"Penina's Letters"

 

By Joe Linker

Hawthorne Fellow 2012

 

 

Joe Linker lives in Portland and blogs at "The Coming of the Toads."

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Chapter One: Penina Seablouse

The war fizzled out, and a deafening silence filled my ears. I lick-spittled through my last details, policing cigarette butts and cleaning latrines, suddenly finding myself a short-timer who might get to see Penina again. When General Sherman said war is hell, he knew what he was talking about; his march to the sea was not a surf trip, but hell is an idea hard to explain, and most wars are actually a kind of purgatory, a fictitious place, but where nobody gets clean, a long interlude between waves. But none of that matters here, for this isn’t going to be about the war. I have no gory stories to tell, nothing depicting war as hell. Hell is an ocean with no waves. This is going to be about surfing and how I paddled out to live on the water after throwing Penina’s letters off the end of the pier.

I landed in Los Angeles in my fatigues and hugged and kissed the pure and sweet Penina Seablouse, waiting at the gate, patiently holding the kiss and the pose should any passing photojournalist want to update the iconic photo of the sailor kissing his nurse in Times Square at the end of World War II. But the physics of going to war and winning or losing a war seemed more uncertain than ever, and we waltzed down the Los Angeles airport terminal unnoticed, uncelebrated, and unphotographed, Penina, my duffle bag, and me. 

Outside, the Santa Ana winds whisked up the awful Los Angeles exhaust, and I tasted the heated air, a mixture of gas and asphalt and salt, and I liked the taste, and I loved the smell. I pulled Penina close for another long hug, still no cameras shuttering. We were not an uncommon couple. I had survived a war, and she had survived waiting. Whatever wounds she had yet to show me, her hair still smelled like baseball card bubblegum. She pretended to help me walk to the truck, where I stowed my duffle bag in the bed, and then Penina drove us out of the airport, through the tunnel, and down to the ocean.

“The plane flew over the water and the beach coming in,” I yelled, as if the pickup truck was a deuce and a half.

“We turned the Santa Anas on for your homecoming,” Penina shouted back.

“Yeah, a little unusual for this time of year.”

“Why are we yelling?” she asked, smiling.

“I saw the Airport Authority has bulldozed the folks’ old house. Looks like they’ve wiped out the neighborhood.”

“We can’t park and smooch there anymore,” Penina laughed.

“All the empty lots surrounded by chain link fence. Be a good spot to set up a beach anti-assault force.”

“It’s okay, soldier. You can relax now,” Penina said.

Penina was living in El Porto and still driving my 1949 Ford truck. She had pasted a little blue and white peace-symbol decal to the rear window, and she called the Ford her Peace Truck. After the tunnel, Penina turned west onto Imperial, and I felt a Santa Ana gust shake the truck. I was thinking I might rebuild the engine and keep the truck in good running condition. My discharge pay would last some time if I could live with Penina, and I planned to shape boards at Puck Malone’s surfboard shop, and Henry Killknot had solicited me to attach to his local Guard unit as a special correspondent, and though it was a freelance idea, I was hoping I might land some articles. Plus I had the money the folks left me, though Dad had sagely set up the trust like an IV with a slow drip. My father, who had survived two wars to become a successful architect and land developer, had never given me much advice, but he once told me what we value is simply what we want, but what we want is not always what is good for us. Values are not synonymous with virtues.

“Will there be a soldier’s home parade?” I said.

Penina said something I did not catch.

“What?”

I had mentioned in a few letters to Penina what I called my sound effects, but it would take time for her to get used to the eerie peculiarity of my hearing dynamics. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear, but I had noise in my head.

“I don’t want to see any of the guys just yet,” she said.

“That’s good,” I shrugged. “The sooner I get down to the water the better,” I said. “I don’t need to see anyone.”

“Oh, don’t start pouting,” Penina laughed, reaching over and punching my leg. “Puck and Henry and the guys have planned a surprise for you up at the shop. Try and act surprised.”

“I am surprised. I’m surprised to even just be here. And you are my surprise,” I said, and Penina combed a hand through her hair, glancing in the rear view mirror.

