Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Then I understood. “You never played ball when you were a kid, did you?”

Miles assumed the batter’s stance, then grabbed the mop and started swabbing the deck.

“You never played baseball.”

“Fuck off.”

“You must be some kind of a Communist, Miles. A secret agent.”

He looked at me in a timid way. “So I never played baseball. So what ?”

“Miles, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

He started to get into the rhythm of the mopping. I went back to my aisle, swabbing in broad quick steps. Then Miles said through the shelving: “Baseball isn’t everything, you know!”

“No, and neither is air. But you need it to live , man.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, learn about baseball, and learn to swab the decks,” I said. “Then you can explain it all to your wife. When you move to Hollywood …”

He laughed. “You’ve got a fresh mouth on you, boy.”

I swung the mop almost fiercely now, the moves punctuated by Miles grunting in the next aisle. A screen door slammed. I turned and saw Becket.

“Hey, Miles” he said. “That picture of me. Can I have it? I’d like to send—”

“ What picture of you?” Miles said.

I glanced at his desk. It was bare.

“The picture you drew this morning. I saw it on your desk.”

“Not me,” Miles said. “I didn’t draw any picture of you.”

He was lying. Flat out lying. I’d seen the drawing. So had Becket. A good drawing. A beautiful drawing.

“Well, then, who—”

“Maybe someone was visiting,” Miles said. “It wasn’t me.”

I stayed on the base for the rest of the week, reading books and magazines, saving my money for Saturday night and Eden Santana. One evening after dinner I went up to the barracks where the blacks lived, looking for Bobby Bolden. An older messcook met me at the door, blocking my way, and told me that Bobby wasn’t there. He looked at me as if I were a cop. “Okay,” I said, “just tell him Devlin, from the Supply Shack, came around to talk.” The man nodded in a way that might have been saying: Don’t bother . I went away, thinking: What’s with these goddamned Negroes anyway? Most evenings, I dozed. I wished I had a radio. I thought about New York. And on another evening, Red Cannon caught me asleep on my bunk with my shoes on. He smacked me on the soles with the club.

“Listen, shitbird,” he said, “what makes you think you can sleep wearing shoes on that fartsack?”

“They’re clean, sir.”

“They’re clean ? You walkin around in shit all day, on dirt , on gas oline, you say they’re clean ?”

I sat up and looked at my shoes. Slowly and deliberately.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

Cannon placed a hand on the overhead rack and leaned close to me. An odor of whiskey seeped from his body, though his breath smelled of toothpaste.

“What’d you say, boy?” he whispered.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ sir,” I said, standing now and looking him directly in the eyes.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Cannon said, his voice rising. “Maybe that fine dark pussy in town’s rottin your brain, boy.”

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ’, sir. I didn’t mention women.”

“You got yo’sef a mouth on you, boy.”

I was taller than Red Cannon by a couple of inches, but he looked like a puncher. So I turned sideways to him, ready to block anything he threw at me. Or try to. But I knew now I couldn’t back away from him. It was too late. The barracks were empty and this was between us. Just us. Without witnesses. If he tried to hit me, I’d hit him back. I must have wanted him to try. Just to get it over with.

“Tell me what you plan to do about it, sir ,” I said. “Have me executed, sir ? Call a General Court Martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, sir ? For saying ‘Jesus Christ’ on my own time, and placing the heel of my shoe on a U.S. Navy fartsack? Sir ?”

That was it. A direct challenge. And Cannon knew it. I pulled my mouth tight over my teeth in a tough guy’s mask, but my heart was pounding and I felt trapped in the old cycle. Challenge and reply, hurt, then retaliate. Right off the streets of Brooklyn. I didn’t like it back there either. But it was the way you lived: If you’re pushed, push back. That was the code. If you’re hurt, hurt back. When you’re leaned on, lean back, and I’d just leaned back.

Cannon glared at me. “Get that fartsack washed tonight, boy.” He stepped back. “And remember, I’ll be watchin you.”

With that he turned on his heel and walked out of the barracks. When the screen door slammed behind him, I exhaled loudly. My heart kept fluttering for a long time after that.

Then I saw Miles coming around from the other side of the row of lockers. He’d obviously been there all along. His face was beaming.

“Magnificent!” he said. “Glorious!”

He came forward as if to embrace me, then turned and grabbed a bunk and shook it.

“You faced down Red Cannon!” he said. “The jackass champion of the world!”

“Hey, I—”

“I’m going to call the Pensacola Journal . This should be on page one.”

“Come on—”

“Let’s get some tea at the gedunk.”

On Thursday night, I was back at the dumpster. But I didn’t really mind. If Red Cannon wanted to be the King of Chickenshit, I wasn’t going to let him know he got to me. Whatever chickenshit he threw at me, I would take; it was heavy shit that I wouldn’t. Besides, Donnie Ray let the guys on twelve-to-fours have the afternoon off the next day; so it all evened up in the end. Donnie Ray didn’t like Red Cannon any more than the rest of us did. Now I see myself standing out there under the stars, thinking about Eden Santana, and I want to hug that boy I used to be. He was nervous all week, but at the dumpster he couldn’t drive her out of his mind by reading a book. So he thought all the worst things: that maybe she wouldn’t show up or maybe she was just playing some joke or maybe she was going to meet him while holding hands with her husband, if she had a husband, or with her kids, if she really had those kids. I let all these maybes flower in my imagination, like a baseball fan trying to imagine some disastrous ninth inning or a kid rolling off a cliff.

The problem was simple; I didn’t know very much about her. Sitting with her in The Greek’s, I’d done most of the talking. She’d asked all the questions and I’d tried to answer, tried to sound older than I was, a more experienced man, a man of the world. But while I was answering her questions, she wasn’t telling me anything. Sure, I knew she worked at Sears, but I didn’t know where she lived , and I didn’t know where she came from. I didn’t know why she’d ended up on a Greyhound bus on a New Year’s Eve either, and most of all, I didn’t know why she’d agreed to see me this Saturday night. I was afraid to know. She was beautiful, as beautiful as any woman I’d ever seen. But because she was beautiful, I was scared. She could have all those other guys, veterans, guys with cars and money to spend, officers. Mercado . That was why I couldn’t tell anyone about her. Suppose I told them I had a date with this woman from Sears? The next thing I knew, Max and Sal and the others would probably go to Sears and find her and tell her I had the clap or something. Or they’d wait across the street when I showed up for my big date and if she didn’t come to meet me, they’d see me standing there like a goddamned fool, and I’d never hear the end of it. It would be back to the Dirt Bar and Dixie’s immensities. So I said nothing. The eerie thing was that after Mercado, only one other man on the base had seen her. And that was Red Cannon. Jesus Christ.