Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

There was a full moon and everyone was outside, on blankets, and the Beemer boys had hauled the big cooler out there so you could grab a beer without having to go all the way to the house. There were some cute girls, a couple Sonny recognized from Shortley, and some others from around the lake, summer girls. Jocko was dating this blonde from Logansport, supposedly a real hot number and plenty stacked. He always had the cute ones. Everyone was just horsing around and drinking. The four guys at the Sargent had killed Wheels’ bourbon, though he had done most of the damage on it himself. One of the girls Sonny knew of from Shortley was Hildie Plummer, who had short-clipped strawberry-blonde hair and a lot of freckles and wasn’t any queen but wasn’t a dog either, the only trouble being she was one of those “personality” girls, one of the kind who was loads of fun. She spotted Sparky and squealed his name like she was about to come in her panties, and ran over and hugged him, not sexy but with loads of fun in it.

“Well, Hildie,” he said real nice and put his arm around her, just being friendly, knowing it wasn’t any use as far as making out, but being nice anyway. It got Sonny depressed, thinking how this really good guy was about to be shipped off to some ice cap or something for a year, what was supposed to be one of the best years of his life, and he was horny as hell and had spent that seven hundred bucks for nothing in Florida, and how much he needed a piece and how easy it would have been for Hildie just to go off with him somewhere and let him have it, and yet she would have probably rather have been shot by a firing squad, keeping her precious cherry for some poor bastard who would marry her and settle down for a life loaded with fun. It got Sonny hating all the women, all the goddam bitches tossing their little tails around and then acting like it was a federal case if a guy wanted in. And yet he had been offered the best he had ever seen in many ways and yet couldn’t do anything about it, which was the worst thing, the scariest thing of all. He had told Gunner the truth about what really happened—and worse, what didn’t happen—and how scared shitless he was. It wasn’t the sort of problem Gunner was familiar with himself, but he said he was going to set his mind to it, he was going to figure something out, and in the meantime for Sonny not to worry until he came up with something. Somehow that relieved Sonny a little, like knowing a great doctor has taken your case. You have to give him a little time to come up with the cure.

Even that couple hours in the sun had got his body pink and sore, not really painful but touchy enough so that just having a shirt on was kind of irritating. Gunner was out in it most of the day, but it just deepened his tail. Sonny figured you could make a good case for the idea that the world is basically divided into two kinds of people—the ones who tan and the ones who just burn. The healthy and the messed-up. Show him a guy who just burns, and he could show you a messed-up guy.

A couple of the girls started singing “In the Evening by the Moonlight” and everyone joined in, doing it the slow way first and then the jazzy way. After that Kings Kingley sang the Wabash song, and hardly anyone could join in because the words went on so long and there were so many verses you had to have spent four years at Wabash to know the damn thing. Sonny figured if you went to Wabash and learned that damn song it probably took up your whole time. That got ’em started on fraternity songs, “Phi Delta—Phi Delta Thay-ay-ta,” and “Pass the Loving Cup Around for Beta Theta Pi” and then the anti-Beta song, “Up in the Air Beta Bird-man, Up in the Air Upside Down,” and the sorority songs like “Remember the Golden Arrow of Pi Phi.” Hearing those songs depressed Sonny, made him feel it never ends, they’d be singing that stuff when you’re eighty and you’d still feel outside of things, not good enough to belong. He knew almost all the damn words to all of them but didn’t join in, like that would have been cheating or pretending he was part of all that when he wasn’t. Wheels sang along with the rest, even though he couldn’t pledge because he was on probation because of low high-school grades his first year and then flunked out, but the difference was he could have pledged, he knew that some of the big houses would have asked him, so you could see why he didn’t mind singing the songs and why it seemed all right that he did. Of course, no one would have minded if Sonny had sung either, it was him who would have felt funny about it.

After one of the songs Hildie chirped, “Hey, gang, speaking of Kappas, did you know that Sandy Masterson got engaged?”

Sandy had been a Junior Prom Queen at Shortley and a Kappa at I.U. and was always being voted this and that for being so beautiful. She was one of those dumb but nice sort of beauties, always walking around like she was in a daze, hypnotized or something. Sonny wondered if she was like that even when she screwed or whether she really got hot and active. He had a feeling she’d just lie there in the daze, letting the guy go about his business.

“Who to? Who’s the guy?” several people asked at once.

“He’s a Phi Gam,” Hildie revealed, “from Michigan State. She met him at a wedding.”

“Way to go, Phi Gams!” yelled Kings Kingley, who had been a Phi Gam.

“Phi Gams always were lucky,” said Jamie Beemer, who had been a Sigma Chi. “Not good, just lucky.”

“Shee-it,” Kings said, “tell it to the birds.”

“Shee-it,” Jamie answered back.

“Hey, Hildie,” Gunner asked, and he had that curious edge in his voice, like he was about to pop one of those questions that got people nervous. “How come when they asked you who Sandy married you said ‘a Phi Gam?’”

Hildie didn’t get what he meant. “Because that’s what he is ,” she explained.

“But isn’t he anything else?” Gunner persisted. “Is he a jock, is he a lawyer, is he a veterinarian, is he rich, is he handsome? Does he have green eyes and red hair, or walk with a cane, or sing opera in Italian?”

“Well, I’m sure he’s cute ,” Hildie said, kind of miffed.

“How do you know? Just ’cause he’s a Phi Gam?”

“Goddam right,” said Kingsley, and some other guys hissed and booed.

“No, really,” Gunner went on, “I mean, you tell about a girl we all know getting married, and you describe the guy just by saying what fraternity he was in.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said one of Jocko’s lodge buddies from Bloomington who didn’t know Gunner and might have thought he was some wildeyed, nutty Independent or something.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Gunner said. “It just seems funny, when you think about it. It seems especially funny when you realize after Hildie described the guy that way, nobody even asked anything else about him, like that was all anybody needed to know, what fraternity he was in.”

“So what do you want, the guy’s life story?” asked Kingsley, kind of grumpy.

“No, man, I just mean it tells a lot about us, about what kind of values we have, that’s all,” Gunner said.

“Oh, Jesus, we gonna have a sociology class or something?” asked Jocko Beemer. “ Val ues, for Chrissake.”

“Gunner’s turned real egghead on us,” Jamie said.

“What’s with this guy?” asked the big lodge brother from Bloomington.

“He’s O.K.,” said Jamie. “He’s just gone a little egghead on us since he’s been to Japan and seen the world.”

“Sounds kinda pinko to me,” the Bloomington guy complained.

“Pinko!” shouted Gunner, and Sonny’s stomach got that queasy feeling, the one like he had at the swimming pool that day when he thought Gunner was going to get into it with Wilks Wilkerson.