The Great Santini (7 page)

The children stirred slowly out of their sleep. Lillian groaned into awakeness with a loud, feline stretch. Bull walked back to the open door and said," Pit stop. Head run. Get the dog out and let him lift his leg. Everybody out who needs to pee."

"Sugar," Lillian said," I know this is an outrageous request, but the girls and I feel more comfortable powdering our noses and doing our business in a clean well-lighted bathroom."

"It's good for you to get a little night air. C'mon Mary Anne and Karen, you two go over there behind those trees."

"Don't you dare make a move, young ladies. We will keep our dignity."

"O. K., then let's get Matt awake. You too, Ben. Here, Okra, I want you to pee on the track while the train's moving there."

"That's not funny, Dad. That's why Okra hates your guts," Karen retorted.

"I don't need to go," Matt said, only half awake and pulling his pillow tightly over his head to cut out the noise of the train.

"You better go now, son. You know your father doesn't stop often."

"He only stops for three reasons: trains, the death of someone in the car, or if he has to go to the bathroom," Ben said climbing out of the car over Matt.

As Ben walked toward his father, he was surprised to look up and see the universe shivering with starlight. Cotton grew in the field that bounded the railroad tracks and the air was laden with the opulent smells of greening crops and leafy forests. Approaching the sea the land had begun to slope gently, the hills were brushed downward, the earth was smoothing itself, and the rivers straightened for the final run to the sea.

Ben and the colonel were urinating in the ditch that paralleled the highway. Bull commented on each car that flickered past like a single frame on a long roll of film. His voice was excited. As always, Bull felt euphoric and princely in the company of trains. "There's the Illinois Central. The Southern Pacific. And right there goes the queen of them all, the Rock Island Line. That's the one that half your Chicago relatives work on, Ben. Watch where you're whizzin'. You almost hit my foot. Aim high and away. There's the Southern. Probably carryin' a box car full of grits to some southern pansy living in New York. "Then in the regionless drawl of a conductor, the half-intelligible patois belonging to no country that Bull had learned by imitation as a child riding free on the Rock Island Line, he began to chant, "Davenport, Ioway. Next stop. Ioway City, yes loway, loway, Ioway City. Dee Moynes. Dee Moynes. Dee Moynes, Ioway. All off for Davenport. "The voice of the conductor resided with great constancy just below the customary pose of the fighter pilot. "All aboooooard," he said, climbing back into the car as the caboose flashed by and the thunder of the train diminished gradually into the darkness.

Bull barked out at Ben as the car moved across the tracks in first gear," Did Okra whizz?"

"I think so, Dad," Ben answered.

"You're not paid to think, mister. I asked you a question."

"Yes, sir. He did," Ben said.

"You'd better be right. That was the last head stop before Ravenel. Ravenel. Rav-e-nel. Next stop, Rav-e-nel, South Caroli-na."

"Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses," Lillian said.

"Hey, not bad, sportsfans. That was a good line."

"Bull, there's nothing in this road, not even a pig. Are you sure we're going the right way?"

"Affirmative. The navigator has never made a mistake in his career.

"Oh, I don't know about that. I seem to remember a night when the navigator took a wrong turn and we ended up in eastern Tennessee instead of western North Carolina."

"Ah, the grits who put up road signs in the South never got past second grade."

"Just to change the subject, sugah, you haven't told me the gossip on the old squadron. Where are all the Cobras now and what are they doing?"

"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 passages, 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 damn 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 identity 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 hello, good-bye, and kiss my fanny 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 butt a few heads," the colonel glowered through his sunglasses.

"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 Combahassee 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.