Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  She wobbled along beside me on her heels. She smelled of concentrate of flowers.

  “You look nice!” I said.

  “Thank you!” She had a chirpy voice with a sexy catch to it.

  She took my arm with a flick of her Ella Cinders eyes at me. Her business was manipulating. I didn’t think Bonny even knew how to flirt.

  In the steamy warmth of the White Castle, we sat in a booth with a freshly swabbed table. Dessy ordered a poached egg on toast and a Coke, and I three coffees to go. Cal was out of town, she said.

  When she asked what my sign was, I didn’t know what she meant.

  “Your Zodiac sign!”

  I didn’t know.

  “When’s your birthday, silly?”

  “July fifth.”

  “Cancer! I’m Aries, April eleventh. Don’t you know astrology?”

  When her eggs and coffee were delivered, I found myself insisting on paying. Manipulated! Dessy didn’t seem like the other south-of-Broadway hookers except for her painted eyes.

  “April eleventh of what year?” I asked.

  “Nineteen twenty.” She was older than the young whore in the donkey show at the Molino Rojo. “And you?” she asked.

  “Nineteen twenty-one.” I watched her ring-laden fingers tearing her toast into bite-sized segments. She popped a piece into her mouth, like a chipmunk with a nut.

  “Tell me one of your dreams,” she said.

  I thought about it. “Well, I’m on a bike going up a long hill that keeps getting steeper until it finally goes convex, and I have to pump really hard to get over the hump. I can’t remember what happens, so I guess I make it.”

  “I’ll look it up. I’m sure it’s meaningful. Fear of falling, maybe. My father died in a fall when he was out hunting,” she said in a frail voice. “My mother died on my fifth birthday,” she added.

  “That’s too bad,” I managed. I couldn’t bring myself to inquire about her dreams, and I had better hustle the coffee back to Tully and Tee-John before it got any colder. Dessy pouted down at her untouched egg.

  “I get so lonely when Cal’s away,” she said.

  I wondered if Calvin was helping his Uncle Red smuggle Mexican tires across the border with the connivance of someone in the Direccion of the Molino Rojo. How did Dessy feel about Calvin being a Negro? Maybe she had to pretend she loved him. Maybe she really loved him.

  What would Marx think of her working conditions?

  “I know it’s silly,” Dessy went on, “but I have to have a man to take care of me. I know it’s because Daddy always took care of me, and he died.”

  I had the sensation of some sticky substance clinging to me.

  “Cal wants to drive out on Sunday and see that big dirigible come to Camp Kearny Mesa,” she said. She raised her arms to stretch, her breasts pressing the wool of her sweater into little peaks. “Would you and your girlfriend like to come along?”

  I said that sounded like fun, but my girlfriend went sailing with her parents on Sundays.

  8

  Dr. and Mrs. Bonington were in the study listening to the evening news, so I didn’t have to deal with Mrs. B.’s disapproval. Bonny wore tan shorts and a white shirt with the shirttail out, pacing barefoot as I perched on the arm of the sofa. She left to make us some cocoa.

  Through the unlighted dining room with its thicket of chair and table legs, I could see her bare legs in the bright slice of kitchen doorway. I admired the perfect H’s of the backs of her knees, and the ascent of her thighs into her shorts. I stretched and tried to feel a proprietorial ease, but there was something jagged in the air.

  Bonny returned with cocoa mugs and a pot on a tray. Her face was pink from the heat of the stove, and cheek pieces of fair hair swung forward as she bent to pour the cocoa.

  “Charley got orders to ship out,” she said.

  I whistled. “Where to?”

  “He thinks Australia.”

  “I thought the Coast Guard—”

  “God!” Bonny said. “I’ve been hearing that all day!” Her eyes were dark with resentment as she seated herself on the footstool.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I’m in a bad mood. When we have kids, we’re going to pretend each one is as important as the other.”

  It was a complaint I’d heard before.

  “He was flunking out of Stanford and he was going to get drafted, so they talked him into enlisting in the Coast Guard. Now Daddy’s trying to pull strings to get him out. God, they must get sick of people pulling strings for their precious sons!”

