Loving Women (24 page)

“What’d you say?”

“I said it all seems a little nutty to me. You know, religion.”

“
Religion
seems nutty to you?”

“To tell the truth: yeah.”

“Well, I never—”

We were near one of the poles along the edge of the dance floor. I had seen people say
Well, I never
in comic strips and heard the words on the radio; but she was the first live human who ever said them to me.
Well, I never
— I thought the next word I’d hear was “pshaw.” She looked flustered, and that made me feel like an even bigger man of the world. Something I’d said had actually made her react to me. She’d think I was sophisticated, fearless, a rebel. And instead of shutting up, or telling lies, bending my knee to Jesus the better to see up her dress, I went on talking.

“I mean, here’s this Jewish carpenter, Jesus, who died two thousand years ago, and all over the world people are still arguing about what he said, and
killing
one another over it. Does that make any
sense
? And—”

“You better mind what you’re saying.”

“They’re all
Christians
, aren’t they? So why are they all split into a hundred different groups? It’s
nuts
. Jesus—”

“You said he was a
Jew
! You said the
Lord
was a Jew!”

“Well, he
was
. He was born in Nazareth, he went to the synagogue, he—”

“He wunt no
Jew
! The Lord wunt no damned
Jew
! The Lord was a
Christian
!!”

She turned abruptly away from me, pushing people aside, heading toward the front of the hall. I went after her, sorry I’d talked so much, saying: “Hey, I didn’t mean to hurt your
feelings
, Sue Ellen!”

Then I saw that some faces were turning to examine me or gaze after Sue Ellen. A few dancers stopped. I saw them talking, nodding at me, and wondered where Sal and Max had gone. Then I saw a heavyset man in a tight shiny blue gabardine suit go to Sue Ellen. I came closer, still hoping to recover my lost moment, take back the words, try to find my way to those luscious hidden tits. He took her
hand, as if about to bow and kiss it. Then he turned to face me. He had small abrupt features bunched together in a large round face. Staring at me, he said to her: “What’s the problem, Sue Ellen?”

“Buster,” she said, “this sailor said the Lord was Jew!”

“Now, hold it,” I said. “What I said was—”

Buster said to me, “You said the Lord God, our Savior and Redeemer, was a
Jew
?” Then louder, as he dropped her hand: “A
Jew
?”

I tried to smile and turned slightly, keeping Buster in my sight, and saw Sal coming through the crowd. The band was playing loudly now. Then I saw Max coming over too. I relaxed (or grew braver, knowing I wasn’t alone). And then saw that Buster was no longer on his own, either. Two, six, then a dozen young men were assembling behind Buster and Sue Ellen. In this sudden formation, they looked like some odd football team where the quarterback had big tits and a pockmarked face; she looked at me now as if possessed, suddenly realizing that she could call the signals. Ah, the power of cunt.

“What’s going on?” Sal said in a flat even voice.

“A little theology discussion,” I said, performing my cool part as much for him as for the others. “I was explaining that Jesus was a Jew. And—”

“See?” Sue Ellen said, as if I’d just snapped the ball from center. “He said it
again
!”

Then Max stepped in and raised his hands with the palms out, like a referee separating fighters.

“Please, please, folks,
please
,” he said. They waited, looking at him in a puzzled way. “I happen to be an expert on this subject. And I have to say that my friend Devlin here is right. It’s a fact of history, beyond any question, that Jesus
was
a Jew. I know. Because
I’m a Jew myself
.”

A stunned moment, and then Buster said: “You’re a
Jew
?!”

“Born and bred, my friend. A card-carrying New York Jew.”

Suddenly the preacher was there, pushing through Sue Ellen’s brawny backfield, his face ashen, and I thought:
Holy Christ
, his nose has a hard-on!

“What is this
all
about?” he said.

At that point, we could have bowed, shook hands and gone off to the Dirt Bar. But Sue Ellen then changed the terms of the debate. She pointed at Max, her eyes wide.

“This boy … this boy’s a
Jew
!”

