The movers arrived at eleven that morning, powerfully muscled, red-faced men who grunted officiously over the dead weight of refrigerators and air conditioners. In alternating currents of laughter and profanity, they journeyed time after time from the inside of the truck to the interior of the house, authentic beasts of burden accustomed to inflamed muscles and sugar-voiced housewives like Mrs. Meecham who thought a mover's only goal in life was the destruction of irreplaceable heirlooms and fragile glassware. Ben would catch snatches of his mother's lamentations to the movers and smile every time he heard them answer in a peremptory "Yas'm."
"Be careful, sugah," he heard her say to the largest of the men. "My best china is in that box, darling, and I declare you are throwing it around like a shot putt."
To another, Mary Anne heard Lillian plead," Sweetie pie, a man of your gargantuan proportions can wreak untold destruction if you're not careful. The treasures of my heart are in that box. Pretend you're carrying eggs. They ought to hire tiny little men to move the fragile objects and have ya'll giants move pianos and things."
In the middle of the move she whispered to Ben," You have to watch movers very closely, son. They are brutes like your father. They are destroyers of beautiful things."
By three o'clock, the movers had laid out carpets, positioned furniture, hooked up the washing machine and dryer, and filled each room with the stencil-marked boxes that the Meechams would have to unpack. When the ordeal was over, when Lillian Meecham half believed that her personal riches were not reduced to dust from mishandling, and when the movers drove off griping about incipient hernias, the gears of the truck grinding against the humidity of the afternoon, the family was left with the task of getting the house into inspection order for the critical gaze of Colonel Meecham. For them, the day was beginning in earnest.
"All right, darlings," Lillian called to her children, slapping her hands together," here's the battle plan. Well concentrate on the downstairs. Let's unpack all the downstairs boxes and get them out of sight. We will hang the pictures, try to make things look natural, and hope that your father does not realize that the house is a long way from being in tiptop shape. Then you each will be responsible for unpacking the boxes in your own room. But you can do that tomorrow morning. As for now, let's get to the business of the living room."
"God, it's hot, Mama," Mary Anne said. "I feel like Dante."
"It must be a hundred in the shade," Matt added.
"Just think about being in a cool place. That always helps. Let's pretend this is our new home in Norway. There's a fjord outside and snow on the mountains."
"That just makes me all the hotter, Mama," Karen said. "Let's go for a swim at the base pool and do this later."
"Can't do it, little sister," Ben said. "Godzilla will be back at six."
"Ben," his mother warned.
They began to unpack the boxes that contained the accoutrements of the living room. Ben emptied one box that held ashtrays from Japan, four statues of Buddha in various postures and degrees of corpulence, six oriental silk screens, and two camel seats from Morocco. The room was already studded with five sets of brass candlesticks from Taiwan. On one wall was a large painting of a Seine river scene which Bull had bought while drunk in Paris. Soon the room was piled with goatskin rugs from Lebanon, richly embroidered blankets from Arabia, Libyan tapestries, and swords from Toledo crossed over a coat of arms. In the center of the room, fronting a large, overstuffed sofa, was a large brass table with mahogany legs and a single oriental letter embossed in its center.
"What does that Chink letter mean, Mama?" Matthew asked.
"It means that this table is a piece of crap in Chinese," Mary Anne answered.
"I don't know, Matt," his mother answered. "Your father picked it up when he was overseas one time."
"Ol' Wespac housing," Mary Anne sniffed. "Nothing is so tacky as this junk Marines pick up when they're overseas."
"Some Marines know what to buy. Your father has some difficulty in telling the difference between treasure and garbage."
"No, that's not fair, Mama. Dad is an expert when it comes to garbage."
"Hey, Mama," Ben said," half this house looks like the Teahouse of the August Moon and the other half looks like A Thousand and One Nights."
"We don't have anything from America," Karen said, as though she were seeing her family's possessions for the first time.
"Dad's taste is so terrible," Mary Anne announced.
