Loving Women (55 page)

I
guess Becket cut him down. Or maybe it was Donnie Ray. I don’t know for sure. I do know that Boswell and Parsons and Donnie all were shouting for an ambulance, for medics, for someone who could do mouth-to-mouth:
Hurry now still a chance that’s it easy boy okay hold him soft
. I remember hands reaching, then all lifting, then tearing open a shirt; rubber heels on the concrete floor; an empty wash bucket going over and men grunting.
Jesuschrist now what in the fuck would he wanna do that for?
And more shouts and doors slamming and the incessant ringing of a single telephone. All that happened: the logistics of death.

I remember staring at the gouged skin of Miles’s neck. I remember him lying on the painted concrete deck that he would never walk again or curse again or swab down again on a Friday afternoon. I cursed the Navy. And I cursed God. And I cursed Red Cannon. I cried too, cradling my dead friend’s head, feeling the heat drain away; just sobbed like a boy, until the medic came at last and tried to thump the dead heart back into life before saying that it was too late, the man was dead and hey, sailor, what was his service number?

Becket walked me outside.

Just like that (I said to Becket, in some fumbling way), Miles Rayfield was gone. And now that it had happened, I realized that he had been going away for days. First they took his work away. The paintings, drawings, paints and chalks: all had disappeared. Then they took his tongue, forcing him into tears and silence. And now he’d done what they couldn’t do: removed himself from the Navy and the earth itself.

Miles you son of a bitch
, I said out loud.
Why’d you do this, you dumb fuck? Why didn’t you just run? Why’d you have to loop a rope around your goddamned neck?

And then finally Becket said “Okay, dat’s enough. Be a man, Michael. Right now.”

So I wiped my eyes and took a deep breath and straightened up and exhaled hard and then walked back to the Supply Shack. Becket let me go alone, and I reached the building just as the corpsmen were carrying Miles’s body on a stretcher to a waiting Navy ambulance. The body was covered with a blanket. The corpsmen looked vaguely puzzled as they heaved Miles up into the back, slammed the double doors, then drove away. I went inside and saw Donnie Ray looking at me strangely.

“Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off,” he said.

“No. It’s all right.”

He looked out at the field.

“It’s a tough thing, seeing somethin like that,” he said. “Combat’s a lot easier.”

“I said I was all right.”

“You don’t
look
all right.”

“He was my
friend
. I
liked
him. That’s all.”

“Okay,” he said. “But you can get lost if you want.”

“There’s some things to do. Like calling his wife.”

“His wife?”

“Yeah, he talked about her all the time.… A wife. Back in Atlanta. And he’s got a mother too. Same town.”

“Christ.”

“Someone’s gotta call them.”

“Yeah. Someone’s gotta call them.”

He picked up the phone on my desk and asked for Maher in the admin building. I heard him speaking about next of kin and turned around to examine Miles’s desk. There was no sign that he was thinking of checking out, just an ashtray, a pile of requisition forms, some pencils. I put one of the pencils in my pocket. Then stood there and looked out through the screened windows at the hot June morning. Nothing had changed. Sailors ambled down the crosswalks. Helicopters thumped in the sky. I tried to imagine what Miles was thinking a few hours earlier, his heart beating as he came to his decision. Whatever he thought, whatever pain or grief or shame he felt, it had ended forever.

Donnie Ray hung up.

“The captain’s calling his mother,” he said.

“What about the wife?”

He looked at me with pitying eyes.

“There was no wife.”

He turned to go to the counter.

“I think you better take the day off,” he said gently. “He was your friend.”

That was true. He was my friend. Not a friend of Sal or Max or Maher or any of the others. Except Freddie. Miles wasn’t part of the O Street nights. He wasn’t there on any wild evenings. He didn’t care when Hank died and didn’t know the words of any Webb Pierce songs. So I didn’t go first to Sal and Max to tell them the news. They were probably talking about Sal’s big birthday party at the Miss Texas Club.

I went to Freddie.

I found him sitting on the steps leading up to the shuttered doors of the Kingdom of Darkness. He looked at me when I reached the stairs but didn’t say anything.

“Freddie?”

“Yeah?”

“Miles is dead, Freddie.”

“What?”

“He killed himself this morning.”

Freddie rose slowly, carefully, standing three steps above me, looking at me as if I might be playing some awful joke.

“I’m
not
kidding,” I said.

“You better not be,” he said.

“He hung himself. In the mop locker.”

The phrase “mop locker” would have made Miles laugh. Maybe that’s why he chose it.

“He—he
say
anything? Like leave a
note
or whatnot?”

“Not that I know of.”

He seemed relieved and looked past me in the direction of the Supply Shack. Then he gripped the railing and sat down hard on the steps and began to cry.

By noon, his locker was empty, his sea bag packed, his transfer
papers typed up by Maher and signed by Captain Pritchett, and he was on his way to Port Lyautey. He never said good-bye. And I remember thinking:
Maybe Freddie Harada would get to see the Red Shadow
. I knew that I never would. Nor, of course, would Miles Rayfield.

Chapter

65

W
e went out to the Miss Texas Club in a cab, all of us in uniform: Sal and Max whooping and joking, Maher sipping from Boswell’s bottle of white lightning, and the cab driver acting as if the ride was surely the most distasteful job of his life. On this day Sal was twenty-one; it was payday too and we were all going out to get drunk and get laid. There were no further ambitions. If the world thought we were just a bunch of goddamned lonesome sailors, then by God, we were going to act that way.
If ya got the name ya might as well have the game
.

