by Don DeLillo
PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.
She dug a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket in the suitcase. Then she opened a window and lit one up. The noise came blowing in, bullhorn cops, news bulletins, rock music, and she turned off the radio and sat by the window smoking.
She’d seen a multicolored Volkswagen beetle with painted faces in the windows, earlier in the day, on Babcock Drive.
She sat there blowing smoke out the window because her mother was supposedly allergic and would have preferred, in any case, that Marian did not smoke, and they were taking off their belts and wrapping them around their fists.
And a Dow recruiter was trapped in Commerce Hall, listening to firecrackers, if that’s what they were, going off outside the door to room 104, where he talked across the desk to a potential recruit.
There were trash fires on lower State Street.
There were rumors about Terminal Theater, a group that did not concede its own existence, and a student on a second-story porch on Mifflin Street turned up the volume when she saw police in riot gear moving in a double column down the street.
And over by the Library Mall members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, if that’s who they were, kept turning up among the police, more or less suicidally, wearing whiteface and carrying panpipes and dressed in busker costume, quaint and ill-fitting mid-Victorian drag, with cricket caps, a dozen young men and women on the police side of the skirmish line, mimicking the gestures of the cops and getting dragged to a van and beaten.
People everywhere listened to the radio, to the dialogue between what was real and what was spliced and mixed and processed and played, and the speakers dealt out heavy metal and a woman on the air read the copy on package inserts of Dow products, speaking in a hushed and sexy voice.
The police began firing tear gas and students started running toward the gas out of a sort of rompish curiosity or because the gas carried a fragrance of apple blossoms, believe it or not, a fast-acting agent now being used in Vietnam.
Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry. This was Dow’s catchy ad slogan and the woman read it on the air repeatedly in a soft and sexy voice.
There were Dow interviews scheduled in three buildings but the sit-in was taking place at Commerce and that’s where the recruiter sat trapped, with a hamburger going cold in a white bag.
Two squads of police formed a wedge.
He said to the potential recruit, “So tell me about what happens between now and graduation day.”
The kid said, “Someone had a live rat out there.”
“Let’s, I think, stick to the issue,” the recruiter said, “for our own, really, peace of mind.”
Or they ran toward the gas because they thought the moral force of their argument would neutralize the effect of the chemicals.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe was not supposed to be on the Library Mall. This was the interesting thing.
And affinity groups started fires here and there, or broke windows, small bands with names like the Mudville Nine, the members masked in bandannas soaked in baking soda and egg white, a folk remedy against the gas.
And smoke in white streamers rose from projectiles that came flopping down on the broad lawn in front of Bascom Hall. Students were running the other way now, moving in an agitated mass, some with dixie cups over their mouths or hankies out, and others strolled casually on the sidewalk between the squads of helmeted police and the thickening gas, which was beginning to roll in banks toward the columned hall, and a guy resting a guitar lengthwise on his head stood watching from the streetlight.
And the sexy voice on the radio repeated the Du Pont slogan now. Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry. The woman enjoyed the pause. She prolonged the pause. She moaned through the pause. She spoke urgently and excitedly up to the pause and then she paused and moaned slowly and then she finished reciting the slogan, finally, all sated and limp and moaned out, and then she started from the beginning again.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe was supposed to be in front of Old Chemistry. This was the interesting thing. They were supposed to be passing out copies of Faculty Document 122, in front of Old Chemistry, which is exactly where they were, chanting Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. This was interesting because it meant that the people in whiteface on the Library Mall must be members of Terminal Theater, the legendary factoidal group whose name, even, was subject to conjecture, or was an aspect, perhaps, of the group’s borderline existence.
Rock-and-roll everywhere, serpentine twangs of feedback rolling from window speakers all over the campus and on nearby streets.
The police were coming down hard now, clubs out, cops acting without orders or against orders, inevitably, riding their own rampant highs.
The recruiter and the student waited to be rescued and they talked in the meantime about courses and professors as an affinity group entered the building with cherry bombs, lengths of pipe and size D flashlight batteries, the homemade makings of a mortar attack.
The radio reported that Lyndon Johnson was being dangled upside down from a towline on a helicopter, swinging in the breeze over the Primate Lab, right here in Madison, in the outright nude, after being kidnapped by parties unknown.
The radio reported that you could make your own napalm by mixing one part liquid detergent Joy with two parts benzene or one part gasoline. Shake vigorously.
The day-glo VW moved through the streets and Marian shut the window and turned on the radio and then went and flushed the cigarette down the toilet.
