In the bunk under me was a guy from Chapel Hill named Dee. He had two older brothers in the navy who'd already been shipped over to the Pacific. It was a big deal, Dee going with the marines.
"Nobody expected me to," Dee said, putting black polish on his boots and then brushing it off and then doing it over again. "But I just figured it was better, you know, spreading out a little."
I told him I just had sisters.
"Well, one of them sure likes you." He winked at me and stuck his hand deep inside his boot. "You get more good-looking envelopes than anybody here."
"That's my fiancée." I tried the word out. "Cecilia."
"You getting married? No kidding?"
"Before I get shipped out, one way or another."
"Sweet deal," Dee said. "Guy ought to have a wife waiting for him when he's off at war. I'll tell you, if there was anybody I liked, even a little, I'd marry her in a minute."
"I like her just fine," I said. It was a wonderful thing, to talk about Cecilia to someone who didn't know her, someone who hadn't watched us grow up and seen her leave and come back like a seasonal bird. Dee thought I was doing her some kind of favor by marrying her. He didn't know how it was at all.
"Pretty?"
"You better believe it."
"Blond or brunette? Or God, she's not a redhead is she?"
"Blond."
"Good thing she's not a redhead. I have this thing for redheads. I might have to get on a bus to go and meet her myself if she was a redhead."
"Then she's safe," I said.
"You got a picture?"
I put down my boot brush and wiped my hands carefully on the edge of a towel. I had a picture of Cecilia in my footlocker, in the little space for personal things we could keep. It was the same picture I'd had of her for years, the one of her in her blue sundress. I looked at that picture so much I thought I'd pull her off the paper. But then I just lost it somewhere. I never knew what became of that picture. "Here," I said, and handed it to Dee.
He took it by the corner, careful, like me. He whistled. "She's a little thing. God, what a doll. Hey, Jim," he said, calling over to the guy in the next bunk. "Get a load of this."
Jim came over and took the picture. "Yours?" he said to Dee.
"Son's. What do you make of that?"
Jim took the picture and showed it to his bunkmate, a guy from someplace in the Midwest, Illinois maybe, and from there it started to go around, up one row of bunks and down the other. Even when I couldn't see it anymore, I could hear them saying our names, Son, Cecilia, whistling. Every guy wanting to be me, wanting to have Cecilia wait for him.
Dear Cecilia,
You don't know it, but you are very popular in Parris Island. I'm not the only one who dreams about you now. Your picture has been making the rounds and everyone agrees you are the prettiest girl we are fighting for. One fellow named Sam Dixon who is from Alabama came over to my bunk early this morning before inspection and asked couldn't he please see your picture again. I guess I'll have to be very careful now, so many guys who want to know where you are.
There isn't much I can tell you about what's going on here. Everything is a secret, most of the time even from us. Whatever we're doing I am mostly thinking of marrying you. Running in the hills in the morning or marching or peeling potatoes, I am thinking about you in a wedding dress and how you will be such a beautiful bride. I can't remember a week that ever went by that I didn't see you, but now it has been almost two weeks. I think of you so much it is hard to know what else I am doing. Marry me the first day I see you again.
I love you. I keep thinking there must be a better way to say it. I wish there was a way to tell you so that you would know that no one has ever loved a girl the way I love you.
Son
Just after New Year's we got our first Cinderella liberty. I didn't know what that meant until the D.I. came in and told us that if we weren't back on the stroke of midnight, we sure as hell better plan on turning into pumpkins. In our lives there had been so much free time, but after three weeks in boot camp, twelve whole hours without instruction seemed impossible. We didn't know where to start because there was just so much. You'd have thought we would have wanted to be alone more than anything, because we hadn't been by ourselves, not even for a minute, since we arrived. But instead we went out the gate together and stayed in our groups all night. A uniform was your ticket back then, not like it is now, and when we went down the streets of Parris Island, it was, "Hello, Marine," "How's it going there, Marine," everywhere.
