by Pete Hamill
Through the screened window, I could see sailors in white hats walking in pairs in the distance, and more white-painted wooden buildings, and then the main administration building, all brick with white trim, rising three stories out of a plaza, a control tower on top, its wide windows made of green-tinted glass. Thinking: I’m here. On the first morning of a new life. This is. New York was. I found myself breathing the thick air as if it were food.
Donnie Ray Bradford came back. His face looked troubled but he said nothing and began to explain what I would be doing. Filling out requisitions for re-supply. Servicing the mechanics and electronics’ mates and even an occasional pilot. “We call them customers,” he said, “though they don’t pay for a damned thing.” They came here to the Supply Shack for their parts or for new tools. And they would wait to be served at the long wide counter at the front of the building. Usually they would have their requisition slips filled out, approved by a superior. “But they might not always have the numbers right,” Donnie Ray said. “So you’ll have to double-check the numbers in the book.” It wasn’t all tedious detail; there were housekeeping chores too. The storekeepers cleaned the Supply Shack once a day, swabbing it down on a rotating basis. And we weren’t imprisoned in this building; sometimes we had to go to Mainside on a truck to pick up new supplies. A bunch of the crew was over there now.
“You gotta watch this weather, too,” he said. “You think ’cause it’s Florida it’s always hot, like yesterday, today. But it sometimes gets goddamned cold. These big storms come down from Canada and take half of damned Alabama with them. Most of the time it’s too hot. All the time it’s too damp. So you gotta keep parts dry and clean. Otherwise they end up little blobs of rust. And get all the numbers right on the forms. You get one digit wrong, you end up with a jeep instead of a screwdriver …”
His voice was soft, but there was an edge underneath. It was as if he was reciting a set speech and had something else on his mind. He said other things; I didn’t really hear them all. I felt blurred. Ready for the sleep I’d missed while guarding my dumpster.
“You got a driver’s license, right?” he said.
“No, I don’t, Donnie Ray.”
“Really? How come?”
“I don’t know how to drive.”
He looked surprised. “You don’t know how to drive?”
“Never learned.”
“Hell, everybody knows how to drive.”
“We didn’t have a car in our family,” I said, already tired of the old explanation. “Nobody had cars where I grew up. So there was nobody to learn from.”
Besides, I wanted to say, but didn’t: I’m the oldest son. My father was born in Ireland and my mother’s dead and I’m the first American. I had to learn the American things first. Baseball and football. Sugar Ray Robinson. And Batman and The Spirit and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And Charlie Parker late at night on Symphony Sid. I guess I’ll have to learn to drive, too, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Well,” Donnie Ray Bradford said, “you can load and unload till you get a license.” He glanced out a window at a lone sailor, then back to me. “Someone around here’ll teach you.”
He said all this in a quiet, even tone. No redneck bullying. None of Red Cannon’s malignant style. He talked to me as if I were a man, not a slave, not an inferior, not a boy. He ended by repeating, “Welcome aboard, sailor.” I liked him for that. I liked him a lot. He went off to use the phone again. Then another sailor came over. His name was stenciled above the pocket of his shirt: Harold R. Jones. A second-class storekeeper on his second hitch. He had lank blond hair that lay flat on his skull. Wary eyes. Dungarees so heavily starched they looked as if they’d crack when he walked. He was holding a requisition slip.
“Gimme a hand,” he said casually.
“Sure.”
We went into the back room together, and he led the way to a long flat crate that contained a rotor blade.
“Donnie Ray looks nervous,” I said. “He always that way?”
“Yeah, he’s a bit of a nellie,” Jones said. “But he’s extra nervous today. We got a missing sailor. Jimmy Boswell didn’t make muster. He’s Donnie Ray’s big buddy.”
“You mean he’s AWOL?”
“Who knows? I’m sure Donnie Ray didn’t report him yet. He just don’t know what the skinny is on Ole Boz. The man likes his whiskey, so maybe he got himself in a nice little car wreck somewhere. Nobody knows. Donnie Ray called the hospitals. But nothin turned up yet. Here, grab that end …”
I was surprised at how light the crate was. We lifted it and laid it on a dolly. Jones looked at my shoes.
