Loving Women (17 page)

The next day the snow was gone. The sun burned its way back, high and dim in the clear cold sky, but it wasn’t strong enough to rid us of the bitter cold. Liberty was restored. I wanted to go to town and search for the curly-haired woman, but after the night at
the Dirt Bar I had no money, and it was three more days until payday. Still, Dixie Shafer had erased my shameful secret and I felt triumphant and powerful except for the money. Harrelson and Boswell left for Montgomery and the big service for Hank Williams. When they came back two days later, full of details and white lightning, we were all tired of Hank Williams and nobody wanted to hear about it. I walked through the Panhandle afternoons, listening for Bobby Bolden. But all the windows were still closed against the cold. I thought about going up to see him, but I was afraid he’d play some game in front of the other blacks and tell me to get lost. I wouldn’t let him do that.

We worked long days, with the helicopters flying from 0500 until sunset, thirty of them in the air at once, catching up on lost time. Somewhere in those few days I started to know the difference between push-pull rods and irreversibles, swash plates and wobble plates, cuff and trunion assemblies. I wasn’t sure what a gimbal ring was, but when Sal came to get one, he said that for shit sure it wasn’t available at Macy’s.

All Navy nights resembled one another. Broke, confined, we sat around on the bunks and read the newspapers or listened to the radio. We exchanged what was called “the gouge,” another word for lore, or “scuttlebutt,” which was rumor and gossip. I learned how to spit-shine my shoes. My hair grew longer. I pulled another midnight-to-four, learning the password first, and signed the clipboard once more for Red Cannon. I learned that the best place for tailor-made uniforms was Anchor Tailors on South Baylen Street. The manager’s name was Marie. But I didn’t want tailor-mades. I wanted civvies. I wanted to be able to go into town in normal clothes, with some money in my pocket, and find that woman with the curly hair.

But I needed money for clothes and a locker. As an airman apprentice in pay scale E-2, just above the bottom, I would get a check for $80.90 after the taxes were taken out. A fortune. Finally we lined up one morning at 1020 in Hangar Two to get our paychecks. Everybody else got paid, but there was nothing for me. Maher was the duty yeoman and he said he was sorry, that this sometimes happened to new sailors while the paperwork was being sent back and forth to BuPers in Washington. He’d look into it and let me know. Sal, Max and Miles Rayfield offered to loan me some money; I said I’d wait.

I stayed on the base for more than two weeks, waiting for the paycheck. Sal and Max went out most nights. Miles remained on board, but went off most evenings to some destination on the base itself, saying nothing. The image of the woman began to fade. I was sure she was with a guy now, perhaps a husband, some Navy lover. The weather stayed cold, but there was no more snow. I read the art book, my head filling with Rembrandt and Goya, Leonardo and Botticelli. At the Supply Shack, I got better at my work each day, and the mechanics now knew my name. I heard other hillbilly singers on the radio, Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell, and began to know the words. If Bobby Bolden was playing his horn, nobody on the base could hear him except the mess cooks. One chilly night I was in the barracks reading the
Pensacola Journal
. Miles and Jones were there. A story on page one said that 40,000 American servicemen had deserted since the beginning of the Korean War and 36,000 had been recaptured. That was astonishing. “Who the hell
blames
them?” Miles said acidly. “What’s that goddamned war
about
anyway?” Jones bristled, said it wasn’t a war, it was a police action, and Miles said you couldn’t tell that to the dead, and Jones said that if we didn’t fight the Communists in Korea we’d have to fight them in San Diego, and at that, Miles laughed and shook his head. “Jonesie,” he said, “that’s the hoariest cliché of the decade so far.” Jones bristled again, said there’d always be cowards in any war, men who’d rather run away. Miles said: “We’re talking about two complete
divisions
of deserters, Jonesie. Doesn’t that tell you something? “Yeah,” Jonesie said. “It tells me this country’s getting soft.” And he walked away.

Miles and I were quiet for a while, and then he looked up at me and said, “Do you ever think of doing it?”

“Going over the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” I said, and meant it. “I made a deal. I have to keep up my end, even if I don’t like it.”

He stared at his hands.