At the end of Imperial we turned south onto Vista del Mar for the drive up into El Porto. To our right, flattened by the winds, hunkered an ebbing Santa Monica Bay. Two red and black oil freighters were anchored off shore, one deep in the water, the other high, and three blue and white yachts looked like they were scurrying back to Marina del Rey. Above the horizon the setting sun spread orange spears through the tar slick winds, and the sky above with the water below looked like a Rothko painting. The Santa Ana winds had been blowing for a couple of days, and all the silt from the basin bowl had blown out over the water. It was Easter Sunday, and I thought I picked out the moon waning pale, high up, out over the water, but the Santa Ana winds were blowing, and I was probably seeing things. But close in we could see the beaches were swept clean and empty, the waves were flat, and no surfers were out in the water. The wind was now to port, blowing tumbleweeds across Vista del Mar, and Penina had to concentrate to keep control of the truck.

“The truck’s handling just fine,” I yelled.

“You can stop yelling,” Penina said. “The war is over,” she said.

 

Penina was trying to finish school and was a part time teacher’s aide but still also waiting tables and tending bar at Blubber’s down on the Strand and living in a room above a garage on an alley in El Porto. The garage was attached to an old beach house that belonged to Puck Malone. Malone was a capable surfer, a waterman, and an entrepreneur. He had opened a surfboard shop in El Porto, and his boards were popular. The shop was housed in another old beach house, a gathering place for locals and surfers on surf trips looking for a crash pad. We pulled into Penina’s place and climbed the outside stairs up to the deck so I could stash my duffle bag.

The wind was blowing down the streets of El Porto and out over the beach, but the deck faced west and was somewhat protected. Penina had set up a table and a couple of beach chairs out on the deck. Against the wall was an old couch with torn arms. Beachcomber shell-and-driftwood mobiles rattled against the railing. In one corner was a pile of empty beer bottles and a couple of big candles burned halfway down. On the wall hung a rusted and weathered steel and wood tool of some sort.

“What in the world is that?” I asked.

“That’s my harpoon,” Penina said.

“Thinking of going whaling?”

“Not in the water.”

“You find this on the beach?”

“Storm surf washed it in.”

“It’s a log roller,” I said, taking a closer look. “It must have drifted down all the way from up north.”

A surfboard was strapped to the deck rail.

“Whose board?” I asked.

“Puck’s,” Penina said, looking away.

We had no time to waste before we were supposed to walk up to Puck Malone’s surf shop for my surprise homecoming reception.

“Whose idea was it to have this reception at Malone’s so soon after you picked me up at the airport?” I said.

“Everyone wants to see you,” she said. “Puck and Henry were going to come to the airport, but I said I would meet you alone, and then we’d come right up.”

“How about another kiss first?” I said.

“Can’t that wait until later?” Penina said.

“I’ve been waiting a whole lot of letters for this day,” I laughed.

“I know, I know,” she said, “and you’re as big and hard as a bazooka.”

We kissed again, and Penina pulled away.

“Listen,” Penina said. “I met you at the airport alone for a reason. I wanted to tell you something before you saw anyone else. I’m sorry, Sal, but I didn’t wait.”

+ + +

Penina tried to grab the letter away from Malone, but he was in a bully mood, and her protests simply fed his appetite for the tease. She looked around as if to go after another letter, but the letters quickly spread around the partiers. It would be hopeless and humiliating to scamper around trying to scoop them back up. Penina retreated next to me on a small couch where together we sat back and listened to the letters I had written to her while away in the war being read aloud.

“Penina, I love you,” Malone sang out to a few encouraging cheers.

“I want to go surfing with you and get married,” Malone continued. I glanced at Penina, who had her head down, combing her hand through her hair.

“I want to lick the salt off your cheeks after you come out of the waves,” Malone read, but as he continued, the playful but sardonic tone went out of his voice. I recognized it as the first letter I had sent Penina after I left for the Army. Malone’s false tone mellowed as he struggled to maintain a sarcastic voice while simultaneously discovering what the letter was saying. 

“I want to lick between your toes,” Malone read, pausing as he scanned what was coming next, “and lick the soft part of the arches of your feet and around your ankles and lick up your calves and tickle your thighs and trace your triangle and stick my tongue in your belly button and tickle until you giggle, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ wiggling to get away but wanting more.”

Malone paused to swallow a swig of his beer.

“This is some salty dog stuff, Sally,” Malone said.

“Were there no hurry, I would marvel,” Malone continued reading, “as the poet Andrew Marvell said three hundred years ago, two hundred years at each breast, or until the oceans again cover the earth, but here comes the drill sergeant with his whistle blowing his two minute warning so I’m on to your neck and brush your lips and lick the salt from your cheeks and close your eyes with my mouth and bury my face in your hair. Got to go now. Love, Sal.”

