by Pete Hamill
She didden come home that night, or the next one either. So I wandered around the house with the radio blastin, smokin and drinkin and takin shits with the bathroom door open. On Sunday morning she still wasn’t back. I got drunk twice that day without leavin the house and even to me the place was beginnin to stink. On Monday morning, I took a long cold shower and got all dressed real neat in civvies and went down to the bank. She wasn’t there. Called in sick, her boss said. Lookin at me funny. Sick of me, I reckon. So I hit the bars, feelin lower than whaleshit and playin the jukes and callin home every hour. She never answered the phone and I realized that I didn’t really know much about her, didn’t know where she came from, where she might of run. I didn’t know her folks. I didn’t even know the name of the damned church. All I knew was she was gone. And I was through. By sundown, I was loaded. I couldn’t hardly walk, but I got on a bus and went to Mission Street and went to the house to pack my clothes. I kept writin a note to her in my head, all about how I was goin back to the Navy where I belonged and I was sorry I was so rotten to her and she should find a nice guy for herself and let him put the papers on the floor once in a while. And of course I was gonna sign this letter sincerely. I opened the door with my key. And heard a noise from upstairs. From the bedroom. Not the kind of noise a burglar makes. I tiptoed up them stairs and when I opened the door, she was naked on the bed, goin down on a fat bearded guy I’d seen one day at the bank. The fat guy looked scared shitless, but Susan didn’t stop. She looked at me with her eyes all crazy and her mouth full of dick and kept goin at it with the fat guy. I went out in the hall and packed my clothes and never saw her again. A week later I got a good-bye letter from her, typed and neat. It was like the charges in a court martial. Or a bank statement. She never said nothin in it about the fat man.
Chapter
4
I hear his voice now. Hear the warnings. Hear the Old Salt telling that boy something about the price of love. Or sex. Or both. And the boy thought: That’s his story; those were Turner’s mistakes, and I won’t repeat either. I’ll find my own woman. I’ll know. Such courage makes the young fight old men’s wars. But the woman was not far away, waiting in the shadows of the South. I remember that we changed buses outside a large, badly lit bus station in downtown Atlanta. We had about an hour to wait. And then Turner said it would be better if we got on board the second bus and found window seats. That way, he said, if it ain’t a full bus, we can stretch out and sleep the rest of the way. I thought he must be right. He had been on a lot more buses than I had. And a lot more women too. I found a seat in the seventh row, Turner in the second. There were more Negroes sitting in the rear, and a lot more empty seats. Pensacola. I was almost there.
She got on just before we left.
I first saw her standing beside the driver, her skin almost olive in the diffused light from the terminal. In all the years since, that simple image has remained in me. I’ve photographed models standing in empty buses, bathed in that oblique light. I’ve tried to capture the same mood on buses in the hills of Nicaragua, or the highlands of Kenya, or moving around Washington Heights. It’s never worked. The pictures in your head are always more powerful than the ones on paper. But there she was, with curly black hair and an oval face and the sort of long, thin nose that I’d once seen described as aquiline. She was wearing a black turtleneck and blue jeans and she was lugging a small, beat-up suitcase. Come to me, I thought, trying to send messages to her through the dark air of the bus. Sit here, woman. Sit beside me and learn to love me and I will meet you every night and you can wear a veil and look at me with dark eyes and I will love you more than all the earth. Here. In this empty seat. Beside me. Please. She started down the aisle, looking left and right, and stopped at the empty seat beside me.
“This taken?” she said. There was something scared in her hoarse voice. If she was wearing makeup, I couldn’t see it. Her lips were full, and she had a mole on her left cheekbone.
“No, it’s open,” I said, standing up. “Need a hand with that?”
I took the suitcase and heaved it up into the baggage rack. The bus was moving now.
“Thanks, sailor,” she said. I sat back down and she seemed to collapse in the seat beside me. She put a large leather purse on her lap. Her legs were clamped together but I could see strong thighs under the jeans. Go ahead, I thought. Talk to her. Say something. Say anything. Speak. She is here. You wanted her here. Speak.
“Goin’ to Pensacola?” I said. Oh you dumb kid. You asshole. Asking a dumb-kid question.
