Rumors of Peace (10 page)

W
E STOOD OUTSIDE THE GYM ENTRANCE
, waiting. At last Eudene came blustering out, her fingers scratching in her hair, which was always greasy at the roots. She might not be Rita Hayworth to ask, but we stepped up to her.

“Hi, you guys!” she yelled, which she always yelled, even if she had seen you twenty minutes before.

“We want to know about that guy,” Peggy stated with her authority. “The one who thought you were twenty-one years old.”

“Sure!” And she began searching for something in her big squalid shoulder bag.

I glanced around, concerned that Mr. Lewis might stride around the corner with his vicious eye and see that Eudene was telling us of flesh. “Should we go somewhere?” I whispered to her.

“Sure, let's go.”

Gym was our last class; everyone was hurrying off. It was a dark, windy, showery day. Peggy was in her powder blue coat, somewhat wilted since its trip to the cleaner's, I in my yellow slicker, and we both wore bandannas that flapped in the wind. Eudene, by contrast, was coatless, bareheaded, her sweater sleeves rolled to her elbows—too dumb even to notice the weather, but unquestionably the leader as we walked off
together, a superior being taking us on a forbidden and mysterious journey.

She was still looking through her bag, making a terrific racket in its bowels as we crossed the lawn. We turned onto Las Juntas Street, at whose end you could see a chunk of leaden bay and a warship. I wondered if this man of Eudene's was a sailor. Or a soldier. Was she searching for his photograph? A love letter? Or something more unusual—

Eudene kept searching, lifting her head only to yell a greeting at passing classmates, until the students had thinned and we were walking alone.

“Remember that guy, Eudene?” Peggy asked. “You were going to tell us about?”

At that moment Eudene found what she was looking for, but all she fished out was a stick of unwrapped gum embedded with lint and tobacco, which she shoved into her mouth with her palm.

“Well he was this guy,” she said, chewing juicily, “and he sees me and he says hi babe you got a nice little town here and would I want to show him around, like where could he get something to eat? So we go down to Meloni's and we have a spaghetti dinner, and he says I figure you're about twenty-one years old.”

We waited for the rest, but unbelievably, she was done. She just sauntered along, chewing, her profile framed against the ugly black storage tanks on Shell hill.

“Didn't he say anything else?” Peggy asked. “Didn't he flirt?”

There was a bellow of delight, and Eudene's left elbow rammed the powder blue coat.

“Was he a soldier?” I asked, and suffered the other elbow.

“Didn't he
do
anything?” Peggy asked. “I mean afterwards—you know what I mean.”

Eudene threw her head back, still bellowing, and rolled her eyes heavenward. “Do I know what you mean, kid!”

“Well, tell us! What he did!”

But our guide looked suddenly stupid beyond belief, as if she had come to a blockade in her mind and was trying to squeeze around it or push through it. “We had a spaghetti dinner.” She wasn't sauntering
now. We hurried alongside, shifting our books in our arms.

“
After
the spaghetti, Eudene!”

“You said you'd tell us!”

“Get outta here,” she said in a low voice.

Peggy grabbed her sweater sleeve. “He told you to take your clothes off, didn't he?”

Eudene began to run, her sauerkraut hair streaming, her big bosom bouncing in her sweater.

“Didn't he!” Peggy cried, still hanging onto the sleeve as we ran alongside her. “He took you some place and took your
clothes
off!”

A cheap hotel room whirled through my mind—Eudene's clothes dropping to the floor, the white flesh exposed, the soldier's hands quivering, pouncing. My mouth went cold as I pounded along at her side.

“Didn't he!” Peggy demanded, stretching the sleeve as the three of us thundered along. Eudene was pincered between us, so close that she smelled like the tule marsh, her secret armpits steaming, her face deep-pored and oily. I hated her for doing this disgusting thing in the hotel room, and I hated her for not telling. I wanted to give her a kick, but we were going too fast. I delivered something just as good.

“If he bought you dinner, he must've known you'd do it! Why else would he bother with somebody like you?”

“Right!” cried Peggy.

Eudene's face swung around, the lips laid back like those of a mauled animal. My steps faltered; the two of us fell back. Her sleeve pulled out of shape, Eudene kept running, and now she gained the corner and disappeared around it.

We walked on in silence. A thin rain swerved down. There was an iron weight in my chest.

“I don't know why we did that,” Peggy said at last, in a timid voice.

My voice was timid too. “Where do you think she went?”

“Home, maybe?”

“I know where she lives.”

Once more we began running, using all the shortcuts I knew.

Eudene lived on the road leading along the bay front to Port Chicago. The houses there were big and had once been very fine, but now they were ramshackle and divided into apartments. In the front yard of
Eudene's building stood a rusty car on blocks. We went behind it and waited.

