People tried to tell Millie this, but she wouldn’t listen. Her roommates saw it clear as day. One good look in Charlie’s eyes, that cocky smirk of his, and you knew. They told her but it went through one ear and out the other. Now she opens her eyes, looks at the clock on her bed table, and slaps him on the butt. “Charlie, get up.”
“What?” he mumbles, happy in his sweet, warm sleep. They sat up and drank when she came home from her night shift at Consolidated, and then they did it and then drank some more, so he don’t want to get up.
She shakes his shoulders. “It’s thirty days.”
Millie knows the navy—up to thirty days it’s AWOL, after thirty it’s desertion. He’s been shacked up with her for almost a month now. Almost a month in the little bungalow that was already crowded with four other girls, and he said he was going back before the thirty days were up.
But now he mumbles, “To hell with that.” And closes his eyes.
“You’re going to get in big trouble,” Millie says. AWOL, he would get a captain’s mast, but probably no time in the brig because he’s set to ship out soon anyway. But for desertion he’s going to get a court-martial, maybe years in the brig, and then a DD.
“Charlie, get up.”
He rolls over, kisses her, and then shows her what trouble is. That’s the thing—she knows he’s bad news but he’s just so damn handsome and so good in the sack. She knew from the moment they met at Eddie’s Bar that she couldn’t keep her legs shut with Charlie.
Charlie makes her see fireworks.
Charlie rolls off her, reaches for the green pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, finds his Zippo, and lights one up.
“Go fix us some breakfast,” he says.
“What do you want?”
“Eggs?”
“Try buying eggs, Charlie.”
“We got any coffee left?”
“A little.”
Like everything else, it’s rationed. Coffee, sugar, meat, cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline of course. The girls swap ration coupons but there’s only so much and she doesn’t like it when Charlie deals in the black market. She tells him it’s unpatriotic.
Charlie doesn’t give a damn. He figures he’s done his patriotic duty all over the Pacific, most recently on a tin can in the cordon line off Okinawa, and he deserves a little coffee and sugar.
The first cigarette of the day is always the best.
Charlie sucks the smoke into his lungs and holds it before letting it out his nose. It makes him feel good, relaxed, at ease with the decision he has to make.
“Then after breakfast you’ll go back,” Millie is saying.
“I thought you loved me,” Charlie says, flashing his smile. He’s proud of the smile—his teeth are white and even.
“I do.” She does love him, despite everything. That’s why she doesn’t want to see him get into a really bad jam. He’s always going to get in a little trouble, Millie knows, that’s part of what she loves about him.
“Then why do you want me to go?” Charlie teases. “You know we’re shipping out.”
“I know.”
“Will you wait for me?” he asks.
“Of course I will.”
He knows she won’t. Millie needs it, like most women. The story is that men need it and women just put up with it, but Charlie knows better. Maybe not virgins, maybe they don’t, but once a woman’s had it, she wants it again. And Millie wants it. Takes a couple of drinks to loosen her up enough to admit it, but after that, hell, look out.
If he ships out she’ll be with another guy by the time he gets back. He knows this for a fact because she was cheating on some poor jerk when she went to bed with him. Anyway, Charlie knows she won’t wait and tells himself that’s why he’s not going back. She’ll find another guy to sleep with, another guy’s back to scratch with her nails, another guy to tell that he makes her helpless to stop him.
That’s what he tells himself most of the time, and when that story doesn’t sell—usually in those cold gray hours of the early morning when he’s so drunk he’s almost sober—he tells himself a different story—that he doesn’t want to go back to the brig.
Charlie has felt an SP’s baton in the kidneys, along with the metallic taste of his own blood when they decided it was more fun to bust up his face, and he don’t want any more of it. They do whatever they want to do to you in the brig, and then hose it down like that washes it all away. Thirty days AWOL, the captain might send him to the brig and it’s not a chance he wants to take.
That’s what Charlie tells himself, anyway.
Now he watches Millie walk into the kitchen and likes the way she looks in the little white silk robe he bought her.
Millie’s a looker, all right.
That Saturday night he had liberty and headed down to Eddie’s because he heard that’s where the factory girls go. The ship had just limped back for repairs so they had a lot of free time, and after what they’d been through they were all ready to for it too. The scuttlebutt was that Eddie’s was the place to go, so he skipped the usual dives in the Gaslamp and headed to Pacific Beach. The joint was crowded with sailors and Marines all after the same thing, but he saw her and gave her that smile and she smiled back.
Charlie went up to her and talked and then she let him buy her a drink and then another and they talked and he asked her a lot of questions about herself and found out she came out from a little town in North Dakota because she’d always wanted to see the ocean and she wanted an adventure.
“I heard there were jobs for women in San Diego,” she said. “So I got on a train and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Charlie smiled.
“In Pacific Beach, California,” she said.
“Do you like it?”
She nodded. “I like the money and it’s fun living with the other girls most of the time.”
They talked some more and then he asked if they could get out of there and she said okay but where did he want to go?
“Can’t we just go to your place?” he asked. “You said you have a place.”
“I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to go right away. A girl likes a little romance, you know.”
Oh, hell, he knew. He was just hoping this one girl didn’t. But if she didn’t, she’d be the first ever. At least of the ones you didn’t pay. The whores, they didn’t want romance, they just wanted you to get your business over with as soon as possible so they could get on with theirs. It was like eating on a ship—hurry up and finish because there’s a sailor waiting for your chair.
But Millie, she looked at him with those dark blue eyes and he decided that a walk along the beach would be just the thing. You expected blue eyes with a blond girl, but Millie’s hair was jet black, and cut short, and she had these cute lips that made you think of Betty Boop. When he walked close to her she smelled like vanilla, because, she told him, perfume was hard to get.
But the vanilla smelled good behind her ear, in her hair. She was small, what did she call it—petite—and fit nice under his arm as they walked on the sand under the pier. A radio was playing somewhere and they stood and danced under the pier and he held her tight.
“You feel nice,” he said, because it was all he could think of to say and because it was true too.
“So do you,” she responded.
Now he remembers how nice she smelled and how good she felt under his arm and how life was the way he always hoped it would be. There were no flames that night, no acrid smoke that burned his nose, no screams that seared his brain, and the waves touched the beach like kisses, and if he told the truth he would have stayed there forever with her on Pacific Beach and not even taken her back to her place and her bed.