Loving Women (53 page)

In chalk on paper. She was sitting on a chair in the trailer, with one leg up over the arm. The hair had grown back between her legs, frizzy and thick. The hair on her head was more clearly the hair of a black woman, and so were her features, the nose slightly wider, the lips fuller. She was looking at me in a cool direct way, wearing the high-heeled shoes. And she was more beautiful than ever.

I closed the Supply Shack at twenty minutes after midnight. I walked slowly to the barracks and sat on my bunk for a long while before I knew what I had to do.

I had to go to Eden Santana.

Right away.

If I didn’t, I would lose her.

Chapter

60

T
here was no moon. I avoided the road, because it went past Billy’s where Red Cannon did his drinking, and past the boat shop where Buster’s presence hung like an evil smell, and past too many gas stations where the lights of pickup trucks could snap on suddenly and find me in the darkness. I chose the woods instead, and I was almost immediately lost, slowly moving forward, going around thickets and tangles of wet brush. I had never gone this way before; until this night, all I needed to know was the trail to the highway. But now I was alone, going the other way, into the unknown.

After a while my body ached and my shoes were soaked. But I plunged on. I wanted Eden and I wanted her tonight. I was going to tell her I was with her forever. I didn’t care if she was black, colored, Negro, nigger. I didn’t fall in love with her because she was black and I wasn’t going to stop loving her because she was black. I didn’t care what anybody else thought. Not her mother or her father or my friends back home; not old blacks with shotguns or whites with whips. On the subject of Eden Santana, the opinions of others didn’t interest me.

Speeches rolled around in my head, as I pushed through the brush and the thickets and bumped into trees, my arms and face scratched now, the words a kind of fuel, driving me on.
We can’t quit, baby
. They’ll win, the Klan will win.
The rednecks will win. Harrelson will win. We gotta be together against all of them. Me, you, your kids, our kids. Wherever we go. Paris. New York. We gotta do it. We got to fight this out together
.

Until at last I saw the lake. Black and sullen and silent.

I walked along the shore and found a flat-bottomed boat tied to a dock. The oars were leaning against a piling. I picked up the oars and untied the boat and began to row across the lake. I knew that I’d just committed the crime of stealing a boat. But I didn’t care. On the far shore was Eden Santana.

There were no lights anywhere, and no stars. But I was still afraid of being watched as I came across the lake: watched by the Klan or the blacks. Waiting there for me in the dark. I rowed softly on, trying to stay low. If they were waiting for me, I didn’t want to give them a good target. The oars seemed to make a sound that said Eden. Eden. Dip and pull and Eden.

And then I was at the far shore. The boat made a squashing sound as it drove into weeds and mud. I stepped into a foot of water and then pulled the boat up another foot into the mud until it was firmly wedged. I was about a half mile from the trailer, closer to where Bobby Bolden lived with Catty than to the place where Eden and I had played our games. I started walking through the woods in my soaked shoes. I saw the tree where Catty had been whipped into unconsciousness. I looked at the bushes where the old man had aimed his shotgun at me. It all seemed part of a dream I’d had a hundred years before. I paused, listened, heard nothing. And then moved ahead.

Soon I could see the trailer, small and silvery in the dim light. And my heart pounded. The car wasn’t there. I began to run. A few feet from the trailer, I stopped, listening again, afraid. And then tried the door. It was open, but when I flicked on the switch, nothing happened; there was no electricity. But I didn’t really need light.

From the moment I stepped inside, I knew that everything was gone and so was Eden Santana.

PART

FIVE

Chapter

61

From
The Blue Notebook

N
othing matters.

Chapter

62

S
o it had happened to me, as it had happened to Turner and Sal and Maher, to all the other poor lost sailors I’d come to know: the thing I feared most: suddenly, after sickening violence, she was gone. The boy I was then went down to Sears and talked to some counter girls, and was told they hadn’t seen her, no, they’d seen no sign of Eden Santana. The boy I was then went to see the store manager, a fat pig-eyed man named Rudolph. “Damn woman never even called,” he said. “Just stuck me with her counter. Never called. And I got her pay check here for her too. Well, she comes to get paid, I’m gone to give her a nice fat piece of ma mind …”

On those nights in the fifties, when people all over America were sitting in their safe little houses talking about Gorgeous George and Howard Unruh, Miss Hush and pyramid clubs, I was searching the streets of a city that was not my own, trying to find a woman I was sure I loved more than anyone on earth. On the third night, I took a bus over to Roberta’s and told her what had happened. We sat together in the living room in the fading light. She cried twice. I comforted her. Then she put my hand on her breast and started to move to the bedroom. I shook my head no.

“You helped
me
when I was hurting,” she said. “Now I want to help
you
.”

“Only thing could help me, Roberta, was if she walked in that door.”

She started sobbing again.

“Me too,” she said. “Me too.”

She looked suddenly old, and now the trouble, the loss, the departure was all about her and no longer about me.

“My friend is
gawn
,” she said. “My sweet friend Eden is
gawn
.”

She was still sobbing when I left.

I drifted through an agony of days, desperate for a letter, a note, some proof that Eden Santana had existed, was not conjured or invented by the boy I was then. I wanted something that said at the end “love always,” like the picture of Captain Pritchett’s wife. In bed, in the woods, in rivers and on beaches, she had made me almost a man. And then, through the simple act of departure, she’d broken me down again into a child. Not a word arrived from her. Some sick bastards had come out of the swamp and scared her and she had run. And I couldn’t run after her. She had the car and the open roads of the great wide country. But I was trapped in the Navy, the prisoner of an easy oath.

And so, after those first few days, I went back to what I was before I met her. I didn’t have to explain to Sal and Max and Maher and the others. I just showed up one evening at the gate and then all of us were racing to O Street. And once again, Webb Pierce was singing on the juke and Tons of Fun showed up with their van and then Hank Williams was singing about how he was so lonesome he could die.

While Dixie Shafer laughed and opened bottles.

The whole gang was there and nobody asked where I’d been and why I was back. But I was sure they knew. I drank beer and talked about Bobby Bolden and the Navy’s great cover-up and drank more beer and said Harrelson had to be the finger man and then we all talked about what we should have done to save Bobby Bolden and then we chug-a-lugged more beers and then I was leaning against the concrete blocks outside, throwing up in the dirt while the night sky whirled around and the ground pitched and Dixie Shafer told us all it was time to go back to the base.

O Eden
.

The next morning, my tongue was thick and slimy. My brains felt diced. I stood in the shower for a long time and when my brain started working again I still wanted Eden Santana. Instead of eating lunch, I went to the barracks and lay down on my bunk and tried to sleep and still I wanted Eden Santana. I went back to the Supply Shack and filled out forms and swabbed the deck and tried jokes with Becket and talked about college with Charlie Dunbar and still I wanted Eden Santana.