The Great Santini (8 page)

Lillian knew about marshes from girlhood summers spent on the Georgia coast.

The Chevrolet crossed a bridge that announced the entry into Ravenel County.

"Thirty more miles, hogs."

"Will you tell us about the new house, Bull? I'm perishing from curiosity," Lillian spoke.

"It's a surprise," Bull gloated.

"I gotta go number one real bad," Matthew said.

"Tough titty," Bull answered, his sunglasses eyelessly hunting for Matthew in the rearview mirror. "You should have gone when we stopped for the train."

"Cross your legs, darling," Lillian advised. "And offer it up for a good intention."

"Like the conversion of Russia," Ben suggested.

The air had a fetid, tropical feel to it as it passed through the car: the land was flat, lush and brilliantly green. On the road's grassy fringes, black men and women, sometimes alone but often in lethargic twos or silhouetted in triplicate, walked the long stretches between shacks and cabins where plumes of morning smoke trailed above rusty tin roofs and smells of breakfast spilled from open windows and entered the rush of air that caromed about the Meecham car.

"Bacon," Lillian moaned, as the car passed one small house. "I would rather eat bacon than a filet mignon."

Bull grunted, a monosyllable meaningless in any language, but an audible assent that he had heard and understood her. He was tiring now and his participation in conversation would diminish with each mile passed. The children were staring out the windows. As strangers, they entered Ravenel with sharpened, critical eyes assimilating every image that flashed by them, so that what they saw was the addendum of ten million impressions that registered briefly and almost tangentially in their minds like flags of undiscovered countries: each image a single frame of memory whose life span was light quick and heartbeat fast: each a mystery clamoring for preservation, for life, for admittance to the vaults of the brain where remembrance burns. Each child in the car hunted for the familiar; the sights that would relate Ravenel to the other towns that had served as temporary homes.

A jet passed overhead; the sound poured into the car like a liquid. Leaning his head out the window, Bull scanned the treeline for a glimpse of the plane. "That's the sound of freedom," he said. It was a sound familiar to all of them, its thunder rumbling across them as though they were long sheets of glass. It was a legitimate sound of home, one that would remind the Meecham children of their youth more strongly than the singing bells of ice cream trucks or the cadences of lullabies.

Moments later, Mary Anne began to cry. It was soundless weeping free from hysterics, unrelated even to grief. Her eyes glistened as the tears rolled down her face in clearly defined salt creeks.

"What's the boo-hooing about?" Colonel Meecham stormed at his rearview mirror, catching and holding the image of his weeping daughter. "You better get her to stop, Lil. I can't stand boo-hooing."

"Get a Kleenex to wipe your face, Mary Anne. There's nothing to cry about. You've got to give it a chance."

"I gave it a chance," Mary Anne replied miserably. "I hate this town too."

"You'll learn to love it. Give it time. If I were you, I'd say, 'I'm going to take this town by storm. I'm going to go out of my way to meet people and I'm going to be the most popular young lady in Ravenel by the time I leave here.' That's the spirit I'd take."

"Just get her to turn off the waterworks, Lillian. We don't need a speech."

"I'm trying, Bull. Just give me a chance. Mary Anne is just upset about moving. So are all the kids."

"Tell the hogs too bad from the Big Dad. I don't care if they're upset or not."

Mary Anne searched her purse for a Kleenex, but pulled out instead a teaspoon pirated from her mother's silver service. Crying gently, she held the spoon under her eyes, carefully catching each tear, preserving their sad silver in the hollow of the spoon. "I'm
real
depressed," she said finally. "I'm going to hate this town. I wish I were dead."

Bull replied," You may get your wish if you don't cut the weepy scene.

When the tears filled the spoon to overflowing, when the edge of the spoon brimmed with the trembling residue of her grief, Mary Anne carefully flicked her wrist and the warm liquid flew the length of the car, only slightly dispersed, and splashed against Bull's head.

"I ain't believing somebody spit on me," Bull bellowed in disbelief, his hand feeling his hair. "Has someone gone nuts?"

