The Great Santini (18 page)

Now, he felt rough hands grabbing at his throat. The man who glowered before him conformed to the classic stereotype of Marine barber Ben had envisioned in his mind: the face was saturnine, pock-marked, and the mouth was grim. The man's hands trembled. He also had a nervous habit, which Ben noticed while being garroted with the barber sheet, of blowing tiny spit bubbles that were scarcely noticeable unless his face happened to be a foot away from your own. The bubbles were small, inconspicuous, and held a strange, unpalatable beauty when shafts of light pierced them and brightened his mouth with a briefly degraded spectrum of color. "I'm going to be sick," Ben thought, as he offered his head up for sacrifice.

Colonel Meecham, after delivering precise instructions to Matt's barber on the far side of the room, came up to Ben's barber and said, without looking at his son," I want you to cut the sides as short as they go, mister. Cut those sideburns all the way off. Leave a little bit on the top to comb, but on the sides, whitewalls all the way. I'll be in the pool hall, Ben."

"Why don't you have him shave my head, Dad?" Ben said, but his father was out of earshot.

When his father left the shop, Ben said to his barber in what he hoped would pass for a voice of substance and command," Just trim the sides, mister. Very lightly."

"Your father said whitewalls, sonny," the man answered sourly.

"Yes, I heard him," Ben said, then in a sterner voice," but the guy who is getting the haircut—namely me—and the guy who is paying for the haircut—me again—said trim the sides."

"Your old man's a colonel, sonny. You get whitewalls."

"What if he had told you to cut my nose and ears off?" Ben said. "I guess you'd just whack 'em off right before you brushed the hair off my neck, huh?"

"At ease, dependent," the barber replied, his shears cutting deep swaths into Ben's hair. He was pressing hard with the clippers.

Ben relaxed once the point of no return was reached. Then he spoke again, looking at the barber in the skinny mirror in front of them which Ben recognized as Marine Corps issue. "Do you know what I like about military barbers? You guys are such high class people. I mean it. Sincerely, I do. The absolute cream of military personnel. Handsome, aristocratic, urbane, without being affected."

"What are you talking about, dependent?" the man said between spit bubbles.

Ben continued, warming to his topic," Scientists conducted a study last year, fine sir. Would you like to hear the results?"

"You're a real wiseass, dependent."

"Yeah, but you're a little afraid of me because my daddy's a colonel, right, fine sir? Now let me tell you about this scientific study. The scientists did a study of all Americans. The average white man had an I. Q. of one hundred. The average Negro had an I.Q. of ninety. The average Mongoloid idiot had an I.Q. of thirty. Now—and this is the interesting part, the truly fascinating part to me—Marine Corps barbers had an average I.Q. of twenty-one. They say the Mongoloid idiots are in an uproar that you guys came so close."

"You officers' kids think you're hot shit," the man hissed, the pressure of his clippers harder against Ben's scalp now.

"There's an opening downtown at the morgue for a man to shave the pubic hair off the balls of male cadavers. With your talent and personality, you'd be a shoo-in."

"You've got wax in your ears, dependent," the barber said. "Don't you ever clean 'em?"

A moment later the barber spun the chair around to face the mirror. Ben's hair was now as short as his father's.

"Why didn't you just give me a trim, fella? Huh? What's such a big deal about a trim?"

"The colonel said whitewalls."

"You know I'm one of those weird guys who likes a few tiny filaments to be left on top of his head after he has a haircut. It wouldn't have hurt you to ease up a bit."

"Just pay up, dependent," the man said, a bubble of saliva darting out of his mouth.

Matthew had also fared badly. His hair was cut shorter than Ben's. A prickly tuft of hair ran down the middle of his head, bisecting it.

"You look like the Last of the Mohicans, Matt, my boy," Ben said, grinning at his brother.

"I wish Dad would go on another Med cruise."

They walked out of the barbershop toward the pool hall. As they passed a jeweler in a cubicle hunched over a watch, Ben told his brother, "Today you are going to witness a beautiful sight, Matt. You are going to get a chance to watch me whip Dad one on one in basketball. And seeing Dad lose in a sport is a sight beautiful to behold. He's the worst loser in the world. Of course, he's the worst winner in the world too."

