“How do you know this? You don’t go to the Bohio, do you?”
“Of course not, but I have it on good authority.” Guillermo was a regular at the rowdy bar.
“But surely he wouldn’t take advantage of family.” Rosita wrapped her arms around herself. “They’ll be okay,” she said, perhaps more for herself than for him.
If he wanted to go alone, he would stow away on one of the big freighters that left port for Mexico or Brazil. He knew a few dock workers who would look the other way for a reasonable price, but he couldn’t bear the thought of freedom without his girls, or them without him on this island of uncertainty.
“There must be some other way,” he said.
Rosita tilted her head, jutted out her chin, and threw a mocking glare that he had seen more frequently in recent weeks. “Name one. Oh yes. Big-shot Quique. Where is he now? In the belly of a shark?”
Ramón’s mouth went dry. Sweet Rosita had learned to be nasty. He couldn’t say anything about his suspicions about his brother, and now she was mocking his lost savior. It was too much. He swiped his drink off the table with the back of his hand. The glass hit the wall. Shards of red and golden drops of rum rained down on the clean tiles. The sting of her and Guillermo’s mockeries gathered in his hands. His brother was out range, but his wife wasn’t. He shoved the table hard into her and followed with another backhand, this time across her cheek.
“Ay!” she yelped.
He had never hit his wife before. It felt so good he didn’t want to stop.
“Mami!” Margo shrieked from the bedroom, loud enough, it seemed, to wake the whole country. Their old mutt stuttered out barks from the front room, starting a chorus of strays and outside dogs.
Rosita’s fists trembled on the table. His mother’s hands had clenched the same way on this yellow Formica. He had wanted those hands to caress his face, to let him know that everything was all right. Now he wanted to pound them flat. He raised his arm again.
“Ramón.” Rosita’s high, fierce voice rang out in a tone he’d never heard before.
He paused in his back swing.
She was trapped behind the table, but her eyes glittered as she lifted her chin into that haughty Montero pose. “You think this will make you a man?”
He landed another blow to her face. Just then he noticed Virginia’s tousled head in the doorway. Did she see? Her lithe teenaged body tensed under a pink night gown. Alma, their middle daughter, peered around her. A second later, Margo, her face wet with tears, crowded in on Virginia’s other side. The mutt’s grizzled snout poked in between the two oldest girls.
Rosita eased the table away. She dipped her head and mustered a crumpled smile. Her multiple dimples had been known to disarm the most skeptical of government officials, even the female ones.
“We’ve had a little accident,” she said. “The drink fell off the table.”
Virginia followed the long arc the glass would have to travel to make the mess across the room, then stared at her mother’s swelling face. Ramón saw his wife’s lie register in his daughter’s eyes. Virginia left him at that moment. Nothing would ever be the same with her.
“Mother,” she said, choosing a formality she almost never used. “Help me put Margo back to bed.”
“Of course, hija.” Rosita winced as she stood but didn’t stop moving before joining her girls in the doorway. They all turned their backs on Ramón.
“Rosita,” he said.
She gathered in her girls but didn’t turn around. A man from work had said to always punch them where the bruises wouldn’t show in church. He saw the man’s black teeth and the boils on the finger he used to punctuate this bit of wisdom. Ramón could dismiss this mofeta whose stink rivaled that of a rotten hide, but he had finally joined the brotherhood that nodded and laughed along with him. It defeated him, this country, with its secrecy and betrayals and violence.
“Rosita, my life,” he said.
She looked over one shoulder. Virginia peered over her other. The twin set of dark eyes, so alike in the gloom of the hall, decided him.
“Do what you must,” he said.
Rosita nodded once and turned away. Virginia held his gaze until her eyes were lost in the shadows.
