Mama's Boy Read online

  He carried the brandy to the easy chair—FDR’s chair—opposite the big Capehart TV. He set his brandy on the antique trestle stand next to the easy chair, careful not to spill. He turned on the TV, then held the ice pack on the back of his head. He pressed his head against the chair’s padding, holding the ice pack in place that way.

  The Lucky Lager commercial he and Marva had watched on her little Crosley came on. The attractive couple under the palms were more attractive in full color. Their welcoming smiles and relaxed manner presented a vision of sane living that made the selling of beer incidental. “Really now folks, can life get any better than this?” said the smooth announcer.

  “Probably not,” Gus said.

  He got up and went into the kitchen where the telephone was and called her.

  “My husband paid up the collection people,” she said.

  “It’s me, Gus Reppo,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that I’m all right. The cuts didn’t go deep.”

  No response, just her little TV in the background with the voices of a religious forum all talking at once.

  “Marva?”

  “You still don’t know, do you?” she said.

  “It was a mistake, my coming down there to see you.”

  “You will go to your second grave ignorant,” she said.

  She laughed—the dry cackle of a wise crone who’d taken the measure of a fool.

  “I guess this is another mistake,” Gus said. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay, in case you were worried.”

  “Worried? About you? I have better things to worry on.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You sound stupid drunk.”

  “I was stupid for coming to your house,” Gus said.

  “You can’t walk away from it sinless,” she said. “Did you think of that?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry won’t undo the child.”

  “Child? There is no child.”

  “You can add that to the store of things you don’t know.”

  “Marva, I’m sorry …”

  “Sorry is the hypocrite’s favorite word.”

  “Sorry’s all I got.”

  “You’ll be a far sight sorrier when the reckoning comes. And it will come, you’ll see. The child will see you dead.”

  She waited a few seconds, then hung up.

  Gus slept in FDR’s and Flora’s overstuffed bed that night and got up late the next morning. A dense fog had rolled in from the ocean. He took a shower, rebandaged his cuts, put on clean clothes. He turned off the furnace and locked up the house. Then headed north on the Goldstar.

  Visibility on the highway was less than fifty feet. The fog was so thick Gus felt he could part it with his hands like drapery. When he turned the Goldstar into the Pacific Coast Highway north of Torrey Pines he lost all sensation of speed even though the speedometer said fifty. Fifty was too fast in such conditions. He backed off to forty, then thirty. Thirty felt no different than fifty. He looked down to see if the pavement was moving under him. This bit of foolishness made him laugh at himself. Even so, he could have been riding a treadmill on a stage with no scenery. There were no visible objects, left or right, to give him the sensation of progress.

  He worried about cars coming up behind him blind. They might see him too late. He pulled off the road to let traffic pass. He stopped to assess his situation but left the motor idling.

  Stopped felt no different than not-stopped. Zero felt no different than thirty. The looming shapes of cars slipped by, soundless except for the hiss of tires on wet pavement. Like dreams of cars, they appeared and disappeared in uncertain intervals. The cars—gray blurs with nondescript human shapes behind the steering wheels—seemed made of fog, not steel.

  A plump child in the back seat of a slow-moving sedan waved at him. The child pressed its face against the window and smiled. The red mouth against the glass was like a gastropod attached to a hull. The mouth had an abundance of small teeth. The fat tongue moved like a pink eel against the glass. For a moment Gus thought the child was Corky Comfort. He shook off the thought. When he looked again to make sure, the car was re-swallowed by fog.

  Gus eased out the clutch but kept the Goldstar on the highway’s shoulder. He held his speed to thirty, even though he could not sense motion. Gus thought: I’m going to be killed if I stay out here.

  He left the highway at Encinitas and stopped at a café called the Breakwater. He went in and took a seat at the counter and ordered the seventy-nine cent breakfast special—two eggs, two strips of bacon, toast, and hashbrowns. Coffee was ten cents extra.

