HANK FAYETTE RETURNED TO Beaumont after the war, with an honorable discharge and a Japanese flag. People were pretending the war had been only a long interruption, that nothing had changed. Like almost everyone, Hank threw himself into the traditional life—he married Mary Ellen Johnston.
Their marriage was annulled three months later when both admitted they had changed. Mary Ellen moved back to Port Sabine, where she had done wartime work as a secretary at a shipyard. Her father found Hank a job as a carpenter. Hank’s own parents were long dead and there was no reason for him to stay in Beaumont. But he stayed. He worked with a construction crew building tract homes in the worn-out farmland out toward the Sabine River refineries. He could have bought himself a home, using GI Bill money, but he preferred his rooms over the drugstore on Main Street, around the block from the bus depot. For a long time there wasn’t much to his life except work and late night walks through the dead town. He sometimes walked through the colored section of town, where chickens roosted in trees in people’s front yards and slow talking, stand-offish boys behind the cinderblock store tried to sell him reefers or race records. They couldn’t imagine why else a white man wanted to talk to them. Hank wasn’t sure himself.
He joined the Beaumont Baptist Church, sitting every Sunday in the row of folding chairs behind the pews, where the men without families sat. There he met Forrest, who lived outside of town with his mother. Forrest introduced Hank to his special circle of friends, men who came from as far away as Lake Charles to the parties Forrest threw in the rec room in his basement. Everyone was very Southern and polite, until Forrest’s mother went to bed.
There were no orgies, only talk, but an orgy of indiscreet conversation. The dozen or so men were very romantic, very nervous. Hank was paired with Forrest for a time, then, one by one, with others. Farmer or teacher, married or bachelor, handsome or plain, it seemed to make no difference to Hank. The others didn’t know what to make of him. He was a man with whom you could be seen in public without fear of anybody talking. He was strong, masculine, reserved. In bed he was somebody else entirely—loud and hellacious, violently affectionate. Forrest and his friends prided themselves on their double lives, but Hank Fayette seemed downright schizophrenic. And it was no good falling in love with him. He loved back much too easily, almost insincerely. When someone ended it with him, frightened by his wildness in bed or worn out by his silences, he never made a scene the way the others did when they changed partners. He accepted it with a nod and looked relieved.
Over the months and years, they romantically passed Hank around without really making him one of them. They grew accustomed to his peculiarities. Forrest often brought out his 16mm projector and showed the muscle movies he ordered through the mail; nothing dirty, just crewcutted bodybuilders posing for each other in G-strings or gladiator costumes. The dirty stuff came in the form of comments from the viewers. Hank always left the room when the projector was turned on. He said he just didn’t like movies. They found that strange, considering what Hank did in bed. They also learned not to say anything against Jews or niggers in his presence. He went nuts, called you faggot, said faggots were the niggers of the world and that putting down the coloreds didn’t make you white. He spoiled more than one party with his ranting. And yet, they continued to invite him back, even after everyone had been in and out of love with him. “There’s one in every crowd,” they said. Hank continued to see them. They were the only game in town and he had a creeping fondness for their romance, jokes and lies.
In the other world, Hank was known as a good citizen, serious and sober, a member of his church and the volunteer fire department. It was too bad about his marriage. The contractor Hank worked for made him foreman. There was a high school kid on his crew that summer, a wiry seventeen-year-old with curly black hair and a mouth, forever razzing and teasing the foreman. Hank took a liking to the boy and invited him back to his rooms one night for a beer. Once there, Hank found himself unable to do anything except show the boy the silk flag from Japan and ask what he wanted to be when he grew up. Hank did not know how to cross over from one life to the other. The summer ended and the boy returned to school.
All too quickly, the past became past. When Hank’s boss and others talked about the war now, they talked about it as a guilty pleasure, a time of adventure and horseplay that would have been better spent making money and starting families. Forrest’s friends, most of whom had been in the service, talked about that time as a golden age, days in a world of available men when there were more choices than the dozen overly familiar faces in this basement rec room. Hank never talked about his war.
Not until February 1953 did Hank hear from Erich Zeitlin.