The Pattern Man 3
RAY SAT AT his desk and counted. He counted the number of minutes until midnight. Seven. He counted the number of cigarettes he had left. Nine. He counted the number of voices arguing over a box of scuffed and nicked O-rings. Three, now four. He went back to the paperwork on his desk. The hours between eleven at night and seven in the morning could stretch into eternity, but not when flight readiness had dropped to an hour. Each day, papers stacked in his in-box while he trailed Stone to catch changing orders or harangued men to get faster without the carelessness of being in a hurry. He flipped through a stack of blue carbon copies and counted the cartons of O-rings they had. Four. Not counting the disputed case. Okay, that would get them through a couple of days, but the next order would have to go on the fast-track list. Seemed as if everything went on the fast-track list these days.
“Owens,” he yelled. An airman leaned across the doorless entrance to his office, his hand braced on the frame. Ray looked into coal-black eyes. “Tell them to take that box back to the depot and pick up another one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And for Chrissakes be careful this time.”
“You got it, Sarge.” Formalities were for day shifts and one shift at a time and for men you barely knew. Still, he had gotten the “Sarge.” Men around here always gave him that.
Owens disappeared and Ray went back to counting. The phone rang, its jangle surely suggesting another dropped delivery or misplaced pallet. He lifted the phone and heard big band music and a mix of male voices. Here was a disaster of another sort. What did Ham want now?
“Grayson House. On the double,” his CO said. The words were crisp and low. Someone who didn’t know him would think that he were sober.
“Ham, we have a whole convoy—”
“Now.” The line went dead.
Ray threw the stack of invoices back into his in-box and shouted.
This time Owens appeared with O-rings in his hands as if he were about to juggle them. The ones in his right hand could be salvaged, Ray noticed. Good thinking. Owens was an asset.
“Take over here. I gotta go to Stone.” He slipped on his jacket. “Keep them moving. We’re going to get more tomorrow.”
“I’m on it, Sarge.” He backed up to let Ray pass. “Good luck.”
Ray snorted and went out to the Galaxy 500 he had gotten when the youngest was finally out of a booster seat. Betty Ann drove the new Pontiac, but that was all right. Ray had this baby painted a cream color, and some people assumed it was a Thunderbird before they got a good look at it. That was cool with Ray. It hadn’t been washed in a week—a long time for him—but he had been pulling double duty and the only time the car was home, it seemed, was when the boys were fast asleep or gone to school and he was too tired to keep his eyes open. He emptied the ashtray and the small trash box that sat with weighted flaps on the hump, just in case his CO needed a ride home.
What in devil did Ham want with him? It was bad enough that he bartered parts off the books. And that he called Ray off of duty when things were slow. But not now. Not with the Russians in Cuba. It was no longer amusing. Both of their butts would be in a sling if they were caught now. Of course, the men who would do the catching were probably the same ones Ham was playing poker with or whatever they were doing at the Grayson House. He had been past there plenty of times but hadn’t been inside. Not yet. He pulled into the parking area shadowed by a circle of trees. Several cars skewed this way and that, all squeaky-clean and reflective even though the dark muted their colors. He sought out Ham’s car but didn’t see its distinctive two-tone paint job. No wonder he called.
Ray approached the porch, which was dimly lit by an electric lantern swaying in the wind. His first thumps of the brass lion knock
er went unanswered, and the doorknob didn’t turn when he tried it. No sounds escaped from the interior, although a sliver of light seeped from the large window to his right. He finally located the rectangle of a doorbell and pushed. Almost immediately the door opened and a young black man in a waiter’s coat stared out at him.
“Major Ham Stone,” he said.
The waiter opened the door wider and Ray slipped inside. He hadn’t realized how cool the night had gotten until he inhaled the warm air of the foyer. The waiter turned to lead him deeper into the house. He glanced into the front room as he passed without breaking stride or appearing to snoop. The errant light had come from a table lamp beside a leather chair near the window. It was the only illumination in the room, as if the master of the house had sat down to read a chapter in a history book as the rest of the household slept. Nice fantasy, Ray thought. He could almost believe it if it were not for the woman’s sling back shoes kicked beside the chair.
