The Great Santini Part 27

"Yeah, it's a great toast. Ben and Mary Anne helped me write it up. Those two are good with the words."

"Did they write the whole thing?"

"The spirit behind the whole thing was mine. They just wrote the words."

"Did they write all the words?"

"I did the polishing."

"Let's go, Bull. My G.o.d, that uniform's tight on you. You look like a package of pork sausage."

"I'm the handsomest son of a b.i.t.c.h ever to serve in the United States Marine Corps."

"Then, let's ride, handsome, or we'll be late for the birthday ball."

They walked out the front door arm in arm, down the stairs, and to the driveway at the side of the house. Bull opened the door for his wife. As he walked to his door, Lillian turned to the tree where her children remained hidden, blew them a kiss, and gave them a victory sign with her gloved fingers. They heard her laugh again as the car pulled out of the driveway, and eased onto Eliot Street.

Only when the car was out of sight did the Meecham children open Mary Anne's window and clamber out of the branches into the house.

The mess hall, gracefully festooned with flowers, streamers, and brightly colored ribbons, pulsed with celebration as the pilots and their wives gathered for the 187th birthday of the Marine Corps. Arrangements of carnations and chrysanthemums sweetened the air, commingling with the perfume of the wives and the sweat of the first dancers, and made something in the vast room seem primal and libidinously manifest. Trellises wired with roses and ferns rose ten feet on the wall behind the head table; music filtered through the hall, light and airy, as the Marines gathered under the soft light to promenade their glittering wives before their peers. The hair of the wives was piled high about the room, eyelashes fluttered, and ice tinkled in full c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses. It was a night of myth and remembrance, a night of rustling gowns, long dances, and heavy drinking-a night of pride among the fiercest warriors on earth, who preened in their dress whites like birds of prey suddenly struck with the gift of bright plumage.

The women of the pilots, in long elegant dresses, clung to their husbands, guiding them around the room to make sure the proper courtesies were paid, to ensure that the fine obeisances and homages were proffered to those high ranking officers and their ladies who were in positions to make or break careers. Afterward, they returned to the long tables where each squadron sat beneath the squadron emblem, pouring drinks, laughing, the spirit of the evening inoculating them slowly.

Lillian stood at the center of a large group of 367 wives. She enjoyed her role as the confidante of young wives and the envy of the wives her own age. As she stood among them leading the conversation through small rhetorical hills, she looked around at "her girls" and could put them in categories by signs she recognized. The daily golfers had dark, unseasonal tans and the hard casualness of women who had strolled the front nine too many times to curb the restlessness they felt when exiled to the small towns where the Marines built their bases. She saw women who smiled too much or drank too much and these were the women ordered to have a good time by their husbands. There were women who clung to her and laughed at her every joke, and administered to her every whim, and she knew that these were the ambitious women who were driving their husbands forward in the ranks. There were many others who could not be shuffled into convenient categories, but it was because they were skilled at hiding the signs of their satisfaction or their discontent. Whatever their story, these wives were appendages, roses climbing on the trellises. Their roles were decorative on this night and on all others; the glory was their husband's and their sustenance came from what nourishment they could derive from his reflection. In the room, the band played slow waltzes and streamers began to sag from the roof in scarlet, gold, and forest green parabolas, and Lillian talked gaily to the wives, her friends, her comrades, her rivals.

As she went to fetch her husband she found him talking to a group of four young pilots from 367. Like pilots everywhere they had escaped from their wives to talk about flying. Bull had reached a point of inarticulateness, and he was demonstrating a maneuver by using his hands as the aircraft. Sooner or later, pilots always resorted to their hands when discussing the mysteries and secrets of flight. Lillian went up to her husband and as soon as every eye was on her, she curtsied charmingly and asked him for the next dance.

Meanwhile, the Meecham children were honoring a secret tradition among themselves. This would be the third consecutive year they had held their own private celebration of the birth of the Corps. Like most ceremonies, its origins were simple but pomp and color were added each year. The rituals, conceived by Mary Anne, were being thickened, lengthened, and enriched.

Ben was emptying a bag of dog feces onto a large plate on the dining room table. Mary Anne, using a spatula from her mother's silver service, was shaping the feces into a remote semblance of a cake. Their noses wrinkling in disgust, yet enjoying their inclusion for the first time into this forbidden baccha.n.a.l, Karen and Matt watched each detail of the operation with the keenest interest. Fearing youthful tongues, Ben and Mary Anne had not allowed the other two to partic.i.p.ate in their b.a.s.t.a.r.dized version of the ball until this year.

"Do we have enough shoo-shoo?" Karen asked.

"We ought to," Ben said. "I got every piece I could find in this town."

"What if Dad catches us?" Matt asked.

