Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Donnie Ray hung up.

“The captain’s calling his mother,” he said.

“What about the wife?”

He looked at me with pitying eyes.

“There was no wife.”

He turned to go to the counter.

“I think you better take the day off,” he said gently. “He was your friend.”

That was true. He was my friend. Not a friend of Sal or Max or Maher or any of the others. Except Freddie. Miles wasn’t part of the O Street nights. He wasn’t there on any wild evenings. He didn’t care when Hank died and didn’t know the words of any Webb Pierce songs. So I didn’t go first to Sal and Max to tell them the news. They were probably talking about Sal’s big birthday party at the Miss Texas Club.

I went to Freddie.

I found him sitting on the steps leading up to the shuttered doors of the Kingdom of Darkness. He looked at me when I reached the stairs but didn’t say anything.

“Freddie?”

“Yeah?”

“Miles is dead, Freddie.”

“What?”

“He killed himself this morning.”

Freddie rose slowly, carefully, standing three steps above me, looking at me as if I might be playing some awful joke.

“I’m not kidding,” I said.

“You better not be,” he said.

“He hung himself. In the mop locker.”

The phrase “mop locker” would have made Miles laugh. Maybe that’s why he chose it.

“He — he say anything? Like leave a note or whatnot?”

“Not that I know of.”

He seemed relieved and looked past me in the direction of the Supply Shack. Then he gripped the railing and sat down hard on the steps and began to cry.

By noon, his locker was empty, his sea bag packed, his transfer papers typed up by Maher and signed by Captain Pritchett, and he was on his way to Port Lyautey. He never said good-bye. And I remember thinking: Maybe Freddie Harada would get to see the Red Shadow . I knew that I never would. Nor, of course, would Miles Rayfield.

We went out to the Miss Texas Club in a cab, all of us in uniform: Sal and Max whooping and joking, Maher sipping from Boswell’s bottle of white lightning, and the cab driver acting as if the ride was surely the most distasteful job of his life. On this day Sal was twenty-one; it was payday too and we were all going out to get drunk and get laid. There were no further ambitions. If the world thought we were just a bunch of goddamned lonesome sailors, then by God, we were going to act that way. If ya got the name ya might as well have the game .

Nobody mentioned Miles Rayfield. The silence wasn’t because they didn’t care what had happened to him. There just wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Not tears, revenge, or prayer. Squashed in the back seat of the cab, I remembered my mother’s wake, all the uncles and cousins drinking, singing, even laughing, and how enraged I was at them; yet riding through the Pensacola night, I forgave everybody. You might as well sing, and declare the existence of the living. And (here, down in the Gulf, with rain scattering on the motel windows) remembering my remembering, other bodies force their way into me, dead on meaningless hills in the Asian jungles, dead on blasted deserts in the Sinai, dead without mourning. Their deaths never chilled me nor attacked my bowels. For years it has been my pride that I can look at dead strangers and photograph them with the remorseless eye of an assassin. But I am like all other men on earth: wounded by the death of people I love. And of those, Miles Rayfield was the first. That night long ago, I churned with fear, anger, mystery and guilt. My friend was dead and I should have known it was coming. And now there was nothing to be done except get drunk, get laid, and remember.

There was a huge parking lot outside the place, which was a big red-painted barn with a red neon sign saying MISS TEXAS CLUB and a large suety bouncer posted at the door. We chipped in a dollar each for the cab, paid the man, and piled out. The bouncer was checking most IDs but we were all in dress whites, and he recognized that as sufficient credentials, took two dollars from each of us and waved us in.

“Enjoy yissef, boys,” he said.

And Sal whooped and said, “Yeah, brother, oh yeah. En- Joy . We want some joy! ”

About five hundred people were already inside and the place was only half full. There were tables on the near side and a wide wooden dance floor and a stage where a country band was playing hard. Off to the right, people sat on stools at a large circular bar. I saw a few sailors dancing with young girls and wondered where Eden was.

We went to one of the tables and ordered three pitchers of beer from a round-legged blonde waitress dressed in a short buckskin skirt and sneakers. After half a beer, Max angled over to dance with a thin redhaired woman who was alone at the bar. Then Becket came in with Dunbar, and a little later Larry Parsons arrived too, and then a couple of guys from the hangars. Then Dixie Shafer arrived from the Dirt Bar carrying a box with a chocolate birthday cake and candles.

She yelled out to Max on the dance floor: “Get back over here, boy. Her tits are too small!”

I sipped some beer and looked up and saw Tons of Fun waddling through the room, each of them carrying delicately wrapped presents for Sal (a Hawaiian shirt, a leather belt) and Betty yelled at a table full of Marines: “Who wants a blow job in the parking lot?”

And Dixie Shafer said to me, “They’re so crude .”

And Sal said, “ Me! I do!”

And Betty grabbed his cock as she sat down and Sal giggled and the band played the Webb Pierce song and we all began to sing:

And singing the anthem of O Street, I remembered the first time I heard it, almost six months before. And I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I remembered how lonesome I was that night and how then Eden Santana was only a nameless face glimpsed in a dark bus.

We shouted the chorus and the Marines looked at us and Dixie Shafer slid over beside me, her hair redder than a sunset, and Sal got up and went after a dark girl with a violet blouse and Maher started drinking straight from the beer pitcher and then I glanced at the door and saw Red Cannon coming in.

Ah Miles ah poor sad Miles Rayfield .

Red Cannon was wearing tan chinos and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He squinted through the smoke as if looking for someone and then he walked to the bar and leaned over and said something to the barmaid. If he saw us through the nicotine haze, he didn’t bother to let us know.

You killed him Red you put the nails in his coffin You son of a bitch .

Then the music ended and the lights dimmed and Sal yelled at us (the girl with the violet dress gone off): “They just executed the chef.” Dixie Shafer lit the candles and we sang “Happy Birthday” to Sal and the Marines booed and Sal told them to go fuck themselves and reached down and grabbed a handful of the cake and shoved it at Max’s mouth. We all cheered and Sal opened his presents and kissed Tons of Fun on the breasts and pretended to whip out his dick and then we heard a tom-tom beating in a Gene Krupa style and then a different band started playing “Caravan.” There was a sudden spotlight on the stage and a voice from a hidden microphone saying, “Ladies and gennulmin, the Miss Texas Club is proud to present one of the greatest dancers of her tahm, straight from a trah-umphant tore of Havana … Madame Nareeta !”