Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Gunner stood up. “I said you better take it easy, man.”

The lady who had yelled for Messner to stop was leaning forward in her chair, twisting her hands together. “Please, young man, don’t hit him,” she said to Gunner.

Gunner turned to her and held up his palms. “Jesus, lady, you think I want to?”

“Just keep your mouth clean when you’re talking to my wife,” said Messner.

Gunner did a double-take on the woman, and so did Sonny. Christ, if it wasn’t Mrs. Messner, sitting all by herself while her husband got drunk and fooled around with a young girl art student right in front of her face.

“I’m sorry,” Gunner said to her.

“You damn well better apologize,” Messner said. He took a couple steps closer to Gunner and Sonny, hitching his pants up again with a sort of James Cagney move. He was a good four or five inches shorter than Gunner, and probably thirty-some pounds lighter. If the dumb bastard really started something, Gunner would clean his ass. Sonny figured Gunner didn’t really need his help, but he wanted to help anyway, he wanted to be there when it counted.

They all stood there staring and then there was a whirr into the room and Shawl buzzed up between the potential combatants in his jazzy wheelchair.

“There will be no primitive combat,” he said. “You are guests in my house, all of you. You will have to make the apparently difficult effort to comport yourselves like civilized human beings.”

“I’m sorry,” Gunner said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

“Ah, how heroic, how chivalrous!” Messner taunted.

“Mr. Messner,” Shawl said in the tone of a stern professor, “if you can’t control your hostility, I shall have to ask you to leave.”

“Who’s hostile?” Messner challenged.

Mrs. Messner had stood up and gone to the front door. “Let’s go home, Eddie, please,” she said. “I’m going home.”

Messner turned away, deflated, and mumbled, “I’ll be along in a while.”

Mrs. Messner took one last look as her husband settled back down next to the fat girl. It was like she was turning her cheek for one more slap before leaving.

Someone put on one of those brassy, blasting Kenton records, and everything seemed to settle down.

Gunner let out a long, tired sigh and rubbed at his temple. “High school,” he said quietly. “Fuckin high school. Doesn’t it ever get over with?”

Sonny was wondering that himself, and his suspicions didn’t cheer him up too much.

“Let’s go,” Marty said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She turned to Sonny with a look of real concern and affection. It seemed like the first time she had really looked at him.

“You come with us,” she said. “You oughtn’t to stay around here by yourself. That Eddie’s liable to get crazy again.”

“Right,” Gunner said. “We’ll meet you at the Key.”

They managed to get one beer down before closing time, and even though they were pretty low after the Eddie scene, there was a warmth among them that was nice.

When they left to go home, Gunner biffed Sonny one on the arm and said, “Thanks, buddy.”

“Yes,” said Marty and squeezed his hand.

“Shee-it,” Sonny said.

He felt very glad that he had acted in a way he never had before, that he had shown where he stood. It almost made up for the absence of the beautiful girl art student he had expected to meet at the party and fall madly in love with.

He went home to bed and jacked off thinking about her, the way he imagined she’d be. Maybe he would really meet such a person and really get married to her. Gunner would be the Best Man.

The day after the party was a stifling summer Sunday, and Sonny woke up around eleven, bleary and slightly nauseous. His parents were at church, and he went down to the kitchen and had a couple aspirin, a Pepsi-Cola, and a peanut-butter sandwich. He took the Sunday Star out onto the breezeway and experienced the soothing relief that came with the anticipation of sinking into the sports section and the funnies, those magic parts of the paper that at least for a while had the power of pushing the everyday fears and fuming thoughts of the future clear out of his mind. He hadn’t even finished the funnies, though, when his parents came back, blessed for another week, and Mrs. Burns reminded him today was the day they all had to go to Grandma Lee-no’s for one of her big Sunday meals. Sonny had put this occasion off ever since he’d been home but there was no getting out of it any longer. Grandma Lee-no had called a few days ago and said that she knew nobody loved her anymore and she was just a worthless old woman, but anyhow she was cooking up a real big Sunday meal and if everyone didn’t come and eat it she was going to kill herself.

Not wanting to have his grandmother’s blood on his conscience, in addition to all his other guilts, Sonny made himself go get dressed. Grandma Lee-no was his mother’s mother, and Sonny had “named” her when he was a little boy who couldn’t pronounce her real name, Leona. Like everything he did then, Grandma Lee-no thought the name he gave her was the cutest thing in the world and cherished it as a special gift from her “little angel-child,” which was what she called him then and in fact still did, insisting, “You may be all grown up but you’re still my little angel-child.”

Grandma Lee-no lived in a little house up on Guilford that Sonny and his parents had lived in until they built their own place and gave the old house to Lee-no, who had just retired about then from a lifetime of service at the Indiana Gas and Utility Company, where she worked one of the switchboards; raising her children without any help from that fly-by-night no-good Johnny Haspel, who had left with some floozy for parts unknown when Alma was just a little girl and Buck was still a baby. Oh, yes, he came back and visited every few years when the kids were growing up, bringing them toys and trinkets and buttering up to them with his old snaky charm, making them think he was wonderful—until they were old enough to understand he was nothing but a two-bit liar with a slick tongue, all promises and no delivery, just like most men. They were so cute when they were little boys, but then they all grew up to be— men . Even little Sonny had gone and done it, just like the rest of them, but Lee-no still loved him anyway.

“Oh, my lit-tul an gel-child,” she cried when Sonny came in her front door. “Kiss your pore old ugly grandma.”

Sonny leaned down and bumped his lips dutifully and dryly against her slack, parchment cheek. Her wiry little arms squeezed his waist, and he pulled away.

“Hello, Lee-no,” he said.

“Oh, I know you don’t want Lee-no to squeeze you anymore,” she said. “Nobody loves an ugly old woman.”

“I love you,” Sonny mumbled and sat down on the couch.

“Sonny loves you,” Alma assured her, “We all love you, Mama.”

“Lord, yes,” Mr. Burns said.

“Well, you all just sit down by the fan there. I’m still a-cookin’.”

The whole house was like an oven, and the little oscillating fan on the floor buzzed bravely but only sent out enough of a breeze to sort of tickle you. Alma went to the kitchen and Sonny and Mr. Burns picked Lee-no’s Sunday paper apart, trying to find something to distract them. Not even the funnies and the sports could work their magic on Sonny in Lee-no’s house, though; there was an oppressiveness about the place, a sort of invisible gravy of despair that clogged your senses. The many mementos and photographs and figurines that cluttered the mantel and the marble-topped table and the knick-knack shelves didn’t brighten things but seemed to Sonny like little symbols of sorrow and betrayal; a picture of Sonny as a cute little boy in a sailor suit, his cheeks tinted with rose, smiled from a heart-shaped frame; a grayish picture of Alma as a fair young maid, circled with silver; a model airplane curved and painted by Buck as a boy, a plaster Jesus kneeling in prayer, a silver reindeer Sonny had liked to play with long ago, a gold Statue of Liberty that Johnny Haspel had sent from the 1939 World’s Fair (it turned out to be the last thing anyone heard from him), a snapshot of Buck with some Army buddies just before he was sent overseas, a pincushion that looked like a tomato, a souvenir plate with a picture of the White House that Miss Verbey from across the street had brought from her trip to Washington.