“What mush,” Malone said, amid general laughter, and he balled the paper up and tossed it over to Penina, who, not seeing it coming, flinched as it hit her in the head and bounced to floor.

“Oh, I think it’s sweet,” Peggy Ann said.

“What’s that about a drill sergeant?” John Humulus asked.

“Never you mind,” Mary Humulus said.

“Who’s Andrew Marvel?” Lucas Crux asked.

“I’m marveling at these letters, Salty dog,” Puck Malone said.

“It’s Sally’s feting,” Henry Killknot said. “We are deep into some sort of mythical festal surf feast for the soldier home, a party game. Another letter,” Killknot called out. “Who’ll read the next one?”

+ + +

It is too simple to suggest that there were but two kinds of men in my generation, those who went to war and those who stayed home. The crucial question is always what a man is to be, not what he has been. And most men are full of surprises. And I am not impressed with either one, whether a guy went or stayed, as any kind of argument of definition. Most life decisions are made from limited choices. But Puck Malone was the kind of surfer who stole waves, who took off in front of other surfers and cut them off. He had all the trappings of the local surfer hero, and the young kids looked up to him, but he had no respect for the heart of surfing. I do not think he much enjoyed surfing. So I was not thunderstruck to learn that while I was away at war Puck had paddled about on top of Penina. But then came the blast of the letters. My letters to Penina read aloud at the party was a surprise.

As good a method as any other to learn to write, though I am not necessarily recommending it, is to go away to a war somewhere and as often as you can, write letters to your girl waiting back home, then watch what happens when you return and everyone in your small town sets eyes on your letters. I had been an indefatigable letter writer in fatigues. I did not know how the party game got started, if it was a spontaneous, misbegotten idea or someone’s calculated prank. I did not think Malone had seen any of the letters prior to the party, but he was a trickster. The letters came out and got passed around with the beers and wine coolers, and the letters were read aloud with the music merrily twirling and the winds howling outside. The reading went on for a couple of hours, a kind of Beat poetry reading. At least I felt beat. Someone put Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” on the stereo and set the turntable to repeat, and I kept hearing the “So What” cut over and over again.

Not every letter was read, and not every reader lampooned a letter. Peggy Ann, one of Penina’s friends, said, with no irony intended, that Penina should publish the letters. A few of the letters sparked separate conversations, one that became quite heated and almost ended in a fist fight. The reading was not continuous. Someone would read a letter, a conversation would ensue, things would die back down, and then another letter would be read. The reading grew quiet when an argument erupted between Henry Killknot and Puck Malone about the opportunity to make money from veteran housing loan repossessions. Someone asked me to read a letter, but I declined. Then someone said Penina should read, but they had not noticed she had left the party. 

When it was all over and the party ebbing, the last letter having been read by a blushing, hush-voiced young hipster I did not recognize, a dozen or so bitter end partiers led by Malone, Henry, Peggy, and I, walked in a mock solemn procession out of the surf shop. Henry Killknot had collected the letters up and put them back in Penina’s box, and I was carrying them down to the Manhattan Beach Pier. I had announced my intent to toss the letters into the ocean. Everyone thought that was a splendid idea, an evening Easter parade down to the pier. I did not know where Penina was, but I suspected she was aware of the procession walking from Malone’s shop down to the Strand and then down to the pier. Malone had brought along an ornamental tiki torch that he could not keep lit in the wind. It was a little over a mile from Malone’s shop to the pier, and by the time we got there, a fog-like sobriety had settled over the group. I walked out alone, the wind at my back, and I threw Penina’s letters off the end of the pier. They fluttered about silently with the wind and like afflicted birds fell into the water.

It was just past midnight when I got back to Penina’s room. She let me in, but we had to sleep head to toe, an awkward arrangement of hers she had early introduced me to as punishment for causing hurt feelings. But it was just this kind of characteristic in Penina that I found endearing and one of the reasons I loved her. I might have suggested a foot rub to try to sweeten her mood, but the skin behind my ears that first night back was as dry as the brushed beach beneath the Santa Ana winds.

