Mama's Boy Page 5

  7

  Mutt Runkle said, “Word’s out your knockin boots with the town punchboard, Reppo.”

  Gus was the charge-of-quarters that morning. Runkle had stepped out of the AP shack to watch him raise the flag as reveille was bugled at earsplitting volume over the squadron PA system.

  “Give her some tongue, she drops her oyster,” Runkle said. He intoned the words musically, like song lyrics.

  “Oooh, oooh,” Runkle said, musically.

  Gus restrained himself. He concentrated on getting the flag up without tangling it in the ropes.

  “She mention how she wants a busload of rug rats?”

  The flag reached the top of the pole in good condition. The wind took it and it flapped hard, straining at the ropes. Gus tied the ropes to the bracket on the flagpole. The flapping flag reminded Gus of Beryl’s windblown pup tent.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Runkle,” he said.

  “You’re the type of dipshit who’d actually marry the town nymph,” Runkle said. “Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of life with Beryl: You marry her, make a nice little love nest for her. Then when you’re out peddling vacuum cleaners door to door, she’s banging the milkman in the morning and the meter reader in the afternoon. You’d better talk to a chaplain, kid. Get some serious counseling before you deep-six your life.”

  “You’ve got a rotten mouth,” Gus said. He threw a wild looping punch. The punch bounced off Runkle’s thick nose. Gus threw another wild punch that Runkle slapped away.

  Runkle smiled as if Gus had done him a favor. He touched the trickle of blood on his upper lip. His smile widened.

  “The Board of Inquiry is going to call it self-defense,” he said. “When you get out of sick bay, kid, I’ll teach you how to punch.”

  The last thing Gus remembered was Runkle unseating his nightstick.

  Gus got an in-squadron Article 15 court martial after he got out of sick bay. He had an egg-sized lump on the side of his head, two black eyes, a swollen nose, and a loose tooth. He lost his single stripe and First Sergeant Burnside restricted him to the base for two months. He pulled KP duty every day of those two months and worked swings and graveyards at the radio shack.

  Gus was afraid to call Beryl. Afraid to find out what Runkle said was true, and that she had been intimate with him. But how else could Runkle have known about her desire to be married and have babies?

  Gus felt sick and vengeful and helplessly in love. These cross-wired emotions called for some kind of action. He couldn’t just let them stew while he did nothing. He wanted to forgive her; he wanted to slap her. He wanted to hug her; he wanted to strangle her. He wanted to buy a ring; he wanted to buy a gun.

  He imagined being married to her. Imagined her telling the mailman to close his eyes and do kitty while neglected babies—possibly his, possibly not his—cried in their cribs. Imagined coming home early from work and catching her in bed with the milkman. Imagined her telling the meter reader and milkman and a dozen others that her husband’s ornament wasn’t, candidly speaking, adequate.

  He imagined taking the deer rifle out of the closet and killing the milkman, the meter reader, and Beryl, repeating with each discharge of the rifle, “Is this adequate? Do you find this adequate?” He imagined their heads mounted on a wall, the dead glass eyes staring. These awful scenes gave him a throbbing headache. Crazed and sick at heart, he punched the wall next to his bunk, breaking the skin on his knuckles.

  Ray Springer, who’d been reading a book, looked at him. “Work it out, Gate,” he said. “Whatever it is.” He put a blues record on his turntable. Lightnin’ Hopkins told a story in a slow striding rhythm that seemed to be Gus’s story. Hopkins’ guitar and voice spoke directly to Gus. Jim Jackson’s “St. Louis Blues,” with the original uncensored lyrics, did the same. The stories weren’t his stories—they were beyond his experience, the lyrics difficult to understand—but the sound and rhythm that drove them moved something in his chest that needed moving before he could take an easy breath. Jelly Jaw Short’s “Barefoot Blues,” Henry Townsend’s “Long Ago,” Charlie Jordan’s “Keep it Clean” untangled gridlocks in his head.

  “I’m stupid, Ray,” he said.

