Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  The war wasn’t really a war—a “police action” some of the papers called it—and nobody gave much of a damn about it except for the politicians and the military men and of course the guys who got drafted and all their relatives. Being a soldier during that half-assed war was like being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players’ own parents and friends. The young man had got a much bigger kick out of World War II, when he served on “The Homefront” as a kid collecting scrap metal and tinfoil and raising a “Victory Garden” of radishes and carrots that nobody ate, and learning to be an “air-raid spotter” so that if the Nazis decided to bomb Indianapolis—thereby knocking out the very heart of the nation—he would be able to stand on the roof of the Broad Ripple lumberyard and spot the Stukas and the Messerschmidts as they dove toward such cultural targets as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument or the world-famous Indianapolis Speedway. World War II had been a fun war, full of glamour and glory, but Korea was just a bore, a national nuisance, drab as olive. His whole generation had been stuck with it, but somehow the young man took it as a personal piece of bad luck. Just the sort of thing that was always happening to him.

  “You like the races, huh?” the tattooed guy was asking the blonde. The soldier didn’t want to hear about it. He got out the rolled-up copy of the latest Newsweek magazine he had stuck in his hip pocket, and plunged into it right at the hardest part, foreign affairs. As well as doing daily exercises in the fruitful, new life that the young man was going to begin, he had also promised himself he would keep his mind in trim, stay up on things, be alert and informed, and as part of this resolution he planned to read Newsweek magazine each and every week, not just the sports and entertainment sections but the world and national news and the art and literary parts. Most everyone read Time, and the young man figured he might have a little edge by being a Newsweek reader, might just be a little more in the know than your average citizen.

  The big world news was about the “crisis” of the Fall of Dienbienphu, the French bastion in part of the Commie Orient. It sounded pretty bad. The magazine said that

  While it might turn out to be only a heroic incident in the continuing struggle to contain aggressive communism, it might prove to be the cataclysmic event that would trigger a chain reaction culminating eventually in a third world war—this time an atomic war of unimaginable deadliness and devastation.

  Fuck it all. More of his kind of luck—the next world war not only wouldn’t be any fun, it would probably kill everybody. He often had this feeling that maybe if he ever got settled down, married to a great, sexy-looking babe who was also very tender and motherly—sort of a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and old Jane Gallagher of The Catcher in the Rye—and he had a great job that paid a lot of money and a couple of beautiful kids and had just moved into a cozy house with a lot of fireplaces and a white picket fence, he would go out to pick up the mail and look up in the sky and see a monstrous mushroom-shaped cloud, and that would be the end. He regarded the H-bomb too as a personal menace, a weapon uniquely and insidiously devised to scare the shit out of him, until it finally blew him to smithereens.

  He couldn’t finish the article about the latest world crisis, and he flipped through the magazine in search of some less depressing stuff. “Business Trends” said that the Atomic Energy Commission was encouraging colleges to expand their courses in “nuclear studies.” Senator Joe McCarthy was fighting with the Army, making more of his famous “points of order,” trying to scare everyone about the Reds in government. The first jet transport plane was almost finished. Roger Bannister had broken the four-minute mile. That was something, but the soldier already knew about that. He turned to the book section, hoping to improve his mind. There was a story about some philosopher who a lot of eggheads thought was hot stuff. It said:

  Sören Kierkegaard, a melancholy Dane of a century ago, is a triple-threat hero among modern intellectuals. He unwittingly fathered the gloomy philosophy of Existentialism. He anticipated the rise of modern remorse by developing a twentieth-century sense of guilt in the heyday of the optimistic nineteenth.…

  Shit. The soldier figured he was even born in the wrong damn century. The century of gloom and guilt. Wouldn’t you know it? He finished his beer and looked up to see if he could flag down the grumpy, indifferent waiter. A foom of the air-compression door announced the entrance of somebody new in the club car, and the young man turned to look.

