Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  It was strange and tense with her, as though we didn’t know each other very well. As though we were embarrassed by Sunday night. When she had gone to class, I waited in the Caff to see if Pogey would show up after his chem lab. There he was, cutting between the tables, slight and neat in his cords and blue cashmere, glint of his glasses in the light. His face was stiff.

  I stretched out in my chair and said, “They did it, huh?”

  He nodded. Behind him the high windows cast long slants of sunlight across the half-occupied tables. “You can come and appeal next Monday night.”

  “I’d have to eat a lot of shit.”

  Muscles crimped along his jaw. “The guys think if you don’t have time to spend with them you ought to turn in your bond.”

  “Can’t you even sit down?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll turn in my bond so I can talk to you. I don’t care if I talk to any of the rest of them.”

  “They’re your fraternity brothers!”

  The whole fraternity-silencing jerkery seemed so utterly stupid to me I could hardly focus on it. Pogey was my best friend, but it was as though I’d taken a long step toward something that he hadn’t taken yet. Nothing made you grow up so fast as giant women in your life.

  My neck ached from squinting up at Pogey where he stood beside the table.

  “It’s just too much snotty attitudes and high school grab-ass,” I said. “I hate the thing where you sit around and criticize each other! So you can be a better fraternity brother. That’s what they do in Communist cells, for Christ sake! I’m working two jobs, and I really don’t have time to hang around with the guys, except you. I’m not interested in beer busts and joint meetings with sororities and all that shit.”

  “Well, don’t get igneous,” Pogey said. “I told them I’d tell you you can appeal, if you want.”

  “I guess I don’t want.”

  “Okay,” Pogey said, and, with a saluting gesture, walked away through the rectangles of sunlight.

  3

  When I came down the stairs with a load of empty boxes from my Mission Hills route, Lois jerked her neat head toward the basement. “Mr. Union Bigshot is here.”

  Big Bill Hutchinson, once my mother’s lover, and the Teamsters’ steward, stopped in to chat with the Perry’s drivers every couple of months, a big-bellied, big-shouldered man with a tough handsome face running to jowls. Except for Mr. Perkins, it was with Bill Hutchinson that I had had the most trouble maintaining my no-blame, limited-involvement policy concerning my mother and her love life.

  I had not been required to join the Teamsters, like the other drivers, because I worked part-time. Big Bill had, in fact, got me the after-school job at Perry’s because I was my mother’s son.

  A blue layer of cigar smoke floated in the basement. Big Bill, in a tan gabardine double-breasted suit, sat on the zinc-topped counter with drivers surrounding him, smoking the stogies he always passed out. Bruce, Herb, and Ted were in their deliveryman uniforms, and Len Upton, who had come from groceries upstairs to replace the drafted Chuck-the-checker, wore his Perry’s apron. I had forgotten to snap my bow tie back on, but Lois hadn’t noticed.

  “Hey, kid!” Bill called to me, raising a massive gabardine arm. The others’ heads turned toward me. “How’s your lady mother?”

  “Just fine, Bill!”

  “Good! Cigar?” He proffered his silver case.

  I said I was trying to quit.

  This was considered a fine joke because Bill laughed at it. I stowed away my boxes and joined them, given the place of honor beside Mr. Union Bigshot. Bill shook hands with his left hand gripping my elbow.

  “How’s school? Lots of those coeds available, I bet. Boys all gone off to fight for Dugout Doug.”

  There was more laughter at the premise that all coeds were sex-crazed.

  “Telling these fellows we’re getting them a twelve-and-a-half percent raise in the new contract. How’s that sound? Join up and I’ll get you a raise, too.”

  I said I was probably going to have to go on full-time anyway. I explained that the Legion pickets were shutting down the brand’s job-printing business. Len and the other drivers watched Bill’s face to see what attitude they should assume in the matter of the Legion versus the brand.

  “You people got a lawyer?” Bill asked, squinting at me through the smoke. “First Amendment! This is supposed to be a free fucking country. Free speech, free press.”

  “That’s right, Big Bill,” said Ted, the worst suck-up.

