Loving Women

  “What are you drawing now?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.

  “Your neck,” I said.

  She ran a hand down her neck as I was shading the same place in my drawing.

  “And now?”

  “Your clavicle,” I said. “You know, at the base of your neck? Goes across from shoulder to shoulder.”

  She ran a single finger along the clavicle. Then paused.

  She was breathing in a different way. Her eyes were still closed.

  “What about now?” she whispered.

  “Breasts.”

  She ran her hand around her breasts, from one to the other, feeling their shape and form, caressing them as if they belonged to someone else. Then she took both nipples gently between her thumbs and forefingers. I tried to draw. Getting hard.

  “And?”

  “Belly.”

  Her hand moved over her belly, eyes closed tight, examining the hard pads of muscle, the concave dip. And then she pressed the heel of her hand above the blackness.

  “You better get over here, child.”

  She guided me into the tight wet channel, the light off now, the rain pounding down, arms around my back, squeezing my cock inside her. “Don’t move,” she whispered. And squeezed again, as if wanting to remember the feel of it, its size and thickness and pulsing presence. I was afraid to move, and then she moved, pressing against me, and I moved, six, eight times, all the way into the tight emptiness, and once more, and then exploded, shuddering, a hoarse involuntary cry coming from me, with Eden Santana holding me tight and squeezing me, and pushing hard against me until I was done. I eased away from her, feeling the fool. A crude kid who couldn’t hold it back. A boy who shot his load faster than a man ever would. But she held my head in her hands and kissed me on the mouth and whispered “You’re so big.” And told me “You’re so strong.” And kissed me again and then slipped away and went into the bathroom. Water ran. I couldn’t believe I was there. This wasn’t Dixie with her savage old eyes and hungry mouth. This was Eden Santana. Who was beautiful. And then she was back with a hot washcloth, bathing my cock and my balls, the hotness of the cloth like a second cunt. We lay there side by side for a long time, her arms around me, saying nothing, the flower smell very strong and the rain falling. And after a while she turned my head to hers and kissed me again and then I felt her hand lightly on my chest and she pinched my nipples, little stabbing pinpoints of pain, and she touched my flat belly and then my cock and I was hard again and the rain still falling. She lay on her side with one knee raised and delicately rubbed the head of my cock against the lips of her cunt, her breath coming in short quickening gasps, and then she whispered, “Now” and I was in her again and her body was convulsing and I drove into her and she moaned and I rammed harder and she groaned deeply and then her voice was rising with the rain still falling and she dug her fingers into my ass, kissing me wetly, rubbing her tongue on my face and eyes, making panting sounds and then a long high-pitched sound and still I kept going, driving away into her, her legs up high now, the wide feet flat against the low roof of the trailer and I kept going and going and going until everything in me exploded and convulsed and I could feel each part of myself bone muscle fiber blood plunging down and out of me and she screamed one last triumphant time while the rain still fell through the dark sky.

  She dressed quietly, pulling on high rubber fishing boots and a yellow slicker. I looked at her, wishing I’d drawn more, knowing now what was beneath the clothes and thrilled by the private knowledge but wishing I had a record. I liked her in clothes too, tossing her hair, about to plunge again into the storm to drive me back to the locker club. She turned to me and smiled. What do you think of me now woman tell the truth did I fuck you well or are you just being polite tell me tell me now tonight not tomorrow. Her face seemed to glow in the soft light.

  “We better hurry, child,” she said hoarsely. “You’ll be late.”

  She opened the door and the wind blew it shut again. I pushed against it, held it open. The rain was still falling in sheets, hurling itself loudly at the trees and echoing off unseen water. “That’s a lake out there,” she said, pointing at the darkness behind the trailer. “Little bitty lake, almost a pond, so small it don’t have a name … Runs into the River Styx, if you could believe that name.”

  We dashed to the car, slamming the trailer door behind us. I got in on the passenger side and she slipped behind the wheel, dripping with rain. Go ahead ask her how was it how was the fuck the second fuck not the first one ask ask. She started the car.

