Loving Women (37 page)

I
ate one morning in March, Sal burst through the double doors into the Supply Shack, leaned forward on the counter and sobbed: “
Joe’s dead!
” His laid his forehead flat on the counter, pounded with balled fists, said “First
Hank
, and now
Joe
! Long live the proletarian revolution!”, then whirled and hurried out. That’s how we learned that Stalin had died.

Harrelson got out the radio and Jonesie said,
Good, I hope the son of a bitch suffered
, and Becket said,
Gee, dat makes Choichill de only one left outta da Big Tree
. The news bulletins were somber, but not sad. The words were all virtually the same: Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union, ferocious dictator, killer of millions, once an ally and then our most implacable enemy, was dead. To which Donnie Ray shrugged and said
This is all fine, but we still gotta swab down at four
. After a while, he took a phone call at his desk, nodding, grave. He talked a long time. A Marine pilot at the counter said
Maybe now we can get the goddamned thing in Korea settled
.

“This is sho nuff big shit,” Harrelson said. “The whole damn shootin match could fall apart.”

“Or start,” Jonesie said. “Goddamn Commie bastards.”

Then we saw Captain Pritchett hurrying around outside in a jeep, with a Marine driving and Chief McDaid and Red Cannon in the back. Donnie Ray finally put down the telephone.

“That’s it, boys,” he said gravely. “We’re on full alert. The base is being secured
right this minute
. All liberty and leave is canceled.”

And all I could think, while a near-panic swirled around me and the telephones started ringing crazily, was:
How am I going to tell Eden?
I’m sure now that men thought the same things at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and the Battle of Hastings. She was supposed to pick me up at the locker club at six and we were going to the Warrington Drive-In to see
Moulin Rouge
. Miles had described the movie as pure hokum, full of lies and mistakes and stupidities about this French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, but even so, it was still the best Hollywood movie ever made about an artist. I wanted to see it badly, wondering if I was anything like Toulouse-Lautrec; Eden said she wanted to check out this José Ferrer, find out if he was anything like me. But now all leaves were canceled and we’d have to wait. I was eighteen and I didn’t
want
to wait. Besides, there was no telephone at the trailer and no way to call her at Sears. I hoped someone in the store’s appliance department would turn on a radio and she’d discover that all the bases in Pensacola were secured, so we could hold off the expected assault of the vengeful Russians. She would know that I was joining all the other brave American boys who would protect the country from a dead man.

“Are they kidding?” I said to Donnie Ray.

“Fraid not. Our troops are on alert all over the world.”

“But
why?
The guy’s
dead
.”

“Maybe he was murdered, sailor. Maybe there are some guys
worse
than him, want to blow up the damn
world
. Maybe they’ll blame us. Who knows?”

“You mean there’s a bunch of guys in the Kremlin saying, ‘Okay, now’s our chance.
We can get Ellyson Field
.’ ”

Donnie Ray laughed. “Could be.”

All through the day we saw jets screaming high across the sky. We heard that there were plans to move the American government to Cuba if the Russians invaded. We heard that SAC bombers were in the air over Europe so they couldn’t be destroyed on the ground. All of them were carrying hydrogen bombs. Everybody talked about the death of Stalin. Uncle Joe, some of them called him. Worse than Hitler, a few said. A monster. Becket said Stalin was a Catlick who started out to be a priest and then saw the light and became a bankrobber and a Bolshevik and someone else said he was born in Georgia, and Harrelson said, Yeah, near Macon. We drank a lot of coffee. Customers arrived in a stream because the sky was dense with helicopters, and that meant that parts were breaking, failing, wearing out. Becket said he was glad that Miles Rayfield was off at Mainside with Dunbar because if he was at Ellyson when
the Russian bombs started dropping that would
really
piss him off.

“He’d prob’ly throw his skirt in the air,” Harrelson said.

And I thought of Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada walking alone on the beach beside Perdido Bay. And that made me think of Eden Santana.

