by Pete Hamill
You think I’m a shit, don’t you, Devlin?
Maybe I am.
Maybe I’ll always be a shit.
But I wunt born a shit. Maybe I left somethin out there in that fuckin ocean. Maybe I’ll never find it again. I know I sure ain’t gonna find it on land. Hey, git your ass up off the sand, sailor. We gotta git back to the base.
Chapter
67
It was gray and chilly when we got back to the base. Sunday morning on the Gulf. The sky empty. Red Cannon left me without a word, as if he had no words left, or was vaguely ashamed that he had used words at all. My uniform was filthy. My body hurt. I showered for a long time. My mind was as blank as the sky.
Then, clean again and most of the aching gone, I climbed into the sack. Longing for sleep. I shoved my hand under the pillow and found the letter.
Dear Michael,
By the time you read this, I’ll be dead. They’ve taken everything away from me at last. My work—my pride—my need for love. There’ll be a court martial and they’ll say all sorts of filthy things about me and make filthy jokes in the corridors and write filthy things into my record. And all of that will follow me everywhere. Well, I don’t want any of that. I don’t want the shame or the tears or the cheap laughs. I want out of Anus Mundi. Forever.
All my life I had to hide what I was. When I was young, it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. But when I was twelve or thirteen, I started to think I was a woman in a man’s body. It wasn’t a sudden thing. I just looked at boys instead of girls. I wanted to dress in women’s clothes. I had urges—desires—they weren’t what boys were supposed to feel—weren’t what I saw in the movies—weren’t what I heard on the radio. I can’t explain it all. I die, not understanding it all.
But once when I was in art school I loved a boy and he loved me and I understood for the first time how hard my life was going to be. You see, we couldn’t ever do what other people did. Not in Atlanta. Not in the South. Maybe not anywhere. We couldn’t walk down the corridors at school, holding hands. We couldn’t kiss each other in the balcony at the movies. I couldn’t sit in the living room with him at his parents’ house, necking, while they slept upstairs. We had to hide and sneak around. Until there was a big school party out at a lake and we all got a little drunk and one of the advertising people—a designer—a real shithead—found us in the woods. Maybe that’s why I joined the Navy. To get away from that boy—to get away from the shame and the talk—to get away from Atlanta. But I loved that boy. He was my wife. That bitch. And it’s been a long long time since he loved me. Or since anybody loved me.
But it turns out that running away and joining the Navy was a terrible mistake. The Navy was just too tough for me. I’d see bodies in the showers—muscles and asses and cocks—have you stopped reading this? have you thrown it down in disgust?—and I’d want to touch them—kiss them—hug them—and have them hug me back and make love to me as if I were one of those women whose bodies were taped inside their lockers. To tell the truth, I’d see you like that sometimes. Do you understand why I could never go with you to O Street? I didn’t want to see you dancing with your sluts. And I was afraid that I’d have too much to drink and then I would do something or say something that I’d be sorry for later. I loved you. But you were my friend too. Maybe the only one I had in this goddamned Navy. I didn’t want to love you so much that I lost the friendship. Do you understand?
So I was a coward and that’s why I went with You Know Who. He was small and beautiful and didn’t care about anything except money. He couldn’t find a girl in the great American South. Too dark. Too small. So he found me. Or I found him. I’m not sure now who started it, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. He let me draw him at first (and how jealous I was of your woman when I saw your drawings of her). He posed for me for money, of course. And then he let me take photographs of him, for money (Cannon must have those now). And then later he let me do what I wanted to do with him, and that was for money too. I had a crush on him in some ways, because he was so perfect—so small—like a doll.… But he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him. I couldn’t—because I loved you. Does that embarrass you? Will you burn this letter? I guess you’d better.… But you knew it, didn’t you? You’re a damned innocent in a lot of ways, for all your Brooklyn crap, but you aren’t a fool. You must have seen …
But I knew that it was never to be. Nothing ever was to be. I had poor little amoral You Know Who. And what broke me—after Cannon took away everything—was that I would be disgraced over a tart. Someone I didn’t even love.
