his awed teammates.
“You heard me, Cal,” the coach said, folding his fat arms over his belly. “A man cannot afford to lose his vital fluids before a demanding physical test.”
“How about Thursday, Coach?” Calvin insisted, and it had become a password for the team.
* * *
After leaving Mission Beach, I drove downtown to 3rd Street to try to find Calvin King.
South of Broadway was the servicemen’s bar-and-whorehouse part of San Diego, where I worked at the brand printshop two evenings a week and Saturday mornings. Six months ago there had been mostly a population of bums and drunks, but as the numbers of servicemen increased, the bums had vanished.
* * *
BRITISH RETREAT and SINGAPORE DOOMED? were the evening headlines on the newsstand on the corner, illuminated by the streetlight there, as though for my benefit. The war headlines made me short of breath.
I parked in front of the dark window of the printshop and started down to the Fremont Bar, where I thought I might find Calvin.
Five stories of the Benford Hotel gleamed with lights. On the big Saturday nights, women leaned out the windows calling to the servicemen in the street. I passed clumps of sailors, and Marines in greens, and MPs with white puttees and belts, carrying nightsticks. I felt like a civilian jerk among the uniforms.
* * *
I followed a platinum blonde, big-assed in her tight red dress, wobbling on high heels. I remembered encountering her in the White Castle hamburger stand and thought of asking if she knew Calvin. A pair of drunken swabbies catcalled after her.
Coach Garland had often showed slides of the horrors of venereal disease to the team, one of them a syphilis guy with his prick eaten away and a sickly grin. When I’d signed into the midshipman’s program, a bunch of us had been taken for a tour of the Navy’s San Diego Recruit Depot. In the men’s john, half the stalls had carried the sign VD ONLY.
The Fremont was half filled, reeking of beer, the bar an expanse of uniformed backs. Music from the jukebox pulsed through the clamor: “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” Ella Fitzgerald. A colored bartender with a face like a slab of brown beef slid beakers of beer along the counter to outstretched hands.
Calvin was at the far end of the bar, his pork-pie hat with its jaunty feather cocked back on his head. There was an empty stool beside him.
“Hello, child!” he said as I took the free stool.
“How about Thursday, Coach?” I said.
“How about a Cuba libre?” he asked, grinning, and signaled the bartender. I met sailor-glances. A colored man had been lynched only weeks ago in Missouri for an “attack” on a white woman. I squinted at Calvin’s handsome tan profile.
“Dessy’s out makin money,” Calvin said. “She’ll be along directly.” He tossed out a crumpled bill when the bartender placed rum and Cokes before us.
“If a fellow can get more’n one lady on the stroll, he is doin good,” he went on expansively. “If I cop a couple more I am full-fledge. You know, these ladies can pull down a hundred bucks on a Saturday night.”
I opened my mouth and closed it on air. A hundred dollars!
“Dessy’s not pullin anything like that yet.”
“What does she do, give you some?”
“Give me all. I give her back some. I take care of her, see?”
It was hot in the bar as well as noisy. Sweat tickled under my arms. “Don’t you ever get in trouble in swabbie bars like this?” I asked him in a low voice.
He produced something from his pocket. There was a snick of metal. “Boy’s best friend,” Calvin said, exposing a bright blade.
I swung on my stool to conceal the knife between us. Calvin wore his habitual aloof expression as he pocketed it again.
“Do you know a doctor who’ll do an abortion?” I asked.
Calvin’s eyebrow hooked up. “You, child?”
“Friend of mine went in the service and left his girl knocked up.”
“Tijuana, Child. Nothing in Dago.”
I asked what it cost.
“Hundred and fifty ought to do it.”
A girl had come up behind us, brown-haired, young. Calvin slid off his stool, establishing proprietorship with a long arm. I was shocked to see her tuck something into his jacket pocket. All of it!
“Child, this here’s Dessy. This my old pal Payton Daltrey.”