  Other drivers had the same idea. They filed into the café like the survivors of a shipwreck. Gray shapes outside the café became recognizable human beings in the fluorescent lights that hummed like hornets above the tables and booths. They all ordered the seventy-nine cent breakfast special.

  “Pea soup out there,” one driver said to another.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the other answered.

  “The hell you say. Where?”

  “San Fran. London. Erie PA.”

  “What about you, gorgeous?” the first man said to the waitress. “Good looker like you seen worse?”

  The waitress took offense at the man’s flattery. She was not gorgeous. She was short and stocky and had a large, red-spotted nose. Gus thought: She’s had her fill of liars.

  She gave the man his food then turned her back on him and went into the kitchen. It was an open kitchen. The customers could watch the cook fry eggs. The waitress said something to the fry cook. The cook, a large solemn man, looked at the man who had offended her.

  “Touchy as a prima donna,” the man said, ducking away from the fry cook’s stare. He chuckled and wagged his head bashfully so the fry cook and others would see that he’d meant no harm by his remark. He was a good guy, a harmless wit.

  After that they all fell too silent eating.

  Gus mopped his plate with a piece of toast and finished his coffee. He put a dollar on the counter and headed for the door.

  “Good luck, kid,” said the man who’d seen worse fog in San Fran, London, and Erie PA. “If I were you I’d wait it out. It should burn off by noon. Take a stroll on the beach. Do a little beachcombing. No telling what you’ll find. My wife once found a Distinguished Flying Cross some joker left behind. We use metal detectors.”

  Gus didn’t take the man’s advice. At Newport Beach he turned east and got on the Santa Ana Freeway hoping to escape the fog but the fog had moved inland. If anything it was denser. In Anaheim the only visible objects were the towers and spires of Disneyland. They rose out of the fog ominous and white, like spell-casting fingers.

  In East Los Angeles the sun had burned off the fog. Gus twisted the throttle and the Goldstar roared with unrestrained relief. The world was simple and clear again, weighted with massive slabs of concrete and steel and dappled with bright patches of color all the way to the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains. He got to Lyle’s house in the early afternoon.

  “Where’ve you been?” Lyle said, inspecting the Goldstar for nicks.

  “San Diego,” Gus said.

  Satisfied that his motorcycle hadn’t been marred, Lyle said, “Welcome back to the war zone. Ricky and Lucy are at each other’s throats again.”

  They went inside. Mr. and Mrs. Dressen were sitting in the dining room. A platter of pinwheel sandwiches and a pitcher of martinis were on the table. The martini pitcher was less than half full. The sandwich tray was untouched.

  “I’ve wasted my life,” Mrs. Dressen said. She lit a cigarette, blew smoke dramatically toward the ceiling.

  “That’s what life’s for—to waste,” Mr. Dressen said. “It’s our one absolute no-strings-attached luxury. How have I wasted thee, let me count the ways.”

  “I don’t want to hear your nihilistic bullshit today,” Mrs. Dressen said. “My fatal mistake was marrying a self-justifying cipher like you.”

  “And yet
my income is substantial, your comfort uncompromised.”

  “Dumbfuck luck,” she said.

  “My favorite Chinese dish,” he said. “Dumbfuck luck with potstickers. Seems to me you’ve done all right for a no-talent stand-in for Jean Harlow.”

  Lyle and Gus escaped into the patio before Mrs. Dressen could mount a counterattack. They sat in wicker chairs facing the pool. The sunlight reflecting off the water was green and cool.

  “I’m never getting married,” Lyle said. “How about you?”

  “I’d rather be a priest,” Gus said.

  “Too drastic. If you were a priest you’d never get laid. You’d have to pound your pud twice a day to get some relief or butt fuck a fellow padre and then tell your confessor all about it. All that pussy out there would be off limits. You stray one time, the pope deep fries your cojones.”

  “If getting laid means getting all tangled up in stuff you didn’t know was there and never wanted any part of, then I’d ask the pope to deep fry my cojones.”

  “Jesus, Reppo. You’re what—eighteen, nineteen? How tangled up can you get at nineteen? You have a bad experience in San Diego?”

