Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  It was cool and dim inside, and smelled very beery. Sonny liked it. The Red Key didn’t seem like any special sort of place, unless you knew that Wilks Wilkerson and Blow Mahoney and a lot of the other Big Rod jocks who used to go to Shortley hung out there after work when they had summer construction jobs to make a lot of money and keep in shape. Sonny used to really envy those guys who could casually say, “Yeh, I’m workin’ construction this summer.” They wore dirty T-shirts and faded khakis slung low on their hips, and they were always whipping out a grimy snot rag that was stuffed in a hip pocket and give the nose a terrific, noisy blow, just like the regular construction guys did. It showed they were real men.

  Gunner was already there, and Sonny pulled up a chair at his table. It was still early, and they were the only customers except for one of those old dame lushes in a messy flowered dress, singing to herself.

  Gunner had been observing the old gal, and he shook his head and explained to Sonny, “In Japan, you never see a woman drunk.”

  “No shit?”

  “Never. See, the women are there to please the men, and if a woman’s drunk, she’s not going to be much good to a guy, right?”

  “Yeh. I never thought of that.”

  “They think of everything. Acourse, they’ve had thousands of years to do it. We think we’re so damned advanced, but we’re babies compared to them.”

  Sonny realized you had to go get your own drink at the bar and he got himself a Bud like Gunner was drinking, and came and sat down with it.

  “Ours is an infantile, competitive society. Mickey Mouse,” Gunner said. “Look, you saw it at Shortley. All that social-climbing shit. The rod system, the jock stuff. You were one of the quiet ones, you just sat back and observed. Watched us run around chasing our tails, a bunch of greenasses. You were a detached observer.”

  Sonny shifted uneasily and took a gulp of beer. “Well, sort of,” he said.

  The truth was he had been a detached observer because he was never asked to be an active participant. Now it was like he was getting credit for being something he’d had no other choice than to be. It was sort of weird.

  “You were way ahead of us,” Gunner said.

  “Shee-it.”

  Modestly denying the credit for having been something he couldn’t help being, Sonny realized it probably sounded like genuine modesty, making him seem even nobler.

  “Same thing in college,” Gunner went on. “All that rah-rah fraternity crap, secret initiation and beating ass and all the rest of it. You saw through that, right? You didn’t go Greek, did you?”

  “I was Independent.”

  Sonny didn’t explain he was Independent because none of the top houses had rushed him, and he was so much a secret snob that he turned down a second-rate house with a seemingly nice bunch of farmer sort of guys because they didn’t have a big name on campus. Instead he moved into a rickety rooming house with a motley assortment of other outcasts—all of them snobs in their own way, trying to take a bitter kind of pride out of not fitting in. You had to have something.

  “I knew you weren’t the type to fall for that frat shit, Gunner said admiringly.

  Sonny shrugged modestly, knowing he was being sort of phony, and yet he began to wonder about that. It was like Gunner had this particular picture of him, and he liked the way that picture of himself looked, and began to even think maybe it was the real picture. Maybe he really had been a shrewd quiet rebel all along, more mature than the others, above their little games. Maybe he just hadn’t seen it that way.

  “Ya see, I never observed anything,” Gunner confessed, “never looked at anything and questioned it, till I got to Japan. Then I was a real outsider, for the first time, and I saw things. I realized I didn’t know anything at all about my own society. I just accepted it. The last couple days I’ve been going around taking pictures. That’s one way of seeing things. Ya know? You get something in that lens, you gotta be looking at it.”

  “Right,” Sonny agreed, as if he’d thought of it himself long ago.

  They had a couple more brews, Gunner talking that way, excited and curious, Sonny just nodding wisely in his new position as the quiet sage.

  Around 4:30 Gunner said, “Listen, let’s haul ass. Before long the jocks’ll be coming in, and I just don’t feel like shooting the shit with those guys right now.”

  “Sure,” Sonny said.

