The Great Santini Part 37

"What would you have done if he'd taken the bet?" Bull asked.

"They'd had to clean that stool Ed was sitting on," Cleve Goins laughed.

"See you boys at the game tonight. I've got to go and keep the world safe for democracy."

"Hey, Colonel," Slinkey yelled at Bull. "Why don't we just go ahead and nuke the h.e.l.l out of Moscow, Havana, and Peking? We're gonna have to do it someday anyhow, so why don't we just get on with it so we won't have to worry about it?"

"Sure thing, Slinkey. I'll send out three lieutenants this afternoon to get the job done. There's no sense in procrastinating any longer."

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. When he walked in the back door at four in the afternoon, he found his family sitting in the kitchen listening to Arrabelle reel off stories of her late husband. "Now Moultrie was a hardworkin' man. You go ask anyone about Moultrie Smalls and they tell you that he wouldn't run from no work. My man work many jobs during the Hoover years. Lord, we hate them Hoover years. If it wasn't for the river and the shrimp and fishes we could catch, Arrabelle wouldn't be talkin' this trash to you folks right now."

"This kitchen is filthy," Bull said sternly as he walked in the door.

"What you mean, Captain?" Arrabelle snapped from behind the stove. "The whole kitchen clean as a co-llection plate. What you talkin' about?"

Bull did not answer. Rather, he continued into the dining room inspecting corners and wiping his index finger across furniture. When he returned to the kitchen, he sighed heavily then sat down on a chair next to the stove. "The whole house is one big garbage dump."

"Cap'n, you just talkin' stuff. You just pleasurin' yourself by runnin' your mouth about nothin'."

"Don't listen to him, Arrabelle," Mary Anne said. "Dad is so juvenile sometimes."

"It's gettin' gone time anyhow. I'll see you folks with the sun."

"Bye-bye, Arrabelle," Lillian said.

"Say hi to Toomer for me," Ben called as the maid walked out the back door. He then began to take imaginary jump shots against the kitchen wall.

"Get off your feet, jocko," Bull said to Ben, "you don't want to wear yourself out before the game. Go on upstairs and take a nap. I'll give you a yell before we have to leave for the game."

"It so happens, sugah, the whole family was having a very pleasant conversation before you barged in and insulted Arrabelle."

"That's great," Bull answered, "but you're going to continue it without Ben. I want his mind to be on the game and nothing else. I hear there are going to be college scouts all over the stands tonight."

"This helps me relax, Dad," Ben said. "Just sitting and talking."

"Who asked you? Get upstairs and into the rack on the double. I didn't ask you for a speech."

"I think you're more nervous than Ben," Lillian said after her son had left the kitchen.

"This is the big game, Lillian. The big game. If he screws up in this game, Calhoun doesn't go to the tournament and he blows his chance for a scholars.h.i.+p. So I want everybody in this family to cut the yappin' and start thinking about the big game."

"It's so pleasant to have you home early, darling," Lillian said lightly.

"I couldn't sleep last night I was so worried about the big game," Mary Anne said. "I woke up with a cold sweat. And fever. And three different types of cancer. And a touch of rabies."

"Where's the paper?" Bull said, ignoring his daughter. "The afternoon paper's supposed to have a big spread about the game."

"It's in the living room," his wife said. "Would you like me to make you a drink and send it in?"

"Affirmative. Now let's break up this little pow-wow and think about the big game."

"Daddy, I got an A in an English theme," Karen said. "Would you like to read it?"

"Naw, let your mother read it," he said, leaving the kitchen.

"All right, children. Why don't all of you go do your homework so you'll have it done by the time we leave for the game," Lillian said, ushering Matthew and Karen toward their bedrooms. "Take this drink to your father, darling," she added, handing a silver gla.s.s to Karen.

"I finished all mine in study hall," Mary Anne said. "I think I'll go into the living room and read a book."

"I wouldn't if I were you," Lillian warned. "You've got to learn how to interpret the signals your father gives off."

