Lillian stirred in a half sleep, caught the smell of cigar smoke, and smiled.
The smoke filled the room, commingling with the warm scent of the river that spilled into the marsh seventy yards from their window.
Colonel Meecham appreciated the eminence of ritual in relationship to the morale of troops in peace and war. He also understood its essential importance in giving his family a feeling of place and belonging in a new town. A family without ritual and order was a rootless tribe subject to boredom and anarchy, lowered heads, pouting mouths, and sorrowing memories of friends left behind. At the center of the dilemma, it was a family whose leader had failed to provide the requisite guidance. He did not tolerate sadness or regret over a move in any member of his family, just as he did not tolerate poor morale among Marines in his squadron.
He shaved and showered quickly, then put on his most faded and beloved fatigues, pulled his swagger stick from a top drawer, laced up his combat boots, and strode toward Ben's room.
"Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-," he played on an imaginary bugle. "It's time to get up, it's time to get up. It's time to get up in the morning. Rise and shine, soldier. Hit the deck with your boots on and head for the goddam trenches. The Japs are overrunnin' the camp."
"What?" Ben said, coming out of a heavy sleep. Then he remembered the game and rolled off his bed fingering a machine gun. By this time his father had stolen into Matt's room, crawling on all fours. He shouted at Matt," We got to get these soldiers moving before the Jap artillery finds out where we're camped. "He snatched the pillow from beneath Matt's head and rolled him to the floor. Matt was sleeping in the nude.
"The little homo's sleeping naked," Bull roared. "Get your skivvies on and hit the battle stations on the double."
Bull sprinted for the girls' room where he shook Karen and Mary Anne, yelling," The women will be raped by the slimy yellow bastards if they don't man the trenches; follow me to the ridge in the living room," he cried, plunging out the door and down the stairs in melodramatically elephantine steps.
"I've always wanted to be raped by a slimy yellow bastard," Mary Anne called after him. "I wouldn't mind a slimy yellow bastard or a slimy black bastard either. "She turned over to go back to sleep.
"You'd better come on," Karen said.
"I never cared for his childish games," Mary Anne replied.
Karen followed her father out the door and down the steps. She met Matt coming out of his room, holding a broom on his shoulder.
"What's that, Matt?" she asked.
"A bazooka," he answered.
In the living room, Colonel Meecham had overturned the coffee table, his eyes scanning the dining room for troop movement.
"Do you see anything, Sergeant?" the colonel cried to his son, Ben, dug in behind the flowered sofa where Okra slept.
"Yes, sir," Ben yelled, sighting Matt and Karen tiptoeing down the stairs," here come three hundred crack troops from the emperor's own regiment."
"Don't fire," his father ordered," until you see the yellow of their skins and the slant of their Buddha lovin' eyes."
The Marines fired in delirium, cutting down the first advancing wave of Japanese infantry. Death cries of Bonzai, Kamikaze, and Minolta hovered over the battlefield and the carnage of battle stained the beachhead a terrible crimson as the two Marines, employing the courage and wisdom of the Occident, prevailed in the first deadly moments of the assault.
"Kill those yellow son's a bitches, Sergeant," the colonel screamed above the din of battle.
"These ain't Mother's Day cards I'm sending 'em," Ben replied toughly while sliding a clip into his automatic.
"Goddammit, Sarge, here they come again. Hundreds of them."
"It looks like curtains for us, Colonel."
"Sarge, I just want to say I've never fought with a braver man.
"Thank you, sir," Ben answered. "And I ain't ever fought with a bigger chicken shit in my whole life."
Before Bull could answer, Matt and Karen charged from the hall. "Here they come," Bull bellowed. "A goddam yellow horde. It looks like it's gonna be that proverbial hand-to-hand combat. Fix bayonets, Sergeant."
The horde burst into their perimeter. Matt was shouting "Simba Barracuda, Simba Barracuda" as he ran.
