Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “Why do you write things like that?” Bonny said.

  I pushed her around the floor. “Because I want to make people feel outrage about things like that.”

  “I don’t know how you can write those things. I don’t know how you can know—”

  “That’s what writers do! Everything hasn’t happened to them that they write about.”

  Bonny seemed heavy in my arms, as though I were supporting her full weight. “Mother was upset about it,” she said.

  “Upset about the children, or because I wrote it? What’s she going to do, get me out on your boat and grill me?”

  She kept her head down. “You make fun of it, though,” she said. “You call it the tot molesteds.”

  “I don’t make fun of it! There’s other stuff like that, too, you know. There’s old guys making sure young guys go off to get killed in the war. I mean, sure it’s a good cause, sure we have to stop Hitler and Hirohito, but it’s people with power over other people making them do things they don’t want to do. Like you and—you know! There’s a poem—” I stopped, trying to remember the lines.

  Bonny raised her head to look at me with her blue eyes.

  “It’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’” I said. “It’s Yeats. I forget how it goes exactly. ‘The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, the young in one another’s arms.’ That’s the way life ought to be, not guys marching off to be cannon fodder.”

  “It’ll be another year before you have to go. You said it would be over by then!”

  “Listen, what is this tomorrow? Some kind of interrogation thing? My attitude?”

  “You have to do it for me,” Bonny said.

  “To win you.”

  “Yes, to win me!”

  I saw Liz and Richie through the doorway of the bar, Richie’s arm around her waist. Errol Flynn was greeting them, appearing out of shadow with his sharp, handsome profile and his fuck-you grin. I guided Bonny closer.

  Another man, a balding civilian, was also on his feet. Two women were seated at a table, one with flaming red hair. Richie shook the bald man’s hand. The neck of a champagne bottle slanted out of a silver bucket. No sign of Hagen.

  “Isn’t that the reddest hair?” Amy said, when the four of us were seated at our table. “That must be Lili Damita.”

  “Is he still married to her?” Bonny said. She was clasping my hand so tightly it hurt.

  Will peered toward the bar, where Liz and Richie were now seated. “I’ve never seen a movie star before,” he said. “You San Diego people sure are fortunate!”

  Richie and Liz returned after the next set, Liz flushed and animated.

  “We’re going to LA tomorrow,” Richie said. “Errol’s having a tennis thing at Mulholland Farm. There’ll be some good tennis, maybe Jack Kramer and Frank Kovacs. Jack Warner will be there.”

  “He’s a terrible letch!” Liz said, bright-eyed.

  “You’re invited, Will,” Richie went on. “And the little one,” he said to Amy.

  “Oh, I can’t!” Amy said quickly.

  “And young Martin Eden and the fair one.”

  Bonny said we had a date to go out on the Sun Bear tomorrow with her parents, cutting her eyes at me as though I might protest.

  6

  When I’d taken Amy and Liz home, and deposited Richie and Will at the Navy dock in time to catch the last whaleboat back to North Island, Bonny did not object to our going out to Point Loma to neck, but something was wrong.

  On the radio Jimmy Rushing sang, “Sent for you yesterday, and here you come today!”

  Bonny sat over against her door facing me. She had something to tell me, she said.

  “They brought this sailor in,” she started out. “He wasn’t even as old as you are, he was a boy! He’d been scalded in an explosion and he was wrapped in bandages and doped up. He was in pain.”

  She paused while the disc jockey put on “Frenesi,” with the exalted line of Artie Shaw’s clarinet soaring. I could feel her intensity across two feet of seat between us.

  “The nurse was down in the ward,” she said. “It was late, and his light came on. His room was dark, but there’s a light outside the window so you can see. All I could see of his face was some dirty hair and one eye. He was sitting up in bed—halfway sitting up—”

  I didn’t want to hear this. “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “I have to!” She sounded close to tears. “He’d uncovered himself there! And he was whimpering, ‘Please, please, please—’” She kept on saying “please.”

  “Listen—”

  “Just listen! I mean, he was all bandaged, his hands and arms and everything but his one eye. And I knew what he was saying ‘please’ about. I couldn’t just run away! I told Jeanine, she’s the head nurse in the ward nights. She said she’d had to do that, too!”

