The Great Santini: Chapters 23–28

If the devil caused it, if in Ravenel, South Carolina, in the year of 1962, Satan had taken possession of that vulnerable geography around Ben’s loins, staked a claim in this beleaguered region; if the rise and ebb of his bright manhood was the sole armature of the Prince of Darkness, then he had developed the most potent weapon.

“Because I’ve snooped around a lot. Gone on reconnaissance missions. Paid off informants. I’m real nosy when it comes to presents.”

Picking up a very small present, shaking it for some telltale clue of its content, balancing it on her palm, she weighed and analyzed it with the expertise of a rapidly developing sense of human avarice.

His very teeth were floating and his voice was a plaintive cry as he begged our father to rise from his throne and enter into family life.

Their parents walked downstairs, Lillian skipping lightly, proud of her beauty, aware of it; her husband followed, pulling at his necktie, uncomfortable in the full dress regalia of civilians.

It was a time when happiness was allowed to spill over, to inundate all rooms, to rule all faces, and to reign unmolested in the turbulent kingdom of the fighter pilot.

But when she danced, it was with a feral grace, a controlled wildness that had been preserved secretly in her body.

In a thick drawl, more ponderous than his low mass responses, the priest spoke the Latin phrases with a sonorous, dramatic discernment.

In a thick drawl, more ponderous than his low mass responses, the priest spoke the Latin phrases with a sonorous, dramatic discernment.

The priest’s vestments shone with the white and gold jubilation of the church celebrating the birth of its redeemer.

Ben and Matthew were serving Mass in red cassocks worn only on feast days and special holidays.

He never sat with the family in church. Instead, he stood guard in the rear to the unconcealed chagrin of the ushers.

He could call it self-love and give plenary indulgences for its religious performance.

“O.K., what’s the big surprise Christmas present?” Ben asked when they had broken out of Ravenel County and in a hauntingly crepuscular light were shooting across a causeway where the locks and sluices of an old rice plantation were still visible.

“O.K., what’s the big surprise Christmas present?” Ben asked when they had broken out of Ravenel County and in a hauntingly crepuscular light were shooting across a causeway where the locks and sluices of an old rice plantation were still visible.

A gifted raconteur and an indefatigable drinker, Causey was a pilot of unimpeachable courage.

A gifted raconteur and an indefatigable drinker, Causey was a pilot of unimpeachable courage.

Causey was a master of half expression, half smiles, and half glowers, for all nuances of expression stopped at the invisible frontier that marked the dead sector of his face.

But Lillian always remarked that the doctors had taken a badly burned, homely man, and with all the advances of modern medicine at their disposal, turned him into a grotesquerie.

He’ll be wearing an ascot, a Sam Brown cartridge belt, and a Bowie knife.

Bull replaced the phone on the hook, smiled to himself in anticipation of the coming fracas, then bellowed for Sergeant Latito.

Though not as tall or physically commanding as Bull’s, Captain Brannon’s body was stacked together with the knotted muscles of a stevedore, and an implied menace shadowed his whole appearance.

His eyes were dark, coffee-hued, and his jaw was an aggressive promontory.

Bull had promptly nicknamed him “White America,” an appellation that Brannon bristled at to the undiluted joy of his commanding officer.

“You’re joking with me, aren’t you, sir?” Brannon asked, as a smile began to build on the spartan isthmus around his mouth.

He had seen injured jets fall from the sky as inexorably as arrows pulled from strong bows.

He was swarthy, dark haired, and one of those men who always look as if they need a shave no matter what the time of day.

In a sepulchral voice filled with concern, Cecil said, “Lillian said she wanted me to send a pilot from 234 home with Colonel Meecham tonight..."

But 367’s most puissant weapon in this frothy olympiad was the prodigious guzzling powers of Butch Brannon.

He pointed his arms behind him like the wings of a plane and made stacatto sounds like a jet on a strafing run, shooting imaginary bullets at the pilots outdrinking his comrades.

Only in its external serenity was life abnormal there, but Bull felt comfortable as he claimed the middle stool each weekday morning and entered into the matrix of warm wood colors, breakfast odors, and a glass window where the history of Ravenel could be unobtrusively charted on any given day by the voluble fauna who formed its early morning cadre.

He walked slowly with a constrained dignity, hoping to conceal the presence of his artificial limb.

That afternoon Bull returned home early, too excited about the game with Peninsula to concentrate on the niggling administrative details that caused him more annoyance than any other element in his role as squadron commander.

“That’s the silliest, most asinine, most hateful thing I’ve heard in my whole life.”

In her heart, she was his silent ally, a fifth columnist, in Bull’s inveterate assaults on the trellised escutcheons of the Old South that Lillian shoved in front of him.

He did not chew the peaches, rather, he swallowed them whole as though they were live goldfish with bone and viscera intact.

Matthew picked up the entire can, turned it upside down and drained the juice violently, his adam’s apple straining and pulsing like a metronome.

There was a commotion at the locker room door and the manager’s voice was raised in a shrill, feckless protest.

The nadir of his distinguished career in asking the wrong question had come when he was playing second base in pony league and a boy walked up to bat who clearly had not been trained with an eye for style or classicism.

And each boy according to his own capacity drank in the applause that poured over his entrance. Ben bathed in the unction of his shouted name.

The crowd erupted in a deep, sinewy exaltation of triumph.

To end the half, he took the ball away from Abbott on the dribble and scored on an ostentatious reverse layup after a behind-the-back dribble that had more relationship to the big top than it did to basketball.

He waited for her anger to come in fusillades of outraged motherhood, smothering southern platitudes, and Catholic theology.

He waited for her anger to come in fusillades of outraged motherhood, smothering southern platitudes, and Catholic theology.

He wants us to punish Junior Palmer for his transgressions against the God of Abraham.