Just when Sonny was thinking all that stuff about the guy, Messner suddenly yelled out real loud, “Hey, Casselman—are you the great Gunner?”
Everybody turned to look, and Gunner just said, “I’m Casselman.”
“Didn’t reck-a-nize ya at first. Didn’t expect to see a Big Rod out slumming with us oddballs.”
“What do you mean slumming?” Gunner said.
Messner laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh. “They had the same system back when I was at Shortley,” he said. “I know all about the Big Rods. They stick together, they don’t give a tumble to the peasants.”
“Jesus, man,” Gunner said, “that was high school.”
“Once a Big Rod, always a Big Rod.”
Gunner shook his head, disgusted like, and took a swig of his beer.
But Messner wouldn’t let up. “I played ball, too,” he said. “Even started my senior year. But that’s not enough to be a Big Rod. You gotta come from the right background. Your old man has to belong to the country club and have a big house set back on Meridian Street or Washington Boulevard.”
Gunner looked like he couldn’t believe what he heard. He raised his own voice for the first time. “You’re fulla shit, man.”
Gunner was right. There were plenty of rich kids who never made the In Group, yet some of the Big Rods—Gunner himself, in fact—were from families that seemed to barely scrape by, and the kids had to work part time.
If they played ball they had to work on weekends or nights or get up at five in the morning and carry Star routes with a couple of hundred customers, or maybe do all that stuff. Just being rich couldn’t make you a Big Rod, but evidently that’s what Messner had made for his own excuse. It must have made him sore as hell to beat his brains out making the football team and still not get In, so he had to blame it on something that wasn’t his fault, like his family not being in the bucks. At least Sonny never fooled himself that way. He knew damn well you didn’t get to be a Big Rod just by being rich, or even good-looking, or even a good athlete—you had to have some quality that was hard to pin down, a certain kind of confidence, a little swagger but not in a boastful way, an easiness, a style, an air of casual good nature, of leadership that wasn’t sought but seemed to come natural. You couldn’t pin it down but you could see it in a person.
“You’re telling me I’m fulla shit?” Messner said, pointing a thumb at his chest, as if to make sure.
“You are if you believe that crap about money,” Gunner said. “My old man traveled for Goodyear and he kicked off when I was ten. My old lady got a job as a saleslady at Ayres, I got a morning Star route and set pins at the Broad Ripple bowling alley. In the summer, when I got old enough, I worked construction and caddied on the weekends. We lived in a double at Thirty-ninth and Winthrop and the Monon railroad went right in back of the house and the whole place shook like an earthquake had hit whenever a train went by. You call that a big social country-club background?”
“Whatya want us to do, cry in our beer?” Messner said.
“No, man—just quit crying about what happened to you in high school. For Christ sake, man, how old are you now? How long have you been out?”
“I’m old enough not to have to take any bullshit from a punk like you.”
Messner got to his feet and hitched up his pants. He had on a pair of old brown slacks, a moldy-looking T-shirt, and tennis shoes without any socks.
Without planning it or thinking about it, Sonny found that he was standing up too, facing Messner. He was scared shitless of fights, but something deeper than fear was moving him now.
“He’s my friend,” Sonny said. “He isn’t any punk. You shouldn’t say that.”
“You gonna stop me, you little suck-off?”
“For God sake, Eddie, sit down!” yelled the lady who was sitting all alone. Messner didn’t pay any attention to her, didn’t even act like he heard. Sonny stood rooted in his place, ready for whatever had to happen.
“You shouldn’t say terrible stuff to people,” Sonny said. He heard his voice from far away, like it was coming from someone else.
“You trying to suck off the Big Rod, huh?” Messner said.
“Hey, Messner, just take it easy, man, O.K.?” Gunner said evenly. He didn’t move from his place on the floor.
Marty put her arm around Gunner and said, “Go have a beer, Eddie.”
That seemed to make Messner even madder, and little red splotches came out on his cheeks, like a disease.
“So, your suck-off buddy has to protect ya, and even your hot little piece of tail has to protect ya, huh?”
Gunner stood up. “I said you better take it easy, man.”