“I guess,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “I hear it’s beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t know. Never been there before.”
Her accent was Southern, but the rhythm was odd. It wasn’t like the corn-pone accents I’d heard in the movies or on the radio. Her voice was more slurred, like the voice of Billie Holiday. I looked at her face again. There were tiny lines around the corners of her eyes and a little pad of fat under her chin. The skin was pulled tight across her cheekbones. I couldn’t tell how old she was. And that excited me even more. All I was sure of was that she wasn’t a kid.
“I never been there before either,” I said. “I’m looking forward, you know. See it …”
“Well, you’ll be comfy there, I reckon. It’s all sailors, so I hear.”
“One of the biggest bases in the country.”
“Imagine that.”
She was curt, in a polite way, but she wasn’t freezing me out. She just seemed to have something else on her mind. Then, without willing it, my eyes drifted to her chest and she must have felt my look and turned slightly to the left, pulling the leather bag close to her body. Even then, she didn’t cut me off.
“You’re a Yankee, right?” she said.
“Yeah. Well, I’m from New York. But we’d go nuts where I came from if you called us Yankees. I’m from Brooklyn and we hate the Yankees. The ball team, I mean.”
“Well,” she said, and smiled, “you’re in the right part of the country f’ hatin’ Yankees.”
Please, do that again. Smile like that again. And say “part” like it was pronounced “paht.” And smile that wide smile, with those hard white teeth. Please.
She turned to me. “Mind if I smoke?” Saying it mahnd.
“No, no, go ahead.” She took a pack of Luckies from the purse and lit one. The movement was pure Ida Lupino. But in the match’s flare, I saw that she had ugly hands. The skin was raw and her veins jutted up and she had chewed her nails down close. Then she took a drag and exhaled and the smoke drifted up into the darkness and I forgot the hands and wanted her to teach me everything she knew.
“Sure don’t feel like New Year’s, does it?” she said.
“It sure doesn’t,” I said, wondering What does my voice sound like? “How’d you get stuck on this bus tonight, anyway?”
She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were dark brown and lustrous and she looked straight at me. Really looked at me. None of that flirting stuff that a thousand generations of women had been taught back home. “How did you?” she said, a little annoyed curl in her voice. I smiled and told her I was assigned to Pensacola. That they gave me a Christmas leave but insisted I report to Pensacola on New Year’s Day. She smiled and glanced at my body and turned away and took another drag on the cigarette. I was right: she wasn’t wearing lipstick.
“Who knows?” she said. “Who ever knows?”
She tamped out the cigarette and put her head back and closed her eyes, holding the purse tightly. When her face relaxed, the lines at the side of her eyes widened. Under the eyes, there were bluish smudges. Fatigue. Or age. I couldn’t tell. The bus was moving into open country now and I could see her only in glimpses of light from passing cars. Suddenly, I wanted to draw her, defining her hair with a million pen lines, all curling, twisting, moving, making the shadows with a brush fat with ink. I wanted her to take off the turtleneck and stand before me and let me draw her. On paper, she would be mine.
Her eyes opened.
“Why are you starin at me, child?”
“ ’Cause you’re beautiful. I guess.” And wished I hadn’t added that “I guess.” I didn’t need doubt. Or qualification.
She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “How old are you?”
And I said (taking it from a movie or a story or from somebody else), “Old enough.”
She smiled again, showing those teeth.
“Old enough for what?”
She giggled when she said that, and I thought of Turner: People laugh at sailors.
“Old enough to tell you you’re beautiful.”
She fumbled for a fresh cigarette and sighed. “Well, I sure don’t feel beautiful. But I guess I’ll take the compliment. Thank you, child.” She lighted another Lucky and offered me the pack and when I shook my head, she tucked them away. She held the cigarette in her left hand, which was bent almost at a right angle to her arm. “You got any vices, child?” I hated that “child.” It sounded as if she was playing with me. Keeping me at a distance by treating me like a kid. And I thought: Give her the worldly look, the Flip Corkin set of the mouth. I assumed it, and shrugged off her question in a weary way. She said “You got somethin wrong with your mouth?”
