The Great Santini (64 page)

"This is why you never have any friends, Mary Anne. You're always trying to be so goddam smart and know-it-all."

"When I die, Ben, I want you to eat all my sins just like you're eating that salad there. I want to shoot like a rocket up to heaven. For all eternity, I want to float like a Sputnik around God's head. All because you chowed down on my acts of commission and omission."

"You don't always have to show off what you know," Ben said.

"If I don't show it off, feces face, then who's going to know it?"

"You'll know," Ben answered. "That's what's important. I've always admired quiet people who have achieved a lot much more than I have loud, obnoxious people who brag about their achievements."

"You have?" Mary Anne said sarcastically.

"Keep your voice down," Ben whispered. "People are beginning to notice us."

"I wish they gave a Congressional Medal of Honor for piety. Saint Lillian is the Patron Saint of piety, but you ought to receive some kind of recognition for your efforts. When Saint Lillian is assumed into heaven, then you're going to be a shoo-in for the title of Patron Saint. You're so sweet, Ben, so innocent, so God Damn Christ-like. God missed a good bet not having you born in Bethlehem."

"Why are you attacking me? I'm the one who's taking you to the Junior-Senior."

"I'm attacking you, Ben, because you are the one who is taking me to the Junior-Senior. There are two things about you I can't stand, golden boy. One is your sickening fake modesty. The other is your goodness. Just like Dad can't stop drinking, you can't stop being good. You can't be satisfied with being an average nice guy, you've got to be the nicest guy that anyone will ever meet. But I've noticed that you're always good in ways where people can see it and compliment you on it. And by far the best thing you've ever done, the grandest act of all, the crowning glory is taking your fat, freckled sister to the Junior-Senior. Long Live Saint Benjamin! Who asked you to take me? Mom or Dad?"

"No one," Ben said, cutting the steak just brought by the waiter.

"How noble."

"No one, I said," Ben flared.

"It was just natural sugar-coated goodness. Pure saintliness."

"That's right. I'm beloved of the Lord."

"Let me say one last thing, jock brother, and then I'll become sweet Mary Anne again."

"Sweet Mary Anne? You'll have to introduce me," Ben said, attacking his steak and talking with his mouth full.

"You and Mom can hurt people more with your piety than Dad can ever hurt with his temper. You always know where Dad stands and he knows where he stands, but no one will ever know where Golden Ben and Darling Lillian stand, not even Golden Ben and Darling Lillian," Mary Anne said, ignoring her food. "You know why Dad hits you—not all the time, but sometimes. He sees her piety in a male face and sometimes he can't help but hit it. If he can beat it out of you, he thinks maybe that some of it will be drained out of her."

"If you don't eat, Mary Anne, I'm going to throw you in the swimming pool or pour A-I Sauce on your orchid."

"You wouldn't do that. You're the Perfect One."

"Eat," Ben ordered.

For several minutes they ate in absolute silence. Ben was acutely aware that the couples at the other tables were staring at them with a mixture of curiosity and chagrin. Struggling with her steak, Mary Anne looked hunched and bruised beneath the pale blue dress that covered her delicately, as though the dust had been scraped from a butterfly wing. She had to bring her face close to the plate to see what she was eating. Ben wanted to say something to hurt her, but could not force himself to do it. She would attribute it to measureless wellsprings of piety or stewardship of the phantom herds that bled out the milk of human kindness. But it was something different and far deeper, he thought. Though they had grown up in the same household and were shaped by the same two parents, Mary Anne had been damaged more severely in the passage. He had grown up to be afraid, but he had not grown up to suffer. He was not a member of that forsaken elect. But his date across the table was.

Finally, he said," Here's what I figured, Mary Anne. Next year, I'll be in college and this will be the last time we ever go out together like this and anyway I'm going to miss you and you've been my best friend and who cares anyway."

"I think I'll kill myself," Mary Anne answered.

"Good."

"No, I mean really."

"I mean really, too. I mean really good," Ben said. "Anyway, you're too chicken to do it."

"You'll be sorry, Ben. When the doctor pulls the blanket over my head, you'll become hysterical, because you had a chance to stop me and did nothing. They say that a suicide always gives off warning signals and that's what I'm doing right now. This is a warning signal."

"Why are you going to kill yourself?"

"Because I'm real depressed," Mary Anne answered.

"You're always depressed."

"Yeah, but this time I'm real depressed. Suicidally depressed and, buddy-roo, you can't get more depressed than that."

"How you going to do it?" Ben asked.

"Painlessly. That's the most important thing. I want there to be no pain. None whatsoever. And no blood. I will not tolerate a bloody corpse. I want to be lovely in death."

"Why don't you die on the operating table while you're having a nose job."

"That's one thing that always bothered me about you, Ben. You get serious when the world's screaming with laughter around you. Then you get witty when you're trying to talk a very valuable human being out of killing herself."

"I just wanted you to be lovely in death. C'mon," Ben said looking at his watch," we've got a rendezvous in Paris."

