Part 46 (1/2)
”Give me a loaded gun and I might give it a try.”
”I want you to go bring your father home, Ben. And I want you to bring him home now.”
”I'm not going to do it, Mama.”
”Yes you are, Ben,” she said patiently. ”I am asking you to bring your father home. Now hurry before the sun goes up.”
So Ben dressed and left the house in the dark not knowing where to search or even to begin. First, he skirted the edge of the marsh near the house. He walked the length of Eliot Street until he reached the Catholic church, then came back down Rowland Street. He began to call out, ”Dad! Dad!” but heard no response.
It was after five in the morning when he found him lying almost in the dead center of the Lawn. There was blood on his dress whites and his uniform was still damp from the plunge into the swimming pool at the Club. He had retrieved a bottle of Tanqueray from his squadron car and had come to the middle of this acre of gra.s.s, this common land flanked by mansions, to drink alone far from the dissonance of his children's eyes. He was moaning when Ben reached him and was lying in his own vomit.
Ben stood over his father, astride him. For a moment it did not register to Ben what he was seeing. For the first time in his life he was studying a helpless Bull Meecham and thoughts began to gather in storm clouds as his father's face turned toward him. Ben had a notion to stomp the face until it was indistinguishable from the gra.s.s, to kick the belly until his foot broke through to the spinal cord, to bring the blood flow from every orifice in the body, to thumb the fighter pilot's eyes into permanent darkness, to smash the testes until the life-giving power was extinguished forever. But, as in the kitchen, Ben did nothing. Atrocities occurred only in his brain.
”Dad,” he said, and the figure moaned in the gra.s.s. ”I got to get you back to the house, Dad.”
”I'm sick, mama's boy,” Bull answered.
”I know, Dad. I got to get you back to the house. You've got to help me because I can't carry you by myself.”
Ben's rage had fled and it angered Ben that he had no camel hump of spirit where rage could be stored, preserved, and called upon whenever it was needed. Twenty minutes before he would have spit on this obscenity in the gra.s.s or he thought he would have done it. Now he was trying to resuscitate the hatred he had felt in the kitchen. But it would not come. Rage blazed up in him often, but its atoms were too active for preservation and its life span was brief like the kick and the flame of an afterburner in his father's F-8.
He tried to get under his father and lift him up, but could not. He went down again and managed to coax Bull up on his hands and knees. Then he hooked Bull's arm around his neck and together they rose, and began staggering toward home. And as they walked a feeling came over Ben that he tried to control but could not. He felt himself about to say something and he fought against it. He warred against it, but his tongue was a transient orator who, in moments of madness or in the dazzling half-nelson of a father's arm, a.s.sumed a life and career of its own. He heard himself saying, unbelieving, unwilling: ”I love you, Dad.”
Bull Meecham increased the tempo of his slouch homeward and acted as though he didn't hear.
And the voice came again and Ben listened to it with the same sense of wonder as his father.
”I love you, Dad.”
Ben saw his father looking over at him as though he was witnessing the birth of something wild and schizophrenic in the psyche of his oldest son. Bull pulled away from Ben, then wheeled back toward the middle of the Lawn and began running into the darkness. But the liquor still had his legs. He ran in an agonizingly circuitous pattern, weaving and stumbling, falling once, but immediately on his feet again, running slowly, unable to escape anything.
Running behind his father, Ben began to feel a disproportionate joy rise in him. He began to catch his father, sprint past him, slap him on the rump in pa.s.sage, and turn him like a steer. And he started chanting joyously, teasingly, the master of his tongue again, ”I love you, Dad. I love you, Dad. I love you. I love you. I love you.” And each time Bull would turn away from the phrase and hunt the part of the night that would enclose or hide him. Then he fell a last time and began vomiting again.
Ben stopped. He was smiling, exhilarated, liberated and meanly enjoying a weapon he did not know lay in his a.r.s.enal. When Bull had finished throwing up, Ben thought about resuming the chant, but did not. He hooked his father's arm around his neck again, got him to his feet, and walked him toward the house in silence.
Chapter 33.
By the end of April the air was full of summer and the small wind that lifted off the river was heavy and uninvigorating. Lillian Meecham sat on the lower veranda with her children rocking in a chair and waiting for the sun to go down. Even the sun seemed to be affected by the air.
”Is Dad going to be transferred anywhere this summer, Mama?” Karen asked.
”No. He'll be at Ravenel at least one more year.”
”This will be the first time we've been in one place for two years in a long time,” Matthew noted.
”I wouldn't leave my new friends for anything,” Karen said pa.s.sionately. ”I'd kill myself before I'd move somewhere else.”
”You won't have to, sugah. We're staying in Ravenel next year,” Lillian consoled.
”Hey, Mary Anne,” Ben said from his perch on the green railing where he leaned against the white doric column.
”Yeah, fish feces,” she answered, not lifting her eyes from the book she was studying in the diminis.h.i.+ng light.
”The Junior-Senior Prom is in two weeks. Anybody ask you yet?”
”Very funny. What a joke,” Matthew cackled.
Mary Anne raised her eyes imperiously and cast a withering glance at her younger brother who returned it in full.
”As a matter of fact, I have had hundreds of phone calls from some of the smartest and best looking boys at Calhoun High. But none of them are mature enough to converse with such a chic and worldly woman.”
”That's a laugh,” Matt said. ”No one's ever called you for a date in your whole life.”
”That will be quite enough, mister,” Lillian said to Matthew.
”Why'd you ask, golden boy?” Mary Anne said.
”Because, I, Benjamin Meecham, being of sound mind and body, do hereby announce that I intend to take my sister, Mary Anne Meecham, to the Junior-Senior Spring Formal, if she but permits it.”
”Oh, puke,” Matt said, leaning over the railing and pretending to vomit in the side yard.
”Have you lost your gourd?” Mary Anne said, her eyes returning to her book.
”I think that's a very sweet gesture, Ben,” Lillian said.
”I ain't no charity case, big brother. No thanks.”
”Wait a minute, Mary Anne. I know you're not a charity case. But look at it this way. I don't have a date. I'm too chicken to get one. I tried to call up a few girls, but as soon as I did my face broke out in pimples and my nose hair grew to a length of three feet...”
”You don't have to sink into vulgarity, darling,” Lillian interrupted.
”Earwax poured out of the side of my head and sweat rained down from my underarms,” he continued. ”So I don't have a date. Since Sammy isn't here, he can't ask a girl for me. So we ought to go together. It's your Junior-Senior too and it looks like no hunchback or blind man is going to call you.”
”I don't think that's funny,” Mary Anne said.
”Nor do I, Ben,” Lillian agreed. ”But I do think it was adorable of you to ask Mary Anne, sugah.”
”C'mon, Mama, don't say that kind of stuff or I'll never get her to go with me.”
”You'll never get me to go with you anyway,” Mary Anne said to her book. ”It sounds a little sicko-s.e.xual to me.”
”Why, for G.o.dsakes?” Ben demanded. ”Why don't you want to go?”
”Because I honestly don't want to. Besides, you ought to get a date. It will look perverted and I can't dance.”
”I don't want to get a date,” Ben answered. ”I am perverted and I can't dance either.”