The Great Santini: Chapters 29–34

Then both he and Ben scouted the terrain beneath the water tower half expecting the tubercular, sallow face of Junior Palmer to appear as an apparition before the long climb to the catwalk could begin.

But they found nothing to either arouse their suspicions or allay their fears.

The higher he climbed, the more subject to delusion Ben became. He was teased only slightly by the phantoms of vertigo, but slightly nevertheless.

The steel ladder was made of paper, of silk, of quicksilver, of air.

“Why couldn’t you have had him tape the money at the bottom of the railroad trestle or leave it beneath the bridge, Sammy?”

The music, the anthem of Saturday night debauch, filtered to them through the jail stones that now enveloped them, isolated them with Junior Palmer.

The deputy pivoted in the direction of the doorway and shouted at a featureless face broken up in equidistant penumbras by four bars, “Who’s there?”

His blond hair was brushed straight back and his face shone with a ruddy health in the February air.

The old part of the town, fiercely antebellum, rested in the stillest slackwater celebration of itself, in the habiliment of azaleas cutting into shadows with a soft-winged blue, or a deepening ruby.

An animal whine of unequivocal desperation and absolute hopelessness rose in his throat as he ran and ran and ran.

Along River Street a harsh silence prevailed as white men clustered in doorways and nodded their heads ruefully, then looked toward the street.

The id of the town was bared, gathering into something terrible, fed by the slow accretions that came with a blazing hunger for retribution.

“Great, Toomer. I’ll come here Friday after school and just go on to your place with you,” Ben said, leaving for home, the ends of his fingers abraded from the crab shells.

He felt the stiff, arched withers of two German police dogs who ran together and often teamed to fight and get licked by the Gray.

His brain flooded with images and memories. But the images broke up of their own accord, weightless chimeras routed by a numbness that ran through him unchallenged.

Mess night was a formal dinner, a rigidly proper genuflection toward the stiffest and most chivalrous origins of the Marine Corps and one that Bull Meecham believed to be the single most efficacious ceremony for stimulating esprit de corps that a commanding officer had at his disposal.

Mess Night was a testament of linkage, an evening that allowed for the lyrics of both form and ferocity.

The aviators were resplendent in full dress as they drank cocktails in the anteroom before the call to dinner.

There was a caution to the early evening drinking, almost an abstemiousness, for the Mess Night that began with the dignity of a coronation often ended with the survival of the species as a major concern.

But in this beginning hour, there was only a glittering retinue of officers and gentlemen, a low and decent murmur of conversation, an uncommon restraint among the slim, muscular, seemingly invulnerable men who, slightly titillated by the light that could dazzle off cordovan and the understated correctness of the full dress uniform, seemed to Bull Meecham to represent everything that was right with the United States.

His normal intolerance of affectation did not extend to the elegant symmetry of Mess Night.

The ceremony itself was one which began in refinement, in a spirit of proper felicity.

He had issued a call to the most legendary aviators he had known in the Marine Corps, the ones who had combined uncanny abilities as pilots with the personalities of carnival barkers and exhibitionists.

The Mess Night was bridled by stiffness and form only in the first hours; now the evening was moving quickly toward a more visceral, more wanton kind of tradition.

The man was the largest and most physically imposing man in the room. He had soft places and was girdled with a ponderous stomach and huge buttocks, but the weight did not diminish his formidability.

Every time he sees a grunt, he acts like a mad dog, foams at the mouth, and if not restrained, eventually bites the grunt on the leg causing gangrene and death.

Again and again, louder and louder, Odum would unleash a thunderous feline howl, a cat sound, unbridled, fulminating from deep within the man until Brannon, a servant to the wishes and moods of his fellow pilots, began to roar back, and the waiters who were clearing silver and china from the table witnessed two Marines in full dress snarling and hissing at each other like animals.

Apache Bill found a huge summer fan which he placed at the very end of the carrier deck with the blades of the fan an added inducement for pilots to make sure they hooked onto one of the three landing cables.

As he passed Apache Bill, a bucket of water was thrown on him. “Rain squall,” the men screamed.

He girded himself and knew this would be a conflict that would extend the thresholds of his fear of his father and his cowardice before the plowman who had granted him life.

He had retrieved a bottle of Tanqueray from his squadron car and had come to the middle of this acre of grass, this common land flanked by mansions, to drink alone far from the dissonance of his children’s eyes.

Dad is a slubberdegullion, which is a paltry dirty wretch.

Dad is a slubberdegullion, which is a paltry dirty wretch.

You can’t move every other year and be anything but a transient.

She would attribute it to measureless wellsprings of piety or stewardship of the phantom herds that bled out the milk of human kindness.

She would attribute it to measureless wellsprings of piety or stewardship of the phantom herds that bled out the milk of human kindness.

She would attribute it to measureless wellsprings of piety or stewardship of the phantom herds that bled out the milk of human kindness.

The theme of the dance was Gaïté Parisienne and the gymnasium where Ben had once thrown up jump shots and broken a boy’s arm was decorated in one corner with La Tour Eiffel and in another with a cardboard frontispiece of Notre Dame.

Their coffee was always the earliest coffee fixed by the men with the calloused, fin-cut hands as their puffed, ascetic boats moved into the stream of tide returning, cutting through the dark artery of the marsh, through the green empire heaving in the tumult of retreat, alive with the instinct of billions obeying the unbenign law of the tide.

Then, in his bones, Bull felt the nature of the emergency change; even before he had proof or corroboration of what his viscera told him, he felt a change in his aircraft, and a change in himself as he went to the radio once more and called out words he had never used before: “Mayday. Mayday. Six-five-seven. I’m in the soup at 2000. Have severe engine vibration and over-temp. Am going to guard channel and squawking emergency. Out.”

He had known too many Marine wives and children who had come to their front door and found dour messengers, their faces carved from the ices of duty, standing with tragic news welting their tongues.

Lillian spent a full, enervating day on the telephone notifying a staggering number of relatives on both sides of the family.

She attributed Bull’s death to God’s will, the inexorable will, the unrecallable will and she had no quarrel with that...There was a dignity to her grief and an acceptance of the fait accompli—the fatalism that the pilot’s wife must beget whenever her mate forsakes her for his aircraft.

She attributed Bull’s death to God’s will, the inexorable will, the unrecallable will and she had no quarrel with that...There was a dignity to her grief and an acceptance of the fait accompli—the fatalism that the pilot’s wife must beget whenever her mate forsakes her for his aircraft.

The jets flew over the burial cortège in a tight formation that had an odd imbalance to it.