Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [75]
Now Charley had been planning to stay up all the night before to watch the fire so he planned to take a little nap in the late afternoon of July 3. Went to ask his mother for a room. She had three bedrooms available for company and he'd had the pressure of buying that leg, marinating it, worrying it, trucking it, digging the trench, hefting the rocks-all he wanted was go to bed and take a little nap so he'd be fresh through the night, and his mother said, "You can't go down there and lay on Kenny's bed-you'll sweat on it, and make it stink." Real friendly. It pissed Charley off something terrible. There was his new bride-to-be, Wendy, with him, young as an angel, and Charley was feeling funny enough already because it was the first time he would be seeing all these brothers and sisters without Kathryne-why, if they'd been married a couple more years, everybody would have been coming to Kathryne and his 25th anniversary-but now they were divorced. He was here with Wendy, half his age. And had to sleep in a tent out on the lawn at his mother's suggestion.
His feelings were building. It was too much to ask a man to watch a fire when he was tired and sleepy and had a lot of unhappy memories-nothing to bring out unhappy memories like a fire. Darned if he didn't fall asleep out there. In the early hours of the morning when he woke up, the fire had gone out and the rocks were cold. Well, he kept working to build that fire back, but it was a lost cause. All next day during the party, there was a lot of irritation building because they finally had to hurry the barbecue up on a spit, and that didn't compare in flavor. There was a lot of smoke you couldn't control and soot, and the marinade got charred, instead of there being a juicy tender really deep old-fashioned pit barbecue. Charley couldn't even excuse himself for letting the fire go out. He wasn't about to tell anybody how bad some of those memories had been. Only thing a man could do when memories got too bad, was sleep.
It started off because his father mentioned that Nicole was living down the road with a fellow. Of course all through the night Charley Was thinking off and on about Nicole. Which got him onto Kathryne and that gave him terrible recollections. Before he got back from Vietnam, Kathryne used to write loving letters. Things were better between them. He hadn't been home a week before there was a terrible fight, and Kathryne said, "I wish they'd shipped you back a box." Hell of a homecoming. It was like the fights they had in Germany about him drinking beer, the best goddamn beer in world for 18 cents, a big stein. How could you keep from getting loaded every night on beer? Then have to come home and face carping. He was supposed to be a Sergeant. At home, she had downgraded him to fool. He'd still get mad to think of that. Did him no good at all. He could feel that kind of thing getting into his organs and roiling them up.
Then, of course, he would never get over that business of Lee and Nicole. Hell, it was true. They told him as much at the when he visited Nicole. The fact of the matter was that he and Nicole were never comfortable with one another.
Watching the flames, deeper woe was coming to him from the fire. April getting raped by three niggers in Hawaii, and nobody to tell him. Going back from Hawaii to Midway, Kathryne had said, April a real bad case of gas and has to go to the bathroom. Maybe they should wait a day to fly. He told her, We're going to on that plane. What's a few farts? Made his decision in ignorance and there was April hurting so bad that he thought he'd have to ask the pilot to turn around and get her to a doctor. When they landed at Midway, Kathryne still kept the news from him. It wasn't until was out of the Seabees that she admitted being afraid to tell because there were all those black sailors on the Base. She'd been afraid he'd run amok. It hurt his feelings that she considered him