Mama's Boy Read online

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Gus said.

  PART FOUR

  23

  Gus—bulky in parka, two layers of clothes, bunny boots, and with his B-4 bag in tow—squeezed through the front door of his parents’ house. Arctic wind moaned in the eaves like the baying of a lost dog. All the lights in the house were on, suggesting a social occasion in progress, but Flora was alone, seated at the dining room table drinking Rhine wine.

  “My God Gussie, where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been worried sick.”

  “You’ve got all the lights in the house turned on, Mommy,” he said.

  “I don’t like dark rooms. Answer me. Where have you been?”

  “I caught a flight to Los Angeles. I didn’t have time to tell you.”

  “How long does one telephone call take?”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “Los Angeles? Why Los Angeles? You’re not making sense, Gussie.”

  Her face sagged with fatigue. Gus saw that she hadn’t been sleeping. He pulled off his parka and boots and sat at the dining room table. Without asking if he was hungry Flora brought him a foil-wrapped ham sandwich from the fridge and a chocolate cake from the cupboard. She cut a moist wedge of the heavily iced cake and poured him a glass of milk.

  “What’s wrong?” Gus said.

  A tear slid down the side of her nose coming to rest on her upper lip. She dabbed at it with a napkin. Another started down the same path.

  “Your father,” she said, and for a moment Gus had a vision of Orson Gunlocke, broken and torn under a mile of water, strange, deep-water creatures gliding in and out of what was left of him.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “He’s had a heart attack. I tried and tried to contact you, but no one knew where you were. Some sergeant I talked to thought you took time off to visit with us. The sergeant was under the foolish impression that you were close to your family.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The sergeant?”

  “FDR.”

  “In St. Bonaventure’s Hospital. I’ve spent the last two days sitting at his bedside.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Bad? You think a heart attack can ever be good?”

  A Mantovani LP was on the hi-fi. The army of tepid violins labored its way through “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” Gus got up and went to the Stromberg-Carlson hi-fi. The machine was big as a coffin. He raised the groove-riding stylus from the spinning disk and turned the machine off.

  “How did it happen?” he said. “I hope he wasn’t shoveling the driveway. I told him I could do that. All he had to do was call me.”

  “Call you? You might as well be living on the moon, for all the good calling you does.”

  In the space between heartbeats, Flora’s expression went from cross to pensive. She watched snow pellets, illuminated by the porch light, stream horizontally past the dining room window like thousands of crazed moths. Gus bit into his sandwich.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “We were discussing you and what we had planned for you once you were free of the air force. He still had dreams of you going to the UCLA dental school. But I told him no, my baby wasn’t cut out for dentistry. I told him you were more suited to the agrarian life, farming in particular, since sharecropping was in your blood.”

  “You told him that? That sharecropping was in my blood?”

  “It puzzled him. He asked me what I meant. I was feeling bitter at the time and full of self-pity. I don’t know why I opened the subject.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got this right: You opened the goddamned subject but you don’t know why?”

  “Please, Gussie. Don’t use such rough language to me. I’m not sure what I intended. But FDR hadn’t a clue. He actually hadn’t. I thought he’d had his suspicions, and that a full admission would be a comfort to him, but I was wrong. I told him all about Orson Gunlocke, our gardener. I told him of our secret trysts. Oh God, I must have been out of my mind!”

  “He never guessed I wasn’t his?”

  “Never. It came as a complete shock. Oh, the poor dear turned so white he was almost blue! I realize now that was the beginning of his heart attack. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but I kept on with the details of my affair with Orson as if he might understand and forgive! He must have felt that I’d put a knife into his heart! I didn’t mean it that way, Gussie! I was only trying to be honest! Didn’t someone once say the truth would set you free? What perfectly dreadful advice! The truth can throw you into hell!”

  Flora got up and went to the hi-fi. She turned it on, started the disk spinning, then lowered the tone arm. “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” started over again, from the beginning. Pleasant, genteel music about the agony of betrayal and the misery of loss. Gus wondered if Mantovani had ever heard of the Blues.

