Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “It’s here somewhere.”

  She showed me an amateurish drawing of a young woman stretching out her hands into a spiderweb that covered the space before her. Her fingers made sharp dents in the web.

  “You understand that dreams never say exactly what they mean,” Dessy said. “Almost always it’s love, but sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s death. The bicycle means something is going too slow. See?” She pointed to a paragraph in the text that did mention a bicycle, but which I couldn’t focus on. There were rings on every finger on her hand holding the magazine, two on the index finger, one red stone and one blue.

  “Are you in love, Payton?”

  I cleared my throat to say I was.

  She took the magazine from me and opened the second one, leafing through until she found a drawing of a girl in a windswept dress standing at the top of a precipice whose lower depths were lost in shadows.

  “You said you had to pedal out over space to get to the top. That’s a cliff, do you see? That means a difficult decision. An important decision.”

  It seemed that I had given Dessy some advantage when I had revealed my dream. Manipulators of men.

  She went to sit on the bed, where she had to prop her bottom on the very edge so that her toes touched the floor. Where she carried on her profession.

  “It might be money, say if you and Barbara couldn’t get married until you had a lot of money. Is Barbara like that? Or danger? Dreading that something bad will happen?”

  Too close for comfort.

  “My dream has a cliff in it, too,” she went on. “I’m way up on a height place. It’s scary! Down below there’s someone calling to me to jump, they’ll catch me, they’ll save me, but I don’t trust them. They might be lying to me. You know, you have more dreams once you start keeping track.”

  I got up, hands in pockets, to look down out the window. A car cruised by on 3rd Street. I could see the glint of the window of the printshop. My throat was thick with pity for Dessy. I didn’t think I should bring up the subject of Calvin.

  I glanced at my watch ostentatiously. “Thanks for looking up my dream.”

  She slid to her feet. “Come again when you can stay longer.”

  “Well, we’ll see each other at the White Castle,” I said, and she stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek.

  I made myself descend the stairs slowly, to walk slowly to the alley behind the printshop, where Ol Paint was parked. What was the matter with me? You had to take some chances if you were going to get laid; you couldn’t worry all the time what others thought of you. What did Dessy think of me, after she had got me up to her room like that?

  Maybe she just wanted to be friends.

  At Perry’s, when I looked into Lois’s cubicle, she said, “You’ve got lipstick on your cheek there, loverboy.”

  6

  Tully invited me to dinner with “a young friend” on the day the Americans on Bataan surrendered, thirty-six thousand of them, the size of a football crowd in a big stadium. The POWs were probably about my age, maybe a couple of years older; prisoners of the Japanese, who had been savage in China, and murderous with the British soldiers and Gurkhas they had captured at Singapore. Bonny would be in a state. She was working at the hospital two nights a week, and our necking sessions on Point Loma were not so frequent.

  I was nervous about meeting Tully’s young friend, another Spanish Civil War vet, for I suspected he might be a competitor for my job on the brand. Not that there was going to be a job much longer, if the picketing continued.

  Tully lived on the top floor of a rickety white house with peeling paint that towered off the steep street with a lower flat beneath it. From the steps there was a grand view of the Bay, with the sun setting over Point Loma, the rows of gray ships of the destroyer base, and planes slanting in to North Island.

  Inside, Tully’s pride was a big record player, and a beat-up Spanish Colonial chair, his “throne.” Beside it was a wall of records, opera and symphonic. Tully listened to music at night, unlike my father hunched before the radio pouring out its bad news. The Bataan surrender was the really bad news tonight.

  Symphony boomed from the big Capehart. Standing looking down at it was a skinny fellow not much older than I was, with a pasty face and hair so yellow it looked dyed. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, and a knurled stump of wrist was braced on his hip. His left hand was gone. He had a bottle of beer in his right hand.

  “Have a beer?” Tully said, coming out of the kitchen. He handed me a brown bottle and flourished a fat arm. “This is Winston Jones. Winny, Payton Daltrey, my assistant at the brand.”

