Texas Trilogy 01 – The Ayes of Texas
By Daniel Da Cruz
2 MAY 1943
“NAME?”
“Gwillam Forte.”
“Spell it.”
Gwillam Forte spelled it.
“Age?”
“Fourteen.”
“Race?”
“White.”
“Address?”
“Liberty Towers.”
The desk sergeant’s pen paused in midair. He looked down sternly at the young man. “Get smart with me, boy, and I’ll boot your ass all the way down to the drunk tank-Address?”
The arresting officer coughed discreetly. “That’s where he lives, Sarge. I checked.”
“The Liberty Towers is a whorehouse.”
“Right. The kid here helps out at the bar in the Kit Kat across the street. He works from ten at night to five in the morning-same working hours as the Liberty. Charley Miller-he owns them both, you know-lets him sleep on the pool table downstairs.”
“What about his family?”
The arresting officer shook his head.
“How long’s he been at the Liberty?”
“How long, kid?” The officer hadn’t bothered to ask earlier.
“Since November,” Forte replied.
Six months. Desk Sergeant Pyle put down his pen. He asked other questions, but those answers too were not reassuring, and he didn’t write them down. The boy had been brought in for assault with a deadly weapon- a barroom stool-on a Kit Kat customer who propositioned him. The customer was in the emergency room with multiple contusions and scalp wounds. As a minor, Forte would appear before Judge Landrum of Juvenile Court. Landrum was a hanging judge. The sexual provocation was bad enough; he would like even less the Kit Kat’s violation of the child labor laws, and that young Forte worked at night behind a bar and slept in a cathouse by day, and had been doing so for months in Sergeant Pyle’s precinct without him knowing about it. Suddenly, his chances of making the next lieutenant’s list began to look thin. There was one ray of hope, though: the kid was big for his age. And Pyle hadn’t yet written down the particulars of the charge. Maybe he could work something out.
“Know what the penalty is for assault and battery, young fellow?”
Forte shook his head.
“Three to five years,” Pyle said, looking sharply at the arresting officer, who was about to correct him. Considering the circumstances, even an adult would probably get off with a warning or a suspended sentence. Forte, however, wouldn’t get even that. Under common law, he was a child, presumed incapable of committing a crime. In fact, Judge Landrum would probably pat the kid on the back for putting a pervert in the hospital. But it wouldn’t do to tell the kid that.
Forte licked his lips, but said nothing.
“Yes, some judges would give you three,” Pyle went on, his tone grave, “but others would give you five. Depends on the mens rea.”
“Huh?”
“That’s lawyers’ talk for criminal intent.”
Forte’s eyes were tired and uncomprehending. He didn’t understand a word the man was saying.
“Three to five years,” Sergeant Pyle mused. “That’s a long stretch for a young man. The best years of your life.” He paused for that to sink in. “But there may be another way to handle this. You’re a big lad. You could easily pass for seventeen, even eighteen. With the war on, nobody gets nosy about age any more. And think how much better it would be for you to serve your country-come out with a wad of cash and a string of medals instead of a prison record. You’ll see the world, make friends, find adventure, save your money to start off business when the war’s over.”
Gwillam Forte just looked at him.
“Well, what do you say?”
“Say?”
“About joining up. As a matter of fact, one of the Navy recruiters is a friend of mine. Chief Armstrong. If I put in a word for you, maybe-just maybe-he might be able to get you in.”
“I don’t know.”
The boy was bewildered. He knew there was a war on, but it didn’t mean anything to him. Soldiers and sailors came in the Kit Kat all the time-there were a lot of bases around Atlanta-and they drank and boasted and cussed a lot and had a lot of fights. He guessed it was all right. He had just never thought about it.
“I haven’t got all night, young fellow,” the sergeant said, picking up his pen. “Make up your mind-the Navy or five years in the state prison.”
“All right,” the boy said quickly, afraid the big man would change his mind.
Sergeant Pyle smiled. “You’ve made a wise decision, lad. Now, here’s how we’re going to handle this. You’re already on the book. I can’t do anything about that. But I’m going to write down the charge as vagrancy. Later this morning, when you appear before the judge, you tell him you just got into town last night, on your way to join the U.S. Navy. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if he asks your age, tell him eighteen. Now, how old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Eighteen. You’re eighteen years old. Now, how old are you?”
“Eighteen, sir.”
“Good. He’ll dismiss the charge-I’ll see to it. Then I’ll introduce you to Chief Armstrong. . . .”
Everything went as Sergeant Pyle predicted, and at midafternoon that same day, Gwillam Forte was sworn in as an apprentice seaman in the United States Navy. On 3 May 1943, he joined the draft headed for boot camp in Norfolk, Virginia.
2 MAY 1945
He used to lie in his hospital bed at night, sleepless from pain, and try to remember what it was like to have two hands and two feet. Like everything else about his earlier years, though, the memories were elusive, probably because so few were fair.
The mean, blustering voice of his father-that was his first recollection. His whiskey-hoarse cursing seemed to crowd out all other early recollections. It was followed, as often as not, by a cuff on the side of the head when Gwillam became old enough to hold down a newspaper route and came up short when the old man wanted to “borrow” two dollars for his Saturday-night toot. Not that his mother, with the succession of “old school friends”-all male-who kept her company for half an hour or so those nights his father passed out on the living room sofa, was all that much better. Still, when it came to that, neither was Gwillam himself, he had to admit. He peddled pens and perfumes pilfered from neighborhood drugstores to finance the movies he sneaked off to see when he should have been at school, where he squeaked by from one grade to the next only because his teachers found him too quarrelsome to tolerate another year. His only talent was playing the trumpet, which he did inexpertly in the school band. But if he didn’t play well, he played loud and fast. It was talent enough, he thought at the age of twelve when he left home in downstate Illinois to find work in a nightclub band. The closest he got was a succession of cheap barrooms, which he kept more or less clean, for more or less board and room.
Sometimes he thought about the women at the Liberty Towers. In books he read in later years, whores were always wronged maidens with hearts of gold, but that wasn’t the way he remembered it for the six months he had lived at Liberty Towers, before that police sergeant conned him into joining the Navy. Of course, by then he had already learned a good deal about whores, his mother being a part-timer and all that. At Liberty Towers, he learned it wasn’t generosity that prompted them to throw their money around, but stupidity and an indifference about the morrow. Nor was their line of work-“profession” was hardly the word for a business that required only a few hours of on-the-gob training to master-picturesque so much as degrading and mechanical, mere assembly-line production involving nuts and screws. That they had been driven into prostitution was only a self-delusive fable: they were mostly lazy, shiftless, dishonest sluts who would do anything to avoid decent work, and feared only the day when they would be so old and raddled that there would be no alternative to honest labor. Living in the company of such females hadn’t given him a joyous view of civilian life, and it was almost with relief that he had walked through the main gate of Recruit Depot in Norfolk, Virginia, to begin what he thought was going to be a bright new life as a sailor.
Going to sea had been a change, at that, but life was no sweeter than it had been ashore. If he was big for fourteen, he was small for eighteen, and the target of every bully, bugger, and boatswain’s mate aboard the battleship U.S.S. Texas, to which he had been drafted as a bugler after finishing Music School in late 1943. For Gwillam Forte, the enemy wasn’t the Germans and Japanese, although during the next eighteen months he would see action against both, but his own shipmates.