Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “You’re the one I like,” I said. “You’re the one my heart beats for.”

  “My mother thinks I’m seeing too much of you,” she said.

  “She thinks you’re precious and so do I.”

  I pulled her back into my embrace. We kissed and kissed, but there was that hollowness, an incompleteness that I did not want to feel. My crotch had turned to pure ache.

  She told me she loved me.

  Chapter 6

  1

  At my grandmother’s I checked to make sure that the bricks remained as I had disposed them under the shrub at the corner of the front yard. I hated the idea of sneaky tramps receiving messages that my grandmother was alone in her little house.

  She met me at the door with her arms-raised stance of delight. I hugged her and kissed her suede-soft cheek, sniffing the violet sachet.

  I was tired of my detective Jeff Dodge, and I’d had the idea of using my grandmother’s John Burgess in that role.

  My story that had won the High Schools Fiction Contest in the San Diego Union had not been fiction, but one of my grandmother’s tales hardly changed from her telling it. John Burgess was a character out of her youth, who, taken advantage of because of his credulity, would always by luck or pluck turn a situation to his benefit.

  Locked in a cellar by mean kids, who seemed to have abounded in Richmond, John Burgess tried to dig his way out with a convenient spade and uncovered a Mason jar filled with double-eagle gold coins buried by a previous owner of the house. When he was driven away from the swimming hole by the town bully, John Burgess arrived at the turnpike just in time to save the daughter of the druggist in a runaway buggy. The grateful father gave him a job at the soda fountain, where he could drink his fill of sarsaparilla. Many of John Burgess’s triumphs were over the bully Rupe Johnson.

  I sprawled in the easy chair, smoothing the antimacassar over the worn place on the chair arm, while my grandmother bustled into the kitchen to make cocoa, which was presented, steaming, on the round lacquer tray. I remembered my years sequestered here, when no one else had wanted me. My grandmother stood before me, hands clasped in her apron, watching me burn my lips on hot chocolate.

  “I forgot to get marshmallows at the store!”

  “I’m too old for marshmallows,” I said. Marshmallows were one of the uncomplicated pleasures of childhood, as were her custards, with their crinkled brown and yellow crusts. I remembered her reading Dickens to me when I was in bed with the mumps, Pip and J-O-Joe, and Lawyer Jaggers shooting his finger out accusingly, and Miss Havisham calling out, “Play!”

  When she asked about my schoolwork, I told her I was writing a paper on Huckleberry Finn for Mr. Chapman. I said, “Huck reminds me of John Burgess. I was hoping you’d tell me a John Burgess and Rupe Johnson story.”

  Her pale blue eyes peered at me in surprise over her spectacles, but she seemed pleased. “Well, dear, Rupe was very jealous because John was Sophia Brinkerman’s favorite boy at the Academy. Once Rupe was chasing John on his wheel. He’d let Rupe almost catch up, then he’d pedal faster. Until he came to a part of State Street where there were two potholes. John turned at the last minute and whizzed right between them, and Rupe hit one and just flew head over heels.” She laughed in her tinkly way.

  She continued with the familiar story of Rupe locking Sophia Brinkerman in the coat closet at the Academy, so as to capture John Burgess when he tried to set her free.

  What a handy muse my grandmother was! I thought I might use the bicycle story, only with cars; John Burgess and the villain, a movie stuntman.

  When I arrived at Perry’s to check in, the evening papers were on the stands. RANGOON FALLS.

  2

  I phoned my mother from the pay phone at Perry’s to say I had finished work early, and would she meet me for a drink at the bar around the corner from her real estate office?

  “How wonderful! A date with my son!”

  The RANGOON FALLS headline, illuminated by streetlights, snatched at my attention as I drove to the bar on 6th Street.

  I ordered a Cuba libre and sat on the red leatherette stool waiting for my mother. I gazed at my image in the mirror behind the bar, in my deliveryman’s khaki shirt and black leather bow tie, which I had donned for the evening check-in with Lois Meador. I unsnapped it and tucked it in my breast pocket.