The rain was heavy now, carried by strong gusts of wind that splattered loudly against the car. At intervals Peggy gave a profound sigh. Her eyes were anxious, unhappy. I tried to take my mind off Eudene by thinking of her surroundings. It was a dangerous place to live, with Shell right across the street, the hills dark and cindery in the rain, the black tanks stretching into the distance. But behind the houses lay the railroad tracks, and the marshes and the bay, and it must be nice to live where you could hear the ferry bell clanging across the tule. The houses were nice too, in their run-down way, with huge windows filled with tiny panes, like houses from ancient Paris. At night, sleeping under those windows, you would have all the stars spread out above. But it did no good to think about these things.

Peggy was looking with mournful surprise at her legs. “I'm wetting my pants.”

Our eyes met. The Towel Supervisor out of control, and I with my chest of cast iron. What if Eudene had run away and never came back, and we had to go through the rest of our lives like this, sick with remorse, hating ourselves?

At that moment we saw her coming up the street. We hurried from around the car. Eudene planted her feet apart on the wet sidewalk. She wrapped the strap of her bag around her hand. The gray eyes were flat, stony.

“We apologize! We were only joking!”

“We want to be friends again—”

Eudene remained as she was, the bag held ready.

“Hit us,” I told her. “Hit us!”

Her stony look turned to one of cold suspicion, but she raised the heavy bag by its strap, whipped it around and around in a vigorous warm-up, and unleashed it with a brutal smash against my neck. It felt wonderful, it took care of all my guilt, and with my whole soul I loved Eudene. I wanted to see her happy, celebrated, laden with medals. I groped for some dazzling compliment.

Peggy found one, rubbing her smacked neck. “I love the color of your hair, Eudene. It's practically blond.”

Still hard-faced, Eudene pulled a damp strand to her eye and looked at it.

“It's naturally wavy, isn't it?” I asked.

She gave a cool nod. “I never need a perm.”

“Lucky you, mine's straight as a stick!” Grabbing a hank from under my bandanna, I tugged at it disgustedly as Eudene's lips finally, slowly, turned up in a small, superior smile. It was as good as a medal on her chest. I hoped it would bring her strength and happiness forever.

“We've got to go, so long, Eudene.”

“You'd better dry off good and not catch cold,” Peggy told her with concern.

“Yeah.” She walked off across the muddy yard.

“So long, Eudene.”

“So long.”

Peggy leaned down and scratched her ankles, where the urine had run into the tops of her socks. “I don't know why I did that. I never wet my pants for years.”

I didn't know why she had done it either. I could no longer grasp the reason. My chest was light.

But that night in bed it all came back. I thought of Eudene lying under her Parisian window. Probably she never washed her hands or brushed her teeth before climbing under the blankets—just a big satisfied mess chewing her worn-out gum and enjoying the stars without a worry. And what I felt now was that she would never enjoy the stars again. There would always be a black spot inside her that we had put there, a black wound that would make the sky seem too cold and dark, so that she couldn't sleep. But I wouldn't mention these sad thoughts to Peggy, because of the Salvation Army.

The next morning at school, a pale gray bruise on my neck, I worriedly observed Eudene for signs of a haggard night. But she didn't look haggard, and she didn't look hateful either, though she wasn't as friendly as she usually was. It was a couple of days before she was back to normal; but then she waved us behind a tree for a comradely puff on her cigarette, and I knew that her blurred, skiddy mind had triumphed. Probably
the only thing she had kept from that horribly disputed spaghetti evening was the voice of the soldier, releasing those magic words, “I figure you're about twenty-one years old,” and putting her right up there.

But I wasn't wrong about the black spot. Except that it was in me, not Eudene. Every time I remembered that I had said, “Why else would he bother with somebody like you?” I felt an unbearable shame. It was flesh that had unhinged me, flesh and slithering hands. I pushed them deep in the storeroom of my mind.

F
EB
. 2:

Stalingrad

Recaptured by Russ!

F
EB.
7:

Guadalcanal Victory!

“It could be over by the time you graduate,” I told Peter.

“Are you kidding?” He was busy polishing his shoes on the back porch.

“No, it could.”

He squinted, holding up a loafer. “It's just getting started. Look at those hundreds of islands in the Pacific. Look at—”

“I don't want to talk about it. It's boring.”

“Ah, to be twelve again,” he murmured, smiling and attacking the shoe again with his cloth.

“Your shoes look terrific,” I said sadly, thinking of those hundreds of islands. “They really shine.”

And I saw that Peter himself looked terrific and really shone—with his blue eyes clear and bright, and his chiseled features glowing, as if the skin gave off a radiance—and though he was much older than I, it seemed that I was glimpsing all youngness and brightness and freshness as he stood there by the rainy back porch, working over his brown loafers.

