her eye and splashes coffee all over her face and she screams and stands up. She wipes the coffee out of her eyes and feels the blood and then stares at him for a second and says, “You son of a bitch.”
Charlie doesn’t answer.
“Get out,” Millie says. “Get out.”
He doesn’t move except to grab the bottle, take a drink directly from it, and lean back into the chair.
Millie watches this and says, “Fine. I’ll get you out.”
She heads for the door.
That gets him out of the chair because now he remembers what she said she’d do if he hit her again, and he did hit her again, and Millie is the kind of girl who does what she says she’ll do, and he can’t let her go and call Shore Patrol.
Charlie grabs her by the neck, pulls her into his chest, and then wraps his arms around and lifts her up, and she wriggles and kicks as he carries her toward the bedroom because he thinks maybe it can end that way. But when drops her on the bed she spits in his face and claws at his eyes and says, “You’re real brave with a woman, huh, Charlie? Aren’t ya?”
He hauls off and pops her in the jaw just to shut her up, but she won’t shut up and he hits her again and again until she finally lays still.
“Now will you behave?” he asks her, but there’s blood all over the pillow and even on the wall and her neck is bent like the broken spine of a ship and he knows he can’t fix her.
She’s so small, what do they call it—petite.
Charlie staggers into the bathroom, pushes past the stockings that hang from cords, and washes his bloody hands under the tap. Then he goes back into the bedroom, where Millie is lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He puts on the loud Hawaiian shirt he bought at Pearl, the one Millie liked, and a pair of khaki pants, and then sits down next to her to put on his shoes.
He thinks he should say something to her but he doesn’t know what to say, so he just gets up, goes back into the kitchen, finds the bottle, and drains it in one long swallow. His hands shake as he lights a cigarette, but he does get it lit, takes a long drag, and heads out the door.
The sun is blinding, the concrete hot on his feet.
Charlie doesn’t really know where to go, so he just keeps walking until he finds himself at the beach. He walks along the boardwalk, which is crowded with people, mostly sailors and their girls out for a stroll. He pushes his way through and then goes down the steps to the sand and under the pier where him and her held each other and danced to the radio.
Maybe it’s the same radio playing now as he stands there listening to the music and looks out at the ocean and tries to figure out what to do next. They’ll be looking for him soon, they’ll know it was him, and if they catch him he’ll spend the rest of his life in the brig, if they don’t hang him.
Now he wishes he had just gone back like she told him to.
But it’s too late.
He stares at the water, tells himself he should run, but there’s nowhere to run to, anyway, and the music is nice and he thinks about that night and knows he should never have left the beach.
Then the music stops and a voice comes on and the voice is talking like he’s real excited, like the radio did that day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.
Charlie turns around to look up at the boardwalk and all the people are just standing there, standing stock-still like they’re photographs or statues. Then suddenly they all start to move, and whoop and yell, and hug each other and kiss and dance and laugh.
Charlie walks to the edge of the boardwalk.
“What’s going on?” he asks this sailor who has his arm around a girl. “What’s going on?”
“Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.
And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.
Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.
He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.
Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.
Charlie’s no good.
Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.
DON’T FEED THE BUMS
BY LISA BRACKMANN
The stickers were all over the place. On the bumpers of cars. On store windows. Kari had even seen one on a surfboard stuck into the sand by the pier.
