The Great Santini Read Online Free PDF Page A

and use them as binoculars?"
    "Very funny."
    "Seriously, I tried that once with your glasses. For the first time, I saw the rings of Saturn. "Then he shouted suddenly, "There's the plane. I was looking right at the thing. I must be getting rusty."
    Lillian Meecham gathered her children around her to choreograph the homecoming.
    "Stand up straight, Ben and Matt. Shoulders back. Like Marines. Matthew, let me comb your hair. Girls check your makeup, we want to be beautiful for your father. When he gets off the plane, we'll all run to meet him. I'll go first, followed by the girls, then the boys. I'll give him a big juicy. Then the girls will give him big juicys. Boys, you shake his hand firmly. Very firmly, like men. Then say, 'Welcome home, Colonel.'"
    "We better get a chair for the midget to stand on," Mary Anne teased," Matt will end up shaking hands with Dad's bellybutton if we don't give him a lift."
    "You heard her, Mama. You heard her call me a midget."
    "Mary Anne," Mrs. Meecham called sternly.
    "Yes, ma'am," Mary Anne answered.
    "Be a lady."
    The eyes of the air base turned in the direction of the fat-bodied transport plane that was bringing foodstuffs and airplane parts to Smythe Field, and Bull Meecham back to his family. It lowered steadily to the earth, flaps down, nose up, until the wheels screamed along the concrete and a black seam of rubber burned into the runway, marking the final leg on Colonel Meecham's journey home. As the plane taxied toward the operations tower where the family waited, a fuel truck sputtered into life by the hangar and rolled slowly toward the plane.
    The door of the plane opened and steps were lowered. A man in uniform appeared in the doorway. He looked out, saw his family, and bellowed out to them with a large, exuberant smile," Stand by for a fighter pilot."
    Yes, as they ran to him, that echo from past memories rang in their brains, that password into the turbulent cellular structure of the past, the honeycomb of lost days, of laughter and fury, that told them as they ran to his outstretched arms a simple message: Lt. Col. Bull Meecham, United States Marine Corps, was back from Europe. The father had landed. The Great Santini was home.
     

Chapter 3
     
    A month later, on Rosebriar Road in Atlanta, an alarm clock knifed into the darkness of two o'clock in the morning. Bull Meecham was already awake and his hand silenced the alarm almost as soon as it began. His body was alive, vibrant, singing like an electric wire as he dressed in preparation for the trip to Ravenel. He cut on a lamp at a bedside table and shook his wife gently.
    He dressed in fatigue pants, a military issue T-shirt, and combat boots. High on his left arm, a tattoo of a red cobra, fanged, coiled, and ready to strike, stood in stark relief to his pale, freckled skin. His hair was cut short in a military burr. His neck was thick, powerful, and cruelly muscled; his arms were long, athletic to the point of being simian, threaded with veins, and covered with reddish hair. Quickly, he did fifty pushups and twenty situps. Then, he jumped up from the floor and began to run in place. He pulled a rosary from the pocket of his fatigues and began to say the first decade of the rosary. The drumming of his feet on the floor echoed throughout the darkened house. Lillian put a pillow over her head and tried to cut out the noise and light, tried to resume sleeping, although she knew it was hopeless. Timing himself precisely, Bull quit running after he had said three decades. He liked the idea of caring for his body at the same time he cared for his soul.
    "C'mon, Lillian. Up and at 'em. No goldbricking this morning. We've got two hundred and fifty miles of hard traveling to get done. The movers are going to meet us at the new house at 0900."
    "Say one more rosary, darling. Then I'll be half alive."
    "Get up, trooper. I'll get the kids. I want to be on the road in fifteen minutes."
    He was sweating lightly as he moved to the girls'