Loving Women (49 page)

Nothing
. I don’t—

You
sure
of that? You sure you wouldn’t miss him just a
little
bit? You sure you wouldn’t wish he’d come back?

I didn’t answer.

Why, you been jealous of
me
with no good reason, child. Why wouldn’t you be jealous of this
Miles
fella?

Cause he’s a
man
. And I’m not—

A faggot? she said.

Damn right!

She smiled and reached over and touched my hand.

She said, Child, you better learn quick that human beings are
complicated
. You hear me? Every woman got a little
man
in her. Every man got a little woman in
him
. Nobody’s all
one
thing. Your friend Miles Rayfield is not one thing. Most people ain’t.

I hated the way she was looking at me. Smiling. Self-satisfied, like a grade school teacher instructing an infant.

Okay, I said, with heat: Say that’s true. Why should I be
jealous
, for Christ’s sakes?

She tamped out the cigarette.

Cause the way you
talk
about him, if this Miles fella runs off, you’ll be heartbroken.

You saying I’m
queer
?

No. Just saying maybe you want Miles in your life for a long time.

Oh bullshit, I said, in an annoyed way.

She made a small A with her hands and peered at me over the point.

Why you talking like that? she said.

Cause you’re talking bullshit!

Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed.

Don’t raise your voice to me, she said in a cold flat voice.

It was there again. The tone of authority. I slammed the table with the palm of my hand. The ashtray bounced and fell to the floor.

I’m not queer
.

I never said that!

Well, what the
fuck
did you say?

She tried to reply, but I was standing now, the words rising.

I said, You should talk.
You!
The way
you
act with Roberta. Are you kid—

She looked at once furious and terrified, standing up too and backing away.

Shut up.

I knew I’d gone too far, and mumbled something, a lot of maybes and who knows, and reached for the ashtray and pawed at the
cigarette butts on the floor. The anger was gone; but I couldn’t get the words back.

She said, Maybe you better go off to the Navy, child. Maybe you better sleep this anger of yours
off
. Maybe you better
go
. Right now.

What?

The words then came rolling out of her too. Her face was creased and contorted. For the first time, she seemed ugly to me. And old.

She screamed: I said, go back to the
base
. Right
now
. Back to Ellyson Field. With all the other sailor boys. I don’t want
trouble
. Not with you, not with no one. I had enough trouble to last me ten lifetimes. And you look like you want to
hit
someone, Michael Devlin. Fact, you look just like
another
man I knew once. Man didn’t want to hear
no hard things
. No
difficult
things. So I don’t want you here tonight. Go.

I threw the ashtray against the wall.

Jesus Christ! I said, panting. Jesus
fuckin
Christ.

I jerked the door open, slammed it behind me and went out.

I walked down the road toward the highway. And then felt nauseated. We’d never argued before. Never even raised our voices at each other. And here we were … Screaming. Smashing things. Or at least I was. I’d said cruel words. I’d gone out of control. Here we were … breaking up. Over words. Over the word
queer
. The word
faggot
. Not over Mercado or a husband or another lover. Over Miles Rayfield. A possible faggot. What the hell did she
mean
? Trying to tell me I had some faggot in me? With that smug schoolteacher look on her face. Why’d she
start
this crap? I’m trying to explain about Miles and she turns it around, makes it about me. And when I object, she gets harder. She pushed me and like always,
I pushed back
. Yeah. That was it. She couldn’t take the way I pushed back. She thought I was this sweet boy.
Child
, she always called me. Well, I wasn’t a child. Maybe she knew that now. Push me and I push back harder. Like a man does. She should’ve know that and she made one big goddamn mistake. Does she think she can find someone as good as me? Hey,
come on
 … Or maybe I made the mistake. If I did, then she’d never let me back. If I made the mistake, it was
over
, just like that. Over? The way it ended for all the men I knew. All the men who loved women and weren’t loved back.
No
. Jesus, no.

I stopped, started to go back.