  He couldn’t help wondering if Gunner wanted to go because he didn’t want his old jock buddies to see him hanging around with a nobody like Sonny. But maybe it was really that Gunner felt he’d grown beyond those guys and wanted more serious, deep discussion with the sort of guy he evidently figured Sonny was.

  Gunner had his mother’s wheels—a neat-looking Mercury hardtop—and he said if Sonny had time he’d take him out to the Meadowlark and show him some of the pictures he took in Japan. Gunner was living with his mother in the Meadowlark, a new apartment complex out northeast where a lot of young people lived, couples and groups of guys or girls who had graduated from college and come to Naptown to get a job. It was the first kind of place like that in the city. There was always some party going on in one of the apartments, and in the warm nights you could hear music and laughter. People played records like South Pacific and Call Me Madam, and the latest jazz, like Brubeck and Chet Baker and the cool guys, and they turned the volume up loud at the parties and nobody complained. It was that kind of place. Everyone was up on the latest thing, right there in Indianapolis.

  They had just started looking at Gunner’s pictures from Japan when his mother came in. Sonny felt himelf turning red when he saw her. It was the babe he had seen go off with Gunner at the station, the one Sonny thought was probably a show girl down from Chi. Gunner introduced her as “Nina,” which was what she liked to be called. You could see why she didn’t want anyone to call her “Mother.”

  It wouldn’t have fit. It would have seemed as silly as calling Marlene Dietrich “Grandma” even though she was one.

  Nina looked Sonny over like she was annoyed or something.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” she said. “What was your name again?”

  “Sonny Burns,” Gunner answered for him. “He went to Shortley.”

  That didn’t seem to satisfy her.

  “I thought I knew all the gang from Shortley,” she said. “I don’t think I ever heard of you.”

  “Nobody did,” Sonny said, trying to smile.

  “Why so?” Nina asked, her eyebrows arching.

  “I didn’t do much,” Sonny said.

  “He was a photographer,” Gunner said in defense. “For the Echo.”

  “Did you go to DePauw?” Nina asked.

  “I.U.”

  “Oh? What house were you in?”

  “The rooming house.”

  Gunner laughed very loud. “The rooming house,” he said. “That’s great.”

  Nina shrugged and stalked to the kitchen. “I guess I don’t get the joke,” she said.

  Gunner looked at Sonny and winked very hard, as if to tell him not to pay any attention. He was showing Sonny a picture of a Japanese pagoda. It was some kind of shrine, on a hill of deep green, with the sunset bleeding behind it. Gunner’s pictures were good, they were framed well, they showed a sense of imagination and certainly a competence, and more than that, a flair. It made Sonny a little jealous, it didn’t seem right that this guy who was a terrific athlete and all should be good at photography, too, should be able to pick up what it took Sonny years to learn. Some guys were good at anything, which didn’t seem fair when most people were just good at one thing or nothing at all. But Sonny felt ashamed for feeling that way. Especially what with Gunner befriending him and all, treating him like he was someone special.

  Nina had changed out of her dress and came in wearing another pair of those skin-tight toreadors and a low-cut matching green silky blouse. Sonny tried not to look at her, terrified he would get a hard-on and Gunner would see it and know that Sonny was sex
ed up by his mother. Jesus. Nina had made herself a highball and was rattling the ice in the glass, so you couldn’t not pay attention to her. She had on those backless high heels and was joggling one foot up and down, just holding the shoe on the edge of her toes. Sonny thought her feet were sexy, too, and that made him feel even more ashamed and guilty. He knew a lot of guys thought women’s feet were sexy, but it was something hardly any guy admitted or talked about. It was O.K. to talk about tits, and even asses, but not women’s feet.

  “You fellas want a drink?” Nina asked.

  “I was about to get us a beer,” Gunner said, and set the photograph box down and went to the kitchen, leaving Sonny alone in the room with Nina. He figured somebody ought to say something, but Nina wasn’t any help. She just sat there clinking the ice around in her glass and joggling her shoe and looking sort of haughty.

