by Pete Hamill
“To him? The husband?”
She smiled in a knowing way. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you all about that. Not tonight. Not now. It’s just too damned beautiful out here for that.”
She stood up and looked at the moon and the stars, and then said, “Don’t look now. Don’t watch me.”
I stared at the sea and heard her moving behind me. And then she came up beside me and handed me her stockings.
“Couldn’t stand them one more minute,” she said.
The stockings were silky and feminine in my hands and I rubbed them slightly as we walked, thinking that they’d been where I’d never been. For a second, I wanted to put them in my mouth. And then rolled them and slipped them in my pocket.
“Look, you can see the sea oats, up on the dune. See? The dark stuff? That’s what holds the dune together. They got deep wide roots, and they move under the sand, like steel in concrete, you know?” She led me over to look at the dark clusters in the light of the moon. “You ever see anyone pullin’ them up, you give ’em a good quick hop in the butt, hear? Lose them sea oats, you lose the whole damned beach.”
“I’ve never seen them before.”
“You have a beach in New York, don’t you?”
“Yeah, a bunch of them. Coney Island and Rockaway and Jones Beach, a bunch of others.”
“Well, if they don’t have sea oats, you’re gonna lose them.”
We climbed the dune. The island was all dark, the nearest lights a mere glow across the bay in the town, and the wind was rising and she looked up at the stars.
“There’s something I’m gonna do. Something I wanted to do all my life,” she said out loud, as much to the night or the wind as to me. “Gonna do it.”
She turned her back and reached up under the dress and peeled off her panties. She looked at me as she stepped out of them, then smiled faintly, and handed them to me.
“I want to feel the wind,” she whispered.
And faced the sea, lifting her dress, her legs spread and planted to the ankles in the sand. She threw her head back and closed her eyes and shivered. The wind moved between her thighs and I could see her dark roundness and then she shivered again. And then again. The wind was sighing and a buoy was ting-tinging away off and a moaning sound rose from her throat.
I held her panties to my face. They smelled of salt and the dark sea.
Chapter
28
She drove me back to Ellyson Field.
“I’d rather go home with you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to fool you.”
“I don’t think you’d do that.”
“I might.”
“Just tell me the truth,” I said. “Even if it hurts.”
“That’s a deal. If I can’t tell you the truth, I won’t say anything at all.”
“Deal.”
We moved past bars and car lots and churches. I felt the lump of her rolled stockings in my pocket and slipped them out and laid them on the seat.
“You get awful quiet sometimes, child.”
“Maybe I can’t tell you the truth either.”
“You better not bottle too much up. Lots of people do that, and it drives em crazy …”
The lazy drawl rose at the end, as if she had more to say. But she just shook her head in a rueful way. She was driving slowly now behind a fat squat truck. She looked out at the side, trying to see ahead, started to move once, suddenly darted back in lane as a car roared by in a blaze of light. “Gah-damn.” Then she looked again and gave it the gas, biting her lower lip, and roared past the truck, honking her horn, half in anger, the rest a tease. Then another car was in front of us, lights very bright. She whipped into the right-hand lane, missing the other car by a foot. She laughed like a teenager and shook her head and then slowed again. I was beginning to love the way she did things: she was confident, sure, enjoying risk and escape. Who was she anyway? I turned to her.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Why did Red Cannon get you so upset last week? You know, about seeing you in the San Carlos bar with that Mexican pilot? That Tony Mercado?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
She took a deep breath.
“Okay … I went over there with a woman from work. A friend of mine, Roberta Stone. Just to have a drink. After work. That’s all. Real innocent. Not to pick up men, hear? Just a drink on payday. I hadn’t had a drink since I got to Pensacola, savin’ my money for this car … We sat at a corner table. That fella Tony Mercado was standing at the bar and he saw us, and sent over a drink, and smiled at us. Roberta thought he was cute. She thought more than that, the truth be told … Well, maybe he saw it in her eyes. Anyway, he came over. The trouble was, he started makin’ moves on me, not Roberta. And she got all upset and drank too much and though she was comin’ on strong, this Tony Mercado backed away. Anyway, he had a key on him. A room key. For upstairs there in the San Carlos. And he slipped me the key. Well, I hadn’t been with a man … It’s been a long time. For good reasons …” She lit a cigarette with a small Zippo lighter, let the smoke drift out the window into the cool air. “But I didn’t want him. I didn’t like the idea, guy comin’ over, slippin’ you a room key. And besides, Roberta more or less staked her claim. I wasn’t gonna do that to her. I mean, the guy was handsome, and was charming. But just like that? Picked up in a bar? No thanks. There were a lot of sailors and Marines in there, including, I guess, your Mister Cannon. So I gave Tony Mercado back his key and said, No thanks. You know, slipped it to him under the table. Well, he smiled in that charming way, real polite, and then turned to Roberta.” She took a deep drag, let it out slowly. “Roberta took the key and then he left and then she left to go upstairs and then I left.”
She flipped the cigarette out onto the highway. The locker club was less than a mile away.
“So that’s the whole story. Pretty damned long-winded answer to your question, wasn’t it? Why’d I get so upset? Cause that red-headed sailor with the dead face—he acted like I was some whore who works the bars. And I’m not.”