  My eyes seemed to me to be too close together under lesser eyebrows than my brother’s. In fact, my face was a kind of twerp imitation of Richie’s face. I needed a haircut.

  The rap of heels signaled the arrival of Ellen Daltrey. She strode toward me, fresh lipstick, hennaed hair brushed out. In the mirror I saw two men at a table watching her.

  “What’s that?” she demanded. “I’ll have one of those, too.” She brushed my cheek with her lipstick and perched on the next stool, smiling sideways at me.

  “Richie’s coming out next week,” she said. “He’ll have more time this trip.” She had been hurt because Richie had not visited her on his last leave.

  “Liz told me.”

  She, too, examined her face in the mirror, sitting straight-backed, legs crossed, purse in her lap. The bartender brought her drink. I paid; that was new.

  I whispered to her, “Those guys at the table back there keep checking you out. You look terrific!”

  “Thanks!” she said with a dazzling smile. She cased the two men in the mirror. “Well, I do have to look my best these days.”

  What did that mean? I asked about her friend Mr. Levine, who lived with her—her Englishman lover. “The Jew-boy,” my father called him. He ranted against all her men friends, her lovers. He called Bill Hutchinson a “labor goon,” Tully a “Red” and a “Commie,” Mr. Perkins “That rich son-of-a-bitch.” It was as though my father had no capacity for understanding his own attitudes. I myself was all too often aware of doing something for a shitty reason, a conscience-imp on my shoulder to remind me.

  “Gone back east!” my mother said. She produced a pack of Chesterfields from her purse, lipped a cigaret, and handed me the matchbook. I lit her cigaret, her eyes concentrating on the flame, lips pursed around the white cylinder.

  “I’ve met such a nice commander,” she said. “He’s going to rent an apartment I showed him. He says the Naval Academy is mostly just engineering training. You’re good at math, aren’t you? Have you ever thought of applying to Annapolis?”

  I said my father thought I should become an accountant, but I was going to be a writer.

  My becoming a writer did not interest her, but the subject of my father did.

  “Eddie thinks I ought to have entered a nunnery,” she said, checking herself in the mirror again. “When I found out he was having other women, I was a mess! You remember. I screamed at him. I cried. I tried to make him feel sorry for me. I tried to punish him every way I could think of. It was like I was drowning, grabbing onto anything that would hold me up. I didn’t realize that that was all he had then. He’d lost his job, but if he could still get women to come to bed with him he hadn’t lost everything. It wasn’t total.”

  “You figured that out,” I said.

  “And I realized I was all right. I had a job. Other people were laid off, but I wasn’t. That was when? Thirty-four, thirty-five. Times were bad!”

  Like something beating behind my eyes I could feel the recollection of it; hating Mr. Perkins, the strands of hair combed across his skull, his pink-rimmed eyes. My mother had left me with her mother while she jump-started her new life. If I’d understood, I’d’ve wanted her in a nunnery also.

  “I never wanted to go through what I went through with your father again,” she said. “I’m not saying it was all his fault! You know, I feel squeezed absolutely dry because Ben’s gone. But I’ll get over it. I mean, I know someday I’m not going to be attractive to men anymore, but right now I am. And it’s exciting to look around at a party and think, Let’s see—” She laughed her delighted laugh. “War times are good times for women, dear!”

  One
minute she was laughing about the good war times, and the next she lamented “this terrible war!”

  I said carefully, “All the time I was living at Grandma’s it was as though I wasn’t paying attention to anything—”

  “You were a sullen little twerp, dear. I know it was my fault for being a bad mother.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You remember that year Richie was working for Mr. Lubin, and he had the Cord car and a lot of money. Then just like that he quit and went into Naval Air.”

  Her face took on an expression of dismay.

  “I want to know what happened,” I said.

  “I don’t know! Oh, God, I hate LA so much! I get upset every time I see that scar on Richie’s knuckle.”

  The scar had come from a fight Richie had had with a tramp when he was at SC. “What about it?”

  “You know, a parent just can’t believe her child would have different politics than hers. You remember: He was a strikebreaker during the Okie troubles in the Valley. They hired those USC brutes, football players and fraternity boys, to go beat up on those poor farm people. It was just terrible!”

