Going All the Way (26 page)

Sonny felt much better after the call. He was sure the phone had rung at that particular time because he was already going ahead on his own with constructive plans, not depending on his friend. That's the way things worked—if you sat around waiting for something to happen, it never did, but if you forgot about it and made yourself get on with things, what you wanted to happen would happen. Sonny felt rather pleased with himself and wondered if his insight might not make a fine, memorable essay, the wise sort of thing that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Maybe he would try it sometime.

In the meantime he got on his bathing suit and snuck outside, behind the breezeway on the side away from the street, where he spread out a blanket and lay down to get some sun. Buddie's remark had gotten to him. He hated to go to a pool or the lake or any place white as a sheet when everyone else was already tan, and he figured maybe he could get a secret little coat of coloring by making himself lie out behind the house for an hour a day.

He wondered what the secret thing was Gunner wanted to show him, and suspected it was probably a painting. It would probably show great promise and mark Gunner as a rising young Picasso. That was the kind of luck that guy had. Sonny tried not to feel resentful about it. He turned over from his stomach onto his back. His feet stuck out over the blanket and the grass tickled them. The sun was uncomfortably hot, and Sonny had to squint, even behind his dark glasses. He looked at his watch and found that only seven minutes had passed. Son of a bitch. He rolled back over on his stomach, closing his eyes and trying to keep his mind from falling into memories of old frustrations and failures, but it was hard to control the damn thing. It seemed like there was a movie running in his mind all the time, a movie that showed all kinds of terrible shit he had done and had happened to him and that he might do and might happen to him in the future, and Sonny couldn't seem to stop the movie when his mind didn't have other things to distract it, like talking or reading or watching TV. After a while he felt some perspiration on the back of his legs and decided it was time to go on. He had only been out twelve minutes, but he couldn't lie there anymore. He went upstairs and took a long, lukewarm shower, sitting down in the stall and closing his eyes so that the water made a safe, enclosed world.

Gunner called a couple days later and said he was ready to show Sonny what he'd been working on and would like to meet him at the Key that afternoon around three. That seemed a funny place to look at a painting, a bar that was dark even in the brightest part of the day, but Sonny didn't ask any questions. He put on a short-sleeved sport shirt, the kind you didn't have to tuck in, and he let it hang out over his khakis so no one could see that the top button was open. He couldn't get it buttoned anymore.

The day was bright hot, and as usual it took a little while to get your eyes focused to the bleary afternoon darkness inside the bar. There was an old guy sitting near the front, wearing a checked shirt and suspenders and an old felt hat. He was muttering to himself. Aside from the old guy and the bartender, there only seemed to be one other person in the place, farther to the back. Sonny walked toward him, blinking and squinting. Even when he got right up to him, staring him right in the face, he had to ask, “Gunner?”

The man smiled. “It is I, Agent X-Twenty-seven,” he said.

It was only his voice that affirmed his identity for sure. Sonny fumbled a chair out from the table and sat down.

“You betray a certain shock,” Gunner said, sounding pleased.

“Yeh, that's right. I do, I am,” Sonny said, which was putting it mildly.

Gunner had a beard.

Not the kind of beard he used to grow by just not shaving a couple days before a football game so he'd look more tough and mean. This was a real, honest-to-goodness beard, bristling out of his cheeks and chin, a full-scale bush of a beard like the ones that Lincoln and Jesus and the Smith Brothers had.

It was one thing for guys like Jesus and Lincoln and the Smith Brothers to have beards. They were dead. Besides, they lived in times when other people had beards, too. But this was not such a time, not by a long shot. Having a beard in the summer of 1954 was like running around without any clothes on or passing out copies of the Communist Manifesto or reading a dirty book in a crowded bus. It was asking for trouble. As far as Sonny knew, the only
living
people who had beards were poor bums who couldn't afford a razor and the guys who lived at the House of David, which was some kind of religious sect up in Michigan. People didn't mind the House of David guys having beards because they were obviously harmless crackpots, and sort of funny. The House of David had a baseball team and it was quite a big attraction because people couldn't imagine how guys could have beards and also play baseball at the same time.