+ + +

By morning the winds had died and the water was glassy and there was a small swell, and even though I had been awake late, I got up early and grabbed Malone’s board from Penina’s railing and paddled out. The beach was empty. After an hour or so of catching some small, inside waves, I saw Penina out beachcombing. I came out of the water to meet her and we walked up to the Strand together talking.

“How was going back into the water for the first time?” Penina said.

“You missed it. I was born again. Of course, I had to baptize myself.”

“Serves you right,” she said. “Look, I found one of the letters washed up,” and she held out a ball of wet pulp wrapped in seaweed as evidence.

“They were gifts to me, every letter, and every one full of grace that I was saving for your return,” Penina said.

“They were party favors last night,” I said.

“So what,” Penina said. “Why do you care what anyone thinks?”

“I care what you think, and I care about what you’ve been through. I was caught off guard. I was surprised. I got a little emotional.”

“I’m sorry, Sal. I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you. But I didn’t want to be one of those girls who write a Dear John letter. And you told me not to. Remember?”

“Yes, I do remember saying no Dear John letters. And we decided not to get married.”

“But it was a one time thing,” Penina said, “a mistake.”

“Why was it a mistake?” I said.

“I wanted to talk about it before we slept together again,” she said, “so there would be no misunderstanding. And then you go and do this,” she said, holding up the wet letter.

When Penina was upset, she would shake her head and run her hands through her hair. Then she was like a seal going under, and I never knew where she would surface next. She was shaking her head now and running both hands through her hair.

“It was no fun being alone and feeling alone and feeling afraid of feeling alone and getting pestered and bothered everywhere I went, a special target, you know, the girl waiting for her soldier,” Penina said, her breath rising and falling in swells.

“It wasn’t much fun being a soldier, either,” I said.

“I was like a trophy,” Penina said.

“A solid gold weekend,” I said.

“A girl gets tempted,” Penina said, “and, yes, seduced, and sometimes she succumbs. And once she falls there’s a brawl and a free for all?”

“What do you say to we just turn the page on all that, and I’ll write you some new letters?”

“Life is not a book, Sal. In a book you can throw my letters away and write new ones, but not in real life. You could have stopped them last night. Malone was being a jerk, but he respects you. Why didn’t you do something?”

“Yes. You can do things in a book you can’t do in real life. Last night was like something in a book.”

“I felt so alone last night,” Penina said. “Sitting next to you just made it worse. Who does this?” she said, holding up the wet pulp. “Who invests so much writing love letters to his girl and then when he gets home throws them off the end of a pier?”

“Some character in a love story,” I said.

“I save a box of your letters. I want to read them all with you. It’s something I thought you would like. I always thought we’d go down to the beach when you got home and sit on the sand watching the sunset and you would read your letters to me. I wanted to hear your voice close to me,” Penina said.

“Sounds lovely,” I said. “How do you think your letter box got to the party?”

“I know you just got back from the war, and I’m worried about you. But none of your letters even hinted at something being wrong. Your ears, I know, something about your hearing, but that doesn’t explain this behavior.”

Penina was not yelling. Her voice was soft. We were not fighting. We did not want to hurt one another. 

“Were you embarrassed? Is that it?” Penina said. “A guy survives a war but gets embarrassed when a bunch of drunk friends joke around with his love letters?”

“I confess to being mildly embarrassed. Yes,” I said.

 “I used to sleep with them,” she said.

“So I heard,” I said.

“Not that,” she said, blushing and punching me playfully in the arm. “Sleep with the letters, fall asleep then wake up with the pages falling from my hands. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would get up and listen to the surf out the open window, knowing that you were awake and working on the other side of the ocean, and I ached to have you there with me, and then I’d think, he’s writing, he’s busy right now writing a letter to me, and thinking of you writing made me smile and gave me comfort and I’d get back into bed able to sleep. That’s the grace I’m talking about, the grace of sleep, and of waking up in the morning rested and with something to look forward to.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m home now. Why do you still need the letters?”

“They made me laugh and filled me with hope and made me feel good about myself.” She was shaking her head and running her hands through her hair. She looked trapped. Penina was a tough young woman but not unhappy and almost never cried. We had stopped in the middle of the beach, and she turned away now and was crying.

+ + +

The image of pages of my letters falling from Penina’s bed as she drifted to sleep did warm my war weary soul, but there was no getting the letters back. I had written to her every chance I got. Writing the letters had been a lifebuoy. Penina was my diary, my journal. More, she was my book of psalms, yet there was nothing so mysterious or unusual in her being my reader, my constant companion, my pen pal. Even the roughest of hard-boiled soldiers moves away disappointed from a silent mail call, yet I had not saved a single one of Penina’s letters to me. 