  “I guess I didn’t know about that,” I said. Oh, shit, Richie! No wonder he had hated The Grapes of Wrath. We’d had spats about that. I hadn’t understood why he’d got so down on the Okies. Tom Joad!

  “Remember that LA girlfriend of Richie’s?” I said. “Val something?”

  She squinted at me with that almost cross-eyed intensity of attention she could turn on sometimes. She nodded.

  “She killed herself.”

  “What’s this about, Buddy?” my mother said.

  “At a party last winter there was this guy that really went after Richie, yelling he was a throat-cutter. About that. It was scary.”

  She laid a hand to her cheek and gazed at me fearfully with her brown eyes.

  “Remember that terrific Cord car? And he had really fancy shirts and sport jackets. He had Val up there and Liz down here.”

  In a mystery story the detective bored in until he found vital information, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was just talebearing on Richie and making my mother unhappy besides.

  “I just know Mr. Lubin was going to help him be a movie producer,” my mother said. “Then everything went up in smoke the way it does up there. Maybe because that girl did that. She was older than Richie, a cheap flashy girl with a pretty body.”

  “He was sure a big shot that year,” I said.

  “He wanted to be a big shot! That’s what happens to people in LA. They get LA-ed! People catch something up there so they turn into toads.”

  “Maybe Richie joined Naval Air so he wouldn’t turn into a toad.”

  We looked at each other. I stood up to embrace her, and she hugged me back.

  3

  On Friday when the American Legion made a call on the brand, I sat facing Tully at his desk with my own headline before me: TOTS MOLESTED IN VESTRY. This had happened in Cleveland. The guy was a vestryman, the girls aged five and six. Writing it had been wringing hard work, as though something heavy was seated on my shoulders as I typed. I wasn’t even sure what a vestryman was.

  Tully’s editorial was on the news item: 9 ACCUSED CLEARED BY FBI.

  Tully had hired a printer named Tex Boyle when Tee-John left town. Tex was so skinny inside Tee-John’s overalls that it appeared to be draped on a hanger. We could hear him in the pressroom, cursing and banging metal.

  A heavyset, sandy-haired man came inside. He looked like one of the salesmen of newsprint and printers’ supplies who dropped in regularly. He wore a blue Legionnaire’s cap.

  “Post Five,” he said in a tight voice. He glanced around the office with sharp eyes in a fat face. He scowled at me.

  “Pardon?” Tully said.

  “Name’s Conley,” the man said. “I’m with Brubaker Laundry and Cleaning over on Tenth. Some of us have been reading your paper.” He jutted his jaw.

  Tully rose, beer-bellied in his blue shirt and leather cap.

  “We think you’re a bunch of Commies,” Conley said.

  I rose, too, to lean on the counter staring at him. I felt light-headed.

  “What is the purpose of this visit?” Tully said.

  “Tell you we’ve got our eye on you.”

  “I will be aware of it,” Tully said with dignity.

  “Who’re you, kid?” Conley said.

  I felt as though I was coming down with the flu. I said I was the deliveryman.

  “You a Commie, too?”

  I took a deep breath. “Comsymp,” I said, smart-ass.

  “Is this an American Legion visit?” Tully said, folding his arms and swaying on his heels. “A Brubaker Laundry one? Or personal?”

  “I’m telling you!”

  “Telling me what, Mr. Conley?”

  “Your paper is a piece of Commie asswipe!”

  “I suggest that you not read our paper if it offends you.”

  “Tell you what we’ll do if it offends us!” the Legionnaire from Post 5 said. “We’ll throw a picket line around here so fast it’ll make your head swim!” He scowled at me again. “You ought to be in uniform, kid!”

  “I’ll be in uniform soon enough. When I get out of it I won’t spend the rest of my life wearing a stupid cap with tassels.”

  Tully gaped at me. Conley took a threatening step forward. I was shivering. My father’s post!

  “Let me tell you something,” I said to Conley. “I belong to a fraternity out at State, a lot of football guys, basketball players. We hire out to bust picket lines. You throw a picket line around here, we will come down and bust it so fast it’ll make your head swim!”

