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| Photograph of autographed copy from author to editor [cover slightly curled] |
By Roger Owens
James Donald Owens was sweating more than usual as he headed up Roosevelt Boulevard, the warships at the base standing on the skyline behind him like ugly grey buildings. It was rarely so cold you couldn’t take a swim anywhere in the Keys, even on Christmas Day or New Year’s, but this still, silent heat was oppressive. It felt more like August than December. The south-east wind, which folks considered more or less permanent in these parts, seemed to have died an unfortunate death. It would be sorely missed, he thought with his normal good humor.
When he came to the Navy laundry, there at the Dutch-door window was Louise, whose name – he had looked it up – meant “lovely” in old French. Her sweet face was pale compared to most girls in Key West, and was framed with blazing scarlet curls that cascaded down her slim shoulders. His solid body felt positively feather-light whenever she was near.
He strode forward speaking endearments in his low yet penetrating voice, and Louise flashed those fabulous eyes behind her to see if her mama was looking before she leaned out the open top of the door to give him a quick kiss. Jim was careful never to seem too forward around the Dedges. Lola thought well of him, but fleet champion or not, he would hate to have it out with Amon. That old man was tough, and mean as an Indiana ’coon. Recently, he’d heard that Louise’s father had nearly beaten a man to death at a local bar. He wanted no part of brawling, at least not until he got out. What happened aboard ship was one thing, but the Navy was notoriously unforgiving to those who embarrassed her on shore. If he had to beat his future father-in-law senseless to marry Louise, he would do it, but not before he was in civvies again. He wanted to gather his love in his powerful arms right then and there, but he knew that had to wait. Soon, he prayed earnestly, let it be soon.
Louise Dedge was happy. Tomorrow, December 31st, 1946, they would finish the preparations for the New Year’s Eve celebration and have a dance that night. Momma was upset, because she had driven the 1945 Buick Daddy had just bought down one of the skinniest streets in the old city and gotten it stuck. The Buick Roadmaster was just a hair wider – what with the chrome bump rails and all – than that particular alley, which led to the back doors of some of her Haitian washer-women. Lola Dedge knew that, being she was white, just her coming around could cause the struggling black women problems with their own. She had always tried to remain inconspicuous, and this led her to these tight little alleys where the Haitian folk congregated. Her previous vehicle, a 1939 Oldsmobile, would just fit. And that’s what Daddy’d had when he’d heard the new car was stuck. A fit.
Yet the truth was, Daddy was doing well. After the war, no more ships were being built in Savannah. That’s why they had come to Key West, because the Naval station here wasn’t going to close. It was critical to “a continued vigilance, allowing no encroachment,” as the press releases always said. Here Amon William Dedge had advanced swiftly, mainly because he wasn’t claustrophobic. His job was now shipfitting, which included every type of installation, modification, or retrofitting of all the warships still in Destroyer Squadron 12 and Submarine Squadron 89, which had survived the postwar budget cuts along with the base itself.
Shipfitting often included crawling through the guts of these warships, which were like mazes from the depths of a nightmare. There were endless compartments formed by steel walls called bulkheads that cut across each ship, designed to prevent it from sinking if it was struck by enemy fire. One compartment might be flooded but hopefully others would keep the ship afloat. To access each compartment there were hatches at the bottom right of one bulkhead and at the top left of the next. The compartments might be so tight a man had to jump sideways through the port hatch, bent forward, just to fall headfirst into the narrow, unknown space ahead. Then, after crossing the width of the vessel, he would have to lie down and squirm, head first, around and through the starboard hatch on the opposite side.
On top of that it was dark. Very, very dark. Throughout their shifts these men would be carrying flashlights, welding equipment, drills, tools, and safety gear. They would have to drag it all with them every step of the way, sloshing through the oily filth that gathered at the asshole of any ship. They had to pass every particle of it over and under themselves, work around it through each and every hatch, to get to whatever problem or outdated system plagued this particular part of this particular ship. It was not as if the equipment had been designed for this work either. Every possible combination of pre-war junk, aircraft, and hobby equipment had been cobbled together and pressed into service during the war, and since the end of hostilities the money had gotten even tighter. Acetylene and oxy tanks were too long, and had to be jerked back and forth a hundred times to get them through each hole and around each corner formed by the bulkheads. Hoses that should have been ten feet long were sixty feet long, like masses of entangling naval incompetence.
When the exhausted men finally reached their destination, they had to cut the necessary holes with torches or drill the hard, hard steel and bolt a new something to this bulkhead or that, connect that old pipe to this new one, while the darkness crouched behind them like a pack of starving wolves. They had to accomplish all this while jammed close, like in a hot steel closet or the depths of a coal mine. A man couldn’t get a straight shot at drilling, Daddy told Louise, because a man and a drill wouldn’t both fit between those damned wartime bulkheads, so you had to hold the drill at arm’s length instead of getting behind it where you could put your back to the wall behind you and get your ass into drilling that hole. This was murder on the arms and shoulders, the drill screaming continuously while the tiny twists of chopped steel fell, glinting in the weak lamplight, into the filthy water at their feet. Sweat poured off them so that many passed out from the heat and lack of air. When their brutal daily tasks were done they had to drag all the stuff back again just to get out. The work was long and hard and dark, just ask her Daddy if you didn’t believe it, and there were lots of guys who couldn’t take it. Daddy said simple darkness could swallow some men, weak men, swallow them whole. The Devil lived not in flames but in darkness, Daddy had told her, and she wasn’t dumb either. Yes, she worshipped her father, but he was truthful too. She knew he would never make up the tiniest detail of his service for the Navy, and she knew for a fact that eight out of ten new shipfitters quit in the first few weeks.