"I can. He always gives off the signals of a psychopathic killer so it doesn't really make any difference how you interpret them."

"Shame on you. You're so disrespectful sometimes."

"You're always telling me I should try to get to understand my father better, that I never try to penetrate beneath his gruff exterior."

"I would choose my time with caution. Sometimes beneath that gruff exterior is a far gruffer one."

"Do you know that Dad and I have never had a single conversation in my whole life."

"That's just as much your fault as it is his, Mary Anne."

"He doesn't know me at all and I don't know him."

"Your father loves you very much, Mary Anne. He brags about how smart you are to everyone he knows."

"Does he really?" Mary Anne said with obvious delight.

"Of course he does."

"He never tells me that he thinks I'm smart."

"He probably never thinks about it," Lillian said, turning toward her daughter and appraising her with arctically critical eyes. Even the temperature of her voice plunged when she said, "Why don't you go upstairs and find something real pretty and lacy to wear to the game tonight?"

"I don't want to wear anything real pretty and lacy to the game. I prefer to wear something real ugly and frumpy instead."

"I don't want to tell you this, Mary Anne. But you've backed me against a wall," Lillian said, her voice becoming a whisper trembling with the promise of conspiracy. Lillian loved conspiracy, whether real or imagined. "Your brother, Ben, came to me yesterday and asked me if I'd talk to you about how you're dressing."

"Ben did?" Mary Anne asked. Lines of doubt radiated from her narrowed eyes as she watched her mother.

"Yes."

"Why didn't he talk to me?"

"He didn't want to hurt your feelings. But he did tell me that it embarra.s.sed him to see you going to school and to basketball games so sloppy looking. He thinks you ought to have a little more pride than that. He says-and this is strictly between us boys, Mary Anne, because he made me swear not to tell you-he says that he is humiliated beyond words to see you walk into the gymnasium dressed in those baggy, wrinkled clothes you seem so fond of."

"Ben didn't say that, Mama. That's you talking."

"Ben mentioned it to me yesterday."

"No, he didn't. Ben wouldn't care if I went stark naked. You see, I know Ben a lot better than you do. I even know you better than you do. And Ben wouldn't say that. But you would and just did."

"Well, he's thinking it, Miss Smarty Pants. You had better believe he's thinking it. If you have so little self-pride that you can't put on a little makeup and wear clothes that fit properly, then it's no wonder that your brothers and sister are growing ashamed of you. When I was growing up a young girl wouldn't be caught dead walking out her front door looking the way you do. Now, you've got a fairly nice figure, Mary Anne, and instead of wearing clothes to show your figure off, you wear clothes to hide it. And that's unnatural. That's why I'm so afraid you'll never catch a man worth a salt."

"I hope I never catch a man like you caught."

"You have to be so smart and so superior and so cute. Remember that it was me who gave you your love of reading and literature. But I never taught you to flaunt the fact that you are smart and can use words to hurt people. Men find that very unattractive."

"Creep Marines find that very unattractive."

"Sugah, I know men. A man's a man and any man who isn't should go out with the. morning trash. A woman has one job. To be adorable. Everything else is just icing. Dressing nice to catch a man's eye is part of the game."

"I don't like creep boys looking at me."

"That's what every woman wants," Lillian said harshly, "or should want."

"Not me. It's too sicko-s.e.xual for me."

"Well, if I were you, and I'm certainly not, I'd dress nice for Ben's sake if for nothing else. He's very upset."

"I thought we decided Ben never said anything, Mama."

"Get out of this kitchen this instant!" Lillian ordered. "I don't even know why I waste my time trying to teach you how to be a woman. Karen wants to put her best foot forward. She takes advice."

Mary Anne began to move toward the living room. She stopped, adjusted her gla.s.ses, and turned back to face her mother once again. She took a deep, sad breath and said, "You like Karen better than you like me, Mama."

"That's not true," Lillian countered. "I love all of my children equally. I love you for different things but I love all of you exactly the same."