  “It’s a nice apartment you’ve got here, Mrs. Casselman,” Sonny said as heartily as he could.

  “Call me Nina,” she said. “I do like the Meadowlark. I was in a bigger place before, but it was one of those strait-laced buildings down on Meridian with a lot of old people. The hallways smelled like a hospital. This place is a little cramped, but it suits just fine for a bachelor girl like myself.”

  Sonny vaguely remembered something about Gunner’s father dying when he was a kid, even before he got to high school, but, of course, his mother—Nina, that is—would never think of herself as a “widow” any more than she would think of herself as a “mother.” She was a “bachelor girl.”

  “It’s a little cramped with Gunner home, but if he promises to stay I’m going to get us a bigger place, right here in the Meadowlark. Just the two of us.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Has he shown you his pictures of Japan?”

  “He has been, yes.”

  “And the scrapbook?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “I kept a scrapbook for him, while he was gone. Of course he doesn’t appreciate it—but he will someday.”

  “Sure,” Sonny said.

  Nina stood up and went to a bookcase that had the Churchill volumes on World War II, some textbooks, and a row of orange china elephants, linked trunk to tail. She pulled a green-leather scrapbook off one shelf and came and sat down beside Sonny, laying the book on one of his knees and one of hers. She smelled heavily of some woozy kind of perfume, and when she bent forward over the scrapbook, Sonny could see down her blouse almost to the nipple of her tit. He felt dizzy and tried to focus on the scrapbook. There was a page of newspaper clippings, and Sonny read one that said:

  Cpl. Thomas B. “Gunner” Casselman, known to Hoosiers for his gridiron exploits at Shortley and DePauw University, is stationed in Japan, where he recently climbed to the top of the fabled Mt. Fujiyama, according to his mother, Mrs. Nina Casselman, of 3429 East 42nd Street.

  “That’s something,” Sonny said.

  “Which?” Nina asked.

  “Mt. Fujiyama. Climbing it.”

  Gunner came in with two cans of beer and stopped short when he saw the scrapbook.

  “Mother,” he said.

  That was what he called her when he really was pissed off at her.

  “Your friend wanted to see it,” she said.

  “Whatya think he’d say, no?”

  Gunner handed Sonny a beer and grabbed the scrap-book.

  “We were looking at that!” Nina shouted.

  Gunner put it back on the shelf and said, “Please, Mother.”

  Nina let out a heavy sigh and went back to where she was sitting before and picked up her drink.

  “He’s always been like that,” she said to Sonny, “hiding his light under a bushel.”

  Gunner got that look like he had on the train after all the sake and the deep contemplation, where it seemed that his eyes became glassy and sunk farther back into his head.

  Nina put on a Brubeck record and turned it up real loud. Nobody said anything, they all concentrated on drinking. When Gunner was finished he set down his glass on the coffee table and stood up.

  “I’m giving Sonny a lift home,” he said.

  “You haven’t forgotten about tonight, I hope?”

  “No, Nina.”

  “I broke two dates for you, sweetie. Not that I wouldn’t rather go out with you, but you just better show me a good time.”

  “We’ll paint the town, Nina.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Come give Nina a kiss.”

  She surged up in her chair, her face lifted high and her tits pressing against the tight silk blouse. Gunner went over and leaned down to kiss her and Sonny looked away. He stood up and went to the door and Gunner was there in a moment, his eyes still sunk back, a lipstick stain on his mouth.

  “Good-bye, nice to meet you, Mrs. Casselman,” Sonny said.

  “Nina,” she corrected.

  “Nina,” said Sonny, not looking at her directly, and hurried out the door behind Gunner.

  On the way to Sonny’s house, Gunner apologized for Nina’s questions about all the social crap, the fraternity jazz.

  “She’s still impressed by that shit,” he explained.

  “That’s O.K.”

