The Edge of Honor (51 page)

“I know, and I hate it.” That last had popped out without a lot of thought, and she had cringed when she heard his reply.

“Well, Maddy. Maybe I should have drawn a clearer picture when we got married.”

“Oh, Brian, let’s not fight. You’re way over there and I’m here. We can’t do anything about it, so let’s just grit it out. Which is why I think you ought not to fight the system on whatever it is about the ship that’s bugging you.”

“Well, like I said, I’m going to have to sort this one out by myself, I guess. I thought you’d—well, never mind. I’m getting some looks, taking up the phone. I love you, and I’ll write soon. Bye-bye.”

And he had gone, just like that. She had hung up the phone and lain back on the bed, sudden tears stinging her eyes, trying to recall her exact words, wondering how in the hell she had managed to say precisely the wrong thing on what was probably the one and only phone call she would get during the whole cruise. She drummed the mattress with her fists. It was so damned hard, with all their communications compressed into little scraps of paper that were weeks old when you got them, and a five minute phone call every three months. What the hell kind of marriage was this? And if he does real well, they’ll let him do it again. Maybe right away.

Wonderful. One of the other wives had even said that Hood might have to deploy again next year. Brian was assigned for two years.

She really didn’t think she could do this again.

But Brian had been trying to tell her something, something going wrong in the ship, some kind of mystery about people using drugs. This was news. His letters had mentioned that there was some kind of drug problem, but there had been no hint that Brian might be getting himself sideways with the captain and the exec. Most of his letters had been entirely routine, the mirror images of her own weekly reports on the home front. The captain’s wife had made a big deal about not filling her letters with the “poor me’s,” as she called it. Maybe the captain or that big commander, the executive officer, had made the same point to the officers—tell the home front everything’s just fine; that way, we don’t get the girls all upset.

God. Two sets of people, both desperately wanting to reach out and touch, to communicate, to be with one another, if only in letters and phone calls, and both playing by a set of rules that makes real communication almost impossible.

She turned the bedside light off and stared out the top half of the apartment windows at the late-fall overcast, illuminated by a city full of rose-colored streetlights. She could never get used to the way it looked like rain every morning, only to have that perpetual overcast burn off into a gloriously clear, sunny day. Every day. She was sick of perpetually beautiful weather. She missed the seasons, whether at home in Atlanta or in New England.

It had been such fun with Brian when they were approaching engagement and marriage. But since then, while in the Navy had settled into one long wait. She could understand why some of the other wives had opted early for children, if only to so fill their daily lives that missing Daddy was a pastime that could be confined to the long hours after midnight.

Or they found jobs, a career of their own, and maybe somebody else to share them with.

Which brought her to Autrey. Autrey the campaigner.

She could now well believe that he was a skilled stalker, patient in the woodscraft ways of a hunter. She didn’t feel threatened in any way—it wasn’t as if he were menacing her. But she felt like the white men in the Western movies who look around from time to time and see distant figures on the hills around them. Autrey was campaigning, in the sense that he was—how had he put it?—putting himself in the way of love and hoping. Quiet, persistent, projecting a lot of sex appeal without being a macho idiot about it, and making it very clear that he was attracted to her, that he wanted her. Nothing complicated, not marriage, not a love affair, not their life stories.

He just wanted her, desired her, a man wanting a woman and being strong enough, unafraid of rejection, to tell her so. She smiled. If men only knew what a powerful force that was, no marriage would ever be safe.

And every time she had broken it off, he had gone along with grace and a smile. And then he had appeared up on those hills again with the same grace and smile, the same focus and direct awareness of her, even when she did something outrageous like wearing the high school cheerleader outfit to Parker’s Place. All he had done was look and smile and then up the pressure a few notches by telling her he was shipping out. And then saying, with that insouciant grin, that the news was absolutely a ploy to win her heart. Three months ago, she could never have even speculated about an Autrey, and now she was living in two well-developed spheres of imagination, one in which she loved her husband, yearned for his return, and wondered about their future and a second where she sometimes yearned just to call Autrey on the phone and tell him to get over here. Call him on the phone? She didn’t even have his home phone number. She was tempted to turn on the light and look him up in the book. Under what—Crows? Catches Crows? She realized she knew nothing about him, not where he lived, not his phone number, not his domestic habits. Which is one of the reasons he is so attractive—you haven’t seen him on a Monday morning.