Dee was in our group, and Jim from the next bunk, and his bunkmate Perry from Illinois, and that guy Sam Dixon who liked Cecilia's picture so much. We wandered through town, feeling a little anxious about the daylight. It was night we were interested in, though nobody came right out and said it. I wanted to buy a present for Cecilia, and the guys were good about coming along with me. The five of us went in and out of dress shops, talking about sizes and the color of hair. All the salesgirls were sweet, and there was one who said she'd meet Dee for a drink after work. The other guys thought of girls they'd known at home, maybe somebody they just went out with a time or two, but now they wanted to buy her something. It felt good to have a girl to send a present to, any girl. I picked out a scarf with red flowers around the edge.
"If you want to write a note for that and give me the address I could just mail it for you," the salesgirl said. "If you want, that is."
"That would be good," I said. I thought about it for a minute and then wrote something down and handed it to her. She was a pretty girl, slim and dark-haired. I thought if she was all fixed up she would have looked a little like Ava Gardner.
"Would you like to go for dinner tonight?" she said, keeping her eyes down on the counter as she wrote out the receipt.
I felt my face flush and I hoped that none of the guys had heard her. "I can't," I said quietly, "I've got a girl." I tapped the scarf on the counter.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were brown. "Here?" she asked.
"No, Tennessee."
"So do you want to have dinner with me tonight?" She started to smile, but then looked away, like all of the sudden she'd lost her nerve about the whole thing. I felt bad for her. She was a pretty girl. I wondered then if that's what it meant to be in love, turning down invitations from pretty girls when you were away from home.
I thanked her for everything and we left. It was cold and snowing a little bit and we pushed our hands into our pockets and headed down the street toward noplace in particular.
"I say we have dinner," Jim said.
Dee looked at his watch. "It's barely four o'clock."
"Well, it's too early to start drinking now. If we wait and have dinner later, it'll just cut into our drinking time." Jim was a sensible guy. He could always figure out how to do something, fix an engine or tighten his blankets to make a quarter bounce. If he said dinner was a good idea, then chances are it was. We were seventeen. We were always hungry.
By the time we'd eaten it was getting dark, and we figured we could raise any sort of hell we wanted. The first bar we went into a couple of guys bought us a round of beers and we took this as good luck. Sam and Perry shot pool while Dee and Jim and I split a pack of cigarettes. It's not that I'd never had a drink. I'd done some drinking in my day, but that was the first time it didn't matter. I wasn't breaking any rules, there was no worry in the back of my head about coming in late and drunk and seeing my mother waiting up for me in the living room. Now I was a marine out with my marine friends and I could drink what I wanted.
"You should see this guy's girlfriend," Sam said to the bartender, and put his arm around my shoulder. "Great big guy like this and he has this little bitty girlfriend." He held up his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. "This big. And pretty." He shook his head.
"Who?" Jim said.
"Cecilia. Son's Cecilia."
"To Cecilia, then," Jim said, and raised his glass, and the whole bar raised their glasses and looked up an
d said, "To Cecilia," and we all whooped and hollered. The bartender filled us up again and we started talking about getting over to the Pacific to show those guys what for. Then just when we were all starting to feel a little lonely, the salesgirl who liked Dee came in and gave us all a wave. She came to our table and sat right down next to Dee and kissed him on the cheek. Suddenly I missed my salesgirl and remembered her as looking more and more like Ava Gardner.
"Betty," she said to Perry and shook his hand. She shook hands with all of us and asked us where we were from. Then someone put a song on the jukebox and she got up to dance with Dee, even though there wasn't really a dance floor. Jim and Sam and Perry and I watched them like they were a movie. We were all drunk, but Dee was drunk and dancing.
Then a guy around sixty came over and sat down with us and bought everyone a round of drinks. "I was a marine myself," he said when we raised our glasses to him. "The Great War. Hell of a war." We nodded.
"What's that on your hand?" Perry said. He probably wouldn't have asked that way, except that we were all so drunk whatever came to our minds came out of our mouths.
