Pete Hamill - Loving Women

So Eli left and I walked around the hills for two days callin his name, trying to get him to stay. Them hills used to be so thick and beautiful. But then the loggin people come and they started cutting down the trees. They rolled them down to the creeks and floated them off to the mills where they were cut into lumber, and soon the hills were naked. But even in the naked hills, Eli warnt to be seen. And I thought: there’s nothin left for me in this valley .

So I went away. I jest left Robert and went to the town, walkin for days, waitin to see the place with the brick houses and the tar streets and the Moonlight Sonata gowns in the store windows that’d make me feel, you know, winsome and desirable. I couldn’t find hit. Cause that place never did exist except in my foolish damned schoolgirl head. But I did find Hazard and got me a job in a tool store, wearing shoes cause the streets was all mud. And I met some other girls in town and we started goin to these barns, jenny barns they called them, where people drank Cream of Kentucky whiskey out of Coca-Cola glasses and there uz gamblin in the back rooms, and I met other girls that worked in these places, that dint just come for the dancin, girls that were stayin there for the winter, followin the carnivals in the summer. The jenny barns was wild, with music playin and men from all over, down from the hills, comin to the towns, like the hills uz emptyin out. Which they was .

And one day the store I worked in closed from the Depression, which was all over the world by then. So I went to work in the jenny barns and I just dint care. The first time I uz scared and started cryin, sure I’d be slain by the Lord for my terrible sin. But I hadn’t et for three days and the Lord dint hear my prayers so I did what I did to live. After the first time, I dint care. Fact is, I liked hit. Those boys was crazy and wild and drunk and lonesome, but they was all better’n poor Robert. And they sure did love my titties. Trouble is, that’s when I started getting large. There was some shacks back in the woods and I’d go there with them, for three dollars apiece, which was good money in them days. I give the man that run the jenny barn a dollar but hit was all right. I dint care long’s I dint get the old rale, or a good dose, and I was lucky, I never did. I specialized in the other thing anyway. I guess after a while, I was knowed all over for hit .

And then one night, who comes in but Eli. My Jewboy. He couldn’t stand what I uz doin, and asked me to come away with him, and so I did. He uz organizin for the National Miners’ Union now, trying to get everybody to band together against the operators in Harlan County. He was a Communist, my Jewboy, and he lived stricter than some Hardshell Baptist. He only et once a day, so he was all skin an bones, jest pathetic, and he went around makin his speeches, usin a bicycle until someone came in from up North with a Ford car. The only place he warnt strict uz in bed. He got to be the hottest man I ever seed in bed. I even got skinny again. And I’m tellin you, you never heard anything like this boy when he was speechifyin. All about how we should own the fruits of our labor and how the bosses was usin our work to make themselves rich while men was dying in the bottom of coal mines and kids warnt learnin how to read an write. When he talked about readin and writing the tears come to his eyes and to tell the truth, they come to my eyes too, and to everybody that could hear his voice .

And soon they was a war right there in Harlan County. My Jewboy brung down a bunch of big writers from the North to see what was happenin and all the men come from around the hills, living in the streets of the town, in the mud, making tents, houses out of Coca-Cola signs, good men, hurt men, men that had families starvin, men that wanted their kids to learn how to read. It was so goddamned excitin, I tell you. They was guns everywhere. Rifles and pistols. And the women were the hardest, the women warnt so beaten down, and we got together and we war making speeches in the square when the sheriff locked us all up. Sixteen women in all. We sat in jail, singin all the songs that was written at the time. And we saw that the companies really did run the sheriff, jest like Eli said, the company men jest walked in and gave the sheriff his orders, we seed it, they brung in gangsters from someplace and made them all deputies. And then they let us out, cause they was so many bad stories in the newspapers, and there was another big meetin .

This time they got my Jewboy. They beat him vicious on the head with blackjacks and I seed them carryin him off and I was screamin at them, cause his face was all blood, and when I screamed they bashed him again and then grabbed me and dragged me off. So they took my Jewboy out to the county line and they dumped him in a ditch. Some of the men found him and got him to a hospital but hit war too damn late. Two days later he died. When someone asked the sheriff why they arrested poor Eli, the sheriff jest smiled and said quote unquote resistin assault. Some joke. They said too that Eli had run away, he escaped and that uz why he war in that ditch, and nobody got locked up for it, even though everybody in the county knew it was murder, plain and simple .

That was hit for me. I left then. Forever. I dint want nothin to do no more with no politics or with them damn hills. I found my way to New Orleans. I had my specialty. I married a man for a while, but nothin come of hit. I made some money in the war. Workin down by the Higgins shipyard. And I thought: I don’t ever want to need nobody ever again. Specially no man. And here I am, boy. You lookin at a free woman. You uz a virgin boy, warnt you? I could tell. Well, it jest got to be time. Get used to hit, boy. You gonna have lots more, all the rest of your days and nights .

Dixie drove me back to Ellyson Field in her 1950 Plymouth in the gray chilly dawn. We had the windows up and I could smell her perfume. She didn’t say anything. I felt strange. I looked for a woman on a blue bicycle, with a yellow T-shirt and a baseball cap, but she was nowhere in sight. Dixie stopped a hundred feet from the main gate. I opened the door and thanked her for the ride. She looked at me and nodded.

“You’re a nice boy,” she said.

And then pulled away.

Then suddenly it was winter. The wind came howling down from Canada, and when we woke up the blankets weren’t warm enough and the showers were cold and we couldn’t tell the time of day from the morning light. We closed all windows tightly and changed white hats to watchcaps. The sky at noon was the color of slate, and thousands of gulls came in from the Gulf to huddle close to the earth. The helicopters were grounded. Gigantic gray clouds rose in the sky. And then one afternoon it began to snow.

We did cartwheels in the snow and threw snowballs at one another, while Becket took pictures with a little box Brownie. Liberty was canceled and we were handed shovels and put on work details to clear the streets of the base and the landing strips beyond the hangars. Out at the hangars, shoveling snow with Sal and Max and a dozen others, I saw the pilots up close, smoking, playing gin rummy, posing for photographs. They were all lean men in loose baggy flight suits. Sal pointed out a Marine who had just come back from Korea, where he’d flown 151 helicopter missions, 86 behind enemy lines, picking up the wounded or the dead. When I looked at his eyes they didn’t seem dashing and cocky, the way Clark Gable’s eyes looked in the old movies; they just looked sad and tired.

Most of the pilots wore patches on their flight suits, showing a goggled grasshopper with a rotor blade above its head and a figure eight below it. And as we scraped the snow off the landing strips I realized I was standing on a huge painted figure eight within a painted square. Max explained that this was a basic part of the training routine, the pilots learning to maneuver with precision, to hover, to land right on a mark. They called the helicopters pin-wheels, whirlybirds, or eggbeaters, and they hated flying them because the center of gravity was so low that they turned over too easily. And after flying jets, said Sal, who would want to play with these toys?