Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Thanks.”

  * * *

  The lights were still on in the printshop, and through the window, past the lettering

  THE BRAND

  PRINTING

  I could see Tully at his desk, suede shoes up on the metal wastebasket, reading the Los Angeles Times. The headlines were visible through the window: BALI BATTLE and COAST SPYING DISCLOSED.

  He put down the paper when I came in. He wore his leather cap and ink-stained loafer jacket. Last Saturday’s brand was spread out on the counter. On the beaverboard wall behind him were thumbtacked newspaper photographs and headlines: SACCO AND VANZETTI DIE! A photo showed Tom Mooney handcuffed to a policeman, another a Spanish Civil War soldier in a tasseled cap in the instant of dropping his rifle and falling. Still another was of John Reed, who looked a good deal like Tully. The brand had something to do with the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party, which had something to do with Trotsky, who had been murdered in Mexico City a year or so ago. I’d never heard Tully speak of any Russians but Stalin, whom he hated.

  “Saw your car parked out front,” he said.

  I said I’d gone with a friend to Tijuana, to the Molino Rojo.

  He looked alarmed. “You didn’t dip your wick in that venereal snake pit!”

  “Never fear.”

  On the front page of the brand the headlines were HUAC COUNSEL NAMED and TOTS MOLESTED IN QUARRY. Smaller heads were STRIKE DEADLOCK and OPA SCANDAL. The news stories, which Tully wrote, were boring. The brand was not interested in the war but in “social issues”: the tuna cannery strike and the trial of some strikers up in Yolo County, wherever that was; the latest outrages of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its California offshoot, the Tenney Committee.

  Tully perused the San Diego and Los Angeles papers daily and received others in the mail. He didn’t subscribe to the Daily Worker.

  On the other side of the counter was the door to the pressroom, domain of the Dutchman printer, Tee-John, where Charlotte, the cranky old press, hulked up in her concrete pit like a grizzly bear.

  “If you want to do some writing, you might try your hand at this,” Tully said. He folded the Times to an inner page. YOUTH MOLESTED, JUDGE NAMED. A judge in Altadena who had consulted in his chambers with the eleven-year-old son of a couple seeking a divorce was accused of inappropriate behavior with the boy.

  As I scanned the text, the pretty kitten face of the girl at the Molino Rojo crowded my eyes.

  The judge had been arraigned and released on a thousand dollars bail. The attorney representing the judge—neither of them named—maintained his client’s innocence. The boy had been treated at a local hospital and released. I was interested that the Times writer had managed to produce outrage out of bare facts.

  “What a shit,” I said.

  “Use short, declarative sentences, and don’t offend Mrs. Grooms.”

  Mrs. Grooms was the widow of Erwin J. Grooms, the founder of the brand. The molested-tots right-hand column had been a feature of the brand as long as I’d known it, a come-on of the kind of underground evil sex news the San Diego Union never printed, so people would buy the brand to be shocked and scandalized by the political and social molestations with their SWP slant in the other columns of the paper.

  Once I’d asked Tully what molestation meant exactly.

  “Someone with power over someone else doing something humiliating to the party of the second part,” he said. “Fondling, buggery, rape, incest, any kind of sexual abuse. It’s not an exact term.”

  A fat envelope from the clipping service arrived every week, with clips from all over the country.

  It was Tully’s pronouncement that war was the ultimate molestation of the young. Only kids, he claimed, would fight a modern war, because they did not yet really believe that they could get killed.

  “Pretty low on specifics,” I said, handing back the paper. “Altadena. March second. A thousand dollars bail.”

  “You will have room to exercise your talents.”

  “I’ll tell you where I’d like to exercise my talents. At the Molino Rojo there was this young girl, maybe she was eighteen. She was being fucked by a fucking Shetland pony. That’s evil!”

  “Someday, my boy, you will have to read Das Kapital,” Tully said. “Especially the terrible chapter entitled ‘The Working Day.’ Marx would point out that your Tijuana whores make their living under relatively pleasant circumstances.”

