Loving Women (57 page)

When I came close I saw that it was Red Cannon.

I stopped.

Jesus Christ
.

Now, sore and naked and exhausted, I’d have to finish what had begun in the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club.

Red was waiting for me, battered, unbeaten. Three great waves of exhaustion moved through me. I wanted to lie down naked in the sand and go to sleep. I didn’t have any strength left to fight him nor will to beat him. I would have to contrive some rage and use it as fuel. So I thought about Miles Rayfield. His face blue and swollen. The cord digging into his flesh. But the anger wouldn’t come. And I still needed those clothes.

I walked closer, on an angle, giving him a smaller target if he came at me in a rush, protecting my cock and balls. He was shirtless. His face was a mess of caked blood, dried by the Gulf breeze. He smiled, but I couldn’t see his eyes. The surf broke on the shore. I stopped six feet away from him and waited.

“I need those clothes, Red,” I said.

“Come and get em.”

“I don’t want to fight you for them, but I will if I have to.”

“It’s your gear. Whut the hell do I want with it?”

I took a step forward and so did he. Then we both stopped. I could see his eyes now. One was almost closed and was turning purple. The other just looked sad.

He held out his hand.

I shook it.

“You’re okay, Devlin,” he said.

“And you’re still a prick,” I said and released his hand and went for my clothes and started dressing. I looked at Red. He was gazing out at the sea. And then he toppled over and fell face down in the sand.

I went to help him.

Chapter

66

What Red Cannon Told Me

I
shoulda seen they was shit the day they showed. Green snotnose shit, enlisted men and officers both. We were in the buildingways up at Mare Island near San Francisco. They was fixin everything that was ripped up by the kamikazes at Okinawa, the hull and the water supply and the bridge, every damned thing on the ship. This was the summer of ’45, just before the war ended, and I was a third-class gunner’s mate on the
U.S.S. Indianapolis.
Bet you never heard of her, right, Devlin? Well you ain’t alone. Most nobody ever heard of her, then or now. The Navy don’t want it out, what happened to her. The goddamn politicians don’t, either
.

But she was a death ship, Devlin: a great big heavy cruiser, that was what we call tender. That means she was about as heavy above the waterline as below, loaded down with all sorts of shit that wasn’t there when they built her. Just walkin the deck, you knew it wouldn’t take much ocean to tip her over. The Navy brass didn’t give much of a fiddler’s fuck. All those Annapolis boys loved cruisers cause the next stop was usually a battle wagon and that was the top in them days, before the carriers became the big deal. So they gave you a big So What? if you told them the ship didn’t right itself too quick after a sharp turn. They didn’t care she was tender. They even made her the flagship of the Fifth Fleet, and did all kinds of ceremonial shit whenever Admiral Spruance came aboard. And they gave her a captain, McVay was his name, a gray-haired guy with coal-black eyes, always smilin like a goddamned politician
.

Yeah
.

The
Indianapolis.

A nice big cruiser
.

They thought it looked good in pictures, I guess, though it wasn’t worth a fuck at sea. So in July, we were gettin her ready, the war over in Europe, thinkin we was all gonna be part of the invasion of Japan. I wunt too big on that. I seen the way the Japs fought at Okinawa and figured theyd take a lot of us with them in Japan. Say what you will about the Jap, but he’s a fightin man, sailor. Still although they was beat, and must’ve known it, the Japs wouldn’t quit, so there was nothin to be done except invade. It was a war and we had to finish it and in the Navy, on the
Indianapolis,
we’d play our part like everybody else, tender ship or no tender ship
.

The trouble was most of the old crew was dead now or scattered around, and one bright morning along comes this new crew. Talk about haulin green shit. Two hundred and fifty wiseass kids fresh out of boot camp and thirty officers out of the Academy and I knew right off we gonna have us some trouble. They made up almost a third of the crew and they showed up like they was goin to a Fourth of July picnic, instead of a war against a real tough son of a bitch. I knew we’d have to break their asses real good. But almost as soon’s they were piped on board, we got orders to get ready to ship out. In twenty-four hours. The ship wunt ready. They wunt enough chow. The livin quarters wunt finished. Didn’t matter. We had to go. And it was all because of the goddamn bucket and the goddamn box
.

They swung them on board in the morning, usin a giant goddamn gantry. The bucket weighed maybe three hundred pounds, cast iron, sealed, and we welded it right to the deck, holdin it down with straps. It couldn’t move or slide. If the ship went down, so did the bucket. The box was a crate really, eight feet high, and they took it below decks and wedged it in real tight. But then they called me and Big Nose Bernardi below decks and we met these two army guys, lookin like perfessers with guns, and they opened the box and took out a steel cylinder maybe three feet long and had us carry it into Captains Country, where Captain McVay gave us part of the mess, sealed off, and watched as we strapped this cylinder to the deck and welded the straps tight. The army guys never said a word. They stayed with the cylinder and never came above decks again
.

Well, we pulled anchor at three ayem on July 16 and sailed out of San Francisco and started haulin ass. There was all sorts of scuttlebutt about the box and the bucket. Most of the crew thought they had to contain germs. That we was gonna use germs on the Japs. Or some kind of gas that would paralyze every last Jap in the country, something we captured from the Germans. It wunt till well after the war that I learnt that the bucket and the box was full of parts of the atom bomb
.

