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.
As Ben was getting back in bed, Lillian appeared at the door of his bedroom and said," Your father's not back yet. I'm getting worried about him."
"I hope he died of pain out in the marsh," Ben said.
"He didn't take the car, sugah. That means he's afoot. I'm worried that he passed out somewhere in the neighborhood."
"Too bad. A real shame, Mama."
"I want you to go look for him."
"Give me a loaded gun and I might give it a try."
"I want you to go bring your father home, Ben. And I want you to bring him home now."
"I'm not going to do it, Mama."
"Yes you are, Ben," she said patiently. "I am asking you to bring your father home. Now hurry before the sun goes up."
So Ben dressed and left the house in the dark not knowing where to search or even to begin. First, he skirted the edge of the marsh near the house. He walked the length of Eliot Street until he reached the Catholic church, then came back down Rowland Street. He began to call out," Dad! Dad!" but heard no response.
It was after five in the morning when he found him lying almost in the dead center of the Lawn. There was blood on his dress whites and his uniform was still damp from the plunge into the swimming pool at the Club. He had retrieved a bottle of Tanqueray from his squadron car and had come to the middle of this acre of grass, this common land flanked by mansions, to drink alone far from the dissonance of his children's eyes. He was moaning when Ben reached him and was lying in his own vomit.
Ben stood over his father, astride him. For a moment it did not register to Ben what he was seeing. For the first time in his life he was studying a helpless Bull Meecham and thoughts began to gather in storm clouds as his father's face turned toward him. Ben had a notion to stomp the face until it was indistinguishable from the grass, to kick the belly until his foot broke through to the spinal cord, to bring the blood flow from every orifice in the body, to thumb the fighter pilot's eyes into permanent darkness, to smash the testes until the life-giving power was extinguished forever. But, as in the kitchen, Ben did nothing. Atrocities occurred only in his brain.
"Dad," he said, and the figure moaned in the grass. "I got to get you back to the house, Dad."
"I'm sick, mama's boy," Bull answered.
"I know, Dad. I got to get you back to the house. You've got to help me because I can't carry you by myself."
Ben's rage had fled and it angered Ben that he had no camel hump of spirit where rage could be stored, preserved, and called upon whenever it was needed. Twenty minutes before he would have spit on this obscenity in the grass or he thought he would have done it. Now he was trying to resuscitate the hatred he had felt in the kitchen. But it would not come. Rage blazed up in him often, but its atoms were too active for preservation and its life span was brief like the kick and the flame of an afterburner in his father's F-8.
He tried to get under his father and lift him up, but could not. He went down again and managed to coax Bull up on his hands and knees. Then he hooked Bull's arm around his neck and together they rose, and began staggering toward home. And as they walked a feeling came over Ben that he tried to control but could not. He felt himself about to say something and he fought against it. He warred against it, but his tongue was a transient orator who, in moments of madness or in the dazzling half-nelson of a father's arm, assumed a life and career of its own. He heard himself saying, unbelieving, unwilling:
"I love you, Dad."
Bull Meecham increased the tempo of his slouch homeward and acted as though he didn't hear.
And the voice came again and Ben listened to it with the same sense of wonder as his father.
"I love you, Dad."
Ben saw his father looking over at him as though he was witnessing the birth of something wild and schizophrenic in the psyche of his oldest son. Bull pulled away from Ben, then wheeled back toward the middle of the Lawn and began running into the darkness. But the liquor still had his legs. He ran in an agonizingly circuitous pattern, weaving and stumbling, falling once, but immediately on his feet again, running slowly, unable to escape anything.
Running behind his father, Ben began to feel a disproportionate joy rise in him. He began to catch his father, sprint past him, slap him on the rump in passage, and turn him like a steer. And he started chanting joyously, teasingly, the master of his tongue again," I love you, Dad. I love you, Dad. I love you. I love you. I love you. "And each time Bull would turn away from the phrase and hunt the part of the night that would enclose or hide him. Then he fell a last time and began vomiting again.
Ben stopped. He was smiling, exhilarated, liberated and meanly enjoying a weapon he did not know lay in his arsenal. When Bull had finished throwing up, Ben thought about resuming the chant, but did not. He hooked his father's arm around his neck again, got him to his feet, and walked him toward the house in silence.
Chapter 33
By the end of April the air was full of summer and the small wind that lifted off the river was heavy and uninvigorating. Lillian Meecham sat on the lower veranda with her children rocking in a chair and waiting for the sun to go down. Even the sun seemed to be affected by the air.
"Is Dad going to be transferred anywhere this summer, Mama?" Karen asked.
"No. He'll be at Ravenel at least one more year."