"Yes," her mother replied," but he thinks the things he buys are beautiful and we don't want to hurt his feelings."
"I don't mind hurting his feelings," Mary Anne said. "Besides, we've got enough stuff from China to make me think I've got slanty eyes, Mama. We ought to get something to remind the little children of this family that we are American. A couple of Coke bottles or something. Maybe a box of Hershey bars."
"I've told kids that I spoke Chinese before I spoke English and they believed me after I showed them the house," Ben said.
"Did they ask you to prove it?" Lillian asked while cutting some masking tape from a box.
"Sure," he answered. "I just recited a few prayers at the foot of the altar. Introibo and Altare Dei. Poor ol' Protestants don't know any better."
"Ben, do you remember that time I told Jamie Polk you only spoke Latin and that was the only language Catholic boys were allowed to speak. Every time he would ask Ben a question, Ben would hit him with a line from the Confiteor."
"Shame on you both. It's not something I would be proud of."
They emptied the boxes with the expertness of four straight years' experience. Everything had a place, Mrs. Meecham kept reminding her children, everything belonged somewhere. Linens were placed on closet shelves. China was dusted and neatly stacked in a glass-fronted cabinet; the silverware was filed away in the kitchen drawers nearest the sink. The kitchen began to rattle with implements. Matt and Karen hung pots and pans on nails in the pantry. Slowly, the boxes downstairs began to empty and Ben piled them in the backyard where they lay like the discarded shells of reptiles.
Order was drawn from chaos by cunningly applied laws tested on previous moving days. Some boxes were stacked in closets, others were hidden in the attic. The downstairs began to shape up at about the same time that Lillian sensed her children could take no more.
Lillian walked to a box in the front hall stenciled "shrine. "Always, in every move, she unpacked this box. She did not allow her children to touch it. In the box, carefully wrapped, was a crucifix, a slender graceful icon of the Virgin Mary, a smaller statue of Michael the Archangel standing astride a fallen angel whose face was swollen with fear, two small candlesticks, a box of milk white candles, a small font for holy water, and rosary beads her husband had given her when she converted to Catholicism. Finally, she removed a plastic model of an F-8 Crusader, paused to fix a misplaced decal with a small application of spit, then set it down in a window ledge.
She had chosen the location of her shrine the moment she entered the door of her new home. It was in the vestibule underneath the stairway, to the left of the front door. She set up a card table which she covered with a filigree lace tablecloth from Florence. The crucifix she hung from the wall, fascinated, as she always was, by the realism of the tiny nails lodged in the crockery feet of Jesus. Next, she twisted the candles into the small brass holders, filled the font with stale holy water, put a small oriental rug in front of the altar, and positioned Michael strategically to the far left. Finally, she placed Mary directly below her crucified son. At her feet, she placed the airplane Bull Meecham flew.
Behind her, the children gathered, watching each ritualistic step in the installation of the shrine.
Mary Anne whispered to Ben," Oh, Jesus. Here we have the Lady of the Fighter Pilot again. Why don't you tell Mom that it's a bit much?"
"Why don't you tell her, big balls?" Ben whispered back.
Before Mary Anne could answer, Lillian motioned for her children to come to the vestibule. "Let's say
a prayer, thanking the Blessed Mother for a safe trip."
The children knelt while Lillian lit the candles. Then she began to pray aloud and Ben, her son, had an image of her prayers floating light as pollen into the ear of God.
Chapter 6
Oleander bushes flanked the road leading up to the main gate of the Ravenel Marine Air Station. Colonel Meecham watched as an F-8 lifted off an unseen airway, cleared the treeline, thundered eastward, accelerating and rising in a clean parabola. As Bull's eyes followed the plane, he had an old feeling come over him and he knew he wanted to climb into a jet very soon. He heard the afterburner of the jet kick off, the plane bank to the right and fade like a sliver of light into a blue sky. The feeling was a thirst, a thirst borne of time, of memory, of blood; an almost diabetic thirst that afflicted him whenever he passed a long period of time without flying. He had not flown in the month he had been home and he felt this abstinence in his mouth and bones.
