Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  She took a drag.

  But you don’t really know, do you, child? I mean, you never seen him do somethin with a man.

  No.

  But say he is, say he’s that way. Say he got somethin goin with that Filipino boy.

  She paused.

  Well, if that’s the case, why, maybe you’re jealous.

  I felt jolted. I said, Hey, come on.… You know better than that—

  She went on, a small smile on her mouth: Suppose he decided to run off with that Filipino boy? What would you do?

  Nothing. I don’t—

  You sure of that? You sure you wouldn’t miss him just a little bit? You sure you wouldn’t wish he’d come back?

  I didn’t answer.

  Why, you been jealous of me with no good reason, child. Why wouldn’t you be jealous of this Miles fella?

  Cause he’s a man. And I’m not—

  A faggot? she said.

  Damn right!

  She smiled and reached over and touched my hand.

  She said, Child, you better learn quick that human beings are complicated. You hear me? Every woman got a little man in her. Every man got a little woman in him. Nobody’s all one thing. Your friend Miles Rayfield is not one thing. Most people ain’t.

  I hated the way she was looking at me. Smiling. Self-satisfied, like a grade school teacher instructing an infant.

  Okay, I said, with heat: Say that’s true. Why should I be jealous, for Christ’s sakes?

  She tamped out the cigarette.

  Cause the way you talk about him, if this Miles fella runs off, you’ll be heartbroken.

  You saying I’m queer?

  No. Just saying maybe you want Miles in your life for a long time.

  Oh bullshit, I said, in an annoyed way.

  She made a small A with her hands and peered at me over the point.

  Why you talking like that? she said.

  Cause you’re talking bullshit!

  Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed.

  Don’t raise your voice to me, she said in a cold flat voice.

  It was there again. The tone of authority. I slammed the table with the palm of my hand. The ashtray bounced and fell to the floor.

  I’m not queer.

  I never said that!

  Well, what the fuck did you say?

  She tried to reply, but I was standing now, the words rising.

  I said, You should talk. You! The way you act with Roberta. Are you kid—

  She looked at once furious and terrified, standing up too and backing away.

  Shut up.

  I knew I’d gone too far, and mumbled something, a lot of maybes and who knows, and reached for the ashtray and pawed at the cigarette butts on the floor. The anger was gone; but I couldn’t get the words back.

  She said, Maybe you better go off to the Navy, child. Maybe you better sleep this anger of yours off. Maybe you better go. Right now.

  What?

  The words then came rolling out of her too. Her face was creased and contorted. For the first time, she seemed ugly to me. And old.

  She screamed: I said, go back to the base. Right now. Back to Ellyson Field. With all the other sailor boys. I don’t want trouble. Not with you, not with no one. I had enough trouble to last me ten lifetimes. And you look like you want to hit someone, Michael Devlin. Fact, you look just like another man I knew once. Man didn’t want to hear no hard things. No difficult things. So I don’t want you here tonight. Go.

  I threw the ashtray against the wall.

  Jesus Christ! I said, panting. Jesus fuckin Christ.

  I jerked the door open, slammed it behind me and went out.

  I walked down the road toward the highway. And then felt nauseated. We’d never argued before. Never even raised our voices at each other. And here we were … Screaming. Smashing things. Or at least I was. I’d said cruel words. I’d gone out of control. Here we were … breaking up. Over words. Over the word queer. The word faggot. Not over Mercado or a husband or another lover. Over Miles Rayfield. A possible faggot. What the hell did she mean? Trying to tell me I had some faggot in me? With that smug schoolteacher look on her face. Why’d she start this crap? I’m trying to explain about Miles and she turns it around, makes it about me. And when I object, she gets harder. She pushed me and like always, I pushed back. Yeah. That was it. She couldn’t take the way I pushed back. She thought I was this sweet boy. Child, she always called me. Well, I wasn’t a child. Maybe she knew that now. Push me and I push back harder. Like a man does. She should’ve know that and she made one big goddamn mistake. Does she think she can find someone as good as me? Hey, come on … Or maybe I made the mistake. If I did, then she’d never let me back. If I made the mistake, it was over, just like that. Over? The way it ended for all the men I knew. All the men who loved women and weren’t loved back. No. Jesus, no.

