The Lords of Discipline (21 page)

“No, sir,” I answered. “You won’t run me out.”

“Are you telling me I can’t run you out, scumbag?” he screamed directly in my ear. “Pop off!”

“You can’t run me out, sir.”

“He’s mine. This fucker belongs to me,” a boy said, stepping in front of me, memorizing my features as I memorized his. He was my height, but leaner, more angular, with a long rather handsome face disfigured by a cruel, lipless mouth and narrow eyes.

“He’s an English major,” Wentworth said, reading from his clipboard.

“An English major!” several voices said at once.

The boy in front of me was named Fox.

“An English major,” he said disgustedly. “Do you want to suck my dick, boy? Pop off.”

“No sir.”

“Shit, dumbhead, everyone knows English majors love to suck and blow on dicks.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Fox,” Wentworth said, still studying the clipboard. “I’m an English major.”

“What’s my name, douchebag? Pop off,” Fox said.

“Your name is Fox, sir,” I said.

“Put a ‘mister’ on that.”

“Your name is Mister Fox, sir,” I said.

“What am I, idiot?” he yelled, pointing to the insignia on his collar. “Look at my uniform and tell me what I am.”

I stared at his uniform, at the unfamiliar insignia, at his nametag, at his face. I was confused, disoriented, and I did not know what he wanted me to say.

“You better tell me what I am, idiot. Now, douchebag. Now. Say something. Anything. But you better answer me, smackhead. Now, boy. Now. Now. Now.”

I looked at his nametag and said, “Sir, you are a small carnivorous animal kin to the dog.”

The punch came from behind me, delivered by an invisible assailant, a perfect blow to the kidney. I staggered forward, fell to one knee, and almost knocked Fox and the card table over.

“Not here, Newman, you stupid bastard,” the company commander said. “Wait until you get him to his room. If a tac officer sees you, we’ll all be walking tours. If the Bear sees you, we’ll be lucky to graduate.”

“I don’t like a smartass knob,” a deep voice said from behind me.

“Get up, douchebag,” Fox commanded. “You make any more remarks like that and we’ll send you home with your nuts in your pocket. And for your information, I’m your platoon sergeant.”

L
ate that afternoon, before evening formation, I studied my shaved head in the mirror. I did not recognize the boy in the mirror who stared accusingly back at me, did not recognize the desperate blue eyes. I felt silly in the new summer uniform the upperclassmen had called the “gray nasties.” The uniform exuded the nauseating odor of new clothing. My hands smelled of Brasso and Kiwi polish. The heat was fierce and sweat stains spread beneath my arms, along my collar, and down my back. I spoke to my image in the mirror, “You stupid asshole, McLean. You poor dumb fucker. How did you get yourself in this mess?”

“Give me a shirt tuck, what’s-your-name?” my new roommate said behind me. “Hurry up, will you? We’ve got to get to evening formation.”

His name was Harvey Clearwater and he was from Memphis, Tennessee. “
The
Clearwaters of Memphis,” he had been careful to explain.

“My names Will, Harvey,” I said. “Will. It’s a simple little name. Four letters. Starts with a capital
W.
Ends with a little bitty word synonymous with ‘sick.’ I like being called Will. It’s a habit I got into in childhood.”

“Just give me a shirt tuck, will you? They’ll kill us if we’re late.”

“They’ll kill us if we’re early.”

“My mother certainly didn’t tell me this school would be anything like this,” Harvey said. I cannot tell you how I detested Harvey.

“Well,
The
Clearwaters of Memphis have always been a tight-lipped crew.”

“How do you like this place so far, tell me?” he said as I was giving him a shirt tuck.

“Oh me, Harvey,” I answered, unable to keep myself from lashing out at my roommate every time he spoke. “I’ve found myself a home. This is a fabulous place. There’s not many colleges in the country where you get to see seven of your classmates pass out from heat exhaustion the very first day of school.”

Ignoring me, he said, “I’d be big stuff in a fraternity if I’d gone to the University of Tennessee. Clearwater is a big name in Tennessee.”

“Yeh, you’ve only told me that a couple of thousand times today, Harvey, and I’ve only seen you alone for ten minutes.”

“You’ve got a bad attitude, what’s-your-name.”

“I’m only beginning to have a bad attitude. I’m just getting started. In a month, I plan to have the shittiest goddam attitude in the United States.”

“I don’t want you to hurt my chances to make rank, you hear?” he said.

