The Great Santini Part 5

"Sam Pancoast and Ollie Oliver are stationed in Ravenel. Rocky Green's in El Toro. His wife left him six months ago to run away with a twenty-two-year-old corporal in his squadron. Rocky's got the kids."

"Poor kids."

The conversation centered around the Marine Corps, moving from one old friend to another, men and women they had been stationed with, whose destinies had crossed again and again. The fraternity of Marine fighter pilots was small, intimate, and exceedingly close. The year's absence from the military had put Lillian somewhat behind in following the lives of some of her friends. Transfers were constant among all of them, and with both Lillian and Bull it was a peremptory requirement of their nomadism that they keep a vigilant eye on the travels of their peers. The two of them talked very little of politics, literature, or the arts. Most of their conversation was of the Corps or of their own family.

Ben shifted uncomfortably on the other side of the car. The sun was pouring in the car directly on his face. He heard his father say that they had been out of Georgia for a half hour. Out of Georgia, Ben thought. "Into South Carolina."

Georgia born, Ben felt a strong kinship to the blood red earth his father hated, loved the fragrant land he saw mostly in night pa.s.sages, whose air was filled with country music and the virile smells of crops and farm machinery possessing the miles between towns. It was the one place he could hold to, fix upon, identify as belonging to him. He was rooted in Georgia because of the seal on his birth certificate. He lived there only when his father went overseas, but that made no difference to him. No matter how hard he tried, he never developed any imperishable allegiances to the washed-out, bloodless Marine bases where he had lived for most of his seventeen years. It was difficult to engender fealty for any geographical point when he had dwelt in four apartments, six houses, two trailers, and one quonset hut in his forced enlistment in the family of a Marine officer. Every house was a temporary watering place where warriors gathered for training and the perfection of their grim art before the tents were struck again. He longed for a sense of place, of belonging, and of permanence. He wanted to live in one house, grow old in one neighborhood, and wanted friends whose faces did not change yearly. He renewed his tenuous claim on Georgia with every visit to his grandmother's house and with each dash through the countryside following the necklace of Marine bases strung through the swamplands of the Carolinas and Virginia.

Rising on one elbow, Ben addressed a question to the front seat. "When do ya'll think we'll get there?"

"Ya'll?" Bull roared. "Ya'll isn't a d.a.m.n word. What's this 'ya'll' stuff? I go overseas for twelve months and I come back to my boys all talking like grits."

"Ya'll is perfect grammar, Ben darling," Lillian objected. "It's perfect and it's precise."

"Don't use that word when you're addressing me. You got to realize, Lillian, that a southern accent sounds dumb anywhere outside of the Mason-Dixon grit line."

"I think it sounds cultivated. Anyway, you've managed to make sure none of the children have a southern accent."

It was true. None of Bull Meecham's children had accents. Their speech was not flavored with the cadences of the South, the slurred rhythms of the region where they had spent their entire lives. Every time one of his children made a sound that was recognizably southern, Bull would expurgate that sound from his child's tongue on the spot. Though the Marine Corps put its bases in the South, he could never accustom himself to the sad fact that he was inevitably raising southern children. He could exorcise the language of the South, but he could not purify his children of the experience that tied them forever to the South, to the strange separateness, the private ident.i.ty of the land which nourished and enriched their childhoods.

"Let's see what else has gone to pot since the Big Dad has been gone," Bull announced. "What is the capital of Montana, Karen?"

"I just woke up, Daddy," Karen protested.

"I didn't ask you for a speech. I just asked a question."

"Bismarck," she answered after thinking for a moment.

"Wrong. You're supposed to know them all."

"Helena," Matt said.

"Right, Matt."

"Here's another one, Karen. This will be a chance to redeem yourself."

"It's too early in the morning, Daddy. I don't feel like playing 'Capitals.' "

"Too bad," he answered. "What's the capital of Idaho?"

"Just a minute. Don't tell me. Let me think about that one."

"You ought to know it right off the bat, girlsey," he said.

"Boise," she screamed.

"Yeah, but I gave you a hint."

"Mary Anne," Bull said, "what's the capital of Uruguay?"

"Montevideo."

"Ben, the capital of Afghanistan."

"Kabul."

"Good, good. I'll tell you kids something right now. You are lucky to be part of a Marine Corps family. There are no kids in America as well trained in geography as you. You've been to more places than civilian kids even know about. Travel is the best education in the world."

"Sugah," Lillian cooed, "the reason the children know all those capitals is because you threatened to kill them if they didn't learn them."

"It's called motivation, Lillian," Bull answered, grinning.

