The Great Santini: Chapters 6–10

Instead of returning the salute, Bull stopped the car completely and stared with visible truculence at the guard who held his salute as rigidly as some umpires who call strikes on batters with exaggerated formality.

“He’s indisposed at this moment, sir.”
“Oh, he’s indisposed,” Bull mocked. “I surely would hate to bother anyone who was indisposed.”

Now I think I’ll mosey on down to check on Colonel Hedgepath.

The shoes were impeccably shined; the pants had a fresh crease.

He fell sprawling onto a thin carpet that did little to cushion his precipitous fall to the floor.

Bull, pacing in front of Virgil’s desk, brought a restlessness and a fever to command, a yeoman’s rigidity, and a genius for inspiration, whereas Virgil had the natural instincts of a general.

Varney used his head and nose when he spoke, slashing the air with his sharp aquiline face as though it were an ax chopping at some invisible woodpile just below his eyes.

“Uh-oh,” her father teased, “here comes Miss Hang Crepe, morose as ever.”

Since they had moved to Ravenel, Lillian had charted his moods like a cartographer, and her instinct for defusing his temper before it erupted told her this was a day for caution.

“Would my executive officer like to address the hogs?” Bull said, turning deferentially to Lillian.

“I’m the head honcho, mister. I don’t have to tell you what I’m gonna do.”

When the children had faded silently out of the kitchen, Lillian spoke to her husband in a mollifying, supplicating tone.

When the children had faded silently out of the kitchen, Lillian spoke to her husband in a mollifying, supplicating tone.

When Lillian failed to correct him, he screwed up his face again, worked his throat muscles and summoned an even louder burp, this one an octave higher, more musical, more evocative of the meal just completed.

She looked up from washing dishes and saw the river full of small sailboats leaning toward the far shore and knifing toward the bridge which was not in her view. The day was bright, the water green, and the wind full as Lillian saw her whole kitchen window fill up with the September regatta, as though she were watching a painting that changed as she watched it.

I’m a veritable bundle of nerves awaiting the outcome of this race.

It was efficacious for an officer to keep the troops busy, he thought, and when he exited a place, he left a trail of assignments in his wake no matter where he was.

Each day, Bull poured torrents of contumely on his morning paper.

After he finished the sports section, having checked the progress of the White Sox, memorized the rankings of the teams in the majors and the statistical leaders in the race for the three most important batting titles, he turned with reluctance and ire to the front page.

With a bellicose finger, he jabbed at a picture of Fidel Castro.

Before him was a blue-haired, aristocratic woman, very small, elegant, and old. On first appearance she looked to be composed of various shades of blue and white. In one thin arm, threaded with veins in a kind of senescent bas-relief, was a basket.

“I live two houses down from you on the Lawn in the old Hall Mansion. I’ve been unforgivably derelict for not having paid a social call before now, but my doctor thought I was going to die last week.”

“C’mon back to the old Meecham Mansion any time you want to,” he said, ascending the stairs with an ursine heaviness, his footsteps an intentional warning to his children.

“Ten-hup,” he bellowed to his children as the first cataclysmic strains of the Marine Corps hymn reverberated through the upstairs rooms.

When the choir of two-fisted tenors on the record were “proud to bear the title” Colonel Meecham entered the room slapping the swagger stick in a steady, tautological rhythm that seemed ominous, even predatory.

Turning away from Ben, his expression pained, condescending, as if he were performing an odious task among a doomed genus of animal, Colonel Meecham walked over to Ben’s desk and rubbed it with a gloved forefinger.

Bull held his disbelieving grimace for a full ten seconds, staring at his finger as though a stigma had formed on his dust-violated digit.

You’ve been practicing basketball for so long, your brain has atrophied.

“Just tell your favorite brother what the word ‘jejune’ means.”
“I’ll use it in a sentence, bully. ‘Ben “Pimple-face” Meecham often acts jejune when he forces his charming sister to tell him the meaning of words.’”

Though the manic edge had lifted since the inspection, still the juggernaut of Saturday moved over him, the nothingness implicit in a day of rest, when his world lay fallow, and he suffered all his demons running within him, sprinters in a bottle.

Though the manic edge had lifted since the inspection, still the juggernaut of Saturday moved over him, the nothingness implicit in a day of rest, when his world lay fallow, and he suffered all his demons running within him, sprinters in a bottle.

“I’ll always help the needy and infirm, ma’am. Here’s a dollar. That’ll buy a couple of watermelons and keep you going for a couple of days.”

Perspiring heavily, he looked up when he heard Okra barking at a mule-drawn wagon that pulled around the corner of Eliot Street and was coming toward the Meecham house at an unperturbed pace.

A thin man in khaki work clothes came out of a diminutive octagonal aerie and leaned over a steel gangplank.

With a certain dramatic grandiloquence, he slurped the oyster into his mouth.

Then his eye focused on the enormous shape of a sea turtle struggling out of the sea and ponderously making its way up the sand.

On the way to the base Colonel Meecham announced to his sons in a calm, didactic voice that they were both in critical need of a haircut.

In the Corps barbershops, the heads of the entire base were handcrafted for the edification of visiting generals and inspection teams.

The man who glowered before him conformed to the classic stereotype of Marine barber Ben had envisioned in his mind: the face was saturnine, pock-marked, and the mouth was grim.

“At ease, dependent,” the barber replied, his shears cutting deep swaths into Ben’s hair.

“Do you know what I like about military barbers? You guys are such high class people. I mean it. Sincerely, I do. The absolute cream of military personnel. Handsome, aristocratic, urbane, without being affected.”

Ben had inherited his father’s speed afoot, his good eyes, and much of the competitiveness, but he had not received his father’s genius for games, the raw nerve ends and synapses that brought a game up from a region of sport into a faith based on excellence, a creed toughened by fire.

Rolls of fat encircled him and he wore the sweat suit to keep his new ballast unexposed.

Finally the score was tied nine to nine, and the family on the sidelines readied themselves for a denouement.

Lillian and Matt tried to pick Ben up, but he was too heavy and all three of them fell into the grass laughing, forgetting the lone figure of the father standing under the basket, sweating, red-faced, and mute, watching the celebration of his wife and children with the inchoate, resurrected anger of a man who never quit in his life.