"He'll kill you," Matt said. "There isn't a sport in the world he can't whip you in."

"Look, I've been playing basketball almost every day of my life for the past three years. I'll be eighteen soon. He's getting older. It's time I started whipping him."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Matt protested. "I've heard you talk for years how you were going to beat him. You might start winning, but then he'll start talking to you. You'll choke like you always do."

"Nope. I've been preparing for this grudge match for a whole year. He's good at psyching me. But not this time," Ben said.

"It's too hot to play basketball."

"Why do you think I chose this particular day, little brother? Hell melt like a Popsicle out there."

"Don't call me little."

"O.K., mohawk."

"Don't call me anything."

The challenge match was set for five o'clock that afternoon. Ben swept off the cement court that spread from the back porch of the house to the garage. While Bull dressed upstairs, the rest of the family gathered by the side of the court to cheer Ben while he warmed up. Matt fed Ben passes out beyond the foul line, and Ben, dribbling twice, would fake a drive toward the basket, then go up with a quick awkward jump shot that was adequate even though it lacked artistry and the essential purity of flow always found in good jump shooters. Then he began to drive all the way to the basket, dribbling slowly, then exploding toward the basket, changing hands in midair and letting the ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket.

Lillian coached him from a wicker chair by the porch. "You can't listen to him, Ben. Once you listen to him, he has you beaten. Keep your mind on the game. Your game. And don't worry about him. If you start beating him, he'll start to cheat. You just concentrate on your game."

Bull appeared on the back porch wearing a sweat suit with "United States Marine Corps" stenciled on it. Standing on the porch, he raised his clasped hands over his head and pranced like a boxer going into the ring.

"Boo, booo," his wife and children jeered.

"You ready to go one on one, Dad?" Ben called from under the basket.

"With you?" Bull said, skipping lightly down the stairs. "You ain't man enough to go one on one against the Great Santini."

"Let me play too, Dad," Matt pleaded.

"Naw, you get out of here, Matt. Go sit under a toadstool or something," Bull said. Matt ran into the house. Only Mary Anne saw that he was crying and she followed him. Ben threw a pass to his father. Dribbling three times with both his right and left hand, Bull went into a strangely graceful crouch and threw up an arcing two-hand set shot that swished through the net. Bull crowed with delight, a self-indulgent but euphoric eruption that silenced his wife's catcalls for the moment. Looking toward Lillian, he said," The old boy's still got it, huh, Petunia?"

"That shot went down with the Titanic, Dad," Ben teased.

"It still counts two points, does it not, jocko?" Bull snapped back, shooting another arcing set that hit the back of the rim and bounced back to him without ever touching the court. Mary Anne slipped out of the back door without Matt and sat down again by her mother. Bull shot another time and once more the ball swished through the net.

"What was it like, Dad," Ben said, throwing him the ball," shooting at a peach basket?"

"You're gonna find out what it was like having a fist stuck up your left nostril if you don't quit your yappin'."

Mary Anne squealed from the sidelines," You could stick two fists and a leg up Ben's left nostril with that schnozz of his."

"Ha, ha, very funny," Ben sneered at his sister.

"I'm surprised Mommy let her sweet little boy play any nasty sports at all when the Big Dad was overseas," Bull taunted.

"Don't listen to him, Ben. He's starting on you now. Just think about the game," Lillian called out.

"There's a reason I'm going to beat you, Dad."

"Do tell, sportsfans."

"It's because," and here Ben paused, ensuring that everyone was listening," it's because you're getting fat."

"What'd you say?" Bull had picked the ball up and was holding it in the crook of his left arm.

Lillian doubled up with laughter in the white wicker chair.

"Not real fat. Just kind of chunky. You look kind of slow now, Dad."

"We'll see who's slow. I told you never to mess with greased lightning, son."

"Greased lightning don't weigh no two hundred twenty pounds."

"I could eat you for breakfast, sportsfans."

"You been eating somethin' real big for breakfast, that's for sure.

