Loving Women (12 page)

Suddenly Boswell shook us off and kicked Becket hard in the stomach. He whirled and punched Jones in the chest with a wild right aimed at his face. Then he turned to me, blinking. He started another roundhouse right and I bent at the knees, went under the punch, and ripped a hook to his belly. He went
hooooo
. And sat down. He blinked again and then keeled over.

Becket looked at me: “Jesus. Where you loirn to do that?”

“I used to work out,” I said.

“You boxed?” Jones said.

We were lifting Boswell onto a pallet. “A little. I wasn’t very good.”

I didn’t say anything else. I was as astonished as they were at the way Boswell went out from one punch to the body. Anything I said would sound like bragging. Boswell was stretched on a pallet now, and Becket built a little fence of them to hide him. Then Jones laid Boswell’s white hat on his chest.

“Will you look at this man’s shoes?” Jones said.

Chapter

13

T
here are entire years of my life I can’t remember at all, and days that are as dense in memory as granite. That first day on the job at Ellyson Field was one of those. First, I learned about Hank Williams—which is to say, I learned about the American South. I knew only a few things about this vast region of my own country: In the 1860s, the North had fought a bitter, brutal war against the Confederacy, a war that we were taught was about slavery; colored people still were not complete citizens there; southern politicians were figures of fun on radio shows. Good baseball players came from the South and they played a lot of football. But I didn’t know anything about the people; my ignorance extended even to the lies, for I was probably the only person left in America who had not even seen
Gone With the Wind
. That day I learned that the South of Hank Williams was not the South of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. On the day Hank Williams died, the air itself seemed charged with emotion, packed with loneliness and loss, as the radio stations played the man’s songs over and over, the deejays sounding hushed, tearful, even reverent. At first I thought this was comical; I even turned away to smile as the corn-pone voices grieved on the radio. But then, as the words and voices accumulated, I knew they must be serious.

On the news shows, everything else was forgotten. Instead, we heard the governors of Florida and Alabama and Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, all saying what a great tragedy the death of Hank Williams was for the South, for America, for the human race. This all sounded ludicrous then; more than thirty years later, I think
they were probably right. The radio reporters interviewed other hillbilly singers, and though their names meant nothing to me, there was something genuine about their heartbreak. We heard too from sobbing people in the streets of a dozen southern cities. By late afternoon, at least two women were claiming to be the true wives of Hank Williams and were described as shocked and in tears. I felt as if I’d arrived in a country where the king had just died and I didn’t even know his name.

At one point, an announcer said that a grand farewell to Hank Williams was being planned at the Municipal Auditorium in Montgomery, and Harrelson shouted: “Ah’m
goin
!” He slammed the desk with the flat of his hand. “Ah don’t care whether Ah got duty or
not
—Ah’m goin!”

And the details began to come in, too. A cop named Jamey was on the radio, explaining that he found Mister Hank Williams dead in the back of a Cadillac in Glen Burdette’s 24 Hour Pure Oil Service Station on Main Street in Oak Hill. That was in West Virginia, at five-thirty in the morning. There were two men with Mister Williams, the cop said. One of them was the driver of the Cadillac, the other a friend. They were taking him to Canton, Ohio, where he was supposed to sing in a concert that night. The weather was so bad they couldn’t risk a plane. “That’s it!” Harrelson shouted. “
They
killed him! The driver and that so-called friend. They killed him cause he was
too damned good to live
!” The cause of death, a coroner said, was probably heart failure. “But we’ll have to wait for an autopsy.” Harrelson didn’t have to wait: “They gave him some kinda shot, you wait an see. They
killed
him.” Hank Williams was twenty-nine. Only twelve years older than me. “Shit,” Harrelson said. “Shit.”

As the music played, Harrelson moved around in a distracted way, singing along with Hank Williams in a low, tuneless voice.
She warned me once, She warned me twice. But I don’t take no one’s advice
 … Becket knew the words too, but only his lips moved, and he kept working, hurrying from desk to counter to storeroom, sometimes enlisting my help. He didn’t try to explain the spreading sorrow. That was another thing I learned: I wasn’t one of them, maybe never could be one of them, because the things that were deep in me didn’t exist for them, and the things that were deep in the southerners didn’t mean anything to me. I could be quiet, that was all. I could respect them. But I couldn’t truly
feel what they felt. I was an outsider here, as they would be in the gardens of Brooklyn.

The customers were all talking about Hank Williams too.
Musta been the whiskey
, they’d say. A shake of the head:
All them women
. Then a glance out at the airfield and heads cocked as they heard the lonesome voice from the radio.
The honky-tonks got ole Hank at last
.

Then I heard a Hank Williams song I actually knew.
I tried so hard, my dear, to show / That you’re my every dream
 … The tempo was different, the accents broader. But I knew that one.
You’re afraid each thing I do / Is just some evil scheme
. Backed by strings, sounding like South Brooklyn, Tony Bennett sang it all through the fall of ’51, his voice aching the way my heart did then, as I tried to convince a girl named Maureen I loved her.
A mem’ry from your lonesome past / Keeps us so far apart
 … Until I met her in the back room of the Caton Inn on a Saturday night, held her close, whispered the usual lies into her hair. On a night of bitter wind.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind? / And melt your cold, cold heart?