“What?” I could barely believe my rotten luck in getting this boy for a roommate.

“I plan to be a company commander. That’s the least I can do for Mother. What are you shooting for, whatchamacallit?”

“If my mother will let me, Harvey, I’m shooting to be a civilian by tomorrow morning.”

“They won’t let you near a telephone for two weeks. And you can’t write a letter, send up smoke signals, or pound on a tom-tom. Your mama won’t even know if you’re alive for two weeks. They lose twenty percent of the class in the first month.”

“I hope I can make up part of that twenty percent,” I said.

“You’ll know if you can take it or not after tomorrow night,” Harvey said, checking his watch.

“What happens tomorrow night that could be worse than what happened today?” I asked in alarm.

“Tomorrow is Hell Night.”

“What happens on Hell Night?”

“Let your imagination run wild,” he said, rolling his eyes. “And tell me your name just one more time. I’m terrible on names. I’ll get it this time.”

“Lee Vercingetorix. My mother was from Virginia and my father was from Gaul.”

“Bad attitude, Lee,” Harvey said, shaking his head back and forth. “Say, I’ve been having a tough time with those pushups and that constant running. I hope they let up some after Hell Night.”

“We’ve got two minutes to get to formation,” I said, turning my head sideways to read his watch.

“Will you support me, Lee?” he asked.

“Support you for what?”

“For company commander. You have to get the support of your classmates early.”

“Harvey,” I said. “If you want to be mayor of Charleston or Yertle the Turtle you have my solemn support. But you’re not listening to me. I’m not going to be around. I don’t belong here. I’m getting out in the next couple of days. I’ve just got to get to a phone.”

“One more question, Lee.”

“Shoot, Harvey.”

“What’s a douchebag?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never heard of one, but a lot of people sure think I have a strong family resemblance to one.”

A
ll was prelude. The first day was a dress rehearsal, for the most severe test of the plebe system did not officially begin until the second evening. They ran and taunted and hustled us through the second day. We had no time to ourselves, no time to think, no time to rest, no time to familiarize ourselves with the cramped, austere cells where we slept at night. We changed uniforms four times during the second day. They screamed at us, abused us, beat on our chests with their fists. They ran us from one end of campus to the other.

In the late afternoon, the fatigue had entered my bloodstream and my legs glowed with pain. The blood seemed to collect around my brain. I felt a strange giddiness in the heat as though at any time I might faint and my skull would break against the scorched concrete of the quadrangle. Plebes fainted often during the first week. It was a sign to the cadre that they were performing their duties well. The prestige of sergeants increased when one of their knobs hit the planet unconscious. The sun seemed to be in collusion with the cadre. The heat had a man-eating quality about it. With each uniform change, I could squeeze cupfuls of perspiration into the small sink by the door. There was a ubiquitous stink to the platoons of freshmen, and it was the first time I had ever prayed for rain.

At 1700 hours, we stood at attention on the quadrangle at the end of a forty-five-minute segment of practicing rifle manual. Blasingame, the company commander, shouted out a final command to us, a surprise one, when he said, “At ease, dumbheads.”

He continued to talk to us in a relaxed, intimate voice, friendly and void of menace. “Now, dumbheads. I know it’s been a long, hot, upsetting day for all of you. I want to give all of you a chance to rest before mess tonight. When I order you to your rooms, I’d like you to put on your bathrobes and just relax in your rooms. Write a letter home to your parents if you want to. Take a nap. Or go down to the shower room and take a nice refreshing shower. You gentlemen have put out for big R today and to show you my appreciation, I’m going to let you have this time to yourselves.”

His manner was so kindly and so brotherly that I felt like weeping out of pure human gratitude. This was the first time since I had entered the Gates of Legrand that an upperclassman had been anything but bestial to a group of freshmen. It was the first time a member of the cadre had spoken to us as though we had some standing, no matter how low, in the human community.

He continued in the same soothing voice, “Now go to your rooms, dumbheads. The cadre won’t bother you. We need time to rest, too. Just relax, turn on your radios, and take it easy.”

Then with a shout that echoed off the enclosed cement walls of the barracks, he screamed, “And you fucking scumbags better be back down on this quadrangle in thirty seconds, Now move it, waste-wads. Change your smelly uniforms and get back here on the double. We’re going for more PT”

The sixty of us thundered off the quadrangle, yelling as we went. I made it quickly to my room on the first division. Harvey came in right behind me as we began stripping off our wet uniforms and hurling them anywhere in our frantic haste to beat the thirty-second mark when they would begin chanting for us again. As I put on my Institute T-shirt and PT shorts, I noticed that a change had taken place in Harvey’s eyes; the confidence that had gleamed in his shining gray eyes the day before was under siege. He had not spoken a word since before breakfast that morning. As he stood naked before me looking for his gym shoes, I saw how painfully underdeveloped his body was and realized that the strenuous physical exertion of these first days was taking an inestimable toll on the Clearwater boy from Memphis.

“Are you all right, Harvey?” I asked as I tied the laces of my shoes.

“They’re not letting me eat at mess,” he said. “I’ve got to eat or I can’t stand this.”

“Whose mess are you on?”

“Mr. Fox’s.”

I reached into my press where my one suit of civilian clothes hung limply among the uniforms and pulled out a package of M&M Peanuts.

“I’m a fanatic about M&M Peanuts. Eat all you want, Harvey.”

He shoved a handful in his mouth.

“Five seconds, dumbheads,” a voice shouted from the gallery.

“Two seconds, scumbags.”

“My mother didn’t tell me it was going to be like this at all,” Harvey said.

“Neither did mine.”

“Where are you, maggot-shits? Get down here, people. Now, people. I don’t care if you run PT naked, dumbheads. I want you out of those rooms.”

Doors slammed all over the R Company area as freshmen sprinted down the stairs.

“Thanks for the M&M’s, Bill,” Harvey said, laying an exhausted head on my shoulder. “They’ve got to let me eat. I’ve always needed regular meals.”

“Harvey, you’ve got to pace yourself better. You look all washed out.”

“I’m dying,” he replied. “I’ve never done a pushup.”

“Get down here, scumbags.”

They took us on a two-mile run. We lapped the parade ground twice, circled the armory, passed the yacht basin, crossed the baseball field, and halted finally at the farthest perimeter of the campus by the edge of the salt marsh, which separated the grounds of the Institute from the Ashley River. On the run, some of my classmates had stumbled, faltered, dropped out from exhaustion, and lay moaning on the grass or on the pavement, surrounded by the flushed, hostile faces of several cadre members screaming for them to rise. They were being forced to rise, to run again, to catch up to the chanting, driven platoon, and to rejoin their classmates. To drop out was to betray your fellows, and the central theme of those first hours of plebe week was that no one had the right “to shit on his classmates.” It was the first and most basic law of the Corps.

The cadre broke off from us and drove the platoon of freshmen into the marsh itself. The long blades of Spartina grass sliced our bare legs, and the marsh was undermined by the immensity of our herded, desperate weight. We began to sink into the mud, first to our ankles, then to our knees. When we had gone far enough, they stood us at rigid attention and told us they would beat our asses bloody with their swords if we moved a single muscle. My shoes filled with water. I did not know why they had brought us to the marsh or why they watched us with such amused attention from their vantage points on dry land.

As I stood there, I realized that except for Harvey, I did not know the face of another classmate. They all looked the same to me, a race of bald, timorous zombies chanting a debased, newly minted language in a country alive with cruelty. As I waited in the marsh grass, the other plebes seemed repugnant to me, odious and contemptible. They looked too much like me, and their faces, like mine, were in pain. In their humiliation, they reminded me of what I had become.

The cadre began to cover each other with spray from aerosol cans. The hiss of the spray sounded like a colloquy of snakes in the parched summer grass. My tongue was swollen and I needed water. With the sun declining, in the stillness of the late afternoon in the Carolina lowcountry, we suddenly knew why we had ended the long run by being forced into the marsh. The first mosquito bit into my thigh. Instinctively, I made a move to kill it.

“Don’t you move, maggot,” Fox screamed at me.

Clouds of gnats and mosquitoes began to swarm before my eyes. I counted eight mosquitoes on the neck of the boy in front of me. Our coming had stirred an invisible empire of insects, and we had come as food for that empire. Soon I felt the insects biting me in a dozen places. It seemed as though the entire motionless platoon disappeared beneath an awful living drapery of tiny wings and feathery black legs. Around me, I began to hear the moans of freshmen about to break from the ordeal by insect. The mosquitoes fed deeply and leisurely, as though they had come upon a freshly slaughtered battalion with the blood still warm and fragrant in the quiet veins. Some of the upper-classmen were laughing so hard they were on their knees in the grass.