Mama's Boy Read online

  “Is he a Red?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “What does that mean?” Gus said.

  “He’s not a card-carrying Communist, but he sympathizes with socialist philosophy. I think it’s safe to say that Professor Gordon is a Marxist. You see, Gus Reppo, the people have got to be looked after, and the capitalists won’t do it because there’s no money in it. To the capitalists, human labor is a commodity to be bought on the open market for the lowest price, like pinto beans or sorghum. That’s why they hate unions or any legislation that protects workers, like the child labor or minimum wage laws. If they could move their manufacturing plants to Mexico or India where people work for pennies a day, they’d do it.”

  “People wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “People have nothing to do with it.”

  “Are you a Marxist?” Gus said.

  “Technically, peripherally, I’d have to say yes.”

  “You’re a peripheral Marxist.”

  “I’m certainly not a capitalist. But my education is far from complete. So, yes, I guess you could call me a peripheral Marxist.”

  “So I guess I’m a peripheral warmonger, right?”

  “Do you feel a need to make jokes about everything?”

  “It’s part of the military’s brainwashing program,” Gus said. “We make the enemy die laughing.”

  She opened the door and started to get out of the car, then hesitated. “Come to Professor Gordon’s lecture with me, Gus Reppo—for your own edification.”

  “My edification?”

  “It means enlightenment.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t date warmongers,” Gus reminded her.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. This doesn’t qualify as a date.”

  Gus thought of the practical benefits. She might think differently of him if he managed to stay awake during the entire lecture.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  The seats in the auditorium were small and set close together with shared armrests. Attendance was good, and the audience, dressed in winter coats, wool hats, and heavy fur-lined boots, were packed into the seats, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. The air was dense with the aroma of wet wool.

  Tracy and Gus were jammed together directly under the speaker’s podium but Gus’s attention was fixed on Tracy, not on Professor Gordon. Gus lost track of the professor’s argument after he described the coal strike of 1902.

  Gus spent the hour breathing her perfume, feeling the strands of her electrified ponytail finding his ear and the back of his neck. The press of her thigh kept his adrenaline flowing. Dozing off was not an option, in spite of the relentless drone of Professor Gordon’s voice.

  “Well, what do you think?” Tracy said when they were back outside the auditorium. She lit a cigarette.

  “I thought it was very profound,” Gus said.

  She studied Gus’s face for traces of sarcasm.

  “Doctor Gordon is a brave man,” she said. “He stands up for what he believes. He refused to sign the loyalty oath his college requires of its faculty and got fired for it. The House Un-American Activities Committee has subpoenaed him. He’ll probably go to prison. They’ve made a mockery of the First Amendment. Do you find that very profound, Gus Reppo?”

  “You want to get a cup of coffee?” Gus said.

  “I’ve got a class,” she said.

  “How about after class?”

  “Well, you’re not in uniform, so I guess it would be all right. Get a table in the Student Union. I’ll meet you there. You can tell me more about how profound you thought Professor Gordon’s lecture was.”

  When she came into the Student Union an hour later, she was not so fierce. She was with a group of other students. They were all smiling and laughing, but she came to Gus’s table alone and pensive.

  “If you have the time, you might take some courses here,” she said.

  “My parents would like that,” Gus said.

  “They don’t want you in the military?” she said.

  “They want me to be a dentist.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, laughing.

  “What about you? What do your parents want you to be?”

  “Normal,” she said.

  “What’s normal?”

  “For them it’s marriage, kids, bank accounts. Nice house, nice car. Husband in the Rotary Club. The usual mindless fluff.”

  “And you want something else.”

  “I want to go to law school, at the University down in Missoula. I don’t want to bring kids into this world. They’d just become gun fodder or lockstep consumers. I want to help change the world so that people some time in the future can bring kids into it with a clear conscience.”

  “A thousand years from now,” Gus said.

  “You’re a pessimist. I’m not. By the next century things will be different. Fifty years at most. I look forward to the year 2000. Things are going to be wonderful in the twenty-first century. War and capitalism will be history. People then will look back at us and say, What were they thinking?”

