by Pete Hamill
“Miles,” I said, peering past a tray of ballpeen hammers, “you’re doing it wrong.”
“There’s no way to do this right!”
I leaned my mop against the shelves and came around to Miles’s side. “Here, watch,” I said, taking his mop. I didn’t know much about anything, but I certainly knew how to mop a floor. “First thing you do, spread your legs.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. Spread your legs and plant them, see? Like a baseball player at bat. Then—”
“I hate baseball.”
I paused. “You hate baseball?” I was amazed. “How could anybody hate baseball?”
“Bunch of grown men standing around in knickers trying to hit a little white ball with a stick.”
Then I understood. “You never played ball when you were a kid, did you?”
Miles assumed the batter’s stance, then grabbed the mop and started swabbing the deck.
“You never played baseball.”
“Fuck off.”
“You must be some kind of a Communist, Miles. A secret agent.”
He looked at me in a timid way. “So I never played baseball. So what?”
“Miles, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”
He started to get into the rhythm of the mopping. I went back to my aisle, swabbing in broad quick steps. Then Miles said through the shelving: “Baseball isn’t everything, you know!”
“No, and neither is air. But you need it to live, man.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, learn about baseball, and learn to swab the decks,” I said. “Then you can explain it all to your wife. When you move to Hollywood …”
He laughed. “You’ve got a fresh mouth on you, boy.”
I swung the mop almost fiercely now, the moves punctuated by Miles grunting in the next aisle. A screen door slammed. I turned and saw Becket.
“Hey, Miles” he said. “That picture of me. Can I have it? I’d like to send—”
“What picture of you?” Miles said.
I glanced at his desk. It was bare.
“The picture you drew this morning. I saw it on your desk.”
“Not me,” Miles said. “I didn’t draw any picture of you.”
He was lying. Flat out lying. I’d seen the drawing. So had Becket. A good drawing. A beautiful drawing.
“Well, then, who—”
“Maybe someone was visiting,” Miles said. “It wasn’t me.”
Chapter
25
I stayed on the base for the rest of the week, reading books and magazines, saving my money for Saturday night and Eden Santana. One evening after dinner I went up to the barracks where the blacks lived, looking for Bobby Bolden. An older messcook met me at the door, blocking my way, and told me that Bobby wasn’t there. He looked at me as if I were a cop. “Okay,” I said, “just tell him Devlin, from the Supply Shack, came around to talk.” The man nodded in a way that might have been saying: Don’t bother. I went away, thinking: What’s with these goddamned Negroes anyway? Most evenings, I dozed. I wished I had a radio. I thought about New York. And on another evening, Red Cannon caught me asleep on my bunk with my shoes on. He smacked me on the soles with the club.
“Listen, shitbird,” he said, “what makes you think you can sleep wearing shoes on that fartsack?”
“They’re clean, sir.”
“They’re clean? You walkin around in shit all day, on dirt, on gas oline, you say they’re clean?”
I sat up and looked at my shoes. Slowly and deliberately.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Cannon placed a hand on the overhead rack and leaned close to me. An odor of whiskey seeped from his body, though his breath smelled of toothpaste.
“What’d you say, boy?” he whispered.
“I said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ sir,” I said, standing now and looking him directly in the eyes.
“That’s what I thought you said,” Cannon said, his voice rising. “Maybe that fine dark pussy in town’s rottin your brain, boy.”
“I said, ‘Jesus Christ’, sir. I didn’t mention women.”
“You got yo’sef a mouth on you, boy.”
I was taller than Red Cannon by a couple of inches, but he looked like a puncher. So I turned sideways to him, ready to block anything he threw at me. Or try to. But I knew now I couldn’t back away from him. It was too late. The barracks were empty and this was between us. Just us. Without witnesses. If he tried to hit me, I’d hit him back. I must have wanted him to try. Just to get it over with.
