Going All the Way (33 page)

Sonny was just as glad of the distraction; he hadn't known what to say about Gunner's advice.

Gunner cupped his hands and called, “Heeeey, Wheels baby!”

Wheels Conzelman had come to Shortley after getting kicked out of some military academy, and he didn't know anyone and was too small to be a jock and not very coordinated, but his old man was an executive with some big national firm and had a lot of bucks and bought him that red Studey for his sixteenth birthday, with the hitch that if Wheels flunked out of Shortley or got kicked out or didn't graduate, the car got taken away. Of course, he was known to his old man as Richard, which was his real name, but he got known around school for the car. At first the Big Rods made fun of him, but then he started letting them use the car and taking them places and also driving them on dates, which was very useful because not many guys had their own car and couldn't get the folks' car
all
the time and so they sort of took Wheels in even though some of them joked about his having a “four-wheel personality,” but Wheels didn't give a shit, he even said it about himself, and he didn't seem such a bad guy at all. Just like Sammy Katzman joked about being a Jew, Wheels joked about his four-wheel personality, and if you joked about something like that, people accepted you more. He did flunk out of college his freshman year, but that wasn't part of the deal about the car, and besides right away he enlisted in the Marines and you could hardly take the car of a U.S. Marine away from him.

The Marines had shaved off Wheels' curly blond hair, and even though he'd been out for almost a year, he still kept it shaved, just as he kept wearing his old Marine fatigues and T-shirts that said, “Camp Lejune,” the way some guys wore their old athletic gear even after they got out of college. There was another guy with Wheels, a guy who Sonny liked a lot, even though he hardly knew him, a guy called Sparky Mackenthorpe. They called him Sparky the way you would call a fat guy “Slim,” because he was the most relaxed, easygoing guy you could ever meet. He never went out for ball, but everyone liked him. He was the sort of guy people asked for advice and went to when they were in trouble. It was soothing just to be around him, his easygoingness calmed other people down. He was always dressed nicely, not sharp or fancy, but casually right, like his personality. He had on some plaid bermudas and loafers and a nice-looking blue T-shirt, one of the kind with an alligator on the tit.

The newcomers gave a big greeting and clapping on the shoulders to Old Man Beemer and then came over to Gunner and Sonny. Gunner gave the quick introduction-reminder he always did—the “You remember Sonny Burns,” said so the person would think he
should
remember the guy, and they always said, “Yeh, right, sure, man, wha-say.” Wheels and Sparky didn't have any place lined up to stay, and Gunner told them to come on over to the Sargent with him and Sonny.

The Sargent was an old hotel that used to be hot stuff on the lake a long time ago, but it had gone to seed and the summer before they took all the beds and crap out and it was just standing there, so you could go over with a sleeping bag and pry open one of the windows and have a room at the lake, even though it was an empty dilapidated old room, dusty as hell, decorated with spiderwebs and peeling paint. They said the owners were trying to sell it and in the meantime they evidently didn't give a damn if people sacked out on the floors. Some of the windows were broken out, by guys who couldn't pry them up and get in any other way. It wasn't exactly vandalism, no one threw rocks to break the windows for the hell of it, they just couldn't get into the room they wanted any other way.

They found an empty room and then Wheels went out to the car and brought in a couple of six-packs and a fifth of Echo Springs bourbon.

“Don't you wanta go back to Beemers and hit the water?” Gunner asked. “Before the sun goes down.”

“It'll be there tomorrow,” Wheels said and cracked open a can with a churchkey he had hanging from his belt on a little chain.

“Ole Wheels,” said Sparky with a little chuckle, “he puts first things first.”

Everyone got beers and Wheels opened the Echo Springs and offered it to anyone who wanted to take some jolts from the bottle, but he was the only one who felt like it, at least yet. He would take a little gulp and then chase it with some beer.

“So what's up with you, Wheels?” Gunner asked. “You been out long?”

“Almost a year. Already lost three jobs.”

“No shit?” said Gunner.

Sparky clapped Wheels on the back, affectionate like, and said, “You'll be O.K., buddy. You'll do 'er.”

