Loving Women (9 page)

“That’s my locker,” I said.

Something like a smile showed on his face. But he didn’t move. For a moment his eyes clouded, as if a drop of milk had been added to the slushy blue. And then they were diving deep into me, probing for weakness or softness like a knife. And I broke it off. I turned to the side and fiddled with my towel and groped in the ditty bag for something I didn’t want. I felt humiliated. The gunner’s mate had faced me down. And I’d quit to him like a dog. In this strange and alien place. On New Year’s Day. A long way from home.

“What’s your name, boy?” the man whispered.

“Michael Devlin.”

“Your
Navy
name, boy.”

“464 0267.”

“464 0267,
what
?”

“464 0267, sir.”

There was a long, silent moment. He stared at me, and I tried to smile in a casual way to cover up my fear.

“Open it,” he said, stepping aside from the locker. His short arms were hanging at his sides. “Let’s see what y’
got
heah, boy.”

I turned the combination lock. Six, for the month I was born.

Twenty-four, for the day. Thirty-five, for the year. I unhooked the lock and lifted the latch and opened the locker door. The gunner’s mate stared into it. Then, with his free hand, he grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it hard. The sound was explosive. He did it again. And again, the metallic sound caroming through the barracks. And then he did it once more.

“
First
off, boy, this ain’t
your
locker, heah?”

He snarled the words and then banged the door with the billy club.

“This heah locker is the property of the Yew-Nited States
Navy
.”
He banged it again. “Second of all, you aint s’posed even be
near
this lockuh ’thout my p’mission. You unna
stand
me?”

He slammed the door again. His mouth was quivering but the glossy skin on his face didn’t move. Then he looked inside. He reached to the back of one shelf and pulled out everything: work shirts, dress whites, skivvies, socks. He cleaned out the second shelf. Then he dropped my pea coat on top of the pile on the floor.

“Now, heah this, boy. I am the M A A on this base. The Master at Arms, case you don’t know what I’m saying to you.
I
assign the racks in these barracks.
Me!
Nobody else. You got that?
Me!
First-class gunner’s mate Wendell Cannon, U.S.N.”

“Sir, I was told—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass
what
you was told, boy.
I’m
tellin you now. You don’t pick a locker, you don’t pick a rack, you don’t pick your goddamn nose, less I give you p’mission. You got me?”

His eyes fell to the clothes, then wandered back to the locker.

“What in the
fuck
?”

He lifted out the oversized art book with the long-haired Botticelli blonde on the cover. He blinked as he read the title. Then he turned to me.

“
A Treasury of
Art
Masterpieces?
”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“
A Treasury of
Art
Masterpieces?
” he screamed. He shook the book in my face. “What are you, some kind of gahdam
faggot
?” His voice rose another decibel. “What in the fuck is
this
doing in a locker in
this man’s Navy
?”

He whirled and heaved the book the length of the barracks. I saw it bounce off an empty rack and skid across the floor. The Blue Notebook fell out, but Cannon didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at me. Waiting. I stepped forward. A red film fell over everything. My body was bursting. I wanted to swing out and destroy him, but when my hands came up, the towel fell. I was naked before him. He had his jaw clamped shut, breathing hard through his nose. His eyes widened. I stepped forward. An inch from his face. The blue eyes didn’t blink.

“You thinkin of
doing
somethin, boy?” he said quietly. “Standing there with yo’ pecker hangin out? Huh? You want to
do
something?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well, I’ll tell you what you
bettah
do, boy,” Cannon said. He
smiled thinly. I stepped back, still looking at him. His face didn’t move, didn’t sweat. I picked up the towel and covered myself. “You better get all your gear together and go down there to locker 211. Y’heah me? And then move your fartsack and your ass down to that rack there. You see the one I mean? Yeah, that one. Next to the head. Be perfect for you, boy. There’s lots of light all night long, f’ you to read about your
art
masterpieces. Easy for you too, ef you hafta shit your pants. Like you’re doin now. Save a lot of wear and tear on this good U.S. Navy beddin.”

He seemed cooler then, almost cold.

“And tonight,” he said, “I think you oughtta go out and stand watch at post three. At midnight. A good midnight to four, that’ll give you lots of time to think about your
art
masterpieces, boy.”

With that, Cannon turned abruptly and walked the length of the barracks to the far door, his polished shoes clacking on the hardwood floor. The screen door slammed loudly behind him.

I stood there for a long moment. On the Outside (as we called civilian life), I would have beaten his brains out. Or gone down trying. On the Outside, I would have made him eat the book. For sure, I’d have put some damage on his plastic face and made the son of a bitch sweat. But there in the Navy, if I did any of those things, I’d be sent to the brig. “Shit,” I said out loud. And then shuddered. The man had punked me out. Like that. With his sweat-less face and slushy eyes and the three hash marks on his sleeve. That was all it took. No punches. Just authority. And I was there because I asked to be there. I signed the papers. I joined the Navy. And this was the deal. For a moment I felt like crying, thinking of myself free on the streets of a city. And then I twisted and threw a punch at the locker door, slamming it one final time.

