The Great Santini (33 page)

Bull took Lillian in his arms and kissed her lightly, playfully.

"Sometimes I play the ogre just to make you mad," he said.

"Sometimes you play the ogre because there's nothing else there."

"See you in Havana, kiddo."

"So it is Cuba."

"It's a shame you don't smoke cigars," Bull said as he walked out the back door.

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Varney entered the ready room a few minutes before 0500 and went immediately into the clipped, faintly Oxonian accent that scraped across Bull's eardrum like a nail. Bull knew there was no real reason for Varney to address the squadron; he wanted to be a part of the grand panoply of what could be the first day of a war.

"Gentlemen," Varney addressed the pilots," as you probably know by now, a call came from the Second Marine Air Wing yesterday placing squadron 367 on a twenty-four-hour alert. This action is culminated by the action that is forthcoming. At 0600, squadron 367 will break a day and deploy twenty planes to Gitmo. Arrive at Gitmo at 2 plus 36. On arrival Guantanamo Bay, you will be further briefed on specific missions and targets listed in op order that will be presented by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Further instructions will also emanate and be forthcoming from the C.O. of Gitmo, Captain Bruce Webster, at the time of arrival. Gentlemen, I do not have to tell you of the importance of this mission. If something breaks between Cuba and the United States or between the Soviet Union and the United States, this squadron will be expected to buy Havana. Good luck, gentlemen," he concluded.

He stopped to shake hands with Bull Meecham. "Good luck, Colonel."

"Thank you, sir," Bull replied and the two men shook hands.

Bull then walked to the same spot where Colonel Varney had stood. He did not begin to speak until he was certain that Varney had cleared the premises. "Men, this mission culminates your training in Ravenel. In reality, all our training has come to this single moment. They did not select this squadron by accident. They selected it because we were the best. As I look around, I see that each and every one of you have the capability of making this squadron the finest assembly of fighter pilots in the Marine Corps. If we are the best fighter pilots in the Corps, then by extension we are the best goddam fighter pilots in the world. Now I want you to think that this is the bell for round one and this squadron is the Sunday punch. We're going right into the teeth of the enemy. We will be expected to gain Air Superiority over the mainland of Cuba. Once we begin to clear the skies, I don't want anything larger than a sea gull still in the air over that island. But I also want to caution you on becoming overconfident. Though we are the best aviators in the world, it is fatal for any aviator to underestimate his enemy. The MIG is a goddamn fine airplane and several Marine pilots who doubted that bought the farm in Korea. The MIG is capable of performing extremely well in all types of combat environment. The Russians have excellent pilots and I personally feel very bad that we're going to have to blow the asses off so many of them."

A cheer went up from the pilots, virile, primal, up from the groin, at the very source of the breed.

"Here is my hope for the younger pilots," Bull continued, eyeing the lieutenants and captains. "I hope that we go to war today. You are fighter pilots but you are virgin fighter pilots. The only way to crack the cherry is through combat experience. A cherry bleeds and you have to draw blood before you know how good you are or how brave you are. You're feeling a storm brew in the pit of your stomach and you're worried that it's fear you feel. It's not fear; it's inexperience. When we break the fly this morning then hopefully we will be flying toward experience. I'd like to be talking to this squadron in about six months and see silver stars hanging from every chest in this room. Gentlemen, let's make history today."

The pilots broke toward the flight line and the open hangars dominated by the sleek, predatory presence of the F-8's. Mechanics clambered over the planes making last-minute checks on engines and radar. The air was filled with the smell of oil. The deafening growl of engines and the sound of scraping metal made it a requirement for men to scream at each other to be heard.

"Where are you from, Corporal?" Bull screamed at an unwhiskered man who clambered off the wing of his plane. The boy smiled. He had played the game with his old man before.

"Galena, Illinois, sir."

"Second best city in Illinois, Corporal. After Chicago," Bull said.

"Galena's the best, sir. By far."

"Court-martial this man, Sergeant," Bull said to Latito. "That's heresy."