“Fuckin Sparky.” Wheels grinned. “He believes in
any
body.”

“What is it?” asked Gunner. “Getting back to civilian life?”

Wheels took a gulp of the bourbon and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Fuckin Marine Corps,” he said. “They ruin ya for anything, except for
them
. They only teach ya one thing, and then, goddam it, you can't forget it.”

“What's that?” Sonny asked.

“
Kill
,” Wheels said.

“Time,” Sparky said. “It takes time, ole buddy.”

“No, man. It's not like the Army. Or the Air Force, or anything normal. I mean, they don't just teach you how to do it, they put it in your goddam
brain
to kill. They put it in there deep, so it's what you think about doing, and you can't stop thinking about it. I remember in boot camp at Lejune, some guys couldn't take it, and the DIs spit on 'em and kicked their ass and told us they were fags and goddam mama's boy queers. Maybe they were the goddam healthy ones.”

“I've heard guys say that,” Gunner said. “About the Marines. I knew some guys.”

“It's great for combat,” Wheels explained, “'cause they make you good at it. You
want
to kill and know how to do it good. But what the fuck do you do when you get home? It doesn't just go out of your head, when you get back home. It's in there, all the time, man. I wake up with it at night.”

“Jesus,” Gunner said. He reached over and took the Echo Springs bottle and had him a slug.

“Well, now,” Sparky said in his drawl—not the Southern kind but the special Indiana kind, slo-o-o-o-w and nasal twangy—“you can't just brood on it all the time, you gotta get your mind off it, little by little.”

“Sure, Sparks,” said Wheels, like it wasn't so easy, like he didn't believe it would go away.

“Hey, Sparks,” said Gunner real bright, trying to change the subject for Wheels' sake, “I heard they made you a fly-boy.”

Sparky said, yeh, he had enlisted in the Air Force, a four-year hitch, and he was about to go to some isolated place in Alaska, some base stuck up there in the middle of nowhere.

“Where it is,” Sparky said, “they don't even have any
Es
kimos.”

“What'll you do for snatch?” Wheels asked.

“Penguins, I guess.”

“That's shitty, putting guys up there like that,” Gunner said.

“Well, they try to make it up to you in advance, before you go. I just got back from my three weeks of it.”

“Of what?” Sonny asked.

“Well, just before they send you up to nowhere to freeze your ass for a year, they send you to what's supposed to be this special flight training in Florida. You get extra pay for the three weeks, and what it's really for is so you can have a ball down there, live it up real big, to sort of tide you over.”

Sonny noticed that although Sparky had a good tan, he had the deepest, purplest circles under his eyes he had ever seen.

“Great,” Gunner said. “How was it?”

Sparky made a little chuckle and took the Echo Springs bottle himself and nipped some. “You really wanna know?”

“Sure, man.”

“Well, I tell you. And I'd only tell my friends. I was there for three weeks. I spent seven hundred dollars. And I never got laid.”

Wheels let out a shriek, and Gunner clutched at his head.

“That's terrible, Sparky, that's terrible,” Gunner said.

Sparky just grinned philosophically, and he said with resigned acceptance, “Gunner, it's the American Way.”

2

Hearing other guys' troubles made Sonny feel a little bit better, though that made him feel ashamed and guilty, feeling better because other people were in bad shape. He didn't really wish anything bad on anyone, but it was nice to know he wasn't the only miserable bastard. Another shitty thing, though, was that he still secretly felt he was the
most
miserable.

That night everyone went over to Beemers, but the Sargent Hotel group waited till after dinner because the Beemers already had three guys there, one on a spare cot and two sacked out on the porch in a hammock and a wicker couch, and Gunner said he didn't want to give Old Lady Beemer four more mouths to feed, so they got some ham and cheese and four quarts of milk and a couple loaves of Wonder bread and made sandwiches. They ate in Wheels' car and then rolled over to the Beemers. Even if you weren't actually staying there, it was headquarters, and Old Man and Old Lady Beemer didn't mind at all; in fact, they liked it that way, having a mob of young people coming in and out all the time. Old Lady Beemer had gray hair, but you could tell she'd been a great-looking girl, she had that sweet-pretty kind of face, and damned if her legs weren't even too bad, except the old veins were beginning to show up on them, violet-colored and crawling.

