I laughed too. “I see what you mean.”
But Turner wasn’t laughing. “You see, I don’t like people to laugh. Because sailors aint funny. Sailors are the saddest, most fucked-up, most lonely-ass people on God’s pore lonesome fuckin earth.”
He look a longer swig this time, swallowing it slowly.
“So I travel in civvies,” he said. “Wherever I end up stationed, I get me a locker club first thing, and when I go ashore, I change into civvies. I don’t want anyone laughin at me.”
Neither did I. I liked Turner for that and I wished he was going all the way to Ellyson Field with me. I’d have someone to talk to, to show me the ropes. He was an ordnance man, first class, going to Mainside to show young pilots what guns looked like. He was happy about the billet too. It could’ve been Shit City. Norfolk. Or it could’ve been another aircraft carrier and he hated aircraft carriers. There’s four ways of doing things in this man’s Navy, Turner said: The easy way, the hard way, the Navy way, and the Midway. The Midway was his last aircraft carrier.
He was quiet for a while and then he asked me if I had a girl. I said no, and he looked at my face and saw something there, I guess, and said, “That bad, huh?” I told him that the truth was I got a Dear John letter while I was in Bainbridge and he passed me the bottle and I sipped and my stomach burned and I was very hungry and he said, well, it was better to get a Dear John early than late and I shouldn’t feel so damned bad because everybody gets one, sooner or later, every sailor gets one, and he took a sip and so did I, and he told me he had gotten five Dear Johns in his life and three of them were from wives. I said that was terrible and he said Nah, wasn’t so terrible, they were right, probably, I was no bargain, no sailor is. But I loved them all. Right up to the minute it was over. Tell me about them, I said. And he did.
Chapter
3
Judy, she was the first, sixteen and red-haired and saucy and hot. Damn she was hot. Rub that gal’s elbow and she’d come. Hot, brother. I married her in 1938 in San Diego, just before they shipped me to the Far East. She was from Shreveport, down Luziana way, staying in Dago with her sister, who was married to a bosuns mate. The bosuns mate was out at sea and I met Judy in a sailor joint with her sister and we went home together, the three of us, and we woke up together too. But Judy was mine from the gitgo and I had some leave for a week and we got married. I was on a cruiser passing Guam when I got a letter saying she was knocked up and I should start picking out baby names. I shoulda known better, I guess. Because she tole me she was too damn lonely there in San Diego and she wanted to go home to this little place near Shreveport where her folks sharecropped, go home there and have the baby there, and I wrote back, Sure, okay, that sounds fine. Well, that Pacific tour was eighteen months. This was before the war and we just went all over the damned place, and when I got home and took the bus from Dago to Shreveport, the little boy was crawlin and Judy was sleepin with the sheriff. Everybody knew it too. They knew it in the town. Her folks knew it. And when I went into that little shitass town, six miles from Shreveport, everybody looked at me, like theyuz wonderin what I was gonna do, and they had this look on the face, pity, hell, tell it true, contempt. And when I went to Judy with what I saw, with what I felt from everybody, when I said Hey, woman what is this shit? She looked at me and turned her back and said, I want the sheriff. I want him, she said, not no long-gone forty-dollar-a-month sailor boy. She wanted the damned sheriff and the damned sheriff wanted her, and if I didn’t like it why didden I go down there to the courthouse and tell the sheriff what was on my mind? So I drove around all night in her Pa’s car, with a shotgun in my lap and drinkin white lightnin. And I stopped in some honky-tonks and listened to the damned jukebox. And I watched the goddamned courthouse. All the time thinkin, I’ll just drive over to that whorehouse halfway to Shreveport and get me a piece of ass and then I’ll go shoot the goddamned sheriff. And that’s what I started in doing. But after I got laid I went out to the car and fell asleep with the shotgun in my lap and when I woke up I left the car there and the shotgun and I hitchhiked into Shreveport and got me a bus and went all the way back to San Diego. I only heard from her one last time. She sent me a letter, saying, Here’s your copy of the dee-vorce, Sincerely, Judy. I always loved that word. Sin-cerely. Everytime I hear that goddamned word I think of Judy. She had the roundest sweetest ass in Shreveport, boy.
My second wife’s name was Ginger, and right off I shoulda known better. You fuck girls named Ginger. You don’t marry ’em. She was a hostess in a dancehall in Honolulu when I met her. A long-legged high-hipped woman in a flowered dress like they all wear out there, and small titties and a big ass and skin that glowed like gold. I think maybe there was a little Jap in her, the way she had them high goddamned cheekbones and small little titties, but if that was so, well, her ass sure wasn’t Jap. No sir. She tole me she was nineteen and I believed her and she sure looked great in that dim light in the hall with the smoke and everything and Glenn Miller playin and all of us sailors drinkin hard and the weather so damned hot that her dress with the flowers on it stuck to her ass like a tattoo. Oh I was in love, boy. Right there. Took me about nineteen minutes and I wanted that woman for the rest of my life. Later on, I learned she was really twenty-seven (I was twenty). Later on, I learned she’d been married once before and had two kids she never tole me about. Later on, I learned she had the goddamned clap, too — this while I was two months out at sea and married for three, and I knew this because she gave it to me. I had some dose, boy. I was dripping with it during the battle of Midway and after I talked to the medics in sick bay I went to the yeoman’s office and told him I wanted to stop sendin checks to dear wife Ginger and I filled out all the forms and sent her a letter with one damned sentence it. Dear Ginger, I said. I got yore clap, bitch. Sincerely. I put that in. Sincerely, and signed my name. The next time I was in Pearl was 1943 and she was workin in a whorehouse and I had her blow me for three dollars before talkin about the de-vorce. A real sincere woman, Ginger.
There was a lot of other women too. Yeah. Young girls and old girls, and colored and Chink. But the third wife was the one. I thought she’d make the whole damn thing come together. Her name was Susan and I met her in San Francisco after the war. Small dark-haired girl who worked in a bank and lived alone and wore glasses cause she was nearsighted. Lived in this small house on Mission Street. She didn’t want to have nothin to do with me, me bein a goddamned sailor. She just give me the brush. Right off. When I went into the bank to get change for a twenty-dollar bill. I aint no Errol Flynn but I had my share and so when she gave me the brush naturally I wanted her so bad I hurt. So I stayed on her, every day, sometimes twice a day, while the ship was in drydock, and I plain wore her down. I married her, I guess, just to prove to her I was serious, not some horny damned swabbie. Why not? Hell, she didn’t have no sheriff, she didn’t have the clap. So I tried one las’ time to live the life of a married man.