by Oakley Hall
“Fighting the war.”
“He’s a flyboy, he’ll get killed,” he said. “That’ll take care of that. What’s his cunt’s name?”
I didn’t answer, and he shrugged and turned away. He was walking back toward the piers when Bonny came out of the clubhouse. She didn’t see him this time.
Chapter 7
1
On Monday morning I found my brother sitting in the Caff waiting for Liz to come out of class. His cap was on the table before him, his legs stretched out. He looked as though Flynn’s arrogant grin was catching. I felt a twinge of envy that I had gone sailing with the Boningtons instead of joining the LA expedition.
“You know who played doubles with us?” Richie said. “Flynn and Vinnie Richards played Fred Perry and me. I couldn’t hit anything the first set. Then I got okay, but they beat us two out of three.”
I didn’t have to tell him I’d seen Hagen.
“Jack Warner was there,” he went on. “He watched the girls swimming. You’d think someone like that wouldn’t just ogle, but Lizzy sure got ogled.
“Errol took us for the big house tour. His bedspread has question marks all over it. He is something! He was a real adventurer before he got into the movies. He’s got mementos, and guns—There’s a cocktail bar with a mural of a bullfight. You push on the bull’s balls to open it.”
“Terrific,” I said.
Richie squinted at me to see if I was being sarcastic. “You’ve got to make it up with Dad,” he said. “He really feels bad about that night.”
I watched his eyes turn to follow a girl’s bottom. He’s really smooth, Bonny had said of him, but not as though the word was a compliment. The flying ace was ashamed of something bad that had happened in LA, and he was sure not going to tell his brother about it. I cautioned myself not to get down on him.
“Jack Warner would give Liz a contract anytime, but she’d be just a contract player,” he went on. “When she signs on in Hollywood, she’s going to be a star!”
Liz was coming toward us with her dancer’s walk, as though she were skating between the tables, binder clutched to her sweater. Richie and I rose to greet her. She flung herself into Richie’s arms, bending back with an arm outstretched in a dancer’s pose. Students around us stared.
“When are you Daltrey boys going to take me away from all this?” she said.
She kissed me on the cheek and seated herself with a flourish, She must’ve had a good time in LA, too.
I asked about Will Gates.
“He didn’t come with us,” Richie said. “He sneaked over to see Amy. He’s never met a girl named America before.”
“She’s Bob-O’s girl, and he’d better not forget it.”
“Go Navy,” Richie said, grinning.
Bonny joined us. She wore a blue sweater and blue skirt and saddle shoes. I had to recognize that Bonny was not beautiful, as the party-Liz was, but she was pretty and appealing with her fair hair, her illuminating smile, and that no-sweat, cellophane-wrapped look to her. And I knew there was some kind of filter on my eyes when I looked at her.
Bonny and I had to hear about the day at Mulholland Farm in detail, Richie and Liz talking excitedly.
Will Gates plodded toward us, his white-topped cap underarm, hunching a little as though trying not to look so big. He wore an unhappy expression, and I felt a chill of dread.
“Amy’s friend Bob O’Connor got killed,” he said, when he reached our table.
I felt a pressure like a giant paw on my chest.
Bonny’s chair skidded back as she got to her feet.
“I guess a mortar blew up on him.”
Bonny trotted away across the Caff, her hair bouncing; going to Amy.
“First blood?” Richie wanted to know, gazing at me.
I shook my head. Johnny Pierce. Now Bob-O. Nothing new to Richie, fellow cadets in technical flunks, students taking their instructors down with them, news through the Navy grapevine of friends in the fleet who crashed in carrier landings.
“There’ll be more,” Richie said.
2
Two men wearing Legionnaire caps stood outside the door of the printshop. One wore a blue serge suit and shiny, high-top shoes, the other a buttoned-up gray sweater. It was a moment before I realized what this was.
“That’s a Commie outfit in there, friend,” the Legionnaire in the gray sweater said. He had a mole on his cheek, a gray hair sprouting from it.
I was infuriated by the squeak in my voice when I said, “I’d like to see you try to stop me going in there!”