Bull threw up another set shot. It was good. Then he looked toward Ben with hard eyes. "Your mouth has improved since I left, but you're still a mama's boy. You still haven't developed the killer instinct. I could psych you out even if I was a hundred years old. If I was paralyzed from the neck down I could still beat you in a spitting contest. And there's one thing we both know. I'm a hell of a lot better athlete than you."

That was true, Ben thought. The sons of Bull Meecham lived with the awareness that they would never match the excellence of their father in athletics. In all sports, they lacked his inextinguishable fierceness, his hunger for games. It was not that they were not competitive; they were, compulsively so. It was that this sense of competition was not elevated to a higher level. In Bull Meecham, the will to win transformed all games into a furious art form. The game was a framework in which there was a winner and a loser. Bull Meecham was always the winner. He played cow bingo with the same fervor as he played his last college basketball game at Saint Luke's. He played Old Maid with Karen and Matt with the same competitiveness as when he battled Japanese pilots in the Pacific. The stakes could be higher in some games than others, but Bull played them all to win. Ben had inherited his father's speed afoot, his good eyes, and much of the competitiveness, but he had not received his father's genius for games, the raw nerve ends and synapses that brought a game up from a region of sport into a faith based on excellence, a creed toughened by fire. But on this hot August day in Ravenel, South Carolina, under the blaze of a terrible sun, Ben thought that he had a great equalizer working for him, called youth.

Ben was five feet ten inches tall and weighed 165 pounds; his father was six feet four inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. But Ben had been correct when he observed that Bull had thickened over the last years. He had become heavy in the thighs, stomach, and buttocks. The fast places had eroded. Rolls of fat encircled him and he wore the sweat suit to keep his new ballast unexposed. He was planning to lose weight anyway. There was nothing Bull Meecham hated worse than a fat Marine.

It took a long time for Bull to warm up and it gave Ben a chance to study his moves. Lillian called from the sidelines for Bull to "quit stalling. "But Bull remained unhurried, gliding around the court with the definitive moves of the natural. Though his speed was gone, his quickness was not. His hands were still very fast. He could handle a basketball with remarkable dexterity for one who had abandoned the court so long ago. He was heavy yet he was still a dancer and the easy moves of the old predator came back to him effortlessly as he went from spot to spot testing his eye.

"Let's get the game going," Lillian said, clapping her hands.

But Bull would not be hurried. He was seriously practicing his two-hand set shot. The hands that could make jets perform exotic gymnastics in the sky had a softness of touch and an inborn surety that made him an excellent outside shooter. The pilot with the good eyes for spotting enemy troop movements, for columns of tanks, and for artillery positions could also use those eyes for looking up, and for judging the distance between the basket and his hands, for that silent worship of rims. He shot his two-hand set in a soft, spinning arc that, when true, snapped through the net in a swishing voice that is the purest music of the game. Even when he missed, the spin on the ball made it die on the rim and it would often bounce once or twice between the rim and the backboard before falling in. As Ben fed him passes from under the basket, Bull made eight out of twelve set shots, moving in a semicircle outside the scratched-out foul line. Time after time, Bull brought the ball to eye level, almost resting it on his nose. He sighted the rim, bent his knees, and in a rhythm that never changed launched his body, his arms, and the ball upward toward the basket, his fingers spreading out like fans with the two index fingers pointing toward the center of the rim. Like all good shooters, the pattern of Bull's shooting did not deviate; in fact it was unconscious, buried in instinct, and rooted in long hours of boyhood practice. He did the same thing each time the ball left his fingers to hunt the chords. Over and over, monotonous, without change, until finally he said to his son," Let's play ball."

"You sure you don't want to warm up for a little longer?" Lillian said. "You've only taken about an hour."

"Do any of you creeps realize that this is not exactly a worldimportant event?" Mary Anne said.

"Uh, oh," Bull answered," Miss Funeral Shroud has come to spread joy."

"Don't give him a clear shot, Ben," Lillian coached. "Keep him away from the basket and don't let him take his set."

"Someone ought to cheer for Daddy," Karen said.

"You cheer for him," her mother answered.

"Yeah, Karen, give your Big Dad a few cheers. All the raspberries are coming his way."

"You take it out first, Dad," Ben said, bouncing the ball to his father. "Play to ten baskets by one. You have to win by two."