“Don’t daydream,” Peachie said.
“I was just sayin’ if I was Gunner, for Chrissake. If I was, free like that, I’d get my ass to the Coast.”
“California?” Gunner asked.
“You bet your sweet ass. Sun and sea, sea and sand. The Good Life, brother. Southern California.”
“What the hell,” Gunner said, “what’s stopping you?”
“You bastard!” Peachie said. “My own brother. I’m stopping him, that’s who, me and those two kids of his in there.”
“Hold it, Peach, I didn’t mean he should cut out on you. I meant the whole bunch of you go.”
“Just pick up and leave?” she asked. “Just pack up and go to California, just like that.”
“Why not?” Gunner asked.
“Why not,” she mimicked. “Money’s why not, for one thing. What’re we going to use for money? Sell the kids?”
“Whatya s’pose they’d bring?” Bud asked.
“Shut up, you bastard.”
“For Chrissake, Peachie,” Gunner said, “you think they don’t have money in California?”
“Maybe they do, people who already live there.”
“Oh, and you don’t think they let anybody else earn it?”
“Earn it how?” she shouted. “Picking up driftwood?”
“See,” Bud said, “you can’t reason with her.”
Gunner rubbed hard at his forehead, and said, “Listen, Peach, thousands of people go there all the time, they go there and get jobs and buy houses and live in California.”
“Hell, yes,” Bud said, “it’s Opportunitysville. Anyone’ll tell you that.”
“We live here,” said Peachie, “in Indianapolis.”
“There isn’t any law says you have to,” Gunner said.
“There isn’t any law says we have to leave, either.”
“But why do you have to stay?” Gunner asked.
“It’s home,” she said. “It’s where we live.”
“I’d sure like to try that surfing,” Bud said.
“I know what you’d like to try,” Peachie said. “You’d like to try those blondes on the beach, that’s what you’d like to try.”
Bud let out a belch.
“Seriously, Peach,” Gunner said, “there’s nothing stopping you. Why not try the Coast for a while? If you don’t like it you can always come back.”
“What’re you, the California Chamber of Commerce?”
“I just don’t like to see people tie themself down when they don’t have to.”
“Wait’ll you get a family, then you tell me all about how free you are.”
“I will,” Gunner said. “I’ll wait. To get a family.”
“What’re you gonna be, a bum or something?”
Belzoni got up and scratched under his armpit. “Don’t listen to her,” he said. “Play it loose. Hey, I gotta get dressed. Take it slow, guys.”
“We better get moving,” Gunner said.
He got up and Sonny followed him to the door. Peachie stood there with her arms crossed, like she had to restrain herself from wringing Gunner’s neck.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, “for putting that bug up his ass about California.”
Gunner started to say something and then he stopped himself and just said, “See ya, Peach,” and loped to the car. Sonny hurried along behind him, not wanting to look back at Peachie in the door.
After Gunner started the car, Sonny reminded him they forgot to take pictures of the kids.
“Well,” Gunner said, “it didn’t seem like the time to do it.”
“No,” Sonny agreed.
Gunner said he felt like bashing some golf balls, and Sonny said he wouldn’t mind watching, so they went out to Little America to the driving range. Sonny really couldn’t stand golf. Once, when he was around twelve years old, his father took him out on a dewy spring morning to give him a golf lesson. It was one of those times Mr. Burns was trying to be like a father, but like most of his shy, halting efforts along those lines, it didn’t quite come off. Sonny remembered with a vivid embarrassment how his father curled his hands over his, trying to show him how to grip the club, and Sonny could feel his father’s hot breath on his neck and smelled the sweet mists rising off the tender early morning grass, and he was dizzy with the sadness of it, the fright of touching, the awkwardness of two human beings of the same flesh and blood who didn’t know how to love and were clumsy with fear. Sonny tried, but he never hit one straight ball. His elbows and knees kept popping out at the wrong times, bending when they should have been straight, stiffening when they should have given. After the agonizing hour was over, his father said, “We’ll try it again sometime,” and Sonny said, “Sure, that’d be great,” but neither of them ever mentioned it after that. Sonny wanted to thank his father for the effort, the good intention, but didn’t know how. The words, whatever they were, clung to his throat.