  “If I get hold of some Mexican tires that have been smuggled across the border by the people who run the Molino Rojo—have I contributed to evil?”

  He leaned farther back in his chair with a creak of metal and beamed at me, revealing his gold tooth. “My boy, my boy—what gasoline do you use?”

  “Whatever’s cheap.”

  “If you fill up with Standard, you are contributing to a cartel that still maintains connections with Nazi Germany. That is evil.”

  “My mother says LA is evil,” I said.

  “Your mother is very often correct in her judgments,” he said. “Los Angeles is the biggest Protestant city in the country, with the usual Protestant persecution of anybody with an irregular opinion. Now they are summoning their energies to put the coast Japanese into concentration camps.” He blew out his breath in a hard sigh. “In addition there is Hollywood, operated by a pack of New York garment district parvenus, who are so overwhelmed by their money and power that the only outlet they know is an indulgence in sexual license.”

  That was too close to my brother and the dead Val. To change the subject, I said, “Yeah, well, my father says his American Legion buddies are pissed off at the brand.”

  “A paper that does not offend some people is not worth its ink,” Tully said, pouting his fat lips, and I went home before he could lecture me any more.

  Out of his bullshit lectures and the clipping service, however, I had been formulating a kind of theory connecting the abuse of the young by the old, the weak by the strong, the dumb by the cunning, Negroes by whites, and more specifically Bonny’s seduction by Johnny Pierce and the fourteen-year-old virgins in Tijuana who ended up fucking dogs and ponies.

  Chapter 4

  1

  I was a speedy grocery deliveryman. I’d set the hand brake just right so that when I stepped out of the blue and silver Perry’s Fine Foods panel, the truck braked itself to a stop with the rear doors beside me. I’d wrench the right-hand door open, snatch the numbered box out of the stack within, and trot with it to the kitchen door or service entrance.

  I’d convinced Lois Meador, the dispatcher, that I was a natural for the particular problems of delivering the Mission Hills route, since I had lived there as a boy. I could summon up heavy dogfaced ironies from the fact that I was delivering groceries in my khaki shirt, green twill pants, black leather clip-on bow tie, and twill cap to the back doors of houses I had once entered by the front.

  Today my next-to-last stop was old Mrs. Blair’s mansion on the Rim overlooking Mission Valley like a Spanish castle. Mrs. Blair usually left a tip thumbtacked with the next day’s order to the cork bulletin board. I resented the tip—two dollars today—which turned me into a servant instead of a college boy delivering groceries. But I pocketed it.

  Last stop was the Emmetts’, a high pink stucco wall with a sign over a wrought-iron gate: SERVICE. As soon as I had let myself in, juggling two heavy boxes, the Emmetts’ midget Hound of the Baskervilles was yipping and snarling at my pants cuffs, so I had to cross the service yard in a kind of dance, kicking at Bitsy as the mutt made dashes at my ankles.

  “Don’t you let him in here!” brayed Mrs. Sims, the cook, as I shouldered through the door, fending Bitsy off with my foot. She was seated at the zinc-topped table, glowering at me over the headline: JAPANESE CROSS SALWEEN RIVER.

  I began unloading the boxes onto the counter.

  “Can’t you knock, boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You did not knock!”

&
nbsp; “No, ma’am.”

  “You knock next time, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, meaning I heard her. In fact, however, if I’d made two trips, so that I wasn’t overloaded, I could have dealt with Bitsy and knocked as well.

  When I started out with the empty boxes, Mrs. Sims raised her voice. “How many times have I told you to put the meat in the Frigidaire?”

  Mind on the Japanese crossing the Salween River—where was the Salween River?—“Yes, ma’am.” I stowed the white-wrapped packets in the refrigerator, backed out the door with the empty boxes, and danced and kicked across the service yard to the gate. There I raised a finger in salute to Mrs. Sims and clanged the gate shut so that Bitsy scurried away, yapping.