I had listened with a curious, detached interest to the letters read at the party. Someone had said something was nonsense, and I had nodded in agreement. Someone had asked me what something meant, and I had said I was not sure. Some of the readers at the party had offered their interpretations. In many of the letters I simply talked to Penina. I wrote as if I was reading to her. I drew pictures for her, sent her doodles, crazy drawings. I told her stories about the war, described the setting, the locals. I told her about my buddies, where they came from, what they each seemed up against. But these were not the letters that interested anyone at the party. They had rummaged through the box for something more. I heard myself complaining about the food, the details, the kitchen police duty, and the nightlong perimeter patrols. I was telling Penina about an overnight pass, a night out on the town. But this was not the letter the partiers wanted to hear, either. I was for a time in my letters to Penina a technical writer, describing the equipment, the land, and the work. But after several months of this sort of letter I did not dwell on military maneuvers anymore because I did not want to relive the day in writing that I had to go back out and encounter again the next day. I grew tired of writing the usual GI bill of fare, and I started to concentrate on love letters, inventive and reflective love letters. And those were the prizes in the party game. Henry Killknot had the box on the floor between his legs, and when he found a good one, he let out a shout and picked someone to read it aloud. The ink that had flowed from my war pens was like rubbing alcohol when the letters were read aloud.

My letters to Penina contained ambiguously erotic language framed by funny anecdotes. Many contained private jokes between Penina and myself and words full of personal connotations. Maybe I did use Penina, and was glad to have an excuse to dump the letters once my need for them was over. I told her repeatedly how much I missed her and loved her and wanted her, and how I fell asleep thinking about her. And it was the love letters Penina wanted and the love letters they wanted to hear at the party. Someone had planned this, that was clear, reading the letters at the party, and it was a smash hit. But love is different away at war, alone in a sleeping bag under a shelter-half, than back home, in a bed made whole with another. Away, out of earshot, a soldier’s words might be aimed at targets both real and imaginary, while for the sendee, the letters fill a void the soldier, once home, cannot satisfy. The void fills with a sudden apparition, but the void was full of love.

In the weeks and days before I had left for the Army, Penina and I had spent every day and evening at the beach. The acoustic surf, the hum of the water, concealed the sounds of the city behind us, and the sun disappeared without our noticing. We came out of the water like sea lions and rolled in the sand, bumping heads, necking and kissing as the tides rose hissing in the warm evenings and the cool nights, and in the morning I would get up early and surf while Penina slept. We did not talk about the war or about my having to leave soon, but as we got closer and closer to my induction date, something in me changed. I was sick with dread. I did not want to go. But my not wanting to go may not have had much to do with Penina. I was simply afraid.

“Greeting,” the order from the draft board said, reclaiming grace like a landlord with an eviction notice, recovering his private beach. My pending induction forced a bittersweet fear to our time together, and I tried to recapture that bitter sweetness in my letters to Penina. Once into training and then in the war, I canoodled my fear. Each letter to Penina was my last letter. I saw guys vomit into their steal pots before going into the field, but they got the job done once the mission was underway. Penina was my steal pot. Call that fearful feeling butterflies, like a baseball player gets waiting on deck for his turn to bat, but in war they are more like birds tearing into the bowels. There is nothing worse than waiting for certain things while being torn apart by raptors of worry. This is how men are hollowed out. The hollow man does not worry, but neither does he love.

But paradise too is a compound where life in time grows monotonous, and after awhile, even the love letters trying to recall our bittersweet, last hours on the beach became monotonous, while the war was uprooting my senses, and I wanted to show how my mind was being ripped from its childhood sea. The war was a riptide pulling me away from Penina. My desire for her grew the further she receded, the further I drifted into the war zone. The uprooting of the senses, the tension of love growing in reverse proportion to its object receding, written in a context of risk and danger – this was the kind of thing Penina was thirsty for, and those were the letters they most wanted to hear at the party at Malone’s, the same letters I happily and foolishly tossed from the pier.

Penina did not think she could forgive me for the loss of her letters, but what made making up even harder for her was my lack of remorse. I did not seem to care about the letters, other than being mildly embarrassed about the scene of their being read in public.

