But Ben had watched his mother change as the day approached for his father to return from his year"s journey overseas. It was a universal law in military families that mothers could not maintain the strict discipline enforced by fathers to whom discipline was a religion and a way of life. When the military man left for a year, the whole family relaxed in a collective, yet unvoiced sigh. For a year, there was a looseness, a freedom from tension, a time when martial law was suspended. Though a manless house was an uncompleted home, and though the father was keenly missed, there was a laxity and fragile vigor that could not survive his homecoming.
Lillian Meecham was not a disciplinarian, but as the day of her husband"s return neared, she knew instinctively that she had to harden into a vestigial imitation of her husband, so his arrival would not be too much of a shock to her children. His hand had traditionally been very heavy when he returned from overseas, so intent was he on reestablishing codes of discipline and ensuring that the children marched to his harsher cadences. For the last month she had been preparing them. She conducted unannounced inspections, yelled frequently, scolded often, and had even slapped Matthew when he argued about one of her directives. Tension flowed like a black-water creek through the family as the day of Colonel Meecham"s arrival neared. The change of command ceremony took place the moment his plane arrived at Smythe Field. Lillian Meecham would hand the household over to her husband without a single word pa.s.sing between them.
Mary Anne had a very different face from her mother"s. Her face was wise, freckled, and touchingly vulnerable. Thick gla.s.ses diminished somewhat its natural prettiness. The gaudy frames of the gla.s.ses were cheap, drawing attention to features that needed no heavy emphasis. She was much shorter than her mother and seemed chunky and ungainly in comparison. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were large and full, but she dressed in loose-fitting tentlike clothes so as not to draw attention to herself. Because of the thick gla.s.ses, her eyes had a bloated appearance as though they were both trapped in a goldfish bowl. Her eyes were precisely the same blue as her mother"s, but they nursed a wisdom and hurt strange to find in so young a girl. She opened a compact as she walked along and dabbed at several faded freckles. Never in her life had she liked the stories told by mirrors.
The wind picked up, died, and picked up again. It was a wind that offered no relief from the heat, but it caught Lillian"s hair and pushed it softly back, an auburn shining pennant, a surrogate windsock, revealing a long, elegant neck.
"Mom looks beautiful today, doesn"t she?" Ben said without looking at his sister.
Mary Anne frowned and said, "Yeah, Oedipus. She always looks beautiful. What else is new?"
"She must have spent a lot of time dolling up for Dad."
"About two weeks I"d say. She had her hair done, her nails done, her eyes done, and her clothes done. The only thing wrong is she couldn"t have her children done."
"Do you think she"s excited about Dad coming home?"
"Yes," Mary Anne answered. "She loves the creep. Like all of us, she"s afraid of him. But also like all of us, she loves him. I read all of his letters to her. They"re full of disgusting s.e.xual references. It"s very sicko-s.e.xual."
"You read Dad"s letters?" Ben said, amazed. "Mom would kill you if she knew that."
"It"s my duty to keep informed. I will tell you one lewd, but fascinating piece of information. He refers to his p.e.n.i.s as Mr. Cannon and her v.a.g.i.n.a as Miss Nancy. Isn"t that lovely? It made me want to puke."
"I would advise you, dear sister, not to slip up and call Dad Mr. Cannon sometime. And I would never refer to Miss Nancy under any circ.u.mstances. But what the h.e.l.l, I bet it"s hard for a husband and wife to be separated for a whole year. I know it gets lonely for Mom, but G.o.d knows we need these breaks from Dad once in a while. I"ve got one year left with the big fellow before I"m home free."
"Dad is the most interesting person I"ve ever met," Mary Anne said thoughtfully.
"The fist prints on my jaw can attest to that."
"I don"t mean that. He"s hard to figure out. He loves his family, more than anything in the world except the Marine Corps, yet none of us ever have a real conversation with him."
"Well, it"s been a good year without him. I"ve loved being at Mamaw"s."
"Anything would be a good year compared to the one before he left for Europe."
"It was definitely not a banner year. But that"s over. Mom says he"s changed a lot since he"s been gone. He"s evidently missed us a lot."
"I"ve missed him too, kind of."
"So have I," Ben said with difficulty. "Kind of." Then suddenly he said, "I hear a plane."
Far off, the quiet percussion of an approaching plane resonated over the field. Ben and Mary Anne sprinted the remaining distance to where their mother stood with Matthew and Karen. Ben ran backward trying to catch the first glimpse of the plane, watching for the sharp reflection of sunlight off a wing or c.o.c.kpit window, but still he could not see it. The buzz of the plane seemed to fill the whole sky and came from no one source. It grew louder, more defined. When they finally reached Mrs. Meecham, she was smiling.