Sometimes when we all sat together at night, Dad reading the paper and Mama knitting a khaki muffler or sock, and maybe Peter playing a game of Chinese checkers with me, I would wonder if Peter would look like Dad when he was Dad's age, stocky, bald, and if I would look like Mama with my hair in a bun, and I wondered how Dad and Mama would look then, in thirty years, ancient, bent; but it was impossible to visualize, to go that far into the future—if in fact there would be such a future—and I would quickly burrow back into the warm familiarity of the present, wondering something else—what did people do who didn't have cozy evenings together at the end of the day? I should think that without them the outside world would be too hard, too confusing, too much.

Yet the Hattons never got together. It was Dorothy's Dungeon that was the problem. It was too gloomy to sit in, so they kept to their rooms. Helen Maria's, of course, was her temple. And the parents' room had sofas, desks, everything they needed. As for Peggy, she loved her room, which had collapsed into an unspeakable mess, much worse than mine. Her two remaining records had long since paled on her; but she listened to
The Shadow
and
Fibber McGee and Mollie
on the radio, and she had a big enough allowance to keep her curled up with comic books and candy bars, and she had Rudy curled up at her feet.

Everyone seemed happy with this way of life, meeting as they came and went. Sometimes they converged for dinner. Sometimes they entertained guests in the dungeon. The guests were usually Aunt Margaret, the undertaker, and Grandmother. The lady mortician, who cracked morbid jokes which Helen Maria found “appalling but witty,” looked like a gray-haired version of Dr. Hatton, except that she wore pin-striped slacks and argyle socks with sandals. She lugged her accordion along and, in a rousing voice, sometimes joined by Peggy's off-key soprano, regaled the others with “Santa Lucia” and “I'm in Love with the Man in the Moon,” which Helen Maria found merely appalling. She approved more of her grandmother.

This was a large wobbly woman with a swept-up bun of fine white hair, and a hearing aid which was on the fritz and for which she could not get parts, because of the war. Throughout dinner—at a perfectly
ample table in the dining room—she would bark, “What? What are you saying?” giving the instrument in her ear frequent angry twists. She was extremely fond of Peggy, who ran and fetched things for her, shouting, “Here you are, Granny!” and “You're welcome, Granny!” with her wide-eyed, angelic look.

Helen Maria's attitude toward her grandmother was detached but admiring. “She has a remarkable constitution; for instance, she gave birth to Estelle at the advanced age of forty-eight, soon after which she accompanied our grandfather over the Dolomites with an alpenstock. She's ninety-three now, with her own teeth and unimpaired mental faculties, continuing to read French fluently. She has willed her body to science.”

I was impressed. But it was the other side of the family that interested Peggy: the grandfather of the soda-pop invention, who had awakened rich one morning, and Aunt Dorothy, whooping it up down south of the border.

“You may have Aunt Dorothy and her whoopee,” said Helen Maria. “She's a sodden bore.”

“She's had four husbands,” Peggy told me, undaunted.

“Every time she gets a divorce she comes and cries on Jack's shoulder,” said Helen Maria. “Then she tries to do something nice in return, like ruining our living room. She was once a brilliant, talented woman who has let her life slip through her fingers.”

When we were alone, Peggy said, “Well, I'd rather have four husbands than one. You get more variety.”

“I suppose.” But who cared about husbands, one, four, or four hundred? Peggy was hard to follow at times, yet in a way I wished I were her. Such as when we came across a drunk one day lying in the park with his claw of a hand around a bottle. While I entertained a few useless thoughts (poor old man on the ground all alone), Peggy was stuffing into his frayed coat pocket all the money she had on her. She was always giving things away. Outgrown toys to church bazaars, an overlarge sweater to Eudene, once-read comics to Annuncio's children. She never stumbled around, brooding; she did good things and moved on, and if she changed horses in midstream she didn't care. And she had no real viciousness in her, not even for the three people she said
should be shot: Hitler, Tojo, and Mr. Lewis. Even her bitter attacks on Helen Maria were
parti avec le vent,
as the genius would have put it—gone with the wind. Swept out with a clean broom. You only had to look at Peggy to know she was a happy person, a “growing person,” as Mrs. Miller said each one of us should be.

One day, when we were going through the park, I recognized a figure sitting on a bench. He was dressed in gray work pants and a red lumber jacket, but I knew him by the way he sat: leaning forward, fidgety, on the alert. I saw the big cleated boots that had pounded over the bridge. I saw how his knees were spread apart with his hands lying on them palms up, as if cradling a rifle, and I saw how calloused and ugly the palms were, like yellow horn.

“What's wrong?” Peggy whispered. “What're you stopping for?”

I was on the brink of hurrying on, yet I couldn't help staring at this man who had smashed my world to bits in the space of a minute. The face was tight-skinned, flushed in patches. It should have been shot between the eyes, with his own rifle. More than I wanted to get away from him, I wanted him to know this, and I narrowed my eyes with all the smoldering grievance of fifteen long months.