  “When you were born,” Flora said, “FDR wanted to name you Theo, after his successful uncle, Theodore, the oral surgeon who held the Painless Parker franchise in Arcadia, but I insisted on Gus, much to FDR’s confusion. Do you know why I named you Gus?”

  “You named me after Orson’s great-grandfather, August Gunlocke, the Civil War hero.”

  “How did you know that? I’ve never told anyone!”

  “Your competition told me.”

  “My what? What do you mean, Gussie?”

  “Orson’s widow. I went to her house.”

  Flora paled. Her lower lip trembled. “She has no claim on you!” she said. “None whatever! I am your mother!”

  “For Christ’s sakes, she didn’t claim to be my mother or even my stepmother.” What she claimed was far more bizarre, but Gus was not going to get into Marva Gunlocke’s lunatic obsessions.

  “Did you tell her about me?”

  “Marva knew all about you.”

  “Marva! What an awful name! What did that woman say?”

  “You don’t want to know, Mommy. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Marva Gunlocke is crazy as a bedbug. She should be in a mental hospital.”

  He got up from the table and searched the kitchen cabinets for something with alcohol in it besides Rhine wine. He found an opened pint of French brandy, among several unopened bottles. He drank some directly from the bottle, then poured the rest into his milk glass.

  “You haven’t finished your sandwich,” Flora said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I see you’ve taken up drinking,” she said, bitter but resigned.

  “Smoking too,” Gus said, lighting up.

  “Blood will tell,” she said.

  “Half my blood is yours,” Gus said.

  “That won’t be enough to save you, Gussie.”

  “I wasn’t thinking it would.”

  24

  Gus left the next morning before Flora woke up. The wind had died down and the temperature had dropped. Dry snow squeaked under his boots. The sky was a brittle porcelain blue. Heatless sun dogs burned on either side of the heatless sun.

  He walked to town, then across town to St. Bonaventure’s Hospital. FDR was on the second floor in a cardiac care unit. Gus found him reclining in bed reading the Saturday Evening Post. A Norman Rockwell painting had been reproduced on the magazine’s cover: An overscrubbed family at prayer before the steaming holiday turkey.

  “How you doing?” Gus said.

  FDR looked at Gus briefly, without interest, then went back to his magazine. “I’m doing quite well, thank you,” he said. “It was a minor infarction caused by a miniscule embolism.”

  There was no mistaking FDR’s tone. Gus thought: Like this is my fault? And yet FDR’s iciness made him feel guilty, as if he had been a coconspirator in his own illegitimacy.

  “You’re looking good, FDR,” he said.

  FDR was not looking good at all. He was pale as candle wax, his sweat-filmed jowls had a yellow sheen, and his lips were chalky. His voice was pitched high, as if his lungs couldn’t supply the force needed to produce the timbre of normal speech.

&nbs
p; “Considering everything,” FDR said, “I suppose I should look worse than I do.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t believe her,” Gus said. “She’s flown her broom around the bend.”

  “Please speak of your mother with respect,” FDR said, “whether she deserves it or not.”

  “I just meant her mental condition,” Gus said.

  FDR put the magazine down. “She doesn’t have a mental condition,” he said. “She’s always had … eccentricities, but she’s not insane. In any case she wasn’t insane nineteen years ago, was she?” He made a strangling sound, then coughed to cover it up. “God!” he said with unrestrained bitterness. “To think how thrilled we were when you were born!”

  Gus said what would eventually have to be said: “You’re still my dad.” It was the obvious thing to say, yet his voice wavered.

  “Still? Still? How can never was become still?” FDR said. He picked up his Saturday Evening Post. He licked his fingers and turned the pages too quickly to read any one of them, his face hidden behind the impossibly sane Norman Rockwell family.

  Under his breath, Gus said, “You’d better learn to live with it.”

  FDR dropped the magazine and raised himself on his elbows. “What did you just say to me?”

  “Nothing,” Gus said.