“Tell me what you plan to do about it, sir,” I said. “Have me executed, sir? Call a General Court Martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, sir? For saying ‘Jesus Christ’ on my own time, and placing the heel of my shoe on a U.S. Navy fartsack? Sir?”
That was it. A direct challenge. And Cannon knew it. I pulled my mouth tight over my teeth in a tough guy’s mask, but my heart was pounding and I felt trapped in the old cycle. Challenge and reply, hurt, then retaliate. Right off the streets of Brooklyn. I didn’t like it back there either. But it was the way you lived: If you’re pushed, push back. That was the code. If you’re hurt, hurt back. When you’re leaned on, lean back, and I’d just leaned back.
Cannon glared at me. “Get that fartsack washed tonight, boy.” He stepped back. “And remember, I’ll be watchin you.”
With that he turned on his heel and walked out of the barracks. When the screen door slammed behind him, I exhaled loudly. My heart kept fluttering for a long time after that.
Then I saw Miles coming around from the other side of the row of lockers. He’d obviously been there all along. His face was beaming.
“Magnificent!” he said. “Glorious!”
He came forward as if to embrace me, then turned and grabbed a bunk and shook it.
“You faced down Red Cannon!” he said. “The jackass champion of the world!”
“Hey, I—”
“I’m going to call the Pensacola Journal. This should be on page one.”
“Come on—”
“Let’s get some tea at the gedunk.”
On Thursday night, I was back at the dumpster. But I didn’t really mind. If Red Cannon wanted to be the King of Chickenshit, I wasn’t going to let him know he got to me. Whatever chickenshit he threw at me, I would take; it was heavy shit that I wouldn’t. Besides, Donnie Ray let the guys on twelve-to-fours have the afternoon off the next day; so it all evened up in the end. Donnie Ray didn’t like Red Cannon any more than the rest of us did. Now I see myself standing out there under the stars, thinking about Eden Santana, and I want to hug that boy I used to be. He was nervous all week, but at the dumpster he couldn’t drive her out of his mind by reading a book. So he thought all the worst things: that maybe she wouldn’t show up or maybe she was just playing some joke or maybe she was going to meet him while holding hands with her husband, if she had a husband, or with her kids, if she really had those kids. I let all these maybes flower in my imagination, like a baseball fan trying to imagine some disastrous ninth inning or a kid rolling off a cliff.
The problem was simple; I didn’t know very much about her. Sitting with her in The Greek’s, I’d done most of the talking. She’d asked all the questions and I’d tried to answer, tried to sound older than I was, a more experienced man, a man of the world. But while I was answering her questions, she wasn’t telling me anything. Sure, I knew she worked at Sears, but I didn’t know where she lived, and I didn’t know where she came from. I didn’t know why she’d ended up on a Greyhound bus on a New Year’s Eve either, and most of all, I didn’t know why she’d agreed to see me this Saturday night. I was afraid to know. She was beautiful, as beautiful as any woman I’d ever seen. But because she was beautiful, I was scared. She could have all those other guys, veterans, guys with cars and money to spend, officers. Mercado. That was why I couldn’t tell anyone about her. Suppose I told them I had a date with this woman from Sears? The next thing I kn
ew, Max and Sal and the others would probably go to Sears and find her and tell her I had the clap or something. Or they’d wait across the street when I showed up for my big date and if she didn’t come to meet me, they’d see me standing there like a goddamned fool, and I’d never hear the end of it. It would be back to the Dirt Bar and Dixie’s immensities. So I said nothing. The eerie thing was that after Mercado, only one other man on the base had seen her. And that was Red Cannon. Jesus Christ.
• • •
On Friday, the mail arrived just before noon and there was a pale-blue letter for me. My name, rank, serial number and address were written in the sharp Palmer method script the nuns taught all their young ladies. The serifs of the Rs and Ms were hooked and barbed like thorns protecting roses. Donnie Ray gave me my afternoon off and I went over to the barracks after lunch and took off my shoes and lay down on the bunk to read the letter. A few guys came in and out at the tail end of lunch, slamming locker doors. I read:
Dear Michael
Well I got your letter and I’m sorry I took so long to answer but it was busy here after the holiday’s as you can imagine. It was good to here from you. You must be settleing in their by now and everybody here wishes they were there in sunny Fla.