  “They can’t do that,” Bill said, ponderously shaking his big head.

  I said they were sure doing it.

  “Who in the fuck do they think they are, deciding who is going to print what?” Bill said. “I hate those Legion cocksuckers.”

  “I deliver the papers to the newsstands on Saturdays,” I said. “A couple of them followed me around my route.”

  “Intimidation!” The cigar stuck out of Bill Hutchinson’s jaw like the bowsprit of the Sun Bear. “Beating up tramps in Hoovervilles, intimidating college kids delivering papers, that’s about all they’re good for. Let’s just see if we can’t fuck those birds right in the ear.”

  “What’re you going to do, Big Bill?” Herb asked.

  “Andy Oates is commander of some Legion post. He owns Coast Cartage, runs about twenty trucks. His contract’s on overtime. I’ll tell him I’ll pull his drivers if this shit don’t cease and desist.”

  The drivers laughed and slapped their legs. “Terrific, Big Bill!”

  “And I can do it!” Bill Hutchinson said, with a wink at me.

  “Can you get them beat up, too?” I asked, to more laughter.

  “Just tell your lady mother this one’s for her,” Bill said, grinning and waving smoke away from his face. He turned to address the others in a confidential tone. “Tell me, fellas, is anybody getting anything off little Miss Iron-face in her glass box?”

  4

  TOKYO BOMBED! was the headline. I stopped at the newsstand across from the Benford Hotel to read the front-page text. The Japanese capital had been bombed, presumably by U.S. planes. There was a mystery as to where the planes could have come from.

  I felt as though I were breathing clearer air in great draughts as I trotted on down 3rd Street to the printshop.

  No pickets!

  Tully sat at his desk with his feet up. “Didn’t show up this morning,” he said. “I guess they got tired of it.” He looked smug, as though he had managed this victory personally, and I was pleased with myself that I didn’t have to tell him about Bill Hutchinson.

  “Have you seen the headlines?” I asked. At last there was a banner head I could stand to look at.

  “I saw them, yes.”

  “Well, come on! It’s terrific!”

  “They need something terrific just now. It seems more men were captured on Bataan than were originally announced.”

  “Shit!” I said. “How many?”

  “Maybe twice as many.”

  I leaned on the counter.

  “Winny has deserted us,” he went on. “He is not much interested in work, I’m afraid.” He had given Jones money to take the train to Mexico City, where he had friends. “I can’t imagine what is to become of him,” Tully said sadly.

  “I guess if you’re a vet it’s best to have been on the winning side.”

  “We would have been the winning side if the Western democracies hadn’t sold out to the Fascists!”

  There it was, the “we” of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But Tully hadn’t fought in Spain. He looked like a big Raggedy Andy doll with his fat lips, high-colored face, and curls showing under his leather cap. Who cared about the Spanish Civil War anyway.

  “What if the FBI shadowed him to your house that night?” I said.

  “You must discount a good deal of what you heard on that inebriate evening, my boy. Winny can be a fool when in his cups.”

  I said I’d drunk too much wine, too. “Passed out, in fa
ct.” The hollow of my head buzzed with the numbers that always frightened Bonny. More than seventy thousand men!

  There was some disturbance on 3rd Street, sailors trotting past the printshop window. I went outside for a look. A crowd had collected in front of the Bedford, three sailors hurrying to join it. I took off after them. Something was covered with a gray blanket. I slipped between a Marine and the fat lady from Quality Cleaners. A small hand thick with rings extended from under the blanket, and a dark tongue of blood had leaked over the curb.

  I stared at the many-ringed hand. I don’t want to die! Dessy had cried to Calvin.

  “Jumped!” the fat lady said, pitching her chin toward the high windows of the Benford. The late sun dazzled my eyes.

  I backed out from among the spectators. I almost stumbled over a slipper, high-heeled and decorated with green lace.

  At the far curb I bent as though I’d been punched in the belly and puked yellow bile. Scrubbing my mouth, I retreated to the printshop.

