by Pete Hamill
In the spring she taught me the names of the world. She named the trees in the swamps, mostly cypress and tupelo, and the great hardwoods in the bottom land, oak and sweetgum, hickory, magnolia and red maple. I’d pluck leaves from each new tree, discovering that I could always draw a tree if I followed the basic structure of the leaf. In the higher land, she showed me the difference between slash pine and longleaf pine, and the dogwood and wax myrtle that grew at their base, and sometimes we would just sit there in the stillness and she’d point out warblers and woodpeckers and we’d close our eyes and hold each other and listen to the soughing of the wind through the longleaf pines.
One Sunday we drove west on route 98, hugging the sparse coast until we ran out of road. We moved inland then on a two-lane blacktop and parked the car under some live oaks hung with moss. We carried a picnic basket deep into the woods. When we were out of sight of the road, we heard a snapping sound and saw a white deer scamper away, and then Eden pointed out a possum and the tracks of a bobcat. “There’s prob’ly some black bear in here too,” she said. “Now they could kill ya … But not to worry, they been most hunted off.”
The woods had a deep loamy smell that seemed to enter her, slowing her movements, making her more languorous, her voice more raw. She took my hand and made me bend under low-lying branches, then shoved me away from a pile of leaves (“Copperheads love them leaves”) and made me walk around a fallen log (“That’s where the cottonmouths live”) and laughed at my city ways of walking and told me the names of the bugs: ticks and fire ants, chiggers and deer flies and black flies all mixed up with the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums. If you got a tick under your skin she said, patiently, quietly, you had to smother him, cover him with nail polish, force him to fight his way back out. Chiggers made a little tube under the skin and you had to scrape them away, tube and all, gouging them right off the surface. “Chiggers love the leaves too,” she said. “Best thing you can say about a copperhead is they eat the chiggers …”
Just knowing the snakes were around made me feel creepy. But Eden talked about them in a casual way. “There’s hardly any rattlers around here anymore,” she said. “Nobody knows why. They just moved away, went someplace else.… Coral snakes could hurt you a little. They’re tiny things, a real pretty color, but you’d have to be tryin to kiss one for it to do you any damage. The cottonmouth, well, you don’t want to mess with him in any shape or fashion. He’s big, color of gunmetal, fat and ugly with a head like a triangle. Stay away from that sumbitch.” She smiled. “Mostly, snakes are harmless. Don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. Just cause the poor things ain’t got legs, ain’t no reason to kill em.”
Then the darkness of the forest began to lift and bright yellow shafts of light cut through the trees; we suddenly saw a red wall, and she told me that was because the red buds had bloomed on the slash pines. And when we moved past them, we came to the river. It was about thirty feet wide, gurgling over smooth stones, and was the reddish color of tea. A red river! I thought, remembering the old Gene Autry song about remembering the Red River Valley. And she said it was that way because of the tannin in the cypress trees. Clean brown sand lined the river banks, and in the center of the river there was a wide flat boulder, the water coursing around it. The air was free of insects now, and I could see fish in the river, lolling in the eddies along the banks or moving without effort against the current. Catfish, she said, and bass and perch.
For a long while we stood there in the stillness along the bank, saying nothing, hushed by the solitude. Then we walked to the sand along the banks. Eden looked at me and put down the picnic basket and pulled her blouse out of her trousers. I did the same with my shirt. She wriggled out of her blouse and laid it flat across the top of the basket. She unzipped her jeans then, and I was undressing too; she laid the jeans and her panties across the basket and then breathed deeply and removed her brassiere.
“Come on, child,” she whispered hoarsely.
We waded into the cold river. I held the basket and clothes above the water, my feet slipping on the stones. The water was up to her breasts and her skin was pebbled with the chill and her nipples hard, but she moved to the boulder, which lay like a dry, bone-colored island in the middle of the river. She slipped and almost went under and made a yelping sound and then giggled and righted herself as the swift water pushed against us. She reached the boulder first and pulled herself up, dripping and glistening, the muscles taut under her skin. She took the basket from me and I heaved myself up. We lay there side by side for a long time, her legs apart, her black V drying in the hot sun, the two of us engulfed by the sounds of unseen insects and animals and birds and the gurgling rush of the river. Only our hands touched. My cock felt thick and lazy. I let one hand trail in the cold river.
