Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  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.

  “There’s Wilks Wilkerson,” Gunner said. “We’re in.”

  Wilks had been a Big Rod at Shortley, a hulking sort of awkward guy who made his natural clumsiness seem stylish and entertaining, so that whenever he got in a ball game everyone would laugh and cheer, “Go get ’em, Wilks.” He got in a lot of reserve basketball games, and he’d give a little salute to the crowd when he’d come on the floor and everyone would go wild, and he’d bound around fouling guys and getting into trouble. When he ever made a basket, the place would go berserk. He was very popular and had a famous greeting for everyone, “Hey-Hey-Say,” that was his trademark. He was a Beta down at I.U., and the few times Sonny had seen him on campus Wilks would give him the old “Hey-Hey-Say” even though he didn’t really know him, he just looked familiar. Old Man Wilkerson had a tool-and-die shop and he made his pile in the war—the real war. Lots of guys made a pile in that one, but Korea was such a half-assed war Sonny didn’t even know of anyone who’d made his pile in it, though some probably had and some who’d made it in the real war probably built their piles higher during Korea.

  Wilks was grinning and talking to Mitzi Harmengast, who was lolling on one of the poolside lounging chairs, being sexy. Wilks had on a ratty old brown bathing suit that looked like someone’s discarded underwear. If your family was loaded and you had it made, you could wear stuff like that and it was O.K.—in fact, it was a big thing to do.

  “Hey, Wilks,” Gunner called.

  “Hey-Hey-” Wilks automatically started his greeting, but as he turned and saw Gunner, it stuck in his throat and the last word came out long and low instead of perky—“Saaaaaay.”

  Wilks’ jaw dropped about a mile, but he got himself quickly together and clapped his hands, like it was some kind of borass Gunner was pulling, a stunt to shake people up or something.

  “Hey, man,” Wilks said, “where’s the cough drops?”

  “Wha-say, man. You remember Sonny Burns.”

  Wilks turned to Sonny and pumped his hand, staring at him with a blank smile and saying, “Hey, yeh, sure, how’s it go, man?”

  “Hi,” Sonny said.

  Wilks slapped Gunner on the shoulder and laughed. “I heard the word, fella, I heard the big word on you, but seein’s believin’. Gunner grows a beard. You goin’ out for a big part in the Christmas play? Like the lead, I mean?”

  Wilks guffawed, and Gunner smiled and said, “Might do that. Just might do ’er.”

  “Too much.” Wilks laughed. “Truly, truly.”

  Mitzi Harmengast raised up out of her loll and removed her sunglasses to look at Gunner.

  “Say, Mitz,” Gunner greeted her.

  “What’re you supposed to be?” she asked coolly.

  “Be?” asked Gunner.

  “He’s a Smith brother,” Wilks explained. “One of the original Smith Brothers. You know, Mitz, the cough-drop guys. All he needs is the other brother and he’s in business, huh, Guns baby?”

  “Sure,” said Gunner.

  “I don’t get it,” Mitzi said and slipped her sunglasses back on.

  “There isn’t anything to get,” Gunner said. “It’s just a beard.”

  “Just a beard,” Mitzi said skeptically and eased back down on the reclining chair, her big boobs heaving up inside the Jantzen so you could see the beginning of where they were still white, which was getting pretty close to the old nipples.

  “O.K., Wilks,” Gunner said, “you in shape or not?”

  Gunner had his trunks on under his faded jeans and he shucked off the pants and drew the T-shirt over his head, dropping it beside him.

  “I’ll race you four laps and winner buys the brews,” he said.

  “Hey, hold on, man,” Wilks said.

  His jolly Hey-Hey-Say expression was gone and he looked confused and suspicious, like Gunner was trying to pull one on him.

  “Whassamatter?” Gunner teased. “You been dissipatin’ again? O.K., make it two laps.”

  “You gotta be pulling my leg,” said Wilks.

  “And I’ll give you a full second to start.”