  “The River Styx?” I said (making talk instead of the real talk). “Isn’t that the river of death?”

  “In Egypt, maybe,” she said, “Or Greece, but not in the goddamned Florida Panhandle. That’s for damn sure. I figure they just didn’t know how to spell sticks. S-t-i-c-k-s. That’s the way they should of named it, cause this is where we are. Out in the damn sticks.”

  She laughed hard and it was tough for me to imagine her doing all these things, running to the car, starting it, getting the windshields wiping, joking about the River Styx, after what we’d done in the trailer. She behaved as if we’d just left a movie. But I felt different. Not just in my teeming head. I felt as if my body was heavier and lighter at the same time, as if my skin had been stripped off and replaced, as if I was twenty years older and had just been born. All at once. There was no sign of any such extravagant change on her face, but in the tight, packed air of the car there was one difference and I couldn’t define it.

  “I smell like sex, don’t I?” she said, and smiled. She must have sensed my awareness and how little I knew. Certainly she told me what it was in the car. “Haven’t smelled this way in a long, long time.”

  And (Michael you dumbass kid you former virgin you schmuck) I thought: Who made you smell this way last time? And where? And when? Husband lover sailor Mercado bus driver friend who? But said: “It’s a good beautiful smell.”

  And believed it.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  Now she was bumping up and down over the gravel road, the wheels spinning, the high beams trying to penetrate the driving rain. And then I saw a black man on the corner, before we turned out to the highway. He was under a tree, holding an umbrella. It was Bobby Bolden.

  “Wait,” I said. “Pull over. That’s a guy from the base. Guy I know.”

  She paused, as if thinking this over. Then sighed: “Okay.” And pulled across the highway onto the shoulder and waited. She rolled down the window. “He’s gonna know what we been doin’, child.”

  But it was too late. Bolden came over, slowly and carefully, looking at the car, peering at us. “Prob’ly thinks we’re the damn Klan,” she said. “Come on, man.”

  Then Bolden saw my face and nodded and began to fold the umbrella while I opened the back door.

  “Thanks,” he said, getting in.

  “She’s droppin’ us at the locker club,” I said. “After that, we’re on our own.”

  “Just change your clothes fast, I’ll drive to the gate,” Eden said. “Otherwise you’ll turn into pumpkins.”

  “Okay,” Bobby said.

  We drove to the locker club in silence, Eden Santana leaning over the wheel, squinting into the rain. She pulled around in front of the club and Bolden and I jumped out. In the club, I remembered: I left the goddamned pad and the chalks in the trailer. That meant I couldn’t show the drawings to Miles. And thought: Just as well. They were probably terrible. And I didn’t want anyone asking who the woman was. None of them. This was secret. Mine. Private. In the small tight trailer with the rain and the flowers. I pulled on my whites, hung up the civvies. Bolden was already waiting inside the door in uniform.

  “Sure you want this?” he said.

  “Want what?”

  “Some fuckin’ cracker jarhead libel to hassle our asses. Woman like that drivin’ a black man home.”

  “Come on.”

  She drove us to the gate. Bolden got out fir
st and hurried into the gatehouse. It was a minute to midnight.

  “When can I see you again?” I said quickly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I gotta think about this, child. What happened tonight, well, it happened. But—”

  “Saturday,” I said. “Please. We can talk about it then. I got about a minute left and then I’m AWOL. Please …”

  “Sunday,” she said. There was doubt in her face but she squeezed my hand. “Ten in the morning. We’ll have us a picnic.”

  I kissed her on the cheek and sprinted to the gate, showed my Liberty Pass to the guard. He glanced at the clock.

  “Playin’ it fine, ain’t you, sailor?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Bolden came over.

  “The man’s here, jarhead,” he said. “He don’t need no lectures from you.”

  He took my elbow and opened the umbrella and we hurried into the rain, heading for the barracks. I glanced back and saw Eden’s taillights stopped at the highway. Going home. Bolden looked at me and shook his head.

  “You are a sly motherfucker, boy,” he said.