  I stopped, started to go back.

  Thinking: I can still beg her forgiveness.

  And answered myself: No. I can say I’m sorry for losing my temper. For saying the rotten things about Roberta. For breaking the ashtray. But I won’t beg. Maybe I can even say she was right about Miles Rayfield. I would miss him if he went away. But not because I’m interested in his prick. She doesn’t know everything. But I just can’t run off like this. I have to go back. Even if I have to plead with her. But suppose she says no? Suppose she won’t even open the door? And what if she was just looking for some excuse to break up? Maybe that’s why she started all this. And she started it. Not me. Eden. She started the whole goddamned thing. Fuck her. No, I want her. I want her. No. She started it. Let her come to me, call me at the base, beg me to come back. Right now, I thought, I’m going to 0 Street. To the Dirt Bar. See Sal and Max and the others. Get a blow job from Dixie Shafer. How do you like that, baby? Get drunk. Who needs you, lady?

  I get along without you very well.

  Of course, I do …

  I stopped.

  There was something in the bushes beside the road. Something moving. I reached down for a rock and eased into the shadows. Another movement. Then I heard a thick grunting sound, full of pain. Then shoes scraping on gravel, as if trying to get traction. I hefted the rock. Then moved closer to the sounds of pain.

  And saw Bobby Bolden.

  He was facedown in the gravel, his shirt torn off, deep bleeding wounds sliced into his back. His arms were stretched out in front of him, his hands flopping loosely at the wrists. He was digging his elbows into the gravel, trying to move forward. His face was so consumed with pain that he couldn’t recognize me or anyone else on this earth.

  I turned to the trailer.

  Eden!

  His body writhed as I reached under his arms and started to lift him. He was bigger and heavier than I imagined. The gouged skin was slippery with blood. Eden took his legs and we heaved and got him into the back seat of her car and laid him face down across the floor. His hands flopped loosely. His jaw moved and words came out but no sentences.

  Mothafuck. The House. Get me. Hey you. Oh, you. Go ahead you. Catty. Oh you. Scrapple from the apple and a bottle of ocean. Oh.

  We started to pull out and then Eden saw a glow through the trees. The house. I turned the car around and pushed hard on the accelerator, moving down the road away from the highway. The house where Bobby and Catty lived together was burning beyond the screen of trees. I saw black men running through the trees, most without shirts, all carrying buckets of water. Kids darted across the road and I slowed down. Eden shrunk low in the seat beside me, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide and afraid.

  Then up ahead I saw something else.

  By the side of the lake, only thirty feet away, tied to the branch of a tree with her hands above her head and naked from the waist up was Catty.

  Her head was thrown back. She wasn’t moving. I could see her back had been split open.

  Oh my God, Eden whispered.

  Her hands became fists. She gnawed on a knuckle.

  Oh Je
sus God.

  I pulled over and stopped the car and got out, but Eden stayed where she was. I saw an elderly black man coming through the trees carrying a shotgun. Six black teenagers were behind him. Their faces were blank.

  “You kin keep on goin,” the older man said.

  I pointed at Catty and said I had to get her to a hospital.

  “You just leave her be,” he said. “She deserve whut she get. She come in here, dont care fo decency, cause nuthin but trouble. Things here is peaceful till this white trash show up. And look whut she do. She brung down the affliction on us. She brung down the damn Klan.”

  The Klan. Like Bobby Bolden said. Like all the blacks said. The damned Klan.

  “You can’t let her hang here,” I said. Catty’s bare feet were not touching the ground. She was hanging there, a dead weight. I wondered if arms really did get pulled out of sockets. The small black kids had moved around now to the far side of the tree for their first sight of a white woman’s bare breasts.

  “Hey you kids, git away fum there!” the old man said. The kids looked at him, then at Catty’s breasts, then hurried away to see the fire. The orange glow had faded but the air was acrid with smoke. I glanced back at the car. Eden and Bobby Bolden were both out of sight. I turned my back on the old man and walked over to the tree. Two black kids were still huddled in a bush.

