Loving Women (41 page)

“Doan feel funny, feel
her
.”

Champion Jack Dupree walked in and went to the trench and pissed in silence.

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

“Her husbin’s on the Midway,” Rhode Island Freddie said with a sigh. “Mos’ of us, we know the dude. Wouldn’t be right, us
knowin
him and all. But it seem lak such a waste, hear? And
you
don’t know the man.… Hey, Champion,” he said to Dupree, “want a toke?”

Champion Jack Dupree zipped up his trousers and reached for the reefer. “You hear that fat mothafucka?” he said. He inhaled, held it, let the smoke out slowly. “If he still in the
county
when I finish the second set, itd be a fuckin miracle.” He looked at me. “What the fuck are
you
dune in this shithouse?”

“Came to hear you,” I said.

“Don’t bullshit a bullshittuh, white boy,” he said. “I hoid yiz talkin. You here for da fine brown pussy …”

Rhode Island Freddie giggled.

“Know what I’m saying to you?” Champion Jack Dupree said. “But ya better watch it, white boy. Pussy drive men into da valley of fuckin deat’.”

He took another toke, then sang a few lazy bars:

See, see, rider, see what you have done

You made me love you, now your man done come
 …

We all laughed, and started back to the hall. The place was going crazy. Women were standing, screaming, shouting, and the men were shaking their heads, and laughing, and tugging at the women. And up on the stage was the craziest looking black man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t very big, but his hair rose high over his head in a pompadour, all greasy and wild, and he had on a long draped baby-blue jacket and red shoes and he was standing up at the piano, banging hard while horns and saxes honked behind him and his eyes rolled around, out of control. I couldn’t hear the words. But words didn’t matter. He came to a crashing windup and whirled, and did a double split, stood up, and bowed. The crowd went wild, calling at him, shouting for him. He had the mike in his hand, gazing in a glassy-eyed way around the room, and then saw me about to sit down again next to Winnie, who was very sweaty now, with deep stains under her arms and down her back.

“Why, hello, Miss Thang!” he said, and pranced toward me, and raised his eyes as the room laughed, and then abruptly turned around, furrowed his brows, stared into the darkness and started another song:

Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop Alop-Bam-Boom
 …

Chapter

46

W
innie had a room on the first-floor right of Miss Harper’s Boarding House on East Dancer Street. We lay together on the small bed.

Where you learn to
do
such a thang? she said.

I said I just learned, but I didn’t say where.

She said, No black man ever did that.

No?

She said, He just be worryin bout his own sweet self.

I said she was beautiful. But she knew that. Beautiful women always do.

She said, You do such a thang, word get
around
, black ladies be lining up side yo
house
, boy.

I said she must have men lined up at her house too.

Winnie said, No, they all know mah man. Caint do nothin round here.… That’s why when Ah saw you, Ah said,
him
, Winnie, grab
him
.

I asked her if she’d ever slept with a white man before.

She said, Hell, no.… Not that these crackers don’t come own to me.… Oh no, they come
own
. But Ah wunt sleep with one of them, if they paid me a hunndid dollahs.

She looked at me, her breast dark against my chest. Her hand was playing with me.

Winnie said, It ain’t really
white
anyway, is it? More like
pink
.… Hey, what about you? You slepp with a black woman before?

No.

That’s not whut Ah hear, boy, she said, and laughed in a dirty way. You damn sailors.

I said, Don’t believe every thing you hear about sailors, Winnie. She sat up and dragged the tips of her breasts across my face. She said, Kin you do that thang again?

Chapter

47

A
ll day Sunday, I ached with shame. Not guilt. This was old-fashioned shame, as raw and pulsing and systemic as a toothache. In a way, of course, making love to Winnie was a corporal work of mercy, as they called it in the Catholic catechism. She’d been alone too long, trapped in a neighborhood where everybody knew her and her husband, growing old every minute. Or so I told myself (a lie I would tell myself all my life). I had given her pleasure in the here and now, while Winnie was young, while she
needed
it. We hadn’t hurt anyone. Her husband didn’t know and probably never would, unless that winter Winnie presented him with a blue-eyed boy. And yet I was ashamed of myself. The shame wasn’t about screwing the wife of another guy, a sailor I didn’t know. Nor was it about sleeping with a black woman, becoming at last, for a couple of hours, what Harrelson called a “nigger lover.” No, the shame was about something else. Out of weakness, in a moment of opportunity, I had betrayed Eden Santana.

Yes, she had gone away and I didn’t know when she’d be back. Yes, we had no deal, no verbal or written contract. But I knew that I couldn’t tell Eden what I’d done. I was ashamed of that. And I hadn’t used a rubber. Suppose Winnie gave me the clap? Suppose she’d given me a good dose of something her husband picked up somewhere? I could give it to Eden. And what if Winnie
was
pregnant? Nine months from now, her husband would show up at the hospital and a nurse would bring out the baby, which would have my eyes and skin that was lighter than Winnie’s and lighter than his and the smile would shift into rage. And if the child
was
mine, wasn’t that
my
responsibility too? A son. A daughter … my flesh and blood. I couldn’t go around and say to Winnie, I’ll give the child my name, I’ll send some money. If I did, the husband
would
cut me (in Bobby Bolden’s phrase) long, deep, and
con
tinuously. But if Winnie did have a baby, and it was mine, then all my life I’d wonder how that kid was doing, my kid, raised black in the back end of a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t tell Eden about that either. Or anyone else.