Thinking:
I can still beg her forgiveness
.

And answered myself:
No
. I can say I’m sorry for losing my temper. For saying the rotten things about Roberta. For breaking the ashtray. But I won’t beg. Maybe I can even say she was right about Miles Rayfield. I
would
miss him if he went away. But not because I’m interested in his prick. She doesn’t know everything. But I just can’t run off like this. I have to go back. Even if I have to plead with her. But suppose she says no? Suppose she won’t even open the door? And what if she was just looking for some excuse to break up? Maybe that’s why she started all this. And
she
started it. Not
me
. Eden. She started the whole goddamned thing. Fuck her. No, I
want
her. I want
her
. No. She started it. Let her come to me, call me at the base, beg me to come back.
Right now
, I thought,
I’m going to 0 Street. To the Dirt Bar. See Sal and Max and the others. Get a blow job from Dixie Shafer. How do you like
that,
baby? Get drunk. Who needs you, lady?

I get along without you very well
.

Of course, I do …

I stopped.

There was something in the bushes beside the road. Something moving. I reached down for a rock and eased into the shadows. Another movement. Then I heard a thick grunting sound, full of pain. Then shoes scraping on gravel, as if trying to get traction. I hefted the rock. Then moved closer to the sounds of pain.

And saw Bobby Bolden.

He was facedown in the gravel, his shirt torn off, deep bleeding wounds sliced into his back. His arms were stretched out in front of him, his hands flopping loosely at the wrists. He was digging his elbows into the gravel, trying to move forward. His face was so consumed with pain that he couldn’t recognize me or anyone else on this earth.

I turned to the trailer.

Eden!

His body writhed as I reached under his arms and started to lift him. He was bigger and heavier than I imagined. The gouged skin was slippery with blood. Eden took his legs and we heaved and got him into the back seat of her car and laid him face down across the floor. His hands flopped loosely. His jaw moved and words came out but no sentences.

Mothafuck. The House. Get me. Hey you. Oh,
you
. Go ahead
you
. Catty. Oh
you
. Scrapple from the apple and a bottle of ocean.
Oh
.

We started to pull out and then Eden saw a glow through the trees.
The house
. I turned the car around and pushed hard on the accelerator, moving down the road away from the highway. The house where Bobby and Catty lived together was burning beyond the screen of trees. I saw black men running through the trees, most without shirts, all carrying buckets of water. Kids darted across the road and I slowed down. Eden shrunk low in the seat beside me, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide and afraid.

Then up ahead I saw something else.

By the side of the lake, only thirty feet away, tied to the branch of a tree with her hands above her head and naked from the waist up was Catty.

Her head was thrown back. She wasn’t moving. I could see her back had been split open.

Oh my God, Eden whispered.

Her hands became fists. She gnawed on a knuckle.

Oh Jesus
God
.

I pulled over and stopped the car and got out, but Eden stayed where she was. I saw an elderly black man coming through the trees carrying a shotgun. Six black teenagers were behind him. Their faces were blank.

“You kin keep on goin,” the older man said.

I pointed at Catty and said I had to get her to a hospital.

“You just leave her be,” he said. “She deserve whut she get. She come in here, dont care fo decency, cause nuthin but
trouble
. Things here is peaceful till this white trash show up. And look whut she
do
. She brung down the affliction on us. She brung down the damn Klan.”

The Klan. Like Bobby Bolden said. Like all the blacks said. The damned Klan.

“You can’t let her
hang
here,” I said. Catty’s bare feet were not touching the ground. She was hanging there, a dead weight. I wondered if arms really did get pulled out of sockets. The small black kids had moved around now to the far side of the tree for their first sight of a white woman’s bare breasts.

“Hey you kids, git
away
fum there!” the old man said. The kids looked at him, then at Catty’s breasts, then hurried away to see the fire. The orange glow had faded but the air was acrid with smoke.
I glanced back at the car. Eden and Bobby Bolden were both out of sight. I turned my back on the old man and walked over to the tree. Two black kids were still huddled in a bush.