  Jones locked his beer against his chest with his forearm and gave my hand a single pump. “Hiyuh.”

  Tully pointed to a wicker chair, and I sat down and sucked on my beer. The music was so loud it was hard to talk. I didn’t like Jones’s looks, and a picture had congealed in my head, of a stadium full of American boys lining up to have their hands chopped off by Japs with swords.

  Everyone had known the Americans in the Philippines would have to surrender. The Allies just kept losing.

  Finally Tully tuned the music down.

  “Winny was with the Brigade at the end,” he said.

  Jones held up his stump. “Teruel! I’ll tell you, kid, when you get caught between the Reds and the Fascists it’s time to haul ass. Fucken Reds gettin rid of anybody didn’t toe the Party line. I mean, linin ’em up and shootin ’em! We could’ve licked the Eye-ties if we hadn’t been fucked over.”

  “Must’ve been rugged,” I said.

  “Fucken cold, I’ll tell you.”

  “Winny’s come out to the Coast looking for work,” Tully said. He kept glancing at his friend as though he was half embarrassed, half proud of him. If Tully wanted his pal to write the tots column, that was just fine, but I didn’t see how Jones could deliver the bundles of papers with only one hand, or help Tex with the rolls of newsprint. And what would Tully do for a delivery car?

  “Fought in the wrong war,” Jones said. His teeth were yellow, with dark interstices. “Blacklisted wherever you go. I hear they are decent to you down in Mexico. A lot of fellows have went down there. I heard from a nurse that tended me in Spain. She was blacklisted in the States, so she went to Cuernavaca.”

  “Winny was one of the youngest Americans in the Brigade,” Tully said. “He went to Spain before he finished high school. I’ve been urging him to write down his experiences. The war, yes, but what has happened to him in the so-called Free World since. ‘Report me and my cause aright!’ I thought he could help Tex during the week and start collecting his notes.”

  There it was. “Good idea,” I said. “I want to take some time off anyway. I’m going up to Manzanar and see a friend who’s there.”

  “Payton’s a writer,” Tully said in a fruity voice, not interested in Manzanar. “He writes mystery tales. And I have some qualifications as an editor. We will be glad to offer advice and support, won’t we, Payton?”

  “Sure!” I said. Bullshit!

  Tully had called to a Chinese takeout place for paper cartons of chow mein and other gooey mixtures, rice, and dark brown beetle juice. He produced a bottle of red wine, and we sat at a table in front of the window, watching the lights of the Bay. Jones gobbled chow mein and heaps of brown-stained rice as though it might be his last supper, Tully watching him in that fond way. They were talking about a fellow vet named Scotty.

  “Helluva good hombre,” Jones said, straightening from his feeding to blot his mouth with his paper napkin. “Took things serious. Always help out an amigo.”

  “He wrote me about the Durruti Columns,” Tully said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Changing the Social Structure of the villages.”

  “Shit, they’d just go in and shoot a bunch of peons for reactionaries. That was toward the end. I don’t believe Scotty was in any of that shit.”

  I thought of the Reds in Spain shooting peons, and Japs
cutting off American hands with their swords. I was feeling sick. I had been drinking wine along with Tully and Jones.

  I said to Jones, “You mean some guys were more Red than others?”

  Jones squawked with laughter. “Shit, most of us hated those Party-discipline turds. Frankie’s a lot Redder than I ever was.”

  Tully poured wine, smiling foolishly. “We were all dedicated to Marxist goals, however.”

  It is Marxist, however, Dr. Bonington had said of the brand. I leaned back in my chair with my arms folded on my chest to squeeze out the sick feeling. Reds! Marxists! Young Communists! Comsymps! HUAC lists and Legion blacklists!

  Jones started singing, banging the butt of his fork on the tabletop: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation.” “The Internationale!” Tully joined in, but they soon quit, unable to remember the words.

  “Viva la Quince Brigada,” Jones began. They sang this one, in Spanish, all the way through. Tully’s face was blotched with emotion.

  Left out, I thought of starting “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but I didn’t know those words all the way through.

