Pete Hamill - Loving Women

To the right of the San Carlos there was (and is) a small red-brick building, and beside that a cream-colored church whose cross and steeple were level with the hotel’s sixth floor. The brick building must be the rectory, I thought. And the church bore a cross, so it must be Catholic. Looks Spanish, too, I thought. Or Mexican. Like pictures of churches in National Geographic in places where the sun was hot and clear and blinding. And I remembered the brief lines in the encyclopedia, about Pensacola being called “The City of Five Flags.” The book said it had changed hands thirteen times in twenty years. Obviously, the name itself must be Spanish. Pensa-cola. Cola-cola. Pepsi-Cola. Nickel-nickel, ta-rootie-da-dot-tah .…

I was sweating hard and could smell my own stink rising out of the thick wool winter uniform that I’d worn from the North. Thinking then (as I would later, with other women) that maybe that was why she’d left. The odor of my body, unwashed for two long days, glazed by other men’s cigarette smoke and farts and whiskey breaths: it must have driven her out of the seat and then out of the bus. Maybe she thought all sailors smelled like me. For all I knew, maybe they did . Maybe she had been nauseated by the possibility that Pensacola would be a whole town full of stinking sailors and she would rather get off in Palatka with a bunch of colored people than keep on going. Or perhaps there was some other reason. Something more mysterious, scary, female.

Then a battered gray bus pulled around the corner from Garden Street and stopped in front of the Rex theater. A piece of cardboard was jammed between the windshield and the dashboard. Ellyson Field , it said, hand-lettered in a tight, awkward way. The door opened. A civilian driver got out and stretched.

“This go to Ellyson Field?” I said.

“What’s the sign say, sailor? Brownsville, Texas?”

I got on and sat in a front seat, feeling stupider than ever. Where was Brownsville, Texas, anyway? And why didn’t I say anything back to the man? I wished I could react like the bus driver did. Quickly. Sarcastically. And then thought I never learned her goddamned name . I shifted around, as if expecting her to step off some other bus, maybe the local from Palatka, and saw three sailors in soiled whites hurrying around the side of the San Carlos hotel. They were waving frantically at the bus, mouthing words I couldn’t hear. The driver was behind the wheel now, and looked at them in a blank disgusted way. Then two civilians came down the street, carrying lunch in paper bags. They all got on the bus. The sailors were in their late twenties. I could see from their shoulder patches that one of them was a gunner’s mate, another a second-class radioman, the third a machinist. They were cursing and laughing, bleary from a long night’s drinking. They went all the way to the rear and sat down hard. The civilians eased into a seat across the aisle from me. They said nothing, as if by their silence they were issuing a judgment of the drunk sailors in the rear. As for me, a hairless kid in dress blues, I didn’t exist. The driver came back and glanced at his watch and then looked at me.

“What’s the fare?” I said.

“No charge in uniform,” the driver said. “You jest comin aboard, boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful when you get to Ellyson. The excitement’s libel to kill ya.”

Then he slid in behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, closed the door and moved up Palafox Street. This route was to become a permanent part of my life, one of those templates that are engraved on the mind forever. I’ve lost all traces of offices where I’ve worked, houses where I’ve lived with women, the terrain of battlefields where my life came close to ending. I’ve never forgotten the road to Ellyson Field. I saw a luncheonette, a clothing store, a jeweler’s; then a large United States Courthouse, a restaurant called the Driftwood, a deli. The names were different when I cruised the block tonight, but the basic structures remained the same. There were the three churches, which on that day long ago revealed themselves to be Lutheran, Baptist, a Masonic temple. In the New Year’s Day sunlight, while snow choked the northern cities, people stood outside each of the churches, keeping to themselves. There were men in dark suits, looking hot and alien in the brightness, and a lot of what at the time I called older women, at least in their thirties, wearing long dresses and straw hats and white gloves and low-heeled sensible shoes. All were carrying Bibles. I looked at the women, searching for my lost night woman with the curly hair, thinking that her hair would be wild in the heat, that she might have exchanged her jeans and turtleneck for a yellow summer dress. But she wasn’t there; they were all strangers. Not one of them knew me. She called me child .

We moved into a rougher area. One-story buildings made of raw concrete blocks. Jumbled scrapyards full of rusting, anonymous iron. Auto-repair shops with greasy sidewalks out front. A few cheap luncheonettes, closed for New Year’s. There were telegraph poles everywhere. And still no people. The light here was less intense than it had been on Palafox. Across the aisle, the civilians sat like statues. But I could hear mumbling and sudden laughter from the sailors in the back, as if they were recalling what had happened during the night. I wished I could tell someone what had happened to me during the night. O curly-haired woman without a name .

Then we were out of the ugly district, moving into open country. The fields along the highway were ruled into neat rows of vegetables, and there were more Negroes walking along the edge of the road and more churches: smaller, made of wood or concrete blocks, with white steeples on the larger ones, signs calling to sinners: CHRIST IS RISEN NOW IT’S YOUR TURN and CHRIST IS ON THE WAY and WHAT DOTH IT PROFIT A MAN?

The bus slowed as we passed a row of honky-tonks on both sides of the road, flat-roofed one-story buildings with cars parked outside. The Circle O and Good Times and Jack’s Port ’o’ Call and The Palms Away and The Fleet’s Inn. Some had signs in the windows saying PACKAGE STORE or FISH FRY or BURGERS. The bus stopped at a red light. Cars darted out of the side street. Then a sailor in dress whites came hurrying from a place called The Anchor Inn. The driver opened the door. The man climbed in, a machinist’s mate, third class, breathing hard, his eyes runny and sore. He needed a shave. The sailors in the back all started applauding. One of them shouted: “You didn’t get the clap this time, Roscoe, you oughtta shoot yisself in the foot!”

“Fuck you bastards,” he said.

“You now got yisself the only discharge you’ll ever see!”

He laughed and went past me to join the others in the back. From the open door of The Anchor Inn I heard a fragment of music from the jukebox. Guitars. A woman’s sad and wounded voice. It could have been in another language. At home, when I heard pieces of music, the whole song would play through my head. But this was hillbilly music, music out of the South, and I didn’t know any of it. The tavern door closed. I realized it had been days since I’d heard any music at all. Just “Auld Lang Syne” on the Greyhound bus. Today, every time I hear it I remember that New Year’s night on the bus. And when I hear country music, I’m back in the South, moving along those roads.

The driver turned right at a cross street, and there ahead of me was a long avenue, with unkempt fields on each side and small stunted palm trees planted along the shoulders. Eight-foot barbed-wire fences bordered the empty fields. Then I could see a brick building getting larger as we came closer and a sign that said HTU-1 ELLYSON FIELD and Marines with tan uniforms and white belts and pistols on their hips, watching the approach of the bus. And beyond them I could see this place where I was going to live for a long time: hangars, a lone helicopter the size of an insect rising from a hidden landing strip, and then barracks, white and silent, on green lawns off to the left. Ellyson Field. Where they trained helicopter pilots for the Navy and the Marines, men who went from here to Korea and picked fliers right out of the sea after they’d been shot down. I knew nobody. Nobody at all. I was very hungry and my stomach tingled and then turned uneasy and I wondered who was here to try to break me and who wished me harm. I took out my packet of orders and got my ID card ready and then wondered why I was there at all.