After a while, she sat up and looked at my face and ran her fingernails over my stomach and then leaned forward and took me in her hot tight mouth.
Chapter
37
One chilly Wednesday evening in April, when Eden was working late, Sal, Max and I waited outside the locker club for Bobby Bolden. Traffic moved quickly down the highway. The lot in front of Billy’s was almost full.
“Can you imagine the balls on this guy?” Sal said. “Inviting us to dinner at his chick’s house?”
“He’s got a death wish,” Max said. “Or we do.”
I saw a lot of Sal and Max around the base, but after meeting Eden Santana, I’d only been back to the Dirt Bar twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drinking and the noise and the fun; I loved all that, the recklessness of it, the lack of rules. I just wanted Eden Santana more. To be with her, I had to have more money than I made as a sailor, so I usually spent Monday and Wednesday nights drawing my little ink portraits. Sal and Max (and most of the others) knew I had a woman and kidded me about her, but I didn’t care. On this evening, Sal was insisting on a invitation to my girl’s house too, promising he would even wear socks for the occasion and use a knife and fork. I was glad Eden was at work; we wouldn’t see her at the trailer on the way to the place in the woods where Bobby Bolden lived with his white woman. I didn’t want them to inspect her; I didn’t want her to think I was just another crazy kid sailor.
Then a blue ’49 Mercury pulled into Billy’s parking lot. Bobby Bolden was behind the wheel. He honked and we hurried across the highway. I glanced at Billy’s window and saw Red Cannon and Chief McDaid staring at us from beyond the neon sign. I got in the car beside Bolden. Sal and Max slid into the back.
“What the hell are you doin with a lowlife good-for-nothing Mercury?” Sal said. “I thought spades only drove Buicks and Cadillacs.”
“We use these when we gotta leave a body in the trunk,” Bobby Bolden said in a dry way. “Don’t wanna waste a good set of wheels on the dead.” He was driving up the highway, away from town, toward the lumpy dirt road where Eden and I had picked him up in the rain.
“Should we lie on the floor?” Max asked.
“Won’t help,” Bobby Bolden said. “They kill black men aroun’ here just for leanin on a Mercury.”
“If they stop us,” Max said to Sal, “start singing ‘Mammy.’ ”
On cue, they started singing the old song, trying to sound like Al Jolson, and were up to the part about the sun shining east, the sun shining west, and them knowing where the sun shone best when we bumped over the gravel road and went under the live oaks and past the silver trailer. The evening light was fading now. The lake looked black. Bobby Bolden glanced at me. And I glanced to my right and felt The Boulder suddenly fill my stomach. This was Wednesday. Eden Santana was supposed to be working at Sears. But the car was parked in front of her trailer. She was home. With the lights out.
“ ‘Maaaaaaa-uh-uh-me, Maaaaaaaaaa-uh-meeeeee …’ ”
“Now you gonna get us killed by the niggers,” Bobby Bolden said.
“It’s the Klan we don’t want cutting up our ass.”
“I wunt talkin about ya color,” Bobby Bolden said.
“I was talkin bout ya fuckin singin.”
We all laughed, but I glanced back at the trailer as we followed the gravel road into the woods and I wasn’t thinking about the Ku Klux Klan or anything else. The car was there. I imagined her in the half light with some man. Some man. Showing him my drawings. Laughing at his remarks. Through the woods I saw small unpainted houses, some with the doors wide open and lanterns inside on tables. Black kids moved around in the fading light, playing ball or running through bushes. There were no streets. She’s making him shrimp with the red sauce and a salad. She’s bracing her feet against the roof of the trailer. Bobby Bolden pulled the car through an opening in the bushes and down a narrow path and stopped in front of the house: one story with a front porch and a peaked roof. In the darkness, I could make out peeling traces of white paint. The shades were drawn and the front door closed. She’s got the door locked and his trousers are folded over a chair and there is ice clunking in a glass. They will whisper for a long time. We got out of the car.
“Try to behave yourselves,” Bobby Bolden said. “You in a civilized neighborhood now.”