“Calm down, sonny,” blue-suit said, and laid a hand on my arm.
I jerked away, and blue-suit took a backward step. He looked like an Okie, with an Adam’s apple as sharp as an elbow. If they asked why I wasn’t in uniform, should I say that one of my best friends had just been killed in a training accident?
“What’s your name, lad?” buttoned-sweater asked.
“I’ll tell you who my father is. E. B. Daltrey!”
“Eddie Daltrey?” buttoned-sweater said. He and blue-suit gazed at me expressionlessly. I noticed that their blue tassels hung on the right side of their caps.
I jammed the door open and went inside. Tully stood gray-faced at his desk in his loafer jacket. He smiled wanly at me.
“I’ve been watching the door for HUAC, and here comes the Legion in at the window.”
“I see how you stay mad all the time,” I said shakily.
“This is just a—flidget!” Tully said. He touched the brim of his leather cap. “Not even bad enough to fill a flea’s navel. Room left over for a capitalist’s heart.”
He was writing an editorial against the Un-American Activities Committee, which was holding its noisy circus in Los Angeles. I picked up one of the typescript pages he was revising: “This is the age of the investigator. The prober into files and records has become the protagonist of our time, when the klieg lights of Rep. Dies’s carnival are turned upon men’s lives and no one is cleared until he has been flayed, and penance done by the betrayal of his friends—”
My private eyes, Jeff Dodge and now John Burgess, investigators!
Later, when I barged out past the pickets to head down to the White Castle for coffee takeouts, it worried me that I hadn’t seen Dessy lately. Calvin had charged me with looking out for her, but I had no idea how to locate her.
* * *
On Saturday two men wearing fedoras instead of Legionnaire caps, in a black Buick sedan, followed me on my route delivering the bundles of the brand to the newsstands. I gave them the finger whenever the Buick came up close behind Ol Paint. I knew they had taken down my license number. That was what investigators did.
3
The pickets alternated, one pair in the morning, another afternoons. Usually they hung it up about five o’clock, but today when I came to the printshop after my Perry’s route they remained at their posts even though it was almost dark.
I sat at the Remington on Tully’s desk, staring at the clipping from the Sacramento Union. Two first-grade girls had been molested in a place called Elk Grove. The accused man was a farm laborer. He had invited the children into his “cottage” to play with his puppy.
I was disturbed that Bonny had said I didn’t know what I was writing about. It was what Mr. Chapman had said also. I tried to put myself in Elk Grove with the puppy, the man nice and not scary, brown-faced from working in the sun, wearing overalls; a little house that somehow resembled my grandmother’s. Inside the cottage, with the door closed, a dim room except for a line of sunlight under the door—
Straightening to glance up at one of the pickets framed in the window with his sign, Tully said, “I remember Franz saying that to understand Social Reality one must be inside it. Maybe there is no way these times can be understood unless you have been picketed by the American Legion.”
Tex came in from the pressroom, wiping his hands on some waste. “Leakin oil,” he said. He was not much good as a printer. He squinted at t
he pickets outside the window. “Probably takin down names out there,” he said cheerfully.
“It was very bad at the end in Spain,” Tully said. “If you surrendered, the Falange would shoot you. If your name came up on the wrong list, your comrades would.” He spoke in the solemn manner he assumed whenever the agony of the Spanish Republic was the subject. It was a subject I knew better than to joke about, Tully’s Social Reality.
“They took down names up in Washington State, I can promise you!” Tex said.
A figure in a blue suit appeared gesticulating outside the window, then pushed the door open and came inside. Calvin King tap-danced a few steps and stopped with a Bill Robinson flourish. His suit had mighty shoulders that tapered to pants cuffs so narrow it didn’t seem possible that he could get his feet through them.
“Hi, Mr. Tully! Hiyuh, child! Good-lookin gents outside!”
Tex squinted at Calvin with disapproval and stepped aside so the two of us could pass into the pressroom to talk.
I was glad I could stop worrying about Dessy. Calvin looked just fine. I asked how business was.
“Copped a couple of gals in LA, brought ’em back down with me. Got Chrysie-car out of hock. Nothin now but rakin in the mah-zoola!”