“Who’s got a knife?” I said.

One of the kids handed over a curved blade with a taped wooden handle.

“Leave her be, white man!” the old man shouted.

I stepped over to Catty and cut her down, trying to brake her fall with my shoulder. As she hit the ground, limp and hurt and bleeding, with her jaw slack and red welts noticeable now across her breasts, there was an immense ferocious roar.

I heard Eden scream my name.

I turned and saw the old man holding the shotgun. The stock was propped against his hip. But I felt nothing. He must have aimed at the sky. I stared at him. He stared at me.

“I’m gonna pick this woman up now,” I said. “Right now. If you want to kill me, go ahead. But I don’t think it’d be worth it.”

I bent down and lifted Catty, waiting to be shot. I carried her to the car. Eden was hunkered down low in the front and I put Catty beside her. The light of the fire was gone. There was smoke everywhere. Animals and humans crashed around in the woods.

“Git out now, heah me?” the old man said. His voice seemed old and worn and sad. “Don’t ever come back to these parts. Just go and leave us be. You come back, ah’ll have to kill you.”

I drove quickly to Mainside, but not too quickly, afraid of bouncing Bobby and Catty. Eden threw a coat over Catty and cradled her in her arms. We had no choice but Mainside. There was no night corpsman on duty at Ellyson and no hospital in all of Pensacola that would accept a damaged black man and a hurting white woman in the same emergency room. Bobby talked in a slurred voice, his mouth bubbling with bloody saliva:

All the way
hey
. Yeah. They comin down the ridge. In the snow. You watch the snow. Yeah.
Oh
. In formation, gonna march, mothafucka. He got. No, he
got
. Bottle of ocean and two dimes plus
her
. Yeah.
No
. The house. Oh Catty.
Yeah
. Oh Catty.

Eden was silent all the way. I kept wondering if Bobby Bolden had paid the price for rescuing me from Buster and his friends; then dismissed that; thought if
that
was so, it was only part of it, a small part. He was a black man fucking a white woman in the South. He
couldn’t expect to keep that a secret forever. The old black man was bitter, so even the blacks must have disapproved and the whites would have been crazy. I wondered too if there was some black woman out there by the lake who loved Bobby Bolden from a distance, and then in rage and jealousy made a call or sent a letter. I remembered that night months before when there was a sudden sharp knock on Bolden’s door.… But maybe someone came here out of
Catty’s
life. A husband. A lover. Followed her from Mainside. Watched where she went.
Then
called in the Klan. I remembered the photographs of the Klan in old newspapers and in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons: assholes in white sheets watching fiery crosses burn in the night. Degenerate white assholes. They always seemed funny to me, looking at them back in Brooklyn. What did they tell their wives and kids when they went out for the night wearing sheets? That they were saving the good old Yew Ess of Ay from the niggers and the Jews and the Catholics? Ridiculous. But they weren’t funny to me anymore. They had maimed and hurt two of my friends.

I glanced at Eden as we turned into the long avenue leading to the gates of Mainside. She was staring off in the distance. Her face was slack now, her hair disheveled. She looked older.

A Marine corporal blocked the gate when I pulled up. I pointed at Bobby and Catty and explained that they were sailors, one from Mainside, the other from Ellyson Field. The Marine’s name was stamped on his chest. Gabree. Blond and sunburned. He didn’t move or wave us on.

“This car doesn’t have a sticker,” he said. “
You’re
out of uniform. So are
they
. And this other—
woman
isn’t in the service.” He blinked his blond eyelashes. “You can’t come on board. Sorry.”

“Are you fucking
crazy?
” I shouted.

Gabree narrowed his eyes and gave me the all-purpose Marine Corps hard-guy look, taught daily at Parris Island.

“You better lower your voice, sailor. Or you’ll be in deep shit.
Real
fast.”