  At the entrance to the car was the soldier whose face had floated up to haunt him from the steam of the hissing train on the platform. He was tall, built in an angular way with broad shoulders that sloped in a V to a narrow waist and hips, and long, slightly bowed legs. His face was lean and dark from the kind of a beard that never quite shaves completely away, leaving a permanent five-o’clock shadow. The face was naggingly familiar to the chubby young soldier who was staring at him, and yet he couldn’t quite place it. The tall soldier started walking forward, when the train gave a sudden lurch that sent beer cans skittering precariously over the chrome tables in a general clatter, and something fell and smashed behind the bar. It was the sort of jolt that usually sent anyone who was walking down the aisle reeling into the lap of some stranger, but the tall soldier seemed to catch the very motion of the car with his hips, feinted with it, and continued on, his expression unchanging, his rolling gait with the feet pointing inward moving ahead, ready for anything. It was with the movement that the graceful soldier revealed his identity, for it was the same elusive, flowing sort of move that had so often evaded enemy tacklers, the natural action of the greatest broken-field runner in the history of Shortley High.

  It was Gunner Casselman.

  After recognizing him, the young soldier buried his head back in the magazine, knowing a famous guy like that would never remember him, even though they were in the same class at Shortley, and certainly wouldn’t have anything to say to him. Casselman sat down in the seat next to him and made a pop of his fingers that brought the sluggish waiter to him like a shot.

  “Bring me a Bud, please.”

  “Yassuh, right away.”

  It was as if the waiter knew, or sensed, who he was, or that he was Somebody. From the corner of his eye the pudgy young soldier could see Casselman was staring at him, almost squinting, his hand raised before him as if it would help him grab hold of the memory he sought. Then the forefinger shot out straight from Casselman’s hand, the thumb cocked back, the way kids make like they’re pointing a pistol at you, and Casselman said, “Indianapolis. Shortley!”

  The young soldier looked up, feeling his ears go hot, and said, “I went there.”

  That seemed to accurately describe the unsensational nature of his own time at Shortley, as compared to the glorious record of the Gunner.

  Casselman thrust his big hand forward and said, “I’m Tom Casselman,” and added, “Class of Forty-eight.”

  For anyone who went to Shortley, it was sort of like having the President come up to you on the street and say, “I’m Dwight Eisenhower,” adding, as if you might not know him, “President of the United States.” Then you were supposed to shake hands and say, “I’m John Q. Public.”

  The young man shook the outstretched hand and said, “I’m Willard Burns.”

  The waiter brought the beer, taking the small coin Gunner left him with effusive thanks, and Gunner stared again at Burns, like he had X-ray vision, and made that pop of his fingers.

  “You’re Sonny Burns.”

  “That’s what they called me.”

  And, he thought ruefully, it was evidently what they still called him; was what they would continue to call him, the little boy-cherub nickname he would be stuck with into old age, a bearded old coot called “Sonny.”

  “Sure,” said Casselman. “Sure, I remember. You were a photographer. Took pictures for the Daily Echo.”

  “I did some sports stuff you might have seen,” Sonny said.

  “Right! Action stuff! Damn good!”

  So
nny ran a finger between his neck and the collar of his shirt, looking away as he said, “I got some good shots of you in the Southport game, senior year.”

  “Right! Hey, this is great. Running into you like this.”

  Sonny couldn’t figure out what Casselman could think was so great about it. Unless there was going to be some reelection of high-school class officers and Gunner was looking for votes, Sonny couldn’t imagine what use or interest he could have for the guy.

  “Been doing some photography myself,” said Gunner.

  He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields, gave it a sharp tap, and one of them popped out toward Sonny, just the way it happened when someone offered a cigarette in the movies. Whenever Sonny tried it, either none came out or they spilled all over the floor.

  “Yeh,” Gunner explained, snapping a lighter in front of Sonny, “I just got back from Japan. Stopped off in St. Louis to see an old buddy at Fort Leonard Wood. Anyway, over in Japan, I picked me up a Nikon. I’m not worth a damn yet—mostly shot a lot of tourist-postcard-type stuff, Fuji and the temples and gardens and all that—but I really want to learn.”

  “That’s swell,” said Sonny.