Sonny never picked up a golf club after that—except to play miniature golf on dates with girls—but he got a real charge out of watching Gunner drive balls. It looked like pure pleasure. There was the concentration, the brief, nervous flexing of the knees as the stance was assumed, the swing up and back with the eye never leaving the ball, the crack of the club square on the mark, and the graceful curve of the follow-through as the white dot sailed past the hundred-yard mark, the two-hundred yard, the two-fifty, and sometimes clear into the woods beyond.
“Go you bastard!” Gunner shouted.
“Great,” Sonny said. “You really clobbered it.”
Gunner drove three buckets of balls while Sonny looked on. By the time Gunner finished all the buckets, the sky had turned that purple color it gets just before real darkness, and the big floodlights of the driving range had come on. Gunner said he could eat a horse but he didn’t feel like going home. Sonny didn’t either. They both called their mothers to say they wouldn’t be home for supper, and went to the Von Burg’s Snack Shop and had the big greasy kind of breaded tenderloins that they seem to make that way only in Indiana, and washed them down with root-beer floats.
Gunner still was restless, and he said he wouldn’t mind buzzing by Ray Sheneke’s place.
“You remember Shins?” he asked.
“Sure, sort of,” Sonny said.
Sheneke wasn’t a jock but he was one of the Big Rods who ran around in that gang at Shortley. He was more the playboy type, a quick, skinny sort of guy who dressed pretty sharp and carried a churchkey on his watch chain so he’d always be ready to open a can of beer. He was always elected Treasurer of everything. Certain guys were always being elected Treasurer, just like other guys were always being elected President of whatever it was they were in. Other guys just voted. Sonny sometimes thought that those things were decided when you were born, like when Ray Sheneke came out of the womb, God looked down and said, “That guy’s Treasurer material,” and so it would be for the rest of his life.
“We were lodge brothers at DePauw,” Gunner said. “He was one guy who seemed to have a brain in his head, when he wasn’t partying. You know, if you got him talking without a lot of guys around.”
Sonny wasn’t sure if he ought to go along to Sheneke’s, but Gunner seemed to take it for granted, so he didn’t say anything. Sheneke had married Patsi Heppenstall and they lived way out north on a fairly fancy new street called Morning Glory Road, off Meridian. The house, a stone ranch type, was a wedding present from Patsi’s folks, and a lot of people were catty about it. Everyone knew that a young couple just starting out couldn’t afford a house like that, and some felt they ought to start out like everyone else in either an apartment or a duplex or one of the older little houses in closer to town like Gunner’s sister Peachie lived in. The feeling was that a young couple ought to work their way up, ought to earn their own house, and that way they’d really appreciate it more. Patsi’s parents took the more controversial stand that you were only young once and you might as well be able to enjoy it instead of having to wait till you we
re old and tired.
A light was on in the big picture window, and a guy in a chair peered out at the car. The porch light flashed on, and before Gunner and Sonny made it all the way up the flagstone walk, Shins was at the door, waving and grinning.
“Gunner, old bastard, home from the wars!”
“Shins, baby!”
Sonny stood with his hands in his pockets while Shins and Gunner pounded one another around in greeting.
“Hey, Shins, you remember Sonny Burns,” Gunner said.
Sonny stepped forward and Shins, with an uncertain smile, pumped his hand and said, “Right, yeh, how goes it, man?”
“Swell,” Sonny said.