  “Who’s got a knife?” I said.

  One of the kids handed over a curved blade with a taped wooden handle.

  “Leave her be, white man!” the old man shouted.

  I stepped over to Catty and cut her down, trying to brake her fall with my shoulder. As she hit the ground, limp and hurt and bleeding, with her jaw slack and red welts noticeable now across her breasts, there was an immense ferocious roar.

  I heard Eden scream my name.

  I turned and saw the old man holding the shotgun. The stock was propped against his hip. But I felt nothing. He must have aimed at the sky. I stared at him. He stared at me.

  “I’m gonna pick this woman up now,” I said. “Right now. If you want to kill me, go ahead. But I don’t think it’d be worth it.”

  I bent down and lifted Catty, waiting to be shot. I carried her to the car. Eden was hunkered down low in the front and I put Catty beside her. The light of the fire was gone. There was smoke everywhere. Animals and humans crashed around in the woods.

  “Git out now, heah me?” the old man said. His voice seemed old and worn and sad. “Don’t ever come back to these parts. Just go and leave us be. You come back, ah’ll have to kill you.”

  I drove quickly to Mainside, but not too quickly, afraid of bouncing Bobby and Catty. Eden threw a coat over Catty and cradled her in her arms. We had no choice but Mainside. There was no night corpsman on duty at Ellyson and no hospital in all of Pensacola that would accept a damaged black man and a hurting white woman in the same emergency room. Bobby talked in a slurred voice, his mouth bubbling with bloody saliva:

  All the way hey. Yeah. They comin down the ridge. In the snow. You watch the snow. Yeah. Oh. In formation, gonna march, mothafucka. He got. No, he got. Bottle of ocean and two dimes plus her. Yeah. No. The house. Oh Catty. Yeah. Oh Catty.

  Eden was silent all the way. I kept wondering if Bobby Bolden had paid the price for rescuing me from Buster and his friends; then dismissed that; thought if that was so, it was only part of it, a small part. He was a black man fucking a white woman in the South. He couldn’t expect to keep that a secret forever. The old black man was bitter, so even the blacks must have disapproved and the whites would have been crazy. I wondered too if there was some black woman out there by the lake who loved Bobby Bolden from a distance, and then in rage and jealousy made a call or sent a letter. I remembered that night months before when there was a sudden sharp knock on Bolden’s door.… But maybe someone came here out of Catty’s life. A husband. A lover. Followed her from Mainside. Watched where she went. Then called in the Klan. I remembered the photographs of the Klan in old newspapers and in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons: assholes in white sheets watching fiery crosses burn in the night. Degenerate white assholes. They always seemed funny to me, looking at them back in Brooklyn. What did they tell their wives and kids when they went out for the night wearing sheets? That they were saving the good old Yew Ess of Ay from the niggers and the Jews and the Catholics? Ridiculous. But they weren’t funny to me anymore. They had maimed and hurt two of my friends.

  I glanced at Eden as we turned into the long avenue leading to the gates of Mainside. She was staring off in the distance. Her face was slack now, her hair disheveled. She looked older.

  A Marine corporal blocked the gate when I pulled up. I pointed at Bobby and Catty and explained that they were sailors, one from Mainside, the other from Ellyson Field. The Marine’s name was stamped on his chest. Gabree. Blond and sunburned. He didn’t move or wave us on.

  “This car doesn’t have a sticker,” he said. “You’re out of uniform. So are they. And this other—woman isn’t in the service.” He blinked his blond eyelashes. “You can’t come on board. Sorry.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?” I shouted.

  Gabree narrowed his eyes and gave me the all-purpose Marine Corps hard-guy look, taught daily at Parris Island.

  “You better lower your voice, sailor. Or you’ll be in deep shit. Real fast.”

  “Where’s your superior officer?” I said, getting out of the car. Gabree inhaled, trying to look more chesty. His hand went to his service revolver.

  “He’s asleep, sailor. And besides, I don’t even have to answer you.”

