Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  Bobby drove quickly past the silver trailer, throwing up gravel. And when I looked, the world tilted. Eden’s car was gone.

  Bolden dropped us in front of Billy’s and drove on to Mainside. I suggested a nightcap. Sal said, “Why not?”

  There were about a dozen men in the place being tended by a middle-aged blond barmaid. Seated on a stool in his dress whites was Red Cannon. McDaid was gone. Cannon’s head turned when we came in, but his body didn’t move. He stared at us, but we ignored him, laid our dollars on the bar and ordered beers.

  “Jesus Christ, that was spooky,” Sal said, turning his back to Red Cannon. “Someone knockin’ on the door like that.”

  “The guy’s nuts,” Max said.

  “She’s worse,” I said. “The blacks could do her in, the rednecks could—”

  “What you say, boy?”

  I turned and looked at Red Cannon. He was very drunk, but holding himself still.

  “You call me a redneck?” he said in a surly way.

  “I didn’t say anything about you,” I said.

  “I heard you say redneck, boy.”

  “He wasn’t talking about you,” Sal said, “or to you. So cool it, Red.”

  “Don’t tell me to cool it, sailor,” Cannon said, sliding off the stool. The barmaid moved down to him. She didn’t say anything, just touched his hand and stared. He turned to her. And never said another word.

  “She must be a fuckin hypnotist,” Max murmured.

  “I hope she makes him forget our names,” Sal said.

  “He never knew them,” I said. “All he knows is our numbers.”

  “That’s all he needs.”

  Then Sal started doing his version of Senator Claghorn. If Cannon was going to listen to our conversations, Sal was going to give him something to hear. “Well, FRANKLY, I think the future of NATO is a question of STRATEGIC priorities. The Mediterranean must be CONVERTED into an AMERICAN LAKE. We can’t allow the damn RUSSIANS to THREATEN OUR NATIONAL SECURITY!”

  “No doubt about it,” Max said.

  “Make no MISTAKE! They are out for WORLD DOMINATION! They plan to CONQUER AMERICA and CLOSE THE BAPTIST CHURCHES! They will come in and make MISCEGE-NATION THE LAW OF THE LAND! Turn us into a NATION OF HALF-BREEDS! They will let the COLORED RACES go to school! There’ll be NIGGERS IN THE ORCHESTRA OF THE REX THEATER! Mark my words!”

  Max rolled his eyes at me. Red Cannon stared at the bottles behind the bar, then stood up, holding himself very erect, and with a kind of wordless dignity walked straight to the door and went out. We all got very drunk. At closing time we slipped through the back fence onto the base. We found Maher on duty at the dumpster. He was drunk, too.

  Chapter

  38

  Oh, child, she said, what’d you let get in your head? I took the damned bike to work. When I come home last night, I needed to pick up some groceries; couldn’t do that riding the bike, could I? So I took the car. Went all the way back down the road to Sham’s and got some fresh milk and some bread for breakfast. Simple as that. You can’t let that crazy stuff get in your head. You won’t get me close to you that way, child. Just drive me off.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  Don’t you be saying you’re sorry, hear me? Just don’t let some devil eat your brain. You’re here now, with me, on a Thursday night in 1953. This ain’t some damn movie. This is us. This is here. We got this. You and me. I never thought I’d have this and here it is. And we don’t need to have evil stuff eating up brains. Not your brains. Not mine.

  You’re right.

  So come over here.