  “Suicide at the Benford,” I muttered to Tully, backing against the door to close it. “She jumped out a window.” Like the sailor falling from the dirigible, like Val Ferris filling her pockets with stones and jumping into David Lubin’s swimming pool. For the usual reasons: career failure, love failure, and the realization of the vileness of human nature.

  “About three a year go out those windows,” Tully said, shaking his head. Mr. Social Consciousness.

  “It was Calvin’s hooker.”

  He made a pained face. “This is not a society to let miscegenation go unpunished.”

  “Oh, miscegenation, bullshit!” I yelled at him. “American kids in Jap prison camps and AJA four-year-olds at Manzanar and fourteen-year-old Mexican girls—” I didn’t even know what I was ranting about.

  “You sound as though you have only now been faced with the facts of life,” Tully said severely. “Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned, my boy! Now why don’t you get started packing those fliers into boxes?”

  I went into the pressroom to start unfolding the cartons. When I bent over, my head swam as though I was going to faint. Dessy had wanted a friend and all I could think about was my hard-on.

  Tully had already stacked the fliers on the Masonite-topped table. They advertised a sale of car batteries.

  I needed a new battery, all right, mine run down from Manzanar, Mulholland Farm, a near accident, and a messy sex fracas in Leucadia, and now a suicide on 3rd Street. From 1,200 Greeks starving daily, and 70,000 Americans surrendered on Bataan, and how many tankers a week torpedoed off the East Coast? Dessy with her head smashed.

  A siren sounded, winding down.

  Tully appeared in the pressroom doorway, fat white ink-stained arms. He stepped down into Charlotte’s pit to smack the Start button. With the intent whackety-whack, fliers began flopping into the wire basket.

  “Keep an eye on her. I’m going for coffee.”

  I glared at him, who didn’t give a shit what happened to pathetic hookers. His sympathy for the workers was all talk. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me.

  “Child!” Calvin trotted into the room, wearing a fancy gray-striped suit and a hat with a cute little feather in the band. His face was the color of dirty cement. He halted in a melodramatic pose, fingers spread against his chest and his mouth turned down into a tragic mask.

  “Why’d she do it, child?”

  “Why, shit, Calvin, she just figured out exploitation and lack of regard, that’s all.”

  He stared at me openmouthed. “I loved that little girl, child!”

  “You fucking pimp!” I said.

  I recognized the whuffling sound of Charlotte on the fritz and jumped into the pit to shut her down. When I turned again Calvin was gone, leaving the door open. I cleaned up the mess of crumpled fliers and went into the washroom to wash my hands and face. I was sorry I had shouted at Calvin.

  I went in to sit at Tully’s desk beneath the FREE TOM MOONEY headline, with the black tulip of the telephone receiver jammed to my ear like an ace reporter. I dialed the Mercy Hospital number. After some waits and transfers Bonny’s voice came on.

  I told her that my friend Calvin’s whore had killed herself.

  There was an empty buzz on the line.

  “Went out the window of the hotel.” I didn’t know why I had to be terse and Hemingway when I felt like crying.

  “I’ll be through by eleven,” Bonny said.

  So we made arrangements to meet and to go out to Point Loma to our necking spot; and that would make me feel better.

  It seemed that we did not need to speak of the incident in Leucadia, but something was very different between us. It was as though when she kissed me Bonny was thinking of something else.

  5

  Pensacola, Fla.

  April 30, 1942

  Dear Brud,

  Sorry I haven’t written more, but I figure Liz keeps you posted. I know you don’t see Dad because he keeps me posted. You promised you would get back together with him and make it up. He is a grand guy and you ought to know it. The fact is that a lot of people in this country are anti-Jewish. You just don’t run into it growing up in San Diego.

  I understand what you told me, how you became Mother’s kid, or anyway Grandma’s, after the divorce. You could put up with Mother sleeping with different guys, and I couldn’t. I know I kind of took Dad’s side, and you took Mom’s. But we are not kids anymore, Brud.

  “The Superior Man does at once what the Fool does at last.”