Nobody mentioned Miles Rayfield. The silence wasn’t because they didn’t care what had happened to him. There just wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Not tears, revenge, or prayer. Squashed in the back seat of the cab, I remembered my mother’s wake, all the uncles and cousins drinking, singing, even laughing, and how enraged I was at them; yet riding through the Pensacola night, I forgave everybody. You might as well sing, and declare the existence of the living. And (here, down in the Gulf, with rain scattering on the motel windows) remembering my remembering, other bodies force their way into me, dead on meaningless hills in the Asian jungles, dead on blasted deserts in the Sinai, dead without mourning. Their deaths never chilled me nor attacked my bowels. For years it has been my pride that I can look at dead strangers and photograph them with the remorseless eye of an assassin. But I am like all other men on earth: wounded by the death of people I love. And of those, Miles Rayfield was the first. That night long ago, I churned with fear, anger, mystery and guilt. My friend was dead and I should have known it was coming. And now there
was nothing to be
done
except get drunk, get laid, and remember.

There was a huge parking lot outside the place, which was a big red-painted barn with a red neon sign saying MISS TEXAS CLUB and a large suety bouncer posted at the door. We chipped in a dollar each for the cab, paid the man, and piled out. The bouncer was checking most IDs but we were all in dress whites, and he recognized that as sufficient credentials, took two dollars from each of us and waved us in.

“Enjoy yissef, boys,” he said.

And Sal whooped and said, “Yeah, brother, oh yeah. En-
Joy
. We want some
joy!
”

About five hundred people were already inside and the place was only half full. There were tables on the near side and a wide wooden dance floor and a stage where a country band was playing hard. Off to the right, people sat on stools at a large circular bar. I saw a few sailors dancing with young girls and wondered where Eden was.

We went to one of the tables and ordered three pitchers of beer from a round-legged blonde waitress dressed in a short buckskin skirt and sneakers. After half a beer, Max angled over to dance with a thin redhaired woman who was alone at the bar. Then Becket came in with Dunbar, and a little later Larry Parsons arrived too, and then a couple of guys from the hangars. Then Dixie Shafer arrived from the Dirt Bar carrying a box with a chocolate birthday cake and candles.

She yelled out to Max on the dance floor: “Get back
over
here, boy. Her
tits
are too small!”

I sipped some beer and looked up and saw Tons of Fun waddling through the room, each of them carrying delicately wrapped presents for Sal (a Hawaiian shirt, a leather belt) and Betty yelled at a table full of Marines: “Who wants a blow job in the parking lot?”

And Dixie Shafer said to me, “They’re so
crude
.”

And Sal said, “
Me!
I do!”

And Betty grabbed his cock as she sat down and Sal giggled and the band played the Webb Pierce song and we all began to sing:

There stands the glass

Fill it up to the brim

Till mah troubles grow dim

It’s mah first one todaaaaaaaay
 …

And singing the anthem of O Street, I remembered the first time I heard it, almost six months before. And I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I remembered how lonesome I was that night and how then Eden Santana was only a nameless face glimpsed in a dark bus.

I wonder where you are tonight

I wonder if you are all right

I wonder if you think of me

In mah mis-ereeeeee
 …

We shouted the chorus and the Marines looked at us and Dixie Shafer slid over beside me, her hair redder than a sunset, and Sal got up and went after a dark girl with a violet blouse and Maher started drinking straight from the beer pitcher and then I glanced at the door and saw Red Cannon coming in.

Ah Miles ah poor sad Miles Rayfield
.

Red Cannon was wearing tan chinos and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He squinted through the smoke as if looking for someone and then he walked to the bar and leaned over and said something to the barmaid. If he saw us through the nicotine haze, he didn’t bother to let us know.

You killed him Red you put the nails in his coffin You son of a bitch
.

Then the music ended and the lights dimmed and Sal yelled at us (the girl with the violet dress gone off): “They just executed the chef.” Dixie Shafer lit the candles and we sang “Happy Birthday” to Sal and the Marines booed and Sal told them to go fuck themselves and reached down and grabbed a handful of the cake and shoved it at Max’s mouth. We all cheered and Sal opened his presents and kissed Tons of Fun on the breasts and pretended to whip out his dick and then we heard a tom-tom beating in a Gene Krupa style and then a different band started playing “Caravan.” There was a sudden spotlight on the stage and a voice from a hidden microphone saying, “Ladies and gennulmin, the Miss Texas Club is proud to present one of the greatest dancers of her tahm, straight from a trah-umphant tore of Havana … 
Madame Nareeta
!”

A tall red-haired woman stepped into the spotlight, dressed from chin to feet in a black satin gown. She wore white gloves up to her elbows. There was no expression on her face. I drained my beer and poured another as she began to move sensuously to the old Ellington tune. The light defined the hard mound of her belly and I forgot
Red Cannon for the moment and wondered about the color of the hair between her legs. She did a few gentle bumps and ground her hips, and then she began to peel off the gloves and the crowd roared. Sal said, “It’s like she’s taking a rubber off a dick.” Madame Nareeta moved her naked fingers slowly to the tune, and did a few more bumps and then, still expressionless, put a hand behind her back and shook and shimmied until the gown fell away and she was standing there, still moving slowly to the music, dressed in black bra and black panties and black high-heeled shoes. A roar rose from the dark. My cock was hard. Madame Nareeta’s skin was very white in the pale-blue spotlight and she moved her hands over her heavy thighs, her belly, along the sides of her breasts, her eyes half closed, her tongue moving over her lips. Dixie Shafer whispered to me: “You look too damned sad, boy.”