by Pete Hamill
The movie was Seminole with Rock Hudson, all about a brave white man building a farm out in the wilds of Florida, until the Seminole War began and everything went to pot. I think Rock was a West Point graduate too, which made him an officer and made me root for the Indians. But in truth, I wasn’t paying much attention and had trouble following the story. We sat downstairs with a bag of popcorn she insisted on buying. When we finished the popcorn, she handed me a napkin and I wiped my fingers, and sat there, with my hands loose on my knees. And then when some Indians came crashing through a door to slaughter some white woman, she grabbed my hand and held it for the rest of the movie.
Her nails were short and the skin on her fingers was coarse. But there was a damp soft center in her palm and she wrapped her hand around my thumb, holding it snug in the damp core. After a while, she leaned her head against my shoulder and her hair smelled clean and there was a faint flowery odor to her too, soap or perfume, and I wondered what it would be like to kiss her neck and her back, and then I felt her breast against my arm, firm, slippery under the blouse from the silky material of a bra. Was the bra white or black? Did the straps leave marks in her skin? My cock was hard for most of the movie. But I felt something else, sitting there with Eden Santana: it was if we had known each other for a very long time.
Then the movie ended and the lights came on.
“Those poor damned Seminoles,” she said, separating herself from me, smoothing her hair. “All they ever did was let escaped slaves come to Florida to be free and the damned white man came down to get ’em and killed everything in sight.”
“I didn’t know that’s what happened.”
“Sure,” she said. “Read the history, child.”
Then I looked toward the exit and saw Turner leaving. He was in a sports shirt. Beside him was another sailor, also in sports shirt and slacks. Red Cannon.
“You okay?” she said.
“Uh, yeah. There’s a sailor there, you see him, going out? He’s from my base. A real jerk, name of Red Cannon. Let’s wait a minute, till he goes.”
She looked at me in a puzzled way. “You afraid of that man?”
“No. I just don’t want a hassle.”
We waited a bit and then went out. She took my hand and held it, and then we were in the lobby. Outside, standing on the corner, were Turner and Cannon. I hesitated for a moment, thinking: Go back inside, go to the john, let them wander away, avoid seeing them, keep them from seeing you with this woman and then, afraid that Eden would think I was a coward went on out. They turned to look at us.
“Hey, sailor,” Turner said, with a big grin. “See you settled in.”
“How are you, Jack?” I said. I didn’t introduce Eden Santana. I looked at Cannon, and nodded a hello. His eyes were slushy again. “I’ll call you next time I’m at Mainside,” I said to Turner. “Or if you get out to Ellyson, come round to the Supply Shack.”
I started to leave, and Cannon said: “Guess they don’t teach no manners in New York.”
I stopped and looked at him. His eyes were without emotion, staring at me, challenging me, judging me too, judging the whole North, coming on with some smirking kind of southern superiority that I didn’t understand. I didn’t care what Cannon thought, but I wanted Turner’s good opinion.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “This is my friend, Eden. Eden, this is Jack Turner. Wendell Cannon. Both sailors.”
She shook their hands in a formal way and there was a lot of pleased-to-meet-you and a knowing, admiring glance from Turner to me that said: You’re doin’ okay, sailor …
“Didn’t I see you over at the San Carlos bar last week?” Cannon said to Eden. “With that Mexican flyboy?”
“Not me, mister,” Eden said, and tugged my hand and started away.
“I could swear it was you,” Cannon said. “You got a twin sister?”
She didn’t answer. She led the way to the corner and turned left on Garden Street, away from the lights of Palafox. There were a few blocks of shops and then houses with white porches and swings and she was still walking, still holding my hand, silent until they were far behind us.
“That son of a bitch,” she said after a while.
“Now you know why I didn’t want to see him,” I said.
“With his plastic face and his dead eyes.”
“It ain’t his eyes that’re dead. It’s his heart.”
“Not dead enough,” she said.