Well, I just don’t want to live anymore in a world without love.
I don’t want to live alone.
I used to tell myself that maybe art was enough. That I’d put everything into my painting and that would give me a life. But the truth is—my work just isn’t good enough. I have craft, but no art—an eye, but no vision. There’s always been something missing right from the start—some center—something that would focus the vision—bind all the elements … and I guess that the name of that thing is love.
So I’m going out of this. I want you to have all my stuff—my paints—pads—books—if the Navy will give them to you. If you ever get to Atlanta, go to see my mother. But don’t tell her everything you know and don’t show her all of my work. You know what I mean.… I’ve written to her to explain everything in a way that she will accept.
But I can’t give you anything else. You know what you have to do. You have to go and get love. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life. I go. But I hope that some day, years from now, when you’re a famous painter or a father of six, when you have met ten thousand new people and seen the great cities of the earth, you will pause on a summer morning when there’s a wet wind like the wind off the Gulf and you’ll remember me.
Love,
Miles
Aw, Christ.
Aw, Miles.
I slipped the letter back into the envelope, folded it, thought about tearing it into a thousand pieces but didn’t. I opened my locker and slipped it into Miles’s copy of The Art Spirit. Then I lay down. Wanting to answer him. Wanting to go to his bunk and wake him up and tell him to take some more time, to outlast the Navy and then go to New York or Paris or some other gigantic place where nobody cared what he was and he could find someone to love.
I wanted to say some magic words to him that would save his life.
But it was too fucking late.
I fell into a deep, exhausted, trembling sleep.
• • •
I slept through breakfast. I slept through lunch. I woke at last around three, my hands and head hurting. I was in the shower before I remembered the letter. And thought: What if someone finds it? Suppose they came to search all the lockers, looking for evidence of something or other? A board of inquiry. An investigation. And I felt instantly ashamed, as if I were betraying Miles even after his death. Then, still showering, scrubbing my teeth under the nozzle, letting the water drill into my mouth, the fragments of the night moved through me. Red Cannon in the endless Pacific at the end of the war, with dead men everywhere. Dixie Shafer’s abundance. Madame Nareeta. The fight in the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club. You have to go and get love. There were too many men without women in this world, fighting and hurting one another. And I’m one of them again.
I dried myself and dressed in clean whites and hurried out. I was very hungry. I went to the EM Club. Becket was sitting at a corner table. He looked up in a grim way aand told me that Sal, Max, Dunbar and six Marines were all in the brig. There were seven Marines in the Mainside hospital and the scuttlebutt said that one might die. A guy named Gabree. If he did, everyone would be charged with manslaughter.
“Manslaughter?”
The word sounded huge, scary.
“I’m going to Mass,” Becket said. “Wanta come?”
“No.”
“You’re a Catlick, righ
t?”
“Retired,” I said.
Becket smiled and tapped me on the shoulder and went out through the door into the hot afternoon. I ate a burger and drank a Coke and added a cup of coffee. I wondered if the Marine guards were banging around Sal and Max and Maher. The way I’d booted and stomped Gabree, who had called me a niggerloving swabbie. I thought about Bobby Bolden in the ice hills of Korea and the way the Marines marched back, hurt and wounded and crippled with frostbite, and how much Bobby loved them for that and how stupid the endless rivalry was between sailors and Marines. It was a fight between uniforms. If we’d gone to the Miss Texas Club in civvies, the brawl might never have happened. It would have been a simple fair one: me and Red Cannon.
I looked out through the screened windows and saw Captain Pritchett staring at his flowers. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want to talk to him about what happened the night before or what was going to happen. I got up and slipped out the door and walked across the base, my T-shirt clinging to my back in the heat.