  A couple kids around twelve or so had cautiously come up to stare at Gunner. Their eyes bugged out and their mouths were ready to catch flies, but Gunner didn’t seem to notice anything.

  “Be serious, man,” Wilks said.

  “O.K.,” said Gunner, “if you’re that bad off, you go freestyle, I’ll go breaststroke. You can’t get a better deal than that.”

  Wilks frowned and shook his head. “You can’t go in the water like that,” he said.

  “Like what?” said Gunner. He looked down at his faded navy-blue trunks with a line of white piping up each side and an old red-and-white lifeguard medallion sown on the left leg. The whole place had gone suddenly quiet. A girl at the end of the diving board stopped springing and simply stood on the edge, watching Wilks and Gunner. A guy in the deep end was turned toward them, treading water and arching his head up to see what was happening. Mitzi had risen up again from her lounge chair, her mouth a straight red pencil mark. On the other side of the pool a little girl in a flowered bathing suit ran along the cement lip above the water, her wet feet making a tiny splat-splat that was the only sound you could hear.

  “Ole buddy,” Wilks said in a low voice, “you can’t go swimming with a frigging beard.”

  Gunner laughed and said, “If you think it’ll slow me down, that gives you better odds.”

  “Be serious, man,” said Wilks. His shaggy eyebrows bunched into a painful expression of distress.

  Gunner raised his palms up and said, “I am serious. What’s the beard got to do with it?”

  “This is a pool, ole buddy. I mean, if it was the ocean, it might be different. Or even Lake Michigan, maybe. But this is a pool.”

  “I know it’s a goddam pool,” Gunner said.

  “So, you can’t contaminate it. Be reasonable, man.”

  “Contaminate it! Who’s contaminating it?”

  “Nobody is, right now. And I’m gonna keep it that way. It’s plain common sense you can’t go into a swimming pool with a beard. You’ll get the water dirty.”

  “Dirty! You saying my beard is dirty? Is that it?”

  “I’m just saying it’s a beard.”

  “But it’s clean! There’s nothing dirty about it.”

  “A beard is a beard,” Wilks insisted.

  Mitzi stood up and raised the straps of her suit back over her shoulders. “I’m not swimming in any pool that’s had a beard in it,” she said and turned away, walking toward the clubhouse.

  “You’re crazy,” Gunner said. “You’re all crazy or something.”

  He started walking past Wilks toward the edge of the pool, but Wilks put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

  “We been ole buddies,” Wilks said. “I don’t wanna have to stop you. I don’t even know if I could, but I’d have to try and I don’t wanta do that.”

  Wilks kept his hand on Gunner’s shoulder, and the two guys stood glaring at each other, neither one moving a muscle. The little girl had stopped running, and the splat sounds were gone, leaving no noise at all. The sun was a silent blast over everything, cooking everyone where they stood. Sonny had the weird feeling that they all were being baked into place, that they’d all be immobilized there forever, forming a strange tableau called The Swimming Pool. He prayed to hell there wouldn’t be a fight. But his friend Gunner was being challenged, and if he chose to fight, Sonny would have to fight with him. It would be the two of them against the whole population of the pool, including Mitzi and her big boobs a
nd even the little girl in the flowered bathing suit, not to speak of Wilks and every other guy around the place. He wondered what it would feel like to crack your head on cement.

  Gunner let out a long breath and said quietly, “O.K., forget it, man.”

  Wilks took his hand away and Gunner picked up his T-shirt and khakis, wadding them into a ball.

  “Still ole buddies, Guns?” Wilks said as heartily as possible.

  “Sure, man, sure,” Gunner said and started for the car. Sonny went beside him, feeling all those eyes like hot little suns boring into his back. Then suddenly the air was filled with splashes and splats and yelps and whistles as the pool unlocked into life again.

  Sonny didn’t say anything when he got in the car, and neither did Gunner. He drove back to his mother’s place at the Meadowlark, and Gunner took a cold shower and then mixed up a batch of seabreezes, pouring two tall glasses full and handing one to Sonny.