"How can he catch us? He won't be home until three or four this morning," Mary Anne answered. "Anyway, we're just celebrating the birth of the Corps same as him."

"With a few variations," Ben corrected. "This is just our little way of saying thanks to the Corps for all it has done to us. You have the candles, Karen?"

"Yes, but I don't want to put them in that nasty cake."

"If Dad catches us making fun of the Marine Corps, he'll make us eat that cake."

"Quit worrying, will you?" Ben said. "If that's the worst thing he'd do to us, I'd be glad to eat a piece."

The table was immaculately set. The tablecloth was of Florentine lace used only on the most special occasions by their mother. Mary Anne laid out fine bone china and carefully placed the ornately embossed silverware beside the plates and wine crystal. Two candelabra burned with twelve new long stemmed candles. A strict adherence to form was the order of the night. The cake was the single obscenity in an atmosphere of rigorous decorum.

Dress for the night was a matter of taste. Ben wore a bathing suit, his father's flight jacket, frogman flippers, and an Indian headdress. Matt and Karen clad themselves with random selections from various summer and winter uniforms. They rolled up sleeves and pantlegs which were many sizes too large, and wore dress caps backward. Mary Anne put on pink tights, a fatigue jacket, field cap, and her father's jock strap which she stuffed with Kleenex. Then they regrouped in the dining room for the ceremony.

The children stood behind their chairs going rigid when Mary Anne said, "Ten-hup."

Ben went to the record player he had brought down from his parents' room, and put on the Marine Corps hymn. He then spoke. "Good evening, fellow officers. Fellow wh.o.r.es for the Corps."

"Good evening, sir."

"We are gathered here tonight to pay homage to the United States Marine Corpse. As you know, the Marine Corpse is composed of the bravest fighting men who ever lived. The Corpse cannot be killed in battle. The Corpse cannot be denied their strategic objectives by any fighting force on earth. But what is not so well known and what we have come to celebrate tonight is the fact that the Marine Corpse is also the biggest collection of farts and a.s.sholes ever to gather together under one banner."

"Hear ye, hear ye," the others shouted, reading from the scripts Mary Anne had prepared.

"We will sing our version of the Marine Corpse HYMN. This version was written by Mary Anne Meecham, the charming daughter of that modest, self-effacing, painfully shy fighter pilot, Bull Meecham, that wonderful little man who calls himself 'The Great Santini.' Mary Anne, you sweet little thing, would you wiggle up here and lead these gyrenes in your version of the hymn?"

In an exaggerated southern accent, Mary Anne replied, "Why, lawdy, I'd be pleased as sweet potato pie to lead you big strong handsome Marines in your big strong handsome hymn. All right now, all you strong handsome honey pies and you strong handsome sugar dumplings, ya'll sing along with me. Benjamin, will yo please start the record over for yo dahlin sister?"

"Why sho, sister sweet," Ben said.

"Everybody together now, you heah? Let's sing."

From the halls of Montezuma, To the hills of Tennessee, We're the biggest bunch of a.s.sholes, That the world will ever see.

First to beat our wives and children, Then to wipe their bodies clean, May the whole d.a.m.n Navy take a c.r.a.p On the United States Marines.

The officer in charge gave a sign and the doors to the mess hall were thrown open, as a band marched into the cleaned out center of the hall playing the "Foreign Legion March." They pa.s.sed by the officers and ladies of squadron 367 and marched to the far end of the hall, then coming back up the hall, instruments gleaming, the band broke out into the Marine Corps hymn as Bull stood at attention, the flow of history seizing him. Lillian, standing erect, felt the tears come as they always did when she saw strong men march and heard this song that lived in the center of her. The night would go on, the Mameluke sword would cut the cake, the general would speak, and tradition would be served. But for Bull and Lillian, it was the hymn that made this night a holy night for all time.

Chapter 20.

In his room, Ben packed his gym shoes and trunks into a blue zippered bag that had the Marine Corps seal stamped in white on the outside. From his top drawer he pulled two pairs of sweat socks rounded into uneven b.a.l.l.s, stepped back toward the door, and lofted both pairs of socks toward the open bag. He made one shot, missed the other, but retrieved the missed shot quickly, gave a head fake, pretended to dribble, went up with two defenders on him, and dunked the socks into the bag, then adjusted the zipper.

"It's over for you today, hotshot," Mary Anne said, standing at the doorway.

"What do you mean?" Ben asked.

"First basketball practice. You become the golden boy today. Loved by all. Adored by every creep in the world. After a couple of games, I'll become known as Ben Meecham's sister. But the saddest thing of all, the really sad thing, Ben, is that there's some poor guy who's waking up this morning who thinks he's going to be first string, has planned on it for a whole year, and who doesn't even know you're alive."

"I've got to make the team first," Ben replied.

"False modesty is your worst fault, big brother. You've got to learn to enjoy bragging. I love to brag. I just don't have anything to brag about."

