Loving Women (21 page)

As always, Miles was holding a Pall Mall with his wrist bent, pressing the butt to his mouth in an almost dainty way. That didn’t matter much to me; Miles was Miles. I wanted to talk to him about Eden Santana, ask him whether I should try hard to find out if she was really married, if she really had two kids, and where the kids were. Or should I ignore all that? Should I press her to find out what happened in the San Carlos bar with Mercado? Was it wrong to feel jealous one minute, elated the next? Miles was twenty-three. He would know about such matters. But I didn’t say anything at all because I realized that I didn’t really know
him
. I was afraid he would use all those words of his, his scorn and contempt, to make fun of me. He was probably my friend, but I wasn’t really sure. I wouldn’t know until we’d been in some trouble together. I didn’t know yet if any of them were my friends.

Then Harrelson came down the aisle behind Miles. He was holding a coffee cup. He ran a finger across the back of Miles’s neck and swiveled his hips.

“Morning, Milesetta,” he said.

“Fuck you, redneck,” Miles snapped.

Harrelson walked on, as if he hadn’t heard Miles reply, and wiggled his ass again before sitting down. I looked at Miles and thought:
If I were truly Miles’s friend, I’d smack Harrelson in the mouth. The stupid son of a bitch
. But I said nothing.

“That redneck swine,” Miles said. A vein throbbed in his temple. He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

“Sticks and stones, and all that,” I said. “Don’t waste your energy.”

“I know, I know,” he said. But when I looked at him again, there were tears in his eyes behind the thick glasses.

“I’ve got work to do,” he said, and stood up abruptly, grabbed his tray and hurried out.

The morning seemed endless. The weather was warm, the hangars heavy with traffic. I handed out engine parts, filled in forms, entered requisition slips in logs. Harrelson hurried around, looking busy, whistling Hank Williams tunes. In front of me, Miles sat at his desk, typing grimly, speaking quickly on the phone, doodling with a thick black Ebony pencil. Late in the morning, he was sent on a run to Mainside. I got up and stretched and had started for the coffee pot when I glanced at Miles’s doodle. He had made a beautiful drawing of Becket. I called Becket over and showed it to him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Becket said. “We got us an artist here.” He wanted to take the drawing, but I said maybe he should wait and ask Miles and he said, Yeah, sure, of course, you’re right, Miles is sensitive about some things. He laughed.

“Too many things sometimes,” Becket said. “I wonder about him.”

Jonesie came over and said he thought my shoes looked better. The newspaper arrived and on the front page Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, a guy named Dulles, said we wanted peace but didn’t want to be encircled by the Russians and their allies. The big problem, Dulles said, was in Asia, where the Communists were trying to take over Indochina. I wasn’t even sure where Indochina was. The newspaper (and Dulles) said that the Communists had pinned down the French in Indochina and pinned down the United States in Korea, and they’d managed all this without losing even a single Russian soldier. He didn’t say what we should do about it,
but his speech didn’t sound like the world was about to turn wonderful.

Just before lunch, I looked up from the paper and saw Mercado at the counter. I went over to wait on him. He smiled. My stomach flopped over. He was so fucking handsome I couldn’t believe Eden would choose me over him.

“Hey, how are you doing, fella?” he said.

“Just great,” I said.

He needed a swash plate and had the forms all filled out, neatly hand-lettered. I went to get the part and saw Becket again. He shook his head and said, “You know something? I’m fum New Awlins, but if I hear ‘Jambalaya’ one more time, I’m gonna throw something.” I came back to the counter. Mercado was reading the newspaper.

“Where you from anyway, Lieutenant?” I said, knowing the answer, but wondering what he’d say.

“Mexico City,” he said. “You ever been there?”

“Nah, this is the farthest south I’ve ever been. I’m from New York.”

“Ah, New York. I love New York. Well, if you’re from New York, you will
love
Mexico.” He pronounced it May-hee-koe. “It’s a beautiful city with many tall buildings, you know, the skyscrapers. Well, the truth is, not as
tall
as New York, not as many people. We have beautiful mountains all around the city, with snow on the top, volcanoes, and many beautiful women, and it’s like spring all year. You should come. You look me up and I show you around.”

“Sounds great.”

He signed for the swash plate. “I mean it. You come to Mexico, you look for me.”

He left and I thought:
This is probably an okay guy. Open, decent, free of all the officer bullshit you get with the Americans
. So why did the sight of him mess me up? I knew why. I’d seen him come out of the San Carlos with a blonde; but I really wanted to know what he’d done there with Eden Santana. I tried not to think about it, pushed back the details that ran through my mind, thinking:
Forget it, you’ll go nuts
. Two mechanics came in and asked for tools and bolts, and I went to get them.
Isn’t Santana a Latin name?
I thought. Yes, it was, of course it was. So maybe
she
was Latin, too. Even with that slurred southern accent. Maybe that was what would give him an edge over me. That and his age and his money and his looks. Maybe
she loved him and he didn’t love her back. Yeah: I would see her Saturday. But who would she see tonight? Or tomorrow night? Or the night after that? Maybe he would offer to take her to Mexico with him. May-hee-koe. The country where all those American outlaws went, racing across the Rio Grande to freedom, a hundred yards ahead of the sheriff’s posse. Maybe Mercado was going to take her there. And here he was, only a few minutes ago, telling me to visit him. In a city where it was always spring and where there were many beautiful women. Mexico.

“Hey, stargazer.”

I looked around and saw Donnie Ray. I handed the supplies to the mechanics. The men signed their requisition forms and left.

“You look like you just left earth,” Donnie Ray said.

“Musta been the chow working on me,” I said.

Donnie Ray smiled and tapped the desk softly. “Listen, when Rayfield gets back from Mainside, grab some swabs and give the deck a good cleanin. It’s Miles’s turn. And yours.”

