Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.
“What?” he asks, even though he knows.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Eat my breakfast,” he answers.
“And then what?”
He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to be hot—the summer sun is already pounding the concrete outside—and she should just let things slide so they can go down to the beach and enjoy the breeze and the water, maybe walk down to the end of the pier.
But she won’t let it go. She sits down, folds her forearms on the table, and says, “You have to go, Charlie.”
He gets up from the table, goes back into the bedroom, and finds last night’s bottle. Then he returns to the kitchen, pours some of the cheap whiskey into his coffee, sits down, and starts to drink.
“Oh, that will help,” she says. “You showing up drunk.”
Charlie doesn’t want to listen to her yapping. He wants to get drunk even though he knows that no amount of booze can wash away the truth that no man can stand to know about himself.
That he’s afraid to go back.
Since that moment the Jap planes came crashing onto the deck, spewing fuel and flame, and he saw his buddies become running torches and smelled them burning and he can’t never get that smell out of his nose. Can’t get it out of his head, either, because it comes in his sleep and he wakes up shaking and crying and moaning that he doesn’t want to go back, please don’t make him go back.
Charlie knows what they say about him, that he’s no good, that he’s a hard case, but he knows he ain’t hard. Maybe he used to be, though now he knows he’s as broken as the spine of the ship.
But the ship is repaired now and will be steaming out across the Pacific, this time to the Japanese home islands, and if they think Okinawa was bad, that was nothing compared to what it’s going to be.
It ain’t the thought of the brig and it ain’t even the thought of losing her, because the truth is he’s already lost her. He can take the brig and he can take losing her, but he can’t take going back.
Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.
Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.
“You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.
He stares into his cup and takes another drink.
“If you go back today it will be all right.”
He shakes his head.
Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”
Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts her eye and splashes coffee all over her face and she screams and stands up. She wipes the coffee out of her eyes and feels the blood and then stares at him for a second and says, “You son of a bitch.”
Charlie doesn’t answer.
“Get out,” Millie says. “Get out.”
He doesn’t move except to grab the bottle, take a drink directly from it, and lean back into the chair.
Millie watches this and says, “Fine. I’ll get you out.”
She heads for the door.
That gets him out of the chair because now he remembers what she said she’d do if he hit her again, and he did hit her again, and Millie is the kind of girl who does what she says she’ll do, and he can’t let her go and call Shore Patrol.
Charlie grabs her by the neck, pulls her into his chest, and then wraps his arms around and lifts her up, and she wriggles and kicks as he carries her toward the bedroom because he thinks maybe it can end that way. But when drops her on the bed she spits in his face and claws at his eyes and says, “You’re real brave with a woman, huh, Charlie? Aren’t ya?”
He hauls off and pops her in the jaw just to shut her up, but she won’t shut up and he hits her again and again until she finally lays still.
“Now will you behave?” he asks her, but there’s blood all over the pillow and even on the wall and her neck is bent like the broken spine of a ship and he knows he can’t fix her.
She’s so small, what do they call it—petite.
Charlie staggers into the bathroom, pushes past the stockings that hang from cords, and washes his bloody hands under the tap. Then he goes back into the bedroom, where Millie is lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He puts on the loud Hawaiian shirt he bought at Pearl, the one Millie liked, and a pair of khaki pants, and then sits down next to her to put on his shoes.
He thinks he should say something to her but he doesn’t know what to say, so he just gets up, goes back into the kitchen, finds the bottle, and drains it in one long swallow. His hands shake as he lights a cigarette, but he does get it lit, takes a long drag, and heads out the door.
The sun is blinding, the concrete hot on his feet.
Charlie doesn’t really know where to go, so he just keeps walking until he finds himself at the beach. He walks along the boardwalk, which is crowded with people, mostly sailors and their girls out for a stroll. He pushes his way through and then goes down the steps to the sand and under the pier where him and her held each other and danced to the radio.
Maybe it’s the same radio playing now as he stands there listening to the music and looks out at the ocean and tries to figure out what to do next. They’ll be looking for him soon, they’ll know it was him, and if they catch him he’ll spend the rest of his life in the brig, if they don’t hang him.
Now he wishes he had just gone back like she told him to.
But it’s too late.
He stares at the water, tells himself he should run, but there’s nowhere to run to, anyway, and the music is nice and he thinks about that night and knows he should never have left the beach.
Then the music stops and a voice comes on and the voice is talking like he’s real excited, like the radio did that day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.
Charlie turns around to look up at the boardwalk and all the people are just standing there, standing stock-still like they’re photographs or statues. Then suddenly they all start to move, and whoop and yell, and hug each other and kiss and dance and laugh.