There was a telephone call one Saturday from a man who said he knew Hank in New York City during the war. Erich. He was in Galveston on business and wanted to know if he could drive up to Beaumont that afternoon and have a drink with Hank. Hank said sure. Only after he hung up did Hank feel excited by the prospect, then frightened by it. Here was a man who had helped Hank kill someone, then saved Hank for the life he was now living. What do you say to such a man?
A few hours later, a man with Erich’s face sat on the faded roses of the sofa’s worn upholstery, a glass of Hank’s bourbon in his hand. He kept on his heavy tweed overcoat. The bald spot in his hair was still pink from the cold outside. Hank felt very old just looking at him. His own hairline had receded an inch or two up his brow and the flesh under Hank’s jaw had thickened, suggesting a bandage wrapped around his head for a toothache. He was often teased at Forrest’s for looking like he suffered a toothache.
After the initial greeting and pouring of drinks, he and Erich sat for the longest time without a word, studying each other.
“Well,” said Erich. “We both survived after all.” He spoke like a Yankee now, not an Englishman, and was trying to sound cheerful. The pinch to his eyes showed he was as uncomfortable as Hank.
“What they did to your people over there,” said Hank, wanting to say something real. “Was any of your family caught in that?”
Erich was startled by the question. He stopped trying to look cheerful. He said his family had been very lucky. His immediate family were all out by the time it started. There had been an aunt and uncle they were worried about, but the pair turned up in Santo Domingo. “Still I’m sure many distant cousins, forgotten schoolmates, even personal enemies…” His voice trailed off and he sighed. “It does shed a different light on things.”
Hank sadly nodded, wondering if he meant Juke’s death, the spy’s murder or something else entirely.
“They did the same thing to homosexuals, you know.”
“I didn’t know. It don’t surprise me.”
“Homosexuals, socialists, gypsies.” Erich shook his head. He glanced around at the walls without pictures, shelves without books. “You still a…bachelor?”
“Uh huh.”
“It must be difficult for you now. A small town like this.”
“I get by. Got some friends. But no, it’s not as simple as it used to be. What about you? Did you ever get married?”
Erich had. He was happily married, with a Jewish wife and a three-year-old son. He lived in Connecticut and worked in New York for a Dutch-American shipping line that shunted sulfur and phosphate up and down the coast and across the Atlantic. He sounded more sheepish the more he described his life. “We do a good bit of business through Galveston, Hank. Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve been down here.”
Hank understood what he meant. “No problem. We all got other things to think about these days.”
“No. I’ve thought about it every time I flew down here. And you were certainly easy enough to find in the phone book once I decided to look. I think I was just afraid of looking.”
“You were scared of what you’d find?”
Erich weighed the question, then shook his head. “Only that you might be dead. Or that they double-crossed us and had you put away after all. But those were only vague possibilities. What really frightened me was what you’d see.”
“You? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” Erich laughed. “Which is what’s wrong with me. I’m a fat little businessman with an intelligent wife and a beautiful child. And an accessory to murder charge in a safe deposit box somewhere, but you forget about that. Like the Bomb, you forget about it and become very smug and content about your life. I want to have more to show for what we did. For good or ill.”
He was as embarrassed over Hank seeing his life as Hank was having Erich see his. It was as though they were embarrassed over being alive.
“I don’t think about it much either,” Hank admitted. “Not being able to talk about it has something to do with it.” But he knew it was always at the back of his mind, behind certain thoughts, beneath the surface of the world. It was so easy to have a friend killed or to kill a man yourself that all human beings seemed very pitiable, touching and terrible.
“I do think about it,” Erich said. “Now and then. When I’m depressed. Sometimes I think of it as something awful. Other times, I actually think it was the one heroic act I was ever part of.”
“Wasn’t heroic. It was as mean and lousy as what that bastard did to Juke. The Bible’s full of shit there. Blood doesn’t wash away blood.”
Erich was silent for a moment. “Do you think much about Juke?”
“Not really. I dream about him. Which was awful at first, because I’d wake up and remember he was dead. But then I got to knowing he was dead while I dreamed him, and it was like he was still around, which is kind of nice. I’ll be sorry when I can’t dream him anymore.” Hank looked down and saw his glass was empty, then noticed Erich’s glass was empty too. “You want some more of this?”