She began to understand that someone or some group had taken over the radio and as the day waned a man recited instructions for the manufacture of a fertilizer bomb. How to buy the nitrate, cheap, it comes bagged or bulk, from a farm-supply store, and how to add the fuel oil and what to do to ignite the mix.
There was an interval of static and a brief silence. Then the radio returned to its normal broadcast mode.
What was this?
Three voices chanting liturgically, a priest reciting the same line over and over and two altar boys delivering fixed responses.
Better things for better living.
Through chemistry.
Better things for better living.
Through chemistry.
Better things for better living.
Through chemistry.
She turned off the radio.
Then her father came home and was filled in by her mother and they all sat down to dinner with the poached bass and the baby’s breath and her father said, “What is he?”
Marian thought this was funny and maybe her father did too, a little. What could she say? She could say what he wasn’t. This would take a fair amount of time. But concerning what he was, well, she could say he was an English teacher in a secondary school in Arizona. But she couldn’t say a whole lot more because there wasn’t much he’d told her.
Her mother talked about the broken bones of the demonstrators, the students with head wounds, clubbed, gassed, bleeding.
Her father said, “Do you know what this means to me, the injuries of the students? What can I compare it with? Because I want to be fair to them. It’s like the life and death of a fly, on a wall, in a village, somewhere in China. That’s how much I care.”
He had a drained smile that no one liked to see.
“I guess that means you can’t be a Buddhist. Because the Buddhists if I understand them correctly,” her mother said, and then let the thought drift toward the ceiling.
Marian sat in her room that night and dialed Nick’s number. She told him about her day. There wasn’t much to tell him because she left out the demonstration. She was feeling needy, moody and lunar and she didn’t want distractions.
Then she told him she wanted to get married. She wanted to marry him and live with him, anywhere, wherever he wanted, and not have kids and not have friends and never go to dinner with her parents.
There was a silence at the other end that she could not read. A telephone silence can
be hard to read, grim and deep and sometimes unsettling. You don’t have the softening aspect of the eyes or even the lookaway glance while he ponders. There’s nothing in the silence but the deep distance between you.
They finished the conversation in a halting and awkward manner and she was damn mad, angry at him and at herself, mostly herself, she decided, and she was determined to get back to the grind, to the work of hygiened perfection, shaping herself, willing herself into tighter being.
She opened the window and lit a cigarette and sat there blowing streams of smoke into the cool night air.
FEBRUARY 6, 1953
His mother didn’t want him playing cards on the corner, even with Catholic school boys, and she waited until he came upstairs and told him.
He played a game called sett’ e mezz’, for pennies, sitting on the one-step terrace outside the grocery store, freezing on the stone, and he memorized the cards coming out of the dealer’s hand and won very regular, expecting a picture card and it would come, worth half a point, but she told him not to play anymore.
But before she told him this he sat there in the cold memorizing the cards and making his bets. When he got seven and a half, which was the best score you could get, he turned over his hole card and said, “Sett’ e mezz’.”
But when the dark seeped down around the players he had to quit the game and go to the butcher to pick up the meat his mother had bought earlier in the day.
The butcher was nicer to him now, with Nick upstate. The butcher asked him if he was old enough to get it up and Matty said thirteen, almost, and the butcher said salut’.
The butcher said he needed someone to tell him what it was like to get it up because he couldn’t remember anymore and this was the same thing the butcher used to say to Nick, more or less, when Nick was the one who went for the meat, and Matty felt good about this, smelling sawdust and blood.
When he was walking home with the meat a woman came out of the bread store and gave Matty a tweak with her fingers, a twist of the flesh on his cheek, affectionate, like turning a key, and she told him to give regards to his mother.
He reached his street and the kids were still playing cards in front of the grocery, in the dark, some of the same kids who used to taunt him for his chess when he played chess, or because he had no father, and he sat in for a couple of hands, figuring the meat could not go bad in the freezing cold, and he memorized the cards as they fell.
Then he went upstairs and she told him she didn’t want him gambling. She told him even if it was only pennies. She said it didn’t look good and led to other things and other kinds of company and she told him she didn’t want to say anything in front of the other boys, whether they were Catholic school boys or not, and he stood there with the meat in his arms.
They were the two of them alone and he wanted to obey. He felt the solemn weight of the situation, the size of Nicky’s going, but there were always kids playing cards on the stoops and corners and he wasn’t sure, when they dealt him in, that he’d say no. And not because he could memorize the cards. It wasn’t so sneaky as that. It was another kind of thing completely. He was a little bit of a hero with his brother upstate, doing what he’d done, and boys from blocks around wanted to know him.
This is why he thought it might be hard to obey her, with the lamb chops knobby in his arms.
DECEMBER 1, 1969
You can’t fight a war without acronyms. This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey.