“You better do something about those shoes,” he said.
My black shoes looked dull, but they weren’t dirty. Jones was wearing shoes brought to a high gloss.
“Man that won’t shine his shoes, won’t wipe his ass,” Jones said, as we moved the rotor blade to the front room. A man that won’t shine his shoes won’t wipe his ass? The wisdom of the ages, a certain entry for The Blue Notebook. At the counter, Jones showed me how to fill out the forms and had a mechanic sign for the rotor blade. Jones went back to his desk and I started for mine when I met another second class. He was coming out of the head. His name was Jean Becket.
“The shithouse looks like Poirl Harbuh t’day,” he said.
“You from New York?” I asked.
“New Awlins. Why?”
I tried to explain that in New York, particularly in Brooklyn, people said “poirl” for “pearl” and “terlit” for “toilet.” They could say things like “I dropped my poirls down the terlit.” If Waite Hoyt was pitching for the Dodgers, and something happened to him, they’d say, “Hert’s hoit.” They could also tell you that the men’s room looked like Poirl Harbuh.
“Just like New Awlins,” he said. He had a wide gap-toothed grin and eyebrows that touched, making him look wicked. “What’s your name again?”
It was that easy. Becket showed me the metal bins where smaller parts—tools, nuts and bolts—were stored. Donnie Ray gave me a new Navy coffee cup. The phones were ringing and traffic was heavy at the counter. I watched Jones and Becket work and then I handled a few requisitions myself, and during a lull I took a walk down to the coffee urn.
A bony man with a pinched face stood beside the urn, a cup in his hand. His shirt told me his name was J. T. Harrelson. He groaned softly, then again. I poured myself a cup. Harrelson stared bleakly at the empty morning. His hands trembled.
“You okay?” I said.
“Ah’ll never be okay again,” he said. “That gah-dam white lightnin eats you gah-dam guts out.”
“Maybe you need somethin to eat.”
“Ah’d rather swallow a can of worms.”
Harrelson looked at me, squinting. I must’ve been smiling.
“Who in the hell are you?”
I told him and started to shake his hand. But he was using both hands for his cup.
“And where you from, boy?”
I said the fatal words: New York.
“Gah-dam. Yawl got anybody left in New York? More gah-dam New Yorkers in this man’s Navy now than I seen in thirteen years.”
“Ah, well,” I said and walked away. I didn’t like the hint of coldness about Harrelson, the curl to his lip when he mentioned New York. I went back to my desk and studied the parts catalogs. The coffee cooled and tasted sour.
Suddenly the side door slammed open. A gangly sailor in dirty dress whites lurched into the room. Everything stopped. Donnie Ray looked up from the telephone, at once alarmed and relieved. The sailor was in his twenties and was wearing a third-class AK’s V-stripe. His eyes were wild and red. His big hands waved in the air, jerking, twisting, as if detached from his arms. His shoes were dirty and scuffed. The missing Boswell.
“Hank’s dead!” he screamed.
Donnie Ray came on a run. Becket emerged from the back room and hurried over, with Jones behind him.
Donnie Ray said, “Gah-dammit, Boz, I b
een looking all over for—”
“Hank’s dead!”
Donnie Ray took his arm but Boswell shook him off.
“Hank’s dead, gah-damnit! Hank is fuckin dead!”
“What are you—”
“Hank Williams! Hank Williams died, Donnieray! They found him dead in some car in West Virginia! Just dead. Dead in the back of a Cadillac!”
I’d never heard of Hank Williams. I thought: Why is Boswell so upset? What’s going on here? Then Harrelson was there, his face ashen. He said: “Hank Williams is dead?”
“Dead. He’s fuckin dead.”
Boswell’s eyes closed, then widened.
“Dead!” he screamed and sat down hard on the concrete floor. “It’s on the radio. In the fuckin newspapers. Hank’s dead. On New Year’s fuckin Day.”
Harrelson hurried to his desk, took out a small radio and started turning the dials. There were three sailors waiting at the counter now, staring down the hundred-foot length of the Supply Shack, watching us. Donnie Ray leaned over Boswell.