  “You’ll be a grandma in 2000,” Gus said.

  “No I won’t. You’ve got to be a mother before you can be a grandmother.”

  “You won’t ever get married?”

  “God no! Marriage, like most bourgeois institutions, is finished.”

  Gus took a chance. “The White Tower is playing at the Orpheum. Want to go?”

  “I don’t date flyboys,” she said automatically.

  “Is that part of your freethinking attitude, or are you just prejudiced?”

  This seemed to shock her. “God, I’m such a hypocrite,” she said.

  “Under this brainwashed warmongering façade, I’m really a nice person,” Gus said. “Façade” was not a word he would normally use, but it made her laugh and that was justification enough.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go. Pick me up for the early show, so we can have dinner afterward. I’ll buy.”

  “I can buy,” Gus said.

  “You pay for the movie, I’ll pay for dinner. Those are my terms.”

  She took a small notebook out of her purse and tore out a sheet of paper. She wrote down her address and phone number and handed it to Gus.

  11

  “What sort of name is Reppo?” Dr. Winshaw wanted to know.

  “Sir?” Gus said.

  “What nationality?”

  “I’m not sure, sir,” Gus said. “I think one of my grandfathers came from Wales.”

  “No. It’s not Welsh. It could be a shortened version of some Slavic name, such as Reponovich or Repovanya. Roman Catholic Slav or Eastern Orthodox. Am I correct?”

  Dr. Winshaw scraped his tongue against his front upper teeth after he said “Slav,” as though the word left a layer of scum on it.

  “I don’t think it’s Slavic, sir,” Gus said. “You mean like Russian? No sir, I’m pretty sure it’s not Russian.”

  “There are Slavs other than Russians, my young friend,” Dr. Winshaw said. “The Balkan states are packed with backward Slavs—Polacks and bohunks. Ignorant, troublemaking people. A very undesirable sub-race.”

  Gus and Tracy were standing in the entryway of the Winshaw house, a large three-story brick situated on Saddle Butte, overlooking the city lights. Gus glanced at his watch several times while Dr. Winshaw quizzed him, hoping that either he or Tracy would get the idea that they had to get out of there to catch the seven o’clock showing of The White Tower.

  “What do you make of it, Tracy?” Dr. Winshaw said. “You’ve studied languages and comparative cultures. Where do you think the roots of Mr. Reppo were engendered?”

  “Equatorial Africa,” she said. “Probably the Congo. I believe he’s an albino African of Ibo descent.”

  Gus almost laughed. He faked a cough.

  “Not likely, Tracy,” Dr. Winshaw said. “However, I wouldn’t rule out the Middle East. Perhaps Syria
or Lebanon. Mr. Reppo’s nose doesn’t look particularly Semitic; his complexion, while pale, is not especially sallow, and the blue eyes are quite Nordic, but I suppose it is possible. Do you have a German-Jewish strain in your lineage, Gus?”

  Dr. Winshaw, a tall angular man, bent down to study Gus’s profile closer. His nostrils flared, as if he was able to smell family origins. He was well over six feet and his back had a permanent curvature from years of leaning down to look into the mouths of reclined patients. FDR had once told Gus about this particular hazard of dentistry. FDR had solved the problem by working on patients while seated on a rolling stool.

  “We don’t belong to any church,” Gus said.

  “The Jew, as a member of a racial subspecies, is not only defined by the practice of religious ritual, Gus.” Dr. Winshaw spoke slowly, sonorously, savoring each inflected word. “The Jew, you see, has a way of life, or rather a way of apprehending life, that is quite at odds with our way.”

  “Our way?” Gus said.

  “Indulge me, Gus. That’s why I’m asking these questions. I’d like to know more about the family background of the boy who is taking my daughter out on a date.”

  “We can’t stand here all night, Daddy,” Tracy said. “We’ve only got fifteen minutes before the first show.”