At school that day Ben's mind wandered far from his studies and the voices of teachers. Mary Anne was right. Ben knew that the exile was almost over, that his term of loneliness would be shortened the first time he touched the ball in practice. Since the beginning of school, his every waking hour was directed toward that moment. In new schools, redemption came from his ability to go around anyone with a basketball. But he always worried about the first essential step: the making of the team. He worried most about his shooting, that his touch would desert him, that his fingers would stiffen, and that the coach's eye would fix on him every time he missed a shot. He had nightmares that he would take ten, twenty, or thirty jump shots in the first practice and not make a single one of them. He also feared the stupidity of coaches, especially high school coaches in the Deep South who usually regarded basketball as a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, weak-kneed son who whined and piddled away the dark season between football and baseball. Anything could happen during a first practice. Tryouts were a time of fear for any boy.

Ben had awakened that morning, while it was still dark, with the b.u.t.terflies, the old, invisible protozoa of fear that invaded the stomach on the days of contests or of testing. In the morning dark, he had thought of what might go wrong, of why he might not make the team. The thought of being cut made him physically sick and the b.u.t.terflies moved within him with the burning wings of nausea. But no matter how he tried, he could not think of a reason why he should not make the team. For the past eight years on every day that it was possible, he had shot a hundred jump shots a day, made a hundred layups, and attempted a hundred foul shots. He had once dribbled a basketball lefthanded to and from school for an entire year because he had heard Bob Cousy say that a great guard must be able to dribble well with either hand. But the biggest reason he thought he would make the team was geographical. Ravenel, South Carolina, was so far removed from the proving grounds of American basketball that it seemed impossible to Ben that excellence could be found among the homegrown boys. His main concern was that some Marine kid from California or D.C. had slipped in and, like him, was biding his time until the first practice.

Ben had received his training on the outdoor courts near Washington, D.C. when his father had been stationed at the Pentagon. For three years, from sixth to eighth grade, Ben would go to the courts adjacent to the Centre Theater in Alexandria, Virginia, to learn the fundamentals from boys much older and stronger than he. For two years he was humiliated, teased, and taunted as he tried to shoot over taller boys, pa.s.s through crowds of arms, or defend against athletes who considered it a gift to let Ben guard them. But he earned respect because he returned to the courts every day no matter how severely he had been humiliated the day before. Eventually he became a kind of mascot, and the bigger boys liked him in the way they always like the smallest and the youngest member of their group. It was on this court that Ben learned he could dribble, that he was quick, and that he could beat others because he loved to hustle. He learned to fake and pa.s.s, to set pics, and to lead a fast break. In his three-year apprenticeship, he learned the game. As he improved, he was called "The Weasel" by the other boys and by eighth grade he was selected to play in the full court Sat.u.r.day morning games that were violent, often b.l.o.o.d.y affairs, where he was accepted by the high school boys because he could handle the ball well. No one played defense on the courts. Defense was a kind of approximation; everyone just tried to hurt the guy they were guarding once in a while to let him know they were around. Ben had seen two boys carried off the courts on Sat.u.r.day morning with concussions. That was defense. Ben knew when he woke up on this morning that no one in Ravenel, South Carolina, had been sp.a.w.ned on such a training ground. For on the courts of Alexandria and Arlington, as on most of the courts of the D.C. area, most of the players were black and the swift pa.s.sionate laws Ben had learned in those years were more valuable than the tutoring he had received from any coach, even his father. And Ben knew that south of Alexandria, Virginia, white boys didn't learn anything from black boys.

That afternoon, Coach Otis Spinks gathered all the tryouts in the center bleachers. The returnees from the previous year, already a.s.sured of a place on the team, shot layups as they glanced arrogantly toward the boys in the bleachers, sizing up the group as a whole. There was hatred in their appraisal. "Good luck, rookies," one boy called out, evoking a laugh from his teammates. Ben saw that the boy was Jim Don Cooper, the linebacker and captain of the football team, and the boy who had gone steady for three years with Ansley Matthews.

