It Takes Two (7 page)

“Sure, Buddy,” I answered. “We’ll hit us a coupl’a homers next time. Plenty more balls where that came from.”

Feeling safe for the moment, lying skin-to-skin with another brave but sometimes frightened man, I closed my eyes and risked the Pacific’s nightmare storms. The walls of the house were thin, and I could hear occasional trucks and cars passing on the street. The wind threw stray branches against the window time and again. After a while I dropped off into a dreamless, waterless sleep.

Perhaps an hour later, a jerky series of groans and splashes woke me. I guess I don’t have to explain that I was an uneasy sleeper. Reacting as if fresh nightmares were blowing in off the Gulf, I got to my feet and started moving before I had time to think.

Yellow light, the thin outline of an oblong hole in the darkness, led me to the bathroom door. I tried the handle. Unlocked. Another groan came from inside. I flung the door open. Bud’s face hung unsteadily over the toilet bowl. His wrinkled shirt was wadded up in his left hand.

He retched up a ribbon of bile. “Get out, Dan,” he said between heaves. “Get out of here.”

The sight of him kneeling on the cold tiles woke me up fast. Dropping down beside him, I stroked his naked shoulder. “Hey, Buddy,” I began, hitching my voice somewhere between barroom camaraderie and locker-room concern. “What’s a matter? Coach is here. Take your time. Go easy.”

He steered his face toward me, evidently startled that I hadn’t jumped to follow his order. His eyes had red cracks in them. Stray vomit coated his wrung-out mouth and chin and had drooled down the matted hair on his chest and belly. I tried not to think how recently I’d dragged my tongue across that fouled carpet.

Bud lunged heavily at the switch plate by the door, pawing out the light. “I mean it. Get on away. Don’t fool with me any more tonight.”

I sat on the bath mat, not touching him. “Is this because we didn’t finish?”

The room stank of rum and bile. I flushed the toilet and it stunk a little less. He shook his head and shrugged, as if to say he didn’t know the answer. After a while, he touched my knee and my arm and put his face on my chest and started heaving again—not vomit but sobs. “You could of gotten killed. It would of been my fault. What if we never…got to, you know, finish anything like what we were doing…again?”

I wanted to laugh. Instead, tears popped out and I half sobbed and half laughed with him. “We will. All you want, Buddy. Any time.”

“We ain’t supposed to be doing this.” He swabbed his mouth with the soiled shirt. “We could go to jail, be charged with degenerate perversion and unnatural acts. I could lose my job, everything.”

Bud was right. Florida in the late 1940s was a model of Old Testament intolerance in matters sexual, political and social. Laws on the books criminalized, without exactly specifying, the abominable and infamous crime against nature. Though the laws were selectively enforced, one misplaced hand or well-understood word, one step outside the patriarchal system, one thoughtless, drunken mistake could get a man arrested, his name printed in the papers, his family and career destroyed, his ruin practically assured.

“We just gotta keep our heads down,” I answered. “No talking out of school. This is our personal locker room.”

“You could of gotten killed,” he said again. “Shot by a dee-ranged female—a crazy widow woman that’s hysterical over nothing to do with you, me or the gatepost. Next time, it could be some rabbit-faced cracker wearing a bed sheet. We got to stop this. Got to be friends, is all. So nobody can’t say nothing.”

I might have told him about my plan to hire him as chief of hotel security. I might have said there’s nothing more natural and less degenerate than sleeping next to the person you care about. But I was no crusader. I was just a man who’d run out of luck during the war, a guy who’d found out what he wanted the hard way, and who’d learned that he’d better go after it again when the going seemed right. And I figured Bud wouldn’t remember much of this anyway. So I stuck to the original blueprint. I’d tell him my plan when I could back it up with a job offer, with the go-ahead from Admiral Asdeck.