"Excuse me, Daddy dear. The spoon slipped," Mary Anne protested innocently. Three more tears lit into the spoon. Aiming carefully, Mary Anne flicked them on her father's neck.

Lillian broke in," Remember, darling, what I told you. If you have a lemon, make lemonade. You have to give a town a chance to grow on you. You have to open yourself up to a town. Be willing to take chances. You've been in the Corps long enough to know that."

"I am not in the Corps," Mary Anne said to her mother, tossing another sun-bright tear at her father's head; it missed, passing over his right ear and splashing down on his arm where it lay trapped on the dense red hairs of his arm.

"I ain't believing she's bombing me with tears, Lillian, and you can't stop her," Bull said. "You want me to stop her?"

"Stop hitting your father this very instant, young lady," Lillian flared. But there was not much menace behind Lillian's attempts at discipline.

The next tear hit Matthew on the forehead.

"Weirdo just hit me with a tear, Mama."

"I'm gonna mix those tears with a little blood if she isn't careful," Bull said.

"I said stop, Mary Anne, and I mean it. Remember who you are.

"I'm a weirdo," Mary Anne answered.

"You are a lady," Lillian said imperiously. "And ladies don't catch their tears in spoons and hurl them at their families. A lady grieves in silence. She always has a smile on the outside. She waits until she is alone to express her sorrow."

"I like to do it in full public view. I'd like to draw huge crowds of people and weep all day. I'd flick tears at the crowd until each one of them was hit with a tear. I like people to share in my misery. I like them to feel it when I feel bad. God, I feel miserable."

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," Lillian admonished her daughter. "Ladies . . ."

"I know, Mama. Ladies don't speak with vulgar tongues. How do ladies talk? I'd really like to know."

"A lady just knows how to talk. It's not something she is taught. It is something within her, something inherently gentle and refined. She says nothing that offends or upsets. A lady speaks softly, kindly, and the world spreads out before her and fights to do her favors. If a woman is not a lady at birth, no amount of money or education can make her one. A lady just
is.
"

Mary Anne sang with false joy," What a perfect description of me. Yes. That's how a dictionary would define me."

"Boy, what a joke that is, huh, Mom?" Matthew said.

"Was that a voice?" Mary Anne answered cupping her hand to her ear. "I thought I heard a tiny voice coming from a little insect body. It sounded almost human."

"Cut that out, Mary Anne. Quit teasing Matthew."

"Yeah, because you're gonna die real young if you tease me one more time, freckles," Matthew huffed.

Mary Anne retorted," The only way you could kill me, little one, would be to enter my bloodstream."

"Let's cut it out," Ben said firmly.

"Ah," Mary Anne mocked," the voice of sublime perfection. Was that the godly one? The sainted brother? The perfect son?"

Before Ben could answer, Bull thundered out at all of them, "I'm gonna give you hogs about five seconds to cut the yappin' then I'm gonna pull this car over to the side of the road and I bet I can shut your yaps even if your mother can't."

"Hush," Lillian hissed at her children. "Not another sound. "Her eyes cast a stern, desperate communiqué to her children.

But this time there was no need. Bull's tone had registered. Each child knew the exact danger signals in the meteorology of their father's temperament; they were adroit weathermen who charted the clouds, winds, and high pressure areas of his fiercely wavering moods, with skill created through long experience. His temper was quick fused and uncontrollable and once he passed a certain point, not even Lillian could calm him. He was tired now after driving through half the night. Behind his sunglasses, the veined eyes were thinned with fatigue and a most dangerous ice had formed over them. The threshing winds of his temper buffeted the car and deep, resonant warning signals were sent out among the children. Silence ruled them in an instant. They resumed watching the diminishing countryside on the outskirts of Ravenel. "Control," Lillian said soothingly. "Control is very important for all of us. "She was looking at her husband.

"This is it, sportsfans. This is Ravenel," the colonel said, talking more to himself than to his family.

"And to think I mistook it for Paris, France," Mary Anne whispered to Ben in the rear of the station wagon.

They were riding down a street lined with sharply spined palmetto trees. To the right of the car, the last fingers of a tidal creek groped among the extreme frontier of marsh grass that edged up against the backs of gas stations and hamburger stands.