“Thank you, no. I should be going shortly. I’m not a very good driver even when I’m sober.” Erich looked nervous and ashamed. They had not really shared the same experience ten years ago. For Erich it had been a killing, for Hank a death. “You don’t have a boyfriend or lover at the present?” Erich asked.
“No. It’s not a big concern for me right now.”
“But you’re happy here? Content at least?”
The conversation was failing and a lie would kill it for good. Hank said, “Y’know, there’s days I wish they’d gone and sent me to the bughouse. I hear people are real happy once they cut that cord or fusebox or whatever it is they dig at behind your eye. Dumb but happy. Like I once was.”
In a small, unnerved voice, Erich said, “You wish I’d stayed out of it?”
“Not that. No. I thank you for saving me. I do. That’s not what I meant.” He thanked Erich only in the course of telling him something else. “No. It’s just what I feel now and then, when I’m low.”
“Then you’re unhappy?”
Hank smiled. “Yes. But I’m right to be unhappy. I mean, look at me, Erich. I’m a sexual nigger in a lily-white world.” Hank burst out laughing. “Hell and damnation! I’d be a perfect fool to be happy right now!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s good to know you’re unhappy. It’s a special kind of smarts. I like being smart for a change.”
But Erich looked at him as if he were crazy. He said something about a Dr. Kinsey and how Hank might be happier in a bigger city, then said he really should be leaving.
Hank walked him down to his car, feeling better about himself than he had for a long time, without knowing why. Erich turned desperately cheerful again at the curb, as if he had accomplished nothing with his visit and the past was best forgotten. Hank asked him about his leg. The leg was fine. He remembered the wound only when his muscles cramped in the cold. He had remembered it that morning when he went for a walk along the seawall after breakfast.
They shook hands beside the stout car’s open door and exchanged niceties about seeing each other again. Only when Hank stood alone in the cold in his flannel shirtsleeves and watched Erich drive away on the wide, treeless street did he think of embracing Erich, despite the teenagers in the drugstore, despite the man who died between them the last time they embraced.
That night Hank dreamed about Juke again.
Hank was in an enormous dark movie theater, trying to find his way out. He opened the wrong door and found himself in the movie.
There was a bright orange floor and a forest of glittering blue curtains. He saw the theater from the screen, thousands of faces looking at him. He could not get out. A hundred sailors in dress whites marched back and forth up here. Hank was in his whites, so he joined the sailors, tried to march and sing and look like he belonged with them.
There was a bugle call and, suddenly, a staircase of red and white steps ran from the floor to the blue curtains. The hundred sailors all faced the stairs and saluted. The curtains parted at the top of the stairs. Out stepped a beautiful Negro girl in a long white gown, clouds of white feathers rolling behind her like a vapor trail. She slowly descended the stairs. She stopped, smirked and tossed her long black hair to the sailors below. It was Juke.
Hank was on the stairs beside Juke, in the spotlight where everyone could see them. Hank didn’t care. He was so happy to see Juke again.
“How do we get out of here?” he asked Juke.
“Shut up, darling. This is my big number.” And he sang, or rather there was a feeling of song, without music or lyrics, very sad and beautiful. Juke smiled, luxuriating in the sadness.
The song made Hank feel funny. He looked at himself and saw he was naked from the waist down. That seemed worse than being completely naked. He tried pulling the sailor blouse off, but it was part of him now, like his skin.
He and Juke grew taller, thicker. They towered over the people in the theater as the song came to its end, their faces as big as houses. Then Juke turned to Hank and said, not in a voice but with thoughts, the way people speak in dreams:
“You big bareassed fool. You ain’t in love with me. You just use me when you want to talk to yourself in drag. But you’re right about one thing. You’re smart to be unhappy with the world. Stay unhappy. Without feeling sorry for yourself and without getting yourself killed. Stay unhappy long enough and something will happen. Hold tight, darling. You ain’t alone. When you see your chance, grab it. And if you’re real lucky, one day you’ll have the same dreary miseries as any other cracker or shine with money.”
Juke stepped past Hank and down the stairs. Hank was swallowed by the cloud of feathers, completely naked now inside the billowing bath of tickles.
And he woke up, pleased by the dream and wondering how he could keep some of it for his conscious life.