Just after you left, we had to go in on our vacation and get our pictures done for the yearbook. They wont be ready for a while but we’ll have them before graduation, so I’ll have to wait a while until I can send you one. That way I’ll look halfway descent not like a snapshot.
Its real cold here, lot’s of snow since you left. Its all turned to slush tho so its really rotten out and very bad for walking. Everybodys been staying home most of the time. I went down Stevens Lunchanette the other day just to have a coke with Betty K. but none of the crowd was there. Almost everybody in the Army or Navy now and Mike Fishetti went in the Marine’s. Even the Sander’s or the Prospect on a Fr. or Sat. night are half empty. Nobody is sure why they are still joining up because it says in the paper’s that as soon as Eisenhower has a chance, then the war is over. Everybody hope’s so. But its strange they are still joining up, the guys, I mean.
I heard they are going to name an American legion post for Buddy Tiernan. His mother is still a wreck. She just cant believe he got killed in Korea and she holds Truman and the other communists responsable. She says she think’s hes a prisoner over their, in China maybe, and they will fined him when the war is over. She look’s like a zombie. And Carol Wells is even worse. You know, she was suppose to marry Buddy when he got back but now most people think it will never happen.
Michael I hope you understand everything now. I didn’t want to hurt you you know that. I just wanted to go out with you not go steady. I guess its my fault because I didn’t make myself clear. And I was worried you wouldnt respect me for all the other things. So I stayed with you until you went away. But were too young to get all tied up with each other in a perminent way. I read your letter over and over and it made me cry. You say some thing’s so beautiful sometimes, like a poet almost. But some of the thing’s you said like about Paris and all that I dont know what to say about that. I never thought about thing’s like that before I met you and I dont know what I’m suppose to feel. Anyway your their and I’m here and theres nothing to be done about it for now is there?
I just don’t want you to think bad about me. I know you think I cheated on you when I went out with Charlie Templeton but Michael I never would do what we did with anyone else believe me and also I never said I was going steady with you so how could I be cheating on you? We had a thing that was special but maybe it was a mistake. I think of you as a good friend and I hope you know that. Charlie is a freind too but not like we were and were not going Steady (me and Charlie) no matter what you here from the rotten gossips. I always try and think of the good time’s and hope you do too.
I hope your happy down there in sunny Fla. Maybe the best thing that could happen is that you find a real nice girl down their. And we could always be good friends right?
Love,
Maureen
PS Eddie Terrell got married out in Calif, and is going to stay there with his bride when he get’s out of the Marine’s.
I lay back on the bunk and closed my eyes and for the first time in weeks, I was back in Brooklyn. I saw myself on a summer evening leaving the tenement on Seventh Avenue to walk to Maureen’s house on the far side of the hill. I walked past the red brick hulk of The Factory, where my father worked, and then past the bar Maureen’s father owned. I crossed the avenue at 14th Street and walked under the marquee of the Minerva (where Drums was always playing on a double bill with Four Feathers) and up along the brick ramparts of the 14th Regiment Armory and the synagogue on the other side of the street (where I’d served as the Shabbas goy one year). I passed the Syrian grocery store and walked under the trees along the street that ended at the park. I stopped there, dazed by the lights of the Sanders movie house, the crowded bars of Bartel Pritchard Square, the clanging of the trolley cars, the shouts of the men selling the News and Mirror, two cents each, and looked at all the crowded benches along the side of the park and felt the arctic blast of the air conditioning from the movie house, the coldest in all the world. The sight of this place always gave me a thrill.