Matt lunged at Ben's throat but was disemboweled by a quick thrust of a brass candlestick by Bull Meecham. Karen lingered in the hallway.
"You're dead, Matt-Jap," Colonel Meecham declared.
"No, I'm not," Matt retorted," you only wounded me. Simba Barracuda. M. Meecham lives. "He then lay the broomstick on his shoulder and began pumping bazooka shells into Bull's midriff.
"Wounded, my ass," Bull said. "I cut your goddam yellow guts out."
"I guess the big bazooka isn't doing any damage to your beer gut either. Yeah, sure. That's close."
As the argument raged between the two enemies, Colonel Meecham, ignoring a classic principle of warfare, left his flank exposed to the sprinting figure of Karen who exploded from the hallway bearing a bathroom plunger in her hands. As Bull debated the state of Matt's ability to continue in the holocaust, Karen stabbed the plunger into the dead center of her father's buttocks.
"I killed Daddy. I stuck him in the butt," Karen crowed in triumph.
"You only wounded me," the colonel countered angrily.
"Then you only wounded me," said Matt.
"You are dead, Matt-Jap," the colonel answered. "I am wounded. A good Marine can be brought down only when his heart stops beating."
"My heart's still beating."
Ben was doubled up on the sofa giggling. "Karen stuck the Great Santini in the butt with a plumber's friend. "He was easy prey for Karen, who ran him through with no resistance.
"Shut up and fight, jocko," Colonel Meecham shouted at Ben.
"Simba Barracuda," Matt shouted, thrusting his broomstick at his father.
The battle raged on until Mrs. Meecham descended the stairs on her way to the kitchen.
"It's a regiment of Marines come to relieve us," the colonel cheered.
"America's finest coming in the nick of time," Ben shouted as his father hummed the Marine Corps hymn.
"Why do we always have to play the Japs?" Matt whined.
"Yeah, we never get to play the Marines," Karen added.
"That's because you're a bunch of stinking Japs," Ben said grinning and poking Karen with the candlestick.
"If I'm a Jap then you're a Jap too. Cause you're my brother," Matt said.
"None of you are Japs," Colonel Meecham said, entering the argument. "We're just conducting war games. In war games somebody has to be designated as the enemy. When you get older, youll get to be Marines. You've just got to prove yourself worthy first."
"Simba Barracuda," Matt said, as a form of agreement.
"What's this 'Simba Barracuda' crap?" the colonel asked.
"Matt picked that up when you were gone, Pops," Ben said. "He thinks it strikes fear into the hearts of men."
"Any time I'm about to fight someone I yell 'Simba Barracuda' real tough like. It works every time."
"You could yell 'Simba Barracuda' at me until your butt fell off and it wouldn't bother me," Bull said.
"Then I'd have to use my other approach. I don't use this one unless it looks like curtains."
"What's that, sportsfans?"
"I say real cool and tough, 'Hey man, you mess with me and you'll have to answer to Angelo Delucci.'"
"Who's he?"
"Nobody, Dad. But people get scared when Big Matt talks about Angelo Delucci."
"I don't get it, Big Matt," Bull said. "What's so scary about an Eye-talian?"
"Eye-talians have been known to do a little rubbin' out, Pops. You haven't been watching 'The Untouchables' overseas.
"What a bunch of horsecrap. Ha. Ha. Angelo Delucci."
"Simba Barracuda."
At this moment, her face a portrait of scorn, Mary Anne walked through the middle of the war game and said," Is the war over, creeps?"
r /> "Uh-oh," her father teased," here comes Miss Hang Crepe, morose as ever.
"Who was killed this morning?" she continued, as though she had not heard her father. "The Japs or the Creeps?"
"Here she comes, Miss America," Colonel Meecham sang.
"Dad," Mary Anne said," I'm writing a book about you."
"Good," Colonel Meecham answered, following her toward the kitchen. "You couldn't find a more fascinating subject."