As we rocked in the dark, he kept up his drunken protests that we ought to never mix it up again. Halfway through a confused statement on “manly friendship” and on what he still had “to learn” from me, Bud touched my cock. When I got hard, he obliged me with two or three strokes, but then began to nod off. Switching on a light, I pulled him to his feet, turned him around and guided him toward the cot. After getting him settled under the Army blanket, I found another blanket, returned to the rug and, after a while, heard the reassuring sound of his snoring.

A little before sunrise, I took a shower, dressed, put on a pot of coffee and dug through the medicine cabinet for a bottle of aspirin. The pay phone out in the hall started ringing at six. I let it ring.

Bud’s face, when I woke him, was the color of a bad day—gray to partly cloudy, with storm warnings. He managed to gag down a handful of aspirin with his coffee before demanding to know why I was still there.

“You were sick as a dog,” I said. “Just wanted to be sure you were OK.”

“Feel like bull crap. But you can’t do anything about it.” He swigged down more coffee, coughed, stood up, crossed to the bureau and began rummaging for clean socks and underwear. When he didn’t find any, he gathered up his clothes from the night before. Moments later, I heard him swear: “God damn, Dan. Fucking son of a whore.”

I felt my chest go tight, wondering what he’d found. What he’d found was my Navy-issue boxer shorts, the ones I’d used to wipe myself with after we’d mixed it up. “God damn, Dan. These got your laundry mark and serial number on them and you were going to leave them here? Suppose I sent them out with my stuff and the washwoman saw that? It’d be my ass, sure.”

I spread my hands, laughing. “I found a clean pair in the middle drawer,” I said. “Must’ve been your last set. Want to switch?”

He hurled the soiled shorts in my direction. “Weekend is finished,” he said, pulling on yesterday’s underwear. “You just march on back to your hotel. Maybe we’ll get together for coffee next Saturday. Probably not before then. Could get to lookin’ funny, two guys hanging around all the time. You know what I mean?”

His offhand, dismissive tone pissed me off more than what he said. Sure, in many ways, maybe in most ways, he was right. But I didn’t like hearing him put so much emotional distance between who we were and what we’d been doing.

“Good thing we wear the same size skivvies,” I said. “I’ll get the ones I’m wearing back to you soon as I can. Light starch or regular?”

He looked uncertain. “You ain’t going to send them out, are you, Dan? Those got my serial number on the back. And they’re laundry marked too.”

“Maybe I’ll keep ’em,” I answered, stuffing the other set of shorts into my back pocket. “Feel like I’m inside the Marine Corps every time I put ’em on.”

“I’m dead serious,” he said, smiling thinly. “All it takes is one little thing.”

“The hotel laundress can’t read her own name,” I answered. “Nice lady, and she works hard. She does each load of laundry by hand, but she didn’t finish second grade.”

“Well, Jesus,” Bud answered. “That’s all right, then. We don’t have to worry none.”

“No,” I said. “Not about that.”

Spencer “Bud” Wright moved to Fort Myers eight months before I stepped off the troop ship in San Francisco. Both of us had been raised within driving distance of Myers—me in Tampa, four counties to the north, him in La Belle, in Hendry County, a few miles east. We joined the Lee County American Legion post independently during the autumn of 1948. We were thrown together by accident almost immediately.

As junior members of an ad-hoc Navy and Marine Corps committee, the post commander directed us to plan a nautical-themed menu for an upcoming Columbus Day barbecue. When the other vets on the committee failed to appear for an organizing meeting at the Legion Hall, Bud suggested I take charge. Nailing down the project’s details took ten minutes and one round of drinks at the bar. Then we ordered a second round and started talking.

The sharpshooter sergeant was surprisingly pleasant company. An attractively built if slightly over-muscled man, he seemed level-headed as a judge: straight thinking, law abiding and conventionally idealistic—in short, an ambitious young cop, and thus about as likely a man for me to get naked with as Harry Truman.

His brown suit, white businessman’s shirt and sporty, black-and-white wing-tip shoes were clean and neat. He’d removed his green and peach floral necktie and wadded it up in his coat pocket. The tip peeked out like a pastel turtle’s nose. When he reached across the bar to fill his paw with peanuts from a bowl, a leather holster and the handle of a pistol winked at me from under his arm.