We slowed and there was a little park, dark and deserted, with streetlights burning off in the distance through the trees. We sat on a bench. She smoked a cigarette, breathing hard. Saying nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For you having to hear that crap about the bar at the San Carlos.”
“It wasn’t crap. I was there.”
“With Tony Mercado?”
“Yes.”
She flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the darkness, where it glowed for a moment and then died. I looked at her, feeling her sudden bitterness and regret rising like an odor, and saw that her eyes were filling with tears. I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her to me, trying to comfort her. Or trying to comfort myself, holding her to me, to fend off the feeling that she was going away from me without ever having arrived. She pulled away.
“Men,” she said. The word hung in the dark air. I remember seeing myself suddenly like a character in a comic strip. A thought balloon hovered over my head as I sat on a bench beside a woman who was plunged into despair. Inside the balloon were words: “What does she mean by that? Men. Did she sleep with Mercado, the way that blonde obviously did this afternoon? Did she do it for money? Or does she love Mercado? And if she does love Mercado, what does that do to me? How could I compete with him? His looks, his skills, his officer’s bars, his age, his money? His Leica.” Men.
“Well, I’d better go get my bike,” she said.
The balloon dissolved.
“You’re gonna pedal all the way home?”
“No, I take the bus to Ellyson Field, and bicycle the rest of the way.”
She was up now, and I was walking beside her, back to Garden Street. For more than three hours she had been sweet, warm, intimate; she made me try to define myself and my life; she took a drawing that I’d made and rolled it up and put it in her purse; she held my hand in the dark. Now she was going away.
“You want to talk about this?” I said.
“No.”
Then she turned and looked at me. “Hey, listen, child. This’s got nothing to do with you. You’re nice. It’s not you, if that’s what you’re thinkin.”
“But I want to see you again.”
We were crossing the street, going toward Sears.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“I do.”
“You’re eighteen years old, child. I’m thirty-one.”
“I don’t care.”
“I got two kids.”
“So what?”
“With you, I’m just rockin the cradle.”
“I don’t think so.”
She turned into an alley beside the Sears store and unlocked her bicycle.
“I want to draw you,” I said.
“There must be hundreds of girls your age, you could draw them,” she said, wheeling the bike out of the alley. “That’s what you need. Not an old beat-up lady like me.”
I put my hand around her waist and held her close and kissed her hard on the mouth. She didn’t move. I touched the side of her face and then she shuddered and let the bicycle fall against the wall and she put her hands behind my neck and shoved her belly against mine.
“You silly damn boy,” she said.
Chapter
24
I sit here in the car, the engine running, the radio silent. I am parked in an abandoned gas station, the pumps hauled away, a CLOSED sign hanging at an odd angle in the window. Down the wide street to the right is the entrance to Ellyson Field. Once this
morning, I drove slowly along the familiar road and even more slowly back, but when I started for the motel, I couldn’t go on. I pulled over, to pause on the broken concrete slabs that once were a wilderness of palmetto weeds and scrub and seem certain to be so again. Billy’s old bar is gone. The locker club is gone. And so too is the airfield. The place is an industrial park now, and there is a school for truckdrivers out on the landing strips. I drove in and saw weeds breaking through the cracks in the tarmac. There was stunted summer-baked grass where the barracks once stood and the mess hall has been gutted and converted to a warehouse. The sky is empty and silent.
And I remember waking the day after my first evening with Eden Santana, hurrying into the gray mess-hall morning, wanting to tell everybody about her. There have been many women since then, but none who made me feel that way, made me want to trumpet the news of their amazing existence. I remember that as a Tuesday morning. She had agreed to see me again on Saturday night: a parenthesis in time, but a stretch of almost endless hours if you were not yet eighteen.
