The Great Santini (61 page)

"Sir," Brannon said," you are fat."

Odum rose from his seat, walked around the table, grabbing a fresh cigar as he went, and pulled up a chair in front of Brannon. He straddled the chair backward and stared into Brannon's eyes as though he were a carnivore studying food. Brannon stared back and the two men hung suspended in a moment of unanimated hostility until Odum began to roar like a lion at Brannon. Again and again, louder and louder, Odum would unleash a thunderous feline howl, a cat sound, unbridled, fulminating from deep within the man until Brannon, a servant to the wishes and moods of his fellow pilots, began to roar back, and the waiters who were clearing silver and china from the table witnessed two Marines in full dress snarling and hissing at each other like animals.

Until Odum suddenly stopped and offered Brannon the cigar. Hesitantly, Brannon accepted and offered Odum a cigar from his section of the mess. Odum struck a match, lit Brannon's cigar, then threw the burning match into Brannon's lap. As Brannon extinguished the match, Odum began eating his cigar, taking large bites and swallowing the tobacco with the relish of a gourmand. Brannon, now bound to play out whatever mad charade that Odum wished, dutifully and with utmost gravity began to consume his cigar after he had carefully extinguished it in his water glass.

At this moment the gavel of the Mess President resounded through the room and Bull Meecham released all pilots from the strictures and controls of the formal Mess with these words:" Gentlemen, will you join me at the bar."

Now was the time of hard drinking, rising volubility, and the games of pilots. Bull was drinking martinis out of either hand. A projector started up and a stag movie flickered grainily on a wall opposite the bar. A naked woman smiling concupiscently at the camera fornicated with a donkey, a German shepherd, a Negro, and her own finger. Sitting at the bar, Odum and Brannon arm-wrestled while members of the squadron slapped down money on the bar betting on their favorites. Veins stood out in bas-relief on the necks of both men but neither arm moved more than two or three degrees to the right or left of the fulcrum point. Four bartenders moved in an unrehearsed dance as they tried to provide drinks to the impatient Marines who screamed at them above the broadening dimensions of pandemonium loose in the Officers' Club. A line of young pilots were trying their skill at throwing down flaming hookers. They each ordered a glass of Courvoisier brandy, lit the fumes that rose invisibly above the lip of the glass, watched the blue flame until it was burning brightly, then, picking up the glass, they tossed the liquid down their throats. If they were good, a small blue flame would still be burning at the bottom of the glass when they slammed it down on the bar.

At midnight Apache Bill and Blue Balls Conners began wetting down a long slick black table with Coors beer and issued a call to all pilots with hair on their asses to prepare for carrier landings. A line of pilots began to form at the opposite end of the room, many of them removing their shoes and socks. Bull Meecham was the first in line, chugging what was left of his two martinis, then throwing the glasses the length of the room into the brick fireplace. Two dozen glasses followed his in a bright shower of crystal.

Several lieutenants rolled up tablecloths to act as landing cables and stood on either side of the far end of the beer-slick table. There were three landing cables that could stop a plane from rolling off the carrier deck into the ocean. Apache Bill found a huge summer fan which he placed at the very end of the carrier deck with the blades of the fan an added inducement for pilots to make sure they hooked onto one of the three landing cables.

"There's a bad fucking wind you have to land into, you bunch of Bull's pussies," Apache Bill yelled. "If you don't hook onto the last cable, then you get a bad case of the chicken shits."

Captain Johnson stood on the chair with two napkins in his outstretched arms. Blue Balls had designated him as the Landing Signal Officer. Blue Balls himself stood near the middle of the table with a bucket in his hands; opposite him stood Apache Bill with another bucket.

Bull straightened his arms out behind him in the angle of an F-8, then ran as fast as he could toward the table keeping his eye affixed on the arms of Captain Johnson. The noise was deafening as he neared the point where he would leave his feet and slide the entire length of the table, hooking his feet into one of the landing cables before being chopped up by the fan. Right before he jumped, Johnson gave him a cut. He catapulted to the center of the table, his arms behind him, and shot down the table with extraordinary speed, his eyes filling up with the vision of silver blades waiting for him like a mouth.