She was almost shocked to hear rain against the windows.

She listened hard. It never rains in Southern California, But how did that song go? It never rains in Southern California. It just pours. Oh yes, sometimes it just goddamn pours.

Brian followed Chief Martinez off the gray Navy shuttle bus in front of the main gates. It had been a hot and sweaty ride from the pier area out to the east side of the base. Brian had met the boatswain near the base telephone exchange, after his phone call home to Maddy. He had expected to feel good after calling home, but instead he was … well, disappointed. She had missed the whole point about his dilemma in Hood, about whether or not he should do the right thing. All she could talk about was how miserable she was, how lonely, and how depressed at the thought of more deployments to come. Of course there would be more deployments—that’s what the hell successful officers did, take their ships to sea. But underneath his professional indignance, he feared that his wife was beginning to orbit that question that hung like a dark star in the night sky of every Navy marriage. One day, you may have to choose: a married life with me or a career in the Navy. She hadn’t said it in so many words, but, listening to her tonight, she sure as hell was beginning to think it. Thank God I have a job. And I’m going to keep it. I hate the idea of more deployments. And I hate you for bringing them on our heads. No, no, she hadn’t said that at all. Bet she thought it, though. But there’s been nothing like this in her letters. Of course not, you don’t put that in a letter. So when do you talk about it? When you’re not deployed, dummy. He sighed, realizing that what he really needed was a sailor’s liberty.

He had the sudden urge to get drunk and howl at the moon. And from the looks of this crowd, he’d be just one more coyote.

Stepping off the bus, they were enveloped by a noisy crowd of American Navy men, sailors, chiefs, and officers, the officers wearing slacks and sport shirts; the enlisted, jeans and Tshirts, with even an occasional sport coat in view. The main gates at Subic reminded Brian of the starting chutes at a racetrack: There were actually a dozen gates opening through a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence stretched across one end of a broad bridge. Each gate was guarded by an armed Marine who checked the ID cards of the officers and chiefs, the ID and liberty cards for the other enlisted, and everybody’s overnight bag if he had one. It was fully dark at 2030, but the day’s heat had not yet broken.

Everyone perspired freely in the humid night air, especially the Marines in their fatigue uniforms. Both sides of the liberty gates were illuminated by spotlights mounted on top of the high fence. The spots actually appeared to sputter because of the clouds of insects swarming around the fixtures. The curfew hours, arranged by pay grade, were posted on signboards beside each gate.

The chief carried a small overnight bag, but Brian went empty-handed. He had no intentions of staying over in the town. Warned about thieves and pickpockets, he had left his wallet and rings on the ship, carrying only fifty dollars’ worth of pesos and his ID card. As they neared the sweating Marine checking cards and bags at their gate, Brian could see the edges of Olongapo across the bridge. The town was a blaze of colored neon lights that stretched down an unpaved main street teeming with people and wildly decorated vehicles, known locally as jeepneys. The street resembled a frontier town, false fronts emblazoned with neon signs giving way to ramshackle corrugated-iron roofs crouching in the darkness beyond.

Once through the gate, they walked toward the bridge, which spanned stinking mudflats and a canal that appeared to run completely around the town like a moat.

As they crossed the bridge, Brian glanced down into the canal to confirm what his nose was already telling him.

The chief began his instruction as they crossed over the bridge amid a happy throng of boisterous sailors.

“This here’s called the Shit River; yer nose’ll tell you why. It’s kind of a benjo ditch for the whole town. See them kids?”

Only then did Brian notice a collection of naked Fili pino urchins perched in the weeds under the bridge. The scrawny boys jumped up and down, yelling in their piping voices, trying to get the sailors’ attention. When they succeeded, some of the sailors would toss coins into the malodorous stew and the kids would dive in to retrieve them, creating a brown maelstrom of stagnant water, sewage, and bare legs kicking in the air as the boys probed the muck at the bottom for the coins.

“I can’t believe they jump into that,” Brian said.