Charlie walks to the edge of the boardwalk.
“What’s going on?” he asks this sailor who has his arm around a girl. “What’s going on?”
“Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.
And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.
Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.
He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.
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.
Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.
DON’T FEED THE BUMS
BY LISA BRACKMANN
Ocean Beach
Welcome to Ocean Beach.
Please Don’t Feed Our Bums.
The stickers were all over the place. On the bumpers of cars. On store windows. Kari had even seen one on a surfboard stuck into the sand by the pier.
They sold them at The Black, a souvenir and head shop that was ten years older than she was, that had been around for forty years. The stickers were round, yellow and olive green, with a silhouette of a tall, hunched man carrying a knapsack. It made Kari think of the Boy Scouts.
It wasn’t that she like
d the bums. The homeless crowd that had moved into Ocean Beach recently wasn’t like the old hippies who lived in their beat-up vans and had been around forever. These bums, they were younger, mostly, single guys, and some of them were a little scary. A lot of them were meth-heads, or so the local gossip went, and she believed that was true; with their greasy hair, the blemishes on their skin, the way their faces had hollowed out and their eyes seemed to have come loose from the sockets, rattling around like marbles in a shot glass.
But she didn’t like the stickers.
“I don’t know, I think it’s mean,” she said.
Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re just way too nice.”
They sat in the small gray patio of South Beach Bar and Grille. It was Taco Tuesday, and the tacos were all $2.50. Sam loved the mahi tacos, claimed they were the best fish tacos he’d ever had.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It makes it sound like they’re animals or something.”
“If they were animals, you’d be feeding them,” he pointed out.
She blushed a little. “I like feeding the cats. They don’t hurt anything.”
“It’s cool that you feed them,” Sam said, taking a bite of his taco.
She did like feeding the cats. The routine gave her focus, and a kind of satisfaction.
It was funny, because Before, she didn’t even want to have pets.
There was a Before and an After, and she knew that she was two different people. Except that the After just felt like Now. Everything always happened all at once; she had a hard time putting one moment before another, one moment after the next.
She knew as well that she wasn’t able to think the way she used to. Knew this mostly because people who knew her Before would let that slip sometimes. But every now and then, she’d know it herself. She’d start to think of something, something quicksilver and elusive, and she could almost catch it, but it would flash between her fingers, gone, leaving just its emptiness behind.
Maybe I’ll be able to someday, she’d think, but she didn’t like to think too much about that. Sometimes, if she tried too hard to grab onto such thoughts, she’d get so frustrated, the anger bubbling up in her like a teapot boiling on the stove. She’d break things, sometimes, when she felt like that.
But that didn’t happen much. It hadn’t happened in a while.
She always set a timer when she boiled water too. So she wouldn’t forget.
That was the key to managing her After life. They’d taught her all these things in rehab. Make lists. Check off your to-do’s. Stick to a routine.
“So you want to go, you know?” Sam asked. He stretched out his arm and settled his hand on hers, his thumb gently rubbing the muscle between her thumb and forefinger. Kari liked it when he did that. Her right hand cramped sometimes, at odd moments, since the accident.
She got out her notebook. Looked at her list for the day. “I can’t,” she said. “David’s home tonight.”
Sam tilted back his head and sighed. “Okay.”
Sam didn’t like David. Which made sense, she guessed. They were about as different as two people could be. Sam was relaxed. Shaggy. That was the word that she used for him. He smoked a lot of pot and liked to surf. He made money doing carpentry and odd jobs, and he wrote things, stories and poems. She didn’t know if what he wrote was any good or not. That was one of the problems she had After. Reading, keeping the words in order, was hard for her; they were like unruly kids who wouldn’t stay in line.
But she didn’t really care if Sam was a good writer. She liked him. He was nice, she thought, and she liked the way he smelled, and she liked how he fucked her.
Made love, she corrected herself. That was how you were supposed to think of it.
She liked how David made love too, but he was really different. He was bright. Sharp. Those were her words for him. She liked to look at him, just to take in his glow. He probably wouldn’t like Sam, if he ever met him. David didn’t have a lot of patience. He lost patience with her sometimes, though he tried hard not to.
But David was from Before. She’d had to tell Sam about David, but she couldn’t see any reason to tell David about Sam.
David was from Before, so he came first. She could keep that much in order.
She knew that sleeping with two different men at the same time wasn’t something she was supposed to be doing. Helen, her therapist, talked to her a lot about that. “You have some problems with impulse control,” Helen said. Kari remembered this because Helen had said it many times, and she’d written it down.
