He double-timed the rest of the way, across Cable Street and past the Newport Café to the walkway east of Rick’s. He didn’t look into it. Not yet. First he glanced both ways through the fog and saw nobody watching him from the porch of the hostel or the crowd a block west outside the Cave dance club or out the window of El Nopal Taqueria.
The walkway led along the west wall of Rick’s to the alley and the staircase to the second-floor apartment where Maurice had gone to live after Olivia kicked him out.
If anyone noticed him disappear into the dark walkway, Greg told himself, they’d think he was some drunk looking for a hole to piss in.
Two booms sounded. Greg stumbled backward, out of the streetlamp glow and into darkness where he slipped on an oil slick or something and clattered against a roll of chicken wire or something before he groped his way to the staircase and grabbed hold. He peered underneath it and saw the trash cans were still where he had set them during the murder game, leaving a roomy space between them and the stairs. He steadied himself by leaning against the wall to Rick’s. He gasped a few breaths and noticed a smell like beef broiling, maybe seeping out a vent from Rick’s, and another like fresh crap, so close he thought it might be what he’d stepped on.
Pulse slammed his groin and his skull. The fireworks kept booming, and Greg waited. After a minute, he checked the gun, found the safety on, released it, and leaned the barrel on the seventh step, unless he’d miscounted. To make sure, leaving the gun on the step, he squatted, reached out, and touched each step. He counted to seven. He tried to remember the equation he and James had settled upon. If he shot from between the seventh and eighth steps when Maurice’s foot touched down on the fourth, the bullet ought to slam his midsection. Or maybe he’d got that backward. “Fuck,” he said aloud for the first time since his last doctor’s visit.
Five rockets boomed in rapid succession. A man rounded the corner. Greg peered between steps. The man’s hair was silvertipped black and high on top, short on the sides. Like Maurice’s. He was smoking, but he kept the cigarette cupped so the fire didn’t illuminate his face. He wore a shiny jacket that looked like polished leather, a checked shirt, dark slacks. At the foot of the stairs, he fished in his pocket and lifted out something that jangled. A key ring. Greg nodded. A visitor wouldn’t be using keys. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.
The man hacked a cough, bent forward, and coughed again and again until he was honking like an asthmatic. He appeared to rock back and forward to the rhythm of Greg’s raging pulse.
As the man climbed to the first step, he grabbed the rail. A flurry of booms, then a dozen of Greg’s heartbeats, passed before he made the second step, but the next pair of steps came fast, as if something had warned him to make a dash.
Greg pulled. Time lost its authority. The world spun faster. Two shots cracked, a hundred times louder than the skyrockets. They echoed off both walls of the walkway. The pistol’s second kick launched Greg backward. He fell butt first on the rim of the metal trash can. The can toppled and spilled him into the alley.
The man on the steps groaned from deep in his gut. Then he hacked out something like, “Who the hell?”
As Greg heaved and pushed to stand, the groaning fell silent.
A pain more wicked than any struck. Not in the liver. Higher. Around his heart. Greg tipped forward, grabbed the stairs, and thought, Maybe I only hit him in the arm. Maybe he’s only passed out. He needed to know, before the pain took him under. Using the rail for balance, he managed one step toward the foot of the stairs.
The next boom came, and a cannonball slammed then sucked into Greg’s middle, just below the ribs. His head tipped backward. He saw Maurice, with gritted teeth and red eyes. In one hand, a pistol shook.
Despite everything, a new kind of love washed over Greg. He wanted to reach out and touch the fellow. He tried to say, Hey, amigo. But he began spinning. When his knees buckled, he was facing down the alley, toward the ocean where a mammoth wave rose, emerald green and luminescent.
As Greg sensed commotion around him, he watched the emerald wave sweep high, above the two-story shops, and flood over the sea wall, across the road, and into the alley.
Peace, Greg thought. It’s only peace. He turned, meaning to tell people not to worry, but all he saw was one fellow. Either Jesus or Chad, with a small but earnest smile that meant, I get it, brother. I’ve been there.
It was Chad, not Jesus, Greg thought, as he whispered a last “Ho-ho.” Because Jesus wouldn’t be nodding goodbye.
PART III
LIFE’S A BEACH
AFTER THIRTY
BY DON WINSLOW
Pacific Beach
1945
Charlie Decker is a hard case.
Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.
Charlie’s no good.
He’s trouble and always has been. Drunkenness, absent-without-official-leave, brawling, gambling, insubordination—three stretches in the navy and Charlie’s been in and out of the brig and up and down the ranks. The navy probably would have thrown him out if there wasn’t a war on and they didn’t need a man who knew how to make an engine run. Give Charlie Decker thirty minutes and a wrench and he can fix anything, but you also know that he can wreck anything too, and just as easily.
People tried to tell Millie this, but she wouldn’t listen. Her roommates saw it clear as day. One good look in Charlie’s eyes, that cocky smirk of his, and you knew. They told her but it went through one ear and out the other. Now she opens her eyes, looks at the clock on her bed table, and slaps him on the butt. “Charlie, get up.”