  Tully said solemnly, “You have to understand, my boy, that Marxism is the only viable opposition to the Fascism that is taking over the world. It is a tragedy that it is in the hands of that monster Stalin! But Communists are the only ones who tried to stop Mussolini and Hitler. It is the only philosophy of hope in an increasingly hopeless universe.”

  I said I hoped there was some hope for those poor bastards in the Philippines. I opened one eyelid and then the other. “They were trying to stop Fascism,” I said to Tully.

  I asked Jones if he was a card-carrying Communist. That was a phrase HUAC employed. I realized with a shock that I was drunk.

  Jones fumbled out his wallet, extracted a card and slapped it on the table. It was too dim to make out anything but his name. Jones had said that Tully was Redder than he was.

  “Are you one, too?” I asked Tully, without looking at him.

  “You don’t want to know that, my boy.” Meaning yes. It was as though the ground had become treacherous underfoot.

  “Shit!” I heard myself say. Jones was finishing the last of the rice in the carton.

  “There is simply no place else for people like Winny and me to be,” Tully said. “There may be no place else for you, either.”

  “Well, I think the Russians are just about as bad as the Germans,” I said.

  “The Russkies are assholes, kid,” Jones said. He watched Tully slosh more wine into the glasses. “They got their revolution, though.”

  The Communists are our deadly, deadly enemies, Mrs. Bonington had said. I sounded like her! Here was Tully, a card-carrying Commie, with a big window that looked over the shipping in the Bay, North Island, and the destroyer base. Captain Fletcher ought to be told about him. Captain Fletcher, who kept a file on Errol Flynn—who might be a German sympathizer, a Nazisymp. Investigators were either the heroes or the villains of our time.

  But the Reds weren’t the deadly enemy in this war, the Axis was, and Stan Takahashi claimed he hoped they would win and come over and take away our Ford cars.

  I must have blanked out, and when I came to they were talking about me.

  “He’s in something called a midshipman’s program,” Tully was saying. “He finishes college and then goes into officer training in the Navy.”

  It was Tully’s opinion that I would do better to go into the service as an enlisted man so as to have the proper point of view for my war novel.

  “Fucken officers,” Jones said. “At the end there, if you got called up for one of those autocriticism-piece-of-shits, you’d better tell the fuckers what they wanted to hear.”

  It sounded like an Alpha Beta session on attitude. What if the HUAC asked me under oath if Tully was a card-carrying Communist?

  I listened, eyes closed, to them arguing, Jones saying, “Shit, there’s nothing for me here. I better get my ass down to Mexico before the FBI finds out I’m in town.”

  The FBI!

  Then he was saying, “My arm was so swole I thought they was going to have to take the whole thing off. And you back in Paree sitting around in cafés drinkin wine.”

  “I told you I intended to come back and enlist in the Brigade.” Tully sounded like a little kid defending himself. “But I had to file my stories. And by that time it was over.”

  I felt like Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel. Tully hadn’t fought in the Spanish Civil War, he had only been some kind of reporter. I tried to remember if he had actually claimed to have been in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He had certainly given me that impression. Shit!

  Now it sounded like Jones was crying. “They cut off my fucken hand. And it wasn’t worth it!”

  “It was worth it, Winny,” Tully said.

  Next I woke to music, Tommy Dorsey, the brass section going at “Our Love Affair.” Somehow I’d got onto the sofa across the room from the table where we’d eaten Chinese takeout. A couple was dancing, shadows moving against the wall of records, Tully and Winston Jones dancing together, a sedate fox-trot, the stump of Jones’s left forearm on Tully’s shoulder.

  I managed to get up and sneak around the corner to the door without their noticing. I halted in the dark entry, gasping to keep from puking.

  I eased out the front door and pulled it closed behind me, shutting off the music. I made my way down the steps clinging to the rail. In Ol Paint I rested and tried to sober up, leaning my head back against the seat and staring up at the dim stars over San Diego—the same stars they could see in the Philippines.