Shit.
“No. Why?”
“Never mind.” She took a deep drag and leaned back and blew a perfect smoke ring, then a second smaller one. Just like the Camels sign in Times Square. And I thought, She’s performing for me. Maybe she’s trying to act as cool for me as I am for her.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” I said.
“A sick damn cousin of mine. And I mean sick in the head. That girl knew everything bad there was to know. Started me smokin when I was eight.”
“You’re kidding. Eight?”
“Well, I tried it when I was eight. Just puffin and like that. I really started serious when I was nine.”
I laughed and so did she.
“Where you from?” I said.
She paused. “Down here. From the South.”
“Any special place?”
“No.”
She was avoiding an answer, pushing me back. She stared at her cigarette. Then in the back of the bus someone started to sing: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot …” She turned, as if to listen, then took a small nervous drag. “And ne’er be brought to mind?…” Others were joining in, and I was humming, and she started to sing too, very quietly, and tamped out the cigarette and closed her eyes. “For auld lang syne, my dears, for auld lang syne …” The bus was loud with the song now, with New Year’s Eve, with the sadness of the old words in a sad bus heading south. “We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet …” She opened her eyes. They were brimming. When she closed them, tears slipped down the sides of her face. “For auld lang syne …”
She didn’t open her eyes again. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Then they were still. The bus grew quiet. We passed through an endless region of blackness. Then, on a long wide turn, she fell gently against me. Deep in sleep. And didn’t move. I could smell her hair. Clean and washed. She smelled a lot better than I did. There was a slight snore coming from her. Her right arm was flat and still on my thigh, lying there for a while, and then her hand took hold, hugging my leg in the dark. My heart moved quickly, pumping excitement through me. I was sure this was a signal, a moment of intimacy, a display of confidence and safety. I was desperate for the love of a woman. And here she was. We’d met in the dark on a New Year’s Eve and she was telling me from sleep that there were joinings that did not depend on words. I could feel her breath against my arm, the rhythmic rise and fall of her body. Old enough, I thought.
Chapter
5
Almost as soon as she had appeared in my life, she was gone. I woke up suddenly in a world full of morning green. The woman’s seat was empty. I turned and saw other empty seats on the bus, and a black man with gray hair looking at me in a knowing way and Turner four rows in front, sleeping with his head against a window. But the woman wasn’t on the bus. She’d talked to me and slept against me and had gripped my flesh and now she was gone. Like that. While I slept. I didn’t even remember falling asleep and cursed myself for weakness. And then thought: Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I made this up. Maybe my desperation for a woman had invented her, brought her on board this bus on a lonesome New Year’s Eve, with her oval face and rough veined hands and wild hair. But I checked the ashtray. And like one of those scenes at the end of a fairy-tale movie, there was physical proof of the angelic visitation: her crushed Luckies.
So I gazed around, full of her leaving (even now, all these years later, I fear a woman’s departure during sleep). And angry with myself. I was such a goddamned kid that I didn’t find out where she was from and where she was going. I hadn’t even found out her name. I stared at the passing country, my eyes drowned in a billion shades of green. Dark, bright, rich, glossy. On all sides of the road as the bus rushed along on its ribbon of tar. She’s out there somewhere, I thought, as the meshed greens rose like walls when we picked up speed on a downslope, and then separated as the bus settled. I could see foliage at the edge of the road and beyond that a swampy river, and, away off, a haze hanging in the branches of the forests. She’s here in the green southern world.
This was before I knew the names of the natural world. But I was looking at broom grass and blackjack oak, elder and sassafrass, honeysuckle and sycamores and water oak and willows. And in a blur I felt her hand move in the drowsing dark, holding my cock, her voice small and fearful, my hand led under the black turtleneck to the fullness of her breasts. That was real. Or it was a dream. I’m uncertain even now. I looked for reassurance to the Luckies in the ashtray. And turned away to see the river moving sluggishly in its swampy channel, and saw (but did not recognize) banks of abandoned sugar cane, Spanish moss draping live oaks, sudden movements in the darker green, insects hovering like helicopters and then suddenly jabbing the surface of the opaque water. Her veined hand, her breasts. I saw abrupt saddles of dry land covered with shivering grass as her voice shivered in the blur and then we were again in the darkness of the swamp. Trees rose monstrously, blocking the sky. There were mangrove trees among them, their roots plunged into the water, gnarled and knuckled, like huge hands frozen while searching for some smooth and agile quarry. I will find her.