"I see it," she said simply.
"Where?" Ben cried. "I haven"t seen it yet."
"It"s at two o"clock just below that big cloud."
"I see it. I see it," Matt shouted.
"There"s Daddy"s plane," Karen squealed, jumping up and down in her new ruffled dress and patent leather shoes.
Mary Anne was staring blankly toward the noise. From long experience she knew that the plane was not in her range of vision, nor would it be for several minutes.
"I still don"t see the G.o.ddam thing," Ben whispered to Mary Anne.
"Don"t feel like the Lone Ranger," Mary Anne answered, "I won"t be able to see it until I"m hit by one of the wings."
"Why don"t you turn those gla.s.ses of yours around and use them as binoculars?"
"Very funny."
"Seriously, I tried that once with your gla.s.ses. For the first time, I saw the rings of Saturn." Then he shouted suddenly, "There"s the plane. I was looking right at the thing. I must be getting rusty."
Lillian Meecham gathered her children around her to ch.o.r.eograph the homecoming.
"Stand up straight, Ben and Matt. Shoulders back. Like Marines. Matthew, let me comb your hair. Girls check your makeup, we want to be beautiful for your father. When he gets off the plane, we"ll all run to meet him. I"ll go first, followed by the girls, then the boys. I"ll give him a big juicy. Then the girls will give him big juicys. Boys, you shake his hand firmly. Very firmly, like men. Then say, "Welcome home, Colonel." "
"We better get a chair for the midget to stand on," Mary Anne teased, "Matt will end up shaking hands with Dad"s bellyb.u.t.ton if we don"t give him a lift."
"You heard her, Mama. You heard her call me a midget."
"Mary Anne," Mrs. Meecham called sternly.
"Yes, ma"am," Mary Anne answered.
"Be a lady."
The eyes of the air base turned in the direction of the fat-bodied transport plane that was bringing foodstuffs and airplane parts to Smythe Field, and Bull Meecham back to his family. It lowered steadily to the earth, flaps down, nose up, until the wheels screamed along the concrete and a black seam of rubber burned into the runway, marking the final leg on Colonel Meecham"s journey home. As the plane taxied toward the operations tower where the family waited, a fuel truck sputtered into life by the hangar and rolled slowly toward the plane.
The door of the plane opened and steps were lowered. A man in uniform appeared in the doorway. He looked out, saw his family, and bellowed out to them with a large, exuberant smile, "Stand by for a fighter pilot."
Yes, as they ran to him, that echo from past memories rang in their brains, that pa.s.sword into the turbulent cellular structure of the past, the honeycomb of lost days, of laughter and fury, that told them as they ran to his outstretched arms a simple message: Lt. Col. Bull Meecham, United States Marine Corps, was back from Europe. The father had landed. The Great Santini was home.
Chapter 3.
A month later, on Rosebriar Road in Atlanta, an alarm clock knifed into the darkness of two o"clock in the morning. Bull Meecham was already awake and his hand silenced the alarm almost as soon as it began. His body was alive, vibrant, singing like an electric wire as he dressed in preparation for the trip to Ravenel. He cut on a lamp at a bedside table and shook his wife gently.
He dressed in fatigue pants, a military issue T-shirt, and combat boots. High on his left arm, a tattoo of a red cobra, fanged, coiled, and ready to strike, stood in stark relief to his pale, freckled skin. His hair was cut short in a military burr. His neck was thick, powerful, and cruelly muscled; his arms were long, athletic to the point of being simian, threaded with veins, and covered with reddish hair. Quickly, he did fifty pushups and twenty situps. Then, he jumped up from the floor and began to run in place. He pulled a rosary from the pocket of his fatigues and began to say the first decade of the rosary. The drumming of his feet on the floor echoed throughout the darkened house. Lillian put a pillow over her head and tried to cut out the noise and light, tried to resume sleeping, although she knew it was hopeless. Timing himself precisely, Bull quit running after he had said three decades. He liked the idea of caring for his body at the same time he cared for his soul.
"C"mon, Lillian. Up and at "em. No goldbricking this morning. We"ve got two hundred and fifty miles of hard traveling to get done. The movers are going to meet us at the new house at 0900."
"Say one more rosary, darling. Then I"ll be half alive."
"Get up, trooper. I"ll get the kids. I want to be on the road in fifteen minutes."
