Loving Women

  Becket walked me outside.

  Just like that (I said to Becket, in some fumbling way), Miles Rayfield was gone. And now that it had happened, I realized that he had been going away for days. First they took his work away. The paintings, drawings, paints and chalks: all had disappeared. Then they took his tongue, forcing him into tears and silence. And now he’d done what they couldn’t do: removed himself from the Navy and the earth itself.

  Miles you son of a bitch, I said out loud. Why’d you do this, you dumb fuck? Why didn’t you just run? Why’d you have to loop a rope around your goddamned neck?

  And then finally Becket said “Okay, dat’s enough. Be a man, Michael. Right now.”

  So I wiped my eyes and took a deep breath and straightened up and exhaled hard and then walked back to the Supply Shack. Becket let me go alone, and I reached the building just as the corpsmen were carrying Miles’s body on a stretcher to a waiting Navy ambulance. The body was covered with a blanket. The corpsmen looked vaguely puzzled as they heaved Miles up into the back, slammed the double doors, then drove away. I went inside and saw Donnie Ray looking at me strangely.

  “Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off,” he said.

  “No. It’s all right.”

  He looked out at the field.

  “It’s a tough thing, seeing somethin like that,” he said. “Combat’s a lot easier.”

  “I said I was all right.”

  “You don’t look all right.”

  “He was my friend. I liked him. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But you can get lost if you want.”

  “There’s some things to do. Like calling his wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “Yeah, he talked about her all the time.… A wife. Back in Atlanta. And he’s got a mother too. Same town.”

  “Christ.”

  “Someone’s gotta call them.”

  “Yeah. Someone’s gotta call them.”

  He picked up the phone on my desk and asked for Maher in the admin building. I heard him speaking about next of kin and turned around to examine Miles’s desk. There was no sign that he was thinking of checking out, just an ashtray, a pile of requisition forms, some pencils. I put one of the pencils in my pocket. Then stood there and looked out through the screened windows at the hot June morning. Nothing had changed. Sailors ambled down the crosswalks. Helicopters thumped in the sky. I tried to imagine what Miles was thinking a few hours earlier, his heart beating as he came to his decision. Whatever he thought, whatever pain or grief or shame he felt, it had ended forever.

  Donnie Ray hung up.

  “The captain’s calling his mother,” he said.

  “What about the wife?”

  He looked at me with pitying eyes.

  “There was no wife.”

  He turned to go to the counter.

  “I think you better take the day off,” he said gently. “He was your friend.”

  That was true. He was my friend. Not a friend of Sal or Max or Maher or any of the others. Except Freddie. Miles wasn’t part of the O Street nights. He wasn’t there on any wild evenings. He didn’t care when Hank died and didn’t know the words of any Webb Pierce songs. So I didn’t go first to Sal and Max to tell them the news. They were probably talking about Sal’s big birthday party at the Miss Texas Club.

  I went to Freddie.

  I found him sitting on the steps leading up to the shuttered doors of the Kingdom of Darkness. He looked at me when I reached the stairs but didn’t say anything.

  “Freddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Miles is dead, Freddie.”

  “What?”

  “He killed himself this morning.”

  Freddie rose slowly, carefully, standing three steps above me, looking at me as if I might be playing some awful joke.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said.

  “You better not be,” he said.

  “He hung himself. In the mop locker.”

  The phrase “mop locker” would have made Miles laugh. Maybe that’s why he chose it.

  “He—he say anything? Like leave a note or whatnot?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He seemed relieved and looked past me in the direction of the Supply Shack. Then he gripped the railing and sat down hard on the steps and began to cry.

  By noon, his locker was empty, his sea bag packed, his transfer papers typed up by Maher and signed by Captain Pritchett, and he was on his way to Port Lyautey. He never said good-bye. And I remember thinking: Maybe Freddie Harada would get to see the Red Shadow. I knew that I never would. Nor, of course, would Miles Rayfield.