“ ‘The sun shines east, the sun shines west—’ ”
“Sal, you better shut yo mouf, boss,” Bolden said, sounding like Rochester from The Jack Benny Show.
I realized then that Bolden was dressed entirely in black: shiny black shirt, black tapered trousers, high black shiny boots. He looked as if he’d painted himself in silhouette. The eyes seemed greener. He glanced behind us at the road, as if expecting someone. All he saw were a couple of black kids staring without visible emotion at the visiting white men. Then he led the way to the front door and knocked: one-two, one-two-three. Footsteps. Bolden said, “It’s me.” Two locks were turned and then Bobby Bolden’s white woman was framed in the light. I couldn’t see her face. She hugged Bolden warmly and then he casually introduced her as Catty Wolverton. She shook my hand, then stepped aside to let us in. She locked the door behind us.
“Ugliest group a strays I ever seen,” she said.
“Saved them from a vagrancy arrest,” Bolden said.
Catty was about twenty-five, with brown liquid eyes and a red-dish tint in her hair. She had a short pert nose and an overbite that stopped just short of bucked teeth. Some people might think she was homely. But she had a dark smoky voice and heavy breasts above a narrow waist and a drowsy manner and a dirty laugh and I thought: Yeah, I see.
“Help yourself to the booze, guys,” she said, and waved us toward some bottles, glasses and an ice bucket perched on top of a nearly empty bookcase. She went back to the stove. Inside, the house was very bright and clean, the walls painted white, but it was essentially one very large room that felt as if someone had just moved in or moved out.
A bed was shoved up against the far wall, with a braided rug beside it on the plank floor, flanked by two unmatched pinewood bureaus, and on one of them there was a phonograph and a stack of records. The kitchen was larger than the sleeping area; a wide round table was placed in the middle, covered with a red plastic tablecloth and set with dishes and silverware, and there was a new gas stove that contrasted with the plainness of the room. A small refrigerator huddled beside the range and next to it was a stainless-steel sink. There were no pictures on the walls and no flowers. He will smell lilac and begonias and myrtle. He will stare out at the dark lake. He will hear insects droning on the River Styx. Sal poured Jim Beam bourbon into three glasses, added ice, handed them to Max and me.
“So what are you three jackoffs up to?” Catty said, stirring something in a black iron pot. Smelled like gumbo.
“Chastity,” Sal said. “Only thing that works every time.”
“Not for Jews,” Max said. “Go ye forth and multiply, saith the Lord.”
Catty laughed in a dirty way and stirred the pot, then built a drink for herself and Bobby Bolden.
“Hell, chastity don’t work for anybody,” Catty said.
Bobby stacked some records on the record player and a man with a deep throaty growl began to sing:
Keep your eyes off my lovin woman,
Keep your eyes off that lovin woman,
Stay away from that sweet lovin woman,
’Cause that sweet little lovin woman,
… She belongs to me.…
Catty hummed along with the chorus, talking about the Navy and being stationed at Mainside (touching the small of Bobby’s back) and her stupid son of a bitch of a chief yeoman (pinching his neck) and how as bad as he was, he wasn’t as bad as that total butternut muffdiver out at Ellyson, Chief McDaid. She knew McDaid from Dago, she said. Son of a whoremaster (she said, brushing Bobby’s ass). Then she picked up the bowls from the table and went to the stove and ladled out the gumbo. Why lie to me, woman? Why say you’re working when you’re not? Hey, you got to reap just what you sow.… The Boulder rose and expanded and then I was sipping the gumbo, made with chicken and vegetables, and it was good but not as good as the first gumbo I’d ever had, down the road, under the live oaks, facing the lake. Then as quickly as it had arrived, The Boulder began to fade.
“Great,” Sal said. “The best. Redneck minestrone.”
“I figured I shouldn’t give you pussyhunters anything too solid,” Catty said. “Ruin your routine.”
“Is this chicken kosher?” Max said.
“Is Chief McDaid?” Bobby Bolden said.
“That cunt,” Sal said. That was the first time I’d ever heard any man use the word in front of a woman, but Catty didn’t react the way I thought she would.
“Sal,” she said, “please don’t demean a perfectly beautiful piece of human anatomy by using it to describe that prick McDaid.”
