Pete Hamill - Loving Women

I walked closer, on an angle, giving him a smaller target if he came at me in a rush, protecting my cock and balls. He was shirtless. His face was a mess of caked blood, dried by the Gulf breeze. He smiled, but I couldn’t see his eyes. The surf broke on the shore. I stopped six feet away from him and waited.

“I need those clothes, Red,” I said.

“Come and get em.”

“I don’t want to fight you for them, but I will if I have to.”

“It’s your gear. Whut the hell do I want with it?”

I took a step forward and so did he. Then we both stopped. I could see his eyes now. One was almost closed and was turning purple. The other just looked sad.

He held out his hand.

I shook it.

“You’re okay, Devlin,” he said.

“And you’re still a prick,” I said and released his hand and went for my clothes and started dressing. I looked at Red. He was gazing out at the sea. And then he toppled over and fell face down in the sand.

I went to help him.

I shoulda seen they was shit the day they showed. Green snotnose shit, enlisted men and officers both. We were in the buildingways up at Mare Island near San Francisco. They was fixin everything that was ripped up by the kamikazes at Okinawa, the hull and the water supply and the bridge, every damned thing on the ship. This was the summer of ’45, just before the war ended, and I was a third-class gunner’s mate on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Bet you never heard of her, right, Devlin? Well you ain’t alone. Most nobody ever heard of her, then or now. The Navy don’t want it out, what happened to her. The goddamn politicians don’t, either .

But she was a death ship, Devlin: a great big heavy cruiser, that was what we call tender. That means she was about as heavy above the waterline as below, loaded down with all sorts of shit that wasn’t there when they built her. Just walkin the deck, you knew it wouldn’t take much ocean to tip her over. The Navy brass didn’t give much of a fiddler’s fuck. All those Annapolis boys loved cruisers cause the next stop was usually a battle wagon and that was the top in them days, before the carriers became the big deal. So they gave you a big So What? if you told them the ship didn’t right itself too quick after a sharp turn. They didn’t care she was tender. They even made her the flagship of the Fifth Fleet, and did all kinds of ceremonial shit whenever Admiral Spruance came aboard. And they gave her a captain, McVay was his name, a gray-haired guy with coal-black eyes, always smilin like a goddamned politician .

Yeah .

The Indianapolis.

A nice big cruiser .

They thought it looked good in pictures, I guess, though it wasn’t worth a fuck at sea. So in July, we were gettin her ready, the war over in Europe, thinkin we was all gonna be part of the invasion of Japan. I wunt too big on that. I seen the way the Japs fought at Okinawa and figured theyd take a lot of us with them in Japan. Say what you will about the Jap, but he’s a fightin man, sailor. Still although they was beat, and must’ve known it, the Japs wouldn’t quit, so there was nothin to be done except invade. It was a war and we had to finish it and in the Navy, on the Indianapolis, we’d play our part like everybody else, tender ship or no tender ship .

The trouble was most of the old crew was dead now or scattered around, and one bright morning along comes this new crew. Talk about haulin green shit. Two hundred and fifty wiseass kids fresh out of boot camp and thirty officers out of the Academy and I knew right off we gonna have us some trouble. They made up almost a third of the crew and they showed up like they was goin to a Fourth of July picnic, instead of a war against a real tough son of a bitch. I knew we’d have to break their asses real good. But almost as soon’s they were piped on board, we got orders to get ready to ship out. In twenty-four hours. The ship wunt ready. They wunt enough chow. The livin quarters wunt finished. Didn’t matter. We had to go. And it was all because of the goddamn bucket and the goddamn box .

They swung them on board in the morning, usin a giant goddamn gantry. The bucket weighed maybe three hundred pounds, cast iron, sealed, and we welded it right to the deck, holdin it down with straps. It couldn’t move or slide. If the ship went down, so did the bucket. The box was a crate really, eight feet high, and they took it below decks and wedged it in real tight. But then they called me and Big Nose Bernardi below decks and we met these two army guys, lookin like perfessers with guns, and they opened the box and took out a steel cylinder maybe three feet long and had us carry it into Captains Country, where Captain McVay gave us part of the mess, sealed off, and watched as we strapped this cylinder to the deck and welded the straps tight. The army guys never said a word. They stayed with the cylinder and never came above decks again .

Well, we pulled anchor at three ayem on July 16 and sailed out of San Francisco and started haulin ass. There was all sorts of scuttlebutt about the box and the bucket. Most of the crew thought they had to contain germs. That we was gonna use germs on the Japs. Or some kind of gas that would paralyze every last Jap in the country, something we captured from the Germans. It wunt till well after the war that I learnt that the bucket and the box was full of parts of the atom bomb .

Now out at sea, we were supposed to break in the new crew. Not for any atom bomb. For war. Suppose to do it right off. Dont give em tahm to think. That was the general plan. Real simple. Well, we didn’t get to break em in. There wunt tahm and the ship was a complete fuckin mess. Somehow we picked up a bunch of hitchhikers, officers mostly, all tryin to git to Pearl, which was our first stop. Their luggage was all over the damned deck. Worse, some of em was Army and didn’t know shit from shinola about livin on a ship. And the green kids was the real problem. Some of em was moonin over women. Some even cried for their mommas. They got lost and dint know port from starboard. Real green shit .

Things got so bad, there was a fire on deck cause these green shitbirds left suitcases next to one of the stacks. Suitcases! On a Navy ship. And they was no room in the chow hall, so people ate all over and left food and plates layin around and I seen roaches too. I swear. Cockroaches. On a flagship of the United States Navy .

Nobody paid much attention though. That was just housekeepin. And Captain McVay was haulin ass for Pearl. The Indianapolis was thirteen years old and beat up. But he got her doin twenty-nine knots. We tested the systems. Radio. Radar. There wunt any sonar, though, and that hurt us later. There just wunt time to install it. We was haulin ass with the atom bomb. When we hit Pearl that Monday morning, we discovered that we broke the damned record. Two thousand and ninety one miles in seventy-four-and-a-half hours. I’m still amazed .

But there wunt tahm for celebration in Pearl, for taking pictures, and bragging to reporters. We let the passengers off, and then we were told to get ready to git under way. And seen again that we could have bad trouble. I actually seen some of that green-shit crew start to cry. They wanted to get off. They wanted to call their girlfriends or their mommas. They wanted liberty when they haddin even done nothin yet. They dint want to hear we had no tahm. They dint want to hear we were going to fuckin war .

So we lifted anchor and started out for some little goddamn island called Tinian .