  Chapter

  65

  We went out to the Miss Texas Club in a cab, all of us in uniform: Sal and Max whooping and joking, Maher sipping from Boswell’s bottle of white lightning, and the cab driver acting as if the ride was surely the most distasteful job of his life. On this day Sal was twenty-one; it was payday too and we were all going out to get drunk and get laid. There were no further ambitions. If the world thought we were just a bunch of goddamned lonesome sailors, then by God, we were going to act that way. If ya got the name ya might as well have the game.

  Nobody mentioned Miles Rayfield. The silence wasn’t because they didn’t care what had happened to him. There just wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Not tears, revenge, or prayer. Squashed in the back seat of the cab, I remembered my mother’s wake, all the uncles and cousins drinking, singing, even laughing, and how enraged I was at them; yet riding through the Pensacola night, I forgave everybody. You might as well sing, and declare the existence of the living. And (here, down in the Gulf, with rain scattering on the motel windows) remembering my remembering, other bodies force their way into me, dead on meaningless hills in the Asian jungles, dead on blasted deserts in the Sinai, dead without mourning. Their deaths never chilled me nor attacked my bowels. For years it has been my pride that I can look at dead strangers and photograph them with the remorseless eye of an assassin. But I am like all other men on earth: wounded by the death of people I love. And of those, Miles Rayfield was the first. That night long ago, I churned with fear, anger, mystery and guilt. My friend was dead and I should have known it was coming. And now there was nothing to be done except get drunk, get laid, and remember.

  There was a huge parking lot outside the place, which was a big red-painted barn with a red neon sign saying MISS TEXAS CLUB and a large suety bouncer posted at the door. We chipped in a dollar each for the cab, paid the man, and piled out. The bouncer was checking most IDs but we were all in dress whites, and he recognized that as sufficient credentials, took two dollars from each of us and waved us in.

  “Enjoy yissef, boys,” he said.

  And Sal whooped and said, “Yeah, brother, oh yeah. En-Joy. We want some joy!”

  About five hundred people were already inside and the place was only half full. There were tables on the near side and a wide wooden dance floor and a stage where a country band was playing hard. Off to the right, people sat on stools at a large circular bar. I saw a few sailors dancing with young girls and wondered where Eden was.

  We went to one of the tables and ordered three pitchers of beer from a round-legged blonde waitress dressed in a short buckskin skirt and sneakers. After half a beer, Max angled over to dance with a thin redhaired woman who was alone at the bar. Then Becket came in with Dunbar, and a little later Larry Parsons arrived too, and then a couple of guys from the hangars. Then Dixie Shafer arrived from the Dirt Bar carrying a box with a chocolate birthday cake and candles.

  She yelled out to Max on the dance floor: “Get back over here, boy. Her tits are too small!”

  I sipped some beer and looked up and saw Tons of Fun waddling through the room, each of them carrying delicately wrapped presents for Sal (a Hawaiian shirt, a leather belt) and Betty yelled at a table full of Marines: “Who wants a blow job in the parking lot?”

  And Dixie Shafer said to me, “They’re
so crude.”

  And Sal said, “Me! I do!”

  And Betty grabbed his cock as she sat down and Sal giggled and the band played the Webb Pierce song and we all began to sing:

  There stands the glass

  Fill it up to the brim

  Till mah troubles grow dim

  It’s mah first one todaaaaaaaay …

  And singing the anthem of O Street, I remembered the first time I heard it, almost six months before. And I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I remembered how lonesome I was that night and how then Eden Santana was only a nameless face glimpsed in a dark bus.

  I wonder where you are tonight

  I wonder if you are all right

  I wonder if you think of me

  In mah mis-ereeeeee …

  We shouted the chorus and the Marines looked at us and Dixie Shafer slid over beside me, her hair redder than a sunset, and Sal got up and went after a dark girl with a violet blouse and Maher started drinking straight from the beer pitcher and then I glanced at the door and saw Red Cannon coming in.

  Ah Miles ah poor sad Miles Rayfield.

  Red Cannon was wearing tan chinos and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He squinted through the smoke as if looking for someone and then he walked to the bar and leaned over and said something to the barmaid. If he saw us through the nicotine haze, he didn’t bother to let us know.

