“What’s that?” Jesse asked.
“The Tang dynasty? Before the Ming,” Sally explained.
“The Ming dynasty,” Buddwing said, trying to be funny, “is the dynasty run by the Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon.”
“Who’s the Emperor Ming?” Tina asked.
“A very tall, bald-headed man in a robe, with a pencil-line drooping mustache. Ming. Haven’t you ever read Flash Gordon?”
“No,” Tina said.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“I read Flash Gordon,” Sally said, “and I resented the heavy being Chinese.”
“He wasn’t really Chinese,” Buddwing said.
“Well, he sure as hell looked Chinese. As a matter of fact, I had an uncle who looked just like Ming.”
“Did I hear somebody mention a drink a little while back?” Jesse asked.
“I thought you were the big tea man,” Sally said, smiling.
“I am the big B-Man,” Jesse said. “B for bourbon.”
Sally went into the kitchen, and Jesse knocked over the pile of colored pillows and settled himself on one of them. Buddwing and Tina sat on the couch. The incense was very strong in his nostrils now. It seemed to be emanating from somewhere behind the couch, but he could not locate the burner. Its aroma filled the room. He looked at the girl sitting beside him, the Japanese girl with her painted face and her incongruous garb. In the other room, the woman with the gold tooth was bustling about. The sun slanted through the shack’s one window, touching the glowing coals of the hibachi in the center of the room. Jesse was making himself comfortable on the floor. There was the sound of sandaled feet outside, the babble of Japanese calling to each other, the cries of a fruit peddler wending his way through the neighborhood. There was always a smell of fish and smoke, always; it hung over every Japanese city like something you could touch, a curious smell that was October even when it was May. It came through the open window now, and mingled with the fainter aroma of the incense. A potato was baking on the hibachi. The woman came back from the other room and smiled, the gold tooth flashing in her mouth, and that was the beginning of it.
Sally and Jesse both drank bourbon with a little water, please, while Buddwing and Tina drank Scotch neat on the rocks, and it was along about the third drink that Buddwing realized they were roaring down the pike toward a monumental drunk. The drunk started in the apartment off that side street with bourbon and Scotch, and with music on the record player, and with Sally suddenly getting up and beginning to do a dance alone as if there were nobody else in the room. Tina kept giggling all the while Sally danced, and Buddwing slipped his hand up under her skirt, and she squeezed it between her thighs and then he had another drink while Jesse applauded for Sally, and then they all had another drink — Tina was on his lap now — and that was when Jesse took Sally in his arms and kissed her.
Buddwing was a little surprised when Jesse began kissing Sally because he knew that Jesse was madly in love with a Mexican girl who lived on the outskirts of San Antonio, and who had taught Jesse how to hypnotize people. Jesse was a devout believer in black magic, something everybody on the ship joked about, but nobody made fun of the way he could hypnotize people. They would all crowd into the sonar shack, which was maybe six feet by six feet, and Jesse would fix those blue eyes of his onto the middle of somebody’s forehead, and then just begin moving his forefinger back and forth. “Now, you jes keep a-watchin’ my finger,” his voice would say. “Now your eyes are gettin’ heavy, your lids is gettin’ heavy,” his voice would say. “You cain’t hardly keep ’em open,” his voice would say, and before you knew it, just like in the movies, the guy he was hypnotizing would shut his eyes and do whatever Jesse told him to do. He had Andy Grange jumping around on the deck and barking like a dog one time, and another time he hypnotized Mr. Carver at Mr. Carver’s own request, but then when he had him in a trance he was too chicken to give him any orders, Mr. Carver being the senior communications officer aboard, and not a man to go messing around with.