"Here's the first line: 'I was born to the beast on December 12, 1946.'"
"I like it. It captures my unique personality."
"Nothing could capture your personality. The English language is too limited."
"You're right, Mary Anne, I'm an enigma, like a Chink. But a great subject for literature. No doubt about it. You can be my Boswell."
"What a surprise, Dad," Mary Anne said, pulling out a chair by the kitchen table. "How'd you know about Boswell?"
"The ol' Dad knows all kinds of things."
"Why, Bull," said Lillian sweetly," you keep it so well hidden."
"Bring me the chow," Bull said. Then pounding on his chest he shouted," It is I, Santini. The Great Santini. Soldier of Fortune. Beast of Ravenel. Minister of Death. And the best damn pilot in the Marine Corps."
"How much sugar does the Beast of Ravenel want in his coffee?"
"No sugar. I don't want nothing to make me sweet."
Chapter 8
"This is the day," Colonel Meecham announced to his family, the second Saturday in Ravenel. "There's been a lot of pootin' around but very little maximum effort on the part of this outfit. It has become apparent to me that this outfit is operating behind the power curve."
"This is not an outfit, sugah. This is a family."
It was over a week before the change of command ceremony would take place that would give Bull his first fighter squadron. In the interim he was intoxicated with an overabundance of free time and his whole frame trembled and fidgeted with impatience. He had awakened on this morning with a hungering need to bark out orders and have them carried out with speed and efficiency. Since they had moved to Ravenel, Lillian had charted his moods like a cartographer, and her instinct for defusing his temper before it erupted told her this was a day for caution. Early that morning she whispered to her children in a voice accustomed to conspiracy," Keep busy, keep quiet, and keep out of your father's way."
Bull was incapable of relaxation. He was one of those men whose blood seems to flow too fast, whose brain seems to glow in the dark, whose eyes can never be still, and whose body is in motion even when sitting on a chair or sleeping. Only in his work could he find redemption; only in the Corps was this manic quality channeled into a useful function. He was a man without hobbies except on those occasions when he would challenge his son Ben in some sport. He did not work in the yard, help in the house, wash cars, shine shoes, or anything. His only duty in the household was to issue orders and to marshal the energies of his wife and children to tasks that he would assign with a sense of exigence.
"Listen up, hogs," he said to his children. They placed their forks on their plates, folded their hands in their laps, and listened with eyes that betrayed nothing. The Meecham children had mastered the art of staring at their father with eyes that were dazzlingly bland.
"At promptly 1100 hours, your commanding officer will conduct the first Saturday Morning Inspection of the quarters. You will be at strict attention by your doors as soon as you hear the Marine Corps hymn played on the commandant's lawn. You will clean up your rooms. You will police up the bathroom. You will help your mother in all matters. You will salute the colors. You will report to me when you are finished. You will work cheerfully until your detail is completed to my satisfaction. You will report to me any goldbricking on the part of any brother or sister who tries to take advantage of my kind nature and tries to shirk his or her responsibility. Now do you hogs have any questions?" he asked.
They held their blank stares. They asked no questions, their mother's warning still fresh in their ears.
"Would my executive officer like to address the hogs?" Bull said, turning deferentially to Lillian.
Lillian untied her apron and walked over to the table, hit it with her fist, and began to imitate her husband. "I want to tell you hogs a few things. First of all, you will. Secondly, you will. Thirdly, you will. Then after that task is completed you will, you will, you will."
Karen giggled, like a handful of coins tossed in the air. Then everyone laughed, Bull with less relish than the others, but he quickly recovered his lost momentum.
"O.K., now that the exec has sounded off and you hogs have had the big laugh, get upstairs and police up your rooms. Square the barracks away on the double and prepare for Santini's inspection at 1100 hours. After that you will come downstairs and help your mother."
"What are you gonna do, Dad?" Matt asked.