  He noticed that Gunner had several campaign ribbons, including the Korean theater, and a Purple Heart. The only ribbon Sonny had was the one you got for the Good Conduct Medal. He had the sinking feeling that maybe indeed all of life would turn out to be like high school; the Gunners continuing to be heroes, him going quietly on collecting the boring Good Conduct Medals of life.

  “You must have been in combat,” he said, nodding at the ribbons.

  Gunner shrugged. “Caught a little shrapnel in the ass, that’s all.”

  If you really were a hero you never made a big deal of it. You made it sound routine and unglamorous, like shrugging off a ninety-yard touchdown run as “good luck and good blocking,” and in so dismissing such feats they came out sounding even more marvelous.

  “I got stuck in Kansas City, Public Information,” Sonny said, feeling he had to apologize.

  Gunner shrugged, like it could happen to anybody. “Only one thing you missed,” he said, “but that is one thing no man should miss.”

  “What?”

  “Ja-pan.”

  With just the two syllables, he made it sound fabulous.

  “It changed my whole approach,” he said.

  “To what?”

  “You name it. I never really thought about anything before. College, you know, I memorized stuff. But I mean, think, question. There’s a beauty there we haven’t got—in art, architecture, in food, in philosophy, even religion. Zen. Jesus, it’s not that I really know about Zen, but I sort of got like a feel for what they’re into, ya know, and it’s got the Western religions beat by a country mile.”

  “Yeh, it sounds pretty great,” Sonny said, “from what I know about it.”

  What he knew about it was mostly contained in a story by J. D. Salinger where one of the brothers believed in Zen. He knew it was a branch of Buddhism and that it had masters instead of ministers and priests. Sometimes the masters hit you over the head with a bamboo stick, to give you enlightenment.

  “Say, you ever drink any sake?” Gunner asked.

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  Gunner looked quickly around the club car.

  “Don’t order another beer,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back.”

  He came back with a duffel bag that contained a lot of Japanese stuff. Books on Zen. Some No plays. Pictures of formal gardens. A Nikon camera. And a bottle of sake.

  “You really should drink it warmed up,” he said, “but even so.”

  He had stopped at the water cooler and shucked off a couple of Dixie cups. Surreptitiously, as if he were fiddling for something in the duffel bag, he poured him and Sonny a cup of the sake.

  “Here’s to a great culture,” he said.

  Sonny took a big swallow and it burned going down, making him wince. It tasted sort of like perfume.

  “Terrific,” he said.

  “Can’t beat it,” said Gunner. “Wait’ll you have it warm, like it should be.”

  “How long were you there, in Japan?”

  “Three months. Beautiful. Someday I have to go back. But first I have to find out what I’m doing here. Or going to do.”

  “Job-wise?”

  “Everything-wise. That too, though. I worked at this ad agency up in Chi a couple summers during college. Young bunch of guys, pretty sharp. They said if I came with ’em when I got back, I could write my own ticket.”

  That sounded just like what Sonny would have expected for Gunner. But the odd thing was, because of whatever happened to him in Japan, Gunner no longer knew if he wanted to go where that kind of ticket would take him. Maybe he had been hit over the head by one of those Zen guys.

  “I’m thinking about the GI Bill,” Gunner said. “Maybe go back and really study something, instead of horsing around.”

  “Yeh, it might be nice.”

  “You going into photography?”

  “I dunno, exactly,” Sonny said. “I want to sort of get my bearings.”

  “Yeh, right. No use going off half-cocked. Hey—have some more sake.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sonny was getting used to the stuff. It wasn’t too bad, after you got going on it.

  “Japan,” Gunner said. “What an experience. You get outside your own society, it gets you to thinking. You know, you see there’s other ways to do things, other ways to look at things.”

  “I guess.”

  Gunner said now he wanted to go home and look at everything fresh, reexamine all his old values. What the hell was the good of a damn culture built on neon lights and Hollywood movies, on Sunday church piety and weekday business hypocrisy. He sounded like a damned radical. That seemed kind of unfair to Sonny. He figured a guy like him should be the radical, fighting the Gunners of the world who had everything. But he wasn’t sure enough of himself, he was too afraid.

