The Great Santini (29 page)

"This is a wonderful gift, Dad. Thanks a lot," Ben said looking at his father, feeling somehow transfigured and invulnerable as he zipped up the jacket that was much too large for him.

"Just remember that there are some Marines who would cut your balls off if they saw you wearing this around town. It's not a damn letter jacket. I don't want you to wear it to school or anything. It's something between us. You can wear it around the house or at night."

"I'll be careful."

"Good soldier. Christ, Ben, you're eighteen. I was just sitting here thinking about when you were born. I was on a hop when you were born. All I heard when I landed was that your mother was in the hospital. I went crazy. I hit a hundred miles an hour getting to that hospital. Three M.P. trucks were chasing me as I ran through the front door and up the three flights of stairs to the maternity ward. Then all of a sudden there's this weird skinny Navy doctor telling me I had a fine healthy son and I was nearly thrown out of that hospital I was whooping so loud. I ran down to that window as fast as I could go, knocking nurses out of the way, running over small children, and crashing into patients on their way to the operating room. I'll never forget you screaming your head off while I tapped at the window and bragged to everyone who passed by that the toughest little fighter pilot in the world had been born. Then I ran down to see your mother, expecting her to look like horseshit from hell after punching you out of her system. Well, she was sitting up in that hospital bed looking prettier than I'd ever seen her. Your mother's the only woman in the world that looks like a million bucks ten hours after she's delivered a child. That was eighteen years ago. Eighteen years ago today. I was twenty-three then, just five years older than you are right now," he said, studying Ben with new interest.

"I've got to register for the draft within ten days," Ben said, adjusting the fur collar.

"I'll get off early from the squadron one day next week and take you. But I got something big planned for this morning," Bull said, looking down at his watch. "Let me pour you a cup of coffee, then we have to hit the road. What do you take in yours?"

"Mama doesn't let me drink coffee."

"I ain't Mama. You'll take it black," Bull said, pouring out a cup. "You won't like the taste at first but you'll get used to it fast. I've never trusted a man who put cream or sugar in his coffee. Just like I never really trusted a man who put Coca-Cola in his bourbon. You can drink this in the car," Bull said, handing it to Ben.

"Where are we going?"

"Are you a detective?" Bull answered, then remembering it was his son's birthday, he said," This is all part of the surprise I have in store for you. So let's double time out to the car. I told Sergeant Hicks we'd be outside of B barracks at 0500 hours."

As they drove toward Biddle Island Marine Corps Training Depot, Ben downed the hot, acrid coffee as though he were enjoying it. Bull drove through the dark streets of Paradise past the peeling warped shacks and dog-ruled groceries with their glowing Coca-Cola signs. Bull was talking and smoking one Camel after another. It was during these night rides with his father that the feeling of what it was like to be an adult often possessed Ben. A swift prescience with the strength of adrenaline flowed through him and heralded a day when he would speak to Bull Meecham man to man, as a friend and equal. Only at brief moments had Bull given his sons glimpses of what it would be like to be accepted in that fraternity of men that Bull felt comfortable around. Now, sitting behind the headlights, Bull speaking easily and unself-consciously, Ben in a sudden blaze of perception realized that Bull had forgotten, at least for the moment, that he was addressing a son.

"I've known Sarge Hicks since Korea. If you want to see a Marine's Marine then this guy's the one, Ben. He's a small little turd, but he's built like a fireplug, low, squat, and he's got the face of a man who likes to hit cripples. He looks like he should have a job killing snakes. I called him the other day and asked him when he was getting in a new bunch of recruits. It happened to fall on your birthday so I asked him if I could bring you out to see him whip his boys into shape. I told him he could trust you not to say anything to anybody about what you see. These boys you'll see this morning have been here a couple of days already. They got haircuts and uniforms but this will be the first day they'll really know what it's like to be in the Corps. He can eat recruits from what I've heard. I asked him if he still broke recruits in like he did in 'fifty-eight. He told me he'd think about it. That's Hicksie's way of saying O.K. We just can't go mouthing off about what we see here this morning. It's classified. Roger?"

"Roger," Ben answered.