“You don’t even have to say that.”
“But Roberta isn’t either. Some women do for loneliness what they’d never do for money.”
“Is she a blonde?”
“Why, yes … A real bright blonde.”
“He’s still seeing her.”
“You’d make a good cop, child.”
“I wasn’t looking for her or for him, Eden. It was sheer luck.”
“Well, here’s the locker club.”
She pulled into the lot. I gazed around, hoping Buster and his friends weren’t waiting in ambush. There was nobody in sight.
“I want to see you again,” I said.
She looked away, out at the highway and the traffic.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Can’t tomorrow.”
“The next day.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
“Maybe we’ll go to another movie.”
“No. I want you to draw me.”
“Serious?”
“Like artists do in the movies. I never done that before.”
When I reached my locker, I had her panties in my pocket. Once more I held them to my face.
Chapter
29
I feel that time of my life in fragments now; then I stand back and glibly impose narrative upon it to give it sense. I am driving tentatively through side streets off the highway, feeling as if the next left turn might lead me deep into the past, the right into some scary bleak future. If I can remember that time without the gauzy editing of memory, maybe I can make sense of all the years that followed, the stupid deaths I later saw and recorded, the friends I lost, the women I loved too carelessly or too well. But memory does not exist in any orderly progression, following the clean planes of logic. That’s the scary part: If there is no logic, no sense, wha
t meaning could it possibly have?
I remember clearly the day after she told me she wanted me to draw her, the day after she opened her naked cunt to the breeze of the midnight Gulf. It makes me tremble even now. All that morning, I was like a bundle of jumbled wires. I needed to get to an art supply store, to buy a pad and some chalks. Eden Santana had challenged me, as if she could forgive my youth, my stumbling uncertainties, my awkward poses only if I had talent. So I wanted real tools: chalk, good paper. But I couldn’t go to Sears, couldn’t slide into their art supply section without Eden seeing me. If she saw me buying supplies only for this occasion, she might think I was a fake. Or a dumb boy. Or spying on her. There had to be another place that sold art supplies. In the Pensacola phone book, I found one: Art Land on West Cervantes. I called the store and a woman with a cracker voice told me she closed at five. There was no way I could get there in time. I wasn’t even certain where West Cervantes was. I knew the downtown streets and I could find O Street, but the rest of the city was a blur.
Then Becket came over.
“Take a run to Mainside?” he said.
And I wanted to hug him.
Becket double-parked while I ran into Art Land. The chalks, paints and pens were in drawers behind the counter.
“Kin ah hey-elp yew?” a woman said, coming from behind an aisle. She had a dusty face and weak blue eyes and a disappointed look on her face. A sailor. In dungarees. What could he want?
“Yes, yes,” I said, trying to remember the names of the materials. “I need some charcoal and some of that stuff, you know, the harder stuff, it’s brown or reddish brown?”
“Conté,” she said, bumping around behind the counter.
“And a pad,” I said.
“They’re behind you, right they-uh,” she said. The store was empty of customers and most of the lights were off. From inside, the street was a blinding sun-baked white. “Yew want charcoal paypuh o’ newsprint?”
I didn’t really know. But I looked at the pads, and the prices, and a large newsprint pad was seventy-nine cents and the charcoal paper was two dollars. I picked up the newsprint pad and took it to the counter. “I’ll take this.” She had boxes of Conté crayons and sticks of vine charcoal on the counter. The charcoal looked fragile. She also shoved at me a box of something called compressed charcoal. I picked them up, a stick at a time; the compressed charcoal was heavier and blacker.
“I’ll take two of each,” I said.
“Two of each?” she said.
“Please.”
“Usually we sell them by the box.”
“I know,” I said, “but I don’t really have enough cash on me. I’ll come back and buy the rest of the box, I promise. But I need these right now.”
She sighed in a disgusted way and picked out two each of the vine charcoal, the compressed charcoal and the brown Conté crayons, and made an elaborately sarcastic ceremony of wrapping them. I could hear Becket honking for me. She took her time filling out a bill, listing each item, and then slipped them all into a bag.
“I guess you don’t have enough money for fixative?” she said.
“No,” I said. I didn’t even know what fixative was. The bill was $1.90. I gave her two dollars, waited for my dime and then rushed out to the truck.
“Maybe you drew my picture dat day,” Becket said. “Not Miles.”
“No,” I said. “It was Miles.”
He went roaring down West Cervantes, making up time on his way through midday traffic to Mainside.
“So you’re an artist too?” Becket said.
“Well, sort of,” I said. I explained about cartoons and comic strips, trying to make cartooning sound like an occupation for adults and not something for kids who stayed too long with the funny papers. Milton Caniff made more than a hundred thousand a year, and some guys earned even more. Becket listened and nodded.
“You know,” he said, “you could prolly make some money around the barracks. I remember a guy in Norfolk, he could draw, and he started makin’ pictures from photographs. Two bucks apiece. You know, of different guy’s goirls. Or da guys themselves. And he made him some good money. Not no hundid-thousin a year. Dere wasn’t dat much money in da whole state of Virginia. But good beer money.”
