Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

“No,” I said.

  “Like pilots shooting down enemy airplanes, like becoming aces. You’re not like that,” she said.

  I wondered if I was.

  She moved away from me to lean against the far door, a dim, pale-capped figure against the black window.

  “Sure,” I said. “If we were in some wonderful place. Where there were no obstructions. Where there wasn’t any danger of you getting pregnant, or of getting emotionally—you know, screwed up. And nobody was going to find out about it, and think what they’d think about you, and about me. I mean, I don’t want to be an ace, but if we could get together like that, and you were as willing as I was—boy!”

  Bonny giggled, her arms wrapped around herself. “Girl!” she said. “It’s just—it’s not fair, for girls,” she said. “Boys don’t risk anything much, and girls risk everything.”

  “I know that.”

  “Will you still like me if I don’t want to do it? I mean, I did it and it was—well, I told you, it was like an operation. I know you’ve done it. Haven’t you?”

  “Just somebody’s sister.”

  “Was it wonderful?”

  “Hemingway says somewhere that the good things are things where you feel good afterward. So it was bad.”

  “Well, I’m sorry Johnny’s dead,” Bonny said. “But I don’t have to be grief-stricken.”

  “You are the thing in my life I feel good about,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Bonny said.

  It was a moment to say something more, but I let it go by.

  “I want to have the best marriage I can!” she went on. “Someone I love. I don’t want to live in some terrible place and be poor. With a baby. But you know, I don’t want to just get married to somebody like Daddy and be like my mother, either. I mean, that’s just what you’re supposed to do if you’re a girl. You’re supposed to want that! Is that all there is?”

  Was that what I wanted, only the male side of it? Be a successful guy with a Packard like Dr. Bonington? Since the Depression I hadn’t known to what socioeconomic class—in Tully’s terminology—I belonged, but I surely didn’t want to go on being poor.

  Bonny’s head tipped forward so that her profile became indistinguishable against the window. Glenn Miller was playing “Moonlight Becomes You.”

  After a time she said, “Don’t you ever get scared?”

  “What?”

  “The war! What if we lose? We keep losing and losing!”

  “We’ll start winning.”

  “What if it just goes on and on?”

  “It won’t!”

  She flung herself back into my arms. We kissed and kissed.

  5

  I sat on the long counter in Perry’s basement with Herb Brownell, Ted Sparks and Chuck-the-checker in his tan apron. The two other drivers were smoking after-work cigarets and commiserating with Chuck, who had received his draft notice.

  “Everybody’s going to have to get in it if we’re going to beat the little bastards,” Chuck said. He sat on an upended delivery box with his skinny legs stretched out. Smoke hung in a high pall against the ceiling. The drivers rarely hung around after work unless it was a special occasion, such as Chuck’s induction orders, or Big Bill Hutchinson, the union steward and once my mother’s boyfriend, come to establish the Teamsters’ presence.

  In her glass cage Lois cranked up the day’s CODs on her adding machine.

  “From the President of the United States, Greetings!” Herb said. “Greetings from Eleanor, too!” He and Ted were twenty-eight and twenty-nine, which seemed to me close to the end of acceptable life.

  Ted said, “What do you do, College? Just stay in school till you finish, and then they hand you a commission?”

  “Those snipers like to pick off the lieutenants first, I hear,” Chuck said.

  I should have hustled home to do homework, but I knew there should be some ceremony about Chuck’s induction orders.

  “I’m Navy,” I said.

  “Navy’s not doing so good these days,” Ted said.

  “Hope to God my 4-F holds,” Herb said. He coughed dramatically, hand to chest, and I remembered Errol Flynn talking about his lungs.

  “I couldn’t stand seeing all that good pussy going to waste,” Herb went on. “This town’s full of snatch, their husband’s off in the fleet. It’s a public service.”

  “How many you got out on your route now, Herb?” Ted inquired admiringly.

  Herb held up three fingers, which he reduced to one, pumping it obscenely. I only half-believed his tales of conquests. His habitual stance was slightly bent forward at the waist, as though his back troubled him because of the demands made on him on his Park Boulevard route.

  “Did you ever fuck a Jap, Herb?” Ted asked.