“I haven’t seen Dessy.”
Calvin scowled. “Some problems with that little beauty. She has messed herself up. Got in a fuss with her landlady. Now she’s moved in at the Benford. Ugly!”
Calvin swung the folding chair around and sat down facing me over the back, a man comfortable in Social Reality.
“I tell her my first job is girls,” he went on. “If I don’t have but one gal workin for me I am nobody, and she is workin for a nobody. She says she understand that, but right down to it she don’t understand. A man has to be an explainin ace! I have to keep upgradin. It is up or down in this bidness.”
“Like running an elevator.”
“That’s right!” Calvin said, laughing. “Fact is, she did ten days in the coop. Nobody to bail her out. And she is hittin the pills hard.”
I said I was sorry, I hadn’t known. What would I have done if I had known?
Tex came in to start up Charlotte, taking a swig from his pint of Old Crow first. The press’s breathless whackety-whack began. Calvin raised his voice to say, “My Uncle Red say to ask you did you get those tires okay.”
“I did! Thanks!”
When I left the printshop that night, the pickets had left one of their placards on its stick leaning against the wall.
DON’T PATRONIZE COMMIES AT BRAND PRTNG AMERICAN LEGION POST 5
I broke the stick over my knee, ripped the placard in half, and the halves in half again. I stuffed the pieces into the trash can on the corner.
4
When I got home to Normal Heights, my “Blood Street” story was back from Black Mask with the familiar rejection slip. This one was clearly initialed “PR.”
There was also a letter from Stanley Takahashi from “Manzanar Relocation Center.”
Dear Frutti,
Thanks for the letter about Bob-O. The memorial service sounds really rugged. I guess you were saying I am better off than he is, and I guess that’s right.
We’re all here, all right, my mom and dad and Ben and my sister. Dad lost everything. I don’t know if he thinks he’s better off than Bob-O.
It’s the shits here, but it’s not really bad. There aren’t packs of Dobermans or guards with submachine guns, and no sadistic shit. There is a lot of barbed wire, though, and guards with helmets, and one hell of a lot of Japs. It’s better now, but we were some of the first ones here, and it was misery cold with the wind coming down off the mountains to freeze your nuts. Now we’ve got mud. But the accommodations are Grade-A for a concentration camp.
I read a lot. We have meetings. Ben and the other lawyers are trying to figure some way to shortcut this fucking outrage to the Supreme Court. There is trouble between the old people who aren’t citizens and are only scared, and the younger guys who are citizens and are mad as hell. In a way it would be easier if they were shittier to us, but the fact is they are mostly trying to do their best. If they beat up on us, or shot some of the troublemakers like Ben, I could be purer mad.
Thanks for taking the trouble to find out where I am and write me. Say hello to the King of Kings for me, and drop by when you are up this way, which is two hundred miles from nowhere with a terrific Sierra view. It is nice sometimes when the wind lets up.
But when you tell me you stood up for us in some stupid argument you had, I give you the rigid digit. Don’t use me as an example of loyalty to the good old USA. I hope the Axis wins and the Nips come over and take all your Ford cars away.
If you see Mrs. O’Connor, tell her what a good guy I thought Bob-O was, and all that stuff.
Tutti
I heard Mr. Button come in the front door. After a while he called to me from the living room. He was seated at a card table, making repairs on a fishing pole, winding fish line and pulling it taut. His glasses were propped on his nose. The floor lamp shone on his work.
“Your daddy phoned, wanted to know where you’ve got to. Hasn’t seen you in a month of Sundays, he said.”
I leaned on the back of the sofa as Mrs. Button appeared from the kitchen. Her face was pink from washing dishes, her orange hair wispy.
“He had the idea you might’ve gone off and enlisted, dear. Jim told him you were just working and playing hard as always.”
Mrs. Button stood watching me, drying her hands on a dish towel. “You got your letters,” she said.
“Letter from a Japanese friend of mine in Manzanar,” I said. “They’ve got them locked up up there. You’re Japanese if even one of your grandparents is Japanese. Bad stuff.”
