Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Sonny didn’t feel like doing too much stuff now, and he went to the den and flipped through some magazines. Life had a story of a nun who had outwitted the Commies. It said:

The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia

A resourceful nun who trusted in St. Joseph tells unique story of flight from Reds.

Sonny was getting tired of the damned Reds. He was tired of the damned Christians, too. He wished they’d fight it out and leave everybody alone. They were always “battling for men’s minds” instead of minding their own business. The Reds and the Christians both.

They even had it on television. Every day they broadcast the Army vs. McCarthy show. It sounded to Sonny like a trial, but they called it a “hearing.” Everything seemed to be called something different than it was anymore, like the war in Korea was a “police action,” or a “conflict,” instead of a war. Even though they bombed and shot people. It was like they were trying to water things down so you wouldn’t get too upset about them.

A lot of people were upset about the Army vs. McCarthy “hearings” and most of the people Sonny knew around Indianapolis thought Joe McCarthy was a great hero, hunting down all the dirty Reds in government. The liberal professors Sonny knew, and some of the guys he met in the Army who had gone to college in the East, thought it was McCarthy who was the menace instead of the Reds. Sonny didn’t like the guy’s looks, and he liked the defense guy, old Joe Welch, who was against McCarthy, but he found the whole thing hard to really follow and he didn’t like to get in arguments about it because if you were against McCarthy the people for him suspected you of being a Commie, and Sonny had enough things to worry about without worrying about whether people thought he was a Red. Some people in Indianapolis probably suspected he was already because he didn’t believe in God and he thought colored people should go to school with whites and he didn’t agree that laziness was the only cause of unemployment.

He picked up a Ladies’ Home Journal , just to get his mind off that crap, but even they had articles about it. There was one called “Is American Youth Radical?” and Sonny couldn’t help turning to it to find out the answer. The article was written by a woman named Dorothy Thompson, and it said:

“The high schools and colleges are infiltrated with Communists.” So goes the argument in some circles.…

Sonny was glad to see Miss Thompson didn’t go along with the argument. But what she did say kind of depressed him anyway. She was trying to say that young people weren’t too bad, and one of the things she said to try to prove it was that

There was considerable anxiety in Washington lest the GI bonuses would be spent in riotous living. They were not. They were spent for education—and the GI was a very serious student.

Sonny kind of wished the GI money had been spent in riotous living. That’s how he’d like to spend his, if he got the bill himself. Actually, he didn’t see how you could live too riotously on $110 a month. But at least it could get you away from home. He was really going to look into it. Maybe he could even get a degree in photography, if they had them. It almost seemed impossible, getting paid to learn about something you liked.

He put down the magazine and went downstairs to the darkroom in the basement. He hadn’t used it for a couple years, and there were a lot of crates of old clothes piled up in it. His mother collected old clothes and sent them to the Indians. She couldn’t see why there was suddenly such concern about the colored when nobody cared about the Indians and they were the real Americans.

Sonny picked up his camera and blew the dust off of it. He hadn’t used it since his last leave home. He loved the camera, but had just got out of the habit of using it regularly when he went in service. It was a Rollieflex, and he had bought it from one of the photographers at the Star , a guy who had helped him learn how to use it. He held it in his hands, and it felt solid and reassuring. He almost felt there was something magic about it, that it was a secret weapon he could use to free himself, to become a person in his own right, to have his own life that was different from his parents’. He resolved to go buy film as soon as his mother got back with the wagon.

For the next several days, Sonny and Gunner went on a picture-taking binge. Gunner could use his mother’s wheels any day that he got up and drove her to work down at WIBC-TV, and he didn’t even have to pick her up because some guy she dated at the station drove her home anytime she wanted him to. After leaving his mother off, he’d come by and honk for Sonny, and they’d go out with their cameras, driving all over town and shooting stuff. They drove to the top of Crown Hill Cemetery, a historic landmark of the city where the famous criminal John Dillinger was buried. From the top you could see almost the whole city spread below, flat and green. They went out to the Speedway and tried getting some action shots of the cars in the Time Trials for the great Five-Hundred-mile race that was held every Memorial Day and known throughout the world. They drove way north to where Gunner knew a guy who had a farm, and shot pictures of the livestock; they even took their cameras inside the Riviera Club swimming pool and got pictures of guys going off the high dive.

Gunner was restless, always asking questions, and he sort of reminded Sonny of a spy, or maybe a foreign correspondent, prowling the city and looking into little nooks and crannies and snapping pictures and asking people things, like he was trying to get the real scoop on this mysterious city and its natives, the puzzling place where he was born and grew up. He kept asking one particular question that people took as an insult, the question of some kind of nut or subversive troublemaker— Why?

When Gunner got an urge to drop in on someone, Sonny just tagged along, listening and smiling. It turned out Gunner wasn’t at all ashamed of being seen hanging around with a nobody, as Sonny had suspected he might be, but in fact seemed to want him along, seemed to like hashing things over with him after they’d been someplace, liked hearing what Sonny thought about what was said and what happened, even though most of the time Sonny pretty much agreed with him. Sometimes Sonny felt he ought to disagree more, feared that Gunner might suspect him of just sucking up to him or something, but actually Gunner was so damn convincing that Sonny really did buy most all his ideas and impressions, even the ones that were kind of weird.

One afternoon they buzzed out to Gunner’s sister’s house to get some shots of her kids. Gunner’s sister Peachie lived on Guilford in the forties, one of those blocks of small graying frame houses and brick doubles with front porches, little front yards and occasional hedges to divide one yard from another, a few paint-chipping picket fences, and an alley in back with weather-beaten garages and a few backboards with iron hoops nailed up on them. It was hardly fancy, but nothing you had to be ashamed of; the sort of place a young couple started out in before going farther north to the newer, ranch-type developments. Peachie was only two years older than Gunner, but it might as well have been twenty years or so; the way she was settled into the niche of her life, it would take a load of dynamite to blast her out of it even if she wanted to. She had two little kids and went around most of the day with a kerchief around her head, mopping and cooking and dusting and washing. She had never been a pretty girl, but was sharp and energetic and fun to be around, and always able to organize things. She had been in some of the good clubs at Shortley and made Delta Gamma at Butler, where she went for a year before marrying Bud Belzoni.