This glimpse lasted all of two seconds and it took in something else. Something that meant much more to him. Red velvet curtains with silver fringes arrested his inner motion even as he kept a steady cadence down the hall. He’d seen them before—not here—he’d never been here before. It was at Betty Ann’s dress shop. When she created a combination she liked, she tended to repeat it. He loved that about her. It let him track her riffs across social landscapes on lines that no one else saw. But what was her pattern doing here in the officers’ clubhouse? The waiter stepped aside and allowed him to continue into a room where two tables of poker were in steady action and where a couple of officers lounged in chairs in front of the fireplace. Neither officer occupied his chair alone. One girl’s stockinged leg swung lazily over the chair’s arm, her foot bobbing up and down. Those slingbacks go with her, he thought as he flashed back to the red velvet curtains.
The color scheme in this room continued in the spectrum of rich reds, but different materials and livelier patterns suggested a more casual use. Maybe his brain wouldn’t work this way if he had never met Betty Ann, but he had, and it did.
“Johnson.” Ham’s voice rose up from a couch opposite the club chairs. He pushed a striped pillow onto the floor as he propped himself up into a slouch. More of Betty Ann. Not the same fabric but he could almost smell the musk of her hand. But how? Why didn’t he know? He might have been imagining things, but he wasn’t. He knew Betty Ann’s phrasing the way you knew it was Dexter Gordon and not Sonny Stitt blowing that horn. Did Stone know? And if he did, why hadn’t he clued him in? Stone launched himself off the couch and swayed into Ray before putting an arm around his shoulders and turning him to face the nearest poker table.
General Hepplewhite, sitting in profile to them, looked up at the commotion. “You can’t leave yet.” Hepplewhite dropped his fanned cards face down on the table. “Give me a chance to win them back.”
Stone leaned on the chair of the nearest player and peered over his shoulder. The man shoved back with his shoulder while cupping his cards away. Chips seemed largely distributed away from Hepplewhite, which might cause a man to be belligerent at this point in the night, but he rolled the ash off his cigar in the cut glass ash tray and relaxed back with it cocked between his fingers as he re-fanned his cards.
“General, sir.” Stone steadied himself on the high back of the wooden chair in front of him. He pulled two tickets out of his breast pocket and held them high in the air. “I’m giving these,” he shook his raised fist, “to Johnson here. And I’m instructing him . . .” He paused and raised his index finger. “No. I’m ordering him not to surrender them while we’re in this building.” He passed the tickets back to Ray.
Ray glanced at them as he palmed them and slipped them into his coat pocket. He didn’t get a full look but saw two words he didn’t think he’d see on a ticket this year: “World Series.” No wonder Hepplewhite wanted them back. On the other hand, how could anyone justify a trip with everything going on?
Hepplewhite jammed the cigar in his mouth and gave Ray the once over. “Sergeant, play poker?”
The general knew the answer. No man worth his salt on this base would answer no. What he meant was, do you play poker badly enough for me to win back my baseball tickets? Ray knew how these places could get. This was a tame night. Sometimes the ricocheting energy of a build-up ignited a delirium from which airmen woke up with pregnant girls they hardly knew or stripes stripped from their shoulders. In the other direction, a kind of pall could fall over the base as double duty sputtered into a dull throb of listless card games and half-hearted jousts over steins of beer. Tonight was like that, so far anyway. He knew any night could turn on a dime, especially with his CO involved. He was itching to look at the pair of tickets but kept perfectly still.
The player facing them held the deck as the current dealer. He leaned toward Hepplewhite and said something that Ray couldn’t hear.
“The rules. Of course I know the goddamn rules,” Hepplewhite said. “I made them. I can break them.” He discarded three cards and swept up the new ones into the stack of his hand without looking at them. He tossed two blue chips into the pot.
Stone leaned in as if to look at the hand of the closest player, but the guy just threw the cards on the table. Stone stood up as straight as his condition allowed. “Rules are rules.”
Ray assumed they were referring to some kind of ban on having an NCO at the table, which meant the stakes were higher than a master sergeant could afford. Of course, the World Series tickets were enough evidence of that. He wondered what his CO had put on the table.