Mr. Button was nodding as though he knew all about that. He didn’t look up.
“They don’t call it a concentration camp, they call it a relocation center.” What was I trying to do, work up a quarrel with Mr. and Mrs. Button?
“My Jim’s people would know about relocation centers,” Mrs. Button said. “Wouldn’t they, Jim?”
“Never mind it, Mama.”
“They made peace with the Army,” Mrs. Button went on, drawing herself up in the way she always did whenever she got onto the subject of Mr. Button being an Indian. “But they were sent off to camps where there wasn’t enough food!”
Mr. Button jerked his head in a brusque motion that stopped her.
I watched Mr. Button’s black-haired head bent over his work. His brown, hairless hands moved deftly.
“Never had any trouble myself,” he said, as though he knew exactly what the subject was. “Found if I was friendly most fellows was friendly back. ’Course a barber is usually a well-liked fellow. Barber Jim, they called me. Kept my outfit’s hair cut in Alabama, France, and Coblenz in the Occupation.”
I’d never heard Mr. Button speak so many consecutive sentences before. Mrs. Button’s steamed face had turned from pink to red.
“It’s not always that way,” she said. “My Jim will come home sometimes so mad he isn’t worth living with. Isn’t that so, Jim?”
Mr. Button nodded, cutting the line with the small blade of his pocketknife.
“Do you cut colored men’s hair?” I asked, shocked that I had enunciated it.
He shook his head hard. “They come in my shop, I just point a finger at the door and they go right out. Yes, sir!”
“His regular customers wouldn’t stand for it,” Mrs. Button said. This time she was the one who knew what I was talking about.
How about a Jap’s hair? I didn’t ask it.
“I’d be out of business in a week,” Mr. Button said, holding up the finished handle of his fishing pole for approval.
“How about the American Legion?” I asked. “Did you ever belong to the Legion?”
“Never did,” he said. “I always thought somebody might ask me, but nobody ever did.”
I said good night and went to my room to study French
verbs for a midterm.
5
When I’d finished delivering the brand to the newsstands, no tail on me this time, and no pickets on Saturdays, pressure off. I sauntered along 3rd Street to sit in a booth in the White Castle. I was cramming down a hamburger when Dessy came in. She half-raised a hand in greeting and wandered down the aisle between the booths to seat herself opposite me. Her flowered dress was cut low over her flat bosom, and she wore a cloth coat with a fur collar. Her Ella Cinders eyelashes were gummy with mascara.
“They’re picketing that place where you work,” she said with a severe expression. The White Castle stank of frying grease, but I had a whiff of her flower perfume.
“They think we’re enemies of the people.” I asked if I could get her something to eat.
“Just some black coffee.”
She was too thin; she ought to be eating something. Patches of delicate pimples at the corners of her mouth were imperfectly concealed by powder, and her hair was covered with a tan scarf. I went to get her coffee.
“That dream you told me about,” she said, when I came back. “Come up to my room and I’ll show you what the dream books say.”
Come up and see me sometime! I protested that I was due at Perry’s for my Saturday afternoon route, but she insisted it would not take long.
She linked her arm through mine as we walked up the street toward the Benford. We encountered a pair of sailors, and a man in a leather apron toting a carton from a Coast Cartage stake truck into Ace Products.
With a queer loosening in my knees it occurred to me that I was going to get laid.
At the desk in the Benford a fat woman with a shadowy mustache handed Dessy a key with a red numbered tag on it. We climbed stairs. “It’s on the fourth floor,” she said over her shoulder. I was watching the motion of her hips ahead of me.
Her room looked down on 3rd Street. In it were a bed with a white coverlet, a dresser bearing a vase with a paper rose in it, a green upholstered chair, and a stack of magazines on a shiny maple table. On the pillow of the bed was seated a teddy bear with a red ribbon around his neck.
Dessy directed me to the chair while she removed her coat and hung it in the closet with a jingle of hangers. She selected two of the magazines to bring to me. Mary Gorham’s Dream Book #28 was the top one. She sat on the arm of my chair and turned pages.