  Conley said, “Oh, yeah!” I replied in kind, but it didn’t seem to me I sounded convincing.

  “Warning you we got our eye on you,” Conley said to Tully, then glared at me and marched out. Another blue cap was waiting for him outside.

  Tully blew his lips out in a whistle. “What got into you, my boy? They can cause us a great deal of trouble. Were you serious about your fraternity brothers?”

  “They’re probably going to give me the boot for working for the brand.”

  He plumped down in his chair and propped his suede shoes up on the desk. He looked scared. I was scared, too.

  It was the fact that my father had warned me of this that had caused me to erupt in anger, and the knowledge that my brother had been hired to beat up on Okies in the Valley. I was coming out of my tantrum with a nauseated feeling and shaky knees, like after my defense of Calvin with the fire axe.

  “Fascist sons of bitches,” I said, wiping the back of my hand over my mouth.

  “Just so,” Tully said.

  4

  Richie had hitched a ride west on Navy transport. He was quartered at the JOQ on North Island and would come to the Navy dock in the whaleboat with his friend Will Gates. I was assigned to pick them up and bring them to Mission Beach for dinner. Richie would collect Liz from there.

  The two jg’s were already on the dock, two tall men in black uniforms and white caps, smoking and gesturing. They welcomed me noisily, Richie tapping the face of his wristwatch. Will Gates was as tall as Richie and broader, with a freckled midwestern face and a rock-crusher handshake.

  “Give you a lesson in aircraft identification,” Richie said, laying an arm over my shoulders and pointing. “What’re those?” A flight had appeared over Point Loma, enlarging specks.

  I didn’t know.

  Will squinted and grimaced as though he found Richie endlessly amusing. He had tricks of posture to try to make himself appear not so large. He didn’t know, either.

  “SNJs,” Richie said. By now the flight was large enough for the planes to be recognizable. “What about that one settling down like a duck?”

  “That’s a PBY,” I said, flustered with the Superior Man’s arm on my shoulders.

  “PB2Y,” Richie corrected. “How about that one?”

  “It’s a B-24.”

  “Shall we p
ass this student, Lieutenant Gates?”

  “Oh, I say, yes!” Will said in a phony British accent. “Especially since the lad will be giving us a lift. And what do you make of that aircrahft just coming into view, Leftenant Daltrey?”

  “TBF, my dear Jellicoe.”

  There were many more flyboy jokes driving out to Mission Beach, slow going through the Consolidated Aircraft quitting-time traffic.

  At our father and Weezie’s, Richie borrowed Ol Paint to pick up Liz while we made conversation with Will, who had played football at Minnesota and admired Richie inordinately. Like everyone else.

  Richie and Liz arrived with bright faces and laughter, Liz with a kiss for me. Richie was so loud the little room seemed too small, as San Diego had been too small to hold him. He sparkled most brilliantly surrounded by those who admired him: his father and stepmother, his fiancée, his sidekick from Pensacola, and his kid brother.

  The six of us crowded around the table brought into the living room. Weezie fluttered back and forth from the kitchen with spaghetti and meat sauce, and a bottle of red wine, which my father measured into tiny glasses as though parceling out rubies. And why shouldn’t he pour a little extra into Richie’s glass, squeeze Richie’s shoulder whenever it was within reach, laugh too loud and long at the Pensacola jokes? And why shouldn’t Liz, who was engaged to marry Richie in June, hang on his arm and lean against him, and look into his face with her goddess eyes as though he was the only man in the world?

  Our father was asking about preflight training.

  “Rich brought me and a lot of others through with him,” Will said. “He was four-oh on the exams. We all studied together. We only lost one out of Bunkroom B.”

  “Will and I were top of the class,” Richie said. “That’s why we’re instructing instead of out with the fleet. ‘That is the fourth crate you’ve cracked up this week, Officer!’” he said in one of the crazy accents he and Will bantered back and forth.

  Head tilted, proud slant of smile, our father asked if many flunked out of flight training once they got as far as Pensacola.