  It did not seem a good time to mention an expedition with Calvin and Dessy to see the world’s largest dirigible arrive at Camp Kearny Mesa.

  “Mother and Daddy are listening to the news back in the study. Do you want to listen to the news?”

  I had not come here for the news, which I hated. I had come for kisses. I didn’t want her to know that I was a hypocrite when I pretended to comfort her when the news was bad.

  I reached out for her, but she shook her head. “We can’t tonight. I’m a mess tonight.”

  Chapter 5

  1

  That Sunday, when Bonny was sailing with her parents, I went along with Calvin King and Dessy to see the Navy dirigible Canton put down at an airfield on Camp Kearny Mesa, north of San Diego. The three of us rode in the front seat of Chrysie-car, top down and the slipstream snapping in my hair, Calvin at the wheel wearing a checked cap, and Dessy tucked between us with a scarf tied over her head. Calvin was in semi-zoot and Dessy in a sleek pink dress and high heels. This was south-of-Broadway highlife in the new-smelling car with its plaid upholstery.

  I had been shocked to see Calvin’s hand cup Dessy’s breast as casually as handing her into the car.

  Crossing Mission Valley and climbing to the mesa, Calvin performed a stylish double-clutch into second to slow into a line of cars.

  I lounged against my door with a hand palm-planing in the wind. Dessy’s hip pressed against me. Sometimes she leaned her head on Calvin’s shoulder, sometimes on mine.

  There had been headlines for days announcing the arrival of the Canton, and some morbid interest because of the fate of the Hindenburg, once the world’s greatest dirigible, which had blown up in New Jersey with a terrible loss of life. The Canton was guaranteed safe because it was filled with American helium instead of dangerous German hydrogen.

  On the mesa, cars accelerated into a field where sailors directed them into rows facing a red dirt airstrip. Beyond it were huts with corrugated metal roofs, and a flagpole where a windsock flapped in a gust of wind that kicked up a swirl of red dust.

  Calvin pulled up beside a Hudson, and a Model A turned in next to us, cars continuing to fill the third rank of parking. People wandered among the cars or seated themselves on running boards in the erratic winds, some with picnic hampers. The three of us sat on the back of the front seat with Calvin’s silver flask of gin and orange juice.

  I grimaced at myself for hesitating to lip the mouth of the flask after Dessy. Coach Garland’s slides of syphilis victims! I was conscious of glances from the surrounding cars. Maybe they thought Calvin was the chauffeur.

  I squinted north, over the glare of the sun off the metal roofs. Clusters of sailors were also peering north, their caps like popcorn.

  “Aren’t those sailor boys cute?” Dessy said, snuggling between us. Her silk-stockinged legs, thin as a child’s, dangled down the back of the seat.

  “You just think how cute we is,” Calvin said. “That’ll take care of that, beauty.”

  “You two are the cutest and you know it!”

  I hated glancing around to see who was watching Dessy flirting with Calvin.

  “It’s too bad Bonny couldn’t come with us,” Dessy said. She turned her starry-eyelashed eyes toward me. I blew out my breath to think of Mrs. Bonington’s reaction to Bonny going for a ride with a whore and her Negro pimp.

  “Is she nice to you?” Dessy asked.

  “
What she means is does she put out,” Calvin said.

  “I’m afraid she wouldn’t know what that means,” I said. Dessy put a hand on my knee, perhaps to comfort me. Her hand on my leg and the pressure of her hip made me glance at Calvin, who was surveying the horizon.

  “Sometimes it is possible for the wise to transcend their gender,” I said.

  “How’s that again, child?”

  Just then there was a disturbance of voices raised and people pointing. Dust whipped into a halfhearted funnel that skidded along the airstrip. The ranks of sailors craned their necks. A high speck had risen above the horizon.

  The Canton drifted toward us, somehow enlarging rather than approaching, a silver football with a gondola slung beneath its belly. Close and low it filled the sky, turning to circle the field.