But something more than the drowned letters doused our homecoming assumptions. An emotion neither of us recognized rose like the onset of a strange illness, and we were not sure what was wrong. There was the issue of Puck Malone, and of the suggestion that Malone had not been the only free and easy surfer to paddle out on Penina’s bed. At the party a few of the drunken locals had to be shushed when they started punning on Penina’s Peace Truck. But they were the kind of surfers who did not actually surf much but talked as if they were big wave riders. Malone had followers who drafted in the wake of his popularity and success. I had been Malone’s best friend, so they had to be seen at my homecoming party, Puck’s surfer groupies. But in the end I came to think the biggest problem was my misjudging the importance of the letters to Penina, for it seems she had actually taken them seriously, and she could live her life with pride, a teacher’s aide living alone while waiting tables and tending bar for stoned surfers and drunk refinery workers, because the letters made her righteous, mended her heart and filled her with love. It is even possible she would have been content were I to stay away permanently, like some troubadour poet, as long as the letters kept coming. My coming home put an end to our romance nurtured of longing and fear and worry.

+ + +

“I feel like you threw me off the pier last night,” Penina said. “So what now?” she asked. We were standing on the Strand, up from the beach, looking back at the surf.

“Henry said last night he got permission for me to ride with his Guard unit on their next weekend drill.”

“Why do you want to do that? Aren’t you finished with the Army?”

“It’s an opportunity to do some purposeful writing,” I said. “I told you about the reporter I met in the war, the guy that joined my platoon for a month, loaded down with cameras. I had a chance to talk to him about his writing, about maybe my becoming a writer, a correspondent.”

“You’re talking about a weekend campout getting drunk with Henry Killknot’s National Guard unit? You call that war correspondence?”

“It’s an opening, that’s all,” I said.

“You should have saved my letters if you wanted some war correspondence,” Penina said.

“That’s not the same thing,” I said.

“You should sing your own songs,” Penina said.

“What does that mean?”

“Puck said you guys are planning a surf trip,” Penina said.

“We might go up north, north of Santa Barbara, camp on the beach. You want to come? Or maybe we’ll go down to Mexico.”

“Who else is going?”

“I don’t know, Humulus, probably, if Mary will let him go, and Lucas, and Henry.”

“And Peggy and I along to cook and clean up,” she said with a grimace. “I was hoping some things might change when you got back. And then what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll paddle out and live on the ocean,” I said, “if I can’t live with you.”

“Why don’t you seem very upset with me?” Penina said.

“You’re a beautiful young woman, alone, no family,” I said. “There’s no disgrace, no shame. But you don’t seem to want me back, and I’m not sure that’s only because of the letters.”

“I don’t know what I want,” Penina said. “I’m not the girl of your letters, though maybe I wish I was, or could be. She’s too perfect.”

“Are you serious about Malone?”

“What do you mean?”

“You slept with him more than once. He didn’t park his board on your deck for a one night stand.”

“Don’t say that. I just need more time. Suddenly, here you are, an apparition. I can’t make love to a ghost.”

“Did you think I was not coming back?” I said.

“One week’s dead,” she said. “Then another week’s dead. And another. Then a day with no letter, then another day and still no letter. Then a letter would come, but after reading it, I’d think, maybe this is the last one, his last letter. Every letter sounded like it might be your last one.”

“So you thought I wasn’t coming back,” I said.

“I think maybe we should take some time,” Penina said, “to get to know each other for who we are now.”

+ + +

I was between thinking the whole affair of the letters, my writing them and tossing them and Penina’s reaction to her love’s letters lost, was tender and honest and a valuable illustration of longing and love, and thinking it was mawkish and sentimental and mulching in mush. There had been plenty in the letters to laugh at and to lampoon and ridicule, and it is natural for the smart to sneer at sentiment, for so much of life is filled with false notions of love that disperse when tear gassed with experience. But my experience of war had taught me something of love, of patience and forgiveness. I was tired of fighting. I longed now for peace, peace and silence, and I knew peace was a virtue born of love, and I knew I could drown the sounds in my head in the surf.

I needed a place to sleep, and I wanted to sleep with Penina, for when I was away from her, I missed her and wanted her, and I thought this feeling of missing and wanting, of longing, was what we call love, and so I thought I still loved her, so I wrote her a new letter, my first attempt to replace the ones I had thrown off the pier. Here is that first letter:

Dear Penina,

I’m sitting complacently on your storm-strewn deck, and you’re in the shell of your room, still sulking. Perhaps a letter will cheer you up, though you’ve said the ones I threw back to the ocean can’t be replaced. 

