The Great Santini Part 10

"Who was killed this morning?" she continued, as though she had not heard her father. "The j.a.ps or the Creeps?"

"Here she comes, Miss America," Colonel Meecham sang.

"Dad," Mary Anne said, "I'm writing a book about you."

"Good," Colonel Meecham answered, following her toward the kitchen. "You couldn't find a more fascinating subject."

"Here's the first line: 'I was born to the beast on December 12, 1946.' "

"I like it. It captures my unique personality."

"Nothing could capture your personality. The English language is too limited."

"You're right, Mary Anne, I'm an enigma, like a c.h.i.n.k. But a great subject for literature. No doubt about it. You can be my Boswell."

"What a surprise, Dad," Mary Anne said, pulling out a chair by the kitchen table. "How'd you know about Boswell?"

"The ol' Dad knows all kinds of things."

"Why, Bull," said Lillian sweetly, "you keep it so well hidden."

"Bring me the chow," Bull said. Then pounding on his chest he shouted, "It is I, Santini. The Great Santini. Soldier of Fortune. Beast of Ravenel. Minister of Death. And the best d.a.m.n pilot in the Marine Corps."

"How much sugar does the Beast of Ravenel want in his coffee?"

"No sugar. I don't want nothing to make me sweet."

Chapter 8.

"This is the day," Colonel Meecham announced to his family, the second Sat.u.r.day in Ravenel. "There's been a lot of pootin' around but very little maximum effort on the part of this outfit. It has become apparent to me that this outfit is operating behind the power curve."

"This is not an outfit, sugah. This is a family."

It was over a week before the change of command ceremony would take place that would give Bull his first fighter squadron. In the interim he was intoxicated with an overabundance of free time and his whole frame trembled and fidgeted with impatience. He had awakened on this morning with a hungering need to bark out orders and have them carried out with speed and efficiency. Since they had moved to Ravenel, Lillian had charted his moods like a cartographer, and her instinct for defusing his temper before it erupted told her this was a day for caution. Early that morning she whispered to her children in a voice accustomed to conspiracy, "Keep busy, keep quiet, and keep out of your father's way."

Bull was incapable of relaxation. He was one of those men whose blood seems to flow too fast, whose brain seems to glow in the dark, whose eyes can never be still, and whose body is in motion even when sitting on a chair or sleeping. Only in his work could he find redemption; only in the Corps was this manic quality channeled into a useful function. He was a man without hobbies except on those occasions when he would challenge his son Ben in some sport. He did not work in the yard, help in the house, wash cars, shine shoes, or anything. His only duty in the household was to issue orders and to marshal the energies of his wife and children to tasks that he would a.s.sign with a sense of exigence.

"Listen up, hogs," he said to his children. They placed their forks on their plates, folded their hands in their laps, and listened with eyes that betrayed nothing. The Meecham children had mastered the art of staring at their father with eyes that were dazzlingly bland.

"At promptly 1100 hours, your commanding officer will conduct the first Sat.u.r.day Morning Inspection of the quarters. You will be at strict attention by your doors as soon as you hear the Marine Corps hymn played on the commandant's lawn. You will clean up your rooms. You will police up the bathroom. You will help your mother in all matters. You will salute the colors. You will report to me when you are finished. You will work cheerfully until your detail is completed to my satisfaction. You will report to me any goldbricking on the part of any brother or sister who tries to take advantage of my kind nature and tries to shirk his or her responsibility. Now do you hogs have any questions?" he asked.

They held their blank stares. They asked no questions, their mother's warning still fresh in their ears.

"Would my executive officer like to address the hogs?" Bull said, turning deferentially to Lillian.

Lillian untied her ap.r.o.n and walked over to the table, hit it with her fist, and began to imitate her husband. "I want to tell you hogs a few things. First of all, you will. Secondly, you will. Thirdly, you will. Then after that task is completed you will, you will, you will!"

Karen giggled, like a handful of coins tossed in the air. Then everyone laughed, Bull with less relish than the others, but he quickly recovered his lost momentum.

"O.K., now that the exec has sounded off and you hogs have had the big laugh, get upstairs and police up your rooms. Square the barracks away on the double and prepare for Santini's inspection at 1100 hours. After that you will come downstairs and help your mother."

"What are you gonna do, Dad?" Matt asked.

"I'm the head honcho, mister. I don't have to tell you what I'm gonna do."

"I bet you're gonna do nothin'," Matt blurted out, not perceiving the warning signals given off by Lillian.

"No," Bull answered, "that's not quite true. I may do something that might be of some small interest to you, Matt. If you don't get upstairs on the double, I just may stomp your face in."

"I haven't finished my toast," Karen complained.

"Finish it later. The inspection team is due in soon and we will shine when the general troops the line."