  Ropes drifted at a slant from narrow ports in the gondola. They trailed across the ground. Sailors scampered after them.

  Another gust whipped up red dust, and the great shape lifted again to shouts of alarm. Two sailors still clung to the ropes, both capless, sailing twenty feet above the ground and swiftly rising. One dropped, waving his arms. The other still clung to the rope.

  He soared over the ranked automobiles, legs trailing, white face peering down. Then he was falling, arms and legs flapping. Dessy screamed. There were other screams.

  I put my arm around Dessy’s straining back. Her hands covered her face.

  The silent silver shape floated northward, dragging its shadow over the parked cars. People ran in different directions.

  Dessy wailed.

  Calvin slid down behind the wheel, and I piled into the backseat. In slow stop-and-go we rolled off the field and back onto the road, Dessy curled into a ball against her door. I felt a vast embarrassment for the United States, for its sailors, soldiers, and Marines, for its fliers like Johnny Pierce. How could incompetents hope to win the war?

  Calvin was murmuring to Dessy, arm around her. Her father had been killed in a fall.

  The Chrysler slowed and swung into a sandy lane lined with high brush. I glimpsed the Canton once more, in a stately turn over the rim of the mesa.

  “I don’t want to die!” Dessy whimpered.

  “You are not gone die, beauty!”

  Calvin stopped the car on the sandy track. “Child, will you take a little walk? I’ll give you a toot.”

  I climbed out of the backseat and hurried ahead. Around a bend was a murky pool, fifty feet across. I stood at the edge, gazing up at the mesa for another glimpse of the dirigible. Death! We had become part of the war. Calvin would be employing whatever method he knew to calm Dessy down. Taking care of her. It was the complexity of the female genito-urinary system that made women prone to hysteria. Had I read that in Sexology? Love and death were what novels were about, Mr. Chapman had said in a lecture.

  It wasn’t long before a horn tooted. Walking back, I tried to compose my face into an appropriate expression. Dessy was huddled against Calvin. I climbed into the backseat again. Sirens squalled on the Valley Road.

  “You know what my stepmother said to me?” Dessy said in a normal voice, as Calvin backed out of the lane.

  “What’s that, hon?”

  “Said Daddy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s exactly what she said.”

  “That’s one cold bitch. We know that, don’t we, beauty?”

  “That poor sailor boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Hung on too long!” Calvin said. He rolled his eyes at me in the rearview mirror.

  I thought Calvin really cared for her. He was gentle with her, he called her “beauty,” he took care of her in every way, and he rented her out to sailors and Marines for whatever it was she charged. And what happened when she was no longer a beauty, no longer desirable, no longer exploitable? Did a descending progress take her to Tijuana, to fuck dogs and ponies?

  I sprawled in the backseat watching Dessy’s scarf-covered head leaning against Calvin’s shoulder, with pity constricting my throat so that I could hardly swallow.

  Is she nice to you? Dessy had asked, who had had to be nice to her bosses to keep her job in San Francisco, and had been better off then than now. Bonny didn’t have to be nice to anyone. Her father was an ophthalmologist who lived in Mission Hills.

  But she had been nice to Johnny Pierce. She would have to be nice to some doctor to make the marriage her mother wanted her to make.

  Ol Paint was parked on Sunday-deserted 3rd Street. When I got out of Chrysie-car, Dessy sat up and beckoned to me. She put an arm around my neck, pulled my face down, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You are a nice sweet boy, Payton,” she murmured.

  Calvin got out to speak to me, and we halted together thirty feet from the Chrysler’s grille. “Give her some pills, she’ll sleep it off,” Calvin said in a low voice. “She gets like that, her daddy dying the way he did and all.”

  I wondered how Calvin would react if I inquired about renting Dessy in a professional way—and became part of Dessy’s exploitation-molestation fate. I wouldn’t even know how to phrase the question.

  I said, “I’m worried about us in this war. Those guys couldn’t even tie that dirigible down without getting killed.”