“What?” he mumbles, happy in his sweet, warm sleep. They sat up and drank when she came home from her night shift at Consolidated, and then they did it and then drank some more, so he don’t want to get up.
She shakes his shoulders. “It’s thirty days.”
Millie knows the navy—up to thirty days it’s AWOL, after thirty it’s desertion. He’s been shacked up with her for almost a month now. Almost a month in the little bungalow that was already crowded with four other girls, and he said he was going back before the thirty days were up.
But now he mumbles, “To hell with that.” And closes his eyes.
“You’re going to get in big trouble,” Millie says. AWOL, he would get a captain’s mast, but probably no time in the brig because he’s set to ship out soon anyway. But for desertion he’s going to get a court-martial, maybe years in the brig, and then a DD.
“Charlie, get up.”
He rolls over, kisses her, and then shows her what trouble is. That’s the thing—she knows he’s bad news but he’s just so damn handsome and so good in the sack. She knew from the moment they met at Eddie’s Bar that she couldn’t keep her legs shut with Charlie.
Charlie makes her see fireworks.
Charlie rolls off her, reaches for the green pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, finds his Zippo, and lights one up.
“Go fix us some breakfast,” he says.
“What do you want?”
“Eggs?”
“Try buying eggs, Charlie.”
“We got any coffee left?”
“A little.”
Like everything else, it’s rationed. Coffee, sugar, meat, cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline of course. The girls swap ration coupons but there’s only so much and she doesn’t like it when Charlie deals in the black market. She tells him it’s unpatriotic.
Charlie doesn’t give a damn. He figures he’s done his patriotic duty all over the Pacific, most recently on a tin can in the cordon line off Okinawa, and he deserves a little coffee and sugar.
The first cigarette of the day is always the best.
Charlie sucks the smoke into his lungs and holds it before letting it out his nose. It makes him feel good, relaxed, at ease with the decision he has to make.
“Then after breakfast you’ll go back,” Millie is
saying.
“I thought you loved me,” Charlie says, flashing his smile. He’s proud of the smile—his teeth are white and even.
“I do.” She does love him, despite everything. That’s why she doesn’t want to see him get into a really bad jam. He’s always going to get in a little trouble, Millie knows, that’s part of what she loves about him.
“Then why do you want me to go?” Charlie teases. “You know we’re shipping out.”
“I know.”
“Will you wait for me?” he asks.
“Of course I will.”
He knows she won’t. Millie needs it, like most women. The story is that men need it and women just put up with it, but Charlie knows better. Maybe not virgins, maybe they don’t, but once a woman’s had it, she wants it again. And Millie wants it. Takes a couple of drinks to loosen her up enough to admit it, but after that, hell, look out.
If he ships out she’ll be with another guy by the time he gets back. He knows this for a fact because she was cheating on some poor jerk when she went to bed with him. Anyway, Charlie knows she won’t wait and tells himself that’s why he’s not going back. She’ll find another guy to sleep with, another guy’s back to scratch with her nails, another guy to tell that he makes her helpless to stop him.
That’s what he tells himself most of the time, and when that story doesn’t sell—usually in those cold gray hours of the early morning when he’s so drunk he’s almost sober—he tells himself a different story—that he doesn’t want to go back to the brig.
Charlie has felt an SP’s baton in the kidneys, along with the metallic taste of his own blood when they decided it was more fun to bust up his face, and he don’t want any more of it. They do whatever they want to do to you in the brig, and then hose it down like that washes it all away. Thirty days AWOL, the captain might send him to the brig and it’s not a chance he wants to take.
That’s what Charlie tells himself, anyway.
Now he watches Millie walk into the kitchen and likes the way she looks in the little white silk robe he bought her.
Millie’s a looker, all right.
That Saturday night he had liberty and headed down to Eddie’s because he heard that’s where the factory girls go. The ship had just limped back for repairs so they had a lot of free time, and after what they’d been through they were all ready to for it too. The scuttlebutt was that Eddie’s was the place to go, so he skipped the usual dives in the Gaslamp and headed to Pacific Beach. The joint was crowded with sailors and Marines all after the same thing, but he saw her and gave her that smile and she smiled back.
Charlie went up to her and talked and then she let him buy her a drink and then another and they talked and he asked her a lot of questions about herself and found out she came out from a little town in North Dakota because she’d always wanted to see the ocean and she wanted an adventure.
“I heard there were jobs for women in San Diego,” she said. “So I got on a train and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Charlie smiled.
“In Pacific Beach, California,” she said.
“Do you like it?”
She nodded. “I like the money and it’s fun living with the other girls most of the time.”
They talked some more and then he asked if they could get out of there and she said okay but where did he want to go?
“Can’t we just go to your place?” he asked. “You said you have a place.”