Jesse loved that Mexican girl with all his heart, and he never stopped talking about her to whoever would listen, which was practically everybody on the ship. His descriptions of her became more intimate each time, so that eventually the tiny sonar shack was crammed with listeners who hung breathlessly on his every word. He started by describing the texture of her coffee-colored skin, and her coal-black hair and eyes, and then he went on to describe each part of her anatomy in painful detail lacing his descriptions with wild tales of the voodoo stunts she had performed. He told them of the time she had bitten into the neck of a live chicken and smeared her naked breasts with blood and then kissed him with the blood still hot on her lips. He told them of the time she had summoned her dead sister from the grave, and of the time he had laid her in the back room of a funeral parlor. He told them of just about everything they had ever done together or planned to do together, sex and black magic mixed, chili sauce and incense, tortillas and smut. He left nothing to the limited imaginations of his shipmates, so that before long the fiery-eyed incantating wench in San Antonio became the girl who was waiting back home for every man on the ship.
And now here he was kissing Sally as if he had forgotten all about his Mexican girl back home, but Sally wasn’t having any of it, not right now she wasn’t. Sally, of the entire four, seemed to sense most clearly that a majestic drunk was being formed and started, and she had no desire to spoil it by hopping into bed with Jesse — not right now, at any rate. Sally had the good sense to know that sex was going to be a part of this free-swinging drunk, but that it had to be a controlled and time-biding sex that permeated the entire afternoon, and not something that would threaten or otherwise mar the shining surface of the high they were all building. Sally was a shrewd and experienced girl, and Buddwing knew immediately that they could not have been in surer hands than hers — hell, he had known that about her the moment they had met on the roof of the servicemen’s club. But even then — even knowing that Sally with her gold-toothed grin was the more experienced of the pair, was the one who would lead the fun and set the pace — he had been drawn to the quietly smiling, secretly amused Tina, mainly because she reminded him of a life he had left back home, a life he desperately missed.
The majestically building drunk was all a part of missing the life back home, of obliterating it, of blurring its edges so that it would not seem like the reality any more. Japan was certainly not the reality. The stupid sailor suit he wore was not the reality. The destroyer sitting in the harbor with its ensign flying on the fantail and its “Request permission to come aboard, sir” was not the reality, but it was all the life there was, and he suffered it with a dull patience because he knew that someday it would be over, someday he would go back home again and see L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest and all the others. No, he would never see Beethoven again because Beethoven had been caught in the underwater barbed wire when the marines invaded Tarawa, and he had been machine-gunned to death by the Japanese as he struggled to free himself. A letter from L.J. had told him what had happened to Beethoven on Tarawa, and he had wept silently in the dim radar-illuminated stillness of C.I.C. aboard the Fancher. There were friends aboard the Fancher, yes, but none of them could compare to the boys he had left at home. And so this drunk, all the drunks, all the stumbling, falling-down, staggering, whorehouse-hopping drunks from Norfolk to Pensacola to Guantánamo Bay to Colón (he had received L.J.’s letter in Panama; he had wept in the radar shack while a balmy tropical breeze sifted through the open bulkhead door) to San Diego to Pearl to Sasebo, and now in Yokohama, all these drunks were only an effort to recreate something real and meaningful in his life, only a meager and foolish attempt at substitution. The something real and meaningful had existed in those Harlem streets when his closest friend was a boy named Eric Michael Knowles whom he had taught to make a peach-pit ring, had existed in that cloistered tailorshop with the tall white-haired man who was his grandfather. He had found reality again in the Bronx after he had moved, found it in a tightly secure structure the nucleus of which was L.J., Beethoven, Red Vest, and himself. And then, somehow, the entire structure had weakened — had fifty dollars been enough? — and had collapsed in the confusion of World War II and the United States Navy. Now, with Tina, he tried to recapture something he had known a long time ago, perhaps the innocence of Doris, the shining innocence of those cycling afternoons, perhaps the serenity of a calm and uncluttered existence that held no responsibilites and no pressures. Now, with a whore he had picked up on the roof of the Yokohama Servicemen’s Club, he drank himself into a lulling stupor. This was not the reality, and he knew with grim certainty that the reality he had known would no longer be there when at last he returned to it. The whiskey was a hedge against recognition — the whiskey and the gently inquiring touches along the inside of Tina’s thigh, the secret promise in her eyes, lust and liquor fumed inside him, drowning all else; this was going to be the longest afternoon in his life. He knew he would be subtly changed before it ended; he knew that once he was discharged from the navy, he would return to a different landscape where he would pad as softly as a stranger — and he knew who would be waiting.