Coach Spinks stared at a clipboard while he sucked on a half empty bottle of R.C. Cola. Ben had heard the players discussing Coach Spinks's addiction to this particular soft drink. It was claimed that he consumed three sixpacks of R.C. daily, flavored with two packs of Lucky Strikes. His stomach was enormous, an incongruous attachment to an otherwise finely proportioned body. As the coach called names from his list of tryouts, Ben looked around and studied faces as lonely as his. Odd, he thought, I've never seen any of these boys, yet I must have pa.s.sed them in the halls dozens of times. It gave him a feeling of camaraderie with those outcasts who had come to this gymnasium hoping to find their ident.i.ty and feed on the secret bread of glory that had been denied them, who had felt isolated and banished from the main flow of student life for so long. Each boy seemed to be saying, "I have a name and a face and a laugh and a cry. Can you see me? Can you hear me?" Ben also noticed that almost every boy quivered with excitement. Hands trembled. Feet tapped out nervous tattoos. The bleachers were filled up with new basketball shoes. The shoes seemed blindingly, tragically white, as fresh as wet paint. The smell of shoes lifted straight from their boxes filled Ben's nostrils. A sadness gripped him as he realized how many pairs of new shoes were bought for nothing. The bleachers in this moment were ruled by virgin shoes and wool socks fresh from cellophane. The bleachers swarmed with youth unanch.o.r.ed, unpraised, and convulsed with the dreams of gangly boys and fat boys who wanted to be a part of something with a desperation that was almost palpable and alive. Then Ben listened to Coach Spinks's introductory speech.

"I'm a football coach, boys. Y'all should know that. I never have cottoned too much to basketball because, to tell you the truth, I thought it was a game invented for the boys who were too chicken to play football. It always kind of embarra.s.ses me to see boys running around in their underwear flashing their armpits. I don't really know all that much about this game. But I've read a couple of books and talked to a couple of old ballplayers and it seems to me that this here is a simple game."

Coach Spinks pointed to a young blond boy in the front row and said, "Do you like to put it in a hole, son?" The varsity laughed behind him as they continued to shoot layups.

"Pardon me, sir?" the boy asked, terribly fl.u.s.tered.

"Do you like to put it in a hole? I love to put mine in a hole," the coach said, winking at the other boys in the stands and turning toward the returnees who grinned at the old joke. "Well, that's the name of this game. The team that can put a basketball in that hole most often always wins these games. As y'all know, I got me some stud horses coming back from last year's team, so it's gonna be real tough for you boys to make the team. I don't mean to discourage you now, but with seven players back from last year's team, that means only three of you has a chance to get a uniform. Now I'll give y'all a good look over and if you can put it in the hole or pull leather off the wood, then I can always use another stud in the stable. Looking around, I don't see many tall boys in the crowd except for Mumford there," he said pointing with his R.C. bottle at a skinny blond boy who sat in the same row as Ben. The boy reddened at the mention of his name. All eyes in the gym turned on him. "And I know he can't rebound since I cut him for two years runnin' now." Laughter resounded through the gym as Mumford rested his arms on his prominent knees and stared hard at the laces of his new shoes.

"Now the first thing we're gonna do after warmups is to see how well you boys stack up against the varsity. If you can't play with them boys out there then you're gonna have a mighty rough time against some of our opponents this year. We've got ten games scheduled with teams from the Charleston area this year and that's nothin' but city basketball up there. Get out there on the other end of the court for layups. Then when I call you, line up in two lines at center court. We're gonna play two on two for a while to see if you can put the ball in the hole. Now get your b.u.t.ts down there for layups."

The whole crowd of boys rose and thundered off the bleachers, white shoes shining and voices raised in a high-pitched whistle as the layup line formed inexpertly. The first boy who shot missed the basket by three feet in his excitement. Ben watched Coach Spinks's face and knew that boy had been cut. Coaches were all the same: they had ineffable powers of memory when you made a horse's a.s.s out of yourself. Ben didn't know who the boy was but was certain that his time on the team was finite and brief. Ben took his turn, receiving the pa.s.s, dribbling twice, then laying the ball softly off the backboard. He watched as it dripped in the net. He was being cautious and making sure of his moves and his shots. "That's it, son. Lay it up there soft, like it was a basket of eggs."

Then Coach Spinks turned his attention toward his returning players, letting them go one on one while he shouted instructions to the defensive players. "Get that b.u.t.t down, Cooper, like you was a dog scratching for worms," the coach called out. Awaiting his turn to rebound, Ben watched the drills in progress at the other end of the court. He watched each player, looking for the unmistakable signs of the exceptional basketball player. Ben had been a ballplayer for a long time and he knew other ballplayers the way a gypsy knows other gypsies or a thief other thieves. There were things to look for, an unspoken language of movement and form to decipher, pa.s.swords to exchange, and glances to decode. First, he looked for the walk. Every good basketball player Ben had ever known walked in a certain way, insouciant, ambling, even awkward, as if to purposefully confuse boys who would guard them when they slipped into their Converse All Stars and called for a basketball. Then this creature of the strange walk turned into something ethereal, flowing. The dancer in him was loosed. Whatever poetry was in him found release as his hands rolled the ball over and over, spinning it, warming to it, touching it before he made his first move toward the basket. The walk came back to him when he did not have the ball, during time outs, when he walked to the foul line, or when he walked to the end of a line in practice. The walk was an indelible mark of identification, like a fingerprint. An unspoken joy arose in Ben as he looked for the walk and could not find it.

