Loving Women (31 page)

“From what I hear, you could get yourself killed any night of the week.”

He was suddenly suspicious. “Who you hear that from?”

“You know, the general gouge around the base.”

“What they say, exactly?”

“I don’t know exactly. Just Bobby Bolden got himself a white woman …”

“You mean, that
nigger
Bobby Bolden got a white woman,” he said, his voice hardening.

“I didn’t hear it put that way.”

“Then you ain’t hearin’ too good, boy.”

“Let’s make a deal,” I said with some heat. “You don’t call
me
boy and I won’t call
you
boy.”

He looked at me as if he were going to strike me. And then he laughed.

“You got a mouth.”

“That’s what Red Cannon says.”

“Okay, man. I hear you.”

Chapter

33

What Bobby Bolden Told Me

I
’m from Naptown, up north, Indianapolis, where we got all the seasons, includin winter. I grew up shoveling snow, sleighridin, slidin on trashcan covers down hills; just like a million other kids; just like you. But I love the South, spite of all the cracker bullshit, cause it’s hot. In the summer here, it’s so hot you can’t breathe. You see snow here every forty years, they say, and that’s all right with me. I don’t even like seein
pictures
of snow, I don’t even like ice in a drink anymore. I see snow now, I go to bed. When the snow’s gone, I rise from the dead. And that goes back to Korea. Everything goes back to Korea
.

But shit, I’m gettin ahead of myself here. You want to know who I am and I talk about snow. Maybe Korea scrambled my brains. Maybe lots of things scramble your brains, though women do the best job of all
.

Anyway, back home in Naptown we dint think much about color. Up to the war, the
big
war, we lived pretty integrated. They was white kids on my street. I played with them, they played with me. Played in the school band with white kids too. Trumpet then. The attitude was, you got red hair, I got black skin, so what? Then it start to change. Dune the war, lots more black people start comin up from the South, to work in the war jobs. They just wasn’t any new housin being built and black folks start doublin up in the black houses and then the whites start to move away. They never did say why, although my daddy said it was simple, that it was all right when they was more of them than they was of us, but when it started bein more of
us
than they was of
them,
they decided to move on outta there. And then the shit started. Little shit. Like we got our textbooks all marked up
, used
textbooks, while the white schools, they got them new. We cuddin get the streets fixed, the sewers, that kind of shit. Without even knowin how it happened, we ended up in a ghetto, except for a few real old white people that cuddin move
.

So I start to thinkin about going away. I was the oldest of the kids, seventeen and a senior in high school, but I had a cousin, Charlie Neal his name was. And he was messcookin in the Navy and I liked the way he looked on leave, all sharp and shit, and one night at a party, I toked to him about joinin up. This was just after the war, ’47, ’48, and I was listenin to all the players on the radio and thinkin, Hey, man, I could go to New York and try and play at Minton’s with like, Bird and Dizzy, or I could go in the Navy and get the GI Bill and really learn the instrument, learn harmony and composition, become a great fuckin musician. I had to make up my mind. Just go for it, you know, go try to play with all these monsters in the Apple, which scairt me shitless. Or really prepare myself. Only way I could afford music school was the Bill. But when I thought about the Navy, I just dint like the idea of cookin for white folks for four fuckin years. Dint wanna be no messcook, no domestic in a uniform
.

But there was another problem, you know what I’m sayin to you? At this same time, I got myself some trouble. A girl I knew got herself knocked up and her father and her brothers are lookin for me, comin around the block, lookin to shoot me or make me marry her. Either way, I’m dead. You see, I just dint love the girl. I felt
sorry
for her but I dint think that was too good a reason to marry a woman. So after Charlie Neal left and I had some more time to think (a couple of hours to tell the truth) I went downtown and walked around the block and then toked to the guy, the recruiter, and he says, you know, the Navy is
different
now, it’s
integrated, you dont have to be a
mess
cook, you could be a
musician.…
So I joined up
.

Trouble was when I get through boot camp, they tell me all the music rates are filled up, there’s like a waitin list all the way to 1958, but if I dint want to go messcookin, hell, I could be a
corps
man. Workin with
doctors … 
I figure, Hey, why not? At least I’d learn something I could use on the outside, in case the music thing dint work out. And I could practice, keep listenin to the new music, keep readin my
Down Beat
and
Metronome,
maybe play with some bands wherever I ended up. Yeah
.

So I go to corpsman school. I learn the job is the same as a nurse, but hey, what the hell, it’s a start. I mean, wasn’t Dexter Gordon’s father a doctor? And Miles Davis, his old man was a dentist. Maybe there was some connection.… I work in Jacksonville. A year goes by. I see a little of Gitmo
and those fine Cuban women and some great mambo bands, great horn players. And then Korea happens
.

Bam
.

Like that
.

They assign me to the First Marines, cause they’s a shortage of Marine corpsmen, they gettin the shit shot out of them, cause wherever there’s a medic there’s shooting and bleedin and dyin. By November, I’m the only sailor with this Marine company and we’re climbin through the snow and ice in X Corps. Up by the Chosin Reservoir. All of us freezin, strung out over forty fuckin miles. We couldn’t dig foxholes cause the ground was like iron. It was seventeen below zero in a place called Kato. And it got colder as we kept going, heading for the fuckin Yalu, heading for fuckin China for all we knew. I remember we come into a town called Yudan that the artillery wrecked, just blew the piss out of it. They was an old lady sitting there, cryin. Cryin and freezin and singing something in Korean, a gook blues, I reckon. And they was nothin we could do. We cuddin bring her with us, not where we were goin, and she cuddin go back. They was no back. So we just left her to die
.

To fuckin die
.