“What'll ya have?” Gunner asked.

“Huh?”

“You want a beer?”

“Oh, yeh. I'll have a Bud.”

“Bring the man a Bud, would you please?” Gunner called to the bartender, just as if nothing was wrong. When the bartender brought the beer, he looked gloweringly at Gunner and then suspiciously at Sonny, as if they were some kind of criminals, or worse, maybe Commies. It made Sonny nervous. Being a friend of a guy who had a beard was the next worse thing to actually having one yourself.

“How does it look?” Gunner asked.

“The beard?”

“What else?”

“Well, it's a swell beard, all right. If you want to have a beard.”

“What's wrong with having a beard?”

“I didn't say anything was wrong with it. If you want to have it.”

“Well, since I have it, that must mean I want to have it.”

“Yeh, but how come you want to have it?” Sonny asked.

Gunner swigged some beer from right out of the bottle. It was evidently easier to drink from the bottle if you had a beard. Less chance of spilling.

“It's a theory I got,” Gunner said. He was always getting theories. “The beard itself is neutral,” he explained. “There's nothing good or bad about a beard by itself, right? It's just a lot of whiskers. Anyone could grow them.”

Sonny nodded, but suddenly wondered if he could grow a beard himself, even if he wanted to. Not that he'd ever dream of doing it, but he feared that if he actually tried it might just come out fuzz, little-boy fuzz, instead of real manly bristles.

“The thing is, not many people have them anymore,” Gunner went on. “So if you have one it makes you different. It makes people treat you different even though you're the same person. It's the closest thing a guy like me could come to being a foreigner, here, in my own home town, knowing what a foreigner would feel like here, how he might be treated, what it would be like.”

“What do you think you'll find out?”

“I don't even know yet,” Gunner said, and then he smiled. “But I will.”

It kind of gave Sonny the creeps, though he didn't want to let on. It seemed like just his luck, Gunner growing a goddam beard right when Sonny got to be his friend. Hanging around in Indianapolis with Gunner Casselman made you feel special, like you were somebody, but now that he had gone and grown a beard it could only make you feel silly and a little bit scared. Sonny was afraid that Gunner could tell he felt that way, and he didn't want to show it. In a way the beard was a test of their friendship, and Sonny was determined to pass. He was damned if he'd let himself fink out like he usually did when he was worried about what “everyone” thought.

They had four beers apiece, talking about other stuff, just as if nothing was wrong, and Sonny had the guts to ask Gunner to come on in the house when he drove him home, even though he knew his parents would probably be there.

Mrs. Burns jumped back like she'd seen a vampire.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It's me,” said Gunner.

“It's Gunner,” Sonny explained, “with a beard.”

Mr. Burns came into the den, carrying part of his newspaper, and stared at Gunner. “Name of God,” he said.

Mrs. Burns laughed nervously and asked Gunner, “Did you join the House of David?”

“No, ma'am,” Gunner said cheerfully, “just grew a beard.”

“Is that the new fad?” Mr. Burns asked.

“No, sir, I don't think so,” Gunner said.

“Well,” Mrs. Burns said philosophically, “to each his own.”

She really wasn't that philosophical about it, though.

After dinner, Mr. Burns went upstairs with a migraine, and Alma asked Sonny to come sit with her in the den. She took her purse from off the end table, put it on her lap, and opened it, drawing out a folded-up bill she kept in her hand. Sonny wondered if she was going to try to get him to tell her something. A sawbuck for your thoughts. When Sonny was a kid, she was always asking him, “A penny for your thoughts,” and if he told her something, she really gave him a penny. Once he told her he thought Mr. Burns treated her mean, and she gave him a nickel. When he told her something she didn't like, some thought that was critical of her, she'd grudgingly give him the penny but add unpleasantly, “You're getting more like your father every day.”

