“What’s that?” Sonny asked.
“Kill,” Wheels said.
“Time,” Sparky said. “It takes time, ole buddy.”
“No, man. It’s not like the Army. Or the Air Force, or anything normal. I mean, they don’t just teach you how to do it, they put it in your goddam brain to kill. They put it in there deep, so it’s what you think about doing, and you can’t stop thinking about it. I remember in boot camp at Lejune, some guys couldn’t take it, and the DIs spit on ’em and kicked their ass and told us they were fags and goddam mama’s boy queers. Maybe they were the goddam healthy ones.”
“I’ve heard guys say that,” Gunner said. “About the Marines. I knew some guys.”
“It’s great for combat,” Wheels explained, “’cause they make you good at it. You want to kill and know how to do it good. But what the fuck do you do when you get home? It doesn’t just go out of your head, when you get back home. It’s in there, all the time, man. I wake up with it at night.”
“Jesus,” Gunner said. He reached over and took the Echo Springs bottle and had him a slug.
“Well, now,” Sparky said in his drawl—not the Southern kind but the special Indiana kind, slo-o-o-o-w and nasal twangy—“you can’t just brood on it all the time, you gotta get your mind off it, little by little.”
“Sure, Sparks,” said Wheels, like it wasn’t so easy, like he didn’t believe it would go away.
“Hey, Sparks,” said Gunner real bright, trying to change the subject for Wheels’ sake, “I heard they made you a fly-boy.”
Sparky said, yeh, he had enlisted in the Air Force, a four-year hitch, and he was about to go to some isolated place in Alaska, some base stuck up there in the middle of nowhere.
“Where it is,” Sparky said, “they don’t even have any Eskimos.”
“What’ll you do for snatch?” Wheels asked.
“Penguins, I guess.”
“That’s shitty, putting guys up there like that,” Gunner said.
“Well, they try to make it up to you in advance, before you go. I just got back from my three weeks of it.”
“Of what?” Sonny asked.
“Well, just before they send you up to nowhere to freeze your ass for a year, they send you to what’s supposed to be this special flight training in Florida. You get extra pay for the three weeks, and what it’s really for is so you can have a ball down there, live it up real big, to sort of tide you over.”
Sonny noticed that although Sparky had a good tan, he had the deepest, purplest circles under his eyes he had ever seen.
“Great,” Gunner said. “How was it?”
Sparky made a little chuckle and took the Echo Springs bottle himself and nipped some. “You really wanna know?”
“Sure, man.”
“Well, I tell you. And I’d only tell my friends. I was there for three weeks. I spent seven hundred dollars. And I never got laid.”
Wheels let out a shriek, and Gunner clutched at his head.
“That’s terrible, Sparky, that’s terrible,” Gunner said.
Sparky just grinned philosophically, and he said with resigned acceptance, “Gunner, it’s the American Way.”
2
Hearing other guys’ troubles made Sonny feel a little bit better, though that made him feel ashamed and guilty, feeling better because other people were in bad shape. He didn’t really wish anything bad on anyone, but it was nice to know he wasn’t the only miserable bastard. Another shitty thing, though, was that he still secretly felt he was the most miserable.
That night everyone went over to Beemers, but the Sargent Hotel group waited till after dinner because the Beemers already had three guys there, one on a spare cot and two sacked out on the porch in a hammock and a wicker couch, and Gunner said he didn’t want to give Old Lady Beemer four more mouths to feed, so they got some ham and cheese and four quarts of milk and a couple loaves of Wonder bread and made sandwiches. They ate in Wheels’ car and then rolled over to the Beemers. Even if you weren’t actually staying there, it was headquarters, and Old Man and Old Lady Beemer didn’t mind at all; in fact, they liked it that way, having a mob of young people coming in and out all the time. Old Lady Beemer had gray hair, but you could tell she’d been a great-looking girl, she had that sweet-pretty kind of face, and damned if her legs weren’t even too bad, except the old veins were beginning to show up on them, violet-colored and crawling.