  I leaned against the steering wheel. Shaw’s clarinet swooped up and up.

  “Last night when I went to work he was gone,” Bonny said. “They’d moved him to Naval Hospital. I asked Jeanine to call and see how he was. They told her he’d died. He was dead!”

  The poor swabbie had known he was dying, and that was all he was ever going to have.

  “It was like he was in pain from that! Not just the burns, but there!”

  I stretched my lips into a grin, glaring out the windshield at San Diego Bay. The sky had cleared; stars were out. Hillcrest loomed, light-speckled, beyond the long, low bulk of Consolidated Aircraft. Naval Hospital was nearer downtown, in the park. Poor dying bastard with his hands bandaged so he couldn’t even jack off in the face of eternity.

  “I thought I had to,” she whispered.

  “Sure you had to!”

  She came into my arms, with her wet face thrust into my neck. She was breathing as though she’d been running. I stroked her hair and kissed her teary face and told her she’d done the right thing, she was just fine, she was a nurse. Saint Veronica would’ve done the same thing. The Virgin Mary would’ve done the same thing.

  Finally she sat up. I had better take her home now. I was to be at her house at nine o’clock in the morning, and we would drive with her parents to the yacht club for our Day on the Bay.

  7

  It was a high-fog Sunday morning aboard the Sun Bear, with glints of sun breaking through. Seated at the tiller, Dr. Bonington wore his salty skipper’s cap. Mrs. B. and Bonny lounged on blue and white pillows in the mahogany cockpit. My assigned post was beneath the boom, and I gazed up at the bellying triangle of sail above me and thought of Richie and Liz at Mulholland Farm, Richie playing doubles with Flynn, Jack Kramer and Frankie Kovacs, and Liz being letched by Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.

  Bonny’s legs were slick and brown beneath her white shorts. She caught my eye and tilted her head toward a big two-master anchored with her bowsprit pointed toward the Sun Bear. The Sirocco! No one was on deck.

  Mrs. B. handed around photographs of Charley that had just arrived from Australia: Charley in uniform with some buddies; Charley with a big, blond Aussie girl, both on bicycles with their left legs braced to the ground; Charley in tennis shorts and a floppy hat, tennis racket in hand. Dr. Bonington came about again.

  Bonny’s mother studied the photographs with an indulgent smile before passing them along. Dr. Bonington laid each one on the varnished wood beside him, frowning down as though it contained a message to be deciphered.

  Bonny would look like her mother someday: high forehead under a fringe of silvering blond hair, sharp-cut nostrils, brown-faced from weekends on the Bay, some wattling at her throat, where she wore ivory beads; golf and sailing and bridge parties and organizing events for Children’s Hospital and the symphony. Bonny’s grandfather had been a doctor in Pasadena, and Mrs. B. read the stock market quotations in the Union every morning. Primary accumulation!

  I squinted up the slant of mast to where two seagulls circled. The Sun Bear sliced through the Bay with a long faucet sound and a steady slap. Gold flickers danced on the water. I c
ould thank Charley’s photographs that the grilling on my employment at the Commie rag hadn’t begun yet.

  “Looks like he’s put on weight,” Dr. Bonington said. Charley had the beginnings of a beer belly, all right, and that Charley Bonington doing-exactly-what-he-wanted-to grin. I said I’d heard they drank a lot of beer in Australia.

  “He says Down Under agrees with him,” Mrs. B. said. Her smile was thinner than that opening-up smile of Bonny’s. Her eyes were guarded by dark glasses. She said, “We thought we were so clever, Charley going into the Coast Guard. Which is supposed to guard our coast. He’s been around boats all his life, of course. He says the Navy needs people who know how to operate small craft. Can you imagine a Navy where no one knows how to operate small craft?”

  No need to defend the Navy in this instance.

  “He just means the Coast Guard’s loaned him to the Navy,” Bonny said, as though this had already been explained.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it was the right decision to put off medical school until after the war!”

  “He is going to have to study harder, after the war,” Dr. Bonington said.