  My friend Pogey Malcolm lived on Wisteria Street, just around the corner from the Emmetts. When I’d U-turned to park in front of his house, he appeared in his upstairs window, slight and neat in his blue cashmere and cords. He had a sunburned nose like a Koala bear from tennis at his father’s club.

  “Have you got time to come up?”

  The front door was unlocked, and I knew the way, although, delivering groceries, I would have to go to the back door.

  He was sitting at his blond wood desk. It was a terrific room, with a rag rug on the polished floor, bright impressionist prints on the wall, a bookcase, and a brand-new Royal portable on the desk. I sat on the bed.

  “Where’s the Salween River?” I asked.

  “Down by Singapore, I think.”

  “The Japs just keep going and going,” I said.

  “It’s bad.”

  “Pretty hard to maintain irony and pity delivering to that fat-ass cook at the Emmetts’.” I motioned in their direction.

  Lately we’d been talking like Hemingway characters.

  “Something you don’t feel good after,” Pogey agreed.

  Last summer the two of us had had fun trying to concoct the plot of a mystery novel like The Big Sleep, but for all his neat desk and new Royal typewriter, Pogey never seemed to get any writing done.

  I said I’d sent my “On the Dodge” story off to Black Mask. “I’ll get it back in about three weeks,” I said.

  “Maybe not, this time.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “What did you think of Johnny Pierce? As a guy, I mean.”

  “What do you mean, ‘did’? Is he dead?”

  “No, I mean—just gone in the Air Corps.”

  Pogey looked puzzled. He was very loyal to the tong and the brothers.

  “I thought he was a real shit,” I said. “I hate that kind of big jock guy. Whenever you start to say something, he raises his voice to talk over you. That kind of stuff. I mean, I’ve been taking Bonny out. I don’t see how she could stand a guy like that.”

  “Well, he’s a fraternity brother,” Pogey said, about as close to arguing as he ever got. He had been my best friend since grammar school, but I couldn’t tell him about Bonny Bonington and Johnny Pierce. I surely couldn’t tell him about the Clínica Orozco.

  There was a knock, Pogey called out a “Come in!” and his stepmother opened the door. She was a hippy, good-looking woman in a gray suit and silk stockings, with a helmet of crisp black hair like Louise Brooks.

  I got to my feet. “Oh, hello, Payton,” she said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Malcolm.” She seemed to me too young and pretty for Mr. Malcolm, a bald, wrinkled old gent who walked as though his feet hurt.

  “Will you put the Packard in the garage for me, dear?” Mrs. Malcolm said to Pogey. “Your father has moved some of his things, and I’m afraid I can’t get in past them.”

  “Sure, Beth,” Pogey said.

  “I’m just going,” I said.

  “No hurry, really!” Mrs. Malcolm said, and smiled brilliantly at me. Then she was gone.

  “She’s sure pretty,” I said.

  “She sure is no good at parking the car,” Pogey said, grinning and scratching his sunburned nose. “Seems like when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing,” he added.

  “Nada y pues nada,” I said.

  2

  At home I tried to write something out of the LA Times clipping Tully had showed me. I was trying to grasp what had really happened and not just the kind of abstract pissed-offness that I usually felt from the clipping service items:

  The husky bailiff led the boy along the tiled corridor to the judge’s chambers.

  “Here you go, sonny,” he said. He knocked. The door opened eighteen inches. The boy slipped inside. The judge faced him in his black robe. He had fat red lips. The judge’s eyes seemed to look right through him.

  “So, little fellow,” the judge said. “Come over here while I ask you some questions.” He stepped toward the boy and grasped his wrist with a hand that felt like an ice tong—

  How did you do it? Like Bonny telling me that Johnny Pierce had said he’d had dreams of himself dying in a ball of fire. Like Hemingway writing in A Farewell to Arms that the battery in the garden fired twice, which made the front of his pajamas flap. So you believed it. You could put the whole picture together from those few words. So she’d let him do it to her.