  “Reppo, Reppo, Reppo,” Dr. Winshaw mused. “Turkish? Kurdish? Perhaps Armenian, as in Reposian? Or French, as in Repos. Repos is French for lazy, I believe. Ah, have I hit a nerve?”

  “I’m part Indian,” Gus said, remembering something Flora had told him about her grandfather, a half-blood trapper from up north by the Truckee river. Gus didn’t recall the tribe.

  “Very amusing,” Dr. Winshaw said. “I suppose Tracy put you up to that, Gus. You two seem to share a common sense of humor.” He gave Tracy a hard meaningful look, letting her know that a sense of humor had better be the only thing she and Gus shared. But as far as Gus was concerned, Dr. Winshaw couldn’t have issued a sweeter warning.

  “What sort of name is Winshaw?” Gus said, mimicking Dr. Winshaw’s overbearing inflections, as they drove to the movie.

  “Who cares?” Tracy said. “People who research their family genealogies are usually trying to prove they’re related to the old European aristocracies. It gives them unearned importance. They’ve never heard of the French Revolution, or grasped its implications.”

  “Maybe it’s Chinese,” Gus said. “Rickshaw, Winshaw—pretty close.”

  “You should have asked him.”

  “Uh-huh. And I’d never see you again.”

  “You might not see me again, anyway.”

  “I get the feeling your daddy isn’t a lot of laughs.”

  “That’s the insight of the century.”

  “He thinks I’m a French Indian named Lazy.”

  “If that’s all he thinks, you’re lucky.”

  Gus parked the Buick in front of the Orpheum. The White Tower wasn’t drawing a big crowd that evening.

  “Maybe I am lucky,” Gus said.

  “I don’t believe in luck, Gus,” Tracy said.

  She said it too seriously. Gus hoped there were some laughs in the movie.

  There weren’t.

  12

  George Walters, a radio operator, had a problem with the Hammarlund receiver. Gus was in the radio shack doing scheduled maintenance on the VHF transmitters when Walters called him on the intercom system.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Gus asked.

  “If I knew, I’d fix the fucking thing myself!” he said. Walters, who was hard of hearing, shouted every word as if he had to make himself heard above the noise of an airplane engine. “Bring a flashlight! I can’t see dick in here! Flashlight, Reppo! Flashlight!”

  Gus put on his parka, grabbed his toolbox, and walked against a sub-zero gale to the radar blockhouse, a thick-walled concrete and steel structure built to withstand a non-direct hit from an A-bomb. A “non-direct” hit meant any nuke one-megaton or less landing outside a two-mile radius of the radar site.

  It was dark inside the blockhouse. It took a minute before Gus’s eyes adjusted to it. The glow of the radar consoles and the faint light coming from the Plexiglas plotting board at the back of the blockhouse were the only sources of illumination.

  George Walters’ radio gear—the backup communications system to the landlines—was cubbyholed to the right of the plotting board. Two airmen, taking coordinates from the radar operators, marked directional arrows on the board that signified the flight-paths, speed, and altitude, of all aircraft in the area.

  “What’s the problem?” Gus asked Walters.

  “I got this goddamn hum! It’s fucking near driving me nuts!”

  Gus took Walters’ headphones and listened. “House current,” he said. “You’re picking up AC from the blockhouse wiring. Probably a blown RF filter of some kind.”

  Gus unplugged the Hammarlund, unscrewed and pulled out the front panel along with the chassis. He turned the chassis over and tested the low frequency discriminator circuits. He replaced a filter, put the Hammarlund back together, plugged it in.

  “I’ll send you the bill,” he said to Walters.

  Walters, not known for his sense of humor, said “Stick the bill up your ass, Reppo!”

  Walters was called “Shakey” by some of the airmen, but not to his face. He’d been an artillery spotter in Korea, sitting in the observation seat of an L-4 “Grasshopper.” The L-4 was a Piper Cub rigged for military service. Its top speed was about eighty knots, its engine a little four-cylinder toy putting out all of sixty-five horsepower.