“Yeah, but watch what happens when they git it.”

As the chief spoke, one child scrambled back onto the muddy banks, a shiny coin held high in his hand, while the sailors cheered. In the next instant, a teenaged boy stepped forward from the shadows under the bridge, cuffed the smaller boy on the side of the head, and took the coin. The boy complained in a gibber of Tagalog, but the teenager ignored him and melted back into the darkness to wait for the next success.

“Good deal, huh?” said the chief. “The little kids gotta pay the big kids so’s they git a spot near the bridge.

It’s a protection racket.”

Brian shook his head as they moved with the crowd across the bridge. The concrete pavement ended at the town side of the bridge, giving way to a hard-packed dirt street. As they stepped off onto the dirt, they were assaulted by a wave of Filipino hustlers, all trying to get them to go to this bar or that mamasan, to hire a jeepney for the night, or to meet virginal relatives. The noise was incredible. Brian took a moment to survey the jeepneys.

There were dozens of the brightly painted vehicles waiting at the bridge, each completely covered in flashing lights like mobile Christmas trees and playing at least one very loud radio station over external speakers. The jeepneys were further decorated hi chromium medallions, hubcaps, flags, banners, religious icons, and festooned with young boys and monkeys hanging from the sides or the roof or even from handles on the hood. Every driver kept one hand pounding on the horn to attract the attention of potential riders. When they had a full boat of sailors, they would roar off into the main street in a cloud of exhaust and cheering Filipinos.

“We’re walking’,” shouted the boatswain over the noise, pushing his way through the crowd, with Brian in close-column formation to take advantage of the chief’s broad wake. Several of the nearby Filipino promoters greeted the chief with shouts of

“Hey, Chief!” or

“Over here, Bosun Mate!” A couple of them eyed Brian and then shouted out, “Who’sa officer you got there, Bosun Mate? He cherry? First time Olongapo, okay? You come with me for good time, Charlie!”

“These guys know who you are?” shouted Brian over the din.

“Nan. They jist know I’m a CPO and a bosun mate.”

“How the hell they know that? How the hell they know I’m an officer?”

“They jist do. These little fuckers know everything.

Besides, you look like an officer.”

Brian recalled the chief’s instructions on the way out to the main gate about officer bars and white-hat bars.

“The Flips,” the chief had said, “they know the difference.

They can spot an officer a mile away, jist like they can tell when a white hat walks inna officer bar.”

“There’s separate bars for officers and enlisted?”

“Hell yes. Everythin’s organized out there. Officers kin go to officer bars or enlisted bars, but white hats’ll git throwed out, they go inna officer bar. Chiefs, they go to either one, seein’s they’re khaki but usta be white hats.

Girl works inna officer bar, she’ll turn her nose up at any girl works a white-hat bar. And the mamasan, that’s the woman who runs the bar, she won’t let no white-hat bar girl in her officer bar.”

“Sounds complicated. How do I know which bar is which?”

“They’ll let ya know, and ‘sides, once you been out there a coupla times, you kin tell. Officer bars are quieter, usually, unless there’s a carrier in port. Them fuckin’ aviators are all crazy bastards. The officer bar girls got better English and are better-lookin’. And cost more, of course.”

“Of course. I suppose they figure the officers have more money.”

The chief had laughed. “Naw, they know the officers got more money, but they also know it’s the white hats that’ll spend it. And what them broads’re interested in is the spendin’ bit. Best I can tell, the officer-bar deal is jist a way of makin’ the officers feel easier ‘bout getting’ fucked up without the troops seem’ ‘em.”

“In other words, same fleece job, only a little more genteel.”

“Yeah, sorta. But it all beats a midwatch.”

After clearing the bridge, the chief pointed toward the left side of the main street, which stretched into the night for about a half mile in front of them. The street was lined on either side with bars, restaurants, hotels, souvenir stores, dance halls, and more bars. The main drag, unpaved, hardpan dirt, was filled with sailors, bar girls, young Filipino men, jeepneys, pushcarts, and the occasional dazed water buffalo. The sidewalks were raised wooden plank walks, with each establishment having a different height of plank walk in front of it.