"This will be the first time we've been in one place for two years in a long time," Matthew noted.
"I wouldn't leave my new friends for anything," Karen said passionately. "I'd kill myself before I'd move somewhere else."
"You won't have to, sugah. We're staying in Ravenel next year," Lillian consoled.
"Hey, Mary Anne," Ben said from his perch on the green railing where he leaned against the white doric column.
"Yeah, fish feces," she answered, not lifting her eyes from the book she was studying in the diminishing light.
"The Junior-Senior Prom is in two weeks. Anybody ask you yet?"
"Very funny. What a joke," Matthew cackled.
Mary Anne raised her eyes imperiously and cast a withering glance at her younger brother who returned it in full.
"As a matter of fact, I have had hundreds of phone calls from some of the smartest and best looking boys at Calhoun High. But none of them are mature enough to converse with such a chic and worldly woman."
"That's a laugh," Matt said. "No one's ever called you for a date in your whole life."
"That will be quite enough, mister," Lillian said to Matthew.
"Why'd you ask, golden boy?" Mary Anne said.
"Because, I, Benjamin Meecham, being of sound mind and body, do hereby announce that I intend to take my sister, Mary Anne Meecham, to the Junior-Senior Spring Formal, if she but permits it."
"Oh, puke," Matt said, leaning over the railing and pretending to vomit in the side yard.
"Have you lost your gourd?" Mary Anne said, her eyes returning to her book.
"I think that's a very sweet gesture, Ben," Lillian said.
"I ain't no charity case, big brother. No thanks."
"Wait a minute, Mary Anne. I know you're not a charity case. But look at it this way. I don't have a date. I'm too chicken to get one. I tried to call up a few girls, but as soon as I did my face broke out in pimples and my nose hair grew to a length of three feet . . ."
"You don't have to sink into vulgarity, darling," Lillian interrupted.
"Earwax poured out of the side of my head and sweat rained down from my underarms," he continued. "So I don't have a date. Since Sammy isn't here, he can't ask a girl for me. So we ought to go together. It's your Junior-Senior too and it looks like no hunchback or blind man is going to call you."
"I don't think that's funny," Mary Anne said.
"Nor do I, Ben," Lillian agreed. "But I do think it was adorable of you to ask Mary Anne, sugah."
"C'mon, Mama, don't say that kind of stuff or I'll never get her to go with me."
"You'll never get me to go with you anyway," Mary Anne said to her book. "It sounds a little sicko-sexual to me."
"Why, for God's sake?" Ben demanded. "Why don't you want to go?"
"Because I honestly don't want to. Besides, you ought to get a date. It will look perverted and I can't dance."
"I don't want to get a date," Ben answered. "I am perverted and I can't dance either."
"Your father and I can teach you how to dance," Lillian stated. "He and I are the two best jitterbuggers in the Marine Corps. We can teach you in one or two nights."
"They don't do the minute much anymore, Mama," Ben grinned.
"I didn't even know Godzilla could dance," Mary Anne said.
"You ought to go, Coke bottle eyes," Matt said. "This'll probably be the last chance in your whole life to go to a dance."
"You do wonders for my ego, paramecium," Mary Anne retorted.
"I'll go with you, Ben," Karen said," if Mary Anne won't go. I'd love to go with you."
"You're right up there among the top two candidates, Karen. But this is Mary Anne's first Junior-Senior and my last. She's going to be my date. First well have a candlelight dinner down at the Officers' Club. Perchance, a little wine or a bit of champagne from the land of the Frog. Then we will dance the night away beneath the streamers decorating the high school gymnasium."
"What do you think Jim Don and Pinkie and all those other imbecile jocks will say?" Mary Anne asked.
"The hell with them," Ben said, pulling both of his feet up on the railing, encircling his bent legs with his arms. "We'll have a ball."
"Those people will laugh at us."
"If they laugh, I'll punch them on the cheek," Ben said.
"You ought to go, pig nose," Matt said.
"You've got a pig nose, too, Midget," Mary Anne said. "It's just that you're so small I never notice it. I'm always looking at the top of your head."
"If you two don't stop being nasty to each other, I'm going to take a broom to both of you," Lillian said furiously.
"She's too ugly to get asked to the prom by anyone else," Matt said.
"You're going to get slapped, mister," Lillian said, drawing her hand back.
"Matt didn't mean that, Mary Anne," Karen said. "He really didn't mean that."
"Mama," Mary Anne said, her eyes once again fastened to an unseen, unfocused word in the book on her lap," aren't you happy that you're beautiful?"
"I am not beautiful. I've told you that a thousand times."
"Don't be pious, Mama. You're beautiful and beautiful women get everything they want."