The man, who said his name was Louder, rolled up his shirt sleeve and showed us a snake that went all the way around his forearm. I could tell by the yellow and brown on its back and the diamond shape of its head that it was supposed to be a cottonmouth. Its red tongue was out, lying on the top of his hand. I wondered why anyone would want a cottonmouth on his arm. "This one's basic training," he said, tapping the snake on the head. "I got plenty others, but I'm not going to take my shirt off. It's too damn cold in here. You know what they say, can't be a marine without a tattoo."
And that was all we needed to hear, because nobody was going to tell us we weren't marines. We were all out of our chairs and on our feet. I went to get Dee. "We're going for tattoos," I said. "Come on."
But Dee only pulled Betty closer and pushed his face into her hair. "You crazy?"
"Marines have tattoos," I said. "Are you a marine or what?"
"I'm a dancing marine." They did a sloppy half turn so that all of the sudden I was facing Betty. She gave me a wink. I wasn't sure what it was supposed to mean.
"We'll go without him," I said to the others.
"Without Dee?" Sam said.
"It's either that or no tattoos." I downed the last of my drink and then the last of Dee's drink, which he had left sitting on the table. It served him right.
"You boys know where to go?" Louder said to us when we were almost to the door.
We stopped, looked back, shook our heads.
He pulled himself into his coat and got to the front of the line. "Come on, I'll take you down there, but I'm not going to stay and watch. I never watch a tattoo. Not even my own."
It was nearly midnight, but Louder said the place stayed open late. "I oughta get a commission," he said. It wasn't too far from the bar, and I was glad since the cold was starting to creep up under my coat. There was a sign in the window that said, TATTOOS WHILE YOU WAIT. It was lit up like a soda shop, full of guys I knew and guys from other companies, all as drunk as me. They all said hello and tried to make room for us on the edges of chairs. The place smelled like rubbing alcohol, like gin.
"None of you planning on throwing up, are you?" a small, burly man said to us when we came in. We shook our heads. "Well if you are, go outside." He took a silent count of heads. "It's gonna be awhile."
"We've got until midnight," Jim said.
The man handed us books so we could pick out what we wanted. When his sleeves rode up above his wrist we caught sight of the edge of a world, the tails of things hanging down beneath his cuffs. He called for the next fellow in line to come behind the curtain. Louder looked around.
"Just like the old days," he said.
I was more sure than ever that this was the thing to do, what with so many of the guys there doing it. A fellow named Pinsky whose bunk was near the front of the Quonset hut stepped out from the back, buttoning up his shirt. "They've got three guys working back there," he said. "You won't have to wait too long."
"Hurt much?" I asked him, and then was sorry because the question didn't sound very marine.
He looked at me, his eyes glazed over from bourbon or something else. "You bet," he said, and stepped through the door without a coat.
Jim and Perry went back first, Jim for an eagle with a flag twisted in his talons and Perry for a snake like Louder's, which seemed to make Louder happy. He stayed with us after all and talked about something that I couldn't quite hear. I was thinking about my tattoo, which would say Cecilia. I picked out the kind of letters I wanted. I thought of how happy she would be to see her name there, on my arm like it was on most every tree and park bench in Ashland City. I had carved it in so many places that it was almost a joke in town, every tree named Cecilia. When a very short man with smooth black hair and a careful little mustache called me back I told him what I wanted.
"Big or small?" he said. There was no interest in his voice. There was talk that they'd done more than a hundred and fifty tattoos since liberty began that afternoon. He was tired and didn't care about my love life.
"Pretty big," I said, "from about there to there." I marked out the place on my arm and he started to wash it off.
"Write it down," he said, and gave me a pencil and paper. "I don't want to make a mistake. My spelling's not so good."
So I wrote down her name on a piece of paper and held it up with my other hand while he worked. After every letter he finished, he checked it again.
His hand shook a little while he worked the electric needle, probably just from being so tired. When it was done I looked at it and for the first time I felt married, like the whole ceremony was done and Cecilia was mine. "That's good," I said to the tattoo man.