That was when the death of Hank Williams finally touched me too. Hearing “Cold, Cold Heart.” After that, I listened more closely, imagining that the whole South must be full of men who remembered women they held in their arms, while Hank Williams sang from the jukebox or the radio. The man’s voice was so goddamned lonesome and hurt that I felt sure nothing could have saved him. He had six Cadillacs and a mansion in Nashville (the radio said) and a couple of kids and those two wives. But here he was: dead at twenty-nine. So I listened to all the rest of it, as Harrelson turned up the volume, and a crowd of customers began to gather at the counter. To me it was like the day Roosevelt died, when everybody in the neighborhood listened to radios and some cried and others wondered who the hell this Harry Truman was; later, when Jack Kennedy was killed and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and John Lennon, all the great public killings of my time, I was always working, professionally numb as I chased the faces of disaster. As a photographer, I was paid to focus deeply on the moment, but late at night, exhausted in a motel room in Dallas or Memphis or Los Angeles, I would remember the death of Hank Williams. I was seventeen again and looking over at the side of the counter in the Supply Shack in Pensacola, where a
mechanic with grease-blackened hands was sobbing openly and another man was trying to console him. I’d never seen a man cry like that before. “Come on, now, Jimmy,” his friend was saying to the mechanic. “Don’t you cry, boy. Don’t you cry.” And then someone brought in a copy of the
Pensacola News
and there was a picture of Hank Williams on page one, and they all looked at it in silence, as if the picture and the print and the paper finally and irrevocably had confirmed what they’d heard on the radio but didn’t fully believe. Another man left in tears.

Suddenly the door slammed hard. Everybody stopped and turned. Chief McDaid was standing there, with Red Cannon beside him. All we could hear was the radio.

“I’m free and ready

So we can go steady

How’s about time for me
 …”

“Shut that goddamned thing off,” McDaid said.

Harrelson switched off the radio. It was quiet, except for one of the customers, who was blowing his nose.

“What in the hell is going
on
here?” McDaid said. Cannon searched our faces and his eyes narrowed. Nobody answered. I noticed for the first time that Donnie Ray wasn’t with us. He was the senior man. He should have been there to answer Chief McDaid.

McDaid took a few steps closer to the center of the counter, still on the other side. The customers eased away to give him room.

“This some kind of a
prayer
meeting?” he said. His voice was round and deep, like the voice of a radio announcer. “Is this a
circle
jerk?
What is this?
”

Finally Harrelson said softly: “Hank Williams died, Chief.”

McDaid and Cannon exchanged a weary look that said: See what we have to put up with? Then McDaid pushed through the swinging door that separated our work area from the service area. One mechanic started to walk away, but Cannon blocked him.

“Mister Cannon, what would you do with a lot like this?” McDaid said.

“A little extra duty’d sure help, Chief,” Cannon said.

“How about a firing squad?”

“That’d probably help the most.”

McDaid stepped in among us, looking at our faces, uniforms, shoes. I hoped he wouldn’t go in the back and find Boswell. When he got to me, McDaid stopped.

“You’re new here, aren’t you, boy?”

“Yes, sir. Came on board yesterday.”

“You crying for Hank Williams too?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know his music, sir.”

“You don’t know his music.” McDaid paused. “Why not?”

“I’m not from the South, sir.”

“And where, pray tell, are you
from
?”

Cannon interrupted. “He’s from New York.”

“I see,” McDaid said. He looked at the stenciled name on my shirt pocket, then at me. The tan was perfect. I could smell aftershave lotion. “Are you a New York wise guy, Mister Devlin?”

“I’m a sailor in the United States Navy,” I said.

“You didn’t answer my question, boy.”

“No, sir. I’m not a wise guy.”

“Good,” McDaid said. “You’d better not be.”

Then he turned to the others.

“Where’s Donnie Ray Bradford?”

“Out at the hangars, Chief,” Jones said.

“You tell him to call me as soon as he gets back.”

“Yes, Chief,” Jones said.

McDaid separated himself from us and then coiled tightly and addressed us and the customers.

“Now all you sorry-ass son-of-bitches get back to work,” he said. “This is the United States Navy, not an amusement park. If the
President
of the
United
States dies, you still must perform your duties. You
certainly
don’t stop your work because some banjo player dies. I hope you understand me clearly.”

With that he strode ahead through the swinging door and out into the morning light, with Cannon behind him. Everybody at the counter breathed hard in disgust and started mumbling.

“Fuck you, pal,” I said.

“Forget it,” Becket said. “Dat’s da way he is.”

“Hey, the man’s right,” Jones said casually. “We don’t get paid to hang around and listen to the radio.”

Becket gave him a look. “You know, sometimes, Jonesie, you are a real sorry son of a bitch.”

He walked away and Jones shrugged. Away off, I could hear Bobby Bolden playing his horn.

“Cold, Cold Heart.”

A slow blues.

Chapter

14