Alone in the cold
.

We were wearin so much shit—long johns, hoods, parkas—that we’d sweat like hell, and when we stopped walkin the sweat froze. A few guys took they socks off and tore the skin away with them. In that cold, feet froze to boots. In that cold, if you touched the M-1 with your bare hands, the skin come off. Even the BARs froze. Some guys pissed on their guns to make them work and other guys started greasin them with Wildroot Cream Oil. Or Kreml. That fuckin Kreml was the best, all white and pearly and thick
.

The night of the Big Cold, we’re in the dark on Hill 403 when we start hearin the voices, short quick voices, know what I mean? Not Korean voices, we knew them by now. Chinese voices. And somebody says, they can’t be Chinese, the Chinese ain’t in this thing and we ain’t in fuckin China. But a little after ten, they come at us. The Chinese. They lay down a mortar barrage and start blowing their fuckin bugles, all flat and out of tune, just blowing like crazy, and they was waves of them, all lumpy like, in their white clothes, comin through the fuckin snow. Comin over the ice. Comin at us
.

The Marines shot them and shot them and shot them and they still kept comin. They was blood all over the snow and they still kept coming. One crazy fuckin Marine, his bolt froze and he stands up and throws the rifle at them and they shot him through the belly. And then they were on us, only
nine of us left on that fuckin hill, and they wasn’t time to help the wounded, all you could do was try to live. So we fight them with everything. Trenchin tools. Spades. Knives. Bayonets. Them frozen fuckin unshootable fuckin guns
.

Then one of their bugles blows and they all start to leave. Like that. Whoever that fuckin horn player was, I loved his ass. They was wounded guys everywhere and I did what I cud. The morphine Syrettes was frozen. The fuckin plasma froze and then the plasma bottles started explodin from the cold. We had fifty-four guys wounded, and a bunch of other guys dead. We went to scavenge among the dead Chinese for weapons. I almost shit when I saw what they had. They were fightin us with 1903 Springfields. We had the latest guns and they froze in that cold. They were fightin us with the equal of a bow and arrow. And kickin ass. Right then and there, I wanted to run. We all did. Just get off that goddamned hill and go somewhere. But we cuddin go anywhere. The orders were to hold the hill to keep the road open, down below us in the valley. That was it. Wait for reinforcements
.

So we drag the Chinese bodies over and make a wall out of them and we fill sleeping bags with snow and lay them out on the slopes. The wind was blowing hard and it was colder. And that night they came again with their bugles and we just kept shootin and shootin. We shot them while they were bayonetin the sleepin bags. And we shot them when they came close to overrunnin us again. We just kept shootin. I think I shot nineteen of them. I never did see one of their faces. And then, just like that, they went away again. And an hour later here comes some more Marines, fifty, a hundred of them, another outfit cut off and fightin its way out. They were as fucked up as we were. It gets lighter, day coming, the sky gray as steel. An air-drop comes over at dawn and drops ammo and food and drugs, all we need, and I shoot up the worst wounded with morphine and bandage the others
.

The Chinese stayed away a whole day and I began to think: maybe I’m gonna
live.
Cause for three fuckin days, I knew I was gonna die up there. Just knew it. And then I did die. Just let myself die. Knowing there was nothing to do about it. But now I got to thinking I was gonna live, and for the first time I got scared. Before I was just
do
in. Now I was
think
in. And I was afraid, I didn’t want to die, didn’t want to feel it, wanted to live and go home and play music and get laid. I didn’t want to freeze in my own piss, or wait for the fuckin Chinese to come and kill me. I heard later that’s what they did in their army. Fight two days, rest one. But we didn’t know that up on that goddamned hill. We shivered. We ate crackers. We ate snow. We waited to hear the Chinese bugles
.

Then we hear we are leavin. A strategic withdrawal, they called it. Advancin in another direction, some Marine said later. But everyone knew it was a retreat. All up and down the line, the Chinese had beat the shit out of us and we were pullin out. We wunt going to the Yalu, we wunt going to fuckin China, no matter what MacArthur said. We were gettin the fuck out of there. And they was only one road, one way out, and we knew it and so did the Chinese. Somehow we buried the dead. Eighty-five of them. Still up there at Yudam. The men from Fox Company of the second Battalion of the Seventh Regiment. Still in Korea. Forever
.

So we start out, with some trucks below us now on the road and more trucks comin and more and more fucked-up Marines staggerin outta the hills. We strap some of the worst wounded across the radiators of the trucks to keep them from freezin to death. Sometimes we cuddin tell who was dead and who was alive. You cuddin get a pulse, it was so fuckin cold. We cuddin change their dressins either. So right off, I learn that if the guy’s eyes move, he’s alive. If the eyes don’t move, fuck him, leave him
.

The guys who were walking had diarrhea and they eyes was crazy but they kept movin. They wanted to live. To fuckin
live.
To get off the ice, to get to the warm, to go home. I cuddin feel my own feet. I just kept movin them. Tokin to them, sayin move, mothafucker, like Stepin fuckin Fetchit. Keep goin, feet, get me to the promised land, keep me alive.… We had some of the wounded on trucks on top of parachutes, tied on with primer cord. And we come to a bridge and start over and then the fuckin bridge collapsed. We all back up, but one truck went into the river. A half-frozen river, full of ice. And two of these crazy mothafuckin Marines dive into the river and rescued those guys. Cut em loose from the primer cord. Drug em up on the bank. Let them live. That’s why nobody can tell me no shit about Marines, man. I mean, I don’t take no crap from them, specially some rearguard asshole pullin guard duty in Florida. But I don’t give them no shit either. They dive into frozen rivers, man
.