  “Shit, yes!”

  “Ted wants to ask the oldest question in the world,” Chuck said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Was it set sideways?”

  Ted collapsed with delight. These were the workers Tully considered more virtuous than the bourgeoisie. These jerks made me feel like a Superior Man.

  “I wouldn’t fuck a Jap,” Chuck said. “Probably keep a razor blade in there to slice your dick off.”

  “Treacherous bastards,” Ted said.

  I spoke up to say that one of my best friends was Japanese. “The best quarterback San Diego High ever had. He’s in premed at UCLA.” Why had I had to say that?

  “Most of them traitors, it looks like,” Herb said.

  “Bullshit!” I said.

  Chuck’s brown eyes flashed at me.

  Spraying spit in his vociferousness, Ted said, “Everybody knows they’ve got radio transmitters to call Tokyo.”

  “That’s all bullshit,” I said. “Why do you want to believe that bullshit you read in the papers? They’re just trying to make you hate Japs.” I knew I wasn’t going to persuade anyone here by quoting editorials from the brand. And there was the chance I’d fallen for the brand bullshit just as they fell for the San Diego Union variety.

  I’d had a letter from Stan Takahashi, with sarcastic jokes about his father out in the shed with the powerful transmitter and his mother planting the lettuces in rows that pointed at Consolidated Aircraft. He’d related a joke about the rabbis who were such expert circumcisors that with two more strokes they could rid Japanese of the epicanthic folds.

  Not joking, Stan had written that his father was afraid to go out of the house, and his Uncle Jiro had had to sell his fishing trawler for nothing when the Japanese were evicted from Terminal Island. Now the assholes were trying to get them evacuated from the Coast. There were marches and rallies at UCLA, but it looked bad.

  The outrage had come out in his letter.

  “It’s you college kids that’ll believe anything the pinkos tell you,” Chuck said, who had been good to me as a junior driver, and who knew I worked for the brand.

  “They caught this Jap out in East San Diego sending radio signals,” Herb said. “The FBI came and took him away. No shit, Payt.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Everywhere the Japanese were victorious, and their cruelties in their victories were appalling. How did you tell the good ones from the bad ones, my mother wanted to know, since they all possessed epicanthic folds? How did I know Stan was a loyal American, and how was I so sure that the diminutive Mr. Takahashi did not have a transmitter out in the shed, and that his truck gardens were not planted in treacherous patterns? Because people of whom I was contemptuous believed crap like that?

  “I don’t have to hate people Westbrook Pegler and Henry McLemore say I’m supposed to hate,” I said.

  “We’re watching you, College,” Herb said. “Hanging around with Jap quarterbacks and working for that Commie rag.”

  I managed to grin, but Ted and Chuck wouldn’t look at me now, lighting fresh cigarets.

  “What about pachucos?” Chuck said, blowing smoke. “You got a pachuco football buddy, too?”

  I had a Negro football buddy, another Tutti-fr
utti.

  “They sure beat the shit out of the pachooks up in LA,” Ted said, sticking out his jaw. No doubt he wished he had been there, helping the sailors and Marines clobber the East LA zoot-suiters. Some sailors had been robbed, and mobs of servicemen had roamed the streets of LA, beating up any Mexican who had the temerity to show himself in a drape-shape.

  It seemed to me I got mad too quickly these days.

  I slid off the zinc counter and drifted toward the stairs. Lois had removed her Perry’s apron and was applying lipstick, peering into her purse mirror. I leaned in the doorway, admiring the pretty half-rounds of her bosom in her tight blue suit. I had a daydream of asking her to have an after-work Cuba libre with me sometime when her husband was out of town.

  “Going home?” I asked.

  “Ray’s picking me up.” A flake of lipstick had stuck to her crooked tooth. She regarded me with an almost smile. “How’s your love life?”

  “Just fine!”

  “That’s good,” Lois said. In a different voice she said, “Were you boys telling dirty jokes back there?”

  “Talking politics. They think I’m a Red.”

  “I know they talk about me. I can’t stand that Herb Brownell. All he can think about is one thing.”

  “All the women on his route are after him.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet!” Lois said, and laid a hand on my chest.