“Your friend is quite a character,” she said, trying to smile.

“Who, Gunner?”

“I guess he's a real individualist.”

“I guess.”

Sonny shrugged, trying to stay calm.

“Are all the kids growing beards now?”

Sonny took a deep breath. “We're not ‘kids,' Mother. And I don't know. I don't know what anyone's doing.”

“Are
you?
”

“Am I
what
, for Chrissake?”

“Please don't swear at me,” she said, her voice beginning to quake. “I know you don't love me anymore but—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop saying that stuff!”

“Just tell me then,” she sniffed, “if you're going to do it.”

“Do
what?
”

The tears started down, and she gulped out the awful question. “Are you going to grow a big dirty scratchy old beard like your friend!”

“No, Mother. Please. Please don't cry.”

She took a wadded piece of Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “Do you promise?”

“No!” Sonny shouted. “Goddam it, I
don't
promise. I'm just not going to grow one, that's all. I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have to promise anything.”

“You don't have to yell at me.”

Sonny closed his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm going up to my room. I'm not mad, I just want to go up and read.”

He started for the stairs, and his mother said, “Wait—here.”

She was holding out the folded-up bill. Maybe it was supposed to be a bribe for not growing a beard, and he wanted to tell her to take it and cram it. He knew he was getting low again, though. After the afternoon's four beers he only had some change left. He walked over to her, not looking straight at her, and grabbed the bill. He stuck it in his pocket without looking at it or unfolding it.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I love you, Sonny.”

“Me too,” he mumbled.

He went upstairs and shut the door. Flopping down on his bunk, he closed his eyes and tried to turn his mind off, tried to stop the tortuous movie from starting to roll in his mind.

Jack Sprat would eat no fat

Wife would eat no lean

Together diddle diddle

They licked the platter clean

He sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled the wadded bill from his pocket. It was a ten. It would buy a lot of beers at the Red Key.

7

A couple days later, on one of those real July scorchers, Gunner called and told Sonny to get on his swimming trunks, he'd buzz by and pick him up in about a half an hour. Sonny had been in the den with the blinds closed and the air-conditioner on, spooning up an improvised Black Cow he had made by putting fudge-walnut ice cream into a Pepsi because there wasn't any plain vanilla in the house. The fudge-walnut didn't go too well with the Pepsi, but still it was frothy and cold and soothing.

“It's pretty hot out,” Sonny said.

“Huh? That's the point. Only thing to do on a day like this is hit the water.”

“I guess,” Sonny said.

“Fuckin-A. See ya.”

When Gunner got a plan in mind, there wasn't any stopping him, you had to go along. Sonny slurped up the last of the Black Cow and shlunked up to his room to get his trunks. He had only lain out on the blanket behind the house two days, once for twelve minutes and once for seventeen, and he didn't even have a tinge of pink. He looked white and bloaty in his bathing suit, like some kind of medical specimen. That was one reason he never liked to go swimming. The other thing was that, even though he could swim all right and wasn't afraid of drowning, he had never been able to learn to dive. He always had to sneak into the pool, when no one was looking, or horse around with someone until they pushed him in or he could fall in, pretending he'd lost his balance. Once he'd managed to get in the pool, he had to do all his swimming then and there, because if he got out he would have to go through the whole complicated ruse of getting back in respectably, and it just wasn't worth it.

Gunner, of course, was one of those guys who was in and out of the pool all the time, running along the edge and diving straight and flat with just enough of a knife edge to cut the water instead of slap it, taking a couple of laps, then hauling himself out, dripping and snorting, invigorated by the water; he would sooner or later saunter up to the diving board, test it with some springy bounces, and soar up into an arc and a clean dive, hardly making a splash as he slipped through the surface of the water. Everyone knew the story of how Gunner entered a city swim meet the summer after college and took second place in the hundred-yard free-style, without any real practice or official training. The guys who had worked out all winter at the Y were plenty pissed off.