The car moved through the darkness at a rapid speed, turned left at the Sanctified Church of the Crucified Jesus, and took the Biddle Creek Road which followed the river toward the training depot. Ben grew aware of the flight jacket again. The gift had substantiality and an indefinable quality of endurance. The leather flight jacket was an anachronism in 1962. It had been replaced by a nylon, light-weight flight jacket that was bled of glamour or romance. The leather jacket belonged to the days of the Corsair when men dueled in the skies for possession of Pacific atolls and for airspace above the gray, endangered fleets. But many pilots kept the leather jackets, not only for the sake of tradition but for a more aesthetic reason: the leather jacket looked better than the nylon pretender and made the pilot who wore it look better. Pilots who gathered together wearing the old style flight jacket looked like a well-bred motorcycle gang.

Ben folded his arms and felt the cracked, lined leather between his fingers. The jacket felt good all over. He could not have felt more changed if he had put on the silks of Father Pinckney, prayed over a piece of unleavened bread, and felt it quiver with the life and light of God. The jacket he wore was a part of his father's history, a fragment of Bull's biography that occurred before Ben's birth. Ben put his nose into the leather sleeve and breathed in rich memories of his own life. He could remember burrowing his head into his father's jacket when he was a child, in the days when he was allowed to hug and caress his father, in the days before his father declared it inappropriate. The sons of Marines all come to a day when their fathers moved away from their embrace. The men of the flight jacket. The strong fathers. Ben could see them all, coming through the door of his home, his score of homes, the men who played such a large role in his life. He could see them in their leather flight jackets, their dark mantles, having just come down from doing things that smaller, punier men could never do, doing things that only gods could do. All during his growing up, boys would brag to Ben about their fathers. "My father works for the second largest real estate company in eastern North Carolina," or" My father is the most important lawyer in this town. "And Ben would only smile and tell them with the maddening condescension of a child who knows he has won a contest that his father and all his father's best friends could fly faster than any birds, set an army on fire, or reduce a city of a million people to dust and memory. And it was dust and memory that had Ben now as they rode past the gate at the entryway of Biddle Island Training Depot, the guard saluting them in the sudden light of the sentry box, his form revealed in surreal and unclear lines, as they pushed down the main road that turned into a causeway crossing a vast marsh. The marsh stretched for miles on either side of the road with an ominous symmetry. A man escaping from Biddle Island would do better to try his luck with the river, the tides, and the sharks, than to test the quiet susurrant heart of the marsh. Though the marsh had a look of lush maternity, Toomer had taught Ben that the marsh was a monster. The tall grasses were green razors that could section a man's flesh into an infinite number of fine, almost invisible slices. The oyster beds that lay hidden in the marsh could cut like axes. But worst of all, a man could get lost in the marsh, lose all sense of direction and wander aimlessly in circles, being sucked in by the mud, and maddened by the sameness of the earth, no matter which way he turned. Ben wondered how many young boys from New England or the Midwest had escaped from their barracks in a fever of desperation and tried to cross the marsh on foot. Or how many had come to the river's edge, seen the lights of Ravenel blinking across the river, and had begun the long swim, until too late they realized that no swimmer could fight the power of the moon, this recall of water by oceans, and had let the water take them toward the black, roiled whitecaps along the lips of Prince Ashley Island where they died soundlessly, far from the eyes of Drill Instructors, safe from the mayhem of barracks. He did not know. He felt the jacket again and knew that he wore a part of his father.

They parked in the shadows beneath a live oak directly in front of B barracks. Beside them, a parade ground stretched for two miles until it stopped at a cluster of buildings that Ben could barely identify as the PX and commissary. Bull extinguished his lights, lit a cigarette, passed it to Ben, lit one for himself, and began to smoke in silence.

"I don't smoke, Dad," Ben said.

"Shhh! Not too loud. We aren't even supposed to be here, sportsfans. Go ahead and try it. You've probably been sneaking smokes on your mother for years."

"No, I really haven't. I thought you'd kill me if you ever caught me smoking."

"That's affirmative," Bull said, grinning at his son who fingered the cigarette without a trace of expertise. "I'd have had to ruin your whole day. Take a few heavy drags. Wait a minute. Put it out. Here comes Hicks and the boys."