At lunchtime, Bumper was serving at the messhall and Harrelson was behind me on line. Bumper looked at me, his eyes twinkling in his round black face, laid some extra French fries on my tray, then reached under the counter and found me a piece of coconut pie. Harrelson stared at Bumper.

“How bout some of that pie?”

“Last piece,” Bumper said, deadpan.

“You sure of that?”

Bumper held up an empty pie plate.

We moved on.

“Gahdam uppity niggers,” Harrelson said.

“Is there anybody you
like
, Harrelson?” I said.

“Yeah.
Americans
.”

We sat together at one of the tables. Boswell came over and joined us. He didn’t have any pie either.

“Captain’s runnin around like a duck without a dick,” he said.

“Ducks have dicks?” I said.

“Sure,” Boswell said, “but they ain’t what they’re
quacked up to be
!” He slammed the table and Harrelson laughed, shaking his head, and then Boswell said: “Where’d you get that fuckin pie?”

“Why you even ask, Bos?” Harrelson said. “The boy’s a damn Yankee niggerlover and the niggers love him back.”

“Ah, fuck you,” I said.

“It’s the truth, ain’t it? You upstairs in the slave quarters every other day.”

“Maybe he likes the
smell
up there,” Boswell said.

“Or the spearchuckin music.”

“You guys just take your asshole pills, or what?” I said.

“Maybe he goes to town with em to get some a that dark meat,” Harrelson said. I thought of Winnie standing at the jukebox, one foot curled around the other.

“Nah, he got his
own
stuff,” Boswell said. “Everybody knows that.”

“She ain’t stuff,” I said.

“Shew,” Boswell said, “you
touchy
today, ain’t you, boy?”

“Just lay off,” I said. I was poking at the pie, then slid the plate toward Boswell.

“Want some?” I said.

Boswell grinned. “Nah. I don’t even
like
coconut pie.”

Harrelson reached over with a fork and clipped off a piece of the pie. “I do.”

“Taste like creosote to me,” Boswell said.

“If it ain’t got grits with it, Bos don’t eat it,” Harrelson said to me. “What we gone do after the alert’s over, Bos?”

“Jackson, Mississippi,” Boswell said.

Harrelson turned to me. “He bin tryin to get me to go to Jackson Mi’sippi since last September.”

“Do the ducks have dicks there?” I said.

“Five fuckin hours in the car,” Harrelson said.

“We
gotta
go there,” Boswell said.

“Why Jackson,
Mississippi
?” I said.

Boswell’s eyes brightened. “ ’Cause
it’s the insurance capital of the whole damn South
!”

The words hung there for a long moment.

“So?” I said.

“
Insurance
companies, boy,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“What does that mean?” Boswell said.

“I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“
Secretaries
, boy!

I got up, shaking my head, while Harrelson laughed. I started for the disposal room and saw Bobby Bolden coming toward me. There was a slice of coconut pie on his tray.

“Too bad about Stalin, huh?” he said.

Miles Rayfield and Dunbar came back around three. Rayfield’s eyes were wide and agitated in his pink sunburned face. Dunbar was smoking a cigarette in an amused way.

“You just can’t believe
Mainside
!” Miles said. “They’re running around like a pack of medieval lunatics with the
plague
! You’d think the Russians just landed in
Mobile
!”

“Haulin out anti-aircraft guns,” Dunbar said.

“They’re making sailors
march
!” Miles said. “With
guns
!”

“And officers are checking all IDs, case someone got a Communist
Party membership card on ’im,” Dunbar said. “Tell him, Miles.”

“My wallet was in the truck!” Miles said. “Who carries around
an ID
?”

“They
asked
him for it,” Dunbar said, shaking his head in mock sympathy.

“And
arrested
me!”

“Marched him to the parkin lot to
get
the damned thing.”

“Under
arrest
!”

“They didn’t believe it was a Navy wallet cause it didn’t have a rubber in it.”

“And Dunbar here, this son of a bitch, he told them he hardly knew me,” Miles said. “One of the damned jarheads said I even
looked
Russian. And then the thick-headed dumb bastard started doing one of those scenes out of some rotten World War II propaganda movie. He started asking me about
baseball
!”