“What's wrong?” Peggy whispered again. “Listen, I'm going.”

Old Hackman met my stare from under loose, wrinkled eyelids. It was a gummy, jittery look, yet strangely sure in some way, full of dark knowledge. And to my horror, cutting through all my hatred, I felt a kinship with him, like a bond of blood. He knew. And I knew.

I turned and ran, plowing into Peggy.

“What did he do? Did he say something dirty?”

I hurried on, feeling my palms.

“Was he crazy?” she asked.

The calluses had gone down so much that I no longer sliced them off with a razor blade. But underneath the outer skin I felt the hardness, a definite horny hardness.

“Do you think my eyes look all right?” I asked, stopping.

“What d'you mean?”

“Do you think they ever looked—not right or something?”

“What d'you mean, like cross-eyed?”

“No. I don't know.”

“Tell me what he
said.
”

“He didn't say anything.”

The sky turned clear and warm in April. Downtown, after two winters of rain, the sandbags around Sheriff O'Toole's office were a hard, cohesive brown mass. On buildings and fences war posters hung faded in the brilliant spring light. No one glanced at them. The war was old, old, yet it would not end.

I enjoyed Helen Maria's salon, which had become a regular part of my life, yet I never heard what I wanted to hear: something strong and bright which could be stood upon like a rock. In fact, even comfortable old ideas I had never thought to question were put to the test time after time; far from having my storeroom illuminated, I found my entire mind becoming a hodgepodge of uncertainties. Nor could I withdraw from the salon. Helen Maria was almost a friend, and a friend was a precious thing. Also, if I left now, with my bunged-up brain, I might remain this way for life. I could only stay, hoping that the genius might yet reach out with the golden word.

One night, when I was staying over with Peggy, Helen Maria came into the room. She wore a coat over her pajamas.

“Would you care to invoke the gods?”

“Sure,” said Peggy, already out of bed.

“Put your coats on. Follow me.”

She led us out of the darkened house to the street. It was past midnight. We walked along in slippered feet.

“Where are we going?” Peggy asked.

“Mount Olympus.”

We passed the silent junior high school and the silent garrison. We passed the creek flowing eerily in the dark, and we passed my house lying moonlit and sleeping—a strange, set-apart feeling to see it so. Finally, we passed the community hospital, behind which rose a hill crowned with eucalyptus trees. We climbed this hill, and inside the circle of trees we sat down and rested.

Then Helen Maria got to her feet, lifted her arms, and spoke into the mild night.

“O Artemis, come thou now to these eyes. O Zeus, show thyself in thy glory. Achilles, I wait for thee!”

She paused. “No, I'd better do it in their own language.” And she spoke again, in Greek, her face serene and happy in the moonlight. When she was done, she bowed, spreading her arms in a gesture of gracious welcome.

I looked up at the trees, soaring into the starry night. The air carried a sweet smell of dewed grass. We waited.

After a while Peggy said, “Have they come yet?”

“Yes.” Helen Maria sank down beside us with a smile. “They came. And now they've gone.”

“How did they look?” I asked.

“Magnificent. They were just above the trees, with the moon behind them, and they were colossal. Then they soared away.”

“Did they say anything?”

“They didn't have to.”

“What did they wear?”

“Really, this is not something that can be gone over, like a railway shedjule.”

“Shedjule?”

“Schedule, if you must.”

“Why did you say shedjule?”

“Because I prefer the phonetics of our English cousins.”

“I didn't know you had English cousins. Have they been bombed?”

“Oh God, let's leave before the spell is destroyed entirely.”

Our journey back seemed longer and colder; but Helen Maria was buoyed by her experience, and she walked briskly along, now and then exclaiming on the beauty of the night.

The house was as we had left it, dark, slumbering, ignorant of moonlit gods. We filed silently through the Dungeon and down the hall, past the parental bedroom from behind whose door surged Mr. Hatton's manly snores. “Our parents are still deeply in love,” Helen Maria informed me. “And now, good night.”

I followed Peggy back to bed, where Rudy still lay asleep, unaware of our absence. There was something wonderful about our secrecy, our mysteriousness, and I only wished that I too had seen something—the hint, at least, of a colossal arm or foot.

“Did you see anything?” I asked.

“No,” Peggy yawned. “And she didn't either.”

“She must have, to make her that happy. Don't worry, she saw them.”

But now that I thought about it, it was wrong for someone who hated religion and superstition and anything that you couldn't weigh and balance and discuss—it was wrong for someone like that to glow with mystery, the way the saints glowed in the stained glass windows of the Catholic church. The way superstitious people glowed when they wished on the first star or found a lucky penny on the street. I felt a flash of indignation. How could I find the one solid truth through her if she herself didn't know?