  I went where there were always new things to learn. Maybe the only things that mattered. We lay side by side in the cool evening, and she kissed my neck and then sucked on it and pinched my skin and then pressed gently on my head, moving me to her breasts. She pushed them against my cheeks and then I had the wet tip of my tongue against the dry tip of a nipple, the aureole pebbling as I flicked it. But she pressed again, moving me away, and I was at her navel, kissing it, pushing my tongue into it, and her whole body writhed, her breath changing, the inhaling high pitched, the exhaling deeper, the sound beyond her control, and then my head was between her legs. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I thought if I was her what would I want me to do, and I kissed the inside of one thigh and came up to the great black hairiness, breathing on it, afraid, unsure, and then kissed the inside of the other thigh, nibbling at her skin with my teeth, my hands sliding under her bottom and squeezing. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing, of moving to the wrong place out of stupidity, and then she put both hands on my head and guided me to the crevice, and I inhaled the damp female smell, the earth smell, the tidal salt, and I placed my tongue in the center of it, and moved gently and uncertainly along the closed lips, down into the wetness and then lightly dragged my tongue gently upward until everything else opened like a dark flower. She made a deep moaning sound, a sound almost detached from her and yet most deeply from her, a pleasured sound but sad too, as if life itself were leaving for just that moment and I did it again, and felt for the first time in my life that hard hidden slippery little nipple under my tongue and she said there and I flicked it and she said Right there and I flicked it again and then again, and her voice dropped deeper than I’d ever heard it before, it came from some deep underwater canyon, and she said Oh Gawwwwwddddddddd there. Her hands leaving my body now, and gripping the side of the narrow bed, while I eased the flat of my tongue along the tiny tit, very lightly, then suddenly darting it into her as deeply as I could. My tongue become a cock: I glanced up once and saw her kneading her breasts, pulling them up to a point, and then I pressed my mouth on her and sucked the little tit as if it were a tiny cock, sucked her cock the way she’d sucked mine, doing it over and over, until at last a high-pitched plea came from her, all full of fear and resistance, saying do it, stop, saying don’t stop, followed by a trembling lost wordless sound, and I kept doing it in rhythm to her breathing and mine, to her sounds, to her deep flooding need, until she just came apart. Her legs shot out the length of the bed and locked and she grabbed my head with both hands and then pressed her muscled thighs together and started to scream, up and high and down and low, like a flamenco singer, all in one long uncontrolled sound, and she arched up from the bed and then slammed back down hard at the shoulders, doing it again and then more weakly and then one final quivering time. She rolled to one side, then the other, and then took my head and moved me up and kissed my face that was wet from her. Licking me. And crying. Just bawling. She cried as she guided my cock into her soaked center and cried some more as I pounded fiercely into her and cried when I came and cried until she fell asleep with my arms around her.

  Chapter

  39

  From The Blue Notebook

  BB gave me a book to read, by a guy named Richard Wright. The man is a Negro. There were things in the book that I’d never thought about before. For example:

  “Among the subjects that white men would not discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women: Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the civil war, Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; Slavery; Social Equality; Communism; Socialism; the 12th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.”

  It made me think that I should discuss all this with the Negroes but I don’t know much about any of it. It’s like a lot of other stuff: I feel ignorant most of the time, not just when I hang out with the Negroes. It’s with everybody. The dumbest thing I ever did was dropping out of high school. I thought nobody from Brooklyn could ever get to college and now I meet guys like Dunbar and they tell me college isn’t that hard, that I could go when I get out. But I can’t wait that long to learn about everything. I keep thinking I should just read the whole damned encyclopedia
from A to Z. In a way, that’s what they really mean by “hip”—knowing everything.

  • • •

  The Boulder. Do I really feel it? Or am I imagining it? And if I only imagine it, is it real? I know the feeling is real but it makes me feel ashamed, like I can’t control myself. I hate the way feelings just take over. But if I didn’t feel anything, what would I be? A rock. A plant. There’s gotta be some way to have both.

  Vagina. The passage leading from the uterus to the vulva in certain female mammals. A sheathlike part or organ.

  Vulva. The external female genitalia.

  Uterus. The portion of the oviduct in which the fertilized ovum implants itself and develops or rests during prenatal development. The womb of certain mammals.

  Clitoris. The erectile organ of the vulva, homologous to the penis of the male.