There was a full moon and everyone was outside, on blankets, and the Beemer boys had hauled the big cooler out there so you could grab a beer without having to go all the way to the house. There were some cute girls, a couple Sonny recognized from Shortley, and some others from around the lake, summer girls. Jocko was dating this blonde from Logansport, supposedly a real hot number and plenty stacked. He always had the cute ones. Everyone was just horsing around and drinking. The four guys at the Sargent had killed Wheels' bourbon, though he had done most of the damage on it himself. One of the girls Sonny knew of from Shortley was Hildie Plummer, who had short-clipped strawberry-blonde hair and a lot of freckles and wasn't any queen but wasn't a dog either, the only trouble being she was one of those “personality” girls, one of the kind who was loads of fun. She spotted Sparky and squealed his name like she was about to come in her panties, and ran over and hugged him, not sexy but with loads of fun in it.

“Well, Hildie,” he said real nice and put his arm around her, just being friendly, knowing it wasn't any use as far as making out, but being nice anyway. It got Sonny depressed, thinking how this really good guy was about to be shipped off to some ice cap or something for a year, what was supposed to be one of the best years of his life, and he was horny as hell and had spent that seven hundred bucks for nothing in Florida, and how much he needed a piece and how easy it would have been for Hildie just to go off with him somewhere and let him have it, and yet she would have probably rather have been shot by a firing squad, keeping her precious cherry for some poor bastard who would marry her and settle down for a life loaded with fun. It got Sonny hating all the women, all the goddam bitches tossing their little tails around and then acting like it was a federal case if a guy wanted in. And yet he had been offered the best he had ever seen in many ways and yet couldn't do anything about it, which was the worst thing, the scariest thing of all. He had told Gunner the truth about what really happened—and worse, what didn't happen—and how scared shitless he was. It wasn't the sort of problem Gunner was familiar with himself, but he said he was going to set his mind to it, he was going to figure something out, and in the meantime for Sonny not to worry until he came up with something. Somehow that relieved Sonny a little, like knowing a great doctor has taken your case. You have to give him a little time to come up with the cure.

Even that couple hours in the sun had got his body pink and sore, not really painful but touchy enough so that just having a shirt on was kind of irritating. Gunner was out in it most of the day, but it just deepened his tail. Sonny figured you could make a good case for the idea that the world is basically divided into two kinds of people—the ones who tan and the ones who just burn. The healthy and the messed-up. Show him a guy who just burns, and he could show you a messed-up guy.

A couple of the girls started singing “In the Evening by the Moonlight” and everyone joined in, doing it the slow way first and then the jazzy way. After that Kings Kingley sang the Wabash song, and hardly anyone could join in because the words went on so long and there were so many verses you had to have spent four years at Wabash to know the damn thing. Sonny figured if you went to Wabash and learned that damn song it probably took up your whole time. That got 'em started on fraternity songs, “Phi Delta—Phi Delta Thay-ay-ta,” and “Pass the Loving Cup Around for Beta Theta Pi” and then the anti-Beta song, “Up in the Air Beta Bird-man, Up in the Air Upside Down,” and the sorority songs like “Remember the Golden Arrow of Pi Phi.” Hearing those songs depressed Sonny, made him feel it never ends, they'd be singing that stuff when you're eighty and you'd still feel outside of things, not good enough to belong. He knew almost all the damn words to all of them but didn't join in, like that would have been cheating or pretending he was part of all that when he wasn't. Wheels sang along with the rest, even though he couldn't pledge because he was on probation because of low high-school grades his first year and then flunked out, but the difference was he
could
have pledged, he knew that some of the big houses would have asked him, so you could see why he didn't mind singing the songs and why it seemed all right that he did. Of course, no one would have minded if Sonny had sung either, it was him who would have felt funny about it.