He was sweating lightly as he moved to the girls" room. To wake Mary Anne and Karen, he flicked on the light switches and watched as they grabbed their eyes. It was the way D.I."s awoke recruits when he was at Officers" Candidate School and it remained, to him, the most efficient way to rouse soldiers from their sacks.
"Let"s move it, split-tails. South Carolina is five hours away."
Then he crossed the hall to the room where Ben and Matthew slept. He cut on the lights and walked quickly to Ben"s bed. Before Ben"s eyes could adjust to the light, Bull grabbed one of his legs and pulled him out of bed. Then he reached across and grabbed Matthew"s leg and pulled him on top of Ben. Both brothers lashed out with their arms and legs, but Bull"s weight had both of them pinned in ludicrous, humiliating positions.
"You Marines would never make it during a surprise attack."
"C"mon, Dad, get off us," Ben begged.
"C"mon, Dad, get off us," Bull imitated in a high-pitched whine. As he let the boys up, he ordered, "Be dressed and into the car in five minutes. We"re breaking camp. The j.a.ps are on the move again."
Bull went into the kitchen, listening for the sounds of the house springing to life. He heard his wife cough, water run in the girls" bathroom, a toilet flush, and Matthew yell something at Ben. He went into the kitchen of his mother-in-law"s house, plugged in a pot of coffee, and studied a road map of Georgia. Silently, he read off the names of some Georgia towns. Moultrie, Ocilla, Dahlonega, Jesup, Waycross. The whole state depressed him, the blue lines representing highways that intersected towns whose names and destinies were mysteries to him. Southern towns choked with clay and grits. Black swamp towns who like injured horses ought to be shot and buried. South Carolina was no better, he thought; but at least it wasn"t Georgia.
Alice Sole, sixty-three years old, struggled into the kitchen where her son-in-law sat. She was wearing a blue houserobe sprinkled with roses and chrysanthemums. Her face had been hastily made up into a mask of almost clownish flamboyance.
Bull grinned when he saw her, and said, "Which wh.o.r.e house sold you that bathrobe, Alice?"
"The same one your mother worked for just before you were born," the woman growled back at him. "Now don"t go messing with me at two in the morning, Bull. I"m in no mood. Why in the h.e.l.l can"t you drive during normal hours?"
"Amen," her daughter called from the bedroom.
"You make good time traveling at night," came the reply. "The kids can sleep, no cars on the road, it"s cooler, and you don"t waste a day getting there."
Alice sighed, unconvinced. "It must be the Yankee in you."
Soon Lillian was herding her children out of their bedrooms and toward the front door. The instincts of the military wife were beginning to a.s.sert themselves, the old efficiency of stealing away from temporary homes and entering the bloodstream of highways heading to new quarters. She led them out the front door and down the steep driveway and into the family station wagon. The car was already packed. A luggage carrier strapped to the roof was piled high with trunks, suitcases, and whatever cargo Bull deemed necessary for the first few hours in their new house. Ben and Matthew had flattened the backseats of the station wagon and inserted a double mattress so the children could sleep during the night journey through Georgia.
In the kitchen, waiting for his wife to give the ready sign, Bull poured himself a cup of coffee, drank it black, and felt the heat surge into his belly and flood through his body. The coffee burned into him, a dark transfusion that awakened him to his own desire to leave this house and set his eyes on long curves and highway signs.
"Mama, you"re crying," Lillian said as her mother walked up to the car.
"I"m going to miss you, baby," Alice said embracing her daughter. "When you"re my age you realize you have a finite number of good-byes to say in your life."
"Child," Lillian answered, "you are the healthiest human being on this earth. Don"t you go talking nonsense."
"It is nonsense. But I"ll cry if I G.o.ddam feel like crying."
"That"s the spirit."
"Let me kiss my grandchildren."
She leaned through the window.
"Good-bye, Mamaw," Ben said to his grandmother as she kissed him on the mouth. "I love you."
"I love you too, Benjy," she said, crying softly. "You listen to your daddy, Ben. Just do what he says, and you won"t get into trouble. All of you children do that. You hear Mamaw."
"Sure, Mamaw," Ben said. "If we don"t listen to him, Dad has a good way of getting your attention. He knocks out a few of your teeth."
"Hush, boy. You talk like a fool," she snapped. "It"s a child"s job to adapt to a parent. You have a strict father and you have to adapt quickly."
"Or else you"re not going to have a tooth left in your head," Mary Anne whispered to her brother.