After downing my own fistful of peanuts, I asked how he liked working in Myers.

“Better job over here—regular raises, good prospects. I send money back home.”

“Home?”

“Mama and my sister.”

“You’re not married?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

What a clangy little word—“yet.” I asked if he’d also been a detective in La Belle.

“Didn’t have none. Force is too small. Sheriff, couple of deputies is all.”

“No place for advancement?”

“Right. Yes. Not much crime to speak of. One old lady who taught me sixth grade turns out to be a shoplifter. And Saturday nights there might be a cut-up colored girl lying out behind some juke joint. Domestic entanglements, fights, drunk Indians, that kind of thing.”

“No cattle rustling?”

“Some. Pretty easy, with land unfenced and all.” He coughed, then added a bit of judicious, apolitical ass covering. “Not that the open-range law necessarily needs changing, you understand.”

This servant of the public trust didn’t know me well either, of course.

“Doesn’t sound like Tom Mix and Jesse James,” I said.

He shook his head. “The Lee County job turned up, I came over and took a couple of tests, got me some books and I’m set.”

“Enough serious law-breaking to keep you busy in Lee?” I asked, wondering whether he might show up to investigate my club room one unlucky day.

Hunching his neck down and glancing around, he drew his hands up into machine-gun position. “Ack, ack, ack, ack, ah, ah, ah,” he whispered, grinning like a maniac and fanning the crowd with flaming lead. “Pow!”

Damn, Dan
, I thought.
This guy’s got surprises up his sleeve. He may be a jarhead, but he’s no humorless grunt. Probably brave as hell. Probably earned a chestful of decorations on some stinking beach. Took out a pillbox, won the goddamn war single-handedly.

Quit that, Lieutenant.

Nothing here for you, nothing beyond another vet to say hello to. It could get in the way, you hanging around with some law-enforcing stiff who works for the sheriff. Some yo-yo who’s gonna get married in a year or two and have a baby the next month and need a pay raise. He’ll be looking for some way to fill his book, and into his empty mind will pop… Just quit it.

“On downriver from La Belle…”

Wright’s shift in topics had passed me by. But the strand became apparent soon enough.

“We might stay out on the river all night, running dead slow,” he said, his voice softening. “There’d be gators out there. We’d see their red eyeballs in the lantern light. And we hauled over to Lake Okeechobee a fair amount of times too.”

He was talking about fishing trips before the war, being out on the water with his hometown buddies on the Caloosahatchee River and out on the vast shallow lake that feeds the Everglades basin.

But his memories triggered my own—the dark water of the empty Pacific, floating dead men and circling sharks, loneliness and loss.

Bud noticed, and made the right noises, inviting me to lay out the details of my particular hell if I wanted to, or to keep silent. “You was in the Pacific the whole war?” he said.

I said I’d spent some time at Peleliu, been in and out of Guam and Oahu and a few other islands, but was mostly aboard a heavy cruiser. I didn’t go into details.

“Fishing was great in the bay, though,” he continued, picking right up on my reticence. “Nice mangrove snapper, so thick they’d practically jump into your hand. And we caught mullet and striped bass. Been a long time since I was out there, though. But, to make a long story short, I never did get out in the Gulf.”

“We fished out in deep water a lot when I was a kid,” I said, catching the conversational ball and tossing it back. “My uncle had a  Chris-Craft he docked in St. Petersburg. Now I’ve got one of my own, or the hotel does. Did I tell you I manage a hotel? The Caloosa? Our boat driver’s taken me out a couple of times, showed me some fish holes. You want to go out to open water one day?”

“When?” he answered. And I saw from his eyes and the set of his jaw that he wasn’t kidding or just being polite.

I suggested the following Sunday morning. “Unless you got to be in church,” I added. “Course the boat leaks and the motor’s cranky, but we’ll be all right if we stay in sight of shore.”

He said Sunday morning sounded fine, adding that he hadn’t been to church much since the Japs quit shooting at him. And so the date was fixed.