There was a full moon and everyone was outside, on blankets, and the Beemer boys had hauled the big cooler out there so you could grab a beer without having to go all the way to the house. There were some cute girls, a couple Sonny recognized from Shortley, and some others from around the lake, summer girls. Jocko was dating this blonde from Logansport, supposedly a real hot number and plenty stacked. He always had the cute ones. Everyone was just horsing around and drinking. The four guys at the Sargent had killed Wheels’ bourbon, though he had done most of the damage on it himself. One of the girls Sonny knew of from Shortley was Hildie Plummer, who had short-clipped strawberry-blonde hair and a lot of freckles and wasn’t any queen but wasn’t a dog either, the only trouble being she was one of those “personality” girls, one of the kind who was loads of fun. She spotted Sparky and squealed his name like she was about to come in her panties, and ran over and hugged him, not sexy but with loads of fun in it.
“Well, Hildie,” he said real nice and put his arm around her, just being friendly, knowing it wasn’t any use as far as making out, but being nice anyway. It got Sonny depressed, thinking how this really good guy was about to be shipped off to some ice cap or something for a year, what was supposed to be one of the best years of his life, and he was horny as hell and had spent that seven hundred bucks for nothing in Florida, and how much he needed a piece and how easy it would have been for Hildie just to go off with him somewhere and let him have it, and yet she would have probably rather have been shot by a firing squad, keeping her precious cherry for some poor bastard who would marry her and settle down for a life loaded with fun. It got Sonny hating all the women, all the goddam bitches tossing their little tails around and then acting like it was a federal case if a guy wanted in. And yet he had been offered the best he had ever seen in many ways and yet couldn’t do anything about it, which was the worst thing, the scariest thing of all. He had told Gunner the truth about what really happened—and worse, what didn’t happen—and how scared shitless he was. It wasn’t the sort of problem Gunner was familiar with himself, but he said he was going to set his mind to it, he was going to figure something out, and in the meantime for Sonny not to worry until he came up with something. Somehow that relieved Sonny a little, like knowing a great doctor has taken your case. You have to give him a little time to come up with the cure.
Even that couple hours in the sun had got his body pink and sore, not really painful but touchy enough so that just having a shirt on was kind of irritating. Gunner was out in it most of the day, but it just deepened his tail. Sonny figured you could make a good case for the idea that the world is basically divided into two kinds of people—the ones who tan and the ones who just burn. The healthy and the messed-up. Show him a guy who just burns, and he could show you a messed-up guy.
A couple of the girls started singing “In the Evening by the Moonlight” and everyone joined in, doing it the slow way first and then the jazzy way. After that Kings Kingley sang the Wabash song, and hardly anyone could join in because the words went on so long and there were so many verses you had to have spent four years at Wabash to know the damn thing. Sonny figured if you went to Wabash and learned that damn song it probably took up your whole time. That got ’em started on fraternity songs, “Phi Delta—Phi Delta Thay-ay-ta,” and “Pass the Loving Cup Around for Beta Theta Pi” and then the anti-Beta song, “Up in the Air Beta Bird-man, Up in the Air Upside Down,” and the sorority songs like “Remember the Golden Arrow of Pi Phi.” Hearing those songs depressed Sonny, made him feel it never ends, they’d be singing that stuff when you’re eighty and yo
u’d still feel outside of things, not good enough to belong. He knew almost all the damn words to all of them but didn’t join in, like that would have been cheating or pretending he was part of all that when he wasn’t. Wheels sang along with the rest, even though he couldn’t pledge because he was on probation because of low high-school grades his first year and then flunked out, but the difference was he could have pledged, he knew that some of the big houses would have asked him, so you could see why he didn’t mind singing the songs and why it seemed all right that he did. Of course, no one would have minded if Sonny had sung either, it was him who would have felt funny about it.
After one of the songs Hildie chirped, “Hey, gang, speaking of Kappas, did you know that Sandy Masterson got engaged?”
Sandy had been a Junior Prom Queen at Shortley and a Kappa at I.U. and was always being voted this and that for being so beautiful. She was one of those dumb but nice sort of beauties, always walking around like she was in a daze, hypnotized or something. Sonny wondered if she was like that even when she screwed or whether she really got hot and active. He had a feeling she’d just lie there in the daze, letting the guy go about his business.
“Who to? Who’s the guy?” several people asked at once.