"You know why you don't like me, Mama?" Mary Anne said.

"Maybe everybody would like you better if you weren't so know-it-all. It's best for a woman not to know so much," Lillian snapped.

"The reason you don't like me is because I'm not pretty."

"That's the silliest, most asinine, most hateful thing I've heard in my whole life."

"It's true. You don't know how to relate to an ugly daughter. Ugliness disgusts you."

"Hush up, Mary Anne. Hush up before I slap you across this room. What you're saying is not true. I am not that shallow. I am not that shallow and I refuse to sit here and let you tell these terrible, vicious lies about me. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't been easy living the life I've lived. Nothing worked out like I expected it would. Nothing. I thought everything would be lovely and everyone would be sweet and charming. There is so much poison in the world. You must learn to see the beautiful in things. I have. I can look at the ugliest man in the world and see a prince. I swear I can. It's the product of good breeding."

"I look at the face of the ugliest man in the world and feel sorry for the man," Mary Anne said, "because I know what it's like to feel ugly."

"Beauty is only skin deep."

"That's not true. It's a lot deeper than that. It's the deepest thing in the world. It's the most important thing in the world."

"You're just like your father!" Lillian spat. "You are exactly like your father. Sometimes I can't even believe you're my child. If I ever leave your father, I'm going to take the other children with me and leave you with him."

"You used to tell me that when I was little, Mama. And it scared me to death. But it doesn't bother me at all now."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not going to leave him."

"You're the most hateful child I've ever met."

"You've never liked me."

"Don't say that. Don't ever say that again. You make me feel like I'm something vile. That's the way you've always made me feel," Lillian said, beginning to cry. "Go! Go on now! Get out of my sight! I don't want to look at you or think about you! Everywhere you go you make people feel unhappy. I want to think about something happy."

"Think about the big game."

"Go in and talk to your father. Try and drive him crazy like you do me."

Mary Anne left the kitchen, her head arched proudly, yet somehow her departure had the look of retreat, of irredeemable loss. Lillian leaned against the stove and began to cry soundlessly. Then she stopped and resumed cooking the dinner with an unnatural smile on her face as she stirred the greens, and forced herself to think about happy things.

Mary Anne selected a chair directly opposite from where her father sat reading the paper. Choosing a magazine from a rack beneath her chair, she began to thumb through an old edition of The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. Then she began to steal glances at her father. In her heart, she was his silent ally, a fifth columnist, in Bull's inveterate a.s.saults on the trellised escutcheons of the Old South that Lillian shoved in front of him. Lillian spoke of the Old South when Bull was in earshot as though it were a private garden deeded to her in a last heroic proclamation by the Confederate Congress. Mary Anne looked up from the magazine and made a conscious decision to have her first real conversation with her father.

"Hey, Dad, why do you love me more than any of your other children?" she began, hoping to loosen him up with humor.

"Beat it, Mary Anne. I'm reading the sports section," he said, not unkindly. The paper did not quiver as he answered her.

"You know, Dad, you love me so much. It's about like incest. Do you know in literature that some fathers have been physically attracted to their daughters? That's pretty interesting, isn't it?"

"Hey, Lillian," Bull yelled to the kitchen, lowering the paper to nose level, "your daughter's going ape c.r.a.p out here. How 'bout dragging her back to the kitchen and giving her a couple of dishes to wash."

"Let's have a conversation, Dad," Mary Anne continued. "Just you and me. Father and daughter. Let's bare our souls and get to know one another."

"I don't want you to get to know me. I like being an enigma. Like a c.h.i.n.k."

"Let me ask you a few questions, Dad. Just a couple."

"Shoot," Bull answered, his head still hidden behind the newspaper.

"What's the saddest thing that's happened in your whole life?" she asked.

"When DiMaggio retired."

"What's your favorite book?"

"The Baltimore Catechism."

"What's your favorite poem?"

"By the sh.o.r.es of Gitchee Gumee, by the s.h.i.+ning big sea water."

"Who is your favorite person in history?"