"They don"t expire for two years," Matt offered.
"Give them here."
Bull studied the two cards and began to laugh.
"Those are mighty fine pictures of you two boys."
"Yeah, Dad, the Marine Corps spares no expense on those I.D. photographs. It must cost them at least a nickel for every million dependents they take pictures of," Ben said.
"They"re just for identification," Bull said.
"Dad, there"s not a person in the world who could identify me from that photograph."
When they entered the barbershop, Ben remembered how much he hated Marine Corps barbers. They were interchangeable from base to base, like returnable bottles. Always, their ranks were made up of humorless civilians culled from the lowest species of southerner that could plug in an electric clipper. Somehow, the barbers always became self-important, thinking of themselves as tough, no-nonsense guys because they cut the hair of tough, no-nonsense guys every day. Of course, Ben had to admit that the Marine Corps did not require artists for the job; the Corps wanted butchers, haters of hair, and surgeons who kept platoons harmoniously mutilated in the form of old masters. In the Corps barbershops, the heads of the entire base were handcrafted for the edification of visiting generals and inspection teams.
The old enmity came back to Ben as he sat down in the chair farthest away from the entrance of the shop. For a whole year he had gone to civilian barbers in Atlanta, had come to love the virile smells of tonic and powders, the laughter of old men gossiping above the drone of clippers, and all the joking and the storytelling, and the sound of the bootblack"s rag popping. It had been the first time in his life when he could describe to a barber how he wanted his hair to look, then lean back, stare into a mirror that reflected his image in a dance toward infinity, and wait while the barber did his bidding, shaved his neck with hot foam, and spun him around like a king to see if the job was properly done.
Now, he felt rough hands grabbing at his throat. The man who glowered before him conformed to the cla.s.sic stereotype of Marine barber Ben had envisioned in his mind: the face was saturnine, pockmarked, 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 wisea.s.s, 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 s.h.i.t," 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 pa.s.sed 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? He"ll 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.s 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 t.i.tanic, 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 h.e.l.l 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 compet.i.tive; they were, compulsively so. It was that this sense of compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tiveness as when he battled j.a.panese 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 compet.i.tiveness, 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 b.u.t.tocks. 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 pa.s.ses 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 world-important 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."
"Two? Why not one? First guy to ten," Bull protested. "Of course, it"s not gonna be that close, sportsfans."
"You have to take it behind the foul line after each shot, Dad."
"Don"t stand under the basket, jocko. You might get killed by one of my shots crashing through the basket."
"If you get a shot off."
Ben moved in close to guard his father, who began dribbling toward the basket with deliberate caution. He turned his b.u.t.t toward Ben and backed toward the basket, dribbling first to the right, then to the left. When Ben tried to reach around to swat at the ball, Bull prevented this by holding him off with his free arm. He took Ben almost underneath the basket, then in a quick, fluid move, he pivoted for a hook shot that caromed lightly off the backboard.
"One to goose egg, sportsfans," Bull shouted at his booing family.
Taking the ball behind the foul line, Ben saw that his father was not coming out to play defense on him. He made a move for the basket, went up for a jump shot. His father, off balance, poked him in the stomach as he went up, but the ball went in.
"He"s starting to cheat," Lillian cried out.
"One to one," Ben said.
Bull did not even dribble this time. He set himself immediately and before Ben could recover had launched a high two-hander toward the rim that missed. Rebounding the ball quickly, Ben brought it past the foul line, changed the direction of his dribble twice, gave his father a head fake, a stutter step, then drove toward the basket as recklessly as he knew how. To his surprise, he had broken completely free and laid the ball in effortlessly. "Two to one," he called to his father.
The game became rough. Sweat poured down Bull"s face and Ben caught an elbow under the left eye when he tried to block one of Bull"s hook shots. Each time Bull received the ball he would take his time, dribbling cautiously, moving backward, taking his smaller son under the basket. Ben, for his part, kept driving past his father, changing speeds, and sweeping past him as Bull lunged heavily after a son who had fooled him, betrayed him with speed.
Ben kept saying to himself, "I"ll make him work on defense. I"ll get his legs tired trying to stop me. When his legs go, his shooting will go. He"s out of shape. If I can"t get him tired, I"ll get him mad. If I can get him mad, I"ll beat him."
The game remained close, both combatants missing shots they should have made and sinking baskets that defied all principles of the game. Finally the score was tied nine to nine, and the family on the sidelines readied themselves for a denouement. Bull had the ball.
Ben pressed in close to him with his left hand waving in front of his father"s eyes. He wanted to be sure to prevent the two-handed set. During the game, over and over again, he had proven that Bull was no longer fast enough to drive around him. Bull was breathing as though steam engines were working his lungs, his lips were flecked with dried saliva, and sweat was pouring off his body. He made two half-hearted feints toward the basket, hoping to catch Ben off balance and get an unchallenged set shot. But Ben stayed close to him, his chest almost against his father"s belly, their sweat commingling and their breaths crossing like two alien winds.
"Have you ever read Moby d.i.c.k, Dad?" Ben asked.
"s.h.i.t, no," Bull murmured, pivoting around and beginning a low, cautious dribble, inching his way toward the basket with Ben fastened to his rump. "Why do you ask, sportsfans?"