“What about you?” I said.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I think about it all the time.”

One frigid afternoon, Miles showed me the base library, up one flight of wooden stairs to room 912, above the post office. “It’s
actually not too bad,” he said, in an amazed way. “They’ve got some magazines and a few good books.” He was right. I remember the first time I went up those stairs. A middle-aged yeoman in a pea jacket was sleeping at a desk. He came suddenly awake, blinked at me with the sore eyes of a rummy, saw I was just a kid sailor and went back to sleep. The place was a kind of refuge from the Navy, with five aisles of books, a magazine rack, and a long table where you could write letters or just look out the three screened windows at the base.

I picked up
Life
magazine. On the cover, a model with blurry features peered through a beaded curtain. I remember that issue so clearly. It was the first
Life
I’d ever read, and it was full of marvels. I studied an advertisement for Philco television sets, equipped with the Golden Grid Tuner. A woman who looked like Joan Fontaine was turning the knob of a huge set. She was perfectly groomed, wearing earrings and a filmy dress.

We didn’t have TV at home yet, and in our neighborhood none of the women looked like Joan Fontaine. But that winter everybody I knew was buying television sets. They had already begun to change everything, something I noticed the summer before I went away. At night, there were just not as many people on the streets as there used to be. When you looked up, you could see a blue glow in more and more windows. They were in all the bars, too, and men now stood quietly, staring at the black-and-white images, while the bartenders made endless adjustments. I thought that when I sold my first cartoons, I’d get my father a set. Maybe he’d enjoy the Dodger games. The kids could look at cartoons and Westerns. But I just couldn’t picture myself sitting there with them.

I examined the magazine as if it were a papyrus discovered in some pharaoh’s tomb. There seemed to be a woman in every ad: standing cheek to cheek with a guy in the Chlorodent toothpaste ad, holding her head in the Anacin ad, dressed as a bride in the Kingston sewing machine ad, scrubbing the floor in the ad for Flor-Ever vinyl flooring and a smaller shot of a woman with a sheet wrapped around her, shoulders bare, as a nurse noted her weight on a scale. She was selling lemons as a diet aid. She didn’t look fat to me.

In the news part of the magazine, there were photographs of some quintuplets from Argentina and a lot of pictures of Republicans taking over the House of Representatives from the Democrats.
Harry Truman was still president, and they showed him sitting with some senator named Johnson, who had big ears and was smoking a cigarette, his hair sleeked back. The pictures made me think of Tony Mercado’s camera, and I tried to imagine the photographers looking through their cameras at these events. How did they know where to go to take pictures? Did someone send them or call them? And did they take the film to a drugstore or develop it in some mysterious way themselves? Another story said that 1952 was the first year since 1882 without a lynching of a Negro in the United States, and that made me think of Bobby Bolden. How would he feel reading this news? Would he feel better? I didn’t think so. If I was colored, I’d want to go out and lynch someone back.

I stopped at a full-page ad for Kotex. There was a woman in a tailored suit the color of oatmeal, with dark brown shoes, reddish gloves, a hat and earrings. In her right hand she was holding a leather-trimmed bag. She touched her throat nervously with her gloved left hand. In the distance, a man in a business suit was waving to her with his hat; he had a briefcase and raincoat under his arm. Behind him was a small two-engine airplane. I wasn’t quite sure how Kotex worked, although I knew it had to do with a woman’s period. The ad didn’t exactly expand my knowledge. “Not A Shadow Of A Doubt With Kotex” said the headline. But the rest of the copy promised Protection, and Absorbency, and a Fresh, Dainty Feeling. What did all of this mean? And what did they mean by “no revealing outline”? Most of all I wondered about the nervous woman in the ad. Since this was a Kotex ad, she must have her period. But was this some secret she was keeping from the guy coming off the plane? If so, why? He looked like a husband, she looked like a wife. But she was wearing gloves, so I couldn’t check for a wedding ring. Was she somebody
else’s
wife? And had she made a date with this guy, only to discover that she had her period and wouldn’t be able to sleep with him? Life was full of mysteries.