“I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to go right away. A girl likes a little romance, you know.”
Oh, hell, he knew. He was just hoping this one girl didn’t. But if she didn’t, she’d be the first ever. At least of the ones you didn’t pay. The whores, they didn’t want romance, they just wanted you to get your business over with as soon as possible so they could get on with theirs. It was like eating on a ship—hurry up and finish because there’s a sailor waiting for your chair.
But Millie, she looked at him with those dark blue eyes and he decided that a walk along the beach would be just the thing. You expected blue eyes with a blond girl, but Millie’s hair was jet black, and cut short, and she had these cute lips that made you think of Betty Boop. When he walked close to her she smelled like vanilla, because, she told him, perfume was hard to get.
But the vanilla smelled good behind her ear, in her hair. She was small, what did she call it—petite—and fit nice under his arm as they walked on the sand under the pier. A radio was playing somewhere and they stood and danced under the pier and he held her tight.
“You feel nice,” he said, because it was all he could think of to say and because it was true too.
“So do you,” she responded.
Now he remembers how nice she smelled and how good she felt under his arm and how life was the way he always hoped it would be. There were no flames that night, no acrid smoke that burned his nose, no screams that seared his brain, and the waves touched the beach like kisses, and if he told the truth he would have stayed there forever with her on Pacific Beach and not even taken her back to her place and her bed.
But he did and they made love and he slept through his liberty. He meant to go back that day, he really did, while it was still no big deal, but it was just too good with her in the little bungalow.
Millie shared the bedroom with another girl from the factory, a girl named Audrey from Ohio, and they’d run a rope across the room and draped a blanket over it for a little privacy. Sometimes Millie didn’t want to make love if Audrey was home because she felt shy with the other girl just across from the blanket. But Audrey worked the day shift and was gone a lot of nights with an airman, and sometimes Millie did it anyway with Audrey there and Charlie suspected she liked it because it made her feel dirty.
The bungalow was crowded, but so was all of Pacific Beach since they built the factories and all the people came for work. There was hardly any place to lie down—some people lived in tents in backyards—so Millie felt lucky to stay there even though it was hard to get into the bathroom sometimes and there were two girls sleeping in the living room.
Charlie liked it there too, that was the problem, even though it often felt as crowded as a ship. But it was quiet in the morning with the girls gone on their shifts, and he and Millie got up late and had the kitchen to themselves and they’d take their coffee and cigarettes out into the tiny yard and enjoy the sun.
Audrey had a car and sometimes they’d drive down to Oscar’s for hamburgers, or go to Belmont Park and ride the roller coaster, and Millie would scream and hold on tight to his arm and he liked that. One time when Millie got paid they went to the Hollywood Theater downtown to see the burlesque and she dug her elbow into his ribs when he gawked at Zena Ray, and they both laughed at Bozo Lord even though his jokes were corny. And afterward he got her to admit she thought the girls were pretty, and she was a pistol in bed that night.
On the nights she worked, he’d stay home or hit the bars on Garnet or Mission Boulevard, keeping a sharp eye out for the SPs even though there were a lot of guys walking around in civvies—the 4Fs, sure, but mostly men who had served their bit, or been wounded, or were on leave. So the SPs didn’t look at him too hard and anyway they were busy keeping an eye on the sailors and marines who flooded the sidewalks and had fistfights that spilled into the street.
Charlie would make sure he arrived back to the bungalow before she got home, tired from work but too jazzed up to go to sleep, and he thought it was funny that this tiny girl was building PBYs and B-24s.
“You’ve probably killed more Japs than I have,” he said to her one morning.
“I don’t like to think about that,” she said.
The nights were fun but the days were the best. Most days they’d sleep in late, then have breakfast and walk down to Pacific Beach and swim, or just sit or lie down on the sand and take naps, or walk along the boardwalk and maybe stop someplace to have a beer, and the days just went by and now July has become August, and he has a tough decision to make.
“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.
“The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.
She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.
He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.
Has been for the past couple of weeks, if you want to know the truth. Since that night he woke up with Millie shaking his shoulder, telling him he was having a bad dream.
“It’s okay, baby,” she was saying. “It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.”
He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t a nightmare but real life, and she asked him, “Where were you?”
“None of your damn business,” was all he said, and he felt that his cheeks were wet with tears and then he remembered that he’d been crying and moaning, over and over again, “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back …”
She asked him, “Where? Where don’t you want to go back to, Charlie?”
“I told you it was none of your damn business,” he said, and slapped her across her pretty little Betty Boop mouth. When she came back in from the kitchen she had ice in a towel pressed against her lower lip and there was a little streak of blood on her chin and she said, “You ever hit me again, I’ll call the SPs and turn you in.”
But she didn’t throw him out.
She knew he had no place to go, no money, and would probably get picked up by Shore Patrol. So she pressed the ice to her lips and let him stay, but nothing was ever as good between them after that and he knows that he broke something between them that he can’t fix.
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