“When you want to sleep with somebody, you really need to stop and ask yourself why. And if this is something you’ll be happy about the next day.”
Kari had actually thought this was pretty stupid advice, but she’d kept that to herself. “Why” was because it could be fun and it might feel good. How she’d feel about it the next day was impossible to predict—it hadn’t happened yet.
Still, she remembered that she had to be careful about things, about getting pregnant, about getting diseases. They’d wanted to give her some kind of shot or some other thing, some device, for birth control, so she wouldn’t have to remember to do anything, but she convinced them that she could remember to take the pill, and she could remember to use condoms, and she did.
Write it down. Stick to a routine.
And she didn’t think that she was being that impulsive. She wasn’t picking up strangers in Newport Avenue bars.
Two men didn’t seem like too many.
It was just better if David didn’t know about Sam.
The check came. They’d each had two fish tacos and a beer. As usual, they split the bill. Sam liked coming here on Tuesdays because it was so inexpensive, and he didn’t have a lot of money.
It didn’t bother her that Sam couldn’t pay for things. She guessed it would have bothered her Before, but not now. She had plenty of money now, and she didn’t care if men could take her out or not, even though she was supposed to. Actually, she wished she could just buy Sam lunch all the time. But that might raise too many questions.
Sam didn’t know that she had money, and she wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to tell him.
That was another thing she and Helen talked about. How she needed to be careful, or people could take advantage of her.
After lunch, she stuck to her Tuesday routine.
First, she went down to the beach, then south, past the faded stucco apartment with the tattered peace flag hung in one window and the yard of sand that had once been a saltwater pool, onto the tide-pool flats where generations had carved things into the soft rock; their names, mostly. Why did people do that? Kari wondered. They wanted to be remembered, maybe, but she read their names now, and she had no idea who they were. She watched crabs scuttle in and out of the crevices, listened to a man sitting on a rock play his guitar, his feet dangling over the ocean, catching spray.
After that, she walked onto the pier off Newport and bought a cup of coffee at the café there. Walked past the guys fishing, the Mexicans and the tattooed Anglo with the Volcom cap, the rusting blood on peeling paint, the faint shimmer of scales on the railing.
At the very end of the pier, she paused and stared out over the ocean, today the color of midnight with sapphire peaks where the wavelets arced and crested.
One Leg was there today. She got out the Tupperware container in her tote bag and retrieved a sardine from it, put it on the splintered rail.
One Leg was a big gull, all white with a yellow beak, one leg amputated above the joint so that it waved around like a conductor’s baton when the bird hopped over to grab the sardine.
“Hi, One Leg,” she said. “There’s another one for you.”
He didn’t seem to be doing badly, even with one leg, but she still liked feeding him.
Then it was time to go north, to Dog Beach. She liked to watch the dogs running free in the sand, splashing in the surf, their owners tossing Frisbees and tennis balls. The other reason she liked to
go there was that a bunch of stray cats lived over among the rocks on the jetty, and she liked to feed them.
There were only a few out now: the little gray cat with green eyes, the big white one with black patches, and a half-grown calico kitten she hadn’t seen before.
“Hi, Cow Kitty,” she said. Cow Kitty let her get really close most of the time. Once she’d even extended her hand for Cow Kitty to sniff, and he’d rubbed against her fingers.
She had a baggie full of kibble, and she scooped out a couple of handfuls and left them on the flat rocks.
And after that, it was time to go home.
Her little cottage wasn’t far from Dog Beach, just off Voltaire. It was old, wood, with peeling paint and boards gnawed by termites, and the wrought-iron gate had rusted in places. Inside, the house was similarly rundown. The couch sagged in the middle; the area rug was frayed; there were cobwebs hanging from the high splintered rafters, but she didn’t care.
It was comfortable. It was hers.
The gray bank of clouds that waited offshore had started to roll in, as it often did late afternoons or early evenings in June. Settling in for the night. She liked that thought. As if the clouds and fog were tucking her into bed.
She would watch TV, maybe. Have something small to eat. Lift some dumbbells, since it was not a gym day, and it was important, her physical therapist told her, to maintain her strength, to reinforce those frayed connections between her brain and nerves and muscle.
Oh, and David was home tonight.
“Spare some change?”
The bum stood just outside her fence, leaning against the telephone pole. She caught a sharp scent of sour sweat, and tar.
“I …” Did she have change?
“So I can get something to eat,” he said. “A dollar.”
He was young, skinny, his body taut to the point where it almost seemed to vibrate. His green eyes were big in his face, too big, his hair greasy and ready to mat, his jeans crusted with grime.
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