“He’s a Phi Gam,” Hildie revealed, “from Michigan State. She met him at a wedding.”
“Way to go, Phi Gams!” yelled Kings Kingley, who had been a Phi Gam.
“Phi Gams always were lucky,” said Jamie Beemer, who had been a Sigma Chi. “Not good, just lucky.”
“Shee-it,” Kings said, “tell it to the birds.”
“Shee-it,” Jamie answered back.
“Hey, Hildie,” Gunner asked, and he had that curious edge in his voice, like he was about to pop one of those questions that got people nervous. “How come when they asked you who Sandy married you said ‘a Phi Gam?’”
Hildie didn’t get what he meant. “Because that’s what he is,” she explained.
“But isn’t he anything else?” Gunner persisted. “Is he a jock, is he a lawyer, is he a veterinarian, is he rich, is he handsome? Does he have green eyes and red hair, or walk with a cane, or sing opera in Italian?”
“Well, I’m sure he’s cute,” Hildie said, kind of miffed.
“How do you know? Just ’cause he’s a Phi Gam?”
“Goddam right,” said Kingsley, and some other guys hissed and booed.
“No, really,” Gunner went on, “I mean, you tell about a girl we all know getting married, and you describe the guy just by saying what fraternity he was in.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said one of Jocko’s lodge buddies from Bloomington who didn’t know Gunner and might have thought he was some wildeyed, nutty Independent or something.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Gunner said. “It just seems funny, when you think about it. It seems especially funny when you realize after Hildie described the guy that way, nobody even asked anything else about him, like that was all anybody needed to know, what fraternity he was in.”
“So what do you want, the guy’s life story?” asked Kingsley, kind of grumpy.
“No, man, I just mean it tells a lot about us, about what kind of values we have, that’s all,” Gunner said.
“Oh, Jesus, we gonna have a sociology class or something?” asked Jocko Beemer. “Values, for Chrissake.”
“Gunner’s turned real egghead on us,” Jamie said.
“What’s with this guy?” asked the big lodge brother from Bloomington.
“He’s O.K.,” said Jamie. “He’s just gone a little egghead on us since he’s been to Japan and seen the world.”
“Sounds kinda pinko to me,” the Bloomington guy complained.
“Pinko!” shouted Gunner, and Sonny’s stomach got that queasy feeling, the one like he had at the swimming pool that day when he thought Gunner was going to get into it with Wilks Wilkerson.
“Now, now, here we are at the lake,” drawled Sparky in his best soothing voice. “The lake is no place for politics and arguments, the lake is for fun. Now I’m about to go someplace where if they had a lake at all the damn thing’d be frozen solid, and I’m here to get me some lake time in before—”
“Hey, Sparky, is that true, you’re goin to Alaska?” Jocko asked.
“Alaska!” gasped Hildie, and everything got around to that, the Bloomington guy cooled down and Sonny could see Gunner kind of felt bad for stirring things up and he just guzzled at his beer and kept quiet. He saw what he’d meant, though. It reminded him of this minister’s wife his mother got in thick with for a while, she always described a person by what religion they were, like “Did you know the young Sampler boy married a Baptist?” which was a little weird to her, she being a Presbyterian.
Jamie unloaded some more beer into the cooler, and Sonny had another one too, and then everyone got to singing again, this time the old campfire sort of songs, the ones you sang on blanket parties and hayrides and on summer nights at the lake, ones like “I Been Workin’ on the Railroad,” “Good-bye, My Coney Island Baby,” and then slower, sadder ones, like “My Gal Sal” and “Over the Rainbow” and “Home on the Range.”