And then the swamp was gone and the bus moved into a zone of luminous blond light. The earth itself was lighter, sandier, the grass bleached, and I began to see houses off in the distance, made of silvery unpainted boards, with plumes of blue smoke drifting up from brick chimneys. In the lee of a small hill, three crumpled-looking cows lay under a giant shade tree and beyond them a white boy galloped bareback on a chestnut horse.
I had no sense that any of these things were real. The woman who had sat beside me in the night: Was she real? And were these real rivers and trees and swamps and insects, real shacks and cows and horses? I wished I could stop the bus and wander around in this strange new morning world. This South. Wander until I’d found her. Please stop the bus, driver. Let me touch the South. Let me find my woman. I wanted to see it with her, understand it, read books and maps, ask a million questions, find out the names of the trees and the towns and the people. I wanted to know what armies had fought across the landscape and who the heroes were. And the villains. And the explorers. And the wild men. The South. I’m in the South.
I swore that I would find her. Track her down. Discover where she got off and retrace the steps. Just like a detective. Like Canyon. Or Buz Sawyer. Like Holmes or Philip Marlowe. Ask people and describe her. And finally meet her at dusk somewhere, and she’ll say, How old are you? And I’ll say, Old enough. And she’ll say, Don’t you have a woman back home? And I’ll say, Not anymore. And she’ll say, Well, you might as well spend the night. Yes. Like that.
Then up ahead there was a gigantic brightening, the sky suddenly fuller and whiter. The bus heaved up a long sloping rise and the trees became sparse and then at th
e crest of the rise I could see the land falling away for miles, and the smudged air of many chimneys and the first gas station and a restaurant called Mom’s and a sign saying BAIT and then groups of Negroes, men and women, walking along the sides of the road and cars falling in behind the bus and flatbed trucks moving toward us in the other lane. I opened the bus window and was slapped by a hot, damp wind. And then, beyond the buildings and the smoke and the scrubby mottled surface of the land, out past the trucks and the Negroes, I could see the wide blue waters of the Gulf.
“Well,” Turner said, standing in the aisle beside me, stretching the muscles of his face, cracking his knuckles, “we’re here.”
Chapter
6
One night, after we had made love, my third wife asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I laughed and said she didn’t want to know. Turning in fury, slamming the pillow, she insisted. She was in the stage of our marriage when she was demanding some abstraction called intimacy, the most favored word that year of women’s magazines and the self-help industry. “If you don’t tell me,” she hissed, “I’ll never ever know you.” Rose had a genius for making small talk seem like a stickup. I reached for a cigarette and sighed and started to calculate. But my long pause filled her with the grief she must have been seeking; she sobbed, she cursed, she pulled a pillow over her head. And I tried to remember all those faces, the blurred flesh of three decades and five continents, blond hair and brown, pale skin and olive, bodies thin and thick. Furious, she got up, slamming the door on her way to the bathroom, and was gone a long time, and when she came back, I said I thought the number was around twelve hundred. But then, I added, I couldn’t be expected to remember everything. She fell back as if wounded and lay in a theatrical state of trembling shock. I knew almost immediately that I should have lied; some truths are always unacceptable. To say that she had asked for this information—had demanded it—wasn’t sufficient excuse. Actually telling her was cruel, even stupid. So then I lied. In the name of peace. I told her that I was only kidding, that I’d slept with only twenty-odd women, including wives, and none were as good as Rose was in bed and she smiled through tears and looked grateful and in an hour was talking about Elizabeth Taylor’s diet. But as I lay beside her in the dark, and then made love to her again (another lie), with my brain flooding with the images of other women, I remembered the first. The woman I’d seen so briefly on a bus. The woman named Eden Santana. And tonight, close to the Gulf again, I am full of the aching loneliness I felt the first time I thought I had lost her forever. Eden Santana.