  You killed him Red you put the nails in his coffin You son of a bitch.

  Then the music ended and the lights dimmed and Sal yelled at us (the girl with the violet dress gone off): “They just executed the chef.” Dixie Shafer lit the candles and we sang “Happy Birthday” to Sal and the Marines booed and Sal told them to go fuck themselves and reached down and grabbed a handful of the cake and shoved it at Max’s mouth. We all cheered and Sal opened his presents and kissed Tons of Fun on the breasts and pretended to whip out his dick and then we heard a tom-tom beating in a Gene Krupa style and then a different band started playing “Caravan.” There was a sudden spotlight on the stage and a voice from a hidden microphone saying, “Ladies and gennulmin, the Miss Texas Club is proud to present one of the greatest dancers of her tahm, straight from a trah-umphant tore of Havana … Madame Nareeta!”

  A tall red-haired woman stepped into the spotlight, dressed from chin to feet in a black satin gown. She wore white gloves up to her elbows. There was no expression on her face. I drained my beer and poured another as she began to move sensuously to the old Ellington tune. The light defined the hard mound of her belly and I forgot Red Cannon for the moment and wondered about the color of the hair between her legs. She did a few gentle bumps and ground her hips, and then she began to peel off the gloves and the crowd roared. Sal said, “It’s like she’s taking a rubber off a dick.” Madame Nareeta moved her naked fingers slowly to the tune, and did a few more bumps and then, still expressionless, put a hand behind her back and shook and shimmied until the gown fell away and she was standing there, still moving slowly to the music, dressed in black bra and black panties and black high-heeled shoes. A roar rose from the dark. My cock was hard. Madame Nareeta’s skin was very white in the pale-blue spotlight and she moved her hands over her heavy thighs, her belly, along the sides of her breasts, her eyes half closed, her tongue moving over her lips. Dixie Shafer whispered to me: “You look too damned sad, boy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I am.”

  Now Madame Nareeta moved her hand behind her back again and the crowd roared and then she unhooked the bra and I wished that Dixie would slide under the table and open my fly.

  “You got woman trouble on your face, boy,” she said. “And somethin’ else …”

  “A friend of mine died.”

  “I heard that.”

  “He was my best friend, I think.”

  “And what was the woman?”

  The crowd roared as Madame Nareeta bent forward, shaking and shuddering, letting the unhooked bra hang loose, then wriggling out of it.

  “I don’t know what the woman was,” I said.

  “Then you’ll never get over it,” Dixie Shafer said.

  Staring at Madame Nareeta I felt like crying. She had little red plastic stars pasted over her nipples, and was dancing with more movement, writhing and bending, while someone yelled from the dark: “What color is your hair, honey?”

  And I turned to Dixie and kissed her on the mouth, running my hands through her piled hair, wanting to get lost in her abundance, my cock so hard I thought I would come. She whispered, “Happy Sal’s birthday, sailor,” and the crowd roared as Madame Nareeta stepped out of her panties, wearing only a G-string now, all glittery and promising more.

  I glanced over at the bar and my hard-on vanished. Red Cannon was talking to a sailor in uniform. And I saw the man’s face as he turned. Jack Turner. From that first long lonesome bus ride from New York. They watched Madame Nareeta in a clinical way. She was now down on the floor, her legs bent back under her, her crotch aimed at the audience. I finished my fourth beer. And as Madame Nareeta played with her G-string, teasing the roaring crowd about the color of her hair, I got up.

  I eased between the packed tables. A lot of sailors and Marines were standing along the back wall. I headed for the bar. Maybe this was foolish. Maybe it made no sense. But it was time for me to do something about Miles.

  Jack Turner saw me first.

  “Well, hello there, sailor. Long time. How are ya?”

  I shook his hand and said hello at the moment that Madame Nareeta flipped the G-string aside. The roar was gigantic. Sailors and Marines stomped on the floor, beat hands and glasses against tables. I leaned past Turner.

  “Red,” I said, “I want you outside.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Get outta here, boy,” he said, “ ’fore I call yore momma.”