  “You’re not stupid, Gate, you’re ignorant. You got some catching up to do. Unless you get seriously sidetracked, you’ll do it. Keep it clean, like Charlie Jordan says. What he means is don’t sell yourself a line of crap. Listen kid, half the people in the world are walking around up to their eyebrows in their own bullflop and feeling righteous about it.”

  “Half?”

  “Considering the shape the world’s in, make that ninety percent.”

  8

  By the time Gus was allowed to go into town again the weather had changed. Winter was in the air though it was only late September. Days were warm, nights were cold. Canada geese flew south to their winter refuge in vast imperfect vees.

  Gus decided to confront Beryl. He went to her house. Beryl’s mother, a narrow woman in housecoat and carpet slippers, answered the door. A bent cigarette dangled from her lipless mouth. She squinted at Gus through blue smoke, sizing him up.

  “Is Beryl home?” he said.

  “Take a number,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “She’s got company.”

  “I’m Gus Reppo, her fiancé,” he said. “From the radar base.”

  “A flyboy? How unusual,” she said. “My daughter usually dates divinity students.” A flicker of amusement livened her eyes. “You might as well join the party.” The corners of her thin mouth twitched, as if her lips were trying to remember how to grin.

  The shotgun house was small and shabby. The floorboards groaned under Gus’s feet. The threadbare furniture was ancient and the faded flower-printed carpet showed the cords of its sisal weave. The walls were dark with years of cigarette smoke and airborne fry grease from the kitchen. A fat mongrel slept in the middle of the living room floor, its paws twitching with dreams of the chase. Two antelope heads above an iron stove stared down at Gus. There appeared to be no Mr. Lenahan.

  Beryl was sitting on the sofa with Dwight Hammond, a motor pool mechanic from Detroit. Gus knew Hammond. He was one of those guys who looks athletic but trips on sidewalk cracks.

  Beryl looked at Gus without reaction. Gus had expected her to jump up, excited that her one and only had returned at last, but she remained seated, looking at him with blank indifference. She seemed to not recognize him.

  Gus had changed somewhat. He knew that. But had he changed so much that Beryl couldn’t place him? He found this hard to believe. He’d lost some weight—he was down to 112. His clothes were loose, his hair was longer, his nose had a blue-tinged knot at the bridge and it was bent slightly to the left, but he was still the essential Gus Reppo.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Gus Reppo.”

  After a moment, she said, “Oh. Hi. What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “Surely you’re acquainted with Dwight?” she said.

  Gus and Dwight Hammond nodded at each other.

  “Dwight and I are engaged,” she said. She held out her left hand. She was wearing a thin gold band that supported a solitaire almost big enough to fill a pinhole.

  Dwight Hammond grinned at Gus. It was an innocent grin, no brag or challenge in it. Gus saw it as the grin of a simpleton who had no grasp of what he was getting into. He allowed himself the small pleasure of feeling sorry for Hammond.

  “How have you been, Gussie?” Beryl said. “Did you get your car fixed?”

  “I don’t have a car,” Gus said.

  “Oh. Maybe that was Terry Wankel,” she said.

  “Wankel totaled his Impala,” Dwight Hammond said. “Went into a barrow pit and rolled. Luckily he has comprehensive insurance.”

  “I’m the one who went fishing with you, Beryl,” Gus said.

  “Oh, of course. The pike catcher,” Beryl said. She exchanged grins with Hammond, as if ‘pik
e-catcher’ was their code word for an incompetent angler.

  “Beryl and I caught six native brookies on Beaver Creek just yesterday!” Hammond said. “Beryl fried them up, right there at our campsite. Yum.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Gus said. Another meaning of Hammond’s “yum” occurred to him.

  “We’ve got a little basement apartment picked out over on Twelfth Street,” Hammond said. “Beryl will get a dependent’s allotment every month. I’ll get supplemental pay for moving offbase. I think we’ll have enough left over for a nice car. I’m looking at a used ’57 Fairlane six with only seventeen thousand miles on it. They want twelve hundred for it—too much for a six? But I think I can get it for ten, eleven tops. What do you think, Reppo? Ten about right for a six? Maybe ten-fifty?” Hammond squeezed Beryl’s knee. Beryl sagged against Hammond. Hammond’s visible boner strained against his chinos. The room temperature went up. Gus felt sick.