The lady who had yelled for Messner to stop was leaning forward in her chair, twisting her hands together. “Please, young man, don’t hit him,” she said to Gunner.
Gunner turned to her and held up his palms. “Jesus, lady, you think I want to?”
“Just keep your mouth clean when you’re talking to my wife,” said Messner.
Gunner did a double-take on the woman, and so did Sonny. Christ, if it wasn’t Mrs. Messner, sitting all by herself while her husband got drunk and fooled around with a young girl art student right in front of her face.
“I’m sorry,” Gunner said to her.
“You damn well better apologize,” Messner said. He took a couple steps closer to Gunner and Sonny, hitching his pants up again with a sort of James Cagney move. He was a good four or five inches shorter than Gunner, and probably thirty-some pounds lighter. If the dumb bastard really started something, Gunner would clean his ass. Sonny figured Gunner didn’t really need his help, but he wanted to help anyway, he wanted to be there when it counted.
They all stood there staring and then there was a whirr into the room and Shawl buzzed up between the potential combatants in his jazzy wheelchair.
“There will be no primitive combat,” he said. “You are guests in my house, all of you. You will have to make the apparently difficult effort to comport yourselves like civilized human beings.”
“I’m sorry,” Gunner said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble.”
“Ah, how heroic, how chivalrous!” Messner taunted.
“Mr. Messner,” Shawl said in the tone of a stern professor, “if you can’t control your hostility, I shall have to ask you to leave.”
“Who’s hostile?” Messner challenged.
Mrs. Messner had stood up and gone to the front door. “Let’s go home, Eddie, please,” she said. “I’m going home.”
Messner turned away, deflated, and mumbled, “I’ll be along in a while.”
Mrs. Messner took one last look as her husband settled back down next to the fat girl. It was like she was turning her cheek for one more slap before leaving.
Someone put on one of those brassy, blasting Kenton records, and everything seemed to settle down.
Gunner let out a long, tired sigh and rubbed at his temple. “High school,” he said quietly. “Fuckin high school. Doesn’t it ever get over with?”
Sonny was wondering that himself, and his suspicions didn’t cheer him up too much.
“Let’s go,” Marty said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She turned to Sonny with a look of real concern and affection. It seemed like the first time she had really looked at him.
“You come with us,” she said. “You oughtn’t to stay around here by yourself. That Eddie’s liable to get crazy again.”
“Right,” Gunner said. “We’ll meet you at the Key.”
They managed to get one beer down before closing time, and even though they were pretty low after the Eddie scene, there was a warmth among them that was nice.
When they left to go home, Gunner biffed Sonny one on the arm and said, “Thanks, buddy.”
“Yes,” said Marty and squeezed his hand.
“Shee-it,” Sonny said.
He felt very glad that he had acted in a way he never had before, that he had shown where he stood. It almost ma
de up for the absence of the beautiful girl art student he had expected to meet at the party and fall madly in love with.
He went home to bed and jacked off thinking about her, the way he imagined she’d be. Maybe he would really meet such a person and really get married to her. Gunner would be the Best Man.
6
The day after the party was a stifling summer Sunday, and Sonny woke up around eleven, bleary and slightly nauseous. His parents were at church, and he went down to the kitchen and had a couple aspirin, a Pepsi-Cola, and a peanut-butter sandwich. He took the Sunday Star out onto the breezeway and experienced the soothing relief that came with the anticipation of sinking into the sports section and the funnies, those magic parts of the paper that at least for a while had the power of pushing the everyday fears and fuming thoughts of the future clear out of his mind. He hadn’t even finished the funnies, though, when his parents came back, blessed for another week, and Mrs. Burns reminded him today was the day they all had to go to Grandma Lee-no’s for one of her big Sunday meals. Sonny had put this occasion off ever since he’d been home but there was no getting out of it any longer. Grandma Lee-no had called a few days ago and said that she knew nobody loved her anymore and she was just a worthless old woman, but anyhow she was cooking up a real big Sunday meal and if everyone didn’t come and eat it she was going to kill herself.