In the chow hall, I sat with Miles Rayfield. I’m sure we were both eating Rice Krispies because just as surely the hot dish was creamed chipped beef on toast, popularly known as SOS, or shit on a shingle. Sure, because I remember him turning to me and saying Snap, Krackle, Pop, you goddamned swabby reprobate. And then he went back to reading a letter. He said it was from his wife. I must have looked surprised (he’d never mentioned her existence), because he chattered away almost desperately about how women never knew what they wanted and his woman knew less than all the others. Now she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to move to Hollywood. She had given up ceramics and was studying Stanislavski from a book. She wanted to meet James Dean. She wanted to work with Kazan. Miles just shook his head. But when I suggested that he have her move to Pensacola, where they could get an apartment and he would pick up extra money from the Navy—they called it comrats—he just shook his head again and said, Ah, well … And mumbled about the terrors of taking a pretty woman to a Navy town. Then he said, Hollywood. Hissed it: Hollywood.
After a while, they all came drifting in: Max and Sal, Waleski and Maher, Harrelson and Boswell and the others, hung over, noisy, laughing. Max came over and told me they were going to the Baptist church on Friday night, to investigate ritual murders for the Anti-Defamation League, and Miles laughed, and Sal said that the two of us had to go with them, to protect Max from the insane Baptists and sinister Masons who infested the place. Miles just smiled and nodded until they moved on to another table, joking and grab-assing.
As always, Miles was holding a Pall Mall with his wrist bent, pressing the butt to his mouth in an almost dainty way. That didn’t matter much to me; Miles was Miles. I wanted to talk to him about Eden Santana, ask him whether I should try hard to find out if she was really married, if she really had two kids, and where the kids were. Or should I ignore all that? Should I press her to find out what happened in the San Carlos bar with Mercado? Was it wrong to feel jealous one minute, elated the next? Miles was twenty-three. He would know about such matters. But I didn’t say anything at all because I realized that I didn’t really know him. I was afraid he would use all those words of his, his scorn and contempt, to make fun of me. He was probably my friend, but I wasn’t really sure. I wouldn’t know until we’d been in some trouble together. I didn’t know yet if any of them were my friends.
Then Harrelson came down the aisle behind Miles. He was holding a coffee cup. He ran a finger across the back of Miles’s neck and swiveled his hips.
“Morning, Milesetta,” he said.
“Fuck you, redneck,” Miles snapped.
Harrelson walked on, as if he hadn’t heard Miles reply, and wiggled his ass again before sitting down. I looked at Miles and thought: If I were truly Miles’s friend, I’d smack Harrelson in the mouth. The stupid son of a bitch. But I said nothing.
“That redneck swine,” Miles said. A vein throbbed in his temple. He took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“Sticks and stones, and all that,” I said. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“I know, I know,” he said. But when I looked at him again, there were tears in his eyes behind the thick glasses.
“I’ve got work to do,” he said, and stood up abruptly, grabbed his tray and hurried out.
The morning seemed endless. The weather was warm, the hangars heavy with traffic. I handed out engine parts, filled in forms, entered requisition slips in logs. Harrelson hurried around, looking busy, whistling Hank Williams tunes. In front of me, Miles sat at his desk, typing grimly, speaking quickly on the phone, doodling with a thick black Ebony pencil. Late in the morning, he was sent on a run to Mainside. I got up and stretched and had started for the coffee pot when I glanced at Miles’s doodle. He had made a beautiful drawing of Becket. I called Becket over and showed it to him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Becket said. “We got us an artist here.” He wanted to take the drawing, but I said maybe he should wait and ask Miles and he said, Yeah, sure, of course, you’re right, Miles is sensitive about some things. He laughed.
“Too many things sometimes,” Becket said. “I wonder about him.”
Jonesie came over and said he thought my shoes looked better. The newspaper arrived and on the front page Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, a guy named Dulles, said we wanted peace but didn’t want to be encircled by the Russians and their allies. The big problem, Dulles said, was in Asia, where the Communists were trying to take over Indochina. I wasn’t even sure where Indochina was. The newspaper (and Dulles) said that the Communists had pinned down the French in Indochina and pinned down the United States in Korea, and they’d managed all this without losing even a single Russian soldier. He didn’t say what we should do about it, but his speech didn’t sound like the world was about to turn wonderful.