Then he watched for the wrist, the snap of the wrist after a shot, the hand bent at the joint of the wrist at about a 45 degree angle, the index finger pointed toward the center of the basket. His father called it the wounded duck but to Ben the hand and wrist took on the shape of a cobra prepared to strike. From this wrist snap came touch. And no good shooter was without it. Ben found approximations of it but the shooters at the other end of the court were only adequate, not gifted. None of them had the carriage and bearing that indicated they were of a royal line of shooters or rebounders; none of them had the easy arrogance of talent that was so commonplace on the courts around D.C.

Ben then concentrated on studying the individual players at the other end of the court. He was in a rhythm now, rebounding, running to the end of the opposite line, studying his enemies at the far court, moving up, cheering, then sprinting toward the basket to drop in a layup, and resuming his survey of the other court. He examined the ball-handling skills of Pinkie Taylor who had been a starting guard on the team the year before. Pinkie was Ben's size but much thinner. He had a large scarlet birthmark on his throat that made his pale skin seem almost translucent. He was in Ben's history cla.s.s where he distinguished himself daily with a t.i.tanic ignorance of American history. His intellect was a spa.r.s.e acreage indeed but Pinkie got along by wearing a perpetual smile on his face and having an uncanny knack for repairing the engines of his teachers' automobiles. He was uncomplicated and Ben had fantasized that if a surgeon performed brain surgery on Pinkie he would open his head to find it looking like the inside of a potato. He did have a nice set shot, though, and his small, fast hands bothered the boy he guarded.

Next, Ben inspected Jim Don Cooper, the captain of the football team and all-conference linebacker. He looked like a linebacker, would always look like one, and if his head were mounted on a trophy wall along with cape water buffalo and sable antelopes, people would look at it and say, "That's a nice linebacker you have there." He was six feet three inches tall and weighed over two hundred and thirty pounds. An exaggerated supraorbital ridge gave him an aurignacian, sinister appearance. Ben had carried a strong antipathy for Jim Don since his one date with Ansley Matthews. Often, Ben had watched Jim Don walking the halls of school escorted by Ansley and a school of pilot fish mainly composed of third string football players. He was the most feared boy in the school, at least among the population that did not carry knives. But he was terribly clumsy in gym shoes and the court was his own private china shop. He tried to play basketball as if there were still gra.s.s beneath his cleats and pads on his shoulders. His shot, however, was surprisingly dainty and soft. He could not leap but he would gather in many rebounds because of his girth. In shorts and rubber-soled shoes he looked vulnerable and misplaced, like a Cro-Magnon man lost in the centuries.

Art "The Fart" Ballard was unquestionably the best rebounder on the team. He was squirrelly and skinny to the point of emaciation. But he could come close to dunking the ball during warmups and had the great spring that one comes to a.s.sociate with tall, skinny boys. He had a poor, uninspired shot and was a terrible dribbler. But Art "The Fart" could jump higher than boys six inches taller than he. Ben had heard him called nothing but Art "The Fart" since he had arrived at Calhoun High School. It was an extension of the name that seemed natural. Sammy said Art had been called that since first grade so he had had plenty of time to grow accustomed to his nickname. Ben made a mental note never to name a son Art or Bart.

The only boy that Ben knew personally was Philip Turner. Philip was the Student Council President and had the chiseled, immaculate, Anglican features of that aristocratic breed. He sat in front of Ben in Mr. Loring's English cla.s.s. They had talked several times but Ben was not important enough for them to become friends or for Philip to engage Ben in a truly serious conversation. At all times, Philip was impeccably groomed, his shock of rich brown hair combed neatly, his demeanor serious and forthright. He walked around school with a sense of urgency as if Khrushchev were calling him collect from Moscow or he, Philip Turner, had to make a decision that afternoon whether to recognize Red China or not. Teachers loved him without reservation which made it a law for students to hate and envy him. Though he laughed a lot it seemed more like good social training than the enjoyment of a good joke. He did things in earnest only if he thought it would help him later on. He played basketball because he thought it would help him win a prestigious scholarship to an Ivy League college. Always he was thinking about the future, about events that would occur two, four, or ten years hence. Teachers were always looking at him and saying to each other, "There goes the future governor of South Carolina." Philip would sometimes hear them, blush, but silently agree. Philip's father was a man of little formal education who had become a powerful social force in Ravenel. After twenty years of hard work and ruthless manipulation of small farmers, Marshall Turner had become the emperor of truck farming in one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the state. Though Mr. Turner had dirt under his fingernails and though he could never look like anybody but a man who had seen a lot of cuc.u.mbers in his life, he had trained his wife to train his sons to be gentlemen. Philip was the youngest, the most princely, and the one furthest removed from his father. As a basketball player, Ben noticed that Philip was mostly form. His jump shot looked good but he rarely made the shot. Philip would go up, his legs would come together beautifully, the arm and wrist motion was pure, but something was not there. The shot differed in small ways each time he left his feet. Several times Ben saw Philip look down at his feet when he was shooting. Philip was worried that his feet were not coming together properly; he was worried how the shot looked. He was well muscled, handsome, and proud in his uniform, but Ben saw immediately that Philip was the poorest athlete among last year's starters. He also saw that none of the other players talked to Philip at all.

