The Great Santini (37 page)

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 passed on 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. Well 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 hell 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 grassless 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 Cokes!" and the Old Dominion Kiwanis sprinted toward the Coke stand. Taking Ben into the trees beyond the Park, the Coach poured two fingers of bourbon into Ben's Coke 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 Coke 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 Coke, 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 fearstunned 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 Coke 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 Cokes, 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 God, you let him die, let Coach Murphy die, let Dave die, without my thanks, my thanks, my thanks.

As Ben passed 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.

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.

In the Meecham house, Ben descended the stairs carrying his gym bag. His hair was wet and brushed back. Outside, in the backyard, he could hear Matthew shooting set shots at the outdoor goal. His mother and two sisters were sitting before a large fire. The room smelled of oak, and flame, and December. Entering the room, Ben said to his mother," Mama, I really do need a new gym bag to tote my stuff. You got this one up at Henderson Hall when I was in the eighth grade. That was about a million years ago."

"Your last name is Meecham, sugah," Lillian answered. "It isn't Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, or Carnegie. Your daddy didn't invent Coca-Cola and I didn't recently discover King Solomon's mines."

"It's not like I was asking you to buy me an F-8, Mama. These things only cost a few bucks."

"If I give in for one thing, then the next thing you know, I'll be giving in for everything," his mother replied.

"Why don't you put your uniform in a paper bag, Ben?" Mary Anne said. "After all, we're not Rockefellers."

"We've got a lot of expenses neither of you know about. Your father and I are also trying to save a substantial amount of money each month."

"What are you saving it for?" Karen asked.

"Well," Lillian answered," it's really none of you children's business but if you swear not to let it go any further than this room, I'll tell you. Your father and I are saving money for our dream house."

"Dream house?" Ben said.

"Yes, dream house. I've lived in over twenty houses or apartments since I married your father and I think I deserve a dream house when he retires from the Marine Corps. I want it to be an exquisite, wonderful home that will be included on garden and candlelight tours. I know exactly what it will look like and how it will be furnished. I can see it in my mind as if it were already built. I've been collecting ideas from
Better
Homes
and
Gardens
for over ten years now. There is one thing I can tell you about my dream house: it will be like nothing you have ever seen."

"Does that mean you can't buy us socks or underwear anymore," Ben teased," because of the dream house?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Lillian said.

"Why don't you get the dream house now so we kids can enjoy it too?" Mary Anne said.

"The dream house will be for your father and me. We earned it. It will be lovely and charming and no one will be allowed to lose their temper or to be ugly or to make scenes in the dream house. It will be a place of perfect harmony and people will act sweetly toward each other at all times. There will be no pressure on Bull at all. There will be no Marines around because they tend to bring out the worst in your father. There will be no one around. Just the two of us living in the dream house."

"I've got to get to the game, Mama," Ben said.

"We've got over forty-five minutes, darling. Hold your horses. You're going to turn me into a basket case if you don't relax. Let's go pray at the shrine."

"Oh, brother," Mary Anne moaned.

"You hush, Mary Anne," Karen said," this is the first game."

"Oh," Mary Anne said sarcastically. "Oh, a thousand pardons, little brown-noser. If I'd only known that it was a prayer for the first game. There's nothing in the world as tacky as a basketball game."

"Then you can stay home, darling," Lillian said. "I'd never force you to do anything tacky."

"She wouldn't miss it for the whole world," Karen said.

"That's what you know," Mary Anne said. "I'm going to the game so I can see our golden Apollo here shoot jump shots. Of course, I have to admit that there are other reasons. I like to look at the naked legs of all the boys."

"Mary Anne!" Lillian said.

"It's true. I'm an honest person and I say what's true. But the big reason I want to go to the game is that I enjoy sitting up in the stands hating the guts out of all the cheerleaders."

"You're just jealous because they're prettier than you," Karen said. "I'm going to be a cheerleader when I get old enough, just like Mama was."

"Jealous of cheerleaders? Me?" Mary Anne sneered. "Jealous of Ansley Matthews with her perfect legs and her brain the size of a pea? Jealous of Janice Sanders with her perfect bosom and her brain the size of a bean or Carol Huger with her perfect smile and her brain the size of a BB or Sally Tomlinson with her perfect everything and her brain the size of a chigger's eyeball? I'm not jealous of them. I loathe them. I love just sitting in the stands hating them. They're so disgustingly happy and enthusiastic. They're so peppy. They bounce. I hate girls that bounce."