When the children had faded silently out of the kitchen, Lillian spoke to her husband in a mollifying, supplicating tone. "Bull, you're getting on edge. I can see it coming like I was reading a map. You're getting nervous and fidgety as a treeful of crows about this squadron and I just don't want you to take it out on the kids. You've been good since you've been home and I've been proud of the way you've controlled your temper and your drinking."

"I'm not nervous," he said.

"Sugah, you have the personality of a jack hammer. You can make inanimate objects nervous. Please relax."

"I'm relaxed. I'm relaxed. What do I got to do, write a book?" Bull said, lunging at a piece of bacon.

He ate breakfast as he always did, by the number. A second piece of bacon was mutilated and consumed in two carnivorous gulps. Next he drank a whole cup of coffee before he even looked at his fried eggs. When he finally turned his attention to the eggs, he trimmed the egg white up to the yolk. Then he slid a spoon under the fragile, trembling sac of yolk, and popped one, then the other into his mouth. As was customary in their nineteen years of marriage, he left the grits on his plate untouched, an unexpressed but articulate declaration, rooted in geography, that the society he married into had not a.s.similated him. All the totems of Bull's disenchantment with the South could be carved from pillars of congealed grits. Since they had married, it was a point of honor between them that Lillian serve grits and Bull refuse to eat them. What had begun as a joke between them had become a resolute ceremony fraught with compet.i.tion and even with something deeper, something almost mythological that separated them.

"I'm going to bury you with a box of grits," she had once told him, laughing at the thought.

"Then don't bury me alive," he had answered.

"You're such a Yankee, Bull. Living in the South so many years, and you still haven't been touched by the South. The gentility, the courtliness, none of it."

"I've only heard of one way to fix grits so I like them," Bull told her. "And he was a good southerner."

"How's that?"

"Well, you start boiling grits in a pot. Then you go down by the highway and get some horse t.u.r.ds or as you civilized southerners call them 'road apples.' Well, you take the road apples and dump them into the grits. You boil the combination for fifteen minutes. No more. No less. When you're done, you pour the grits down the drain and eat the road apples."

After he swallowed the egg yolks whole, Bull spread a gluttonous helping of Crosse and Blackwell orange marmalade on two pieces of toast and consumed them with as much noise as relish.

"Darling," Lillian said, "have I ever told you that you eat like a pig?"

Bull looked up at her and answered with orange teeth, "Yeah, you've yapped about that maybe ten thousand times."

"You still chew with your mouth open. If you hope to make general, you'll have to learn the table manners of a gentleman."

"That's one good reason not to make general."

"I'd sure like to be a general's wife."

"Well, it don't look like you'll ever be one."

"Nothings impossible."

"Me makin' general is."

"Close your mouth," she ordered. "I can become physically ill watching you eat."

Bull pulled back from the table and belched, a low sour note from an old tuba. When Lillian failed to correct him, he screwed up his face again, worked his throat muscles and summoned an even louder burp, this one an octave higher, more musical, more evocative of the meal just completed. He saw her wince. When Lillian winced her whole body was affected. She looked up from washing dishes and saw the river full of small sailboats leaning toward the far sh.o.r.e and knifing toward the bridge which was not in her view. The day was bright, the water green, and the wind full as Lillian saw her whole kitchen window fill up with the September regatta, as though she were watching a painting that changed as she watched it.

"The sailboats are so beautiful. It looks like the river is full of white b.u.t.terflies, Bull. They're having a race."

Bull walked to the window and looked.

"You mean those boats are racing?" he asked.

"Yes, of course they're racing. I used to sail down at Sea Island when I was in high school. Or rather my boy friends used to take me sailing."

"Hey," Bull said, "now there's a sport you can get enthused about. Sailboat racing. Man, look at 'em go. My blood is boiling with excitement. I'm a veritable bundle of nerves awaiting the outcome of this race."

"You're such a peasant," Lillian said, going back to her dishes.

"Yeah! yeah! yeah!" Bull said, walking toward the living room with the morning paper. "Finish the dishes."

Whenever Bull left a room it was a natural reflex for him to leave an order behind him. It was efficacious for an officer to keep the troops busy, he thought, and when he exited a place, he left a trail of a.s.signments in his wake no matter where he was. He sat in his favorite chair and began to read the Charleston News and Courier. Already, he had heard the locals refer to it as the Newsless Courier, and he had immediately adapted the b.a.s.t.a.r.dized version as his own. Each day, Bull poured torrents of contumely on his morning paper. Lillian could hear him in the kitchen. The children could hear him upstairs.