Chapter

9

From
The Blue Notebook

ACQUILINE. AQUALINE
.

I love the sound of a pen on paper. I’m writing these words with a Sheaffer fountain pen. It leaks and stains my fingers, but I love the
skoosh
sound it makes. I know that professional cartoonists all use steel crow-quill nibs, but I can’t seem to make them work. The nibs always break. Maybe my hand is too heavy. Maybe I don’t hold them right. I tried a Parker 51 once in a department store. It was beautiful. So smooth, and the nib was flexible, so I could get the thicks and thins I need for drawing. But it cost $20. One of these days, maybe I’ll be able to afford one. But not now. Not soon, the way the Navy pays
.

I need to make some drawings, but I can’t right now. I don’t have my stuff, and anyway this guy C. would probably have me courtmartialed if he caught me drawing. I can just hear him saying it: Only a Gah-dam faggot would draw pictures like that
.

QUALITIES OF A GOOD NAVY MAN
.
Be loyal. Obey orders. Show initiative. Be a fighter. Be reliable. Keep a clean record. Be fair. Be honest. Be cheerful. Be neat
.

—The Bluejackets’ Manual

Maybe we’re just something God dreamed. Or is still dreaming. If there even is a God. I used to believe in God, too. Like everybody else in the world. I prayed to him and worshiped him. Right up to the day my mother died. Then I said, What kind of God could this be who lets a good woman like that die?

Once I started thinking that way, I couldn’t stop. What kind of God lets Hiroshima happen? What kind of God lets six million Jews die in the concentration camps? What kind of God lets people be poor? Back home in Brooklyn, there were crooked cops and murderers and sleazeball politicians. How could God let them live while my mother dies? How could he put up with a guy that throws an art book against a wall? If there’s a God, then he’s responsible for art, too. He must of said once, Okay, now
let there be art.
But if He did, why put guys like C. on the earth to hate art? It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s nothing new. There were all those vandals in history, the Visigoths and guys like that, always sacking Rome. They destroyed all sorts of beautiful things, while killing and raping thousands of people. How could they be part of God’s plan? Unless He’s having a bad dream
.

Or maybe it’s something else. Something simpler. Maybe God’s a mean bastard. Maybe that’s it. Maybe He’s just a mean bastard who likes to see people suffer
.

Agnostic
.
One who holds that the ultimate cause (God) and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience. (That’s me)
.

Aquiline
.

Chapter

10

A
t twenty to twelve that night I wandered out along a dirt road beside the fence and relieved a small Oriental kid named Freddie Harada at post three. He handed me a dummy Springfield rifle and an adjustable cartridge belt without bullets. In a thin singsong voice he told me to forget about sleeping on the post. Red Cannon or the goddamn Marines came around every half hour in a jeep. Then he hurried away into the darkness.

I was supposed to be guarding a dumpster, one of those metal bins that was filled over the course of a week with garbage and junk and then lifted onto a truck and taken away and emptied. It was big enough to hold a car. I’d seen them in boot camp, but even in that land of total chickenshit I was never asked to guard one. I walked around it, feeling foolish with my rifle that didn’t shoot.

There was a barbed-wire fence just past the dumpster and empty black fields beyond and away off lights moving on the highway. Obviously, I thought, feeling hipper than Cannon or the task before me, the Russians weren’t about to steal a giant garbage can. So this watch was really about staying awake. They called it Building Discipline. Usually that meant you did something useless just because someone commanded you to do it. You stayed up all night, watching for a patrol to come around in a jeep, and the patrol came around in the jeep just to make sure you stayed up all night. The Navy. The goddamned Navy.

But after a while I realized it took too much energy to stay pissed off. I started feeling good out there in the open, with the steady drone of insects coming from the fields and silvery clouds moving
across the stars. The darkness smelled of the sea and was so humid I thought I could grab it and shape it, pack it like a snowball, throw it at the stars. There was no purpose to my being there, but in all the years since, as I’ve stayed up through the night working with purpose, developing film, making love, arranging tickets and passports and visas for my next stop, I’ve sometimes longed for those nights without meaning under the stars of Pensacola, when I was solitary and young.

I remember my eyes adjusting to the darkness and how I began to see the varieties of the color black. A green black beyond the barbed wire. The pale black of wild grass. The blacker black of tree trunks. I tried to imagine the way Roy Crane would draw it. All grays and blacks. He would probably add some palms to show it was Florida, even though there were no palms out here. Along the edge of the barracks, the trees were all pine. But I knew that an artist could change things to make them better or truer; in fact, it was probably his
duty
to make such changes. I was sure Crane always did. And so did Caniff: They made pictures that were truer than photographs. They made a lot of things neater than life. The world was a mess, and all the things they taught us in school were lies. But when an artist shaped the world, things always worked out better. An artist would have that curly-haired woman stay on the bus and take the young sailor home with her and make love to him and stay with him forever.