As he passed Apache Bill, a bucket of water was thrown on him. "Rain squall," the men screamed.

As he passed Blue Balls in a blur, he felt the sting of ice cubes flung into his face and the voice of Colonel Conners warning, "Hailstorm," and still he watched the blades and felt himself pass over the first cable, and the second, and lowering his feet quickly his toes dug into the table and his feet hooked into the third cable right before he slid into the teeth of the fan. The third cable stopped him dead. He rose, blowing kisses to his squadron, then hopped down to watch the next pilot racing at full speed toward the landing deck.

At three in the morning, Bull ordered his entire squadron to line up single file behind him. Three of the men had passed out and could not obey this direct if slurringly articulated order. When he looked behind him and saw a wobbling, pixilated mass of men doing their best to imitate a line, he barked," Follow me, hogs. Follow your C.O. and that is an order."

Bull marched them through the bar, past the dining room, out past the barbecue pits, the tennis courts, and toward the swimming pool. He led them to the deep end of the pool, mounted the diving board, and, still marching, shouting the cadences of Quantico, Bull marched off the end of the board followed by every pilot in 367 and the three guests who had flown to Ravenel for the celebration.

At four in the morning, Bull Meecham arrived home. Lillian awaited him in the kitchen.

Ben awoke and heard the unsteady voice of his father raised in a song that in the history of late-night homecomings was a traditional chant of warning. Over the house, the song hung from the ceiling, each word roach-faced and menacingly out of season.

"Silent Night, Holy Night,

"All is Calm, All is Bright."

And then he lay there as the danse macabre of the demons of fear that lived in his body began in earnest. And he heard his mother's voice, the voice of Lillian, the voice of the prettiest girl in Atlanta, Georgia, toughened, forged into a blade, a voice of a lady-in-waiting who had sallied forth to duel with the mailed knight crossing a moat that separated them. He heard the voice of the woman created by a marriage that had its own surprises and labyrinths, its own shadows and secret minotaurs. The song rose in volume, strangely bled of Christmas or of celebration. Now, at this moment, Ben thought, this song is a summons to battle, and as his senses sharpened in the dark, he could hear the forces of wrath gathering around the house and he knew that this would be one of the bad times. He girded himself and knew this would be a conflict that would extend the thresholds of his fear of his father and his cowardice before the plowman who had granted him life. He would act bravely; he would force himself to act bravely. But he knew. Even brave acts could not allay the fear: the consuming fear that ruled him whenever he had to face Bull Meecham boy to man. As he lay in his bed, he heard Karen's door opening and the sound of small, frantic feet on the stairs. Karen is first down, Ben thought. Good for Karen. And then Matthew's door and Mary Anne's door opened simultaneously and he could imagine Mary Anne straightening her glasses and Matthew's fury contained in that small body as they ran to help their mother, as they ran toward the song that always meant the same thing. But Ben knew that the only child who could influence the battle at all was lying in bed awaiting the gift of courage. Then he heard his mother begin to scream at his father and Ben thought," Don't, Mom. Don't fight him now. Let it go."