  Flying behind North Korean lines, Walters radioed the position of artillery batteries and troop movements. The L-4 took NKPA small arms fire on every mission. The little plane always returned home with a dozen or more bullet holes in the fabric of its wings and fuselage. The worst were fuel tank hits, but the pilot always managed to nurse the little plane back to American lines. The pilot, a Nebraska crop duster in civilian life, was good at making the L-4 hard to hit, but for Walters it was a daily, gut-wrenching experience. Walters came home to the US with ulcers, a permanent case of the shakes, and a foul, hair-trigger temper.

  Most steered clear of Walters, but Gus liked and admired him. He knew Walters had been a college student before he enlisted. Walters had two years of graduate work in political science and history.

  “Why did you quit college, Walters?” Gus asked as he packed up his tools.

  “Why do you fucking think?”

  Gus had no idea, but didn’t press it.

  “Three units short of my master’s at CCNY,” Walters said. “Then the money ran out. I’ll go back and get a PhD on the GI Bill. Why do you care about my fucked-up academic career?”

  “Well, I was wondering. What do you know about Marxism?”

  A small desk in front of the Hammarlund supported a logbook, microphone, and a mug of steaming coffee. Walters picked up the coffee mug with both hands and guided it with difficulty to his lips.

  “Jesus, Reppo. What do you think we’re doing up here in this godforsaken shithole? The Marxists are the fucking enemy!”

  He set his coffee down, concentrating hard not to spill any on his logbook. In the chow hall Gus had seen Walters chase a steak around his plate, his knife and fork rattling like machine fire against the Melmac.

  Gus tried to keep his eyes off Walters’ palsied hands. The palsy grew worse when he was agitated, and even worse when someone noticed the palsy.

  “Marxists are Commies?” Gus said.

  “The other way around. Commies are Marxists, but all Marxists aren’t necessarily Commies.”

  “They’re not the same thing?”

  “What did I just say? You’re pissing me off, Reppo! Go read a book on syllogisms.”

  “What kind of gism?”

  “Listen to me you goddamn moron. What they’ve got in Russia is Leninism, the Bolshevik form of Marxism, cooked up by the raznochintsy revolutionaries of the 1860s. Dictatorship of the proletar
iat in a non-industrialized country! Are you kidding me? What a fucking joke! You get it, Reppo? You even know what the goddamn proletariat is?”

  “No,” Gus said.

  “It’s uneducated pudpounders like you! Turning an industrialized country over to the proletariat is like giving your car keys to a retarded five-year-old! You haven’t read Ayn Rand, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus! They don’t teach jackshit in high school! They ought to require Atlas Shrugged instead of that piece of Commie crap, The Grapes of Trash!”

  Gus figured he meant Wrath, not Trash, but he didn’t want to get Walters more worked up than he already was by correcting him. Walters picked up his coffee cup with one hand and lost control of it. Coffee sloshed into his lap.

  “Fuck me!” he screamed. The airmen behind the plotting board looked at Walters, yellow markers suspended. Radar operators looked up from their scopes. The shift boss said, “Let’s watch the language, fellows.”

  “There’s this girl in town,” Gus said. “Calls herself a Marxist. I went to a lecture with her. The speaker was a Marxist from Minnesota who’s getting called up before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

  “You better watch your ignorant ass, Reppo. Remember that loyalty oath you signed when you enlisted? It’s got teeth, brother! You fuck around with those people you could find your clueless ass in Leavenworth! Remember this—if she says she’s a Marxist, then she probably belongs to one of those Commie front organizations that have words like ‘world peace’ and ‘justice’ and ‘the people’ in their titles. You stuffing her chicken yet?”

  “No.”

  “Good. My advice? Do not get involved with a half-assed apparatchik. She will break your balls. If you’re smart you’ll stay the fuck away from these junior league Jacobins. Listen to me for a goddamned minute, Reppo! If the Reds had B-52s instead of those lame Tupolev turbo props, we’d be eating borscht and singing ‘The Internationale’ by Christmas!”

  Gus felt dispirited. This wasn’t how he wanted to think about Tracy. Apparatchik? Jacobins? He’d have to look them up.