  Chapter

  32

  That night, with the world sleeping under the Gulf rain, Bobby Bolden took me to the Negro barracks above the mess hall, the great long room that they all called the Kingdom of Darkness. At the near end, inside the door, there were tables and chairs and a four-burner gas stove, pots and pans and dishes and a refrigerator. The bunks and lockers were at the other end. The room was crowded with black sailors and a few Filipinos and loud with music. The close, humid air smelled of frying bacon. Bolden explained that the messcooks had keys to the galley and the food lockers and did their own cooking upstairs. “They work when everyone else eats,” he said, “so they get to eat whenever they want to. Like now.”

  There were heavy blackout shades on all the windows and weather stripping on the doors to keep the sound from flying around the base. A big noisy air conditioner filled one window. (“They chipped in f’that,” Bolden said. “Sounds like a C-47, don’t it?”) When I walked in, Freddie Harada looked up from a book and waved hello and went back to his reading (the Philippines only four years into independence and the Huks fighting in the mountains of Luzon while the Navy still treated them like colonial subjects, fit only to be messcooks or valets). Then Bobby Bolden introduced me to the others; there were a lot of oh-yeahs, heard-’bout-yous, so Bolden must have prepared them. I wondered what he’d said about me: The ofay that thinks he knows music, the white boy from New York, the storekeeper with the fresh mouth. But it couldn’t have been too bad. They smiled as we shook hands and I tried to use a mental shorthand, matching physical things against names so if I got the names mixed up they wouldn’t think I believed all Negroes looked alike.

  So here was Tampa (red hair, thin arms, a swell of belly) and Lightnin’ (lone gold tooth, short, muscular, trim) and Rhode Island Freddie (big and fat with processed hair and a pencil moustache) and Bumper (thin lips and horn-rimmed glasses) and Little Elroy (bald, huge, a tattoo of a nude woman on his coffee-colored chest). Others were sleeping, drifting around the bunks or out on the town, but this was the basic crew in the Kingdom of Darkness. On that night, as on all the others that followed, Rhode Island Freddie was doing the cooking, his T-shirt very white against his skin, and the others resembled football players in a locker room before a game, jiving, shouting, saying terrible things about one another’s mothers and moving, consciously or not, and sometimes sitting down, to the music. A singer named Lloyd Price was calling:

  Lawdy lawdy lawdy

  Miz Clawdy …

  And they were singing the chorus with him while I was handed a beer and a plate of bacon and eggs—I no longer felt gorged with gumbo; emptied, in fact, by what happened after—and Freddie Harada came down to me and asked how I was feeling and I said great, great (the smell of sex on me too, but nobody here knew except Bolden) and Rhode Island Freddie asked me did I ever go to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and I said no, never been there, wasn’t old enough, but I’d hung out on 52d Street, I’d heard Tatum play piano through the open doors of the Club Ibis and saw Billie Holiday once coming out of a limousine (with a white guy, but I didn’t say that) and then I looked up and Bobby Bolden was taking his horn out of its case and Rhode Island Freddie said, Here we go.

  Bolden blew honking comments on the Lloyd Price tune (which they played again and then again), making dirty sounds in the lower register, his tone fat and sweaty, everybody singing now, and Bolden playing in and out of the words, Lawdy lawdy lawdy, Miss Clawdy and the record falling again on the thick plug of a 45-rpm player and I finished the beer and someone handed me another one and then the music changed and it was Fats Domino singing Goin home tomorrow. Can’t stand your evil ways … Goin home, tomorrow, Can’t stand your evil ways … (no picture of him in my head, ’cause this was the time of Patti Page and Joni James and Jo Stafford and Johnnie Ray, the last year of Tin Pan Alley, the last year of white-bread American music, the last year before rock ’n’ roll) and then the guy named Bumper said this was some song, black man up north working in some factory, tired of all the bullshit, wants to come home to the South. And Little Elroy laughed and said, “Shit, Bum-puh, I tho’t this was about the muthafuckin Navy!”

  While Bobby Bolden played on.