Back in the barracks, I read the letter from Miles again. You have to go and get love, he whispered from the grave. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life. I went outside and glanced into the brightly lit chow hall. Red Cannon was sitting alone, staring at his soup, his face lumpy, the skin shiny from the Pacific sun.
It was time to go.
I packed a small flight bag with the Thomas Craven book, The Art Spirit, The Blue Notebook, socks and underwear and shaving stuff. Nothing except my shoes would say Navy. I left the packed bag in the locker and waited until everyone was asleep. Then I slipped out the side door. The base was very quiet. I crossed to the Shack and went along the side of the building and stopped just before the window that opened into the secret studio where Miles Rayfield had tried to live his life. For a moment, I hoped that none of this had happened and if the shade was up I’d see the stacked paintings and the brushes and tubes and tins of turpentine laid upon a sheet of glass. I’d see Miles Rayfield’s furrowed face. I’d see an orange filling a room.
The shade was up. But all I could see were crates.
I moved carefully along the perimeter of the field. I saw no guards. Not even at the dumpster. I went out through the hole in the fence into the woods, circled to the highway and slipped into the locker club. I hung my uniform on a wire hanger. Then, dressed in sport shirt and chinos, carrying the small bag, I went behind the locker club and stayed in the shadows, moving west. There was a river to cross, a chance of capture, and I was afraid. I was doing something now that would change everything. Doing this, I could land in the brig or become a fugitive for all the years of my life.
But there was no real choice.
I was going to New Orleans.
To find my loving woman.
Chapter
68
I stopped at the gravel road that led to the trailer and for a moment considered staying there for the night: to sleep one final time in the tight small bed where Eden changed me and maybe I changed her. But then I saw lights burning dimly beyond the trailer, and I moved on, safe in the darkness. By dawn, I wanted to be far from Ellyson Field.
I walked for a long time. I trudged past the railroad trestle where Eden once stood in her red shoes and tempted or terrified some railroad men. For the moment, hitchhiking was out; I couldn’t risk being picked up by Buster and his cruising friends, didn’t want to be spotted by anyone who might recognize me from the base. If that Marine died from his beating, they’d want me for more than being AWOL. The word manslaughter chilled me again. And I wished I could just disappear. If I was never seen or heard from again, what difference would it make to the world? I was nobody. Nameless. Faceless. Walking to New Orleans, with seventy-eight dollars in my pocket. What was important to me didn’t matter to anyone else in the world except Eden. Possibly not even to her. But I would get there. I would find her. Even if I had to walk all the way.
The hours went by. The lights of a thousand cars flashed past while I moved behind a screen of bushes and billboards. Then up ahead I saw a road sign saying Foley and I knew I’d walked into Alabama. My legs felt heavier. My feet hurt. Enough. Now I’d have to take the chance of hitchhiking. I stepped out on the road, trying to look like a sweet all-American boy and not some trunk murderer. After a while a dark-blue pickup stopped, the engine racing. An old man was behind the wheel, thin and toothless and smiling.
“Hurry up, sailor,” he said. “I ain’t got all goddamn night.”
I got in and he put the truck in gear and started tearing down the road, wavering from time to time, heaving up gravel from the shoulder. The radio was tuned to a black station. Hank Ballard. Work with Me, Annie. They used to sing it in the Kingdom of Darkness, everybody stopping to shout the chorus.
“How’d you know I was a sailor?” I said.
“Hitchhikin in these parts, you ain’t no Royal Canadian Mountie. Course, I ain’t no Sherlock Holmes either. Just, I drive these damn roads all the time and that’s who I see. Sailors. Most you people look the same. Where you fum?”
“Miami,” I lied.
“Lots of Jews down there, ain’t they?”
“Some.”
“Hell, they’s Jews all over nowadays. I seen them even in Memphis. Can you beat that?”
“Amazing. Memphis …”
“Where you bound fer?”
“Mobile. The bus station.”
“I’ll drop you off.”