He got all choked up in a good way singing that song to himself, looking up at the stars that glittered and the night sky all lit up and how amazing it was to think about how glorious it was compared to us down here on the ground. Sonny leaned back, lying down all the way so his body was still on the blanket but his head was on the grass. You could see about a million stars up there. On a clear night in town you could see about a half million, but you got out to the lake and you could see twice as many. The songs were making him sad as hell, and when they started singing “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding, Into the Land of My Dreams,” he really felt choked up. He guessed the deal was he felt scared and sorry for himself, like he was on the wrong damn trail and that it wasn’t winding to any land of dreams, that he’d always be on the outside listening to other people sing about their dreams, ones that would come true for them but not for him, that he’d always be just listening and watching, waiting for his life to begin, waiting until the damn thing would be over and nothing would have happened. Jesus. He started thinking like that and it was like falling, falling deeper and deeper into some pit you couldn’t climb out of. He made himself sit up and finish his beer, and even sing some. He sang along with “Down Among the Sheltering Palms,” and after that one Jocko and his girl got up, quietly, and walked off hand in hand, down along the lakeshore, no doubt going somewhere to make out, and the Bloomington lodge brother picked up on one of the lake girls and they wandered off someplace, too. The thing started breaking up. Wheels had passed out, quiet and calm, like he’d been conked on the head. Sparky asked if Gunner and Sonny would help get him back to the Sargent, and they carried him out to his red Studey, Gunner holding him under the shoulders and Sonny and Sparky taking a leg apiece.
They got him into the blanket on the floor in the room he and Sparky had thrown their stuff in at the Sargent, and offered Sparky some candles but he said no thanks he was bushed and he just wanted to crap out so they said good night and went down the creaky hall that smelled like somebody’s old attic, Gunner with the flashlight, and got to their room and lit a candle.
By the light of it, Gunner had his prophet look.
“Pinko,” he said, shaking his head. “Anything different is pinko. Anything you ask, if you really want to figure things out, that’s pinko too.”
“Yeh,” Sonny said, “it seems like it.”
“Maybe we ought to move on,” said Gunner. “I’m restless as hell.”
“Sure,” Sonny said. “Me too.”
“There’s other lakes.”
“Hell yes.”
They each had a beer and then Gunner blew out the candle and got in his sleeping bag. Sonny’s sunburn was hurting and so he just lay on top of his bag. It seemed like hours getting to sleep, hours of fighting off thinking of Gail and what had happened, and he drank another beer in the dark. Finally
he must have flaked out because he woke up out of a mixed-up dream, sitting straight up, blinking into an early-morning sunless light.
A voice was yelling, “No, goddam it, no, no!”
Gunner was sound asleep, and Sonny started to get up and then he heard Sparky’s voice saying, “Wake up, wake up, you’re O.K., buddy. It was only a dream.”
It was poor Wheels Conzelman’s dream. The one the Marines had given him.
When they got up, they went to a Shell station to shave and brush their teeth, and then went by Beemers so Gunner could have one more swim, and Sonny did his wading act. The little kids on the sand stopped shoveling and stared at him, and he tried not to notice them. Finally this little girl asked how come he couldn’t swim, and he said he could but not right now because of his arm, waving the bandage at them. They just stared some more. Sonny figured that little girl would grow up to be a real bitch.
They took off around eleven and Gunner just drove due north, on 421, and they just talked about this and that, nothing special, just flapping their lips in the breeze. Sonny was eager to know if Gunner had figured out anything about his cure, but he didn’t want to press it. It was hot as hell and Gunner stopped at a gas station and took off his shirt and drove on, saying he’d like to hit another lake. Around three o’clock they began to see a lot of signs advertising cottages and dances and shit at Lake Bold Eagle, which was only twenty miles or so off the main highway. Gunner said that might be a good place, they had a public beach and bathhouse. Bold Eagle was the lake where most of the Manual-Technical people went if they could afford to go to the lake at all. It was sort of chintzy and had a roller rink and tacky little cottages and most of the boats were just outboards, the people who went there could never have bought a Chris-Craft.
Sonny was tired of wading and he just sat on the beach while Gunner went in, and then, when he’d swam and dived himself silly, he seemed even more full of pep than ever and said they ought to go by the roller rink and see if there was any stuff. In fact, there were some pretty sexy Manual-Technical babies, or at least that type, ones with tight skirts and toreadors and low-cut blouses so you could see the line between their boobs. Some of them were roller-skating alone, some with guys, and some were with other girls, crossing their arms and holding hands while they skated and twirled to the recorded organ music. Sonny and Gunner didn’t go in, but it was sort of an open-air rink and they stood leaning on the fence and watching, just like you’d lean on a corral fence and look over the livestock.
Going All the Way Page 26