BACK    CONTENTS    ABOUT

Page 85.

Chapter 18. Tim’s Arrival in San Francisco

On a rainy evening, in a time when gas rationing still kept most cars off the streets of San Francisco, a lone trolley car rumbled along Clement Street in the Presidio. Tim Nordhall was glad to be back in the U.S.A., and looked forward to exploring the West Coast for the first time. Already, he had a whiff of San Francisco’s unique flavoring, as different from anything he’d known as London was from Katanga or New Haven—an exotic cocktail of Asian and European cultures at times garish, at other times subdued, thriving day and night. It might mean a Japanese fish market or an alley right out of Canton, an Italian spaghetti restaurant or a Oaxaca taco shop, an Alabama Negro gospel hall or an all-White Southern-style boarding school, a Zen meditation center or an Episcopalian church perched on hills ages ago inhabited by Shellmound Ohlone. Overlaying it all was a comfortable American feeling of home, complete with neon, jazz, Sinatra, bobbysocks, and lots of cars.

Tim had arrived just that afternoon on the train from back East, and now the city seemed to slumber. In the stillness, shreds of fog drifted among glistening sidewalks and shuttered buildings. Fog horns whispered in from ships far out at sea on the Pacific Ocean. Smoky clouds winked as they fled past a full lemon-pie moon, which, had it been outfitted with clock hands, might have shown a jazzy and exotic Pacific Time.

The world was at war, but just now all the warriors seemed to be asleep behind blacked-out windows in the sprawling Presidio military complex. Like a mobile island of sanity and reassurance, the White Front trolley of the Market Street Line hummed along Route 31 on a journey that brought its passengers west across the peninsula from the Embarcadero on the east docks. Behind thick shades drawn for safety from possible air attack, the car was dimly lit inside. Sitting at his controls behind the front window was a white-haired man in rumpled conductor’s uniform.

The loud hum, metal on metal, dissipated like a bow wake on all sides into the shadows of large Canary Island date palms and inky lawns among darkened official buildings. Five young soldiers in khaki Class B uniform sat smoking near the front. They smelled heavily of beer consumed in the Barbary Coast nightlife district. Cigarette smoke drifted thickly in the yellowish, almost orange light under colored print ads for such patriotic American commodities as Lucky Strike cigarettes with their green circle package, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, and Maxwell House Coffee.

Seated alone in the back was a handsome, dark-haired Navy officer of 30 with a sea bag on the floor under his polished black shoes: Tim Nordhall. His white saucer cap lay on the seat beside him. He hunched in his night-blue knee-length coat betraying the fatigue and beard shadow of a man who had traveled far and alone.

Letting the muted noises of the trolley and his fellow passengers fade into an aching haze, Tim rested his head to one side against the cold window and dozed. In his fragmented dreams, he thought of himself as a tiny dot on a vast landscape of war. Up came distant flashes of his ship being torpedoed and sunk in the South Atlantic, then more flashes as London succumbed to V-1 and V-2 bombings. He’d spent a few heady days in Paris and Versailles as a tourist, then flown back to CONUS via Reykjavik, Greenland, Gander, and Westover; then had a week’s nostalgic leave with family in New Haven, Connecticut. He could still see his sisters’ faces—warm, cheering, wistful in the ache of his departure. Then came the long journey behind a chuffing coal locomotive across the vastness of the U.S.A. as one of myriad warriors being pulled toward the still-raging war with Japan. All this, in a blender of image fragments and emotional puzzle chips, until he jerked awake as the trolley stopped.

The trolley’s hum deepened an octave or two and grew silent as the car stopped before a row of partially lit enlisted barracks from which emanated the click of pool balls, the echoes of dozens of shouted conversation fragments, and a steady swing beat from a radio turned up loud on a window sill. The young men and the NCO got off in a drumbeat of shoe leather. The trolley ground on several more blocks before its next stop. “Visiting Officer Quarters,” the driver intoned tiredly with a glance over his shoulder. “VOQ.”