  They kept drinking and eating and making a hundred little moves to the music. There was a record called “She Aint Got No Hair” by a group called Professor Longhair and the Shufflin Hungarians (“He puttin on the world, man,” said Tampa. “Fess ain’t no fuckin Hungarian, he just a nigger lak us”) and a tune by Roy Brown and his Mighty Mighty Men called “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and another one, same guy, “Cadillac Baby,” and a sad, wailing, heartbroken song called “Trouble at Midnight.” I remember feeling instantly changed, the way I’d felt with Eden in the trailer; I was one Michael Devlin before and another Michael Devlin afterward. I’d never heard this music before; it was all about balling, drinking and fucking up and it worked off a back beat of some kind, not 4/4 time or the kinds of mixed tempos the beboppers played on Symphony Sid. “Don’t Roll Them Bloodshot Eyes at Me” another guy was shouting (Wynonie Harris, but I didn’t know that then), while Bobby Bolden honked, and I opened another beer, feeling like I’d been granted a passport into a different world. Someone brought a steak to Bobby Bolden and he stopped playing. He saw me sitting on the edge of a bunk and came over. The music was thinner without his horn.

  He watched Tampa doing a tight, intricate series of steps to an up-tempo honking shouter. I told him I liked the music.

  “It sure ain’t Ben Webster, but, you know, it’s alive, man. Party music. Fuck music. Right outta the blues, with a little sound of the church in there too. You gotta hear it in a club. Like in Biloxi, or a place like Macon. Or the Dew Drop Inn over New Orleans … Go to some black joints. Drink some corn likker. Smoke some reefer. Then you really hear it. These records, they don’t get it right. Sound like they playin’ in a field. No bottom. No breath. No feel …”

  He leaned back, looking drowsy and satisfied. Fats Domino was playing again. I was trying to absorb what he was saying, to understand it, above all, to remember. And I felt cut off from other parts of my life. Eden. The Navy.

  “What’d Red Cannon do if he walked in here?”

  “He don’t come here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause we’d eat the mothafucka.”

  He laughed.

  “I’d pay to see that,” I said.

  “Don’t take his shit,” Bobby Bolden said.

  “It’s not his shit I worry about. It’s the Navy’s shit.”

  “Don’t take that either.”

  He was finished eating. Then he faced me, while the music pounded.

  “How come you picked me up out there in the boondocks?”

  “You were standing in the rain, man.”

  “So what? You in a car drove by a woman and
you pick up a black man … Could get yissef killed.”

  “From what I hear, you could get yourself killed any night of the week.”

  He was suddenly suspicious. “Who you hear that from?”

  “You know, the general gouge around the base.”

  “What they say, exactly?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Just Bobby Bolden got himself a white woman …”

  “You mean, that nigger Bobby Bolden got a white woman,” he said, his voice hardening.

  “I didn’t hear it put that way.”

  “Then you ain’t hearin’ too good, boy.”

  “Let’s make a deal,” I said with some heat. “You don’t call me boy and I won’t call you boy.”

  He looked at me as if he were going to strike me. And then he laughed.

  “You got a mouth.”

  “That’s what Red Cannon says.”

  “Okay, man. I hear you.”

  Chapter

  33

  What Bobby Bolden Told Me

  I’m from Naptown, up north, Indianapolis, where we got all the seasons, includin winter. I grew up shoveling snow, sleighridin, slidin on trashcan covers down hills; just like a million other kids; just like you. But I love the South, spite of all the cracker bullshit, cause it’s hot. In the summer here, it’s so hot you can’t breathe. You see snow here every forty years, they say, and that’s all right with me. I don’t even like seein pictures of snow, I don’t even like ice in a drink anymore. I see snow now, I go to bed. When the snow’s gone, I rise from the dead. And that goes back to Korea. Everything goes back to Korea.

  But shit, I’m gettin ahead of myself here. You want to know who I am and I talk about snow. Maybe Korea scrambled my brains. Maybe lots of things scramble your brains, though women do the best job of all.