  “Then you better wake him up, jackoff. If these people die, I’m gonna hold you responsible.”

  Gabree said, “You know something? I might just arrest you on general principles.”

  I pointed at Bobby Bolden’s writhing body.

  “This man was a Naval corpsman at the Chosen reservoir,” I shouted. “He saved more Marines than you’ll ever even meet. If you let him die, then you oughtta die too, fuckhead.”

  “That’s a threat, sailor.”

  “You’re fucking right it’s a threat. Just stop the bullshit and get these people to a hospital.”

  He started to take the .45 from its holster. His face was cold. I heard Bolden groan. I couldn’t see Eden, who was behind Catty.

  “You better kill me with that, pal,” I said. “If you don’t, I’m taking it off you and you’ll end up with an extra asshole.”

  Then another car pulled up behind Eden’s and the horn beeped. There were two lieutenants in the car. I turned my back on Gabree and walked over to them and explained what was going on. They were both Marine pilots.

  “Oh, these goddamned chickenshit assholes,” said the officer behind the wheel. He got out of the car and shouted: “Corporal, get your ass over here!”

  They had that squinty-eyed pilot look, the shambling bony bodies. But they took over. They made Corporal Gabree help them lift Catty and Bobby Bolden into their car, then raced past us through the gate into the great slumbering base. I pulled Eden’s car around in a circle, stopping just short of the gate. Gabree was standing there.

  “I’ll see you around, Corporal.”

  He looked at me without blinking and then I pulled away. Eden huddled against the door, away from me. She didn’t speak until we were on the road back to Ellyson Field.

  What a night, I said, trying to get her to talk.

  She looked at me, shook her head.

  I’m sorry for all those rotten things I said. I’m sorry I blew my stack.

  Forget it, she said in a soft voice. I shouldn’t’ve egged you on.

  It should have felt like a reconciliation; it didn’t. We passed a lot of closed bars and churches. Just short of the base, she asked me to pull over.

  I can’t go back to the trailer tonight, she said.

  I mumbled something about not letting the idiots scare her off and how she didn’t really have anything to be afraid of, since this was really about Bobby Bolden and Catty.


  She said, Are you kidding?

  I said, No. In a way, maybe Bobby brought this on himself, with the Klan and all. You know, having a white woman and all that. Even the black people there—well, you saw that old man.

  Then Eden Santana began to sob, shaking her head, her body racked.

  Oh you poor damn silly fool, she said, through tears. You poor damn kid. You poor child.

  I put my arms around her and held her close and the hopeless sobbing got heavier and then slowly eased.

  What is it, baby? I whispered. What is it?

  She pulled away and looked at me with her eyes all wet and the tracks of tears on her cheeks.

  Don’t you see anything? she said.

  I looked and waited and then she said it.

  I’m black, you damn fool. I’m black.

  Chapter

  57

  What Eden Told Me (II)

  I’m one of The People, child. And maybe you don’t know about them, and for sure you don’t know about me, so listen up, you hear? Don’t sit there with that damfool white boy look on your face. You should’ve seen. You should’ve listened. You should’ve thought: Who was this James Robinson and why are there no pictures of her children on the walls and why is there a kink in her hair and why does she live by the lake with the niggers? You should’ve known. Yeah, I hid it. The truth be told, I didn’t want you backing up, didn’t want you going away. But I knew that if you knew, you’d go away. I learned long ago that I could pass in the white man’s world. But I couldn’t do it forever, child. Sooner or later, the white man smells niggers and forces them to pay for the white man’s own degraded sins. That’s what The People learned, too. Though it took em quite a while before they paid for the sin of pride and for all their sad treasons.

  I knew that from the beginning: when you touched my hand and when you entered my body: because it was all in The Story that was passed to me by my daddy and to him from his daddy, The Story passed down through all the generations, like a curse.

  The People came from a place called Isle Brevelle, twenty-five miles from Natchitoches, way up in the northwest of Louisiana. This was long ago, you hear me? Before there was a United States, before your people came here, before everybody that was to come and fill the great empty land. Before all of them, The People was here. Americans from the start.