Now out at sea, we were supposed to break in the new crew. Not for any atom bomb. For war. Suppose to do it right off. Dont give em tahm to think. That was the general plan. Real simple. Well, we didn’t get to break em in. There wunt tahm and the ship was a complete fuckin mess. Somehow we picked up a bunch of hitchhikers, officers mostly, all tryin to git to Pearl, which was our first stop. Their luggage was all over the damned deck. Worse, some of em was Army and didn’t know shit from shinola about livin on a ship. And the green kids was the real problem. Some of em was moonin over women. Some even cried for their mommas. They got lost and dint know port from starboard. Real green shit
.

Things got so bad, there was a fire on deck cause these green shitbirds left suitcases next to one of the stacks. Suitcases! On a Navy ship. And they was no room in the chow hall, so people ate all over and left food and plates layin around and I seen roaches too. I swear. Cockroaches. On a flagship of the United States Navy
.

Nobody paid much attention though. That was just housekeepin. And Captain McVay was haulin ass for Pearl. The
Indianapolis
was thirteen years old and beat up. But he got her doin twenty-nine knots. We tested the systems. Radio. Radar. There wunt any sonar, though, and that hurt us later. There just wunt time to install it. We was haulin ass with the atom bomb. When we hit Pearl that Monday morning, we discovered that we broke the damned record. Two thousand and ninety one miles in seventy-four-and-a-half hours. I’m still amazed
.

But there wunt tahm for celebration in Pearl, for taking pictures, and bragging to reporters. We let the passengers off, and then we were told to get ready to git under way. And seen again that we could have bad trouble. I actually seen some of that green-shit crew start to
cry.
They wanted to get off. They wanted to call their girlfriends or their mommas. They wanted liberty when they haddin even done nothin yet. They dint want to hear we had no tahm. They dint want to hear we were going to fuckin war
.

So we lifted anchor and started out for some little goddamn island called Tinian
.

I yelled and hollared, I said we gotta do basic drills, we gotta do abandon ship and fire and rescue and anti-aircraft and man overboard. Nobody listened. I think maybe the captain thought he was gonna be part of history and all he had to worry about was posing for the pictures. And besides, we were in safe water. There wasn’t a Jap for a thousand miles, everybody said. We’d do the trainin later. After Tinian. When we got to Leyte in the Philippines … Well, I did whut I could
.

We made Tinian on Friday. It was one of those islands I used to see in the fillums at the Mosque Theater in Montgomery during the Depression. You know, fine ladies in grass skirts and some rummy doctor layin in a hammock with a bottle under the palm trees. There was a landing strip for airplanes but no dock for ships the size of the
Indianapolis.
So we had to unload the box and the bucket onto an LCT out in the open sea. We cut the straps on the cylinder and put it in the box and started the job. But the wire was too short and I remember that goddam box swingin around in the breeze, six feet above the LCT. And then all them snotnose kids started jeerin. But we got it done. The mission was finished. At least that’s what we thought. We delivered the goddam box and bucket, and now all we had to do was beat Japan
.

We sailed west, with a stop at Guam before going on to Leyte. And at last I started bustin balls on the housekeepin. Some shitbird of an officer had ordered 2500 life jackets for a crew of twelve hundred and they was layin all over the deck so I had them tied and stacked against the bulkheads. I had them clean up all the dirty food. I had them paintin and chippin. But most of the time it was like shovelin shit against the tide
.

Wait till Leyte
.

That’s what they all said
.

We’ll get shipshape after Leyte
.

Yeah
.

After Guam we passed a spot called The Crossroads and went into the Forward Zone. That meant we were no longer under the command of Pearl Harbor. Now we reported to Leyte. And I dint like the conditions out there. I felt it from the minute we went through The Crossroads
.

To begin with, we was alone
.

Usually, a heavy cruiser sails with four or five other ships, and that was specially important with the
Indianapolis
cause she was tender. But we was alone. In the Pacific. That’s a big fuckin ocean, Devlin. Another thing I didn’t like, there was a rule that when you wuh in the Forward Area, you could only do sixteen knots. To save fuel. The third thing was the basic thing
.

The crew
.

That damned green crew
.

Well, we left Guam at nine in the morning on Saturday and even at sixteen knots we should’ve reached Layte about eleven in the morning on Tuesday
.

A weekend cruise
.

Yeah
.

Saturday was peaceful. I pulled a twelve to four and on Sunday morning I slept in. I remember lunch wunt half bad. Hamburgers and mashed potatoes. I couldn’t finish the potatoes, and in the next few days I thought about them uneaten potatoes a lot. A lot, sailor. In the afternoon I sat in the shade on deck while the green kids got cholera shots for the Philippines. In the afternoon, the weather changed. There was a haze on the sea now and a heavy chop. We were followin the normal zigzag pattern—normal that is in the Forward Zone, where you want to fuck up the other guy’s listening devices, just in case he’s around somewhere
.

I wished we had sonar
.

I wished we wunt alone
.

That night I had an eight to twelve. It was fuckin hot. I remember walking through the quarters when I went on duty and noticin a lot of watertight doors open. I wondered who in the fuck was in charge of them and I went up on deck, pissed off, needin a smoke, followin the smell of the coffee pot. The deck was disgustin. Sailors had pulled mattresses and cots on deck and were lyin around bullshittin and sleepin. Hundreds of them. There was only one air conditioner on board, down in sick bay, and the Captain didn’t give a rat’s ass where they slept, I guess. I saw some guys shootin craps in a compartment and told them to make sure the light dint show and kept thinkin: There’s too many doors open
.

I went up on the bridge and looked out for a while, standin on the side. For some reason, we had stopped the zigzag. We were going due west. The sea was pretty calm. There was a quarter moon. I smoked half a pack of Camels, goin up and down and around the ship, fore and aft, port and starboard. The guys on deck stopped their bullshittin and grabassin and went to sleep
.