"Yes, it's a military town all right," Lillian said to her husband. "Half the town is liquor stores to keep the Marines happy. The other half is covered with mobile home salesmen to cheat the young enlisted men with families out of their pitiful salaries."

"This isn't the good part of town. So there's no sense yappin'," Bull muttered.

They came to a traffic light. To the right stood a decaying high school with a grassless campus. Behind the school was a garbage dump perched on the edge of a dying marsh. The school had an empty, dried-out look, like the shell of a June bug on the bark of a tree.

"If that's where we're goin' to school, you can forget it, Popsy," Mary Anne blurted out.

"That's the colored high school, Mary Anne."

"It looks terrible," Matthew said.

"That's where the spearchuckers learn to blow darts," the colonel laughed.

"Bull, you hush," Mrs. Meecham warned.

They turned the corner and soon were driving along a high, grassy bluff that sloped down to a glistening river that flowed through the main part of town. Live oak trees, festooned with cool scarves of Spanish moss, and gnarled by a century of storms, loomed over the street. On the left, large white houses with long columns and graceful verandas ruled the approach to the river with mute elegance. Each house was a massive tribute to days long past. In one of the houses drawling conspirators had planned the secession from the Union; in another, Sherman himself had slept after his long march to the sea.

On the other side of the town a drawbridge crossed the river, connecting Ravenel with the three sea islands that separated the town from the Atlantic Ocean. A yacht knifed through the early morning water in a long, green V. Sea gulls, balsa-light, hovered on invisible currents above the river. Three black fishermen fished from the bridge.

But Lillian Meecham was looking at the houses that bordered River Street.

"These are lovely, lovely houses, children. Bull, you didn't tell me Ravenel was such an incredibly charming town."

"I wanted to surprise you, sportsfans. But the big surprise is coming up later."

"You mean the house you rented, Dad?" Ben asked.

"Affirmative."

"Why aren't we living in base housing? No one's told us that," Ben continued.

"Because all the quarters billeted for majors and above are filled up," Bull explained.

"That just means you're not high-ranked enough to get us a house, huh, Popsy," Mary Anne said.

"Of course that's not what it means," Lillian snapped. "Your father will be one of the highest ranking officers on this air base. It simply means that we'll have to wait for quarters to open up to move in.

"I guarantee you we won't move from these quarters I am about to show you," Bull said proudly.

"Tell me about the house, sugah. I'm still perishing from curiosity."

"Not until you see it."

"You know I'm not wild about two bedroom mobile homes, Dad," Ben said.

"Are you wild about having a fist slammed down your throat up to the elbow, wise guy?" Bull bellowed.

"Temper, temper," Lillian cooed. "Aren't these mansions lovely?"

"I gotta go to the bathroom," Matthew said.

"Cross your legs, Matt, and offer it up to the Lord," Lillian said.

"Look at that one, Mama," Karen said, pointing to a large two story mansion with ten columns on each level. It was encircled by a wild, untended garden fierce in its reckless blooming and accidental color.

"That is a true southern mansion," Mrs. Meecham said reverently. "It reminds me of Tara in
Gone
With
the
Wind
except for its garden. Maybe it's hard to get help around here."

"I guess I kind of remind you of Rhett Butler in
Gone
With
the
Wind,
huh, Lillian?" Bull asked.

"No, darling, you don't even vaguely remind me of Rhett Butler."

"You do remind me of somebody in the movies, Dad. I can't think of who it is. No, I got it. You remind me of Bambi," Ben said.

"Dad reminds me of Godzilla from the movie by the same name," Mary Anne suggested.

"Naw," Ben said," I liked Godzilla."

"Ask a simple question, get a lot of yappin'," Bull growled. "Anyway, I remind myself of Rhett Butler. A real ol' stud horse."

"It's a desecration to compare yourself to Rhett, Bull. There's no comparison."

"Yeah, I guess not. Ol' Rhett just can't measure up to the Great Santini."

"That's not what I meant."

"
Gone
With
the
Wind
was a real horsecrap movie."

"It is considered the best ever made."

"I still have to go to the bathroom," Matt whined.