"Hey, newspaper, give me the scores, would ya? Oh, here they are in the G.o.ddam women's section. C'mon, White Sox, get me some hits. Die, Landis, die, so the Sox can buy a decent center fielder. Hey, Mantle makes every catch look easy while Mays makes a routine pop fly look like his Vic Wertz catch in the Series. Ted, hit another one. Attaboy, Thumper, tell 'em you flew with Bull Meecham, too. Killebrew's picking his nose again. He's got two knuckles stuck up his nostrils looking for a lamb's tail."

After he finished the sports section, having checked the progress of the White Sox, memorized the rankings of the teams in the majors and the statistical leaders in the race for the three most important batting t.i.tles, he turned with reluctance and ire to the front page. He could not control the news, and the front page was a source of continuous aggravation to a man who wanted life to be cut into symmetrical quadrants and accessible frontiers. With a bellicose finger, he jabbed at a picture of Fidel Castro. "You bearded f.a.g. I'd like to fly an F-8 to Havana, chase you down main street, and blow smoke rings up your a.s.s. Oh, and McNamara. Cutting fat off the Pentagon budget requests. I can't believe my man, Kennedy, put McNamara in charge of Defense. Russia will attack us with everything she's got and we'll be throwing rocks because McNamara cut the fat. De Gaulle. De Gaulle," he said as if the word caused him physical pain. "Lord, why did you put so many jerks in the world at the same time?"

"Amen," he heard Lillian call from the kitchen.

"Amen," he heard Mary Anne echo upstairs.

"Get to work, Mary Anne," he yelled upstairs.

Bull got up to answer a timid knock at the door. Before him was a blue-haired, aristocratic woman, very small, elegant, and old. On first appearance she looked to be composed of various shades of blue and white. In one thin arm, threaded with veins in a kind of senescent bas-relief, was a basket. In the other was a brown paper bag.

"Good morning, sir," the woman chirped in a voice that reminded Bull of a small, extinct bird. "I live two houses down from you on the Lawn in the old Hall Mansion. I've been unforgivably derelict for not having paid a social call before now, but my doctor thought I was going to die last week."

"That's no excuse," Bull said.

"I know it, and I might perish from sheer embarra.s.sment. But no mind, I brought you a little gift to repair the damage," she said, handing him the paper bag.

Bull peered into the bag unconfidently, paused for a moment, then said, "Ma'am, there's nothing I like better than zucchini."

"Sir, I'm delighted to hear it, and on my next social visit, I promise to bring you some. That's okra."

Bull threw his head back, laughed, then invited the woman inside. "C'mon in and set a spell, honey," he said in an exaggerated southern accent.

"I thought you'd never ask. I'm perishing in this heat. My name is Earline Grantham, sir. Who are you?"

"They call me Bull Meecham, ma'am. I'm a colonel out at the air station."

"I heard you were a military family. Word travels around fast in this neighborhood. So you, Mr. Bull, are a Marine officer."

"A fighter pilot, ma'am. Best one in the Corps. What was your name again, ma'am? I didn't catch it the first time."

"Mrs. Earline Grantham."

"Earline, eh," Bull grinned. "It always tickles me, these names you southerners come up with. Earline, eh. It sounds like something you put in your crankshaft."

Mrs. Grantham had pulled some knitting from her basket and the click of needles, like the rubbing of the smallest of bones, entered the conversation. "Earline was my grandmother's name, sir," the woman answered. "Is Bull a family name?"

"Ha, ha, Earline, buddy, you're O.K. Hey, Lillian," he called to the kitchen, "c'mon out here and meet my new buddy."

"Just a sec, sugah. Let me dry my hands and I'll be right out."

"My grandfather was a military officer, Colonel. A major. He died for the Gray at Antietam."

"No kidding. My great-grandfather might have killed him."

"Then your great-grandfather fought for the Union, I surmise."

"He fought for the winners. I surmise that your grandpa was picked off while fighting for the losers."

"My grandfather died n.o.bly for a cause in which he deeply believed."

"My ol' granddoodle got drafted."

"Where are you from, Colonel?"

"Windy City, U.S.A. The Hog Killer of the World. Shycago, Illinois."

Mrs. Grantham nodded her head. "I find that easy to believe."

"Let me get my wife out here, Early. I married a grit during the war and her great-grandfather got his behind shot off fighting for the losers too. You would have a lot to talk over."

But Lillian was already entering the room, closing the door to the dining room lightly as she came. She swept past her husband and with elaborate gestures that seemed natural on her, she grasped Mrs. Grantham's hand and introduced herself. "h.e.l.lo, I'm Lillian Meecham. So very happy to meet you."

"You are such a beauty, child. You remind me of myself when I was younger."

"Did you hear that, sugah?" she said turning toward Bull. "Did you ever meet a sweeter thing in your life? But I'm not pretty at all. I just have my mother's strong features and I'm good with makeup."