The Great Santini (10 page)

For years she had dreamed of being the mistress of so splendid a house. She had been raised to appreciate anything that was old and to hold in mild contempt anything new or showy. Here, standing on the living room's rift cut pine boards and studying the carved spandrel ornaments on the staircase, she seemed to have come to a place long destined for her. The disrepair of the house did not bother her at all, the crumbling plaster, the peeling wallpaper, the faded paints or the columns; none of it made any difference. She had been reared to inhabit a house as fine as this and only the accidental liaison with a man in love with the Marine Corps had interfered with this consummation.

"They don't build houses like they used to," she heard her husband say behind her. He was dressed in his uniform except for his shoes.

"You look absolutely Napoleonic in your uniform, Bull. Yes, you're right. People used to take pride in their work."

"This whole country's going to the weenie dogs. To build a house like this today would cost you an arm and a leg. I'd like to take this same house up to Chi-city, put her down by Lake Mich and sell her for about two hundred thousand big ones."

"No, sugah, this house belongs here. Nowhere else. It would be sacrilegious to move this house to the Midwest. By the way, Bull, I suggest you put on your little booties before you go saluting the brass."

"Ben's putting a spit shine on 'em for me."

"Ben's a fine Marine, isn't he?" Lillian purred sarcastically.

"Quantico will be a snap after he's been with me for twenty years," Bull boasted.

"Darling," Lillian said," anything would be a snap after that."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing at all. Now you run along and meet all the nice officers; the movers will be here soon and we have work to do."

"You sure you don't want me to supervise the hogs in putting away the ordnance?"

"Absolutely positive, Colonel."

Bull paused at the front door and asked Lillian," How should I handle Varney, Lil?"

"I've been waiting for you to ask me that question."

"Maybe I'll wait till Monday. That'll give me some time to plan a little strategy."

"Get it over with today. Then you won't be thinking about it and brooding over it tonight. You're professionals. You can work it out just by being mature."

"No, we can't. It goes too deep."

"Well, you better try, Bull. He outranks you."

"Can you believe all the goddam luck? Of all the group commanders in the world, I get cornholed with that pussy son of a bitch."

"Watch your language, please. Little ears might be listening. What I would do if I were you is to walk in there bold as can be as though he were my best friend. You never believe me but more flies are caught with honey . . ."

"Than with horseshit," Bull finished.

"Shame on you. Now go so we can start to work. And Bull. This house. You outdid yourself."

The colonel's face lit up with pride. He looked around the house unable to contain his euphoria over his selection of a dwelling. He saluted his wife smartly. Then he shouted to his invisible children scattered about the grounds," You help your mother today and no yappin'. "As an aside to his wife, he said," If any of the troops give you any lip, there will be a summary court-martial when the Great Santini gets home."

"I've been handling the troops without you for a whole year, Santini, and I've done a darn good job of it."

"They're a little ragged, but I'll whip 'em into shape."

"That's what I'm afraid of"

"You don't think I can handle 'em, Lil?" he asked darkly.

"No, I think you can, Bull. That's what I'm afraid of. How you'll handle them."

Colonel Meecham pulled the station wagon out of the driveway. It was caked with the night dirt of Georgia and South Carolina. His family watched him leave, then fanning out in well-drilled squads they set about assaulting the long-standing dust from the recesses and corners of the massive house. Armed with sponges, soap, brooms, and mops, they sweated together in the climbing August sun, working hurriedly before the movers arrived. Mrs. Meecham wanted her furniture placed in a clean house.

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.

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."