And where do these compressed words come from?
They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe—storky bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek.
But acronyms also come from the ranks, don’t they, at least occasionally? Look at old Louis strapped and cramped in his aft-facing ejection seat in the lower deck of the forward fuselage, going through the checklist. And the crews in alert barracks worldwide waiting for the klaxons to sound. And the guys on the line who load the ordnance and juice the engines. These are men who feel an armpit intimacy with the weapons systems they maintain and fly. This gives their acronyms a certain funky something.
And this is why the high-altitude bomber sitting on the ramp out there, crew of six including Louis, a great, massive, swept-winged and soon-to-soar B-52—this aircraft is known as a BUFF to tens of thousands of men throughout the command, for Big Ugly Fat Fuck.
In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him.
“Chuckman, I find myself in a very pussy-minded mood today.”
“Hell of a time to be thinking such thoughts.”
“I don’t think no thoughts. They just come.”
“Being we’re strapped in this tube for the next.”
“That’s the fucked-up beauty of the thing. How thoughts just come. Of and by themselves.”
“Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman.”
“In other words you’re saying.”
“Hold that thought.”
“Hold that thought,” Louis said. “Put it on the back burner.”
“Exactly.”
“First we bomb them.”
“Then we fuck them,” said the navigator.
Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn’t sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight.
Long Tall Sally.
The pilot taxied to the runway and the tower cleared the plane for takeoff.
The copilot said, “Five, four, three.”
The pilot had the throttles gang-barred to full-on position.
The copilot said, “One, zero, rolling.”
When the plane rumbled past marker 7, for seven thousand feet of runway, the copilot said, speaking with a sense of enormous buffeted mass that caused his teeth to feel uprooted because this is nearly half a million pounds of Big Ugly Fat Fuckness laboring to lift itself over the marsh grass—the copilot said, “Committed.”
And then the dark body began to loom like some apparition of the mists, long wings bending and flaps extended and wheels breaking contact and then the gear coming up and the smoky spews of trailing black alcohol and the storm-roar shaking the flats.
In the hole the navigator, Charles Wainwright Jr., called Chuckie, continued to scan the skaty-eight meters and switches and disconnects, a whole lifetime of indicators clustered in front of him and above him and to one side—the side not occupied by Louis Bakey, the radar-bombardier.
Chuckie scanned the switches and harassed his buddy, encouraging marriage to a decent woman with church affiliations.
“Don’t start in with me,” Louis said. “I don’t need a wife. I don’t need a church. You’re the one who needs these things.”
“I already, Louis, have had a wife.”
“Who you didn’t appreciate mentally.”
“I had to go through my awkward phase. I was finishing out some things,” Chuckie said.
The two men had been crewmates since Greenland, flying through arctic mirages and fifty-knot gales. Their current bombing runs were strangely uneventful by comparison, or a different level of reality at any rate, easier to proje
ct as a movie.
“I know what you need,” Louis said. “A woman who’ll be willing to accept your history of screwups. You need to unload this stuff on someone who’s innocent. You want a sweet young female who was born to understand you. Like the sweet thing on the nose of this aircraft.”
Louis said sweet thing in a scornful black voice. Since Louis was a scornful black, this was not surprising. Swee’ thang. Not that he didn’t have a spiritual side that Chuckie responded to. You only had to listen to his stories of the early A-tests over Nevada—stories he’d told dozens of times through the years in lonely barracks in Greenland, Goose Bay and a number of remote SAC bases in the continental U.S.
“I don’t think you ought to deride.”
“Deride. That’s nice,” Louis said. “I rather deride her than ride her, tell you the truth. I believe she’s too skinny for my taste. Plus she’s been misnamed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I get so tired. Educating these boys.”
“What’s it mean, Louis? Misnamed.”
“Long Tall Sally.”
“From the song of the same title.”
“At least he knows that much. Heavens above.”
“You think I don’t know Little Richard and his Ow-ow-ow-ow?”
“This boy worth saving,” Louis said. “But the point being.”
“Used to hide his records from my parents. Oh baby woo baby. I was thirteen years old.”
“This old Negro is touched, Chuckman. But the point I’m making is that the Long Tall Sally in the song and the Long Tall Sally they painted on our nose are not one and the same female of the species.”
“Why not? Check her out. She’s long, she’s tall, she’s got great legs and she looks to me like her name could be Sally. Woo. We’re gonna have some fun tonight.”
“Gonna have some fun tonight. That’s exactly right,” Louis said. “Only the Sally in Little Richard’s number ain’t gonna be seen in no car in no drive-in movie doing a little necking with a youth like yourself.”
