Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

They had four beers apiece, talking about other stuff, just as if nothing was wrong, and Sonny had the guts to ask Gunner to come on in the house when he drove him home, even though he knew his parents would probably be there.

Mrs. Burns jumped back like she’d seen a vampire.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s me,” said Gunner.

“It’s Gunner,” Sonny explained, “with a beard.”

Mr. Burns came into the den, carrying part of his newspaper, and stared at Gunner. “Name of God,” he said.

Mrs. Burns laughed nervously and asked Gunner, “Did you join the House of David?”

“No, ma’am,” Gunner said cheerfully, “just grew a beard.”

“Is that the new fad?” Mr. Burns asked.

“No, sir, I don’t think so,” Gunner said.

“Well,” Mrs. Burns said philosophically, “to each his own.”

She really wasn’t that philosophical about it, though.

After dinner, Mr. Burns went upstairs with a migraine, and Alma asked Sonny to come sit with her in the den. She took her purse from off the end table, put it on her lap, and opened it, drawing out a folded-up bill she kept in her hand. Sonny wondered if she was going to try to get him to tell her something. A sawbuck for your thoughts. When Sonny was a kid, she was always asking him, “A penny for your thoughts,” and if he told her something, she really gave him a penny. Once he told her he thought Mr. Burns treated her mean, and she gave him a nickel. When he told her something she didn’t like, some thought that was critical of her, she’d grudgingly give him the penny but add unpleasantly, “You’re getting more like your father every day.”

“Your friend is quite a character,” she said, trying to smile.

“Who, Gunner?”

“I guess he’s a real individualist.”

“I guess.”

Sonny shrugged, trying to stay calm.

“Are all the kids growing beards now?”

Sonny took a deep breath. “We’re not ‘kids,’ Mother. And I don’t know. I don’t know what anyone’s doing.”

“Are you? ”

“Am I what , for Chrissake?”

“Please don’t swear at me,” she said, her voice beginning to quake. “I know you don’t love me anymore but—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop saying that stuff!”

“Just tell me then,” she sniffed, “if you’re going to do it.”

“Do what? ”

The tears started down, and she gulped out the awful question. “Are you going to grow a big dirty scratchy old beard like your friend!”

“No, Mother. Please. Please don’t cry.”

She took a wadded piece of Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “Do you promise?”

“No!” Sonny shouted. “Goddam it, I don’t promise. I’m just not going to grow one, that’s all. I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t have to promise anything.”

“You don’t have to yell at me.”

Sonny closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going up to my room. I’m not mad, I just want to go up and read.”

He started for the stairs, and his mother said, “Wait—here.”

She was holding out the folded-up bill. Maybe it was supposed to be a bribe for not growing a beard, and he wanted to tell her to take it and cram it. He knew he was getting low again, though. After the afternoon’s four beers he only had some change left. He walked over to her, not looking straight at her, and grabbed the bill. He stuck it in his pocket without looking at it or unfolding it.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I love you, Sonny.”

“Me too,” he mumbled.

He went upstairs and shut the door. Flopping down on his bunk, he closed his eyes and tried to turn his mind off, tried to stop the tortuous movie from starting to roll in his mind.

He sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled the wadded bill from his pocket. It was a ten. It would buy a lot of beers at the Red Key.

A couple days later, on one of those real July scorchers, Gunner called and told Sonny to get on his swimming trunks, he’d buzz by and pick him up in about a half an hour. Sonny had been in the den with the blinds closed and the air-conditioner on, spooning up an improvised Black Cow he had made by putting fudge-walnut ice cream into a Pepsi because there wasn’t any plain vanilla in the house. The fudge-walnut didn’t go too well with the Pepsi, but still it was frothy and cold and soothing.

“It’s pretty hot out,” Sonny said.

“Huh? That’s the point. Only thing to do on a day like this is hit the water.”

“I guess,” Sonny said.

“Fuckin-A. See ya.”

When Gunner got a plan in mind, there wasn’t any stopping him, you had to go along. Sonny slurped up the last of the Black Cow and shlunked up to his room to get his trunks. He had only lain out on the blanket behind the house two days, once for twelve minutes and once for seventeen, and he didn’t even have a tinge of pink. He looked white and bloaty in his bathing suit, like some kind of medical specimen. That was one reason he never liked to go swimming. The other thing was that, even though he could swim all right and wasn’t afraid of drowning, he had never been able to learn to dive. He always had to sneak into the pool, when no one was looking, or horse around with someone until they pushed him in or he could fall in, pretending he’d lost his balance. Once he’d managed to get in the pool, he had to do all his swimming then and there, because if he got out he would have to go through the whole complicated ruse of getting back in respectably, and it just wasn’t worth it.

Gunner, of course, was one of those guys who was in and out of the pool all the time, running along the edge and diving straight and flat with just enough of a knife edge to cut the water instead of slap it, taking a couple of laps, then hauling himself out, dripping and snorting, invigorated by the water; he would sooner or later saunter up to the diving board, test it with some springy bounces, and soar up into an arc and a clean dive, hardly making a splash as he slipped through the surface of the water. Everyone knew the story of how Gunner entered a city swim meet the summer after college and took second place in the hundred-yard free-style, without any real practice or official training. The guys who had worked out all winter at the Y were plenty pissed off.

Sonny pulled on his khakis and a T-shirt over his bathing suit, put on his bucks without any socks, slung a towel over his shoulder in a way that he hoped looked casual, and went out to the front porch to wait for Gunner. The heat was awful and he could feel himself perspiring after only a couple of minutes. Gunner pulled up across the street, his left arm hung in a V-shape over the side of the car, and gave a honk. All the windows were down, but the car was still like a furnace. Sonny got in and slung his own arm casually out his window, but the side of the car burned him and he pulled the arm back in.

Gunner said he thought they’d buzz out to Meridian Hills and see if anyone was there. Gunner didn’t belong, but he had a lot of friends who did, and if you were a friend of a member they would let you go ahead and take a swim. Sonny knew a few people who belonged but he never went out like that, just figuring he’d find someone he knew and be able to use the pool. He didn’t think he knew them that well, and there was always the chance they might say no and he would have to slink away in shame, so he never even tried it.

As far as you could see, everything around the stately brick Colonial clubhouse at Meridian Hills was a bright, shimmering green—the golf course, the gently rolling lawns, the thick lush trees. Gunner pulled up in the parking lot near the pool, where a dozen or so cars were parked. You could hear yelps and giggles and the spraying sound of splashes from the pool. Gunner got out and started ambling up to the poolside, with Sonny following behind him, trying to amble.