Then he heard Karen scream out," Quit hurting Mama," and Ben was out of bed, borne down the stairs by the old Irish version of the divine wind, by the blood of the kamikaze, and he was running now as he heard Mary Anne cry out his name, and he entered the kitchen in time to see his father hideously drunk and laughing. He had Lillian pinned against one wall holding her by the throat as she tried to scratch out his eyes. Matt was holding on to one leg, trying to lift it off the floor. Mary Anne was biting his wrist, trying to pull one arm away from her mother's throat and Karen was hitting his back with fists that could inflict no pain. Of the noises loose in the room, of the screams, of the words, Bull's laughter was the most ominous. And his eyes were wild with the drink. The dragon was loose in his eyes. And Ben came with momentum, driven by fear as he entered the kitchen as a footsoldier bound by the rites of a perverted chivalry written into the family's history. Each time he came to fight his father only one thing had changed: each time Ben was larger and stronger than he had been the time before. With his head down he drove one hundred and sixty pounds of sonflesh into his father's stomach. He pumped his legs hard and felt his father's weight shift and the man stumble. Bull's grip was wrenched loose from Lillian's throat and Ben saw Mary Anne and Matt fly off and away as he drove his father into the refrigerator. But then he realized that the moment of surprise had slipped away forever and that he could not take his father to the ground. And a new dimension entered the combat: a father's awareness of a growing son, the son as challenger, the son as threat, the son as successor, the son as man. But before Bull could turn to the business of Ben, Lillian came at him again, came for his eyes with a five-bladed hand, but he backhanded her and she slumped against the counter, blood spilling from her bottom lip, blood and tears commingling as in a sacrament. Then Bull turned on Ben and his hands went around Ben's throat, both hands tightened, gained control, and Ben was lifted off the floor by his throat. Then Mary Anne sank her teeth into her father's right arm, but Bull lashed out with his right arm, holding Ben suspended by one hand. Mary Anne crashed off the kitchen table, her glasses shattering on the floor, but she came back across the room, running blindly, going into battle against a blurred enemy. Matt received a slap to the face that spun him to the floor where he lay for a moment crying because he was small and because he did not matter and because he could not hurt the man who was hurting him. Then, for a second, there were Ben and his father, eye to eye, as intimate as lovers, and the fingers tightened on the throat and Ben gagged. Slowly, Bull took Ben's head and began slamming it into the wall. Once. Twice. Three times. Then the family was on him again, resurrected by the sound of Ben's skull meeting the wall. They came at him from four sides and they came at him with teeth and nails and tears and the fury of four small nations who have nothing left to lose. Bull dropped Ben and stood there, his hands down beside him. He no longer tried to fight, but acted stunned as if for the first time there was some illumination, some comprehension of the enormity of the resistance in a once placid kingdom. Bull stood there accepting the small hurts of the border skirmishes waged on four frontiers of his body. Ben saw the dragon melt out of Bull's eyes and there came a moment when Ben could have hit his father in the face with a fist that was a lifetime in coming. There was nothing to stop him and he could feel the fist tighten and the punch being telegraphed for eighteen years and he almost sang for joy and through the membrane of his hatred he kicked like a fetus and he prepared to hit the face and make it bleed. But he could not. He would have if he could, but he could not. Though he wanted to hurt this man like he had been hurt, like he had known hurt, he could not hit him. He could not hit the father; he could not hit the face of the father that would be the face of his father for all time.

In a wilderness of screaming and weeping, in a wasteland of his own creation, Bull shook off the inconsequential warriors that swarmed around him and stumbled out of the kitchen, down the back stairs, and into the night.

They listened to the screen door slam. They lay on the floor and wept. Mary Anne was holding a hand over one eye while Karen leaned against her shoulder and cried. Matthew's face was buried in his hands and sobs burst out of him without a sound. The weeping had an accidentally contrapuntal harmony, a symphony of grief in the blood-stained kitchen. For ten minutes they sat in their appointed places where they had been flung in the last moments before the furious exit.

It was Mary Anne who broke the silence when she called out to the blurs on the floor around her.

"Who's the biggest jerk of all?!" she shouted. But no one answered or knew how to answer.

The family did not recognize immediately the nature of the game.

"I said, 'Who's the biggest jerk of all?'" she cried out again.

This time the family was ready, primed for the question and they screamed out," The Great Santini!"

And Mary Anne continued in a voice that broke into fragments as she spoke," Who stinks the worst? Who is a big dope? And who is made out of puke and fish feces?"

"The Great Santini!"

"Who wears a brassiere and women's panties all the time?"

"The Great Santini!"

"Who's a Communist and a homosexual and probably passing for white?"

"The Great Santini!"

Then they were laughing, the species of laughter that often comes as a bridesmaid of violence. It comes for no reason or from a geography of the spirit that is an untracked and foreign land. It was Lillian who began to laugh and it spread to her children and possessed them, a laughter one part hysteria and one part relief. It was an affirmation that the fight was over and that they had banded together, fought for each other, bled for each other, and that they would fight anything that moved, anything that lived, anything that entered the house of Meecham to wage war against a Meecham. Even if that thing was the source and originator of that house.