Going All the Way (5 page)

Sonny had friends of his own he could have called, even a girl, but he just hadn't seemed to be able to get going. In a way he was afraid that when he did get himself together and do something, it might mark the beginning of his real life, and it might not be any different than the old one. If Gunner hadn't called, God knows how long he would have just sat around feeling lousy and picking his ass. When he actually had a place to go and got showered and dressed, he felt one hell of a lot better. He put on some clean khaki summer pants and his old white bucks and a neat sort of knitted T-shirt he had bought in Kansas City. His mother said she had to use the wagon that afternoon, but she'd drop him off wherever he was going.

“I'm going to the Red Key,” he said.

“Where?”

“The
Red Key
,” he shouted. “Over on College and Fifty-fourth Street.”

“The tavern?”

“It's a bar.”

“You're going there in the afternoon?”

“I'm meeting a guy.”

“Are you sure they're open—in the afternoon?”

Sonny took a deep breath. “I'm sure.”

She drove him there in silence and let him off right smack in front of the place even though he said the corner'd be fine. He would just as soon not have Gunner see him getting out of the car door that said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He sort of slinked out of the wagon and walked to the bar with his head bent down.

It was cool and dim inside, and smelled very beery. Sonny liked it. The Red Key didn't seem like any special sort of place, unless you knew that Wilks Wilkerson and Blow Mahoney and a lot of the other Big Rod jocks who used to go to Shortley hung out there after work when they had summer construction jobs to make a lot of money and keep in shape. Sonny used to really envy those guys who could casually say, “Yeh, I'm workin' construction this summer.” They wore dirty T-shirts and faded khakis slung low on their hips, and they were always whipping out a grimy snot rag that was stuffed in a hip pocket and give the nose a terrific, noisy blow, just like the regular construction guys did. It showed they were real men.

Gunner was already there, and Sonny pulled up a chair at his table. It was still early, and they were the only customers except for one of those old dame lushes in a messy flowered dress, singing to herself.

Gunner had been observing the old gal, and he shook his head and explained to Sonny, “In Japan, you never see a woman drunk.”

“No shit?”

“Never. See, the women are there to please the men, and if a woman's drunk, she's not going to be much good to a guy, right?”

“Yeh. I never thought of that.”

“They think of everything. Acourse, they've had thousands of years to do it. We think we're so damned advanced, but we're babies compared to them.”

Sonny realized you had to go get your own drink at the bar and he got himself a Bud like Gunner was drinking, and came and sat down with it.

“Ours is an infantile, competitive society. Mickey Mouse,” Gunner said. “Look, you saw it at Shortley. All that social-climbing shit. The rod system, the jock stuff. You were one of the quiet ones, you just sat back and observed. Watched us run around chasing our tails, a bunch of greenasses. You were a detached observer.”

Sonny shifted uneasily and took a gulp of beer. “Well, sort of,” he said.

The truth was he had been a detached observer because he was never asked to be an active participant. Now it was like he was getting credit for being something he'd had no other choice than to be. It was sort of weird.

“You were way ahead of us,” Gunner said.

“Shee-it.”

Modestly denying the credit for having been something he couldn't help being, Sonny realized it probably sounded like genuine modesty, making him seem even nobler.

“Same thing in college,” Gunner went on. “All that rah-rah fraternity crap, secret initiation and beating ass and all the rest of it. You saw through that, right? You didn't go Greek, did you?”

“I was Independent.”

Sonny didn't explain he was Independent because none of the top houses had rushed him, and he was so much a secret snob that he turned down a second-rate house with a seemingly nice bunch of farmer sort of guys because they didn't have a big name on campus. Instead he moved into a rickety rooming house with a motley assortment of other outcasts—all of them snobs in their own way, trying to take a bitter kind of pride out of not fitting in. You had to have something.

“I knew you weren't the type to fall for that frat shit, Gunner said admiringly.