  Turner put a hand on my forearm.

  “Hey, what’s this all about?”

  “It’s none of your business, Jack. This is strictly between me and Red.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Red killed a friend of mine.”

  Red said, “You mean that damned queer?”

  He sipped a drink casually and watched coldly as Madame Nareeta did a farewell bump for the crowd, which was standing and pleading from the hot darkness “more, more, more.” I wished I had words to use against Red Cannon, some amazing set of arguments and lines. I didn’t. So I reached over and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. Turner muscled his way between us, his face next to mine, and said in a hard way: “You better leave, sailor.”

  Red smiled thinly and put a hand on Turner’s shoulder.

  “Leave ’im be, Jack,” he said. “I think mebbe I’d better kick his gahdam ass.”

  Then we were bumping our way through the crowd and out past the bouncer to the parking lot. I was suddenly afraid and feeling weak. But it was too late. I led the way. When I turned around to face Red Cannon, he hit me and knocked me down. I felt no pain. Just a whiteness. I rolled, expecting a kick and a stomp and I wanted to protect my balls. The kick never came.

  “Better git up, boy,” Red said calmly, “an’ take yo beating.”

  I got up and faced him and saw a short, hard-muscled man, his hands held at chest level, his face blank. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and was going to enjoy it; if I let him, he was sure to give me that beating. I moved away from him, feeling lightheaded, and raised my hands and tried to remember everything I’d ever learned in Brooklyn. I was going to need it all.

  He came in a rush and threw another right hand and I bent at the knees to go under it and the punch glanced off the side of my head. I hooked hard to his belly, threw a right that missed, then hooked again and heard him grunt. That one hurt. Now I heard shouts and saw Turner’s anxious face and about six Marines coming from a car and then I got knocked down again. One of the Marines shouted, “Go Navy! On you ass.” And Red said, “Get the hell out of here, jarhead.” And then I was up and feeling panicky, afraid not of pain but embarrassment, and the fear drove m
e at Red and I got punched hard in the belly and bent over and punched in the upper arms and heard a voice say: “Kick his ass, kick his fucking niggerloving ass.” And was punched again and felt nauseated and hit again and then saw Gabree.

  The Marine from the Mainside gate.

  From the night I took Bobby Bolden to the hospital.

  From the night Eden Santana got scared right out of my life.

  He was leaning against the hood of a car, watching me take my beating.

  I decided not to take the beating. I shoved Red off me and stood up behind a jab and speared him with it. Once. Twice. Again. Backing him up. Then as he came at me I slammed home a right hand, hitting him between the eyes. Blood spurted from his nose. He looked surprised. I stepped to the left and drove a hook to his body, stopped, twisted inside with an uppercut and hit him on the chin and knocked him down.

  I wanted to finish him off right there, end my own fear by stomping him into the gravel. But he’d let me up; I had to let him up. There were more Marines watching us and they cheered as Red got up slowly, a small tentative smile on his bloodied face. He came at me and I hit him, knowing now that I had to time my punches to his rush, and then he paused, turned as if quitting, then suddenly rushed again. I stepped aside and he plowed past me into the group of Marines.

  That’s when the fight changed.

  One of the Marines shoved him. Then another. They formed a circle around him, trapping him, punching him on the shoulders and back, shoving him. He seemed suddenly small and bedraggled and sad. I saw blood leaking from his brow and dripping from his nose.

  I looked at Turner.

  We didn’t wait.

  We rushed at the Marines, and I went crazy, a roar coming from inside me, fighting now without rules, a sailor leaping on jarhead backs to break the circle around another sailor named Red. I ripped an elbow across Gabree’s face, bent him over with a knee in the balls, then kicked him hard on the side of the face. Someone knocked me down with a punch from my blind side. I grabbed a thick-soled boot and pulled and a Marine went down and I stood up and stomped him hard. Red Cannon was fighting two of them, his face a ghastly smear, his shirt torn off his back and I knocked one of them down and then saw Turner on his belly on the ground, not moving, and then there were more Marines coming at me and Red, and I was heaved through the air and bounced off the hood of a car.