Just before lunch, I looked up from the paper and saw Mercado at the counter. I went over to wait on him. He smiled. My stomach flopped over. He was so fucking handsome I couldn’t believe Eden would choose me over him.
“Hey, how are you doing, fella?” he said.
“Just great,” I said.
He needed a swash plate and had the forms all filled out, neatly hand-lettered. I went to get the part and saw Becket again. He shook his head and said, “You know something? I’m fum New Awlins, but if I hear ‘Jambalaya’ one more time, I’m gonna throw something.” I came back to the counter. Mercado was reading the newspaper.
“Where you from anyway, Lieutenant?” I said, knowing the answer, but wondering what he’d say.
“Mexico City,” he said. “You ever been there?”
“Nah, this is the farthest south I’ve ever been. I’m from New York.”
“Ah, New York. I love New York. Well, if you’re from New York, you will love Mexico.” He pronounced it May-hee-koe. “It’s a beautiful city with many tall buildings, you know, the skyscrapers. Well, the truth is, not as tall as New York, not as many people. We have beautiful mountains all around the city, with snow on the top, volcanoes, and many beautiful women, and it’s like spring all year. You should come. You look me up and I show you around.”
“Sounds great.”
He signed for the swash plate. “I mean it. You come to Mexico, you look for me.”
He left and I thought: This is probably an okay guy. Open, decent, free of all the officer bullshit you get with the Americans. So why did the sight of him mess me up? I knew why. I’d seen him come out of the San Carlos with a blonde; but I really wanted to know what he’d done there with Eden Santana. I tried not to think about it, pushed back the details that ran through my mind, thinking: Forget it, you’ll go nuts. Two mechanics came in and asked for tools and bolts, and I went to get them. Isn’t Santana a Latin name? I thought. Yes, it was, of course it was. So maybe she was Latin, too. Even with that slurred southern accent. Maybe that was what would give him an edge over me. That and his age and his money and his looks. Maybe she loved him and he didn’t love her back. Yeah: I would
see her Saturday. But who would she see tonight? Or tomorrow night? Or the night after that? Maybe he would offer to take her to Mexico with him. May-hee-koe. The country where all those American outlaws went, racing across the Rio Grande to freedom, a hundred yards ahead of the sheriff’s posse. Maybe Mercado was going to take her there. And here he was, only a few minutes ago, telling me to visit him. In a city where it was always spring and where there were many beautiful women. Mexico.
“Hey, stargazer.”
I looked around and saw Donnie Ray. I handed the supplies to the mechanics. The men signed their requisition forms and left.
“You look like you just left earth,” Donnie Ray said.
“Musta been the chow working on me,” I said.
Donnie Ray smiled and tapped the desk softly. “Listen, when Rayfield gets back from Mainside, grab some swabs and give the deck a good cleanin. It’s Miles’s turn. And yours.”
“Sure.”
Just after four, Miles and I went into the head and filled some large iron-wheeled pails in the sink. We poured in soap and extra pine scent. Each pail had a roller attached to the top. We wheeled the pails the length of the storeroom, to start at the counter and work our way back to the head. Everybody was gone now except Jonesie, who was the duty storekeeper, there for emergencies. I soaked my mop in the soapy water, then pulled it through the rollers until it was flat. Miles was in the next aisle, doing the same thing.
“Uck,” he said. “Filthy. Disgusting. Just the feel of this slimy thing in your hands. A billion microbes per ounce. Cholera. Polio.”
“All you have to do with it is wash the floor, Miles,” I said. “You don’t have to fuck it.”
“I know, but Jesus Christ …”
I mopped in wide broad strokes, covering the floor of my aisle in one stroke. I remember actually liking this job. It was dumb and simple, but it made me feel like a sailor. Miles was grumbling and I peered through the shelving between us and understood: He couldn’t move his body with any grace. None at all. He had his feet together, and was pushing the mop at the floor in small stabbing strokes, whimpering with each push. The mop looked oddly obscene in his hands.