Tim heaved himself erect in a powerful motion, gripping the shining steel handle atop the seat before him. He slipped the cap onto his head with the bill riding low over his dark eyes. Grabbing the sea bag off the floor, he strode down the wood slat floor, nodded to the driver, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A wood sign in black lettering on white background stood in the grass, advertising the Visiting and Bachelor Officer Quarters (V/BOQ).

As the trolley hummed away on its last few blocks before turning around, Tim adjusted his white scarf and tucked it securely under his lapel collars.

Two Shore Patrol enlisted men in white puttees, white helmets, and white belts over dark blue Class A uniforms strode lazily toward him. Their helmets and white armbands bore, in large lettering, the legend SP, for Shore Patrol. They walked almost in step, looking bored but alert. Their nightsticks swung ominously on each man’s left hip and their holstered, lanyarded pistols looked huge on the right hip. They saluted.

Tim returned their salutes. “You fellows got the time?”

“Yessir,” said the older, a grizzled looking petty officer, snapping his wrist up under his chin to look at a silvery watch. “2230 hours, Sir.”

Tim nodded. “Thanks.” He put his collar up against the damp night wind that smelled of grass and kelp and the sea. Distant lights winked on and off, blood-red, on the towering, cloud-shrouded concrete piers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“You doing okay, Sir?” said the petty officer with some concern.

“Oh yes,” Tim said. “Just catching a few breaths of night air before I go in to sleep.”

The two men fumbled in their pockets and produced cigarettes. They offered, but the officer shook his head. A lighter clicked, casting up a weak orange light that flickered on the men’s cavernous cheeks and veiled eyes. For a moment they were all one with the world and the war, and the petty officer nodded as though someone had said something. The clouds loomed up over the screaming moon as if Japanese bombers were about to pour out by the thousands any minute, like in those war propaganda cartoons, obliterating men and ships and buildings. That was how people lived these days. The memory of Pearl Harbor was acute, painful, and scary. No telling when an innocent evening with parlor lights could turn into an inferno under a wave of enemy bombers. It wasn’t clear if the Fascists really did have Fortress Germany and Fortress Japan. The nuts were on the run these days, but everyone assume they’d have to be cracked on their home turf.

As Tim spoke with the sailors, men crossed paths in the night without speaking, nodded at each other’s secrets without asking any questions, and passed on just as quietly to their separate fates. Everyone figured there would be a day, someday, in the dark and dangerous and looming future nobody could read, when there would be peace again. It was the same helpless patience that had seen people through the Depression a decade earlier, when poverty and starvation had endlessly danced with fear and despair. If nothing else, this was an enemy you could shoot at. Then again, it was an enemy who had shot first and would be happy to shoot back. And the scariest part was that one could not imagine what new horrible weapons the enemy was about to throw at the free and democratic world. The two SPs drifted on down the quiet, glittering sidewalk under a weak street light kept as dim as possible.

Tim picked up his sea bag and walked into the building. He stepped up to the grill of the reception desk, where an Army sergeant sat by a galvanized-steel olive-drab saucer lamp as Charge of Quarters. “Evening, Sir. Signing in?”

“Yep. Here are my orders.” Tim took a thin sheaf of folded papers from an inside breast pocket and smoothed them over the battered wooden counter. The place smelled of laundry soap, the cheap paper used in religious tracts strewn on the tables in the waiting area, and stale cigarette ashes in overflowing old coffee cans on the linoleum floors.

“Lieutenant Commander Timothy Nordhall,” the sergeant said, savoring the name as he read it to himself full of speculation. “Will you be staying with us long?”

Tim sighed and made a face. “Is there a good hotel nearby anywhere?”

The sergeant grinned, showing a gold tooth. “It’s San Francisco, Sir. They have anything you need here, from the Top of the Mark on down. All you need is the cash.” The sergeant rose and lightly tossed up and down a key on his palm. He was a squat little man needing a shave. As he bent to open the steel linen locker, he said: “Looks like you came a long way, Sir.”