Bull pushed the throttle forward and felt the plane become fire and speed beneath him. He rose into a capitulating dark and could see the glimmering lights of Ravenel on his right; in the east the sun was being born in a perishable orange that caught the fuselage of Bull's F-8 in a moment of gold.

As the squadron, in the demon pass of jets, edged offshore high above the green blaze of ocean, Lillian watched and listened from her second story veranda. She saw the night lights mount the treetops at the end of St. Catherine's Island and she heard the explosion of the afterburners and witnessed the fire that spewed from the exhaust of each plane as the squadron tightened into formation. Always, she was moved by the passage of the terrible winged squadrons. In the first plane, her husband controlled the wings and she could see his eyes set with purpose and she knew that he was at this moment a supremely happy man.

The planes formed behind him and a single vision passed through the mind of Bull Meecham, magnificent in its improbability, in its impossibility, but one that he entertained deliciously for a full minute. He imagined that a call would come to him, a voice of Command, the voice of a subaltern of God, hashmarks running down his arm for a thousand miles. It would be an avenger's voice that would turn the squadron toward the convoy of Russian ships bringing missiles to Cuba. And he, Bull Meecham, would turn his boys southeastward, interpret the exact language of latitude and longitude, then drive toward the unarmed fleet. Always, he had dreamed of the day when he could set a fleet on fire, to sink an armada to the depths. He could see it all, the fire in the water and the air filled with the nightmare of an entire squadron diving at leisure toward defenseless ships. He would cleave holes in the hulls of freighters and let continents of seawater have the missiles for the keeping. He would watch as the black waters overwhelmed the broken, foundering craft, breathing the last sunlight as they slid into the water, quenching their fires as they dropped into the easy depths and began the long journey toward the black mountains that lie in the vastest, darkest land outside the vision of God. Bull Meecham could see it; he could hear the sound of ships breaking up and the screams of Russian sailors.

During the whole flight down, Bull allowed his fantasies to roam the country of his eyes. He needed a war. He needed it badly.

"What are we praying for, Mama?" Karen asked.

"A special intention," Lillian answered, impatient to begin.

"What's the special intention, if I may be so bold as to ask?" Mary Anne asked.

"Peace," Lillian said, beginning the Apostles' Creed.

In the early evening of November 10, Bull and Lillian dressed with great care for the Marine Corps birthday ball. They dressed in silence on opposite sides of their bedroom. Lillian was in a slip at her dressing table carefully applying her makeup. Bull reflected on whether dress whites that had been tailored for a one-hundred-ninety-pound man would permit the entry of the same man who now weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. They both dressed as if they did not know the other was in the room.

This was the night that always filled Bull Meecham with a deep pride in the Corps. It was a night of confirmation when he felt an almost mystical affinity with every man who had ever borne the motto of semper fidelis. All over the world, on this one night, he knew, every Marine, active or retired, in groups of thousands, in small clusters, or single sentries patrolling unfriendly borders, all of them, to the last man, turned to this night in celebration and pride. On this night, they drank to the birth of the Corps. For Bull, this night released a sad cargo of memory that held the names and faces of pilots he had seen flaming toward a violent death in Pacific waters, all the dead Marines he had known, the old faces smiling in motionless portraits frozen by recall: they came to him now, the lost squadrons of brash, cocky pilots culled from the sky by a world that thrived on the blood of young men. He remembered too giving close air support in Korea to a retreating Marine battalion, and seeing the dead Marines frozen grotesquely in the snow. At times he could close his eyes and see those dead Marines rise, see them come out of the snow, their uniforms pressed, boots shining, and their rifles gleaming; and he followed them marching, the lost battalions marching under wind-snapped flags and dancing guidons, coming at him in endless procession, calling to him in the animal roar of many men speaking as one, lifting their eyes to his plane, saluting him as he dove toward the enemy that was always there. On this night, he thought of all the dead Marines he had known and not known, and he loved all of them; the beauty and loss of this night moved him. Death in battle was the one poetry that almost released tears in Bull Meecham.