  “Once when I was a junior at Shortley,” he said quietly, “the first hot day of summer, me and a bunch of guys piled into Andy McGovern’s old thirty-eight Buick and went to the Riviera for a swim. You know the damn Rivvy, it’s no damn country club, it’s ten bucks a year or something and you don’t have to be anybody to join. There were about six of us, and Sammy Katzman was with us and he said he didn’t belong, but, hell, you can take a guest on your card and all the rest of us belonged, and so we piled out and we start walking up to the pool building, the bunch of us, and out comes old man Barlow, that bald old fart who used to be the manager, and he stands on the steps with his legs apart and points a finger right at Sammy and he says, ‘You kids can’t bring that Jew-boy in here.’ Maybe he knew Sammy from someplace or had seen him play ball and knew his name, or maybe he just had a Jew-detector or something. I don’t know, but it was like getting hit in the face with a wet rag, I was that surprised, I guess we all were—except maybe Sammy, who hadn’t really wanted to go all along—and we stopped dead in our tracks and then Blow Mahoney started yelling and cussing at the old bastard and us joining in saying, ‘Yeh, you prick, this guy’s our friend, he’s better than you any day, you old turd-head,’ and the old bastard gets beet red and starts yelling he’s going to call the police and Sammy keeps saying, ‘Come on, you guys, let’s go, let’s get the hell out of here,’ and finally we pile back in the car and felt like shit, and Sammy kept trying to make a joke of it like he always did about that stuff, he kept saying, ‘I wish you guys would get the word around that I didn’t kill that character, maybe the Jews killed him but I didn’t kill that guy and hang him up on the cross, not me, it was some other bunch of Jews.’ Finally we all got horsing around and tried to forget about it, but we all still felt like shit. It was the first time I’d seen something like that happen, and it wasn’t like some story you read about a Jew getting discriminated against, it was our buddy, it was Sammy Katzman. He was one of us.”

  “Yeh,” Sonny said.

  Gunner got up and started pacing the room, rattling the ice in his glass and munching on his lips, and then he suddenly stopped and wheeled around toward Sonny, his face alive with some discovery.

  “You know the only goddam person who didn’t even mention the beard when he first saw it, who acted like I was the same guy and nothing different had happened?”

  “No,” Sonny said, knowing it sure as hell wasn’t him and feeling ashamed of that. “Who?”

  “Marty’s father.”

  “Yeh?”

  “Bet your ass. You oughta meet that guy. Man, what a guy. I could sit around and shoot the shit with that guy for hours.”

  “Yeh, I’d like to. Meet him.”

  “We’ll fall by there sometime.”

  “Great.”

  Gunner poured them each another Seabreeze and put on a Brubeck. He was getting back in his regular spirits after the swimming-pool business, and Sonny felt a lot better himself. He was really relieved that there hadn’t been a fight and was secretly glad that he didn’t have to go swimming after all. Maybe he could make it through the whole damn summer. By October, everyone else would be white, too, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it again till the following June.

  Gunner’s mother got home unexpectedly early; they had let people off because of the heat. She kicked off her shoes, flopped down on the couch, and said to Sonny, “What do you think of my fine-feathered friend here?”

  “Oh. The beard?”

  He took a long sip of his seabreeze, hoping he didn’t have to get into it with Mrs. Casselman. He didn’t want to let Gunner down by sounding as if he disapproved, but he didn’t want Nina to think he was a far-out guy who liked beards. She wouldn’t let it drop, though.

  “Do a lot of your friends have beards?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Sonny said, twisting in his chair.

  “Well, don’t you think it looks a little weird?”

  “For God sake, Nina,” Gunner said, “what do you expect him to say?”

  “I expect him to say what he thinks.”

  Trying to sound both loyal to his friend and patriotic, too, Sonny said feebly, “Lincoln had one.”

  “Oh, so you approve, then,” Nina said, as if her worst suspicions had been confirmed.

  “He didn’t say that, Nina.”

  “I heard what he said.”

  “Let me get you a drink,” Gunner said and went to the kitchen.

