Part 25 (1/2)
Chapter 18.
The alarm woke Bull Meecham at 0300 hours on the morning of October 21. He had been cast from a restless sleep, but he rolled off the bed and onto the floor where he pumped out fifty pushups before he groped his way to the bathroom. Lillian listened to his labored exhalations as he struggled with the last ten pushups and remembered the years when Bull could do a hundred with ease. Age had thickened her husband, thinned his hair, and reduced the numerology by which Bull himself measured his fitness.
”How many did you do, sugah?” Lillian called from the bed.
”Seventy-five,” Bull said.
”Do you want breakfast?”
”Negative, sportsfans.”
”I always feel better when I've fixed you a good hot breakfast before you go on a long hop,” Lillian said.
”How do you know I'm going on a long hop?” Bull asked.
”Darling,” she answered, ”the best source of information in the entire Corps is in the middle of an 'O' wives meeting. The word among the girls is that 367 is going to Cuba.”
”The Joint Chiefs of Staff should develop such an intelligence system,” Bull grumbled.
”Then I'm right. You're going to Guantanamo. Is something going to happen?”
”That's cla.s.sified.”
”You mean you don't even trust your own wife?” Lillian asked coyly.
”I wouldn't trust Helen Keller. Even if you lopped her arms off.”
”Do you think there might be war?”
”Lillian, I can't talk about this. It's cla.s.sified.”
”Do you think if we attack Cuba, Russia will intervene?”
”I hope so,” Bull answered, applying shaving lather to his face as he talked to his wife.
”Aha,” Lillian shouted, ”then it is Cuba.”
”Keep your voice down, one of the kids might hear.”
”Matt says he hasn't sold secrets to the Kremlin for at least a year, Bull.”
”Yeah, but what about Ben?” Bull grinned. ”It would take just one Marine wife or one Marine kid to start working for the Russkies and every move the Corps made would be transmitted to Russia twenty-four hours in advance.”
”Do you know if something happens, sugah, you could be in combat later today?”
”I've got to win some medals if I'm going to make bird colonel. This could make or break my career.”
”I'll get breakfast. You'll need to have breakfast if we go to war.”
Lillian drank a cup of black coffee as she watched Bull inelegantly consume a plate of eggs, biscuits, and country ham.
”Do you ever think of the men you've killed in combat, darling?” she said, trying to begin a conversation. Bull's mind was fixed on other things.
”What?” he answered.
”Do you think of the men you killed?”
”Negative. No sense boo-hooing over dead slants.”
”Don't you ever think about their wives and mothers? Or if they had children? Or if they liked to fish or enjoyed a stiff drink?”
”After I set 'em on fire, Lillian, none of those things makes any difference.”
”I wish you wouldn't say things like that, sugah. It makes me feel funny to hear you say things like that. It's so strange that I'm married to a man with so little reverence for human life.”
”I've got lots of concern for human life as long as it was born between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean and just north of Mexico and just south of Canada. That's why I would love to drop a few bombs on Cuba. I've never killed a round eye in my whole career. I've majored strictly in slants.”
”Sometimes I think you'd have made a wonderful S.S. Trooper, Bull.”
”I would have,” Bull said.
”You sound proud of it.”
”I've always admired those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. They were great military men and efficient as h.e.l.l. I liked the Germans a h.e.l.l of a lot better than I liked the j.a.ps. Can you imagine what it would be like if the j.a.ps had won the war? We'd be going down to the temple each Sunday to kiss Buddha's rosy red. And I'd sure rather learn how to speak German than that bird scratch j.a.p talk. Naw, the Germans would have been O.K. But we had to fight the j.a.ps for keeps because the American way of life would have been destroyed if the j.a.ps had taken the marbles. You talk about me not having respect for human life. It's the j.a.ps that don't have any respect for human life. It's got something to do with their being yellow and having slitty eyes.”
”What about the Jews, darling?” Lillian said, her fine blue eyes set in a kind of stare.
”So the Krauts fried a couple of Jews. Big deal. It was war. We fried Germans in Berlin and Dresden. We fried j.a.ps in Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki and I mean, sportsfans, we done fried 'em like eggs there, no pootin' around. In every war someone gets fried. The Jews got it from the Krauts. In war, there ain't no morals. There are just winners, losers, and those that got their a.s.ses fried sunny side up.”
”They killed women and children like they were butchering hogs. They set out to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth and for no reason except that they were Jews.”
”Big deal. Jews are a pain in the a.s.s. I imagine that when Hitler was a kid, he got p.i.s.sed off at everyone with a big schnozzola and a fraternity beanie making more money than he ever dreamed of.”
”He set out to eliminate one part of the human race, sugah. Do you hear that, sugah? Do you understand that, sugah? Is that registering in your fighter pilot brain, sugah? Doesn't that do anything to your sense of justice, sugah? To your heart, sugah? Doesn't that touch you somewhere, Bull Meecham?”
”Yeah, you're right, Lillian. It does touch me,” Bull said sincerely. ”I can feel it deep down inside me. It's a ticklish feeling. A powerful itch that's located somewhere on the high side of my sphincter tube.”
”I don't know why I even try to have a conversation with you,” Lillian said angrily. ”It's hopeless to even try to make you feel things.”
”A fighter pilot isn't supposed to feel things. He's supposed to kill people. You and the other split-tails can do all the feeling you want to, but I can't. I have a mission to do. Period.”
”If the fighter pilot can't feel things, then how can I feel things for the fighter pilot?”
”Because that's your mission. Your mission is to love the fighter pilot, cook good meals, police up the house, and raise superior children.”
”Darling, you think an inch deep on every subject. Then quit.”
”O.K., Lillian. I'll play your game,” Bull said. ”You've been reading those books about what jerks. .h.i.tler and the Germans were for as long as I can remember. But I'm a realist. I don't believe anything I read because I know that anyone who writes about something is always picking the scabs off someone else. If Hitler had won the war you'd be reading books about what a jolly good fellow Hitler was and how jim-dandy it was that he killed every Jew that ever lived. And what if he had? What if there wasn't a single long-nosed Jew living in the world today? Do you know what would be different? Nothing. You wouldn't even notice it. I'm always hearing do-gooders bawling about the pa.s.senger pigeons and the dodo bird being extinct. I have never once in my life given a rat's fart that I never saw a pa.s.senger pigeon. If Hitler had killed off every Jew that drooled between two lips it wouldn't affect my life one way or the other. The world gets by without them.”