San Diego Noir

Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.

“What?” he asks, even though he knows.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Eat my breakfast,” he answers.

“And then what?”

He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to be hot—the summer sun is already pounding the concrete outside—and she should just let things slide so they can go down to the beach and enjoy the breeze and the water, maybe walk down to the end of the pier.

But she won’t let it go. She sits down, folds her forearms on the table, and says, “You have to go, Charlie.”

He gets up from the table, goes back into the bedroom, and finds last night’s bottle. Then he returns to the kitchen, pours some of the cheap whiskey into his coffee, sits down, and starts to drink.

“Oh, that will help,” she says. “You showing up drunk.”

Charlie doesn’t want to listen to her yapping. He wants to get drunk even though he knows that no amount of booze can wash away the truth that no man can stand to know about himself.

That he’s afraid to go back.

Since that moment the Jap planes came crashing onto the deck, spewing fuel and flame, and he saw his buddies become running torches and smelled them burning and he can’t never get that smell out of his nose. Can’t get it out of his head, either, because it comes in his sleep and he wakes up shaking and crying and moaning that he doesn’t want to go back, please don’t make him go back.

Charlie knows what they say about him, that he’s no good, that he’s a hard case, but he knows he ain’t hard. Maybe he used to be, though now he knows he’s as broken as the spine of the ship.

But the ship is repaired now and will be steaming out across the Pacific, this time to the Japanese home islands, and if they think Okinawa was bad, that was nothing compared to what it’s going to be.

It ain’t the thought of the brig and it ain’t even the thought of losing her, because the truth is he’s already lost her. He can take the brig and he can take losing her, but he can’t take going back.

Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.

Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.

“You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.

He stares into his cup and takes another drink.

“If you go back today it will be all right.”

He shakes his head.

Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts 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.