They went inside and Patsi came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, but when she saw Gunner she dropped it, screamed his name, and threw her arms around him, kicking one leg back in the air like the sexy babes in the movies did when they kissed some guy. She was tall and thin and didn’t have much up front, but her long, curvy legs were generally acknowledged to be the best pair at Shortley during her day. When such things were first being judged and appraised by the guys, the accepted fantasy-desire in speaking of Patsi Heppenstall was “How’d you like to have those goddam legs wrapped around ya—squeezing,” just as the equivalent fantasy for Sandy Simpson, who was famous for the way she undulated down the corridors, was “How’d ya like to have that great little tail on top of ya—moving?” These rhetorical questions were answered with moans, wails, grunts, grabs of the cock, and sometimes full collapses to the floor, where the tormented connoisseur would writhe and beat his fists while his buddies howled like mongrel dogs in a midnight alley.
“Hey, Pats,” Gunner said, disentangling himself. “You remember Sonny Burns?”
“Hi!” she said, and Sonny smiled.
“Honey,” Ray asked, “can you show these guys the Lord and Heir?”
“If you’re quiet. He’s just gone to sleep.”
Led by Patsi, they tiptoed single file into the room of the baby, Ray Sheneke, Jr. It was three months old and looked, at least to Sonny, like the usual small white pudding glazed with red. The room was done in Little Bo Peep wallpaper, and there were enough fuzzy animals to start a small zoo. The baby lay there defenseless and all-powerful, the tiny trophy for which men mated and toiled, raising him up until he could repeat the same process, for another who would mate and repeat it again, making the world turn, making it all go on. Powdered in sleep, the kid knew nothing of all that, sheltered with innocence and love. Overhead, educational birds hung still in his cloudless sky.
“Isn’t he adorable?” Patsi whispered.
“Sure is,” Sonny dutifully whispered back.
“Whatya think, Guns?” Ray asked quietly, beaming across the crib at his old buddy. Gunner didn’t say anything right away, and his eyes had that sunk-back look, like he was staring into some secret void.
“Just think,” Gunner said in a quiet, remote tone, “it’s just been born—and someday it’s going to die.”
In the awful stillness that followed, Sonny wanted to die himself, or at least crawl under the crib. It was the kind of terrible silence that comes after somebody lets a fart in church.
“Gunner!” Patsi hissed.
She swooped down and plucked up the baby, nestling it against her chest. The baby started to cry. Ray looked like he’d been hit in the face. Gunner, snapped from whatever far place his thoughts had taken him, looked at his friends with panic. His hands reached in the empty air, groping for an explanation.
“He didn’t mean what it sounded like,” Sonny said, wanting to help.
“I didn’t mean,” Gunner said, “you know. I just meant, like all of us. We’re all going to die, but it hits you when you see a little kid, who has to grow up, and get old, and then—like all of us.”
“Stop it!” Patsi screamed. “Shut up!”
The baby squealed louder.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gunner said, “I’m sorry.”
Ray seemed to have collected himself and he came around and threw his arm on Gunner’s shoulder and said, “Let’s let Patsi take care of it, O.K.? Let’s sit down and have us a drink.”
They went in the living room, where one of those elaborate hi-fi sets covered a whole wall. Ray put on a Brubeck LP and quickly brought in some stiff drinks.
“Man, I’m really sorry,” Gunner said. “It just didn’t come out like I meant it.”
“Forget it,” said Shins.
He gently poked the ice cube in his glass with one finger, watching it bob back up.
“Guns,” he said, “I understand you got hit over there.”
“Yeh, once. Nothing much to it.”
“It must have been rough. Combat.”
“Well, it was weird. I mean, it wasn’t all bad. There were times when you felt more alive than you ever do, just because you know you might die. It’s—I don’t know. Hard to explain. It does something to you.”
“I guess it does,” said Shins.
His brow pressed into a furrow, and he took a long slug of his drink.
“So how’s the life of a family man?” Gunner asked, mustering a hearty tone.
“Old buddy,” said Shins, “there’s nothing like it.”
“How do you mean?” asked Gunner.
Shins looked a little surprised. “I mean it’s great. It’s the only thing.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why is it the only thing?”
“Well, you got any better ideas?”
“I don’t know,” said Gunner.
“Well, what are your plans?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to figure things out, first.”
“Of course, you just got back. You want to figure who to go with, huh?”
“Or whether to ‘go.’”