  Beryl said, “Frankly, I’m just dying to have my own place.”

  Beryl’s mother followed Gus to the door. “Come around tomorrow, flyboy. Maybe your luck will change,” she said.

  Gus walked to the Cabin, a long narrow bar on the east end of town. The Cabin’s walls were varnished ponderosa logs, the low ceiling covered with hammered tin. Deer and pronghorn heads were mounted on the walls at three-foot intervals. Gus ordered a double shot of Lemon Hart rum. The bartender didn’t ask him for ID. Gus downed the Lemon Hart, a 150 proof rum that didn’t taste like rum. It tasted like napalm. He ordered another.

  An Indian old enough to have been at the Battle of the Little Bighorn saw Gus looking at him in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. He was sitting two stools away. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson with a faded snakeskin band at the base of the tall crown. Silver braids hung out of the old man’s oversized hat. He might have been a boy warrior eighty years ago, taking the hair of Custer’s wounded soldiers then caving in their naked skulls with a river rock.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” the old man said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare,” Gus said.

  “What did you mean to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That about sums it up,” the old man said, lifting his beer.

  The bartender refilled Gus’s shot glass. Gus slid a silver dollar toward him. The bartender gave him fifty cents change.

  “She should have cut my eyes out instead of the fish’s,” Gus said.

  “Then you wouldn’t be bothering people by staring at them,” the old man said.

  “She didn’t want the fish to see her gut them,” Gus said.

  This amused the old man. “Oh ho,” he said.

  “But she didn’t mind gutting me.”

  “She figured you out,” the old man said. “She gutted you then cooked you on a stick.” The old warrior, remembering earlier times, drained his mug. Gus downed his Lemon Hart. Gus ordered another beer for the old man and another double Lemon Hart for himself.

  “I can see that you are a young fool from what you choose to drink,” the old man said. “You are going to have to lean just to stand straight.”

  “I’ll try to do better,” Gus said.

  The old man sipped his beer, Gus sipped his rum.

  After a while, the old man said, “What will you give me for this timepiece?” He showed Gus a Timex that hung loosely on his thin wrist from a broken expansion band.

  “Ten cents,” Gus said.

  “What will you give me for Antelope County?” the old man said.

  Gus didn’t know what the old man meant. Milk River was the seat of Antelope County, so he figured it was some kind of joke. He went along with it. “I’ll have to contact my banker,” he said.

  The old man spit on the floor next to Gus’s stool. He looked all of ninety, but he wanted to settle an old score. He wanted to cave in Gus’s head with a river rock. But first the old man wanted to carve Gus’s eyes out so that Gus wouldn’t take his image to the grave. Gus could see these mad schemes glittering in the old warrior’s eyes.

  “You are about as dumb as you look,” the old warrior said.

  The Silver Dollar on the west side of town was the last bar in Milk River before Main Street became US Route 2. Gus went in. There was a narrow staircase recessed in shadow at the far end of the barroom. Gus climbed the stairs to a foyer furnished with sofas and armchairs. There was a red door in the back wall of the foyer. Gus knocked.

  After a few seconds a peephole opened and closed. A woman’s voice said, “No, Fremont. Not one of those sons a bitches.” Gus knocked again. Gus was dressed in civvies but he wasn’t fooling anyone behind the door.

  The door opened. An Indian—Fremont, Gus assumed—filled the doorway, side to side. His head grazed the top of the frame. Fremont said, “You go on up the street to that house behind the Moomaw Dairy. You got no business here, flyboy.”

  Fremont had a scar running down his cheek to his lower lip. The left side of his mouth drooped. Severed facial nerves had given his mouth a dubious sneer. He was a man who could look Jesus in the eye and not lose composure. There was a leather sap hanging from his belt.

  “I’m not a flyboy,” Gus said. “I’m a dental student.”

  “And I’m Rock Hudson,” Fremont said. “I sell pussy when I’m not making movies, but not to drunk dental students.”

  In the room behind him a woman giggled.