Sonny shrugged modestly, knowing he was being sort of phony, and yet he began to wonder about that. It was like Gunner had this particular picture of him, and he liked the way that picture of himself looked, and began to even think maybe it was the real picture. Maybe he really had been a shrewd quiet rebel all along, more mature than the others, above their little games. Maybe he just hadn't seen it that way.

“Ya see, I never
observed
anything,” Gunner confessed, “never looked at anything and questioned it, till I got to Japan. Then I was a real outsider, for the first time, and I
saw
things. I realized I didn't know anything at all about my
own
society. I just accepted it. The last couple days I've been going around taking pictures. That's one way of seeing things. Ya know? You get something in that lens, you gotta be
looking
at it.”

“Right,” Sonny agreed, as if he'd thought of it himself long ago.

They had a couple more brews, Gunner talking that way, excited and curious, Sonny just nodding wisely in his new position as the quiet sage.

Around 4:30 Gunner said, “Listen, let's haul ass. Before long the jocks'll be coming in, and I just don't feel like shooting the shit with those guys right now.”

“Sure,” Sonny said.

He couldn't help wondering if Gunner wanted to go because he didn't want his old jock buddies to see him hanging around with a nobody like Sonny. But maybe it was really that Gunner felt he'd grown beyond those guys and wanted more serious, deep discussion with the sort of guy he evidently figured Sonny was.

Gunner had his mother's wheels—a neat-looking Mercury hardtop—and he said if Sonny had time he'd take him out to the Meadowlark and show him some of the pictures he took in Japan. Gunner was living with his mother in the Meadowlark, a new apartment complex out northeast where a lot of young people lived, couples and groups of guys or girls who had graduated from college and come to Naptown to get a job. It was the first kind of place like that in the city. There was always some party going on in one of the apartments, and in the warm nights you could hear music and laughter. People played records like
South Pacific
and
Call Me Madam
, and the latest jazz, like Brubeck and Chet Baker and the cool guys, and they turned the volume up loud at the parties and nobody complained. It was that kind of place. Everyone was up on the latest thing, right there in Indianapolis.

They had just started looking at Gunner's pictures from Japan when his mother came in. Sonny felt himelf turning red when he saw her. It was the babe he had seen go off with Gunner at the station, the one Sonny thought was probably a show girl down from Chi. Gunner introduced her as “Nina,” which was what she liked to be called. You could see why she didn't want anyone to call her “Mother.”

It wouldn't have fit. It would have seemed as silly as calling Marlene Dietrich “Grandma” even though she was one.

Nina looked Sonny over like she was annoyed or something.

“I don't think I've seen you before,” she said. “What was your name again?”

“Sonny Burns,” Gunner answered for him. “He went to Shortley.”

That didn't seem to satisfy her.

“I thought I knew all the gang from Shortley,” she said. “I don't think I ever heard of you.”

“Nobody did,” Sonny said, trying to smile.

“Why so?” Nina asked, her eyebrows arching.

“I didn't do much,” Sonny said.

“He was a photographer,” Gunner said in defense. “For the
Echo
.”

“Did you go to DePauw?” Nina asked.

“I.U.”

“Oh? What house were you in?”

“The rooming house.”

Gunner laughed very loud. “The rooming house,” he said. “That's great.”

Nina shrugged and stalked to the kitchen. “I guess I don't get the joke,” she said.

Gunner looked at Sonny and winked very hard, as if to tell him not to pay any attention. He was showing Sonny a picture of a Japanese pagoda. It was some kind of shrine, on a hill of deep green, with the sunset bleeding behind it. Gunner's pictures were good, they were framed well, they showed a sense of imagination and certainly a competence, and more than that, a flair. It made Sonny a little jealous, it didn't seem right that this guy who was a terrific athlete and all should be good at photography, too, should be able to pick up what it took Sonny years to learn. Some guys were good at anything, which didn't seem fair when most people were just good at one thing or nothing at all. But Sonny felt ashamed for feeling that way. Especially what with Gunner befriending him and all, treating him like he was someone special.