“Boz, you gotta go somewhere, get cleaned up,” he said. “How’d you get on the damned base anyway?”
“The back,” Boswell mumbled. “You know, the hole in the fence …”
Jones and Becket grabbed him under the arms and started to lift his dead weight off the floor. Donnie Ray nodded at me to help. I grabbed Boswell’s waist and together we got him to his feet. Donnie Ray glanced at the people waiting for parts. About five of them now. Boswell started sobbing. “Poor fuckin Hank. Poor skinny redneck bastard. Poor drunk sonuvabitch …” As if describing himself. Then he passed out in our arms.
Donnie Ray said, “Can’t even get him in a shower in this shape. Can’t lay him out in the barracks, or McDaid’ll find him.” He glanced around, then said: “Put him on a pallet.”
He walked quickly away to the front counter. We carried Boswell into the storeroom, with Becket leading the way through the rough wood tunnels formed by stacked crates. In an empty area against the far wall there were a half dozen pallets neatly piled on top of one another. We moved toward them and then Boswell was suddenly awake.
“What the hell you doin?” he said. “Where you takin me?”
“You’re drunk as a skunk, Boz,” Becket said. “We’re gonna let you sleep it off.”
Boswell looked angry and trapped. “You gonna make me?”
“Not if we don’t have to,” Becket said.
There was a pause, as if he were trying to remember something that was very important. Then his eyes widened again.
“Hank’s dead.”
“Yeah, we know that, Boz. It’s a terrible thing. But to be poifectly frank, it aint our business today. We got other things to do.”
Suddenly Boswell shook us off and kicked Becket hard in the stomach. He whirled and punched Jones in the chest with a wild right aimed at his face. Then he turned to me, blinking. He started another roundhouse right and I bent at the knees, went under the punch, and ripped a hook to his belly. He went hooooo. And sat down. He blinked again and then keeled over.
Becket looked at me: “Jesus. Where you loirn to do that?”
“I used to work out,” I said.
“You boxed?” Jones said.
We were lifting Boswell onto a pallet. “A little. I wasn’t very good.”
I didn’t say anything else. I was as astonished as they were at the way Boswell went out from one punch to the body. Anything I said would sound like bragging. Boswell was stretched on a pallet now, and Becket built a little fence of them to hide him. Then Jones laid Boswell’s white hat on his chest.
“Will you look at this man’s shoes?” Jones said.
Chapter
13
There are entire years of my life I can’t remember at all, and days that are as dense in memory as granite. That first day on the job at Ellyson Field was one of those. First, I learned about Hank Williams—which is to say, I learned about the American South. I knew only a few things about this vast region of my own country: In the 1860s, the North had fought a bitter, brutal war against the Confederacy, a war that we were taught was about slavery; colored people still were not complete citizens there; southern politicians were figures of fun on radio shows. Good baseball players came from the South and they played a lot of football. But I didn’t know anything about the people; my ignorance extended even to the lies, for I was probably the only person left in America who had not even seen Gone With the Wind. That day I learned that the South of Hank Williams was not the South of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. On the day Hank Williams died, the air itself seemed charged with emotion, packed with loneliness and loss, as the radio stations played the man’s songs over and over, the deejays sounding hushed, tearful, even reverent. At first I thought this was comical; I even turned away to smile as the corn-pone voices grieved on the radio. But then, as the words and voices accumulated, I knew they must be serious.
On the news shows, everything else was forgotten. Instead, we heard the governors of Florida and Alabama and Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, all saying what a great tragedy the death of Hank Williams was for the South, for America, for the human race. This all sounded ludicrous then; more than thirty years later, I think they were probably right. The radio reporters interviewed other hillbilly singers, and though their names meant nothing to me, there was something genuine about their heartbreak. We heard too from sobbing people in the streets of a dozen southern cities. By late afternoon, at least two women were claiming to be the true wives of Hank Williams and were described as shocked and in tears. I felt as if I’d arrived in a country where the king had just died and I didn’t even know his name.
At one point, an announcer said that a grand farewell to Hank Williams was being planned at the Municipal Auditorium in Montgomery, and Harrelson shouted: “Ah’m goin!” He slammed the desk with the flat of his hand. “Ah don’t care whether Ah got duty or not—Ah’m goin!”