“Babe Luth, you die,” Dunbar said.

“And I didn’t know what he was
talking
about. Then he asked me about
football
! Or as he called it … foot
bowl
. And I knew even
less
.”

“So they took him to security,” Dunbar said, laughing.

“And
held
me there, trying to get Donnie Ray on the damned phone,” Miles said. “And of course the damn
lines
were busy for two hours and then
everybody
went out to lunch except that damned Larry Parsons.”

“Dumbest white man in the United States,” Dunbar said.

“And he didn’t know my
last
name!” Miles said. “I’ve been here a year and
he never learned my last name
!”

“So what did you do?” I said.

“What do you always do in the damned Navy? We
waited
.”

“Watched the flyboys get ready for an air strike on downtown Palatka.”

Miles was laughing now at the absurdity of the whole world, smothering the laugh with a sunburned hand.

“The Navy,” he said. “The goddamned Navy …”

We were at our desks, filling out forms. And then Larry Parsons came back from a late lunch. His face was all tensed up, his eyes wide.

“Hey,” he said, “did you hear about
Stalin
?”

Dunbar fell on the floor and groaned.

• • •

A half hour later, Miles suddenly turned in his chair and faced me.

“Jesus Christ, I almost
forgot
!”

He took a letter from his jeans pocket.

“There was a woman out by the gate, waved us down as we were coming in,” he said. “Asked us to get this to you.”

He handed me the letter. Blinked. Turned back to his typewriter, pecking out numbers on a form. The letter had my name written on it in a small careful hand. I opened it.

Dear Michael,

Something has come up and I can’t see you tonight. One of my kids is sick and I have to go to see her in New Orleans. I know you’ll understand. Please take care of yourself and I’ll see you as soon as I get back.

Love,
Eden

That was all. There was no phone number for me to call her, and no address. Even the city was something new. She’s never mentioned it to me, never told me that her children lived there, and I’d been afraid to ask. There were a million things she never said, and that I never asked. So as I studied the note as if it were a sacred text, I thought it was very much like Eden Santana, full of holes and confusions. She didn’t say how sick the child was, or with what; she didn’t mention how long she’d be gone or how she’d get in touch with me when she got back. All I knew for sure was that she was gone.

“You okay?” Miles Rayfield said.

“Yeah … Why?”

“You’re the color of newsprint paper.”

“No. I’m okay.”

At least she’d signed the note “love.” I got up and went to the counter and waited on customers. Move, I thought.
Do
something. That way you will not have to think.

After a while, Miles left with Becket and Dunbar for the hangars, the three of them hauling an engine on a truck. I went looking for a pontoon part in the back, taking my time, trying to imagine Stalin’s last hours, anything to push Eden’s face from my mind, and
then slipped into Miles Rayfield’s studio. On the easel, a deserted beach was taking shape on a piece of Masonite. The colors were muted, the colors of dusk. But there were only large rough forms, no details, no drawing. I picked up the sketchbook and leafed through it. Miles Rayfield had made many more drawings.

The last five were of Freddie Harada. His face was beautifully captured in pencil from two different angles; his features looking boyish and innocent, but there was something new in his eyes and the set of his mouth, an aspect I’d never seen before on my visits to the Kingdom of Darkness. He seemed to be flirting with me. Or with the artist. The other pictures were of Freddie standing, looking directly off the page. He was naked. Late in the afternoon, I strolled over to the hangars to see Sal and Max. They were working together on the electronic system of a big HUP. I looked around for Mercado but didn’t see him.

“Trouble with these goddamn things,” Sal said, “if you
use
them, they break.”

“The guys that design them don’t have to fly them,” Max said. “That’s why they’re so lousy.”

“You guys seen that Mercado around?” I said.

Sal looked up. “He’s off for a week. Went home to Mexico.”

Jesus.
She’s
gone.
He’s
gone.
At the same time
. Max and Sal tried to explain to me what they were doing, but I couldn’t follow it.