Her face was all snarled up now, her eyes indignant.

“And
this
one, that I made the mistake of
dancing
with, this one says that the
Lord
was a Jew!”

The preacher turned to me, his erect nose throbbing. But before he could say anything, Sal stepped in. He began to speak in a British accent, even drawing on some secret supply of phlegm.

“Reverend, reverend, with all due respect, dear boy, I think I’d better explain some of the theological ramifications and deep secular philosophical roots of the discussion between this barbaric young man and this lovely Christian lady.”

He touched the side of his nose, as if raising spectacles. Everyone looked at him.

“You see, it wasn’t, ahem, a discussion of phenomenology or epistemology they were engaged in, old chap.”

He cleared his throat. “Nor were they involved in the historical roots of the Hebraic-Christian traditions and the shared tenets of all Mediterranean civilization including Christianity.” He pursed his lips. “You see, dear reverend, what they were actually discussing was—” a pause—
“pussy.”

For one long moment, nobody moved. Buster’s jaw dropped. The preacher’s nose wilted. Sue Ellen widened her stance, as if trying not to swoon.

And then Sal turned, grabbing Max and me with each of his hands, and we were running and laughing through the hall, with Buster and the football team after us. Chairs went flying, a table toppled over with a crash, there were shouts and screams while the band blasted harder than ever. We burst into the cool night air, Sal laughing and leaping, and Max turning, raising both muscled arms at the sky, shouting at the doors of the hall:
“I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew Jew Jew!”

And then we were running and I could feel my blood pulsing and the muscles bunching in my legs and pain spearing my side as we raced for the highway. We could see the bus pulling around from the base to the bus stop and Sal started yelling for it to stop, as we went over a low fence and across a lumpy field. We could make it! We’d get on board and ride away to town and finish our night at the Dirt Bar, with Tons of Fun arriving in the van and Dixie Shafer telling me tales of the vanished hills. Yeah. Simple. And then I turned and saw Max fall and four of the rednecks coming over the fence, Buster leading the pack.

“Max! Come on, man! We can make this goddamned bus!” Sal shouted.

But Max got up and turned to the oncoming rednecks and planted his feet. It was as if he were saying, to us and to the world, that he was a tough proud Jew and he just wasn’t going to run. Not from these morons. Not from anyone. So we stopped running and let the bus leave and joined Max. The first man came in a rush and Max bent low, twisted, let the right hand fly and the man went down. A second one came at me, a guy who looked like an auto engine in a shirt, and I threw the right hand hard and straight and felt the impact all the way up in my shoulder and the man’s face seemed to explode in blood and he fell to his knees. I kicked him over on his side.

But then Buster was there, his rage ferocious, and I wasn’t so lucky this time. I threw a punch and it glanced off Buster’s head and then I was slammed, and lifted, suddenly without breath or bone or strength, and then was on my back. Time stopped. And sound. I saw the sky. Black, with pinwheeling stars. And thought:
I’m knocked out. He knocked me out
.

And then sound came rushing back in and I heard grunting and then a
phwocking
sound and a man’s wordless high-pitched voice yelping in pain. And started to get up, and saw Sal on my left, swinging a gnarled tree branch like a club, hitting Buster on the arms and elbows and hips, while Max grappled with a fourth man, and still another came on a run, to leap on Max’s back.

I got up, my heart pounding wildly, and dived for the man on Max. I grabbed his jacket, which tore down the middle, and then I stepped to the side and punched as hard as I could to the man’s ear. He let go of Max’s neck, holding his ear in pain, and staggered away. I bent him in half with a kick in the balls and then Sal came up, slowly and deliberately, Buster now on his face in the dirt, and hit the big man with the three-branch club and finished him off. We looked at Max. He had another man above his head now, like a strong man at a circus. And he ran forward and rammed the man against a tree.

It was over.

We stood there, panting, dirty, battered, and looked at what we’d done. Five huge men were unconscious on the dark field.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Don’t start,” Sal said.

