San Diego Noir

maybe stop someplace to have a beer, and the days just went by and now July has become August, and he has a tough decision to make.

Charlie comes into the kitchen in his skivvies and a T-shirt and sits down at the table.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.

“The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.

She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.

He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.

Has been for the past couple of weeks, if you want to know the truth. Since that night he woke up with Millie shaking his shoulder, telling him he was having a bad dream.

“It’s okay, baby,” she was saying. “It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.”

He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t a nightmare but real life, and she asked him, “Where were you?”

“None of your damn business,” was all he said, and he felt that his cheeks were wet with tears and then he remembered that he’d been crying and moaning, over and over again, “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back …”

She asked him, “Where? Where don’t you want to go back to, Charlie?”

“I told you it was none of your damn business,” he said, and slapped her across her pretty little Betty Boop mouth. When she came back in from the kitchen she had ice in a towel pressed against her lower lip and there was a little streak of blood on her chin and she said, “You ever hit me again, I’ll call the SPs and turn you in.”

But she didn’t throw him out.

She knew he had no place to go, no money, and would probably get picked up by Shore Patrol. So she pressed the ice to her lips and let him stay, but nothing was ever as good between them after that and he knows that he broke something between them that he can’t fix.

Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.

“What?” he asks, even though he knows.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Eat my breakfast,” he answers.

“And then what?”

He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to be hot—the summer sun is already pounding the concrete outside—and she should just let things slide so they can go down to the beach and enjoy the breeze and the water, maybe walk down to the end of the pier.

But she won’t let it go. She sits down, folds her forearms on the table, and says, “You have to go, Charlie.”

He gets up from the table, goes back into the bedroom, and finds last night’s bottle. Then he returns to the kitchen, pours some of the cheap whiskey into his coffee, sits down, and starts to drink.

“Oh, that will help,” she says. “You showing up drunk.”

Charlie doesn’t want to listen to her yapping. He wants to get drunk even though he knows that no amount of booze can wash away the truth that no man can stand to know about himself.

That he’s afraid to go back.

Since that moment the Jap planes came crashing onto the deck, spewing fuel and flame, and he saw his buddies become running torches and smelled them burning and he can’t never get that smell out of his nose. Can’t get it out of his head, either, because it comes in his sleep and he wakes up shaking and crying and moaning that he doesn’t want to go back, please don’t make him go back.

Charlie knows what they say about him, that he’s no good, that he’s a hard case, but he knows he ain’t hard. Maybe he used to be, though now he knows he’s as broken as the spine of the ship.

But the ship is repaired now and will be steaming out across the Pacific, this time to the Japanese home islands, and if they think Okinawa was bad, that was nothing compared to what it’s going to be.

It ain’t the thought of the brig and it ain’t even the thought of losing her, because the truth is he’s already lost her. He can take the brig and he can take losing her, but he can’t take going back.

Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.

Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.

“You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.

He stares into his cup and takes another drink.

“If you go back today it will be all right.”

He shakes his head.

Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts