The Great Santini Read Online Free PDF

room. To wake Mary Anne and Karen, he flicked on the light switches and watched as they grabbed their eyes. It was the way D.I.'s awoke recruits when he was at Officers' Candidate School and it remained, to him, the most efficient way to rouse soldiers from their sacks.
    "Let's move it, split-tails. South Carolina is five hours away."
    Then he crossed the hall to the room where Ben and Matthew slept. He cut on the lights and walked quickly to Ben's bed. Before Ben's eyes could adjust to the light, Bull grabbed one of his legs and pulled him out of bed. Then he reached across and grabbed Matthew's leg and pulled him on top of Ben. Both brothers lashed out with their arms and legs, but Bull's weight had both of them pinned in ludicrous, humiliating positions.
    "You Marines would never make it during a surprise attack."
    "C'mon, Dad, get off us," Ben begged.
    "C'mon, Dad, get off us," Bull imitated in a high-pitched whine. As he let the boys up, he ordered," Be dressed and into the car in five minutes. We're breaking camp. The Japs are on the move again."
    Bull went into the kitchen, listening for the sounds of the house springing to life. He heard his wife cough, water run in the girls' bathroom, a toilet flush, and Matthew yell something at Ben. He went into the kitchen of his mother-in-law's house, plugged in a pot of coffee, and studied a road map of Georgia. Silently, he read off the names of some Georgia towns. Moultrie, Ocilla, Dahlonega, Jesup, Waycross. The whole state depressed him, the blue lines representing highways that intersected towns whose names and destinies were mysteries to him. Southern towns choked with clay and grits. Black swamp towns who like injured horses ought to be shot and and buried. South Carolina was no better, he thought; but at least it wasn't Georgia.
    Alice Sole, sixty-three years old, struggled into the kitchen where her son-in-law sat. She was wearing a blue houserobe sprinkled with roses and chrysanthemums. Her face had been hastily made up into a mask of almost clownish flamboyance.
    Bull grinned when he saw her, and said," Which whore house sold you that bathrobe, Alice?"
    "The same one your mother worked for just before you were born," the woman growled back at him. "Now don't go messing with me at two in the morning, Bull. I'm in no mood. Why in the hell can't you drive during normal hours?"
    "Amen," her daughter called from the bedroom.
    "You make good time traveling at night," came the reply. "The kids can sleep, no cars on the road, it's cooler, and you don't waste a day getting there."
    Alice sighed, unconvinced. "It must be the Yankee in you."
    Soon Lillian was herding her children out of their bedrooms and toward the front door. The instincts of the military wife were beginning to assert themselves, the old efficiency of stealing away from temporary homes and entering the bloodstream of highways heading to new quarters. She led them out the front door and down the steep driveway and into the family station wagon. The car was already packed. A luggage carrier strapped to the roof was piled high with trunks, suitcases, and whatever cargo Bull deemed necessary for the first few hours in their new house. Ben and Matthew had flattened the back seats of the station wagon and inserted a double mattress so the children could sleep during the night journey through Georgia.
    In the kitchen, waiting for his wife to give the ready sign, Bull poured himself a cup of coffee, drank it black, and felt the heat surge into his belly and flood through his body. The coffee burned into him, a dark transfusion that awakened him to his own desire to leave this house and set his eyes on long curves and highway signs.
    "Mama, you're crying," Lillian said as her mother walked up to the car.
    "I'm going to miss you, baby," Alice said embracing her daughter. "When you're my age you realize you have a finite number of good-byes to say in your life."
    "Child," Lillian answered," you are the healthiest human