“To work?” Shins smiled. “That’s not much of a decision, is it? Or did you have a rich uncle kick off?”
“Well, there’s Uncle Sam,” Gunner said. “I’m entitled to the GI Bill.”
“But you graduated. You got your degree.”
“Yeh, but you can still go back. I could study for an M.A. in something.”
“In what?”
“In philosophy, maybe. I don’t know.”
“But that won’t do you any good,” Shins said. “I mean, if you wanted to go to law school or something you can use, that’s another matter. But that other stuff, you can’t use any of it.”
“Why not?”
“It won’t get you anywhere, for Chrissake.”
“Where should I get to?” Gunner asked.
Shins finished off his drink and bent his head down, staring at the floor between his legs. “Guns,” he said, “a lot of guys get shaken up over there. Jesus, who wouldn’t? I mean, it’s nothing against a person. But maybe you ought to talk to someone.”
“Talk to someone?”
“Someone who understands that stuff. You know. A doctor. I mean, the way you talk. You’re all confused.”
“About what?”
“See? That’s what I mean. You keep asking questions like that.”
“But I want to know,” said Gunner.
“Know what, for Chrissake?”
Shins was really getting worked up and Sonny was scared that there would be another bad scene, like with the kid. But Gunner seemed to sense how things were heading, and instead of pressing on with it, he leaned back, took a drink, and said, “I dunno, Shins. I can’t explain it too well. I think I’ll just relax for a while. Play a little golf, maybe. Get some sun.”
Shins smiled with genuine relief. “Atta-baby,” he said. “You get a little fresh air and exercise, you’ll be ready to run ’em ragged.”
Gunner said they better be moving, made a lot of thanks and apologies, and he and Sonny hustled to the car. Gunner drove without speaking for a while, and then he asked, with puzzled impatience, what he obviously had wanted to ask Shins but was wise enough to restrain himself:
“Run who ragged
?”
“The opposition,” Sonny said.
“Wow,” Gunner said. “Yeh. The other rats in the rat race.”
They went to a little bar called the Melody Inn and ordered boilermakers. Gunner seemed pretty low.
“Hey,” Sonny said, trying to cheer him up a little, “I never knew you were a golfer. I mean, that good, the way you clobbered those balls today.”
“I used to caddy a lot as a kid,” Gunner explained. “The pro over at Meridian Hills took an interest in me. One summer I got real serious about it, and McCardle, he’s the club pro, said he thought if I really worked I could make it on the pro circuit.”
“That’s pretty risky, isn’t it? For making a living?”
“Sure it is! That’s one thing I like about it. It’s a gamble, it’s none of that nine-to-five, work-till-you-get-the-gold-watch-and-retire shit.”
“Yeh, there’s that,” Sonny said.
He felt stupid and prudish asking about the risk, just like Shins and all the rat-race guys. But that’s what had really come to his mind. Most guys mainly worried about that. When he was stationed in Kansas City, Sonny sat up in bull sessions long through the night with guys in his outfit, college grads mostly, talking about the future and careers, and most guys wanted to know what kind of Security a job could offer. That, and the salary; how much you started at and how high you could go in twenty years.
Gunner was rubbing at his chin, pondering something. “It might not be such a bad idea,” he said. “The pro circuit. You’d get to see the whole country, travel a lot, be out in the sun and fresh air. You’d be in shape. You’d have a lot of time to read and think.”
“Sounds good,” Sonny said.
Gunner poked out a cigarette he’d only half finished and shook his head. “Shit, what am I thinking about? I’d just be a goddam jock again, when you got right down to it.”
“Well, there’s plenty of other things.”
“Yeh.”
Gunner was fiddling with a folder of matches. He opened it up and started staring at the inside. It was one of those that had a picture of a woman’s head and said “Draw Me.” You were supposed to draw the woman’s head and send it in to Artists Unlimited, and they would evaluate your talent and see if you had any chance of making it as an artist. If you did, you could sign up for their mail-order instruction course.
Going All the Way Page 6