We could hear the sounds of insects again, filling the night, and
the band still playing a way off. Nobody seemed to have left the hall; the preacher must have held them back. And there was no sign of Sue Ellen.

Max said, “You know something? These guys might be dead.”

Sal looked at him and then at the tree branch in his own hand. His eyes were still wild, as if he wanted more, and I thought for a moment that he looked like Alley Oop. He swung the branch like a bat and hurled it into the trees and then began to laugh wildly.

We hurried back across the highway to the locker club and were changing clothes when we heard the distant sound of a siren. “Jesus, it’s just like the movies,” Sal said. “The killer’s in the building and he hears the cops coming, the sirens and all, and he starts to yell down at them—at Charles Bickford, who always has the fuckin bullhorn—and he says, ‘Up your hole with a Mell-o-roll, coppers, you
ain’t takin’ me alive
!’ ” Max laughed, pulling on his whites, and said, “Why do they
do
that in the movies anyway? To warn the bad guys? The cops must be amazing schmucks …” I said it might just be an ambulance out there. “Those guys are pretty fucked up,” I said. And Max said again that they might even be dead. Sal didn’t want to wait around to find out. “Come on,” he said, and with Sal leading the way, we slipped out of the locker club in our dress whites. The sirens went past the locker club toward the church, but we were out back, walking in the shadows of the palm trees to the main gate of Ellyson Field. Then a car pulled into Copter Road and Sal jumped out and waved at it.

“Hey, we need a
ride
, man.”

The car stopped. A shiny new red Mercury. Max and I hurried over. Mercado was alone behind the wheel. He looked at us and smiled.

“Get in,” he said.

Chapter

27

I
n the early sixties, after my first wife died, I went out for a while with a red-haired stripper who loved to see me fight. She did an act at the Hudson Theater, undressing herself in a giant wine-glass filled with dirty pink water. She believed in Rosicrucianism and lived like the guy in the Rosicrucian ads, who slept each night on the edge of a cliff. To her, danger was a religious experience. Wherever we went she caused trouble, giving various men the eye, then getting indignant when they came on to her, and stepping back to watch me fight for her outraged honor. I got so mad at her one night on the East River Drive, my hands raw and my suit ruined, that I pulled the steering wheel right off its shaft while screaming at her and had to grab the naked top of the shaft with both hands to keep from dying. As I sat there panting, she just laughed and then started to play with me. That was the last time I saw her and I heard later that she’d been shot to death by a female lover in a hotel room in Baltimore. There are women like that, and when I look back, I realize that little Sue Ellen was surely one of them.

All through the next day I hung out in the barracks, expecting the imminent arrival of the Shore Patrol. They would take me off to the Pensacola jail and little Sue Ellen, prim and clean, would breathe hard, making all the cops look at her breasts, and pick me out as the man who said that Jesus was a Jew. Then she would leave for Buster’s funeral and I would spend the rest of my adult life in Portsmouth Naval Prison, or take a shorter trip to the Florida gas chamber.

But the Shore Patrol never came for me, and on Saturday evening
I went out and changed clothes at the locker club and took the bus to town, slouching low as we passed the Baptist Church. It was too early for my date with Eden Santana, but I didn’t want to be late, so I sat for almost an hour on a bench on Garden Street. I was uneasy: I didn’t know where I would take her or what we would do; she’d just smiled and told me she would meet me. I said her name out loud:
Eden Santana
. Then whispered it:
Eden. San. Tana
. A beautiful name, I thought, shuddering at the hard ending of the first name and its promise of paradise. The second name was made of all those female vowels (for surely consonants are male) and rolled in a wave when you said it, like the name Pensacola itself. I wished I had a hundred dollars to spend without care for tomorrow or next week or the rest of the Navy month. Then, if I could sort out the words, I’d ask her to go with me to the San Carlos. To sleep with me between silk sheets. I’d whisper her name at midnight. First name and last, paradise and vowels.
Eden Santana, Eden Santana
. Like a decade of a wicked rosary.