Russell Banks - Outer Banks

— I guess you don’t feel so guilt-ridden anymore, eh? the Loon panted.

— Not really, the king said, zipping up the Loon’s jumpsuit. — But after all, isn’t that what a pilgrimage is for ?

11.

One night on the foredeck, the king, leaning exhausted against the mast, waxed slightly philosophical — I think that guilt, once perceived, i.e. , experienced, is a passion, to be spent, like other passions. The meanings of most things, of passions, certainly, lie wholly in their enactments or in analytical description, i.e. , reenactment of those things. The point of human life, when it comes right down to it, is simply to provide content for the otherwise empty forms of reality. The basic difficulty of human life is in knowing when a particular form has been sufficiently filled, or perceived, experienced — knowing when an experience has become redundant. Thus, most of the “good” life is an exercise in good taste, and I do mean ethically.

— Is it safe to assume, then, that you no longer feel guilty? the Loon asked wearily.

— Right! the king said, surprised. — You know, Lon, for a kid with no college degree, you certainly can think abstractly.

— Thanks, said the Loon.

12.

After one hundred days at sea, they docked in Liverpool, where they caught a train to London, a cab to the airport, and a jumbo jet for home, first-class.

— Good old American Express! the king said, raising his champagne glass in a toast.

— Yay, said the Loon quietly. He was thinking of the block of Moroccan hash he had brought as an offering for the Empire State and how much he was going to enjoy smoking it when he got back to the tree house. — Yay, he said, clinking the king’s glass with his own.

— Kiss-kiss, you little devil, said the king happily.

— Kiss-kiss-kiss, answered the Loon.

The king lit a large Cuban cigar. — “Yay,” huh? Heh, heh, heh. God, Loon, that’s rich! You’re such a disgusting faggot, the king said chuckling.

REMEMBER ME TO CAMELOT

A Novel

by Naomi Ruth Sunder

1.

“Be good to Kay,” Rex instructed his eldest son, Bif. “Your mother’s never been on her own before, she doesn’t know how to take care of herself, son,” he explained to the boy.

I stood somberly in the center of the living room with Hunter and Rory, fighting back the tears, proud of our three little boys, our little men, but proudest of Rex, my husband, because I understood the deep pain he was feeling at this, the moment of his departure. He was leaving us — perhaps forever.

Our country in her need had called him from the side of his loved ones, and he had no choice but to go. Rex was a major in the Air Force Reserve, and his unit had been activated for combat duty in Vietnam, which at that time I couldn’t even have located on a map. They needed all the veteran pilots they could get, and Rex, in Korea more than a decade earlier, before Bif was born, had been one of the best in the skies. He had been almost legendary, and, as he leaned down to kiss me good-bye, I saw him wink away a tear with a brave grin, and I knew that he was still one of the best.

We kissed, long and joyously, and then he patted each of us on the top of the head and walked out the door to the waiting car.

2.

It was true, what Rex had said to Bif — I had never been on my own before, and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I had been the only child of protective parents, raised in Sarasota, Florida, where, as a fifteen-year-old girl trying out for the cheerleading squad, I had met Rex. He was two years older than I, a junior and the captain of the football team.

We fell in love that autumn, the season I made the cheerleading squad and the football team went undefeated, and from the first, ours was a love that never wavered or wandered off center. Rex was everything I wasn’t, and thus it was only with him and through him that I felt completed. He was stern and disciplined, sophisticated yet rough-hewn, gentle but at the same time demandingly straightforward.

And there was a sense in which I completed him, too, for I allowed him to be tender and naive, shy and insecure — character traits he otherwise would have been ashamed of and would have denied himself.

3.

As soon as Rex graduated from Sarasota High, we got married. It was the summer of 1950 and the second half of the twentieth century had just begun. How were we to know that war with the Orientals would break out and, within a year, with me pregnant, would separate us?

Rex went to Texas as an Air Force cadet and earned his wings in record time. I closed up our little apartment, put our wedding gifts and furniture in storage, and went home to live with my mother and father. Three weeks after Rex had left Texas for Korea, I gave birth to our first son, Rex, Jr., whom Rex in his letters instructed me to call “Bif,” the name by which he had been known when he played fullback for Sarasota High.

Even from that great a distance, Rex was a doting father. My parents and I would laugh gaily over his long letters filled with careful instructions as to how we should care for his namesake and how my parents should care for me. In some ways, Rex was able to make it seem that he had never left. In my heart, though, I knew how far away he really was.

4.

But now it was twelve years later, and just as the Vietnam War was different from the Korean, Rex’s absence from his family was different. Over a decade had passed between the wars, and our life together and our lives separately had changed in many subtle ways.

When Rex had come back from Korea, taller, leaner and, yes, harder than when he had left, we had been able to resume our life almost as if there had been no interruption at all. And in a real way, for, when he had been drafted, our life together had not yet had a chance to begin, there was no interruption. As if his absence had never existed, and as if we had not begun at all, we were able to begin anew.

We bought a new, three-bedroom mobile home with a cathedral ceiling in a mobile home park over by the Bay, and Rex went back to work for his father’s plumbing company, a journeyman plumber, as before, starting at the bottom, as before. But, “The sky’s the limit!” he used to say to me, late at night as we talked in bed of our plans and hopes for the future.

I was newly pregnant with Hunter, and touching my swelling womb, feeling the life stir there, knew how right he was. “Oh, Rex, not even the sky can limit us !” I would tell him, as he drifted peacefully off to sleep.

5.

Hunter was born, a healthy, bright child, serious and intense from birth, just as Bif had been boisterous and cheerfully gregarious from birth. Hunter’s personality brought out another side of Rex, a side I hadn’t seen before. With his second son, Rex was somber, morbid almost, encouraging in the boy, and thus in himself, activities that were solitary, physically strenuous, and somewhat dangerous — such as hunting and deep-sea fishing, rock-climbing, scuba diving. Was this a result of his war experiences, things he wouldn’t talk about, couldn’t talk about, even to me? I wondered helplessly.

“What else are you going to do with a boy named Hunter?” Rex would tease me whenever I asked him why, for example, he was encouraging his son to hunt alligators in the swamps with Negroes.

“But he’s only a boy, ” I would plead.

“A boy’s only a small man,” he would explain to me.

I was no less concerned over Rex’s enthusiasm for Bif’s adventures in sports — Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, playing for two or three different teams at a time, day and night, throwing, batting, and kicking balls, sobbing exhausted and disconsolate whenever his team had failed to humiliate the other.