"I'm the head honcho, mister. I don't have to tell you what I'm gonna do."
"I bet you're gonna do nothin'," Matt blurted out, not perceiving the warning signals given off by Lillian.
"No," Bull answered," that's not quite true. I may do something that might be of some small interest to you, Matt. If you don't get upstairs on the double, I just may stomp your face in."
"I haven't finished my toast," Karen complained.
"Finish it later. The inspection team is due in soon and we will shine when the general troops the line."
When the children had faded silently out of the kitchen, Lillian spoke to her husband in a mollifying, supplicating tone. "Bull, you're getting on edge. I can see it coming like I was reading a map. You're getting nervous and fidgety as a treeful of crows about this squadron and I just don't want you to take it out on the kids. You've been good since you've been home and I've been proud of the way you've controlled your temper and your drinking."
"I'm not nervous," he said.
"Sugah, you have the personality of a jack hammer. You can make inanimate objects nervous. Please relax."
"I'm relaxed. I'm relaxed. What do I got to do, write a book?" Bull said, lunging at a piece of bacon.
He ate breakfast as he always did, by the number. A second piece of bacon was mutilated and consumed in two carnivorous gulps. Next he drank a whole cup of coffee before he even looked at his fried eggs. When he finally turned his attention to the eggs, he trimmed the egg white up to the yolk. Then he slid a spoon under the fragile, trembling sac of yolk, and popped one, then the other into his mouth. As was customary in their nineteen years of marriage, he left the grits on his plate untouched, an unexpressed but articulate declaration, rooted in geography, that the society he married into had not assimilated him. All the totems of Bull's disenchantment with the South could be carved from pillars of congealed grits. Since they had married, it was a point of honor between them that Lillian serve grits and Bull refuse to eat them. What had begun as a joke between them had become a resolute ceremony fraught with competition and even with something deeper, something almost mythological that separated them.
"I'm going to bury you with a box of grits," she had once told him, laughing at the thought.
"Then don't bury me alive," he had answered.
"You're such a Yankee, Bull. Living in the South so many years, and you still haven't been touched by the South. The gentility, the courtliness, none of it."
"I've only heard of one way to fix grits so I like them," Bull told her. "And he was a good southerner."
"How's that?"
"Well, you start boiling grits in a pot. Then you go down by the highway and get some horse turds or as you civilized southerners call them 'road apples.' Well, you take the road apples and dump them into the grits. You boil the combination for fifteen minutes. No more. No less. When you're done, you pour the grits down the drain and eat the road apples."
After he swallowed the egg yolks whole, Bull spread a gluttonous helping of Crosse and Blackwell orange marmalade on two pieces of toast and consumed them with as much noise as relis
h.
"Darling," Lillian said," have I ever told you that you eat like a pig?"
Bull looked up at her and answered with orange teeth, "Yeah, you've yapped about that maybe ten thousand times."
"You still chew with your mouth open. If you hope to make general, you'll have to learn the table manners of a gentleman."
"That's one good reason not to make general."
"I'd sure like to be a general's wife."
"Well, it don't look like you'll ever be one."
"Nothing's impossible."
"Me makin' general is."
"Close your mouth," she ordered. "I can become physically ill watching you eat."
Bull pulled back from the table and belched, a low sour note from an old tuba. When Lillian failed to correct him, he screwed up his face again, worked his throat muscles and summoned an even louder burp, this one an octave higher, more musical, more evocative of the meal just completed. He saw her wince. When Lillian winced her whole body was affected. She looked up from washing dishes and saw the river full of small sailboats leaning toward the far shore and knifing toward the bridge which was not in her view. The day was bright, the water green, and the wind full as Lillian saw her whole kitchen window fill up with the September regatta, as though she were watching a painting that changed as she watched it.
"The sailboats are so beautiful. It looks like the river is full of white butterflies, Bull. They're having a race."
Bull walked to the window and looked.