He fastened the collar of his dress blouse. In his twenty years as a Marine he had gained weight each year. At first it was a couple of pounds a year, undetectable even to him. But lately, the leanness of his youth was deserting him at an accelerated pace. More and more, he was coming to dread the yearly physical. He dieted on eggs and cottage cheese three or four times a year. Too impatient to endure a long range diet, he went on radical diets that seemed like preludes to famine. But no matter how stringent the effort, the thicknesses of middle age were encircling him and threatening to overwhelm the athlete's body, the Marine's body of which he was so proud. It was not that he looked fat; he did not. But there is a harsh message in the veracity of collars and photographs. The collar to his dress whites fit so tightly that it was an act of semi-strangulation to put it on. The Marine in the mirror was almost a caricature of the slim, youthful pilot who stood beside his Corsair in a photograph on Lillian's dresser. The Marine in the mirror unfastened his collar and would not fasten it again until it was absolutely necessary. He did not like the feeling of blood trapped in his head.

"Too tight, fatso," he heard his wife say.

"Naw, it isn't too tight," he snapped. "A uniform's supposed to be snug. It isn't supposed to fit like a nightgown."

"I can still wear the gown I wore to my first birthday ball."

"Big deal."

"There's no reason to be sensitive about being a little overweight, Bull. A lot of people are fat," she teased. "Maybe it's your glands."

"Quit your yappin' and get dressed, Lillian, or we're gonna be late for the ball. I'm not kidding. Get a move on," Bull said, looking at his watch.

"Don't rush me, Bull. I want you to be proud of the way I look tonight. I bought a gown that could win wars."

"Just hurry it up."

"Bull, you haven't been exactly pleasant to live with since the Cuban rift," Lillian said, her voice filled with concern.

"It ain't my job to be pleasant to live with. It's my job to fly birds."

"It's your job to be civil when you get home."

Again looking into the mirror, Bull said," Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the toughest leatherneck of all?" Then, in a strained falsetto, he answered his own question," You are, Oh Great Santini. "Then in his own voice, he said," Good answer, mirror. I'd have busted your shiny butt if you had said anything else."

"Bull, darling, why don't you use some of that energy and go downstairs and talk to the children. You've been positively beastly to them since you've been home. You owe it to them to be nice on the birthday of the Marine Corps. This is supposed to be the happiest day of the year for a Marine," Lillian said.

"Not a bad idea, sportsfans. I think I'll find out how they respond to a surprise enemy attack. "He went to his top dresser drawer and retrieved a bayonet he had found on a decayed Japanese soldier near an airfield in the Philippines. He also lifted out a shot putt his wife had given him for a Christmas present as a way for him to release tensions built up during a day's work. From his closet, he unsheathed the Mameluke sword which he had bought the same day he was commissioned a Marine officer. He put the bayonet in his teeth, carried the shot putt in his left hand, the sword in his right.

"Put that shot putt down, Bull Meecham. The last time you used it as a grenade it broke right through a window at Cherry Point. Now you be careful with those children. You might hurt one of them."

He growled at her through the bayonet.

Silently, Colonel Meecham moved toward the den where his children were watching television and doing homework during commercials. Ben was lying on the floor with his head propped up by pillows. Mary Anne lay on the couch, her hair in pin curls. Both Matt and Karen were sitting in overstuffed chairs with unopened books in their hands. Bull calculated the distance between himself and Ben, then lobbed the shot putt in the air. It missed Ben's head by less than five feet, and tore a chunk of plaster out of the wall. Then Bull charged into the room shouting," Torah, Torah, Torah. "Matt scrambled toward the kitchen, but his father nimbly cut off that path of retreat. Ben rolled over toward the fireplace and armed himself with a poker. He yelled at Mary Anne to arm herself with a hearth shovel while he held his father at bay. Mary Anne shouted back that she was not going to lower herself by playing in one of her father's silly war games.