“How’d he start?”
“I guess wit’ one guy. Like da guy dat makes a better mousetrap. The woid gets around.”
“I oughtta try that.”
“Start with me, you want,” he said, as we slowed at the approach to the Mainside gate. “I’ll give you my goirl’s picture later.”
Two dollars a drawing. Until then it had never occurred to me that I could earn money making pictures; that was something for the scary future, when I was out of the Navy. Becket saw things in the present tense. My head teemed with visions of riches.
Late that afternoon, a grizzled mechanic came into the Supply Shack looking for a joy stick. Only Donnie Ray and Harrelson were still at work, filling out forms. I walked to the storeroom, past my desk (where my new art supplies lay flat in the top drawer) and went looking for the joy stick. The storeroom felt gloomy in the fading light. I moved aside pallets and boxes, and found a joy stick in a crate. I went for a dolly, lifted the crate, placed it on the dolly and started to leave. Then, through the new space in the wall of crates, I saw the easel.
There was a painting leaning on the easel, which stood in a tiny room made from improvised walls of stacked crates and boxes. A low crate served as a chair and a second was topped with a sheet of glass upon which were laid tubes of paint and tins of liquid. There were a dozen brushes in a jar and more paintings stacked against the wall. Someone had created a secret art studio here in the Supply Shack. I knew it must be Miles.
I felt as if I’d just entered Aladdin’s cave, piled with treasure. I lifted another crate to fill the space of the one I’d taken and hurried back to the counter with the joy stick. Miles is an artist. I thought about that at my desk, with my own secrets in the drawer, wondering when Miles would be back—he was off to Mainside with Jones and Boswell—and why he had lied to me about the Becket drawing. I waited on a few more customers. Typed forms. Read specification books. All the while anxious to return to the back room, to verify what I’d seen (was this what they meant by a mirage?) and waiting for Donnie Ray to leave. Harrelson had the duty. And he could be a problem; I certainly didn’t want him to discover the studio and invoke the fierce laws of Chickenshit. So at closing time I left, too, and went across the street to the barracks and stood inside the door until I saw Donnie Ray leave.
Then I crossed the street again and opened the middle door, closed it quietly and tiptoed into the back room. I found I could enter the “studio” by flattening myself against the wall and sliding between it and the packing crates. Inside, a single window was covered with a shade tacked to the sill. It was a kind of nest, sealed off, special, private. I felt oddly safe, the way I did when I was a kid hiding under a bush in the park. There was another feeling too: of being in an empty church. I didn’t believe in God, but there was something about the hushed solitude of an afternoon church that always got me. That little cave of packing crates provoked the same awed mood.
The painting on the easel wasn’t finished, but I could see the blocky outlines of a ruined house, a blasted tree, endless green fields moving to a distant blue horizon. It was painted on some kind of heavy board, smooth on the painted surface, coarse on the other. So were all the other paintings. There was a harlequin in a beaded multicolored suit, blue eyes peering from a mask, neither male nor female. Another showed an old woman at the end of a country lane, trees rising above her in a menacing way, her back to the painter. In a third, a man in navy jeans held his head in his hands while a giant orange crowded out everything in the room. The room had screened windows, like the barracks, but there were prison bars beyond the screens, and a small black mask hung from a peg on a wall. There were two pictures of a middle-aged woman with youthful eyes glistening from her sagging face. And a painting o
f four sailors in Lone Ranger masks standing at the end of a ruined pier with their backs to the sea. I’d never seen pictures like them before. They weren’t like illustrations in Cosmopolitan or McCall’s or like the drawings of Crane and Caniff.
There was a black sketchbook on the floor, and I looked through it, recognizing Becket and Harrelson and Boswell, and Chief McDaid and Red Cannon, all drawn very delicately with a pencil, the shading done with hundreds of tiny lines. They were not photographic likenesses; they seemed to go deeper than that, to express Becket’s good nature and Harrelson’s cruelty and Boswell’s blurry drunkenness, and the malignant core of Red and McDaid. There were also drawings of women, nude, heavy-breasted, with faces like crones, a drawing of a black man wearing a jock, his skin glistening as if he’d been oiled. A detailed study of a tree. The wreck of an old car. Ruined piers like the one in the painting. Many careful but unfinished drawings of oranges. And detailed renderings of masks. They were wonderful drawings, but they made me uneasy. Not simply because I couldn’t do them, but because of the subject matter. I’d always been the best artist in my class but I couldn’t draw like this; worse, I couldn’t imagine like this. My own drawings were usually of fights and brawls, the stuff of the comics; these were pictures you saw in museums and art books.
There were a few blank pages and then I stopped short. The next three drawings were of me. In one of them I was sitting at my desk, my back to the artist, my face in profile gazing out at the Florida day. My jaw was slack and I seemed lost in thought. In the second, I was swabbing the deck. My body was bent at a violent angle and I was wielding the huge mop as if it were a blunt instrument. The muscles of my back and arms were perfectly drawn, taut and charged with tension. The third was an unfinished portrait. Some tentative overlapping lines defined my cheekbones and jaw. The incomplete nose was gouged with erasures.