  Gus left the Silver Dollar and went to the flyboy’s whorehouse behind the Moomaw Dairy.

  “Long time no see,” Norrie, the tobacco-chewing whore, said. “You getting all you need from the local beaver pond?”

  “Not exactly,” Gus said.

  Norrie spit a brown stream into the soup can next to her foot. Her accuracy impressed Gus once again. “Guess I’m the only girl a fella like you can count on,” she said.

  “I’m pretty damn drunk,” Gus said.

  “I got a remedy for that,” she said.

  Gus woke up the next morning under a car in the alley behind the Milk River Hotel. He’d been rolled. His shoes and belt were gone, along with his wallet. He couldn’t remember how he got under the car, or who rolled him. Town boys, probably. He crawled out into the cold morning light and walked to the viaduct avoiding broken beer bottles. He hitched a ride to the base with some hung-over radar operators.

  “You look like Death-Eating-a-Cracker, Gate,” Ray Springer said when Gus dragged himself in. “Need some hair of the dog?”

  Springer kept a pint of bourbon in his footlocker and offered it to Gus. Gus shook his head no. The sight of the bourbon made his stomach lurch. He was dry-heave sick and still a little drunk and had to get ready to relieve the day shift. Gus and Ray Springer went to the chow hall. Gus didn’t want food. He wanted something for his raging thirst.

  The chow hall wasn’t crowded. Mutt Runkle was at a corner table sitting by himself and reading a newspaper. The bold headlines said: Red China Shells Quemoy. All the tables around Runkle, in a radius of fear, were empty. No one socialized with him, except for his partner, Jeff, who was on duty.

  Runkle’s square head looked too big for his body. His slow, ruminating jaws flexed and unflexed as he methodically ate his way through a heaping plate of sausages, eggs, hash-brown potatoes, and biscuits. He allowed himself an amused, self-satisfied grin as he studied his paper.

  Ray Springer said, “See that grinning AP?” he said to Gus. “He keeps notes on everyone in the squadron.”

  “Notes?”

  “He keeps a private notebook. He’s probably writing in it right now, about me and you talking about him. Figures to cover his ass if and when the shit hits the fan.”

  “What shit?”

  “Any shit. He keeps track of the details most people forget, just in case.”

  Gus looked over at Runkle. He couldn’t see what Runkle was doing behind his newspaper.

  “Everybody knows about his notebook, so when Runkle comes into a room, ordinary human beings act like zombies. He loves having th
e power to turn people into zombies. Even the junior officers are scared of him.”

  “I didn’t know about his notebook,” Gus said.

  “Now you do, Gate,” Springer said. “There’s only one person he doesn’t have in his notebook.”

  “Who?”

  “Himself. He’ll never figure out Mutt Runkle.”

  “If he does, he’ll have to shoot himself,” Gus said.

  “Don’t be too sure of yourself, Gate,” Springer said. “Lots of folks, some smarter than you, don’t know what they got locked up inside their heads.”

  “Heard something like that my first day on base,” Gus said.

  “You’ll probably hear it again, Gate.”

  Gus put on his field jacket. He walked to the radio shack and picked up his climbing gear. An insulator had to be replaced. The LF mast was cold as ice. Winter was a promise in the air. For the first time ever Gus was reluctant to climb. Wind from Canada sang like a band of wolves in the latticed framework of the mast.

  9

  “Where’s Mommy?” Gus asked.

  “Mommy’s lying down,” FDR said.

  “You’ve already had dinner?” Gus said.

  “We were waiting for you, Gussie.”

  Something was wrong. The kitchen was cold. Nothing was on the stovetop or in the oven.

  “Is she sick?” Gus asked.

  “Not exactly,” FDR said.

  Gus went into the bedroom. It was after six o’clock and Flora was lying on the bed in her nightgown. The nightgown had gathered on her thighs. She was wearing stockings but they were rolled down below her knees. Her hair was lumpy with pink curlers. She’d put the curlers in carelessly. Some had fallen to the bedspread. Some yawned half-open, dangling from her wispy hair.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Gus said.

  Flora closed her eyes. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.” Her voice was dreamy and removed, like a spirit voice at a séance.