  (Where did all the street names come from? Cunt, pussy, snatch, box, furburger, muff, crack, quim, crevice, twat. The glory hole. The bearded clam. And cunt. Always cunt. Cunt and cunt and cunt.)

  “But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view.” —Vasari on technique. (In the base library.)

  Why are so many goddamned countries run by old men? Eisenhower’s already old and he just started the job, and there’s Churchill in England and Adenauer in Germany and Chiang in Formosa and this prick Syngman Rhee in Korea. The papers say the war could be over by now, that we have a deal for this peace treaty, but Rhee won’t sign. Our guys keep getting killed and Rhee doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He wants it his way. So he will keep the war going as long as there’s enough Americans to do the fighting. We ought to shoot the old bastard. How do they do it? How do they get people to obey them? They couldn’t beat up anyone in a street fight. How do they make young people go places to die?

  • • •

  I find myself reading more and more of the front of the newspaper. Now there’s a new thing, the French in Indochina, and it seems like it’s getting worse. Dulles says it’s all tied up with Korea, but from the papers you see right away that the French shouldn’t be there. The place is a colony, and the Indochinese want the French the fuck out. The French won’t go, so the Indochinese are trying to shoot them out. When does this shit end? They also say there is a Communist govt in Guatemala. At least that’s closer to home, though I’m not even sure where Guatemala is. Gotta check the atlas.

  (I also find myself forgetting about the comics sometimes, and I worry about it. I still read Sawyer and Canyon, and I glance at Li’l Abner and Joe Palooka. But I used to read everything on the comics page. I told people who laughed at me, Hey, this is just like a lawyer reading law books. Since I was eleven I wanted to write and draw a comic strip. But suppose I’m losing the urge? I mean, suppose I don’t care about comics anymore? Then what happens to me? What can I become?)

  I checked the atlas. Guatemala is just south of Mexico.

  From The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (great book lent to me by MR):

  “Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.”

  That’s so true. Henri is talking about music in order to make a point about art. But it’s also true about singing. I listen to the blues guys singing and the power comes from the fact they are singing about what’s important to them, even if it is pain. Henri also says:

  “… Most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do.”

  (My father: it’s true of him. It was probably true of my mother. True of most of the people I know back in the neighborhood, even most of the people in the Navy.)

  And Henri says:

  “The self-educator judges his own course, judges advices, judges the evidence about him. He realizes that he is no longer an infant. He is already a man: has his own development in process. No one can lead him. Many can give advices, but the greatest artist in the world cannot point his course for he is a new man. Just what he should know, just how he should proceed can only be guessed at.”

  Jesus Christ.

  When I say the word “I” what do I mean?

  Chapter

  40

  One evening we went to the empty beach facing Perdido Bay. I loved the name of the great wide bay because of the loud honking record of “Perdido” by Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips. They’d taken a simple tune by Duke Ellington and made something insane of it, a sound without control. The bay didn’t look at all the way the record sounded, but I felt some kinship to it because I’d at least heard the foreign word. Eden told me “perdido” meant “lost” in Spanish.

  “What does Santana mean?” I said.

  “Big holy one,” she said, and laughed sarcastically.

  “You don’t think you’re holy?”

  “No.”

  We walked along the beach and talked about the history of the whole area, the fleets of French and Spanish sailors who washed up on its shores, to die of strange new diseases or to stay too long and die of an aching loneliness. The histories at the base library were vague and sketchy, written for high school students. Which one of those men first called this bay “lost” and why? Eden squeezed my hand. I asked her when her family had come to the Gulf and how and why. She gazed out past the bay and said, “Centuries ago.” Explaining nothing about the how and the why.

  And then we stopped. Two men were walking barefoot on the beach far ahead of us, their trousers rolled to their knees. One was short, the other much taller. But even at this distance, I recognized them. The tall one was Miles Rayfield. The other was Freddie Harada.

  “Let’s walk back,” I said.