Nina had changed out of her dress and came in wearing another pair of those skin-tight toreadors and a low-cut matching green silky blouse. Sonny tried not to look at her, terrified he would get a hard-on and Gunner would see it and know that Sonny was sexed up by his mother. Jesus. Nina had made herself a highball and was rattling the ice in the glass, so you couldn't not pay attention to her. She had on those backless high heels and was joggling one foot up and down, just holding the shoe on the edge of her toes. Sonny thought her feet were sexy, too, and that made him feel even more ashamed and guilty. He knew a lot of guys thought women's feet were sexy, but it was something hardly any guy admitted or talked about. It was O.K. to talk about tits, and even asses, but not women's feet.

“You fellas want a drink?” Nina asked.

“I was about to get us a beer,” Gunner said, and set the photograph box down and went to the kitchen, leaving Sonny alone in the room with Nina. He figured somebody ought to say something, but Nina wasn't any help. She just sat there clinking the ice around in her glass and joggling her shoe and looking sort of haughty.

“It's a nice apartment you've got here, Mrs. Casselman,” Sonny said as heartily as he could.

“Call me Nina,” she said. “I do like the Meadowlark. I was in a bigger place before, but it was one of those strait-laced buildings down on Meridian with a lot of old people. The hallways smelled like a hospital. This place is a little cramped, but it suits just fine for a bachelor girl like myself.”

Sonny vaguely remembered something about Gunner's father dying when he was a kid, even before he got to high school, but, of course, his mother—Nina, that is—would never think of herself as a “widow” any more than she would think of herself as a “mother.” She was a “bachelor girl.”

“It's a little cramped with Gunner home, but if he promises to stay I'm going to get us a bigger place, right here in the Meadowlark. Just the two of us.”

“That would be nice.”

“Has he shown you his pictures of Japan?”

“He has been, yes.”

“And the scrapbook?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“I kept a scrapbook for him, while he was gone. Of course he doesn't appreciate it—but he will someday.”

“Sure,” Sonny said.

Nina stood up and went to a bookcase that had the Churchill volumes on World War II, some textbooks, and a row of orange china elephants, linked trunk to tail. She pulled a green-leather scrapbook off one shelf and came and sat down beside Sonny, laying the book on one of his knees and one of hers. She smelled heavily of some woozy kind of perfume, and when she bent forward over the scrapbook, Sonny could see down her blouse almost to the nipple of her tit. He felt dizzy and tried to focus on the scrapbook. There was a page of newspaper clippings, and Sonny read one that said:

Cpl. Thomas B. “Gunner” Casselman, known to Hoosiers for his gridiron exploits at Shortley and DePauw University, is stationed in Japan, where he recently climbed to the top of the fabled Mt. Fujiyama, according to his mother, Mrs. Nina Casselman, of 3429 East 42nd Street.

“That's something,” Sonny said.

“Which?” Nina asked.

“Mt. Fujiyama. Climbing it.”

Gunner came in with two cans of beer and stopped short when he saw the scrapbook.

“Mother,”
he said.

That was what he called her when he really was pissed off at her.

“Your friend wanted to see it,” she said.

“Whatya think he'd say, no?”

Gunner handed Sonny a beer and grabbed the scrap-book.

“We were
looking
at that!” Nina shouted.

Gunner put it back on the shelf and said, “
Please
, Mother.”

Nina let out a heavy sigh and went back to where she was sitting before and picked up her drink.

“He's always been like that,” she said to Sonny, “hiding his light under a bushel.”

Gunner got that look like he had on the train after all the sake and the deep contemplation, where it seemed that his eyes became glassy and sunk farther back into his head.

Nina put on a Brubeck record and turned it up real loud. Nobody said anything, they all concentrated on drinking. When Gunner was finished he set down his glass on the coffee table and stood up.

“I'm giving Sonny a lift home,” he said.

“You haven't forgotten about tonight, I hope?”

“No, Nina.”

“I broke two dates for you, sweetie. Not that I wouldn't
rather
go out with you, but you just better show me a good time.”

“We'll paint the town, Nina.”