  Liz probably told you I’m training in TBFs. I put in for Wildcats but what I got was these clunkers. They make 135 knots if you are lucky, and the idea of running in on a Haruna class battleship with a torpedo that only goes off about half the time (thank you, war workers) with every gun on that battle wagon banging at you does not give you a helluva lot of hope of coming home much less chalking off one Haruna class.

  The dropping procedure is you come in at two hundred feet. The closer you get the more chance the torpedo has and the less chance you have. We are sure looking forward to getting into action against the Nips.

  Lizzy is having a hard time with her father. He is a hardnose SOB. He was damned good to her after her mother died and that year she was so sick. When they quarrel it is very uncomfortable for me. Sometimes he will do crazy things that make you think he is really nuts. He really hates Errol though he doesn’t even know him. He hated it that Lizzy and I went up to see Errol. It is not a healthy place for Lizzy there because she gets to playing games with him like you saw that night. There was that Mrs. DeFriez that lived there for a long time, that maybe he was shacked up with, but she got pissed off and left and so it is a lot tougher on Lizzy.

  She is going to come back here just as soon as she has graduated. She has to graduate before any of her inheritance comes to her. I just pray to God I don’t get shipped out to the fleet before then. The commander says we ought to be here at least three more months unless something big happens.

  Lizzy and I have big dreams that will come true still, because I have some good connections in the industry, and she is damned good-looking and a good dancer, too, and Elizabeth Fletcher is a good marquee name so she will not have to change it. But all that will have to wait until the war is over.

  If anything happens to me I want you to look out for her. I know you will do that for me.

  I don’t want you worrying about that other business we talked about. That was in another country and besides the wench is dead. It was a stupid, tragic business, but it is the kind of thing that happens in Hollywood where people get their sights set on something that just evaporates. Of course David did some things you or I wouldn’t have done, but he knew he was a dying man and I believe you have to give people some leeway in that position.

  It was signed “TBF Pilot Lt. Daltrey.”

  * * *

  The TBF pilot had given me one more ounce of information about himself and David Lubin, and Flynn had given me maybe a little more.
I didn’t like Richie saying “the wench is dead,” which made him sound like a shit, and I didn’t like him talking as though something might happen to him. I knew well enough that things happened to fliers. Which was what Hagen had said.

  I had told Liz that Richie was in love with airplanes, but it didn’t sound as though he were in love with TBFs.

  6

  Dr. Bonington was seated in the rust-colored easy chair peeling an orange. He stacked the peel in the ashtray on the taboret beside his chair. The collar of his shirt gaped at the neck, making him look as though he had shrunk. The Japs were bombing Port Moresby every day, just across the Coral Sea from Australia, where Charley Bonington was stationed.

  He chewed and swallowed an orange segment and waved a hand at the evening paper, folded on the floor beside his chair. “I see they are thinking about prosecuting Father Coughlin. That ought to please you, Payton.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bonny appeared in the archway at the foot of the stairs, wearing a blue sweater set, blue skirt, silk stockings, and heels. Her eyes flashed at Mrs. B., who came in just then, one hand supporting the other wrist as though it were broken. Mrs. B. looked old.

  “Don’t be late, dear. It’s a school night.”

  I said we were just going out for a hamburger and to see Wild Fire.

  Bonny ignored her mother, looking at me now with a tight-faced, snotty expression. Dr. Bonington slipped another wedge of orange into his mouth. Bonny had said her father was convinced that eating plenty of oranges was the key to good health. Tonight Bonny’s parents looked as though they’d lost the key.

  I hated the disarray in the Bonington house.

  When I opened Ol Paint’s door for her, Bonny said, “She doesn’t give a darn whether I’m late or not. She just says that because mothers are supposed to say that.” She flung herself inside.

  As Ol Paint rolled away from the curb, I raised my arm. Bonny didn’t slide over against me. I made a U-turn.

  But she said, “Can I wear your pin? Maybe she’d pay attention then.”

  It would not be the first Alpha Beta pin she had worn. My meat. “They’re probably going to give me the boot,” I said. “If I don’t quit first. It would only be a hollow symbol of our great love.”