Ben sat back against his pillow thinking about what his father had just said. Then he said, "We sure have lived in some of the great cities of the world, Dad. Triangle, Virginia. Jacksonville, Havelock, and New Bern, North Carolina. Meridian, Pensacola, and now Ravenel, South Carolina. You can't get much luckier than that."

"I met some Air Force brats in Atlanta. Now they do some good traveling. They'd lived in London, Hamburg, Rome, all over Europe. They'd skied in the Alps. They'd seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One of the boys spoke three languages. All of them had been to operas and gone to symphonies. I wonder how the Ravenel symphony measures up to the London Philharmonic," Mary Anne said.

"I can tell you all you need to know about Europa," Bull said. "I just spent a whole year inspecting the continent."

"Did you go to the Louvre, Daddy?" Mary Anne asked.

"Sure, I went in to check out the Mona Lisa. You can stand anywhere in the room where that picture is and the Mona Lisa's eyes will follow you. Leonardo Da Vinci did a commendable job with that portrait."

"You really think so, Dad?" Ben said, winking at Mary Anne.

"The old Dad soaked up quite a bit of culture while he was sportin' around the capitals of Europe."

"You're just too modest to flaunt it, aren't you, dear?" Lillian said softly.

"That's right. Modesty is one of my worst faults," Bull shouted, laughing, enjoying himself in the last fifty miles of his journey.

"Hey, Dad," Matt said, "why doesn't the Marine Corps send its families overseas sometimes?"

"They're probably afraid that Marine kids would whip up on Air Force kids."

"Could you imagine living in Gay Paree, speaking French like natives," Ben wondered aloud.

"I can say h.e.l.lo, good-bye, and kiss my f.a.n.n.y in eight languages," Bull boasted.

"Why, Bull," Lillian said, "I didn't know you were multilingual."

"I pick up languages real fast," he replied, missing the irony in her voice.

"If you'd only work a little harder on your native tongue," she said.

"Very funny."

Mary Anne spoke out brightly, extravagantly. "Let's talk some more about how lucky we are to be military brats."

"I'm so lucky that I get to go to four high schools instead of just one," Ben declared with feigned enthusiasm.

"And I, the lovely Mary Anne Meecham whose beauty is celebrated in song and legend ..." Mary Anne began.

"Boy is that a laugh," Matt said.

"Quiet, midget, before I feed you to a spider."

"Mom," Matt called.

"We just have a little ways to go, children. So try to get along."

"Or else I'm gonna have to b.u.t.t a few heads," the colonel glowered through his sungla.s.ses.

"Anyway," Mary Anne continued, "I'm lucky enough to be absolutely friendless through an entire school year until the month of May. Then I make lots of new friends. Then I'm lucky enough to have Daddy come home with a new set of orders. Then I'm lucky enough to move in the summer and lucky enough to be absolutely friendless when school starts back in the fall."

"I know you're kidding," Lillian said to Mary Anne. "And I know all of you are upset about leaving Atlanta."

"Tough toenails," Bull growled.

"But these are some wonderful parts about growing up in a Marine family. You learn how to meet people. You learn how to go up to people and make their acquaintance. You know how to act in public. You have excellent manners and it's easy for you to be charming. I've had many compliments about how polite my children are. This is the benefit of growing up in the military and the gift you take with you no matter where you live. You know how to act."

"But the main thing, hogs," Bull said, "you get to hang around me and all my good qualities will rub off on you."

His family groaned in chorus and the colonel threw back his head and bellowed with laughter.

"I can't wait to get out of this car," Karen said after a silent five-mile stretch.

Matthew added, "I've got to go number one. My teeth are floating."

"You should have gone when we stopped for the train" Bull said.

"I didn't have to go then," Matthew replied.

The car was silent as the Meecham family moved across the bridge that crossed the Combaha.s.see River, toward their fourth home in four years. All hills had died in this last slant toward the sea. Stands of palmettos and live oaks met the car as the road ribboned out straight in its last sprint to the barrier islands. But the most remarkable feature of the land was the green stretches of marsh fringing the rivers and inlets that spilled and intersected through the whole landscape. These were vast, airy marshes, some of them thirty miles wide, as splendid as fields of ripened wheat, yet as desolate in some ways as the dark side of the moon. Every eye in the car filled up with marsh, moved by it, stirred, yet uncomprehending. It was an alien geography that thrust outreaching along the water's edge; a land of a thousand creeks, brown and turgid, but rich in the smell of the sea.

Lillian knew about marshes from girlhood summers spent on the Georgia coast.

The Chevrolet crossed a bridge that announced the entry into Ravenel County.

"Thirty more miles, hogs."

"Will you tell us about the new house, Bull? I'm perishing from curiosity," Lillian spoke.

"It's a surprise," Bull gloated.

"I gotta go number one real bad," Matthew said.