“You mean that cunt is a prick?”
“You ofays sure talk dirty,” said Bobby Bolden.
“This is strictly a discussion of nomenclature, Bobby,” Sal said. “Catty says a cunt is a beautiful thing and obviously I agree. Nothing has brought me greater happiness in this vale of tears. But then she implies that a prick is bad and dirty. So I say, if you can’t call McDaid a cunt then you can’t call him a prick either.”
“Is he circumcised?” Max said.
“Only from the ears up,” Catty said, and slammed the table. The bowls of gumbo all bounced.
Sal turned to me and said, “Welcome to the Pensacola chapter of the Holy Name Society.”
Bobby fixed himself another drink and Max went to the stove for more gumbo and the blues man sang again about his lovin woman. There was no inside bathroom. A rotting outhouse stood in the woods behind the building but it looked so bad that the first time we all had to piss we just stood on the back porch and let go.
“Ooooh, wow,” Sal said. “This gotta be the closest man can ever get to God.”
“Do it downwind, will ya, wop?” Bobby Bolden said.
“Mine aint big enough to feel the wind,” Sal said. “Where’s downwind?”
“Toward me,” Max said, “so aim for the tomatoes.”
“Aaaaaahhhhhh,” Sal said, shook himself vigorously, and zipped up.
The moon was out now, and through the trees we could see its silvery reflection on the lake.
“God, it’s beautiful,” Sal whispered.
“It sure is,” I agreed.
“Twenty years from now, we’ll all be old men and there’ll be houses and supermarkets on the lake and a bunch of assholes flyin around in speedboats,” Max said. “And we’ll remember this night.”
“They’ll pave the road,” Sal said.
“They’ll get rid of the niggers.” Bobby Bolden laughed.
“They ain’t gonna wait twenty years for that.”
“They’ll have to bring guns,” Bobby Bolden said.
“They will,” Max said.
“They got them,” Sal said.
“So do we,” Bobby Bolden murmured. “So do we.”
Back inside, we drank some more and took turns dancing with Catty and played more records. Catty wanted to know why I was so quiet and I said it was
because I was so full of good food and Sal said, no, it wasn’t that, it was because I was in love, and then he shifted to a Stan Laurel voice and said, “You can tell by the silly sloppy grin on his face.” And I laughed and wondered if he could really tell from my face. I poured another drink.
Then there was a sharp single knock on the door.
We all stopped talking and Bobby Bolden put his hand up to quiet us, reached under the bed and came up with a big .45 caliber automatic. His face completely changed. The looseness turned hard. The green eyes were wary. He tiptoed to the door, motioning all of us to get down low and away from the windows. Sal picked up a carving knife.
Then Bobby positioned himself to the side of the door, the gun ready. I put myself in front of Catty, crouched down near the sink. Max picked up a chair. My heart was pounding.
Bobby Bolden unlocked the lock, then flicked off the lights, squatted and jerked open the door.
There was nobody there.
We hurried through the woods and saw nobody and checked the car engine for bombs and went down to the edge of the lake to see if there were any boats speeding away in the moonlight. Whoever had knocked on the door was gone. But when it was time for Bobby to go back with us to the base, he wouldn’t let Catty stay alone at the house. “Some mothafucka was out there,” he said. “Maybe a kid. Maybe someone playin trickster. But maybe somebody else, too.” So he locked up the house and we all crowded into the Mercury. He’d drop us off at the locker club, take Catty on to Mainside, where she could stay in the bachelor women’s quarters. “Just can’t take no chances.”
For a moment, I thought maybe Bolden was putting us on, that he’d arranged for someone to knock on the door, just to let us know that he had the gun and was ready to use it. And to show off for his white woman. But that didn’t make any sense; wouldn’t he rather spend the night with Catty Wolverton? The whole thing felt unreal. What was real was the gun. Bolden slipped it under the front seat. I asked him what he’d do if the cops stopped us and found the gun and he said he’d tell them it was Sal’s. “They believe anything about a wop,” he said. Sal said, “Except that he had a gun in a car with a spade and didn’t use it on him.” Catty giggled. We pulled out onto the gravel road. Max said, “Hey, we never had dessert.”