We were on a four-lane road now and all around us I could see marsh grass writhing under the graying sky. The air was thickening with heat. A mosquito landed on my arm and I slapped it and the old man laughed. “Skeeters down here big enough ta play basketball with,” he said. I laughed too. Then we were on a causeway, shooting out over the swamps. “Six miles long hit is,” the old man said. “One of the longest damn bridges in the world.” He told me his name was Woods. I said my name was Lee. I was surprised how easy it was to make up names and places and histories.
The black radio station faded and Woods fiddled with the dial and found another one. Lloyd Price. “Love that damned nigger music,” he said, as Lloyd Price shouted his delight with Miz Clawdy. “Ho, boy!” He slammed the dashboard with the palm of his hand and moved against the rhythm as he drove. Up ahead was the Bankhead Tunnel. He slowed down and fumbled for change to pay the toll. I handed him a dime.
“Thanks, sailor,” he said, palming the coin.
I could see cops around the change booth. And I thought: They could be looking for me. For killing that Marine guard, that Gabree. I thought about feigning sleep but decided it was easier simply to look casual. The cops were bored and tired, with big sweat stains under their arms. Woods handed over his dime and we eased into the traffic as Billy Ward began to sing Sixty-Minute Man. I wondered where Bobby Bolden was and whether he did much thinking about the rest of his life.
The tunnel was two lanes wide, with a few cars coming at us in the other lane. Woods moved the truck smoothly, both hands gripping the wheel. He didn’t drift. Not down there. Then he started to pick up speed. The tiled walls were dripping with summer perspiration. I had a feeling that we would come up on the other end in Manhattan. I’d see the Hudson behind me and the docks of the ocean liners and the Empire State Building off to the left. The faces would be familiar. There would be plenty of Jews. And black people too. And Puerto Ricans. I’d thank Woods and get out of the truck and go to the newsstand on the corner and buy the News and Mirror and the Journal-American. Maybe I’d take the train to Ebbets Field. The Dodgers would be playing the Cardinals. And when the game was over, I’d go down to Coney Island and buy some hotdogs at Nathan’s and walk out to the beach and look at the girls in their bathing suits, their skin still white with winter, and I’d call my father and tell him I was home, and I’d be there soon and none of this would have happened.
But when we came up out of the tunnel we were still in Alabama. Going
farther and farther away from New York. And then I felt light, boneless, runny with fear; in a few hours, what I had done would be irreversible. Donnie Ray would call the roll and I would not be there. He would run through the motions, as he had the morning that Boswell didn’t show; but when he was certain I was gone, he would mark me AWOL. And I knew that I might never be able to go back to New York. I would never see my father and brothers, except from the shadows. I felt like crying.
Over on the left, jammed around the flat mouth of the Mobile River, I could see cargo ships tied to docks, being loaded with bauxite. The air smelled of salt. It was very hot and there was not yet a sign of the sun.
“Ugly goddamn place ain’t it?” Woods said.
“Depends,” I said.
“On what?”
“On whether you’re from here. Maybe if you’re from here, it’s beautiful.”
“I’m from here, sailor. And I say it’s ugly.”
Then we were passing summer houses with bicycles lying on the lawns. The trees were plump and green. I saw at least one swimming pool. Woods made a series of turns and we were suddenly on Government Street, a main drag full of grand houses. We drove a few blocks under a high canopy of live oaks. We turned again, into a seedy treeless district, with For Rent signs in some of the stores. An abandoned car rusted in a side street, its tires gone, the windows punched out. And up ahead I could see the sign for the Greyhound station.
“There you are, sailor.”
“Well, I certainly appreciate the ride.”
“Ah preciate the comp’ny. Hey, you ain’t in no trouble now, are ya?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“You don’t look too damned good.”
“Just tired. I’ll be all right when I get to where I’m going.”
“Won’t we all.”
He pulled over to the curb across the street from the bus station. I opened the door and got out.