Pete Hamill - Loving Women

I stopped.

There was something in the bushes beside the road. Something moving. I reached down for a rock and eased into the shadows. Another movement. Then I heard a thick grunting sound, full of pain. Then shoes scraping on gravel, as if trying to get traction. I hefted the rock. Then moved closer to the sounds of pain.

And saw Bobby Bolden.

He was facedown in the gravel, his shirt torn off, deep bleeding wounds sliced into his back. His arms were stretched out in front of him, his hands flopping loosely at the wrists. He was digging his elbows into the gravel, trying to move forward. His face was so consumed with pain that he couldn’t recognize me or anyone else on this earth.

I turned to the trailer.

Eden!

His body writhed as I reached under his arms and started to lift him. He was bigger and heavier than I imagined. The gouged skin was slippery with blood. Eden took his legs and we heaved and got him into the back seat of her car and laid him face down across the floor. His hands flopped loosely. His jaw moved and words came out but no sentences.

Mothafuck. The House. Get me. Hey you. Oh, you . Go ahead you . Catty. Oh you . Scrapple from the apple and a bottle of ocean. Oh .

We started to pull out and then Eden saw a glow through the trees. The house . I turned the car around and pushed hard on the accelerator, moving down the road away from the highway. The house where Bobby and Catty lived together was burning beyond the screen of trees. I saw black men running through the trees, most without shirts, all carrying buckets of water. Kids darted across the road and I slowed down. Eden shrunk low in the seat beside me, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide and afraid.

Then up ahead I saw something else.

By the side of the lake, only thirty feet away, tied to the branch of a tree with her hands above her head and naked from the waist up was Catty.

Her head was thrown back. She wasn’t moving. I could see her back had been split open.

Oh my God, Eden whispered.

Her hands became fists. She gnawed on a knuckle.

Oh Jesus God .

I pulled over and stopped the car and got out, but Eden stayed where she was. I saw an elderly black man coming through the trees carrying a shotgun. Six black teenagers were behind him. Their faces were blank.

“You kin keep on goin,” the older man said.

I pointed at Catty and said I had to get her to a hospital.

“You just leave her be,” he said. “She deserve whut she get. She come in here, dont care fo decency, cause nuthin but trouble . Things here is peaceful till this white trash show up. And look whut she do . She brung down the affliction on us. She brung down the damn Klan.”

The Klan. Like Bobby Bolden said. Like all the blacks said. The damned Klan.

“You can’t let her hang here,” I said. Catty’s bare feet were not touching the ground. She was hanging there, a dead weight. I wondered if arms really did get pulled out of sockets. The small black kids had moved around now to the far side of the tree for their first sight of a white woman’s bare breasts.

“Hey you kids, git away fum there!” the old man said. The kids looked at him, then at Catty’s breasts, then hurried away to see the fire. The orange glow had faded but the air was acrid with smoke. I glanced back at the car. Eden and Bobby Bolden were both out of sight. I turned my back on the old man and walked over to the tree. Two black kids were still huddled in a bush.

“Who’s got a knife?” I said.

One of the kids handed over a curved blade with a taped wooden handle.

“Leave her be, white man!” the old man shouted.

I stepped over to Catty and cut her down, trying to brake her fall with my shoulder. As she hit the ground, limp and hurt and bleeding, with her jaw slack and red welts noticeable now across her breasts, there was an immense ferocious roar.

I heard Eden scream my name.

I turned and saw the old man holding the shotgun. The stock was propped against his hip. But I felt nothing. He must have aimed at the sky. I stared at him. He stared at me.

“I’m gonna pick this woman up now,” I said. “Right now. If you want to kill me, go ahead. But I don’t think it’d be worth it.”

I bent down and lifted Catty, waiting to be shot. I carried her to the car. Eden was hunkered down low in the front and I put Catty beside her. The light of the fire was gone. There was smoke everywhere. Animals and humans crashed around in the woods.

“Git out now, heah me?” the old man said. His voice seemed old and worn and sad. “Don’t ever come back to these parts. Just go and leave us be. You come back, ah’ll have to kill you.”

I drove quickly to Mainside, but not too quickly, afraid of bouncing Bobby and Catty. Eden threw a coat over Catty and cradled her in her arms. We had no choice but Mainside. There was no night corpsman on duty at Ellyson and no hospital in all of Pensacola that would accept a damaged black man and a hurting white woman in the same emergency room. Bobby talked in a slurred voice, his mouth bubbling with bloody saliva:

All the way hey . Yeah. They comin down the ridge. In the snow. You watch the snow. Yeah. Oh . In formation, gonna march, mothafucka. He got. No, he got . Bottle of ocean and two dimes plus her . Yeah. No . The house. Oh Catty. Yeah . Oh Catty.

Eden was silent all the way. I kept wondering if Bobby Bolden had paid the price for rescuing me from Buster and his friends; then dismissed that; thought if that was so, it was only part of it, a small part. He was a black man fucking a white woman in the South. He couldn’t expect to keep that a secret forever. The old black man was bitter, so even the blacks must have disapproved and the whites would have been crazy. I wondered too if there was some black woman out there by the lake who loved Bobby Bolden from a distance, and then in rage and jealousy made a call or sent a letter. I remembered that night months before when there was a sudden sharp knock on Bolden’s door.… But maybe someone came here out of Catty’s life. A husband. A lover. Followed her from Mainside. Watched where she went. Then called in the Klan. I remembered the photographs of the Klan in old newspapers and in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons: assholes in white sheets watching fiery crosses burn in the night. Degenerate white assholes. They always seemed funny to me, looking at them back in Brooklyn. What did they tell their wives and kids when they went out for the night wearing sheets? That they were saving the good old Yew Ess of Ay from the niggers and the Jews and the Catholics? Ridiculous. But they weren’t funny to me anymore. They had maimed and hurt two of my friends.

I glanced at Eden as we turned into the long avenue leading to the gates of Mainside. She was staring off in the distance. Her face was slack now, her hair disheveled. She looked older.

A Marine corporal blocked the gate when I pulled up. I pointed at Bobby and Catty and explained that they were sailors, one from Mainside, the other from Ellyson Field. The Marine’s name was stamped on his chest. Gabree. Blond and sunburned. He didn’t move or wave us on.

“This car doesn’t have a sticker,” he said. “ You’re out of uniform. So are they . And this other— woman isn’t in the service.” He blinked his blond eyelashes. “You can’t come on board. Sorry.”

“Are you fucking crazy? ” I shouted.

Gabree narrowed his eyes and gave me the all-purpose Marine Corps hard-guy look, taught daily at Parris Island.