  “It wasn’t nothing. It was something. It was something very unfilial of you—but then what can I expect?”

  Gus started to leave, but FDR called him back. “Mommy told me the fellow had bad teeth,” he said.

  “I’ll come visit you tomorrow,” Gus said.

  “Hear me out. This is significant to me. Do you know what Painless Parker said of those who are indifferent to oral hygiene? He said, ‘God hates those who do not take care of their teeth, and that is why they suffer.’ I find satisfaction in that, though I do not hate the fellow myself. Mommy fed him breath mints when he came into the house. She could not endure him otherwise.”

  FDR’s chest rose and fell under his hospital gown. He made a sustained sound, like gravel rattled in a stoneware jar. This alarmed Gus until he realized FDR was laughing.

  “I trust that you brush at least twice a day, Gussie,” he said. “You may not have dentistry in your blood, but you might have an inherited tendency toward dental neglect—common among rural farming folk, I understand.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Gus said.

  “I expect to be going home tomorrow,” FDR said.

  “Is that a smart thing to do?”

  “I am not medically illiterate,” FDR said. “I know where I stand. This was not a major coronary. I know what I can do and what I cannot do.”

  Gus sat with him for another few minutes before he left the hospital. He would have said goodbye but FDR had dozed off with the magazine on his face. Gus removed the magazine and tiptoed out of the room.

  He walked to the Athenian. The storm had moved south into Wyoming and Colorado having left three feet of snow in the streets of Milk River. Snowplows and snowblowers had been out since early morning, making automobile and foot travel possible.

  The Athenian was empty. Gus ordered coffee and a cinnamon roll. He went to a booth where someone had left the morning newspaper. Gus read the headlines indifferently, then a story on the second page caught his eye.

  STUDENT PROTESTERS BUFFALOED IN RICHLAND

  Three students from Northern Plains State College were apprehended over the weekend at the Hanford Atomic Works near Richland, Washington. Tracy Winshaw, Sandra Ellison, and Josh Billings, were arrested as they attempted to handcuff themselves to the main gate of the Hanford compound. Criminal trespass charges are pending but the upstart trio was not detained. They were sent home to Milk River with their tails between their legs. When asked what they had hoped to accomplish, Miss Winshaw said, “We wanted to call attention to the mindless expansion of the bomb culture. We need to talk to the Russians, not play Who’s Got the Biggest Pipe Organ.” When asked about his daughter’s motives, Miss Winshaw’s father, Dr. Algernon Winshaw, a local dental surgeon and member in good standing of several benevolent fraternities, said, “The foolish girl needs a brisk spanking. What’s wrong with these kids? They can’t seem to grow up. I don’t think their pinko professors do anything to teach them to respect the realities of life. When I was fourteen years old I had my own firewood business along with two paper routes. I helped my dad put food on the table. I shot a worn-out horse when I was ten.” Authorities in the state of Washington would not comment on the case, but hinted that charges would be filed soon.

  Gus wondered if the editors of the newspaper had understood the “pipe organ” reference. He decided they hadn’t, since they’d printed it.

  Gus went to the pay phone on the wall near the exit and dialed Tracy’s number. A woman—Tracy’s mother, Gus assumed—answered.

  “Could I speak to Tracy?” he said.

  “Who’s calling? Are you from the newspaper? We have nothing more to say. We will pay her fine, and that’s the end of it. Please stop this incessant calling.”

  “This is Gus Reppo. Tracy and I went to the movies once.”

  “You’re the one from the radar base?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m the one.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask you—do you have radical ideas like Tracy’s other friends?”

  “The air force doesn’t allow us to have radical ideas, ma’am.”

  “That’s refreshing to hear, if it’s true. Tracy needs normal friends who don’t have these ideas. She’s at the college right now. She’ll be home later this afternoon. You can call her then.”

  Tracy’s mother sounded reasonable but scared. Gus imagined Dr. Winshaw’s thundering rages intimidating the whole family, although he didn’t think anyone could intimidate Tracy.