The whistle blew and Coach Spinks called Ben's group to the center line where they queued up in two lines to wait for their chance to go against the returnees. Spinks called for Pinkie and Jim Don to play defense first. The seven members of the team came together in a circle, joined hands, then broke from the circle cheering and confident. Pinkie and Jim Don slapped hands and Jim Don glowered at the first two boys in the line and sneered, "C'mon, rookies."

The first two boys to face the varsity players were both overcautious, spareboned, young, and fearful of sudden error and humiliation. The boy on the right side in Ben's line received the ball from Coach Spinks, took one tentative, almost apologetic dribble toward the basket, then stopped and looked for his partner. Pinkie was on him as soon as he picked the ball off the floor. Panicked, the boy threw the ball directly into the arms of Jim Don Cooper. The whistle blew, the two boys raced quickly to the back of the line, and the next two boys moved in to challenge Pinkie and Jim Don.

Through the front door of the gym, Mr. Dacus entered silently, walked to the top of the bleachers and watched as a tall, red-headed boy, painfully clumsy, forced his way all the way under the basket where he had his shot blocked fiercely by Jim Don as soon as he made a move to shoot. The whistle blew and it was Ben's turn.

He glanced to his left and saw that his partner was the blond boy who had been cut the two previous years. Before Spinks threw him the ball, Ben called out to the boy, "My name's Ben. What's yours?"

"Lyle," the boy answered shyly.

"This ain't no social," the coach barked, hurling the ball at Ben.

Ben turned toward Pinkie who was crabbing out to challenge him. The other members of the varsity were screaming, whipping themselves up into a lather now that the season had officially started and they were strutting their skills before the newcomers. Ben watched Pinkie and made no move. "Do something, boy," the coach ordered. Ben began a slow deliberate dribble to his right. "Get under the basket, Lyle," he shouted to his partner. Lyle raced for the basket in an awkward spring, Jim Don with him every step, slowing him down with a furtive forearm shiver to Lyle's chest. "C'mon, boy, we don't have but five years to get this practice over. I didn't tell you to freeze the ball."

Ben now had a tremendous area of the court in which to maneuver Pinkie. Keeping to the right side of the court, he began to dribble rapidly, faking as if he were going to burst toward the basket, reversing hands, keeping Pinkie off balance, then slowing up, and bouncing the ball higher, close to Pinkie's reach, until Pinkie made a lunge for the ball, as Ben had waited for him to do, and Ben drove toward the basket and Jim Don. He came with speed and momentum, dazzling speed for a boy enc.u.mbered with the ball, and Jim Don moved out heavily, menacingly to stop Ben. Ben left his feet, his eyes affixed to the basket, the ball swung up in two hands, until Jim Don rose in the air to repel the attack, the two bodies of the two boys suspended, warring, in synchronization, and at the last second Ben slipped the ball toward Lyle, who waited alone under the basket, slipped the ball under the huge arms of Jim Don who crashed into Ben at the same time Lyle was making a layup with no one around him.

The players in the center of the court cheered madly. Lyle almost fell on Ben as he pulled him off the floor and slapped him on the rump, his face astonished and pleased. The varsity brooded and demanded a rematch. The whistle blew. Coach Spinks took a long pull on his R.C., then spat a huge portion of it on the cinderblock wall. Ben saw Mr. Dacus flash him the V-sign in the bleachers. "Now that was a prime example of stinkin' defense. Stinkin'. Stinkin'. Stinkin'. That was dog-doo defense. Now let's do that again. Same four. I wanna see some a.s.s-scratching defense this time."

"Hey, Coach," Jim Don said, "let me guard the show-off rookie."

"Go ahead."

Jim Don pressed close to Ben even before Coach Spinks threw Ben the ball. "C'mon, rookie. C'mon, rookie," Jim Don growled at Ben, his breath smelling like peanut b.u.t.ter and onions. When the ball came Ben made a violent feint toward the basket which drove Jim Don stumbling backward. Ben smiled as Jim Don returned, the anger fanning out in his face.

"a.s.s down. a.s.s down," Spinks said and Jim Don spread his legs wide, bent his knees, spread his arms, and kept up a fierce whisper, "Come to me, rookie. I want a piece of you, rookie." In a single fluid motion, Ben bounced the ball between Jim Don's outstretched legs, broke for the basket, retrieved the ball before it bounced a second time, beat Pinkie in a foot race to the basket, and laid the ball into the basket left-handed. Going back to the line, Ben slapped Jim Don on the rump and said, "Nice try, fatso."