The act of moving was in progress now, set in motion by an alarm clock, and the family that had moved four times in four years, traveling in summer nights, past bleached-out, sun-dried towns, moving along southern highways through the shrill, eternal symphonies of southern insects, humming old tunes and sleeping as the car rolled through the vast wildernesses and untransmissible nights: this family was tied to the image of the automobile; it was the signet of their private mythology. So often had they moved, shuffled on a chess board by colonels in the Pentagon, that it had become ritual; they moved through it all mindlessly, relying on spirit and experience, and with the knowledge that it was all the same, that the air bases were interchangeable, that mobility was the only necessary ingredient in the composition of a military family. The Meechams were middle cla.s.s migrants, and all of them were a part of a profession whose most severe punishment was rootlessness and whose sweetest gift was a freedom granted by highways and a vision of America where nothing was permanent and everything possible.
Colonel Meecham appeared on the front porch. He wore his flight jacket and gazed down the hill at the station wagon where his children jockeyed for position in the backseat. He felt good. Energy burned off him like a light. On the road, he was alive, vibrant, moving. It didn"t afford the freedom of a jet plane flying through a clear sky, but a highway offered something almost as profound, an entry into the secret regions of the earth where towns with foreign, unrecallable names were violated once, then forgotten for all time. Yes, he felt good; everything was ready. The operation was proceeding flawlessly. In a loud voice that swept through the sleeping neighborhood, he called to his family, "Stand by for a fighter pilot." Then he strode to the car, his arms swinging like an untroubled monarch.
As the pilot neared them, Lillian turned to the children in the backseat for last minute instructions.
"Now remember what I told you. Don"t do anything to upset your father. He"s easily upset on trips," she said in a soft voice.
"I"ve already talked to them, Lillian," Mamaw said. "They"ll be good."
Colonel Meecham entered the car. He arranged the things on the dashboard very carefully. On his far left, he stacked three road maps. Beside the maps was a box of Tampa Nugget cigars, blunt. On top of the cigars was a pair of aviator"s sungla.s.ses. Then, putting his hand into the pocket of his flight jacket, he pulled out a .22 pistol from it and laid the gun gingerly beside the cigar box. The appearance of the weapon caused a stir among his children behind him. It was the first time he had ever openly carried a weapon on a trip. The barrel of the pistol pointed at the squinting plastic statue of Jesus that was centered on the dashboard.
"Why are you carrying a gun, honey?" Lillian asked her husband.
"Is it loaded and ready to kill?" Matt asked breathlessly from the back.
"It"s not loaded, sportsfans," the Colonel answered, "but it"s there. You never can tell what you might meet on the road these days."
"That"s right, Popsy," Mary Anne called out. "They"ve been having quite a lot of trouble with stray dinosaurs and stuff in Georgia lately."
"Don"t be flip with your father, young lady," her mother cautioned.
"This pistol," Colonel Meecham said authoritatively as if he were lecturing recruits, "is to be used only in case of emergencies." Then he glanced back at Mary Anne through the rearview mirror, smiled, and continued in a magisterial voice, "Such as dinosaurs. Indian attacks. Tartars sweeping out of the hills, surprise raids by the j.a.panese air force. But most of all because we are in the Deep South, and the times being what they are, you never know when I might have to give some wild n.i.g.g.e.r a new a.s.shole."
A troubled silence invaded the backseat. The eyes of the children turned to Lillian awaiting a swift response. Lillian felt the silence and knew that the children were waiting for her to speak. She did not want to anger her husband, but she had no other options. Finally she said, "You know I don"t allow that word to be used in this family, Bull. Only poor white trash use that word. So please don"t use that word around our children."
"You"re supposed to call them Negroes, Daddy," Karen said, highly offended by her father"s vulgarity.
"Gee, thanks a lot, m.u.f.fin. Negroes, you say," Bull teased.
"Yeah, and he said that other word too, because I heard it with my own two ears," Matt said.
"It"s not sophisticated to use those words," Karen said.
"Oh G.o.ddam," Bull responded, starting up the engine of the car. "If it isn"t sophisticated then I can"t ever use them words again. Lordy me, to think ol" Bull Meecham let an unsophisticated word pa.s.s his lips. Why, it shames me even to think of it." Then his voice lowered an octave, and he spoke sharply to his wife. "What kind of happy horsec.r.a.p have you been feeding Karen since I"ve been gone?"
"For your information, I"ve been teaching Karen the art of being a lady. And I"ve taught your sons how to be gentlemen. Training they normally never receive at home."
"Oh, gentlemen. Excusem-wah," he said sarcastically. "There ain"t nothing in this world that makes me puke faster than a southern gentleman."