Pulling up to the gate, Bull studied the young PFC who stared at the unfamiliar bumper sticker on the front of the car. The dust from the trip and the dried butterfly parts made it difficult to decipher. Finally, the guard looked into the car and spied the silver leaves on Bull's collar. Gracelessly, the PFC pumped a salute. Instead of returning the salute, Bull stopped the car completely and stared with visible truculence at the guard who held his salute as rigidly as some umpires who call strikes on batters with exaggerated formality. Bull spoke to the boy in a frozen, humorless voice.
"You call that a salute, mister?"
"Yes, sir."
"I call that an abortion. I call that a disgrace. I call that an insult to a Marine Corps officer. I call that a court-martial offense. Now straighten that arm, get that elbow up, and don't bend your neck to the right. You salute like you have no pride, son. Now salute me again. Make it snap. That's it. Old Marines should have arthritic elbows from snapping salutes. Good. That's outstanding. Now if I ever see you give me one of those spaghetti salutes again I'm going to have your arm amputated up to the shoulder. Carry on, Marine, and tell your buddies at the barracks that Colonel Bull Meecham has just reported in and that he will be making his presence known soon."
"Yes, sir."
Bull drove straight to the Operations Building. Like all bases where he had worked the buildings he was passing were bleached-out structures of white and gray as though the architect had applied special leeches in the heart of each foundation to bleed off color should it ever appear. The architecture had a spareness and an economy of line that were pragmatic to the point of absurdity.
He drove into the parking lot of the Operations Building. Two Marines saluted him as they left the building. Bull returned the salute and grunted "good morning."
Bull walked down the long polished hall with a bouncing gait that was distinctively unmilitary. Old friends could pick him out of a dismissed battalion, so singular was his walk, so indelibly a part of him, and he could change it no more than he could change his blood type.
He opened the door of the operations officer and entered a sparsely furnished anteroom where a hairless sergeant with a mechanical bearing so stiff that he seemed to be composed of metal parts looked up from the typewriter and said," May I help you sir?"
"Where is Colonel Hedgepath, Sergeant? Colonel Meecham is here to see him."
"He's indisposed at this moment, sir."
"Oh, he's indisposed," Bull mocked. "I surely would hate to bother anyone who was indisposed. "Then, his voice changing, he said," I asked you where he was, Sergeant, I didn't ask for you to practice your mastery of the English language."
"He's in the latrine down the hall, sir."
"Is he taking a shit?"
"The sergeant doesn't know, sir."
"Did he take a magazine with him?"
"Sir?"
"Did he take a magazine with him when he went to the latrine?"
"The sergeant believes he did, sir."
"Then he must be taking a shit. I think I'll go make sure he wipes himself good. Does the sergeant know," Bull said bending down conspiratorially," that Colonel Hedgepath never wipes himself after he takes a shit? He says that animals don't have toilet paper and he personally thinks it's unnatural. What is your opinion of that, Sergeant?"
"The sergeant has no opinion, sir."
"You don't believe in toilet paper either?"
"The sergeant does, sir. The sergeant certainly does."
"Then that's an opinion, Sergeant. You are taking a stand for toilet paper. You are on the side of clean assholes and I, for one, commend you on your vigorous defense of good hygiene. Now I think I'll mosey on down to check on Colonel Hedgepath."
There were two stalls in the latrine. A pair of cordovan shoes gleamed in the stall nearest the door. Bull entered the one next to the wall. He sat on the toilet without taking down his pants although he made noises like undoing his belt and unfastening his zipper. He wanted the sound effects to be natural so the colonel in the next stall would suspect nothing. He bent down and looked at the shoes underneath the partition. Bull thought to himself that Virgil Hedgepath was one of the best groomed officers in the Marine Corps even when his pants were down below his knees. The shoes were impeccably shined; the pants had a fresh crease.