Not wanting to have his grandmother’s blood on his conscience, in addition to all his other guilts, Sonny made himself go get dressed. Grandma Lee-no was his mother’s mother, and Sonny had “named” her when he was a little boy who couldn’t pronounce her real name, Leona. Like everything he did then, Grandma Lee-no thought the name he gave her was the cutest thing in the world and cherished it as a special gift from her “little angel-child,” which was what she called him then and in fact still did, insisting, “You may be all grown up but you’re still my little angel-child.”
Grandma Lee-no lived in a little house up on Guilford that Sonny and his parents had lived in until they built their own place and gave the old house to Lee-no, who had just retired about then from a lifetime of service at the Indiana Gas and Utility Company, where she worked one of the switchboards; raising her children without any help from that fly-by-night no-good Johnny Haspel, who had left with some floozy for parts unknown when Alma was just a little girl and Buck was still a baby. Oh, yes, he came back and visited every few years when the kids were growing up, bringing them toys and trinkets and buttering up to them with his old snaky charm, making them think he was wonderful—until they were old enough to understand he was nothing but a two-bit liar with a slick tongue, all promises and no delivery, just like most men. They were so cute when they were little boys, but then they all grew up to be—men. Even little Sonny had gone and done it, just like the rest of them, but Lee-no still loved him anyway.
“Oh, my lit-tul angel-child,” she cried when Sonny came in her front door. “Kiss your pore old ugly grandma.”
Sonny leaned down and bumped his lips dutifully and dryly against her slack, parchment cheek. Her wiry little arms squeezed his waist, and he pulled away.
“Hello, Lee-no,” he said.
“Oh, I know you don’t want Lee-no to squeeze you anymore,” she said. “Nobody loves an ugly old woman.”
“I love you,” Sonny mumbled and sat down on the couch.
“Sonny loves you,” Alma assured her, “We all love you, Mama.”
“Lord, yes,” Mr. Burns said.
“Well, you all just sit down by the fan there. I’m still a-cookin’.”
The whole house was like an oven, and the little oscillating fan on the floor buzzed bravely but only sent out enough of a breeze to sort of tickle you. Alma went to the kitchen and Sonny and Mr. Burns picked Lee-no’s Sunday paper apart, trying to find something to distract them. Not even the funnies and the sports could work their magic on Sonny in Lee-no’s house, though; there was an oppressiveness about the place, a sort of invisible gravy of despair that clogged your senses. The many mementos and photographs and figurines that cluttered the mantel and the marble-topped table and the knick-knack shelves didn’t brighten things but seemed to Sonny like little symbols of sorrow and betrayal; a picture of Sonny as a cute little boy in a sailor suit, his cheeks tinted with rose, smiled from a heart-shaped frame; a grayish picture of Alma as a fair young maid, circled with silver; a model airplane curved and painted by Buck as a boy, a plaster Jesus kneeling in prayer, a silver reindeer Sonny had liked to play with long ago, a gold Statue of Liberty that Johnny Haspel had sent from the 1939 World’s Fair (it turned out to be the last thing anyone heard from him), a snapshot of Buck with some Army buddies just before he was sent overseas, a pincushion that looked like a tomato, a souvenir plate with a picture of the White House that Miss Verbey from across the street had brought from her trip to Washington.
The house grew smokier and hotter as mealtime neared, and when everything was done, Grandma Lee-no came out with tears in her eyes, wiping her hands frantically on her apron, and said, “I guess we’ll have to go ahead. Buck’s not here, wasn’t here all night, never called. The Good Lord knows if he’ll ever come back.”
“Now, Mama,” Alma said, following Lee-no into the living room, “you know Buck, he’s all right.”
“He never tells me anything,” Lee-no whined.
Mr. Burns cleared his throat and reddened. “He’ll be back, don’t worry. When he’s hungry or out of money, he’ll be back, I’ll guarantee you that.”