  “Well, it looks like he’s having a fine time,” Bonny said. “Bicycling with blondes and playing tennis.”

  I shifted position on the hard deck, wishing I were playing tennis.

  “I just wish the Japs weren’t so close down there,” Mrs. B. said.

  “Coming about,” the skipper said.

  I guarded my head with one hand as the boom passed over and cautiously moved across the cockpit. Rope rattled through pulleys as the Sun Bear heeled over on her new tack. I had cast off the lines from the dock and jumped aboard, thereafter trying to keep out of the way. No doubt Dr. Bonington would tell me if I was supposed to do anything.

  Bonny slid across the shiny mahogany until she was seated next to me, which I guessed was a movement of support for what was coming up.

  The image of the dying sailor sitting up in bed begging her for a hand job would not shake out of my head.

  Dr. Bonington cruised the Bay on different tacks. Now the Sirocco was out of sight.

  Mrs. B. handed around red-and-white-checked napkins, fried chicken, and tuna sandwiches on whole wheat bread. She drank out of a chrome shaker. There were bottles of Pepsi for Bonny and me and a beer for Dr. Bonington.

  Bonny’s father inserted his bottle into a hole in the mahogany shaped to fit it, the Navy blue brim of his cap tipped over his eyes. Maybe he imagined himself a skipper on the high seas; maybe he was thinking of sailing Down Under to rescue Charley from that man-eating blonde. Maybe he was sick of being an ophthalmologist in San Diego.

  “What does your mother think of your working for a Communist newspaper?” Mrs. B. asked suddenly, dark glasses fixed on me like machine-gun muzzles.

  “It’s not Communist, it’s Socialist Worker,” I said.

  “It is Marxist, however,” Dr. Bonington said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know much about Marx.” I cautioned myself against smart-assery.

  “My mother’s a Democrat,” I went on. “She’s for Mrs. Roosevelt and the CIO and Dr. Rollo.” Dr. Rollo was the minister of a downtown church who was accused of being Comsymp because of his pronouncements on racial matters.

  I didn’t think Bonny’s parents would criticize my mother’s politics. “My father’s a Republican,” I added, and felt a twist of anger at having produced that suck-up information.

  “And what does he think of your employment, dear?”

  “Payton supports himself!” Bonny said. “I guess his family can’t complain about what he does for a living!” She sounded proud of me!

  “Barbara,” her father cautioned her.

  Bonny moved her hip an inch, to press against me.

  “He calls the brand a Commie rag, actually,” I said, and managed a laugh. I went on to tell of the Legion’s threat of a picket line. Even the Boningtons must consider the Legionnaires jerks!

  “The Communists are our deadly, deadly enemies, you know, dear,” Mrs. Bonington murmured.

  It was the Fascists who were our deadly, deadly enemies!

  “You can understand our concern if our daughter is dating a Young Communist,” Dr. Bonington said in a gruff voice.

  “Well, I’m sure not a Young Communist!” I said. Maybe your protests always sounded feeble responding to the accusations of HUAC, the Legion, or your girlfriend’s father.

  Mrs. B. went after her shaker again, and the skipper’s attention was turned to tacking us out of the track of a gray ship with a bone in her teeth and tall white numbers on the prow.

  “May we ask what your politics are, Payton?” Mrs. Bonington said.

  This solemn ceremony now seemed funny. I’d told Bonny I was a Socialist, maybe to shock her, and Bonny might have relayed that to her mother, who would equate Socialism with Communism. I felt the pressure of Bonny’s hip; important!

  “I guess they are about halfway between my father’s and the brand’s,” I said. “I believe in liberty and justice for all.” I laid a hand over my heart as though pledging allegiance to the flag, but an edge of anger was right there.