My voice seemed to startle him, almost like I woke him up. "Yeah?" he said. "You think?" He looked at my arm like he'd never seen it before. "It's not bad, really."
I tipped him a dollar over the price and went back out into the waiting room.
Jim and Perry were finished, but Sam was still getting worked on, so I sat down and waited with the rest of them. I was starting to sober up a little and was sorry for it. I could feel a sting in my arm that I hadn't before. Then Sam came into the waiting room with his shirt off. He was still as drunk as he'd been in the bar. He was smaller than the rest of us, but he'd kept up. It must have hit him harder. "Look at this," he said, and turned his shoulder toward us. That tattoo was a little red, but it was clear enough from where we sat. Jim and Perry started to howl. It said Cecilia.
"You son of a bitch," I said, and I went for him across the waiting room. All the chairs, the black and white tile floor, the pictures of tattoos taped to the wall, turned into a blur. There was just no stopping me, though I guess a few people tried. I was a fullback and I moved through the room of would-be marines like water and got to Sam. It was like somebody just handed him to me, and I had him by the shoulders and up in the air. I can still see his face above my face. It was pale and red and a little broken out. His blue eyes were rimmed with water and there was a pain and fear I hadn't seen before. "My arm," he said, crying. "My arm. Put me down."
But I didn't put him down as much as throw him down, through the curtain and onto the table where someone I didn't know was having the word America carved into his chest. The tattoo man I'd tipped five minutes before looked at me like someone he'd never seen before in his life.
"I'll call the Shore Patrol," the burly man said. "Stupid, drunk bastards."
So then I went for him, hating him exactly the way I had hated Sam a minute before. All I wanted to do was fight, that quick I'd gone crazy, seeing her name like she was the one who put it there. Jim took hold of my arm and so I turned to go for him, but when I saw his face he said, "Son, hey. Son," and I heard him. "We need to get out of here now," Jim said.
Perry went and picked up Sam and helped him into his shirt. We were all so good at getting dressed quick in those days, and the four of us were o
ut the door, and it was all forgotten. We were running together, stumbling half blind and laughing at what, I can't imagine. I never saw Sam's tattoo again.
The next morning was a hell that nobody accounted for, 'cause the day went on same as ever, four-thirty wake-up, four-forty-five run. Each beer and whiskey was with us as we went through our course. And nobody's arm felt like lifting a field pack either. It's the day after liberty that folks should talk about, but I guess it doesn't make as good a story.
It was that day I got my assignment to stand guard duty, midnight to four A. M. I wasn't any too pleased, seeing as how all I was thinking about was the night's sleep I'd be having, but there was no arguing with the marines. At eleven-thirty I got up and got dressed in the dark, careful not to wake up Dee in his bunk, took my rifle, and headed out into the night. I was lucky, since it wasn't as cold as it had been the night before and it wasn't raining. Actually, it was a pretty night, and standing guard wasn't too bad as long as you could stay awake. It was the first time I'd been alone and so I walked back and forth in front of my post and thought about Cecilia. With all that time I could think of her as long as I wanted to. It felt like a luxury, like a bath, to remember whole conversations we'd had without anyone interrupting. I'd tried to do it at night, but I was always so tired I just fell asleep after a minute or two. I imagined our wedding, the Lighthouse Baptist Church done up in flowers. Magnolias were her favorite, but there'd be no way of getting them that time of year. In the summer I'd go around cutting off magnolia branches. I took so many I had to start doing it at night. I tried to get them mostly out of the woods, but a lot of the good trees are the ones growing in people's yards. Then I would go and leave them on Cecilia's doorstep, their stems bound together with twine, so many flowers they made their own tree.
That's what I was thinking about when I heard the jeep drive up. I snapped up straight, worried at first that I'd been thinking so much and that my thoughts had taken me too far away. I felt like my thoughts of Cecilia were spread out on the ground, that I had been caught touching her clothes.