"That's Yankee basketball, son. We don't play Yankee basketball down here," Coach Spinks said to Ben. "I want a little less showing off next time you handle the ball, you understand?"

"Yes, sir," Ben said at the end of the line.

"Hey, Coach, you tell the rookie if he calls me fatso again, he's gonna have some knuckles where his tonsils used to be," Jim Don said.

"Shut up, Jim Don, and get your b.u.t.t down. I'm tired of all this dog-doo defense," Spinks said, blowing his whistle.

Three days later, on a Thursday night, the final cuts were made. On a bulletin board outside his office, Coach Spinks posted the names of the players who had made the team. Singly and in pairs, boys who had tried out for the team walked up to check the list for their names. Most of them checked the list quickly, then returned to the locker room to pack their belongings, and vanish in the night to be alone with their private desolation. Ben walked to the paper and saw his name. But he felt very little cause for celebration. He had come to like the boys who were trying out much better than he liked the boys on the team. When he returned to the locker room, Philip Turner and Pinkie walked up to congratulate him. He thanked them, showered, and dressed. As he left the gymnasium, he noticed a large number of parked cars sitting beneath the street lights outside the locker room door. Within the cars the dark shadows of fathers waiting for the verdict on their sons smoked out to meet him as Ben began to walk home. He pa.s.sed one car where a Drill Instructor from the training base on Biddle Island was holding his crying son in his arms. He heard the man say in a voice that shivered with pain and a stark, inchoate helplessness when faced with his son's naked hurt, "Shoot, Eddie. We won't tell Mama nothing. We'll just tell her you sprained your ankle and had to quit the team. It's O.K., Eddie. It's O.K. We'll go huntin' this weekend. Just me and you." Ben went down on one knee to tie his shoe and listened to the boy cry. It was the boy who had missed the layup on the first day of practice. All along the street, in the privacy of lightless automobiles, beneath the gaze of fathers there was a suffering that would be brief, but one that, at this moment, in this place, was all but unendurable.

Ben walked home beside the river, his gym shoes slung over his shoulder, and his thoughts going back to the one team from which he had been cut. He had tried out for the Arlington Jaycees, a Little League team with a long history of winning teams. He had been cut after the second day of practice and had gone to his room and cried for three days. Bull had come up and told him that only girls and babies cried but this had served only to increase Ben's sense of failure. Not even Lillian could soothe him and make him re-enter family life. He missed two days of school until finally Lillian ordered him to school and threatened to spank him if he did not comply with her order. Ben had blamed Bull for his getting cut. "If you hadn't been so cheap and had bought me a decent glove, I'd 'a made the team," Ben had shouted at his father, expecting a hard slap to the face even as he said it. But the slap never came. Instead, each day after he finished work at the Pentagon, Bull went to the coach of every Little League team in Arlington, Virginia, and asked them if they were short any players. None of them were, but Bull kept looking until he finally came to the practice field below the Fairlington Apartments where he walked up to the man who would become Ben's first coach, Dave Murphy.

The next day Ben received a phone call from a Coach Murphy who said he heard from some of his players that the Arlington Jaycees had cut one h.e.l.l of a baseball player and that he would consider it a personal favor if Ben would come play for his team. That was the beginning. And as Ben walked along the edge of the salt river, he realized that he wore the memory of Dave Murphy like a chain and it carried him like a prisoner to the infields of Four Mile Run Park in Arlington, Virginia, where he played for the Old Dominion Kiwanis for two of the best years of his life. In the night games, beneath the arc of lights, in his last year of Little League, Ben's new spikes gleamed like teeth as he walked toward Dave Murphy. For years Ben had walked toward him in dreams and sudden thoughts. If he could, Ben would have told him about the soft places a boy reserves for his first coach, his unruined father who enters the gra.s.sless practice fields of boyhood like a priest at the end of a life. Coach Murphy was gentle. Yes, that was it. Gentle to the clumsy, girl-voiced boys whom he trained to be average, to be adequate, as he hit the soft fungoes to the outfield green. But Dave Murphy had a gift. Any boy who came to him had moments of feeling like a king. Any boy who played for the Old Dominion Kiwanis. Any boy. Coach Murphy still haunts the old fields where his boys bunted down the line, and with graceless fever took infield in voices that cried out for fathers. Going home after practice, they waved good-bye to their coach as they slid their spikes on the sidewalk, astonished at the fire that sprang from their feet. Then they turned toward home, toward the real fathers who waited for their sons to come homeward disguised as heroes.