  Just then Herb mounted the steps past us, with a wolf whistle. Lois snatched her hand away, and I felt my face burn.

  “Well, good night!” I said.

  “Tell your girlfriend I’m jealous,” Lois said, gazing straight into my eyes.

  6

  Over Cokes in the Caff, I showed Pogey my latest rejection from Black Mask, a slip of mimeographed paper, thanks but no thanks. This one was initialed, however: “PR.” P. D. Ratner was the editor.

  “The editor read it, at least,” Pogey said. His white shirt was starched and crisp, his face earnest, his nose sunburned as always.

  The fact that I received another rejection slip for my collection meant that I was at least writing stories and sending them out. I had finished three stories this school year, when I had no time.

  No time meant I had gone to sleep necking with Bonny on Point Loma and had done badly on two midterms.

  Last summer Pogey and I had had great fun planning our private eye novel, laughing as we thought up crazy plots with Dick Tracy villains, like a muscleman called Le Cric, from Jean Valjean the human jackscrew in Les Misérables.

  We didn’t seem to have that kind of fun anymore, no time for tennis or for sitting around talking books. It was Bonny, lately, but the war, too, and working two jobs, and Alpha Beta. I didn’t know what Pogey would do if the brothers really got mad at me for not attending meetings. If they were pissed off enough they would vote a silence, all of them forbidden to speak to the offender.

  Pogey handed me back the rejection slip, which I refolded into my wallet. “You and Bonny are kind of pretty serious,” he said without looking at me. His ears had turned red.

  I shrugged elaborately. “She’s supposed to marry a doctor.”

  “That sounds like a bad novel I can’t remember the name of,” Pogey said.

  “Never darken Lady Barbara’s doorway again, young whelp of Daltrey!”

  Pogey grinned and rubbed his nose. It was like cranking an engine that wouldn’t catch. Rich-kid Pogey would never know what it was like to be disapproved of because he wasn’t up to some mark. Poison frogs and stones, the bitter tea of General P.

  Looking down, Pogey said, “You ought to come to tong meeting Monday night. You know it?”

  “I don’t think I can sit still for all the shit I’m going to have to take.”

  He nodded miserably.

  “It just doesn’t seem serious anymore,” I said. “I mean, we’re losing the war and all they talk about is beer busts and attitudes.”

  I didn’t want to quarrel with Pogey over Alpha Beta. The tong had been important to me, too, once, but now I was impatient with oaths and the Greek alphabet and critiquing each other’s attitude. Something had happened to mine.

  Liz Fletcher threaded her way toward us between the tables, classy-pale face beneath her dark hair, red lips, slim and long-legged. We stood to greet her, and Pogey looked at his wristwatch and said he had to make a class. Liz slipped into his chair.

  She’d heard from Richie. “He’s hoping he’ll get to fly some new kind of plane,” she said with her soft lisp.

  “SBDs?”

  “Maybe that’s it.” Her eyes fixed on me in that way she had; she licked her lips. “The Sirocco’s back in the Bay,” she said.

  “I guess you can see it from your house.”

  “I know all those yachts. John Ford’s Araner and James Cagney’s Martha and Richard Arlen’s Joby B. I forget the name of George Brent’s.”

  I thought of Lana Turner, who had been discovered sitting at a drugstore counter on Hollywood Boulevard, and Rita Hayworth discovered dancing in the Foreign Club in Tijuana. Of course Flynn would seem a way for Liz to be discovered.

  I asked what her father had thought of her going out on the Sirocco.

  Little muscles tensed around her mouth as though she were trying to smile. “He thinks Errol is a Nazi sympathizer. He keeps a file on him.”

  Her father was in Naval Intelligence at the destroyer base, so he was a detective of some kind.

  “I kind of liked Flynn,” I said.

  “He’s wonderful!” She held out her hand to admire Richie’s ring, which glittered in the lights. “Do you think Richie has another girlfriend back in Pensacola?”

  I stammered that Richie wouldn’t do that.

  “He did before,” she said, smiling and turning the ring on her finger.

  * * *

  That was the year after Richie graduated from SC, when he was working for the studio and had the famous Cord car. He was down from LA staying with my father and Weezie.