And the odor of my shame would cling to me all my days.

On Monday, I drifted into routine and the shame began to ease. Harrelson wasn’t talking to me. Not since the night I’d slammed him into the wall. I always said hello when we passed each other, but he kept walking, his eyes not even seeing me. It was as if I were black. Sometimes he and Boswell would look across at me and Miles Rayfield and something would be said and they’d giggle. I asked Boswell about this once, and he said, “Aw, you know Harrelson. He’s just a redneck. Don’t take his boolshit too serious.”

“
I
don’t,” I said. “But
he
does. He thinks Miles and I are queer or something.”

“Shit, he thinks
Eisenhower’s
queer. Don’t let it bother you none.”

At lunch time that day, I walked over to the hangars to see Sal and Max, and there was Mercado just inside the hangar, looking dashing in a flight suit. He held a cup of coffee and was staring at a large blackboard that listed pilots and flight times.

“How are you?” I said.

“Ah, Mister Devlin.
¿Como estas?
”

“How was your trip to Mexico?” I said.

“Ah, hell, I didn’t go,” he said. “The last minute, I hear there was a flight to New York. From Mainsi’. So I take that instead. But you know what? I end up in Philadelphia. I think I am the first Mexican in history to ever go to Philadelphia. I wait three hours for a plane, then at last I give up and got a bus to New York …”

“What did you think?”

“I was there before with my father, when I was twelve,” he said. “So I have seen it before, New York. My father was then working for the Mexican government. It’s a great city, no? Life! Energy! But now, it looks a little more bad. More dirty. More crowded. And
expensive
¡Ay, caray!
” He smiled. “I should have gone to Mexico.”

My stomach was turning over.
He took her to New York!
That’s all Eden ever wanted to see and
he took her
! Anger shoved my shame away. Anger at her, anger at myself for being such a goddamned jerk. Go ahead (I said). Ask him. Ask him
did he take her there
!

“You go alone?” I said (trying to be casual, gazing off at the list of flights and landing strips and aircraft numbers) …

“Yes, what a sin! You ever try to get a girl on a Navy plane? Easier to get a Russian to come with you. But there were plenty of girls there, oh, boy. They got some
beauties
in New York, no kidding.” He laughed. “All giants, too. What the hell they feed those women in New York? All big, like lampposts, those girls. And one disgusting habit: they all chew gum.”

“ ‘Meet me in New York some time,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to some short girls that don’t chew gum.”

“They got any medium size?” he said, and we both laughed.

I was near
giddy
as I walked to the mess hall. Captain Pritchett’s flowers were rioting happily against the walls of all the buildings on the base, red, yellow, violet. Sprinklers played brightly on the lawns and the grass looked green and plump with spring.

“Hey, lover man.”

Bobby Bolden came up beside me, the two of us moving toward the mess hall.

“I don’t know what you did Saturday night, man, but that Winnie done gone crazy.”

I was scared for a moment, then saw Bobby Bolden’s dirty grin, and smiled in what I thought was a cool way. That was one of the moments in my life when I truly felt abruptly older, as if some ability of mine had been ratified and granted approval. And I felt somehow bigger. I said (trying to underplay it), “She’s some woman.”

He looked at me and shook his head. It might have been in pity.

In late afternoon, I wrote a letter to my father, telling him the usual bland lies about life in the Navy. I didn’t tell him about Eden Santana; Red Cannon; Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada; Kuniyoshi or Ben Shahn; Winnie; the Blackhawk Club; the Dirt Bar; Dixie Shafer; the Kingdom of Darkness; Captain Pritchett’s lost wife; Mercado; Sal’s grandfather; or the way to use vine charcoal. I told
him the weather was nice and the food okay and the beaches beautiful. I sent him a picture of me under a palm tree with the snow coming down, taken by Becket. I asked my brothers to write me. I was sealing the letter when the telephone jangled on my desk. I picked it up and said hello.

“It’s me,” Eden Santana said. “I’m back.”

Chapter

48

What Eden Santana Told Me (I)

Y
ou’ve never had
a child, so you don’t know. But I have two girls, real pretty, one fifteen, the other ten. But just saying it that way doesn’t explain anything. I could be describing someone else’s kids, I could be talking about dogs or canaries. You see, having children’s different from anything else on this poor earth, and maybe you can’t ever explain it to people that never have had them. But those girls come from me, from
my
body, I held them in me, I gave them life in blood and pain, and then nursed them and watched them learn to walk and say words and ask for more than food, hear me? You ain’t ever had that, child, so you don’t know why I up and went when I got the word. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe no man ever could
.