It was in the last game of 1957 with Ben pitching against the Arlington Jaycees before he left the Little Leagues forever that Coach Murphy rubbed his pitching shoulder with Atomic Balm and whispered for Ben to keep the ball low and throw for the knees. And he whispered, "This one's for you and me, Ben. For you and me." And Ben could remember how on a frog-choired summer night in Virginia, he pitched into a sweat as slick as birth, then hit a double in the last inning driving Ronka home with the winning run. The whole team ran to him, picked him up and pummeled him madly. Then he was lifted and hurled by Coach Murphy toward the infield lights, his spikes silvered with false light, and Ben came down laughing and jubilant to Coach Murphy. He came down like a child thrown up by a father.

Then Coach Murphy cried out, "Free c.o.kes!" and the Old Dominion Kiwanis sprinted toward the c.o.ke stand. Taking Ben into the trees beyond the Park, the Coach poured two fingers of bourbon into Ben's c.o.ke and said to Ben, "From now on, you call me Dave." Coach Murphy had this gift. He could turn a boy into a king. Ben drank the c.o.ke and he remembered it glowing in his blood like the moon and, very deliberately, Ben looked into the softest of male eyes and said, "That's good c.o.ke, Dave."

But we desert the coaches of Little League, Ben thought, leaving the river's edge and returning to the sidewalk beneath the huge water oaks of River Street. We leave them behind and we never think of them again until Ronka, the catcher, or maybe Schmidt at first asks me if I've heard about Coach Murphy imprisoned in the most terrible room of hospitals, benched by the hardest and most silent of coaches. "Did you hear about his face?" they asked. "It was eaten clean up. They had to cut his nose and half his face off when they probed. All he has left are holes, but he wears a mask now because his mother screamed when she saw him."

Old Coach Murphy. Thirty-one. The Coach of the Old Dominion Kiwanis has come to this hospital, to this strange outfield, to this old dominion of cancer, to this old dominion of death, coaching in the ward of the doomed. Ben went to that hospital and was sent away by nurses who said, "Family only" and Ben had said, "But Dave was my coach," and the nurses had said "Family only." But they talked to him later and Dave Murphy's wife talked to him and they told him how it was in the last days. They said that in the last month Dave tried to teach the other undermined men to bunt down the line at third and to steal signs from the opposing teams, teaching with fear-stunned eyes behind a gauze mask in the last, inarticulate fury of coaching, while the instincts were still good and before the slow-footed cancer partially stole the brain. As the cancer with its unstealable signs moved toward the eyes behind gauze.

At the end, the very end, they roped him screaming to his bed, screaming out for Ronka to take two, for Schmidt to hold fast to the bag at first, and for Meecham to call him Dave. They tied him faceless to his bed, far away from his boys who cried into their pillows, who took down the dusty photos of their coach and prayed for him from the thunderstruck source of their boyhood. At last the cancer entered his brain or maybe his soul, and far from bleachers and c.o.ke stands, far from shoestring catches and the voices of fathers behind backstops, far from the light of spikes, and the sad, blooded moons of Four Mile Run, he screamed out his death not like a coach but a man. What kind of world is it, Ben thought, that lets its coaches die without his boys around him, buying him c.o.kes, calling him by his first name, and rubbing his shoulder with Atomic Balm? He died without a face in a room I never saw without my kisses in the stained gauze or without my prayers entering the center of his pain. But worst of all, O G.o.d, you let him die, let Coach Murphy die, let Dave die, without my thanks, my thanks, my thanks.

As Ben pa.s.sed Hobie's Grill and the alleyway where Toomer sold his flowers, he wished that all the fathers of rejected sons could go on a quest as Bull Meecham had once done, comb the fields and gyms looking for a coach who understood a tiny bit the mystery of being a boy. But in Ravenel there was only Coach Spinks and he didn't even understand the mystery of the double post offense. He walked until he was ascending the steps of his house. He saw his mother, Mary Anne, Matthew, and Karen waiting for him in the living room. Entering the house slowly, he put on a sad, mournful expression. He paused to look at them, then as if the effort was too much, he began to walk toward the stairs, his head bent in defeat.

"What happened, sugah?" Lillian asked, her voice breaking as she prepared herself for the worst. "I heard he was a dreadful coach and a fool of a man," she continued as Ben continued to walk up the stairs. "Do tell us what happened, Ben. We're perishing."

"Nothing," Ben said softly, sadly, then looking up he said, "except that I made the team," and he ran to his mother and his family screamed out their relief.

Chapter 21.

It was six in the evening on the first Friday in December. The sky was clear and dark and bright with stars. A moon of cold silver shone on the river in a brilliantly luminous band. When the light reached the river's edge, it betrayed the last dying green of salt marsh before dropping lightly into the forests across the river from Ravenel, losing itself as it fingered its way from branch to branch and from leaf to leaf. On this night, the moon burned like metal.