Uncle Buck, having been recently divorced for the second time and “between jobs” again, had moved back with Lee-no, who still feared every time he went on a toot and didn’t show up for a few days that he had come to a bad end, been murdered or kidnapped. It was not clear to Sonny who would wish to kidnap Buck or from whom they might expect to extort any ransom money. Certainly not from Mr. Burns. Sonny didn’t mention that he had seen Buck in the Topper only the night before and that he was probably right now humping away on that sexy redhead he’d been with. Sometimes. Buck had the nerve to take his girls home to Grandma Lee-no’s and fuck them right on the rollaway bed in the dining room. If Lee-no discovered Buck in the bed with a woman she would scream and holler and pound her fists on the wall and threaten to call the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. Lee-no didn’t seem to have too much confidence in ordinary police.
Everyone gathered around the dining-room table, which steamed like a caldron with gravy and potatoes and a monster chicken stuffed with dressing. All bowed their heads while Grandma Lee-no said grace:
“Dear Heaven-ly Father, we ask thee to bless this food, in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ. And bring Buck back home safe again.”
The grace-prayer seemed to have relieved Lee-no, and she turned to her joking mood, saying, “Good-bread-good-meat-good-God-let’s-eat!”
“Ma-ma,” Mrs. Burns said, as if she were shaming a naughty but lovable child.
Grandma Lee-no banged her fork on her plate and said, “If that bad boy isn’t home by dark, I will call the Army, the Navy, and the Marines!”
Mr. Burns sighed and asked, “You want me to carve, Lee-no?”
“Oh thank you, Ellie. You’re sech a gentle-man!”
Mr. Burns stood up and attacked the great, stuffed bird.
“You can give me dark meat, as long as it’s that kind,” Lee-no cried. “Don’t want any that other dark meat, though, that what’s taken over.” She held her nose and said, “Pee-yue!”
“Ma-ma,” Mrs. Burns cautioned.
“Well, I don’t care, Alma. I wished my daddy was alive now, he said way back then in the Depression the Jews and the niggers were a-gonna take over, and the good old Klan was the only thing’d stop ’em, by golly!”
“For God sake, Lee-no,” Sonny said and stood up from the table.
“An-gel child!” she whined.
“Sonny! She doesn’t mean it,” Mrs. Burns said.
“Why, Alma, I mean every word,” Lee-no insisted. “Just like Daddy use to tell us
: ‘We’re KKK and we mean what we say!’ Whoopee!”
Sonny headed blindly for the door, hearing behind him the sudden sobs of Grandma Lee-no, crying through the fumes of food, “Let him go, he hates me anyway, I might as well die.”
Sonny stood for a while on the front porch and then came back in and shoved himself up to the table. He crammed himself with the food so purposefully and indiscriminately that by the end of the meal Grandma Lee-no was no longer threatening to die. In fact, she felt good enough to sing “Moonlight and Roses,” which she claimed Sonny used to love to hear when he was her little baby angel-child and she rocked him in her arms at night until he went off to “seepy-time.”
He said he remembered.
The next day Sonny felt worse than if he’d been boozing all night. His stomach was stuffed and his head glommy. He tried to do push-ups, but could only make five of them. He took a shower, drank an Alka-Seltzer, and sat in the den leafing through magazines. He hadn’t kept up with his plan to read every new issue of Newsweek, hadn’t even bought one for almost a month. He had already read most of the Lifes and other serious magazines in the house, and about the only thing he hadn’t gone through already was a June issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. He flipped through it and came to an article called “Young Home-Builders.” It was about a young couple who had built their own terrace, and told how to do it.
When next-door neighbors George and Mary Mallen drop over, or we give a dinner for relatives, the terrace gives us elbow room. Breezeway door opens on back yard; so does kitchen door, for food transporting. Plastic dishes are kept in barbecue shed; it also holds a handy grill on wheels.
Breezeway’s coffee table matches window seat; Don topped both in green plastic, smoothed over adhesive with a rolling pin. That magazine holder on the wall? Bright cotton—with pockets!
There was a picture of a young guy in a sport shirt sitting at a little table reading a newspaper, while his wife sat on the other side, watching him read. Sonny wondered if he would be doing that in a couple of years, on his own clever little terrace. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad, if you had some wife you were madly in love with. What the hell else were you supposed to do?
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