“Sure.”

Just after four, Miles and I went into the head and filled some large iron-wheeled pails in the sink. We poured in soap and extra pine scent. Each pail had a roller attached to the top. We wheeled the pails the length of the storeroom, to start at the counter and work our way back to the head. Everybody was gone now except Jonesie, who was the duty storekeeper, there for emergencies. I soaked my mop in the soapy water, then pulled it through the rollers until it was flat. Miles was in the next aisle, doing the same thing.

“Uck,” he said. “Filthy. Disgusting. Just the
feel
of this slimy thing in your hands. A billion microbes per ounce. Cholera. Polio.”

“All you have to do with it is wash the floor, Miles,” I said. “You don’t have to fuck it.”

“I know, but Jesus Christ …”

I mopped in wide broad strokes, covering the floor of my aisle in one stroke. I remember actually liking this job. It was dumb and simple, but it made me feel like a sailor. Miles was grumbling and I peered through the shelving between us and understood: He couldn’t move his body with any grace. None at all. He had his feet together, and was pushing the mop at the floor in small stabbing strokes, whimpering with each push. The mop looked oddly obscene in his hands.

“Miles,” I said, peering past a tray of ballpeen hammers, “you’re doing it wrong.”

“There’s no way to do this
right
!”

I leaned my mop against the shelves and came around to Miles’s side. “Here, watch,” I said, taking his mop. I didn’t know much about anything, but I certainly knew how to mop a floor. “First thing you do, spread your legs.”

“I
beg
your pardon.”

“Don’t be a wiseass. Spread your legs and plant them, see? Like a baseball player at bat. Then—”

“I hate baseball.”

I paused. “You hate baseball?” I was amazed. “How could anybody hate
baseball
?”

“Bunch of grown men standing around in knickers trying to hit a little white ball with a stick.”

Then I understood. “You never played ball when you were a kid, did you?”

Miles assumed the batter’s stance, then grabbed the mop and started swabbing the deck.

“You never played baseball.”

“Fuck off.”

“You must be some kind of a Communist, Miles. A secret agent.”

He looked at me in a timid way. “So I never played baseball. So
what
?”

“Miles, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

He started to get into the rhythm of the mopping. I went back to my aisle, swabbing in broad quick steps. Then Miles said through the shelving: “Baseball isn’t everything, you know!”

“No, and neither is air. But you need it to
live
, man.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, learn about baseball, and learn to swab the decks,” I said. “Then you can explain it all to your wife. When you move to Hollywood …”

He laughed. “You’ve got a fresh mouth on you, boy.”

I swung the mop almost fiercely now, the moves punctuated by Miles grunting in the next aisle. A screen door slammed. I turned and saw Becket.

“Hey, Miles” he said. “That picture of me. Can I have it? I’d like to send—”

“
What
picture of you?” Miles said.

I glanced at his desk. It was bare.

“The picture you drew this morning. I saw it on your desk.”

“Not me,” Miles said. “I didn’t draw any picture of you.”

He was lying. Flat out lying. I’d seen the drawing. So had Becket. A good drawing. A
beautiful
drawing.

“Well, then, who—”

“Maybe someone was visiting,” Miles said. “It wasn’t me.”

Chapter

25

I
stayed on the base for the rest of the week, reading books and magazines, saving my money for Saturday night and Eden Santana. One evening after dinner I went up to the barracks where the blacks lived, looking for Bobby Bolden. An older messcook met me at the door, blocking my way, and told me that Bobby wasn’t there. He looked at me as if I were a cop. “Okay,” I said, “just tell him Devlin, from the Supply Shack, came around to talk.” The man nodded in a way that might have been saying:
Don’t bother
. I went away, thinking:
What’s with these goddamned Negroes
anyway? Most evenings, I dozed. I wished I had a radio. I thought about New York. And on another evening, Red Cannon caught me asleep on my bunk with my shoes on. He smacked me on the soles with the club.

“Listen, shitbird,” he said, “what makes you think you can sleep wearing
shoes
on that fartsack?”

“They’re clean, sir.”

“They’re
clean
? You walkin around in
shit
all day, on
dirt
, on
gas
oline, you say they’re
clean
?”

I sat up and looked at my shoes. Slowly and deliberately.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

Cannon placed a hand on the overhead rack and leaned close to me. An odor of whiskey seeped from his body, though his breath smelled of toothpaste.

“What’d you say, boy?” he whispered.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ sir,” I said, standing now and looking him directly in the eyes.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Cannon said, his voice rising. “Maybe that fine dark pussy in town’s rottin your brain, boy.”

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ’, sir. I didn’t mention women.”

“You got yo’sef a mouth on you, boy.”

I was taller than Red Cannon by a couple of inches, but he looked like a puncher. So I turned sideways to him, ready to block anything he threw at me. Or try to. But I knew now I couldn’t back away from him. It was too late. The barracks were empty and this was between us. Just us. Without witnesses. If he tried to hit me, I’d hit him back. I must have wanted him to try. Just to get it over with.

“Tell me what you plan to
do
about it,
sir
,” I said. “Have me executed,
sir
? Call a General Court Martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,
sir
? For saying ‘Jesus Christ’ on my own time, and placing the heel of my shoe on a U.S. Navy fartsack?
Sir
?”

That was it. A direct challenge. And Cannon knew it. I pulled my mouth tight over my teeth in a tough guy’s mask, but my heart was pounding and I felt trapped in the old cycle. Challenge and reply, hurt, then retaliate. Right off the streets of Brooklyn. I didn’t like it back there either. But it was the way you lived: If you’re pushed, push back. That was the code. If you’re hurt, hurt back. When you’re leaned on, lean back, and I’d just leaned back.