  3

  Parked in front of the Clínica Orozco pretending to read the Black Mask I had brought along, I didn’t have to wait for anything like half an hour before Bonny was coming down the steps in her sweater set, skirt, bobby socks, and saddle shoes, with her shining hair caught in its silver clip. She gave me a flash of a smile as I hustled out of the car and around to where I could take her arm. I’d thought she might need some support, but she seemed fine.

  “How was it?” I asked when we were inside the car.

  “It wasn’t so bad.”

  I started Ol Paint and pulled away from the curb.

  “He was a nice man,” Bonny said. “He spoke English.” She giggled suddenly. “I’d thought of killing myself!” she said. “Like Connie Roberts’s sister. Isn’t that stupid? Oh, wonderful! Thank you, thank you!” she whispered.

  I was trying to get out of Tijuana without getting lost.

  “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.

  I said, “Johnny—” before I could stop myself.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Don’t you write him?”

  “Oh, no!”

  I didn’t understand that. I got past four intersections and then turned onto the Avenida Revolución, which was the only way I knew to reach the border.

  “Why wouldn’t you write him?” I asked.

  “I hate him.”

  “What?”

  “He said he was going to die, and I had to. But it was just a trick to seduce a stupid—fool! And I even knew it was.”

  It was the style I’d been trying to understand, where she didn’t have to say exactly what had happened, his pants and her slip and her garter belt or whatever girls wore, or any of that; because just the idea that it was all a trick, and she had known it was a trick, carried it along so that I could feel the outrage with an ironical twist to it. She’d had to live with thinking her life was ruined, wondering if she would have to kill herself like Connie Roberts’s sister taking poison on the train down from LA, until she had got up the nerve to ask her date if he could find an abortionist.

  “Does it ever seem to you that things get all hooked together sometimes?” she said. She was talking brightly and too fast.

  It was just what I had been thinking, Bonny hooked together with the kitten-faced whore, and the kid and the Altadena judge.

  “I didn’t even like him,” she went on. “He scared me, but my mother hated him, and she kept—you know. So I wore his pin. I was such a fool! Then when I thought I was pregnant I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anybody. I knew I didn’t fool you when I said it was for a friend of mine.”

  “It’s over now,” I said. I slowed into the line of cars waiting to cross the border in a stink of exhausts.

  The customs officer wanted to know where we were born. “San Diego,” I sa
id. “San Diego,” Bonny said, and he waved us on. I drove on into the United States. Bonny locked her hands together in her lap, like some kind of gear made of white fingers, and bent her head over them so her hair parted over the back of her neck.

  “I guess I’m not a girl anymore,” she said in a shaky voice. But the nape of her neck was a girl’s neck. She was crying, and I put my arm around her.

  * * *

  After that we were going steady, with nothing particular said about it. I just didn’t date anyone else, and she didn’t, though I was embarrassed to tell her I loved her, and I didn’t tell her, and maybe she was the same.

  4

  Johnny Pierce was killed in April.

  In the inky dome of starry night on Point Loma, parked on a slope at the end of a dirt track so if the radio ran the battery down Ol Paint could make a compression start, with Barbara Bonington in my arms, I gazed past her at the lights of the Bay and San Diego. I reached an arm around her to tune up the radio—Benny Goodman and “Sing! Sing! Sing!” I could feel the clasp of her bra against my arm, and I thought about unfastening it, but she had been quiet all evening, something bothering her: maybe her parents.

  I tuned the radio down when the jock’s voice came on, and I asked her what was wrong.

  “Johnny’s dead,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “His mother phoned me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She would know I wasn’t sorry, though maybe I was sorry for her. “What happened?”

  “She only said it was a training accident.” And she said, “In his dream it was in a ball of fire.”

  I guessed she was crying then. She said in a small voice, “His—you know—fetus, and now him.”

  I thought about that.

  “I don’t have to hate him anymore,” Bonny said.

  “No.”

  “Sometimes at night I’d hate him so much I’d almost throw up. Why did he have to do that? Why did I let him? It didn’t feel good, it just hurt. Maybe he felt good, but I think he just felt good because he’d—you know, got me. What made me so mad was he probably bragged about it, like Charley bragging about his women. Did he brag about it?”