  He left the Athenian and walked toward the Northern Plains Campus. It was a good half-hour walk. When he reached the campus he went into the Student Union. He ordered coffee and picked up a copy of the student newspaper, the Northern Plains View, from a stack near the cash register. Tracy’s picture was on the front page. It was a photograph taken while she was listening to a lecture. Gus thought it might be the lecture given by the Marxist Professor from Minnesota. He remembered a photographer moving through the crowd, flash bulbs popping. The photo was a good one. Unlike most quickly snapped newspaper photos, this one made her look as beautiful as she actually was. She also looked heroic, standing up and applauding the speaker, her smile angelic but determined. The article under the photo said pretty much the same thing as the article in the local newspaper, with one addition. The college reporter held a brief interview with Tracy.

  NPV: “Would you do it again, knowing what you know now?”

  TRACY: “Of course I would. And I will. Someone has to stand up for the dignity and survival of the human race.”

  NPV: “But won’t it cost your family quite a lot of money in fines and in damaged reputations? What about your own future?”

  TRACY: “It’s a small price to pay, don’t you think? What future do any of us have if this insanity goes on?”

  Gus sat drinking coffee until noon pretending to read the paper but keeping alert to the come and go of students. He thought about Tracy and the dignity and survival of the human race. Dignity, in his limited experience, was in fairly short supply. Survival, on the other hand, would most likely depend on dumb luck. He thought about these notions: did they qualify as radical ideas, or even as ideas? He decided they fell short.

  He studied each new influx of students as they entered the student union hoping that Tracy would be among them. Then it occurred to him that she was a celebrity now—admired or despised, but either way, in demand. He didn’t think he wanted to talk to a celebrity.

  He walked to the Milk River Hotel and waited for the afternoon shuttle that would take him back to the base. He needed to talk to Ray Springer.

  25

  Something was wrong. Ray Springer’s bunk was bare: no blankets or sheets, and the mattress was roll
ed up. “Where’s Ray?” Gus asked Lamar Harkey, the cook.

  “You don’t know?” Harkey said. “I figured y’all were buddies, going to the whores and drinking like you do.”

  Harkey was a genial freak. His legs were long and thin, his torso short and wide. His spine curved a bit making his torso seem even shorter, his chest a cavernous convex hollow. He had a geometrically angular head with massive black waves of brilliantined hair. He looked like Gregory Peck observed through an astigmatic lens. He also had the biggest feet Gus had ever seen on a human being. Size sixteen quadruple E.

  “What happened?” Gus said.

  Harkey, who had just finished a shift in the mess hall, sat on his bunk and took off his shoes. Gus caught a heavy whiff of foot odor.

  “You missed chow, Reppo. I made my favorite—roast pork with cinnamon applesauce. You hungry? Mess hall’s still open for the swing shift crew. Slow roasted pork and those little white taters about the size of monkey nuts afloat in a cream sauce. Plus butter beans with bacon bits and chipped almonds. Real peach pie for dessert. It makes my pecker stiffen up just thinking on it.” Harkey grabbed his crotch affectionately.

  “Sounds real appetizing, Harkey,” Gus said. “But what happened to Ray?”

  “Always knew he was touched some. He got shitfaced in town and when he come back he drove his hot rod smack into the AP shack. Mutt Runkle said he tried to run him over.” Harkey picked black lint from between his toes as he related the story. “Then he took after Mutt with a tire iron and Mutt put his lights out with his stick. No one’s blamed Runkle. Springer’s the one gonna lose a stripe or better. How you figure a little peckerwood like that going after a big mean sumbitch like Mutt Runkle?”

  Gus wondered about that, too. Drunk or not, it wasn’t like Ray to go on a rampage.

  “So where is he?” Gus said.

  “Springer? They kept him in the hospital in town a couple of days, then shipped him off to the division hospital at Malmstrom. They say he’s got a cracked skull and maybe a ruptured kidney. You see him, Reppo, tell him to back off on the John Barleycorn. He won’t make it to retirement, he starts dropping turds on the squadron lawn like that.”