  “It’s not about how old you are,” Gus said.

  “You just don’t know the ropes, Reppo. I think you got it into your head that getting laid has something to do with obligation. You got to stop thinking that way.”

  “Obligation is just the beginning.”

  “OK, you got laid in San Diego, and now she figures she’s got controlling interest of your ass. Does that about sum it up? Take it from me, airman. She doesn’t.”

  Gus thought: the only woman I’ve ever satisfied belongs in an insane asylum. A trend? Takes a nut to screw a nut?

  Mr. Dressen came out and sat down with Lyle and Gus. He opened a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Lyle. To Gus he said, “How about you, kid? You care to smoke with a nihilistic cipher?”

  It seemed like a good time to start. “Sure,” he said.

  Mr. Dressen lit the cigarettes with his gold lighter. Gus choked on his first inhale. The second puff was easier.

  “Ciggies,” Mr. Dressen said. “Jesus how I love them. Too bad they return your devotion by killing you. Very much like women.”

  “The shithouse rule,” Gus said.

  Mr. Dressen looked at Gus.

  Gus shrugged.

  22

  The plane was empty on the flight back to Great Falls. The other passengers had either found alternative transportation or had more leave time to kill. Major Darling was drunk. Gus didn’t realize this until Darling started singing “Clementine” above the Mojave Desert. He called Gus to come up front and take the copilot’s seat.

  “Look down there, airman. That’s pure Clementine country. Lost and gone forever. Make you feel lonely? Makes me feel lonely as hell.”

  “Where’s your copilot, sir?” Gus said.

  “ ‘Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine, but alas I was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine.’ ”

  “Sir?”

  “Lieutenant Rothstein you mean? He fell in love—got his head up some girl’s dress in Culver City. The boy had another week of leave time so he didn’t have to go back with us. So here we are, airman—up the creek without a copilot. Take the yoke, will you? I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “You attended flight school for a while, before your bad breeding caught up with you, isn’t that right airman?”

  “No sir. I didn’t go to flight school.”

  “Half you enlisted bastards washed out of flight school, otherwise why would you be stuck in Milk Fucking River? Answer me that, airman.”

  The cabin darkened as they entered a cloud. “Major, sir, I don’t mean to contradict you, but you’re not making sense.”

  “I figure you had a few hours in a PT-19, maybe even some T-33 time, so holding this old boat on course should be no big deal for you. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re not right, sir,” Gus said.

  “Listen to me, you insubordinate son of a bitch. I could teach a red-ass baboon to keep this airplane on course, and you’re telling me you can’t?”

  “Shit, sir,” Gus said, weakly.

  “I warn you, airman. Don’t give me any of your nonsense just now. I’ve had a very bad weekend and I’m not in a jocular mood. You continue to disobey my orders, I’m likely to have you put to death. Does that strike you as jocular?”

  “Put to death, sir?”

  “For mutiny. I am the captain of this ship, and therefore I am the absolute law here. Judge, prosecutor, jury, and executioner. You keep giving me static, airman, I’ll have you up on charges, after which I will personally shoot you and throw your lifeless body into the Great Salt Lake where you will be eaten by the carnivorous brine shrimp. No one will ever find your remains.”

  “You’re just kidding around, right sir?”

  “No more of this treason, airman. I’m going to take a nap and you are going to hold this fine old bird on course. I’m very tired. I’ve kissed so much upper echelon ass, male and female alike, my lips are brittle. Now, take the goddamned yoke and apply what you learned in flight school before you washed out.”

  Gus took the yoke in his hands. He felt the vibration of the engines all the way to his shoulders.

  “Keep your eye on the directional arrow of the Omni,” Major Darling said. “You drift left or right, make the appropriate course change. The arrow needs to be pointing straight ahead. You learned this VOR stuff in week one of flight school, if you weren’t asleep.”

  “Major Darling, sir. I didn’t …”

  “Did I ask you for your input, airman? Now shut your pie hole and listen to me. When we pass over Salt Lake City, the arrow will flip-flop. The next Omni station radial will come from either Pocatello or Idaho Falls, I forget which. It doesn’t matter. All you have to do is keep the twitchy little arrow pointed straight ahead. Got it?”