  She looked at me, puzzled. “How come?”

  “I know those guys up ahead. I don’t really want to have to talk to them.”

  “Okay,” she said, “we’ll go to the shrimp place.”

  Chapter

  41

  I ate one morning in March, Sal burst through the double doors into the Supply Shack, leaned forward on the counter and sobbed: “Joe’s dead!” His laid his forehead flat on the counter, pounded with balled fists, said “First Hank, and now Joe! Long live the proletarian revolution!”, then whirled and hurried out. That’s how we learned that Stalin had died.

  Harrelson got out the radio and Jonesie said, Good, I hope the son of a bitch suffered, and Becket said, Gee, dat makes Choichill de only one left outta da Big Tree. The news bulletins were somber, but not sad. The words were all virtually the same: Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union, ferocious dictator, killer of millions, once an ally and then our most implacable enemy, was dead. To which Donnie Ray shrugged and said This is all fine, but we still gotta swab down at four. After a while, he took a phone call at his desk, nodding, grave. He talked a long time. A Marine pilot at the counter said Maybe now we can get the goddamned thing in Korea settled.

  “This is sho nuff big shit,” Harrelson said. “The whole damn shootin match could fall apart.”

  “Or start,” Jonesie said. “Goddamn Commie bastards.”

  Then we saw Captain Pritchett hurrying around outside in a jeep, with a Marine driving and Chief McDaid and Red Cannon in the back. Donnie Ray finally put down the telephone.

  “That’s it, boys,” he said gravely. “We’re on full alert. The base is being secured right this minute. All liberty and leave is canceled.”

  And all I could think, while a near-panic swirled around me and the telephones started ringing crazily, was: How am I going to tell Eden? I’m sure now that men thought the same things at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and the Battle of Hastings. She was supposed to pick me up at the locker club at six and we were going to the Warrington Drive-In to see Mou
lin Rouge. Miles had described the movie as pure hokum, full of lies and mistakes and stupidities about this French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, but even so, it was still the best Hollywood movie ever made about an artist. I wanted to see it badly, wondering if I was anything like Toulouse-Lautrec; Eden said she wanted to check out this José Ferrer, find out if he was anything like me. But now all leaves were canceled and we’d have to wait. I was eighteen and I didn’t want to wait. Besides, there was no telephone at the trailer and no way to call her at Sears. I hoped someone in the store’s appliance department would turn on a radio and she’d discover that all the bases in Pensacola were secured, so we could hold off the expected assault of the vengeful Russians. She would know that I was joining all the other brave American boys who would protect the country from a dead man.

  “Are they kidding?” I said to Donnie Ray.

  “Fraid not. Our troops are on alert all over the world.”

  “But why? The guy’s dead.”

  “Maybe he was murdered, sailor. Maybe there are some guys worse than him, want to blow up the damn world. Maybe they’ll blame us. Who knows?”

  “You mean there’s a bunch of guys in the Kremlin saying, ‘Okay, now’s our chance. We can get Ellyson Field.’ ”

  Donnie Ray laughed. “Could be.”

  All through the day we saw jets screaming high across the sky. We heard that there were plans to move the American government to Cuba if the Russians invaded. We heard that SAC bombers were in the air over Europe so they couldn’t be destroyed on the ground. All of them were carrying hydrogen bombs. Everybody talked about the death of Stalin. Uncle Joe, some of them called him. Worse than Hitler, a few said. A monster. Becket said Stalin was a Catlick who started out to be a priest and then saw the light and became a bankrobber and a Bolshevik and someone else said he was born in Georgia, and Harrelson said, Yeah, near Macon. We drank a lot of coffee. Customers arrived in a stream because the sky was dense with helicopters, and that meant that parts were breaking, failing, wearing out. Becket said he was glad that Miles Rayfield was off at Mainside with Dunbar because if he was at Ellyson when the Russian bombs started dropping that would really piss him off.