And the details began to come in, too. A cop named Jamey was on the radio, explaining that he found Mister Hank Williams dead in the back of a Cadillac in Glen Burdette’s 24 Hour Pure Oil Service Station on Main Street in Oak Hill. That was in West Virginia, at five-thirty in the morning. There were two men with Mister Williams, the cop said. One of them was the driver of the Cadillac, the other a friend. They were taking him to Canton, Ohio, where he was supposed to sing in a concert that night. The weather was so bad they couldn’t risk a plane. “That’s it!” Harrelson shouted. “They killed him! The driver and that so-called friend. They killed him cause he was too damned good to live!” The cause of death, a coroner said, was probably heart failure. “But we’ll have to wait for an autopsy.” Harrelson didn’t have to wait: “They gave him some kinda shot, you wait an see. They killed him.” Hank Williams was twenty-nine. Only twelve years older than me. “Shit,” Harrelson said. “Shit.”
As the music played, Harrelson moved around in a distracted way, singing along with Hank Williams in a low, tuneless voice. She warned me once, She warned me twice. But I don’t take no one’s advice … Becket knew the words too, but only his lips moved, and he kept working, hurrying from desk to counter to storeroom, sometimes enlisting my help. He didn’t try to explain the spreading sorrow. That was another thing I learned: I wasn’t one of them, maybe never could be one of them, because the things that were deep in me didn’t exist for them, and the things that were deep in the southerners didn’t mean anything to me. I could be quiet, that was all. I could respect them. But I couldn’t truly feel what they felt. I was an outsider here, as they would be in the gardens of Brooklyn.
The customers were all talking about Hank Williams too. Musta been the whiskey, they’d say. A shake of the head: All them women. Then a glance out at the airfield and heads cocked as they heard the lonesome voice from the radio. The honky-tonks got ole Hank at last.
Then I heard a Hank Williams song I actually knew. I tried so hard, my dear, to show / That you’re my every dream … The tempo was different, t
he accents broader. But I knew that one. You’re afraid each thing I do / Is just some evil scheme. Backed by strings, sounding like South Brooklyn, Tony Bennett sang it all through the fall of ’51, his voice aching the way my heart did then, as I tried to convince a girl named Maureen I loved her. A mem’ry from your lonesome past / Keeps us so far apart … Until I met her in the back room of the Caton Inn on a Saturday night, held her close, whispered the usual lies into her hair. On a night of bitter wind. Why can’t I free your doubtful mind? / And melt your cold, cold heart?
That was when the death of Hank Williams finally touched me too. Hearing “Cold, Cold Heart.” After that, I listened more closely, imagining that the whole South must be full of men who remembered women they held in their arms, while Hank Williams sang from the jukebox or the radio. The man’s voice was so goddamned lonesome and hurt that I felt sure nothing could have saved him. He had six Cadillacs and a mansion in Nashville (the radio said) and a couple of kids and those two wives. But here he was: dead at twenty-nine. So I listened to all the rest of it, as Harrelson turned up the volume, and a crowd of customers began to gather at the counter. To me it was like the day Roosevelt died, when everybody in the neighborhood listened to radios and some cried and others wondered who the hell this Harry Truman was; later, when Jack Kennedy was killed and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and John Lennon, all the great public killings of my time, I was always working, professionally numb as I chased the faces of disaster. As a photographer, I was paid to focus deeply on the moment, but late at night, exhausted in a motel room in Dallas or Memphis or Los Angeles, I would remember the death of Hank Williams. I was seventeen again and looking over at the side of the counter in the Supply Shack in Pensacola, where a mechanic with grease-blackened hands was sobbing openly and another man was trying to console him. I’d never seen a man cry like that before. “Come on, now, Jimmy,” his friend was saying to the mechanic. “Don’t you cry, boy. Don’t you cry.” And then someone brought in a copy of the Pensacola News and there was a picture of Hank Williams on page one, and they all looked at it in silence, as if the picture and the print and the paper finally and irrevocably had confirmed what they’d heard on the radio but didn’t fully believe. Another man left in tears.