Shouts and obscenities poured out of the windows of B barracks, a two story shingled building that had the unmistakable appearance of military architecture circa 1945. More shouts and more curses cut out the windows and traveled across the parade ground, dying out somewhere across the dark pavement.

"That sounds like our house when you get home," Ben said.

"Quiet," Bull growled, but he broke into a half-suppressed giggle.

By now, frantic shadows were running out the front door of B barracks. A voice of overbred brutality roared from an invisible source within the building.

"That's Hicks," Bull whispered. "He's one of the last of the great cannibals. They've cracked down so hard on the D.I.'s in the past couple of years that it's like they're running Aunt Fanny's Finishing School for Young Girls."

The drumming of feet down wooden stairs continued unbroken as recruits with their shaved heads, vulnerable necks, combat boots, fatigue hats and pants, and new white military issue T-shirts, spilled out into the night and lined up without skill or finesse at the edge of the parade ground, not fifteen yards away from the Meecham car.

A Drill Instructor appeared in the doorway, his distinctive, somewhat ludicrous hat pulled low over his eyes. He was carrying a swagger stick and had a revolver strapped to his hip. The man wore malevolence and formidability as though they were part of the uniform of the day. There was something so incarnately evil in the man's expression that Ben looked toward his father for assurance that they were indeed supposed to be there. Sergeant Hicks seemed to be laid out in squares as though he were constructed out of cinder blocks. There was a hardness to his body that made his uniform appear to be little more than a paint job. He walked as if each step he took was driving a hated enemy toward a precipice.

In the car, Ben removed the flight jacket and folded it on the seat beside him.

"Can you hear me, turds?" Sergeant Hicks said in a malefic whisper that seemed to hiss out of his bowels.

"Yes, Sergeant," the recruits screamed as one.

"That's good, turds. Because I want you to hear me real ood this morning."

"There he is!" Bull whispered to Ben in the car and pointed toward someone in the platoon of rigid, faceless men.

"Who?" Ben asked.

"Sergeant Blakeley," Bull answered.

"Who's Blakeley?"

"Another D.I. Look in the fourth row. Third one back. You can't see his face very good but I saw him waving at us."

"What's he doing there?"

"You'll see."

"Why's he dressed like a recruit?"

"Just watch and quit your yappin'."

The voice of Sergeant Hicks silenced Ben instantly as the D.I. screamed," Look at me, turds. Look at me because I want you to stare at me when I talk to you this morning. Now it makes me sick to my stomach that shit-eating maggots like you can pollute an elite group of fighting men like the United States Marine Corps. So I look upon it as my sacred duty to run as many of you fart blossoms out of the Marine Corps as I can. Because when I look over you bunch of turds and when I think about you wearing the uniform of the Corps, I want to walk up and down each rank and strangle the guts out of every fucking one of you abortions. "Hicks paused to catch his breath, then walked up to a small, rotund recruit who stood in the front of the second squad.

"What do you think the sergeant had for dinner last night, fat maggot?"

"The recruit doesn't know, Sergeant," the boy answered.

"Would the recruit believe it if the sergeant informed the recruit that he dined on shit sandwiches."

"No, Sergeant."

"Are you calling me a liar, turd?"

"No, Sergeant."

"I told you I ate shit sandwiches, turd, and you're standing there calling me a liar in front of my turds."

"No, Sergeant."

"Then what did I eat last night, turd?"

"You ate shit sandwiches, Sergeant."

"Why you fat maggot. You disgusting piece of blubber shit. If you ever tell me I eat shit again, I'm going to run this swagger stick so far up your ass, they're gonna find my wedding ring in your small intestine. I'm gonna remember you, fat maggot, and if you make it through this camp alive then I'm gonna turn in my uniform."

Then Sergeant Hicks began to address the entire platoon again. To Ben, his father's voice was the most fearsome he had ever heard, could inspire the most panic per decibel. But Bull's voice, at its worst, was reassuring and soothing compared to the D.I.'s. And Hicks's whisper was, if anything, worse than his scream, for the whisper carried with it a quality of institutional menace, even fiendishness, that the scream lost in its projection across the parade ground and through the ranks of bald men.