For an hour, I’d stand there with my friends, joking, stalling, shadowboxing, hanging out. And then I’d move off, walking more quickly down the parkside to the other end of The Neighborhood (a separate neighborhood, really), where the houses were solid and safe and there were no tenements to block the sky or the breeze or change the light on summer afternoons. I went there in the uniform of Seventh Avenue, where I came from: pegged pants and thick-soled Flagg Bros, shoes. The way I dressed had nothing to do with Maureen’s neighborhood, its trimmed gardens and fancy curtains and polished cars parked in driveways. I certainly wasn’t one of them. Her family made that clear the first time they saw me. Her mother looked at my clothes, and retreated upstairs. And her father’s face said the rest: stony, blue-eyed, deeply lined, no humor in the eyes, no understanding, no passion. Only suspicion and contempt. It was the face of a man who might have worked for the English in Dublin, one of the people my mother used to call the Castle Irish. That first night, he studied me like a judge, knowing from my clothes and my posture that I came from the poor Irish of Seventh Avenue. On all later nights I would go up there to see his daughter with anger as strong in my heart as love.
And so the boy I was then, dozing in the Pensacola afternoon, her letter in hand, knew he would probably never take that long summer walk again. Maureen had told him in this letter one more time: What she felt for him was not what he felt for her.
And he thought: Well, the hell with it and the hell with you. Until your goddamned letter arrived, I hadn’t even thought of you, girl, for a couple of weeks. There’s a woman here named Eden Santana. I mean a real woman. More beautiful than you. So to hell with you, with your ignorant writing and your rotten spelling and your stupid grammatical mistakes. I don’t want to hear any gossip about the neighborhood from you anymore. Or this crap about friendship. I was in love with you. I didn’t want to be your goddamned friend. I have friends. I even have friends here, guys you’ll never know. I wanted to love you and for you to love me back … And then thought: Okay, good-bye, so long. See you, girl. Someday you’ll be sorry.
I must have slept then.
• • •
Until Sal shouted: “Hey, what’s this! Get up!”
And saw Max and Sal looking down at me.
“That must’ve been some letter,” Sal said. “Had you talking in your sleep.”
I sat up, tucking the letter into my dungarees.
“Yeah,” I said. “Nice letter.”
“Get dressed,” Sal said. “We’re going to church.”
Chapter
26
Sal led the way, words rushing from him in a torrent, Max and I behind him, carried along by the talk of God and blow jobs and beer and the Navy, words pulsing like blood.
Friday night: all right! We left the locker club and crossed the highway, Sal’s long legs striding ahead, his crew cut at attention, like nails banged into his skull, the sky a lavender wash, cars pulling up in front of Billy’s, and Sal ignoring them, marching on down the highway, our fearless leader.
He turned right at the Baptist church, walking as if he’d been coming here all his life, pushing across a lumpy field to the unpaved driveway and past the white-painted church, until we could hear guitars and fiddles up ahead and a blurry voice on a bad microphone and we were following Sal across a lot to another low white wooden building: the Community Hall. A wide flight of stairs led to doors opening into the hall, the fiddle music louder as Sal led us closer, pointing at a sign saying SQUARE DANCE TONIGHT as if it were a caption to some exotic photograph. Off to the right were a dozen parked cars, a few pickup trucks, at least one hot rod. Behind the hall was a dense green wall of pine trees.
“Sal, I can’t go in here,” Max said. “I’m a Jew. It ain’t—”
“Come on, they got the greatest-looking broads in all of Pensacola in here—trust me!”
At the top of the steps, two young women sat at a card table selling tickets. Looming behind them was a gaunt somber man in black somber clothes. Rimless glasses perched on his long knuckled nose. “Dig the preacher!” Sal whispered. “His nose looks like a prick!” The terrible thing was that it did, right down to its knobby tip, and we started giggling as Sal handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the girls and asked for three tickets. The preacher stepped forward. His extra prick quivered above his thin mouth.
“Excuse me, young man,” he said, holding up a hand to the girls before they could tear any tickets off the roll. “I must warn you. This is a Christian affair. Neither liquor nor beer nor rowdy behavior will be tolerated.”