  “It’s tough being in love with two women, Brud,” he had said, leaning on the seawall at Mission Beach. It was a brilliant blue summer day with a few white puffs of cloud, and rollers sliding in to the beach. Seagulls hovered, and people lay on blankets on the sand or sat beneath beach umbrellas. Some kids were playing touch football, and a black dog charged and snapped at the last gasp of a wave.

  “Liz Fletcher and your starlet,” I said.

  Richie gave me a severe look. “She’s a feature player!”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “So you’ve got a girlfriend now,” Richie said, squinting out to sea.

  Her name was Ellie Minton. “Well, we’ve gone to some movies.”

  “Are you getting into her pants?”

  I felt myself flush all the way into my hair.

  “Be careful,” Richie said. “You may think, they let you do it, it’s a real present all wrapped up in fancy ribbons. But you pay for what you get. The more you get, the more you owe.”

  One of the kids playing touch caught a pass and ran across the goal, which was a line scraped in the sand.

  I said it all sounded too complicated for a simple country boy.

  Now I thought that Richie had been bragging that day, the way Bonny was afraid Johnny Pierce had bragged about getting into her pants.

  I asked Liz if she wanted a Coke, but she said she had to run. She patted my hand and with her thin smile started away, swinging her hips to sidestep the tables.

  I had a flash of Bonny across the Caff and raised a hand to signal her, but she disappeared. I knew she didn’t like my meeting Liz on campus, as though I had the hots for my brother’s fiancée, as though I, too, were in love with two women.

  7

  This week’s brand was on the counter at the printshop. The headlines were BIDDLE TESTIMONY REFUTED, OPA ISSUES NEW ALLOTMENTS, and MOLESTED TOT NAMES ASSAILANT.

  Tully handed me an envelope. “Fan mail,” he said.

  The handwriting on lined paper torn from a tablet was sha
ky, maybe from age, or rage.

  Dear Rats,

  Why don’t you rats go back to Russia. I know you rats “bore from within.” You print filthy lies about decent American judges and evil lies about the govt. We are on to filthy rats like you kikes. I am warning you there are plenty of us onto your tricks, and if Rep. Dies don’t know about you he is going to.

  The signature was illegible, but legible beneath it was “American Legion Post 5.”

  I dropped the letter onto Tully’s desk, the letter that was not merely from the American Legion but also HUAC, the Silver Shirts, Father Coughlin—the Jap- and Jew-hating shitty bottom layer of America.

  “Hey, Commie rat!” I said to Tully, who gazed back at me with his arms folded on his chest and his jaw set like a Christian martyr with the lions snarling and pawing the sand.

  My own anger leaked away at the realization that he was scared stiff of the threat of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Tee-John stamped in from the pressroom to lean on the counter beside me, his jaw working like a camel’s on his chaw of tobacco. Tee-John was an old IWW stiff.

  “How about it, Tee-John?” I said. “What if the Legion sets up a picket line?”

  “Break fockin arms!” Tee-John raised an arm-and-hammer fist.

  “They’d smash Charlotte,” Tully said.

  “Bring gun,” Tee-John said.

  “That’s not a good idea, Tee.”

  My father had warned me about feelings at his Legion post against the brand, and one of the reasons I didn’t want to go to a tong meeting was that I didn’t want to find out how my fraternity brothers felt about it. Irony and pity were called for.

  “Well, it’s good to know somebody reads the paper,” I said.

  They both frowned at me. Tully asked me to make a coffee run.

  Heading out the door, I almost knocked down Calvin’s Dessy.

  “Sorry!”

  In the streetlight-illuminated dark she didn’t recognize me immediately. Then her hand flew up in greeting.

  “It’s Cal’s friend! I’m going to the White Castle for something to eat.”

  “I’m going for coffee.”

  She started along with me. She wore silk stockings and high heels; she must be ready for an evening of tricks! But I found I was pleased to be walking beside her down 3rd Street; there was something exciting about her availability. A V-8 drifted past, a man whistling out the window. Dessy ignored him. When I thought of her having to screw her bosses in San Francisco, I felt a familiar gob of outrage in my throat again.