"Tough t.i.tty," Bull answered, his sungla.s.ses eyelessly hunting for Matthew in the rearview mirror. "You should have gone when we stopped for the train."

"Cross your legs, darling," Lillian advised. "And offer it up for a good intention."

"Like the conversion of Russia," Ben suggested.

The air had a fetid, tropical feel to it as it pa.s.sed through the car: the land was flat, lush and brilliantly green. On the road's gra.s.sy fringes, black men and women, sometimes alone but often in lethargic twos or silhouetted in triplicate, walked the long stretches between shacks and cabins where plumes of morning smoke trailed above rusty tin roofs and smells of breakfast spilled from open windows and entered the rush of air that caromed about the Meecham car.

"Bacon," Lillian moaned, as the car pa.s.sed one small house. "I would rather eat bacon than a filet mignon."

Bull grunted, a monosyllable meaningless in any language, but an audible a.s.sent that he had heard and understood her. He was tiring now and his partic.i.p.ation in conversation would diminish with each mile pa.s.sed. The children were staring out the windows. As strangers, they entered Ravenel with sharpened, critical eyes a.s.similating every image that flashed by them, so that what they saw was the addendum of ten million impressions that registered briefly and almost tangentially in their minds like flags of undiscovered countries: each image a single frame of memory whose life span was light quick and heartbeat fast: each a mystery clamoring for preservation, for life, for admittance to the vaults of the brain where remembrance burns. Each child in the car hunted for the familiar; the sights that would relate Ravenel to the other towns that had served as temporary homes.

A jet pa.s.sed overhead; the sound poured into the car like a liquid. Leaning his head out the window, Bull scanned the treeline for a glimpse of the plane. "That's the sound of freedom," he said. It was a sound familiar to all of them, its thunder rumbling across them as though they were long sheets of gla.s.s. It was a legitimate sound of home, one that would remind the Meecham children of their youth more strongly than the singing bells of ice cream trucks or the cadences of lullabies.

Moments later, Mary Anne began to cry. It was soundless weeping free from hysterics, unrelated even to grief. Her eyes glistened as the tears rolled down her face in clearly defined salt creeks.

"What's the boo-hooing about?" Colonel Meecham stormed at his rearview mirror, catching and holding the image of his weeping daughter. "You better get her to stop, Lil. I can't stand boo-hooing."

"Get a Kleenex to wipe your face, Mary Anne. There's nothing to cry about. You've got to give it a chance."

"I gave it a chance," Mary Anne replied miserably. "I hate this town too."

"You'll learn to love it. Give it time. If I were you, I'd say, 'I'm going to take this town by storm. I'm going to go out of my way to meet people and I'm going to be the most popular young lady in Ravenel by the time I leave here.' That's the spirit I'd take."

"Just get her to turn off the waterworks, Lillian. We don't need a speech."

"I'm trying, Bull. Just give me a chance. Mary Anne is just upset about moving. So are all the kids."

"Tell the hogs too bad from the Big Dad. I don't care if they're upset or not."

Mary Anne searched her purse for a Kleenex, but pulled out instead a teaspoon pirated from her mother's silver service. Crying gently, she held the spoon under her eyes, carefully catching each tear, preserving their sad silver in the hollow of the spoon. "I'm real depressed," she said finally. "I'm going to hate this town. I wish I were dead."

Bull replied, "You may get your wish if you don't cut the weepy scene."

When the tears filled the spoon to overflowing, when the edge of the spoon brimmed with the trembling residue of her grief, Mary Anne carefully flicked her wrist and the warm liquid flew the length of the car, only slightly dispersed, and splashed against Bull's head.

"I ain't believing somebody spit on me," Bull bellowed in disbelief, his hand feeling his hair. "Has someone gone nuts?"

"Excuse me, Daddy dear. The spoon slipped," Mary Anne protested innocently. Three more tears lit into the spoon. Aiming carefully, Mary Anne flicked them on her father's neck.

Lillian broke in, "Remember, darling, what I told you. If you have a lemon, make lemonade. You have to give a town a chance to grow on you. You have to open yourself up to a town. Be willing to take chances. You've been in the Corps long enough to know that."

"I am not in the Corps," Mary Anne said to her mother, tossing another sun-bright tear at her father's head; it missed, pa.s.sing over his right ear and splashing down on his arm where it lay trapped on the dense red hairs of his arm.

"I ain't believing she's bombing me with tears, Lillian, and you can't stop her," Bull said. "You want me to stop her?"

"Stop hitting your father this very instant, young lady," Lillian flared. But there was not much menace behind Lillian's attempts at discipline.

The next tear hit Matthew on the forehead.

"Weirdo just hit me with a tear, Mama."