  “I suppose his girl friend likes it too,” Nina said.

  Sonny cleared his throat and said, “I really don’t know.”

  “You’re a friend of hers, aren’t you?”

  “Well,—yes, I guess.”

  “Of course, a beard is more common to the Jews. Their rabbis have to have them.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sonny.

  Gunner came in with the drink for Nina and said, “Please, Mother, let’s not get on the Jews again.”

  “I’m not ‘on’ them. I just made a statement.”

  She turned to Sonny and said, “My son believes I’m prejudiced. His own mother.”

  “Please, Nina.”

  “Actually, I’ve become very interested in their religion and history. They have quite a long history, you know.”

  “Yes,” Sonny said, “I understand they do.”

  “I’ve been reading up on it.”

  “Oh?”

  “She took out a book,” Gunner explained.

  Nina got up and handed a library book to Sonny. It was called Judaism from Ancient Times. Sonny turned it over in his hands, not knowing what to say.

  “Must be interesting,” he finally commented.

  “Fascinating,” Nina said. “But there’s still a lot I haven’t come across yet. Gunner, you say Marty’s father’s so smart, would you ask him something for me? About one of their customs?”

  “What is it, Nina?” Gunner said evenly.

  “Well, when they have their funerals—”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it true that they bury their dead standing up?”

  Gunner grasped at his forehead and stared at Nina out of eyes that seemed to have looked at an atom blast without dark glasses.

  “No, Mother,” he said in a dry, flat tone. “They lay ’em down, just like the rest of us.”

  A few days after they didn’t go swimming, Gunner took Sonny to see Marty’s studio. It was in an old three-story house in a dingy block down around the museum. A commercial artist and his wife owned the building and rented out rooms for studios and also for living quarters for students who studied at the museum school. Marty’s room was on the top floor, and it had one of those curving windows that protrudes like a turret. The room was completely bare except for the art stuff—canvases, paints, buckets of turpentine, a huge easel, a table smeared with colors and cluttered with brushes and tubes and jars. There was also a hot plate with an old coffeepot on it, and a hunk of cheese that looked a couple centuries old. And yet, Sonny felt charged up, just being in the room. There was an excitement about it, a feeling of purpose and crea
tion. Something was happening here. Someone was making something. Sonny felt a tingle that went through his shoulders and his arms, down to his fingers.

  “Yeh,” he said, nodding his head.

  “The real thing, huh?” Gunner asked proudly.

  “Yeh.”

  “Would you like to see some of my paintings?” Marty asked.

  “Sure.”

  Marty seemed different in the room, more relaxed and friendly even. She moved around in it with a kind of authority that was different from the sexy, feminine assurance of her social self, freer in a way, free in the way of a seaman on the deck of his ship. She was wearing a pair of paint-splattered jeans and a raggedy man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “Here,” she said. “Gunner, give me a hand.”

  She had gone to a corner of the room where a dozen or so canvases stretched onto frames were propped against the wall. Gunner helped her as she moved them out, one by one, and placed them against another wall, in the best light. Sonny felt silly because he didn’t know how to make the right comments, and he just sort of made sounds, like “Mmmm” and “Yeh” and “Ahhh.” Some of them had people in them, but they weren’t the jolly All-American folks of Orville Lockwood’s homey magazine covers; they were misshapen, elongated, puffed up, twisted, their heads on wrong and faces distorted in pain and surprise and fear and confusion. They weren’t pictures of how people looked but of how people felt. Some of the canvases had no pictures at all, just colors, swirls and patches and planes of color, thickened and lumped, like hunks of emotion.

  “I feel like a dumb ass,” Sonny said. “But I know you’re doing something real.”

  “She has it, all right,” Gunner said.

  “I’m learning.” Marty smiled. “I’m learning what color is. God. You take green. Have you ever really thought about green?”

  Sonny bit at his lip and then grinned foolishly. “Lucky Strike green has gone to war. That’s about all, as far as thinking about it. That I can think of.”