  “Those are just stupid swabbies, child.” Calvin’s handsome milk-chocolate face gazed at me seriously. “You and me’s got to get into this war if we’re gone win it. Don’t you know that?”

  2

  Tully, who often came in on Sundays, was visible through the printshop window, seated at his desk reading the funny papers.

  I went inside, to lean on the counter and tell him what had happened on the mesa.

  “Somebody’s sons,” Tully said. He wore a brown tweed jacket and a tie slipped loose at the throat. He had probably come to the printshop from church, maybe the only Commie SWP editor and Abraham Lincoln Brigade vet who attended the Episcopalian church up by the park.

  “They ought to’ve known the wind was gusty! There was a windsock. We’re never going to win this war if we keep getting fucked up like that!” I was talking too fast, almost spitting to get it out.

  I was disgusted at the sear of tears in my eyes. Somebody’s sons. “They died in vain!” I said.

  “If this were a proper paper you would have a scoop,” Tully said. “You could write an editorial on American unpreparedness, instead of the tots column.”

  I’d done several other right-hand columns since the Altadena judge.

  Tully busied himself refolding the Sunday Union. “It’s settled for the Coast Japs,” he said. “The president’s signed the evacuation order.”

  “Oh, shit!” I said.

  3

  Mr. Chapman handed the typescript of my story “Essential Parts” back to me. His office had a kind of Moorish window, looking out on the parking lot. Three walls were bookshelves, books stacked vertically and horizontally and at a slant. His desk was a big clutter of stacked books and papers.

  “Very lively,” he said. “Black Mask is your chosen venue, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dashiell Hammett was published there.”

  “I like Raymond Chandler also,” I said.

  “The problem that I see,” he said, “is if you have had none of these experiences of which you write, you are forced to remasticate the fiction of this kind that you have read. Thus a freshness is lost.”

  Shit. “But what do I know?” I said. “I know about parents getting divorced and the Depression and having to move out of Mission Hills to Normal Heights.” Maybe something about love.

  “Normal Heights!” Mr. Chapman said, gaping at me. “What an extraordinary stroke of luck for a writer—to live in Normal Heights! The possibilities for irony, and of course for heavyhanded symbolism.”

  “It’s because the old normal school used to be there,” I said.

  “Ah, Daltrey, you must do something with Normal Heights!”

  Where I lived with an Indian barber and his redheaded wife.
There were many jokes about the name “Normal.” I asked if he’d ever seen the weekly newspaper called the brand.

  “Ah, yes, the lowercase radical sheet with the tots headlines.”

  “I write that column sometimes,” I said. “Not that there’s much writing involved.”

  “My goodness!” Mr. Chapman said. “Sit down, Daltrey, and tell me about writing about abused tots. Are your political beliefs congruent with those of your paper—a young man from Normal Heights? That is so un–San Diego!”

  “Not really,” I said. I didn’t think Tully’s were, either. Was that the way the world ran? You just did what you were paid to do, and never mind how you felt about anything?

  I told him about putting the column together from the clippings with their little tags that identified what newspaper they had been taken from. I almost snickered at his expression of wonder.

  “Think of it!” he said, his eyes squinting at me behind his glasses. “Normal Heights and molestations!”

  I said, “You know what? It all seems to connect together. I know a girl who was seduced by her boyfriend going off in the service and had to go down to Tijuana for an abortion. And down in Tijuana, at the Molino Rojo—those Mexican girls doing it with ponies for a show. And those whores in those whorehouses south of Broadway, where I work at the brand. And the Japanese evacuated from the Coast. And at the same time those Jap soldiers beheading British guys and using prisoners for bayonet practice. And those swabbies that got killed trying to bring the Canton in on Kearny Mesa. I mean, it’s all—” I knew I was being a jerk, but I said, “The war’s the greatest molestation of all!”

  “That is very ambitious thinking, Daltrey.”

  “Yes, sir. But I keep at it.”

  “I will give you a hint as to what to do about it. Just start from Normal Heights.”

  At first I thought he was joking. When I realized he wasn’t, I could feel my face burn.

  “You mean a novel,” I said.