Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

That’s what he tells himself most of the time, and when that story doesn’t sell—usually in those cold gray hours of the early morning when he’s so drunk he’s almost sober—he tells himself a different story—that he doesn’t want to go back to the brig.

Charlie has felt an SP’s baton in the kidneys, along with the metallic taste of his own blood when they decided it was more fun to bust up his face, and he don’t want any more of it. They do whatever they want to do to you in the brig, and then hose it down like that washes it all away. Thirty days AWOL, the captain might send him to the brig and it’s not a chance he wants to take.

That’s what Charlie tells himself, anyway.

Now he watches Millie walk into the kitchen and likes the way she looks in the little white silk robe he bought her.

Millie’s a looker, all right.

That Saturday night he had liberty and headed down to Eddie’s because he heard that’s where the factory girls go. The ship had just limped back for repairs so they had a lot of free time, and after what they’d been through they were all ready to for it too. The scuttlebutt was that Eddie’s was the place to go, so he skipped the usual dives in the Gaslamp and headed to Pacific Beach. The joint was crowded with sailors and Marines all after the same thing, but he saw her and gave her that smile and she smiled back.

Charlie went up to her and talked and then she let him buy her a drink and then another and they talked and he asked her a lot of questions about herself and found out she came out from a little town in North Dakota because she’d always wanted to see the ocean and she wanted an adventure.

“I heard there were jobs for women in San Diego,” she said. “So I got on a train and here I am.”

“Here you are,” Charlie smiled.

“In Pacific Beach, California,” she said.

“Do you like it?”

She nodded. “I like the money and it’s fun living with the other girls most of the time.”

They talked some more and then he asked if they could get out of there and she said okay but where did he want to go?

“Can’t we just go to your place?” he asked. “You said you have a place.”

“I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to go right away. A girl likes a little romance, you know.”

Oh, hell, he knew. He was just hoping this one girl didn’t. But if she didn’t, she’d be the first ever. At least of the ones you didn’t pay. The whores, they didn’t want romance, they just wanted you to get your business over with as soon as possible so they could get on with theirs. It was like eating on a ship—hurry up and finish because there’s a sailor waiting for your chair.

But Millie, she looked at him with those dark blue eyes and he decided that a walk along the beach would be just the thing. You expected blue eyes with a blond girl, but Millie’s hair was jet black, and cut short, and she had these cute lips that made you think of Betty Boop. When he walked close to her she smelled like vanilla, because, she told him, perfume was hard to get.

But the vanilla smelled good behind her ear, in her hair. She was small, what did she call it—petite—and fit nice under his arm as they walked on the sand under the pier. A radio was playing somewhere and they stood and danced under the pier and he held her tight.

“You feel nice,” he said, because it was all he could think of to say and because it was true too.

“So do you,” she responded.

Now he remembers how nice she smelled and how good she felt under his arm and how life was the way he always hoped it would be. There were no flames that night, no acrid smoke that burned his nose, no screams that seared his brain, and the waves touched the beach like kisses, and if he told the truth he would have stayed there forever with her on Pacific Beach and not even taken her back to her place and her bed.

But he did and they made love and he slept through his liberty. He meant to go back that day, he really did, while it was still no big deal, but it was just too good with her in the little bungalow.

Millie shared the bedroom with another girl from the factory, a girl named Audrey from Ohio, and they’d run a rope across the room and draped a blanket over it for a little privacy. Sometimes Millie didn’t want to make love if Audrey was home because she felt shy with the other girl just across from the blanket. But Audrey worked the day shift and was gone a lot of nights with an airman, and sometimes Millie did it anyway with Audrey there and Charlie suspected she liked it because it made her feel dirty.

The bungalow was crowded, but so was all of Pacific Beach since they built the factories and all the people came for work. There was hardly any place to lie down—some people lived in tents in backyards—so Millie felt lucky to stay there even though it was hard to get into the bathroom sometimes and there were two girls sleeping in the living room.

Charlie liked it there too, that was the problem, even though it often felt as crowded as a ship. But it was quiet in the morning with the girls gone on their shifts, and he and Millie got up late and had the kitchen to themselves and they’d take their coffee and cigarettes out into the tiny yard and enjoy the sun.

Audrey had a car and sometimes they’d drive down to Oscar’s for hamburgers, or go to Belmont Park and ride the roller coaster, and Millie would scream and hold on tight to his arm and he liked that. One time when Millie got paid they went to the Hollywood Theater downtown to see the burlesque and she dug her elbow into his ribs when he gawked at Zena Ray, and they both laughed at Bozo Lord even though his jokes were corny. And afterward he got her to admit she thought the girls were pretty, and she was a pistol in bed that night.

On the nights she worked, he’d stay home or hit the bars on Garnet or Mission Boulevard, keeping a sharp eye out for the SPs even though there were a lot of guys walking around in civvies—the 4Fs, sure, but mostly men who had served their bit, or been wounded, or were on leave. So the SPs didn’t look at him too hard and anyway they were busy keeping an eye on the sailors and marines who flooded the sidewalks and had fistfights that spilled into the street.

Charlie would make sure he arrived back to the bungalow before she got home, tired from work but too jazzed up to go to sleep, and he thought it was funny that this tiny girl was building PBYs and B-24s.

“You’ve probably killed more Japs than I have,” he said to her one morning.

“I don’t like to think about that,” she said.

The nights were fun but the days were the best. Most days they’d sleep in late, then have breakfast and walk down to Pacific Beach and swim, or just sit or lie down on the sand and take naps, or walk along the boardwalk and maybe stop someplace to have a beer, and the days just went by and now July has become August, and he has a tough decision to make.

Charlie comes into the kitchen in his skivvies and a T-shirt and sits down at the table.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.

“The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.

She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.

He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.