A few pages later, I saw a woman on skis, soaring through the air up in the mountains. She was wearing ski pants and boots but no shirt.
“I dreamed I went skiing in my Maidenform Bra …”
A blonde. Tinted glasses. Good teeth. I imagined her coming into a small dark room to meet me, the heavy boots making a clumping sound, her tits shoved up by the satiny bra. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, and sat down on the edge of my bed. I put
my hand on her back, the flesh soft, and pulled her close. The hard breasts pushed up against my bare chest, the bra making a satiny noise as her tits touched me … Without working at it, I had another hopeless hard-on.

I looked over at the yeoman, who was still asleep. But I tried to distract myself from the loveliest sight on the dreamscape. Through the window, I could see Captain Pritchett and two other officers walking slowly down the paths. The captain was looking at the lawns. They were browned from the snow and the cold. He squatted and ran his hand across the top of the grass, then plunged his fingers into the dirt. He stood up and shook his head sadly, like a man about to cry. I closed
Life
, and watched Captain Pritchett walk away, his body sagging. At that moment I liked him very much. No matter what else he might be, he was a man who loved something.

Eisenhower was sworn in, but there was still no sign of my paycheck. “Maybe Truman stole it,” Dunbar said. “Put it in a deep freeze. Put a down payment on a vicuña coat.” The
Journal
said that more than 10,000 people crowded into two inaugural balls, paying $12 apiece, and they were so crowded nobody could dance. Back home, Republicans were a separate nationality. But at least now, for sure, the war would end. Eisenhower had gone to Korea between the election and the inauguration. He was a general. He would end it. One way or another. Maybe it wouldn’t be like the last war. No celebrations, no V-J Day, with everybody running wild in the streets and block parties everywhere in the neighborhood and sailors kissing girls in Times Square. Korea was different. Nobody knew what Korea was about. But at least, if it ended, the men would stop dying, would stop being wounded, would stop being lost behind enemy lines. And that meant that there would be no need to train any more helicopter pilots. The Navy could close Ellyson Field. I could go to sea.

The weather turned warmer, but it was still not the hot weather of the day I arrived. During those weeks, I took seven trips to Mainside. Becket promised to teach me to drive. Most days, Sal and Max came to the Supply Shack, telling me that Dixie Shafer was asking for me at the Dirt Bar. I told them again that I wasn’t going anywhere until I got paid. They offered to try to smuggle her onto the base some night, disguised as a case of pontoons. I donated a pint of blood to the Bloodmobile and later Captain Pritchett sent
around a notice congratulating everybody on the eighty percent donation rate, adding up to 478 pints of blood. Walking back from the library one afternoon, I saw Bobby Bolden and nodded. He said hello.

“I miss hearing you,” I said. “Maybe you could play some night at the EM club.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Too many crackers.”

“Ah, they won’t bother you.”

“They won’t serve a black man there. Why should a black man play for them?”

“You’d be playing for us, not for them.” I thought about the lynchings, and masked men from the Ku Klux Klan dragging Negroes out of their homes. “Most of us are from the North.”

“Forget it.”

I wanted to keep talking to him, wanted to get to know him. I thought that maybe Navy small talk was the best way. I gazed off at the helicopters, trying to be casual.

“You give blood yesterday?” I said.

“Are you a fool or what?” he said. “They won’t
take
our blood.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Wise up, chump. This is the Navy. You can’t integrate
blood
in the United States Navy. Spose one of them crackers learned he had a black man’s blood in him?”

“What would he care if it saved his life?”

“He’d rather fucking die.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You better learn, chump. This is America. They got
laws
down here.”

I felt awkward, but also pleased. At least Bolden was talking to me. I mentioned musicians I’d heard on the radio, Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, Roy Eldridge and Milt Jackson. He liked them all, talked about their best work, then said, “You’re pretty hip for an ofay motherfucker.” And laughed. It was as if he’d pinned a medal on my chest. I said I’d like to come visit him and hear him play. He said he’d think about it.

“I’m waiting to get paid,” I said. “If the Navy ever finds the check, maybe we could go out and spend a day at the beach.”

He made a blubbering sound with his lips. “Don’t you understand
nothin
, man? This is
Florida
. These beaches are segregated.”