Ben danced the first slow dance with Mary Anne, both of them counting steps and laughing as they counted. Philip Turner cut in before the dance was over. Mr. Dacus danced the first fast dance with Mary Anne and Ogden Loring took the second slow dance. Ansley Matthews, forsaken by Jim Don who had slipped out to the parking lot to drink, asked Ben to dance twice. Memory books were passed back and forth. A flower cart pushed by a sophomore distributed flowers as souvenirs. Streamers hung from the steel rafters almost to the head level of the tallest boys. The water fountain had a sign that read" Le vin Beaujolais. "Pinkie danced twice with Mary Anne, Art the Fart once. The evening passed quickly, even magically at times. Parisian times in the marshes of Ravenel. No one laughed.

It was a night flight and Bull Meecham had flown from Ravenel to Key West, an out and in flight that would satisfy the requirement of four hours night flying a month.

At 0330 in the morning he departed from Key West estimating his arrival in Ravenel at 0520. He would fly at 32,000 feet. As the F-8 took off, Bull thought about how lucky he was that flight was still a glorious experience for him; he had not grown bored over the years; rather, he still got a small boy's pleasure out of flying a jet plane.

The jet rose in darkness, humming with energy and Godstrength beneath Bull Meecham as he climbed toward his pale, his frontier, as the earth grew puny around him. It was here in an aircraft that he had strange gods before him and his religion was a theology of wind and current, a worship of stars blinking in the intransient dark. Stars, to him, were fixed mariners, old friends, fine compasses, light pure, and druids in the silvery separateness of the night flight. When he left the earth, Bull knew that he had every chance of passing through a square foot of sky unviolated by man before. He could dance as no man had ever danced before; he could spin, dive, or whirl, and his antics in a cloud kingdom thirty thousand feet above the earth would be pure flirtations with absolute limits, with thresholds. His dance in the sky was a ballet of power and menace and there were times when his love of flying possessed him and he would want to heel and toe across the length of one wing, then leap the fuselage and soft-shoe with hat and cane across the other wing, dropping to one knee, and extending his arm to all who would understand this fixation at last; this addiction that certain men develop for flying.

He had begun his career as a night fighter and still practiced the skills of that subphylum of aviator. To him the most feared soldier ever created was the pilot who came at night, hiding from the cast-eyed light of half moons, coming winged and unannounced out of the black, out of the void.

At ten thousand feet, the jet emerged from a cloud bank and the moon filled the cockpit with a light that seemed more than light; it was something distilled through air, something with a smell and a taste and Bull drank in the moon through his eyes and nose and the pores of his skin, a soft Chablis of light suspended between earth and sky. The song of stars tonguelessly entertained him. Bull Meecham was silver, winged, and timeless.

The town awoke in ritual, ten thousand different ways. In Ravenel, the shrimpers rose first. Their coffee was always the earliest coffee fixed by the men with the calloused, fin-cut hands as their puffed, ascetic boats moved into the stream of tide returning, cutting through the dark artery of the marsh, through the green empire heaving in the tumult of retreat, alive with the instinct of billions obeying the unbenign law of the tide. Their coffee tasted slightly of shrimp and the sea.

The river seemed to quicken as Ben began to walk back to his house. A trout flared like a match in the light where the lights of the bridge and the river met. Coins of fire ignited the mullet's back as two shrimp boats slid past ringing buoys, tethered yachts, and storefronts. The shrimp boat captains watched for the channels and markers, somehow feeling that they were the lords of all this, of all they saw and felt. For a time, the early riser ruled the world. It was the grand illusion of the darkness.

Ben returned to his hammock with a heavy blanket for himself and one for Mary Anne. The temperature was dropping faster now and there was surprise in the May chill. In her sleep, Mary Anne was moving her lips and gesturing with her hands and for several moments he studied his sister dreaming and felt sad that dreams were not objects that could be catalogued, put away, and studied at leisure. This dream of Mary Anne's would die by morning like all the other dreams of the town. In the town of Ravenel, ten thousand dreams hovered over the town each night and ten thousand died each morning, their washed-out corpses borne away for burial at sea by the first breeze. Somewhere, the billion dreams of the town since its origin stirred in a maelstrom far from the reach of the shrimpers' nets. Old dreams still burned with the power of their one night on earth, but burned deep and forbidden in regions denied to men.

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"Atlanta Center," Bull said," Marine 657 over Brunswick at flight level three-two-zero. Requesting a Tacon approach to Ravenel. Over."

"Roger. 657 is cleared to Sand Dollar intersection. Contact Ravenel approach control on 325-0 at this time."

Bull switched frequencies and called the Ravenel tower. "Ravenel Approach, Marine 657 inbound. Sand Dollar intersection for Tacon approach. Flight level three-two-zero."

"Roger, 657. You are cleared to approach altitude. Report leaving three-two-zero."

Bull loved the simplicity inherent in the language of pilots. In these highways of flying men, their tongue forbidden the people of the earth, all fat had been trimmed, all excess removed. Mankind, by its nature, produced infantrymen and Bull approved that the grunts of the world could not enter into the language of aviators.

He went to the radio again. "Six-five-seven out of three-two-zero. Request weather."

"Ravenel 0515 observation. One thousand feet ceiling with one half mile in light rain with fog. Surface wind light and variable. Ground Approach is standing by. Roger and out."