  Gunner said he was trying to get her to take a broader view of things. He had brought her a real kimono and some incense from Japan, and tried to get her interested in Oriental culture, but she got to suspecting that he was secretly married to a Japanese girl and was trying to soften the blow by making the country sound so great. Gunner got mad once and said, Well, what if he had married one, what difference did it make, but Nina went to pieces and he had to drop the whole thing. As Gunner put it, she wasn’t too philosophical.

  “Most mothers aren’t,” Sonny said.

  “Right,” said Gunner. “I can’t think of any who are, offhand.”

  4

  The day after Sonny met Gunner at the Red Key he didn’t sleep till noon, like he’d been doing since he got home, but woke up a little after ten, dragged himself right out of bed, and did seven push-ups. He shaved, dressed, and went downstairs humming, thinking of a lot of stuff he wanted to do. Constructive stuff. Like going down to the darkroom and getting it back in shape again, going out to get some new chemicals and film, and maybe pick up the latest Newsweek.

  “You’re up early,” Mrs. Burns said suspiciously. She was puttering around the kitchen, no doubt making more tempting pastries to fatten the world with. She didn’t just feed them to Sonny, but to all the sweet-starved people she met in the course of her work at the church office. She could pretty much make her own hours, and more than being in the office itself she liked driving around on errands of mercy to the sick, the sad, the troubled. It took a load off Reverend Halverson’s back and left him more time for fishing, which was his greatest passion—next to God, of course. He tied his own flies.

  Sonny sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the front page of the Indianapolis Star. The main headline was about the Traffic Toll rising. It usually was. If the Reds didn’t get you, the highways would, or so it seemed from reading the Star. He turned to sports and was happy to see Willie Mays still leading the league in batting. The Indianapolis Indians had dropped a double-header to the Toledo Mudhens. Sonny could never get too excited about the Indianapolis Indians. Not being major league, they didn’t seem “real” in a funny way.

  “Are you hungry?” his mother asked.

  “Yeh, I am.”

  He felt he could eat one of those he-men lumberjack breakfasts, with smoked sausage, heaps of eggs, and hot black coffee.

  “That Casselman boy,” his mother said, “you say he lives with his mother?”

  “Yes. I mean for now, anyway. He just got home from Japan.”

  “He looked very familiar.”

  When Gunner had taken Sonny home the night before, he had come in to use the phone, and met Mrs. Burns. She was gushy with friendliness and please to stay and have a bite to eat, but there was that
little edge in her voice, the way there always was before she had sized up any new friend of Sonny and taken her stand on how he or she would aid or hinder her little boy’s life.

  “He was an athlete,” Sonny explained. “His picture used to be in the paper a lot.”

  “Isn’t he the one who was awfully fast? In high school?”

  “Damn right. He ran the hundred in ten-one.”

  “No, dear. I mean fast with the girls.”

  “I dunno,” Sonny muttered, looking at the major-league standings.

  “I thought everyone knew. I mean, he had quite a reputation, didn’t he? For sowing his wild oats?”

  “I dunno.”

  Cleveland was in first place in the American League. Maybe the Yankees weren’t invincible.

  “Does he always go to bars in the afternoon?”

  Sonny put the paper down. “For Christ sake, what business is it of yours? What if he goes to bars in the morning? What if he sleeps in bars overnight?”

  “Don’t yell. There’s no need to yell.”

  “I’m not yelling! I’m asking what business of yours is it what Gunner Casselman does?”

  “It’s my business what happens to my own son.”

  “What’s that got to do with Gunner?”

  “If you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.”

  “Listen. That guy is a friend of mine.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Well, it’s none of your damn business. For your information, he happens to be a great guy.”

  He picked up the sports page again and tried to concentrate on the standings, but they blurred before his eyes.

  “Really, I just thought maybe you’d want him to come to your party. Now that he’s such a good friend of yours.”

  Sonny looked up, eyeing his mother carefully. She was peeking in the stove.

  “What do you mean, my party?” he asked.

  “Just a little party. A little dinner for you.”

  “What party? I don’t know about any party.”