She offered her hand. When I pressed the limp bit of flesh, I couldn’t take my eyes from her face. Long lashes framing sooty eyes like Ella Cinders’s, pink mouth with the upper lip hiked up, a spit curl at her temple, a thin tender throat. Calvin’s brown hand gripped the shoulder of her gray jacket.
“Ain’t she a pretty thing, though?”
“I’ll say!”
Dessy’s upper lip tucked up into her tremulous smile. She leaned against Calvin.
“How about a drink, beauty?”
She made a wailing sound. “I just want to go home, honey!”
“Well, we’ll just do that,” Calvin said, and swigged long from his glass.
“Honey, there’s some bad men down the bar. They kind of scare me.”
“We’ll just take care of that, too,” Calvin said, and signaled to the bartender.
The bartender pushed my glass aside and raised a section of the bar on a hinge. “Shake it along.”
Dessy slipped through the opening with Calvin behind her. I didn’t know what to do but follow them, out a narrow doorway into an alley past ranked trash cans.
Dessy clasped Calvin’s arm, hugging herself to him, checked skirt, silk-stockinged legs, high-heeled pumps.
“How about T-town tomorrow, child?” Calvin said, over the top of her brown head. “We’ll take Chrysie-car, check some things out.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I said. I’d get one of the other drivers to take my Mission Hills route.
“Pick you up at the printshop at two!”
Dessy flipped a hand good-bye. I watched the two of them move away up the street, arms around each other, hips bumping. I had a mean guilt hard-on thinking of Calvin bringing Dessy home to take care of her. It seemed that I had moved into Calvin’s sphere just by inquiring about an abortion doctor.
I called from the pay phone outside the White Castle. Mrs. Bonington answered, and I asked for Bonny.
“Listen,” I said, talking fast. “There aren’t any in San Diego. There’re some in Tijuana. My friend’s going to take me down there tomorrow afternoon, check them out.”
I could hear her breathing.
“It costs about a hundred and fifty dollars. Has she got any money?”
“I’ve got money.”
“I’d probably better take some tomorrow, if I’m going to make a date.”
“Payton,” she said, “it’s me.”
“Okay,” I sai
d, and told her I’d see her in the Quad at State tomorrow morning after our nine o’clocks.
Chapter 3
1
I usually encountered Liz Fletcher coming across the Quad from the Dance Department. We played a little game, she the vamp and I her goggling admirer—which wasn’t all that far off, actually, but of course it was all covered because she was wearing Richie’s engagement ring.
Liz would glance at me coyly, head tipped down, eyes cutting up at me, and say, “When are you going to take me away from all this, Payton?” And I would try to think of some snappy response.
Here she came today, raising a hand in greeting, striding toward the black Aztec statue in the center of the Quad. She wore a sweater and skirt like the other coeds, but silk stockings and high heels instead of bobby socks and saddle shoes—because she was a little older, or engaged.
She had a way of moving just a little closer to you when you were talking to her than was comfortable, as though she were near-sighted. As we walked together across the Quad toward the arcades, she matched my stride, her leg almost touching mine. She was wearing dark red lipstick that made her cheeks look pale.
Richie had caught a ride back to Pensacola this morning, she said, though he had another day’s leave. “He has to take whatever transport he can find.”
“That was some wild night on the Sirocco,” I said.
“Wasn’t Errol wonderful? It was like a fight in a movie!”
“I was going to deck that guy, but Flynn beat me to it!” I was afraid that sounded like a reflection on Richie, who had not decked Hagen.
“My protector!” She was laughing when we stopped in the shade of the arcade, gazing at me in that way she had—as though regarding me totally. She had an appointment with her psych prof, she said.
I had an appointment with Bonny Bonington.
“When are you going to take me away from all this, Payton?” she asked.
“As soon as I get my schooner,” I said. “We’ll head for the goldfields.”
When she strode off, laughing at that, I watched the swing of her neat hips in her plaid skirt.