  They had more sake, and Gunner got going on Japan again, how great it was.

  “The greatest thing of all,” he said, “is the women. Even the ones that—well, that you’d call whores over here. Over there, those gals are terrific. I guess you’d have to say they’re whores, technically, in that you have to pay them. But they’re not like whores over here where it’s wham-bam-thank-ya-ma’am and you feel rotten afterward. They take their time. They treat you good.”

  He finished off another cup.

  “Making love, with one of those Japanese women—it’s a whole different thing. It’s a whole different kind of experience.”

  Sonny felt his throat go dry, and when he spoke, his voice cracked. “How?” he asked huskily. “How is it different?”

  And Gunner told him.

  By the time they got to Indianapolis they had killed the bottle of sake. Gunner’s eyes seemed to have receded back into his head, as if he had seen a powerful vision. Sonny was seeing green and purple spots.

  “Listen,” Gunner said when the train clanked and rumbled to a halt. “Let’s get together. No shit.”

  “Sure,” Sonny said.

  The sake and the flattery made him almost believe Gunner meant it, believe there was some kind of bond between him and the great Gunner Casselman. He figured he must really be stoned.

  The two guys shook hands at the top of the platform, and Gunner asked, “Hey, you gotta ride home?”

  “Yeh,” Sonny said, blushing. “My mother’s getting me. How about you?”

  “Mine too,” said Gunner.

  He made a sort of crooked smile, and Sonny thought maybe there might be some kind of bond between them after all.

  2

  The great vaulted waiting room of the station, with its stained-glass windows and dank stone walls, had a massive, cathedral-like gloom about it. The booming authoritative voice from the loudspeaker, announcing the arrival and departure of trains, sounded like it might be the voice of God, ordering the milling throngs to their appo
inted tracks and destinations. They pushed and hurried, obediently, through the shadows and the dust-stained motes of afternoon sunlight, meeting their appointed trains and greeting the travelers recently disgorged from the steam-belching cars on the tracks above. Through the parting wave of passengers, Sonny saw his mother, rushing toward him.

  “You’re home!”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Sonny stood almost immobile while his mother hugged him. He tried to raise his arms to make the return response, but they fell back stick-like to his sides. He flinched and leaned back as her warm mouth brushed his cheek. Behind her, like a shadow, his father stood, tall and embarrassed.

  “Welcome home, son,” he said, trying for heartiness.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  They shook hands quickly, their eyes not quite meeting.

  Mrs. Burns hooked her arm through her son’s and pulled him toward the newsstand, where a middle-aged woman he had never seen before was beaming at him, expectantly. She had on a lot of makeup and jewelry, and her eyes looked slightly mad beneath their mascara. Mrs. Burns squeezed Sonny’s elbow, pushing him forward toward the strange woman, and said, “I want you to meet Adele Fenstermaker.”

  The woman placed a hand on each of Sonny’s shoulders and looked him over as if he were a gift.

  “So this is Sonny,” she cooed. “That dear, sweet child I’ve heard so much about.”

  “How do you do?” Sonny said.

  Adele Fenstermaker’s brightly painted face popped toward Sonny with a cat’s quickness. He jerked his head away, but felt the sticky imprint of her lips on his right cheek.

  “I just had to,” she said.

  Mr. Burns, not quite looking at any of them, nervously cleared his throat. “We’re in a no-parking zone,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” Sonny said.

  He hefted up his duffel bag, slinging it over his shoulder on the side next to Mrs. Fenstermaker. She tripped along gaily beside him, his mother took the other flank, and his father followed behind. As they pushed out the big doors, Sonny got a glimpse of Gunner, striding along with a blonde in tight toreador pants and backless high heels. Sonny wondered if that could actually be Gunner’s mother, or maybe some show girl he’d met in Chi who had come down to meet him. The woman’s ass moved tantalizingly in the taut pink pants, and Sonny hoped it wasn’t Gunner’s mother. You shouldn’t have those kind of thoughts about a person’s mother.