  Tully had been one of my mother’s boyfriends. And what was wrong with two guys dancing together? Maybe soldiers in Spain had danced together because there were no women to dance with. But Tully hadn’t been a soldier. And he was a for-real Commie!

  I turned the key in the ignition and cranked the engine to life, for the careful drive home to Normal Heights.

  Chapter 8

  1

  I stuck my head inside Lois Meador’s cage to tell her I had to take Monday off. She swung around on her stool.

  “Going up to Manzanar to see a friend in the camp there,” I said. “Back Monday night.”

  “Somebody has to take that Mission Hills route Monday!”

  “Bruce will take it along with Hillcrest. I’ll make it up to him.” I didn’t think she would forbid it. I needed the job at Perry’s, but with the manpower shortage they needed me, too.

  Winny Jones would help Tully and Tex get out this week’s brand, and they would make the Saturday morning newsstand deliveries in a taxi.

  “Going up to see your Jap buddy?” Lois said. The crooked tooth at the corner of her mouth gave her smile a raffish quality that contrasted with her neat hair, neat pancake makeup, neat bosom in her Perry’s apron. “You and your girlfriend?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “You be here Tuesday!”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “The Emmetts’ cook called me—Mrs. Sims. She says you slam the door.”

  “I hate her! And that rotten little dog.”

  She tapped her fingers lightly on my arm. “The Emmetts are friends of Mr. Perry’s. Let’s go upstairs and have a Coke.”

  My date with Lois. She took off her apron and hung it up. Beneath a blouse of some pearly material her breasts made interesting peaks and shadows.

  I followed her upstairs, nice silk-stocking calves and the squeegee sound of the white nurse’s shoes she wore.

  We sat side by side at the cool marble counter of the soda fountain and sipped cherry Cokes. Across the store was the meat market, two white-capped butchers working behind the display case. Between were aisles of fruit and produce, canned and boxed goods, and clerks in Perry’s aprons waiting on customers and arranging stock. The offices were on the balcony, Mr. Perry in his green eyeshade visible through glass. The pneumatic cash-carrier whooshed and rattled in its tube.

  “How’s school?” Lois asked.

  I said I was w
riting papers and memorizing French verbs.

  “You write those papers so you won’t be delivering groceries to Mrs. Sims all your life.”

  “Never fear.”

  “Ray quit State after a year so we could get married. He thinks if he’d finished he wouldn’t be selling restaurant equipment for a living.” She gave me a flash of her smile again. “You and your sweetie wouldn’t be considering something stupid, would you? On this trip.”

  “Never fear,” I said again.

  She bent her head to her straw and sucked Coke. “Just don’t get married because certain feelings get too strong for you.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not your mother. Well, I think you’re good-guys for going to see your Jap friend.” Her fingers tapped my arm again.

  It was true that I was going to Manzanar to see Stan Takahashi, but also Ben, who’d been Richie’s friend in high school and at SC, and who might know something of Richie’s feature player who had drowned herself.

  And maybe we’d see Errol Flynn. I’d told Bonny to bring her tennis racket.

  2

  Dr. Bonington seemed to have become my ally since the Sunday aboard the Sun Bear. I thought he had interceded with Mrs. B. to allow Bonny to make the trip to Manzanar with me. Also, the Boningtons had been customers of the Takahashi Produce Stand at Four Corners, and before that of the truck Mr. Takahashi or Ben would drive through Mission Hills, the tinkling bell announcing its arrival with the good vegetables and lettuces you couldn’t buy anymore now that the Japanese gardeners were locked up in relocation centers.

  Dr. Bonington belonged to the Auto Club and had good maps. Manzanar wasn’t on any of them but was known to be on Highway 395 in the Owens Valley south of Bishop. Bonny and I would spend Saturday night with her aunt Rhoda in Pasadena and drive to Manzanar the next day, returning to Pasadena that night. Monday we would hang around Los Angeles, and maybe there would be an opportunity for tennis at Mulholland Farm, where I hoped “young Martin Eden” and “the fair one” were welcome. I didn’t know if I had the nerve to go through with that.