  Major Darling picked up a set of headphones and handed them to Gus. “Put these on. Listen for a steady tone. You hear a dot-dash, you’ve drifted left. A dash-dot, you’ve slipped right. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way you’ll know you’ve drifted off your vector. Keep your brogans off the rudder pedals. Just turn the yoke right or left a skosh, she’ll change course for you a degree or two as needed. The winds aloft are negligible so you won’t have much correcting to do.”

  Major Darling climbed out of his seat then leaned down to Gus, his face inches away. Gus smelled bourbon. The major’s eyes were red, the lids heavy. “Whatever you do, don’t mess with the throttles,” he said. “I’ve got the power set at thirty inches of manifold pressure and the fuel mixture at auto lean. Leave the friction wheel alone, she’ll stay put. We’re cruising at fourteen thousand feet at 140 knots, so there’s no need for you to play around with the power or the trim. Just keep her level. She’s a faithful old bird, airman. You treat her with respect, she’ll be true to you. Or is the concept of reciprocal fidelity alien to your family background?”

  Major Darling stumbled back into the rear of the ship. Gus gripped the yoke and stared at the Omni arrow. He listened to the steady tone in his earphones.

  The plane broke out of the gloom into an explosion of light. The Mojave Desert spread out like a beige carpet, weighted at the edges by snowcapped mountains. Overhead the sky was striped with pink herringbone clouds.

  Lyle came into the cockpit. He sat next to Gus. “Do you know what you’re doing, Reppo?” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Great. Just fucking great. He’s sitting back there singing and drinking Old Taylor. He told me he really fucked up at Lackland and that he’d never get promoted to light colonel.”

  “What happened?”

  “He put the blocks to a general’s wife in a coat closet during a full-dress party with a lot of brass hats in attendance. There was some serious drinking involved. The general opened the closet door and found his wife
smoking the Major’s purple panatella.”

  “No shit?”

  “Caught her inhaling. The general can’t bring charges against Darling—too embarrassing. But Darling will never see the oak leaves on his collar turn to silver. He’ll go from one boondock assignment to another until he retires or gets riffed.”

  “Riffed?”

  “Reduction-in-forces. The air force is top-heavy with field-grade brass. The future is grim for these leftover heroes from the war. They don’t fit the modern air force—too fucking wildass to kiss desk-jockey ass and behave themselves. I think Major Darling half hopes you’ll bring down the curtain for him by sticking this old crate into the side of a mountain.”

  “He thinks I went to flight school,” Gus said.

  “Fuck. Do you know anything about flying an airplane?”

  “Just what he told me.”

  “Let me take over, Reppo. I took flying lessons for a while in Pasadena, almost got to solo.”

  “This isn’t a Piper Cub, Dressen.”

  “A plane is a plane. Wings, motor, pedals, stick.”

  “Be my guest. Just leave the throttles at thirty inches of manifold pressure and don’t fuck with the mixture controls or the friction wheel. Keep the VOR needle on the Salt Lake radial. It’ll flip when we approach Idaho Falls or maybe Pocatello.”

  Lyle frowned. “I didn’t understand a word of that, Reppo. I’m going to put on a parachute.”

  When the plane passed over the Great Salt Lake, Major Darling came back into the cabin. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got us over the Pacific Ocean!” he said. “Where did you plan to put down, in Hawaii?” He looked normal to Gus, well-rested and sober.

  “No sir, we’re over the Great Salt Lake.”

  Gus looked out the windows left and right. Mountains to the right, empty space to the left. More mountains straight ahead. The mountains straight ahead were dark under winter clouds.

  “We’re passing over Ogden right now, sir,” Gus said.

  “I was just pulling your leg, airman,” Major Darling said. “Now get your ass out of here. Thanks for your good work. I might put a stripe on your sleeve for the effort. Remind me when we get back to the squadron.”