The first letter I wrote to you from the Army would have said something about how I was sorry I hadn’t written yet, but they didn’t give us a break the first three days, and then at the end of the third day they suddenly sat us down and forced us to write a letter home, so the folks would know we hadn’t been killed yet, I guess. They wanted to avoid moms writing to their senators. So they gave us pen and paper, one each. On my left was a kid out of Odessa who could not read and write, so he dictated a few thoughts to me and I wrote his letter for him. We addressed it to his mom. The kid on my other side was from somewhere in Arkansas, and he could read and write, but he couldn’t spell, so I helped him with his spelling. By the time I finally got around to writing something to you, Drill Sergeant DePoppe yelled out a two-minute warning. And that’s how my first letter to you came to be written so short and sweet. You remember that first letter I sent you after leaving for the Army. It was the first letter Malone read aloud at the party last night.

I don’t want to think about the war, and I don’t want to hear anything more about the letters. I just want peace and quiet. I want to surf in the mornings, work hard the afternoons, and be with you at night. I don’t want to sleep with letters. I want to sleep with you. I’m not looking for perfection, and when we fall we should help one another.

Toward the end of the war we were rushing to get some refugees to a safe place. This was about six months ago. We were loading refugees into the back of a troop carrier, mostly women and children and old folks. The refugees were trying to decide which of them would board first, be the first into the first truck. There were only three trucks, and obviously not enough space for everyone. We were yelling at the parents and they were yelling at one another and the children were all crying. Time was running out. We had to get them into the trucks. We had to evacuate the area. But things were not moving. We had to take charge, and we started throwing the refugees into the truck, inadvertently separating families. The yelling grew to screams of confusion and fear. The first truck pulled away, then the second, both packed, and out of the back of both trucks, arms and hands gestured helplessly, waving. You haven’t heard screaming unless you have held a toddler whose mother is moving away in a troop carrier holding her arms out reaching for her child while others are holding her back from jumping out. Packing the third truck was the worst because it was now inescapably clear not everyone would be rescued. Finally the third truck was packed and started to pull away. There was a young woman hanging over the back rail, holding a child in one arm, her other arm waving down to someone stumbling behind. She seemed to be both waving goodbye and waving come on, jump, climb in with us. The trucks were moving away. The refugees left behind stood in the wake of the trucks, watching. A man fell. Or maybe he simply dropped. I tried to help him up, but he didn’t want to get up. He was screaming into the ground. I watched the woman in the truck with the child bring her hand to her face then reach out again, then she brought her hand to her head and ran her hand through her hair, and on her face was a look of fear and panic, a look of sickness, of anguish. She kept covering and uncovering her eyes with her hand, biting her bottom lip, covering and uncovering her eyes, looking but not wanting to see. 

While my platoon was loading the trucks with the refugees, the Bridge Platoon was pulling up their pontoon bridge, and we now went to help them. This all took place in the morning and into the afternoon, packing the refugees off and the hard physical work on the bridge. By evening I was back in my compressor truck in convoy with the Bridge Platoon. We drove through the night, stopping only once, to refuel. Our mission to rescue the refugees occurred over a three-day period, and I was not able to write you a letter. I didn’t even think of you much during these three days. I slept only a few hours during those three days and three nights. I was losing my senses. I could still see, but the war had become a silent film. Perhaps it was then you were tempted and fell to the mercies of Malone, after successive days of reaching into an empty mailbox. I see you under Malone, reading one of my letters, not enjoying that much his lust for business, and then I see that woman’s face in the troop carrier, but she’s no longer reaching out, and she’s not watching me.

An ocean separates us still. I used to think of swimming away from the war, of carving a surfboard from a cedar tree and paddling across the ocean to you. It seems I’m still paddling, an oceanic pony express rider carrying your letters to you. 

I once asked Malone how long he thought he could tread water. “Three days,” he said, joking, but I believed him. I don’t envy Malone that he doesn’t need a reason to do anything other than for fun or money, and while he could tread water for three days, he never would, for it wouldn’t be any fun, and there would be no money in it. How long do you want me to tread water for you? I’ll tread water for you until I drown. I’m out here treading water now.

Love, Sal

 

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