But her Daddy was strong and brave, and he worked. He worked on the farm as a kid. He worked as a guard in the Lake City, Georgia Correctional Institution, and he once had to shoot an escapee with his shotgun, and the man died. He worked in the sewers of Camp Stewart, Georgia when the Army was building it from nothing to a huge base, and he said the ship compartments were no worse than the sewers and smelled a lot better. He had scars on his hands and arms from the germs in those sewers getting into his cuts and time would show that those scars would never heal. But because Daddy worked, they could have a new car, and they had moved from Navy housing to a real house, on Flagler Street. A retired sponge diver from Greece lived next door, nearer the Gulf side. He drank rum all day and called himself Captain Niko. His entire yard was white marl rocks and palm trees, with every kind of discarded net, float, buoy, and rusty anchor scattered around as decorations. Ships’ lamps for yard lights and a wall around the whole thing only enhanced his reputation for eccentric behavior. When neighbors asked about his rock “lawn,” he claimed he hadn’t retired to have to mow the damn yard. He also regularly and loudly called Ernest Hemingway an asshole who didn’t know shit about fishing. Hemingway went out on “head” boats, he said, where you paid by the head like any other tourist. Louise thought Captain Niko was the neatest old fart she knew, maybe next to Mr. Thompson. Anyone who agreed that Hemingway was an asshole was all right in her book.
On the corner on the Atlantic side of the Dedge’s house, weeds dominated the hard marl ground where a gas tank had stood during the war, and across the street that paralleled the Atlantic Ocean were rows of three-story, rundown wooden tenements filled with poor Cubanos and Hatians looking for work. Only there was somebody different living there now, a mulatto woman with a baby on the way soon, and Louise had become friends with her. She was smart and funny, and most of all she was beautiful. She was teaching Louise all kinds of tricks with makeup to enhance her assets, as she put it, and minimize her liabilities. For someone with no visible liabilities whatsoever except her black blood, she spoke like someone who knew how it felt to not be appreciated. Her name was Porcelain Jones.
Healy Armstrong was happy. He had never expected to be happy; someone as different as he was would be a fool to expect anything. His lover, Excilencio Amadou, was Bahamian and black and handsome, and he thought he was in a dream. It was such a relief to be accepted by someone, anyone, and Excilencio made it all wonderful. After the madness of Birdswood, he could not believe there were really people on Earth who would just let you live, like they did in Key West. When his cousin Lester Clayton showed up, he had run and hidden in the bushes behind the bungalow, sure Lester had come to kill him. Excilencio finally coaxed him out, shivering with terror, and Healy had seen Lester’s black girlfriend. Well, not black – why, she was damn near as white as Healy, and beautiful to boot, not that Healy was the best judge of women. But Lester? Lester and a mulatto woman? It defied imagination. Only Lester was not Lester Clayton Tottenmann any more, Healy was sure of that. Just like he had found Excilencio, Lester had found in Porcelain Jones the love of his life, and it had changed the course of that life forever.
Excilencio’s bungalow sat back in the palm trees on a beach on the Atlantic side, on land he could not prove was his own, although he claimed his great-grandfather had bought it fair and square from a half-breed Bahamian pirate all legal and above-board, a mere sixty years before. Healy figured they were lucky no one else wanted it or the two queer boys would have been run off long since. They all, Lester and Porcelain and their friends, would sit around the fire in the evenings when the Horny B. was in port, drinking rum in coconut milk and roasting fish and crabs for dinner. Blackie told stories of building ships and being a big shot, and his girlfriend Lottie occasionally let out something about a bad childhood in north Florida, which didn’t sound much better than Birdswood. Lester told Healy about how screwed-up all their old friends back in South Carolina were, while Jackson Lee Davis revealed a background of luxury in Virginia they all might have prayed for if he hadn’t made it sound like jail. Joe Hook, as usual, said nothing. Once in a while Porcelain would bring her very white friend Louise, who sipped her rum slowly and seemed oddly determined not to be shocked at associating with the assorted blacks, homosexuals, black homosexuals, robbers, and other vagabonds who hung out by Excilencio’s fire.
The one time Healy ever saw her act surprised was when Horace Ball showed up. Horace was a regular by virtue of walking their beach at all times of the day and night looking for samples and specimens. Healy had at first mistaken Horace for one of his own kind, but soon realized Horace liked girls but was just too distracted to try to act macho, like so many guys did these days. The palm trees rattled in the wind coming off the South Atlantic, the sweet breeze that blew both the smoke and the mosquitos away. Horace and Louise stared at each other in open amusement for a moment and then he took a coconut shell filled with rum from Excilencio and raised it in a toast to the new moon, just rising over the eastern sea. They all toasted the moon, and nothing more was said.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]
| Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens |
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