They heard the back door slam and the heavy footsteps of Colonel Meecham coming through the house. Before he reached the front door on the way to join them, Lillian leaned over toward Mary Anne and whispered fiercely," I didn't get everything I wanted."
Bull Meecham strode down the length of the veranda holding a Budweiser in one hand.
"It looks like the troops are goldbricking again and the C.O. needs to revamp the work detail. Let's cut the idle chitchat and police up the area."
"You should have called me if you weren't coming home for dinner, sugah," Lillian said, rising from her chair and kissing her husband on the cheek.
"I got into a little wrestling match with Jack Daniel over at the club and forgot to call," Bull said, winking at his children.
"Ben's taking Mary Anne to the Junior-Senior Prom," Karen said.
"Hey, that's great, sportsfans."
"You and Mom are going to teach them how to dance," Matt added.
Taking Lillian's hand and bowing dramatically, Bull pulled his wife to her feet, held her close to his body, and they began to waltz around the veranda. For a large man, he danced with surprising grace. They seemed to flow into each other and move as one body, a coupling of flesh that came so easily that it embarrassed Ben.
"You've got to be loose. You hogs must have inherited some of Santini's rhythm," Bull said.
"I inherited Santini's legs," Mary Anne answered.
"I've always been able to dance like a nigger," Bull shouted.
"Negro! Bull. Negro," Lillian corrected.
"What's that book you're reading, Mary Anne?" Ben asked, directing his attention away from his parents who were beginning to lose themselves in the spirit of their impromptu and somehow nakedly sensual dance.
"It's really none of your business but it's Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words," Mary Anne said. She was not watching her parents dance either.
"You mean it was you who stole my copy of Halliwell's?" Ben laughed.
"Why on earth are you reading that? That's just a book of dead words."
"I relate very well to dead words. They interest me and they help me. I can insult people without their knowing it. For instance, Matt is a cuglion."
"Did you hear what she called me, Mom? I bet it's dirty," Matt cried.
"It is simply a stupid, cattle-headed fellow. Mom is a dang-wallet, which means a spendthrift, someone who just loves throwing away money. Dad is a slubberdegullion, which is a paltry dirty wretch. Karen is a grizzle-demundy, which is a stupid person always grinning."
"That's not very nice, Mary Anne," Karen said.
"It's all a joke, Karen. I bought this book for a quarter at the Catholic Bazaar and I've got to use it or Mom will say it's a waste of money."
"Speaking of money," Lillian said," what are you going to wear if you go with Ben to the Junior-Senior?"
"I haven't said I was going yet," Mary Anne said.
"She'll wear the prettiest dress at the dance," Bull said.
"I don't have anything to wear to a formal dance," Mary Anne said.
"We'll buy you a goddam dress," Bull bellowed.
"I'll try to borrow one from one of the young 'O' Club wives. We can't afford to go out and buy a formal dress that Mary Anne will only wear once in her life."
"The hell we can't," Bull disagreed.
"Times are lea
n, Bull," Lillian said, pulling away from her husband and breaking step. "I'm sure one of the girls has a spare formal that will do just fine for Mary Anne."
"She's going to have her own dress. The Great Santini has spoken."
"The Great Santini doesn't handle the books," Lillian answered fiercely. "The Mrs. Great Santini does."
"You see," Mary Anne said to Ben," she is a dangwallet."
"Hey, sportsfans," Bull called to Mary Anne, "are the other girls in your class buying dresses or borrowing them?"
"They'll say they're buying them. But they'll be borrowing dresses, mark my words," Lillian insisted.
"They're buying dresses," Ben said.
The following day, after a furious argument with his wife, Bull Meecham drove Mary Anne to Sarah Poston's dress shop on River Street and bought a full length formal gown for the Calhoun High School Junior-Senior Prom of 1963.
Dressed in his tuxedo and feeling conspicuously elegant, Ben came downstairs on the night of the prom. His father was reclining on the sofa reading the evening paper. Ben walked over to his father and came to attention by clicking his heels together and pulling his shoulders back.
"You look good, sportsfans. Your hair's sticking up in the back but otherwise you win the Commandant's Cup. Where's Mary Anne?" Bull said.
"She's upstairs still getting dressed."
"She's been getting dressed for about three days."
"She really likes that gown you bought her, Dad."
"She ought to, sweet pea. Your mother's been jawboning about that dress for two goddam weeks. I told her that I only want the best for my hogs."
"Do you think this coat's too loose?"
"Naw, it looks fine. You'll probably be raped by a broad or two before the night's over. Go on out to the porch so your mother can complete the inspection."
Lillian was sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette and looking out at a barge coming through the opened bridge.
"How do I look, Mama?" Ben asked.