Stone reached back and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Come on before I change my mind.” He threw a half-hearted salute at the general, who flipped him the finger. Stone chuckled and circled behind Hepplewhite on his way to the hallway. Ray followed.
The red curtains stood silent watch as they passed the entrance to the front room. “Ham.” He slowed to a stop. “How’d this place get to looking so fancy?”
Ham had reached the front door. At that moment no one else was in the hallway, and the front room was still occupied only by the shoes. “Yee haw!” someone shouted and a hubbub rose from the game room behind them. The sounds of a big pot being raked in followed.
Stone raised his hand as if to open the door but instead swiped his forehead with the heel of his palm. He turned and walked back to stand in front of Ray. His face sported a light sheen of sweat but no hint of emotion. Even so, there was something in the almost imperceptible squint of his eyes, something hard but not unkind.
“Need to know basis,” he said.
Ray stood his ground. “I need to know. Now.”
“Okay.” Stone shrugged. “Ask you wife,” he said and turned away.
The Pattern Man 4
THEN IT WAS the next Saturday night at the NCO Club. Ray took it all in. He had been to clubs like this across the globe, each one had its local flavor, but they all felt the same on Saturday nights. They were filled with energy, stacked up behind the fences of routine and let loose in controlled bursts of laughter and unrestrained drinking. He had been to Berlin before the wall became concrete. As if on autopilot, his mind traced the plan of German airstrips and overlaid them with his runways in the Maryland countryside. Blue lights lined the runways at night. He knew the exact distance between the blue bulbs dotting flat land, knew where you got two hundred of them at a time and where to stow them when they arrived.
Red vinyl booths lined the south and east walls of the club, and four-top tables marched right up to the plate glass windows on the western wall. The sun had just set behind the rolling hills beyond, leaving a rim of bright sky over the shadowed trees. It sparked the underside of stray clouds, turning them pale pink and deepening them by the minute as Ray watched. Instruments would rule flight by 2100 hours, he thought. They were out with Sonny and Lucy and sitting almost dead center of the action in the dining room.
Betty Ann was over at the jukebox, sliding her quarter into the slot, pushing B-29, and swaying in
time to “Blueberry Hill.” He hadn’t said a word to her, not a word, about the Grayson House. One moment he vowed to have it out with her, the next his throat itched at the thought of where else she might have gotten her thrill. He took a swig from his whiskey-rocks to soothe it and piled bacon bits on top of his lettuce and bleu cheese as Betty Ann settled back into her chair.
“My birthday’s coming up,” she said. She stabbed a cherry tomato in his salad. It erupted with the piercing of her fork, pulp and seeds dripping, just once, onto her own salad as she ferried it to her lips.
“Big shindig?” Sonny asked.
“I want it to be. He doesn’t,” Betty Ann said. She reached for Ray’s salad but he pulled his bowl out of reach. He hated it when she pretended she wasn’t that hungry but then ate most of his food.
“Don’t feel like it this year. Too much going on.”
“Maybe that’s exactly why we should get everyone together,” Sonny said.
“Sure,” Betty Ann agreed. “Lots of new folks coming in, too. Have you met the Wilsons yet? They seem fun.”
Who were the Wilsons? Ray wondered as the conversation ran along like that, names of couples spilling across the table. He listened, placing its ebb and flow within the rising hubbub in the restaurant. He picked out the patrons who were laughing through their second drinks, noted the ones that wouldn’t be cutting into their steaks until he and his party had moved on to the lounge. The waitress cleared the empty salad bowls while a voice at the next table said, “Tis-sue, I don’t even know you.” A spray of laughter followed, larger than the joke. The man must be mugging it up, Ray thought, not looking. He zeroed in on the day’s special, recited for the fourth time by the waitress with the gum-chomping punctuation as a counterpoint to Sonny’s bass rumble and Betty Ann’s swinging melody.
Home Front Lines Page 10