Finally, the man wiped himself, flushed the toilet, and stood up. Before he could pull his pants up, Bull reached under the partition and tackled the man by grabbing his pants and jerking them into his stall. Bull heard the man scream and a splash as the man's arm sank into the toilet as he crashed down. Bull, taking advantage of the surprise, yanked the man by the ankles and pulled him into his booth, holding him upside down by the feet. Then with considerable effort, Bull climbed atop the toilet, battling the flailing arms and legs of the desperate, upended officer, and was about to dip the colonel head-first into the toilet when profanity filled the latrine and for the first time Bull realized that the man he held suspended so inelegantly was not Virgil Hedgepath. Skinny arms struck inconsequential blows at Bull's legs. On one of the arms below him, Bull glimpsed the bent wings of a corporal's chevrons.
Bull opened the door to the stall, dragged the corporal out, laid him gently on the men's room floor, then crossed his arms as the corporal pulled up his pants. The corporal clenched his fists and was ready to swing at Bull's face when he noticed for the first time that his attacker held the rank of lieutenant colonel. A moment of indecision passed while the two men stared at each other. Bull finally spoke: "Corporal," he said seriously, "do you love the Marine Corps?"
"What?" the corporal half screamed, breath and spit.
"Corporal," Bull roared at the top of his voice, "Corporal, if you ever address me again without using the word 'sir,' I'll make your life in the Corps a fucking nightmare. Now pop to attention when I talk to you, mister.
"That's better," Bull smiled as the man before him drew rigid. "Now, Corporal, you are probably wondering why I attacked you like that. Am I correct?"
"Yes, sir," the man answered.
"Think about it, Corporal. It should be clear to you."
"I don't know, sir."
"What's your name, son?"
"Atchley, sir."
"The attack was prompted by threefold considerations. First, I wanted to test your readiness in the face of a surprise attack. Do you realize, Corporal, that several Marines were killed by the Japanese while they were taking shits at Pearl Harbor? Now that is not exactly a noble way to die, is it, Atchley? A fighting man can never relax. He must be vigilant to attack no matter where he is. Our nation's survival is dependent on the readiness of Marines all over the world. Where are you from, Atchley?"
"Green Bay, Wisconsin."
"Are you a Packer fan, Atchley?"
"Yes, sir."
"I hate the Packers, Atchley. And I hate Packer fans. That's the second reason I attacked you. Nothing I hate worse than taking a shit next to a Packer fan. Now for the third reason, Atchley, and here we come to the crux of the matter. You stink up a latrine worse than a
nybody it's been my pleasure to sit next to. You also, and I know I'm getting a bit personal, Atchley, but I'm trying to make you a better Marine, you also only wiped your ass twice. I suggest that two times is insufficient. Do you realize the number of germs and the kind of germs that can breed in a human asshole, Atchley?"
"No, sir," the corporal answered.
"Right now, this very moment, Atchley, germs with names you can't even pronounce are preparing to launch a devastating attack against your asshole that will render you helpless as a Marine and useless in the defense of your country. I'm gonna let it go this time, Atchley, but if I ever find you neglecting that portion of your anatomy again I'm gonna have you up before a disciplinary board so fast it will make your eyes swim. Now get out of here, Atchley, and if you ever attack a senior officer again I'm gonna jack it up that filthy ass of yours."
"But, sir, you attacked me."
Bull shook his head in patient exasperation. "That's why you're not going to make it, Atchley. You've obviously peaked out as a corporal. Countermanding a statement by a superior officer. Now I want you to forget what happened in here today. Do you read me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good man, Atchley. I also want you to remember my name. It's Jones, Colonel John J. Jones. I'm only at Ravenel for the day. I fly around the country testing the readiness of troops for combat and what just happened here is part of my duties. I want to impress upon you, Corporal, that this was strictly a confidential test of combat readiness classified Top Secret. Tell no one, Atchley, because I may be trying this test on your direct superior. Now, you are dismissed, Corporal, and good luck in your career. Be proud, Atchley, proud of yourself and proud of the Corps."