Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“ Secretaries , boy!

I got up, shaking my head, while Harrelson laughed. I started for the disposal room and saw Bobby Bolden coming toward me. There was a slice of coconut pie on his tray.

“Too bad about Stalin, huh?” he said.

Miles Rayfield and Dunbar came back around three. Rayfield’s eyes were wide and agitated in his pink sunburned face. Dunbar was smoking a cigarette in an amused way.

“You just can’t believe Mainside !” Miles said. “They’re running around like a pack of medieval lunatics with the plague ! You’d think the Russians just landed in Mobile !”

“Haulin out anti-aircraft guns,” Dunbar said.

“They’re making sailors march !” Miles said. “With guns !”

“And officers are checking all IDs, case someone got a Communist Party membership card on ’im,” Dunbar said. “Tell him, Miles.”

“My wallet was in the truck!” Miles said. “Who carries around an ID ?”

“They asked him for it,” Dunbar said, shaking his head in mock sympathy.

“And arrested me!”

“Marched him to the parkin lot to get the damned thing.”

“Under arrest !”

“They didn’t believe it was a Navy wallet cause it didn’t have a rubber in it.”

“And Dunbar here, this son of a bitch, he told them he hardly knew me,” Miles said. “One of the damned jarheads said I even looked Russian. And then the thick-headed dumb bastard started doing one of those scenes out of some rotten World War II propaganda movie. He started asking me about baseball !”

“Babe Luth, you die,” Dunbar said.

“And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked me about football ! Or as he called it … foot bowl . And I knew even less .”

“So they took him to security,” Dunbar said, laughing.

“And held me there, trying to get Donnie Ray on the damned phone,” Miles said. “And of course the damn lines were busy for two hours and then everybody went out to lunch except that damned Larry Parsons.”

“Dumbest white man in the United States,” Dunbar said.

“And he didn’t know my last name!” Miles said. “I’ve been here a year and he never learned my last name !”

“So what did you do?” I said.

“What do you always do in the damned Navy? We waited .”

“Watched the flyboys get ready for an air strike on downtown Palatka.”

Miles was laughing now at the absurdity of the whole world, smothering the laugh with a sunburned hand.

“The Navy,” he said. “The goddamned Navy …”

We were at our desks, filling out forms. And then Larry Parsons came back from a late lunch. His face was all tensed up, his eyes wide.

“Hey,” he said, “did you hear about Stalin ?”

Dunbar fell on the floor and groaned.

A half hour later, Miles suddenly turned in his chair and faced me.

“Jesus Christ, I almost forgot !”

He took a letter from his jeans pocket.

“There was a woman out by the gate, waved us down as we were coming in,” he said. “Asked us to get this to you.”

He handed me the letter. Blinked. Turned back to his typewriter, pecking out numbers on a form. The letter had my name written on it in a small careful hand. I opened it.

Dear Michael,

Something has come up and I can’t see you tonight. One of my kids is sick and I have to go to see her in New Orleans. I know you’ll understand. Please take care of yourself and I’ll see you as soon as I get back.

Love,

Eden

That was all. There was no phone number for me to call her, and no address. Even the city was something new. She’s never mentioned it to me, never told me that her children lived there, and I’d been afraid to ask. There were a million things she never said, and that I never asked. So as I studied the note as if it were a sacred text, I thought it was very much like Eden Santana, full of holes and confusions. She didn’t say how sick the child was, or with what; she didn’t mention how long she’d be gone or how she’d get in touch with me when she got back. All I knew for sure was that she was gone.

“You okay?” Miles Rayfield said.

“Yeah … Why?”

“You’re the color of newsprint paper.”

“No. I’m okay.”

At least she’d signed the note “love.” I got up and went to the counter and waited on customers. Move, I thought. Do something. That way you will not have to think.

After a while, Miles left with Becket and Dunbar for the hangars, the three of them hauling an engine on a truck. I went looking for a pontoon part in the back, taking my time, trying to imagine Stalin’s last hours, anything to push Eden’s face from my mind, and then slipped into Miles Rayfield’s studio. On the easel, a deserted beach was taking shape on a piece of Masonite. The colors were muted, the colors of dusk. But there were only large rough forms, no details, no drawing. I picked up the sketchbook and leafed through it. Miles Rayfield had made many more drawings.

The last five were of Freddie Harada. His face was beautifully captured in pencil from two different angles; his features looking boyish and innocent, but there was something new in his eyes and the set of his mouth, an aspect I’d never seen before on my visits to the Kingdom of Darkness. He seemed to be flirting with me. Or with the artist. The other pictures were of Freddie standing, looking directly off the page. He was naked. Late in the afternoon, I strolled over to the hangars to see Sal and Max. They were working together on the electronic system of a big HUP. I looked around for Mercado but didn’t see him.

“Trouble with these goddamn things,” Sal said, “if you use them, they break.”

“The guys that design them don’t have to fly them,” Max said. “That’s why they’re so lousy.”

“You guys seen that Mercado around?” I said.

Sal looked up. “He’s off for a week. Went home to Mexico.”

Jesus. She’s gone. He’s gone. At the same time . Max and Sal tried to explain to me what they were doing, but I couldn’t follow it.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Around midnight I went outside and sat on the stairs, breathing in the warm air, looking out at the thick clusters of stars. Then I saw Miles Rayfield coming around the side of the Supply Shack, walking fast, his head down. He didn’t see me until he reached the stairs.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, his manner oddly stiff. “Oh, hello . What are you doing here ?”

“Can’t sleep. Nice night.”

He relaxed and took out his Pall Malls and lit up. “I thought maybe you were waiting for Lavrenti Beria to take over the base.”

“Who’s he?”

He told me and I laughed (too hard) at his little joke and felt stupid again. There were at least five hundred names of people in this world that were known by everyone except me. My head was filled with useless knowledge. But I didn’t know Lavrenti Beria was the head of the Russian secret police. I didn’t know a lot of things. I asked Miles if he’d just finished painting. He hesitated, then went rushing ahead.

“Hell, no,” he said. “If there was ever a day they’d catch me, it’s today. Imagine getting caught doing something secret on the day Stalin died? Oh, hey, I wanted to show you something.”

I followed him into the barracks. The racks were full of sleeping men. Miles Rayfield went to his locker and I met him in the head, where the lights were still burning. He handed me a folder crammed with reproductions of paintings torn from magazines. “Study these,” he said. “Copy them if you want.” A lot of the pictures were by his own favorite, a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi. At first (conditioned by Caniff and Noel Sickles and Crane) I thought the drawing was clumsy, the postures awkward, the heads too big or the hands too small. Sometimes Kuniyoshi’s people seemed to be falling out of the picture. But standing with Miles in the head, looking at the pictures while Miles smoked, I began to see in a new way. There was one painting of a fat big-headed kid with crazy eyes holding a banana in one hand, reaching with the other for a peach in a white bowl. The table was a dark orange and tilted so that we saw it from the top. A window was open to an empty landscape: two buildings, two clouds, the view empty and scary like the desolate buildings I’d seen in Renaissance paintings.