  “But not just for people who can afford it,” I went on. “Poor people, too. The tramps my grandmother feeds at her back door, too! I don’t think people should lose their farms and houses and jobs in a depression. I don’t think farmers ought to lose their farms in any Dust Bowl thing, and when they move to California get beaten up by SC football players for being strikers. I don’t think Mexicans ought to get beaten up because they wear zoot suits. And I don’t think people ought to be locked up in concentration camps because they are Japanese. They are citizens of this country! And I don’t think colored guys ought to be lynched, and they ought to be able to ride in a taxi and get a haircut like anyone else.” That was enough, I was sounding like a jerk, but I couldn’t stop myself. “And I don’t think the House Un-American Activities Committee ought to call everyone who doesn’t agree with them Comsymps—” Enough!

  And I didn’t think girls like Dessy ought to have to fuck their bosses to keep their jobs, and be turned into whores with no future but the downward slide to the Molino Rojo.

  My bottom ached from the hard boards, and my neck ached with strain that wasn’t just from ducking the boom. I squinted up the mast.

  “Bravo, Payton!” Dr. Bonington said in his gruff voice. Mrs. B. fiddled with the cap of the cocktail shaker.

  “That’s just what I think!” Bonny announced, and the mast and sail turned misty in my eyes.

  “Well, did he pass?” she demanded. “We don’t have to elope, do we?”

  “Oh, darling, don’t even joke about that!” her mother said.

  My face felt on fire, and I jogged Bonny with my hip to shut her up.

  “That’s enough, Barbara,” her father said. “Payton does not need this hysterical support.”

  “Hysterical—” Bonny started, but stopped when I muttered her name.

  “Coming about!” Dr. Bonington said. This tack headed us toward Point Loma, the Sun Bear’s prow slipping through the spangled water. Bonny leaned against me.

  “I can’t help worrying about Charley and that brassy-looking young woman,” Mrs. B. said.

  “She’s probably an Australian Young Communist!” Bonny said, glaring at her mother. “She’s probably Harry Bridges’s daughter!”

  “Barbara!” her father said.

  * * *

  We walked in along the pier from the Sun Bear, carrying gear. The stuntman Hagen was on the next pier over, with a stack of beer and soup cartons on a hand truck. He halted and tipped the hand truck up straight when he saw me. His dark face was smiling under a beret, his chest and shoulders in a striped T-shirt looked as though he was wearing shoulder pads.

  “Hey, brotherman!” he called to me.

  I nodded to him. I saw that Dr. Bonington was looking at Hagen with interest, thinking him a friend of mine and a yacht club person.

  “That’s that guy from the Si
rocco, isn’t it?” Bonny whispered. I almost bumped into her, hurrying on.

  I said it was.

  * * *

  I was going to take her home in Ol Paint, but she stopped at the ladies’ room in the clubhouse while I went on out to my car in the parking lot. I didn’t even see Hagen approach, fishing in my pocket for the key, but there he was, an unlit cigaret in his jaw.

  He held up a hand as though to stop me from whatever I was thinking of doing, making a process of digging a matchbook out of his pocket and lighting his cigaret. He waved smoke away from his face.

  “You know what your brother is?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He’s a prick,” Hagen said.

  I shook my head at him. “That’s your opinion. He’s my brother.”

  “There was a girl I knew when we were kids together in Hanford.”

  “Where’s Hanford?”

  He sighed and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, where I could see the fists lumping. “Up in the Valley.” The cigaret tilted at the corner of his mouth when he spoke. “She was the prettiest girl in school. She was always in plays and stuff like that. She sang. You knew she was headed for Hollywood. So she went down there and they shit on her and cut her up in pieces and threw her in the dump. For not being pretty enough, or not fucking the right people. She fucked your brother instead of the right people, and he was the one who cut her throat.”

  “I thought she drowned,” I said.

  He made a face as though I were stupid. I figured he wore the beret because he was bald.

  “I thought it was David Lubin,” I said.

  “Sonny, your brother held Lubin’s dick when he pissed. Sure it was Lubin, but it was your brother that did the dirty.”

  He squinted at me, waving smoke. “Here is this sweet, decent girl that everybody who knew her liked her because she had a way of making people feel good about themselves. And they fucked her over till there was nothing left of her. And it was your brother that was the chainpuller for the Jew cocksuckers that gave her the final fucking over. So she drowned herself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  His face twitched. “Well, maybe you are,” he said. “Where’s your brother?”